latitude

Joined 16 years ago

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314
Member since
Mar 23
http://swapped.cc
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Comment · 6 years ago
That’s an UI issue with the tool.

The underlying behavior is correct though - people with open handles have the priority unless they have explicitly stated that deleting a file while they use it is OK.

Comment · 7 years ago
If you haven’t seen it, give a quick skim to “The Mindbody Prescription” by Sarno.

Several years ago I had a very strong on-and-off hip joint pain for several months. This thing helped overnight, with permanent effect.

Comment · 7 years ago
One man’s “beautiful” is another man’s “flat and bare” :)

That said - $20 feels right for this sort of thing. Gotta be light, polished and snappy though, truly exceptional. Not of an Electron variety. The fee is basically a pat on a back for the developer for a job well done.

Certainly not more, because it’s a goodwill purchase. But if it’s less, then it’ll look like a temp side project with a limited life expectancy.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
It is indeed pretty OS specific.

Not the SMART part, but how you talk to the drives and controllers and how storage is generally sliced into partitions, volumes, etc. Windows has a fairly comprehensive version of Software RAID, but in true Microsoft fashion they do things ass-backwards in more than one place. For example, striped volumes (RAID 0) will use only a part of a partition for each stripe, but to learn that you'd have to talk to Virtual Disk Service rather than regular Disk/Volume management API. This is, basically, as unportable as it gets.

Comment · 10 years ago
Might be a good time to plug my little baby - https://diskovery.io

If you want to have a quick, but in-depth look at your drives, it'll give you lots of data, including the SMART table interpreted in a vendor-specific way. It also understands some RAID setups, and more support for this is upcoming. Windows only, at the moment.

To explain a bit of a context - SMART data comprises a set of attributes and each attribute has a value, a threshold and a raw value. Values are opaque 8-bit somethings that are only meant to be compared to thresholds. When they fall under then, then it may indicate a problem. They aren't really interesting. What's interesting is the "raw" values, but as the name implies, they are vendor-specific and require decoding. Some vendors publish the specs, but most don't. Specs that are published are often incomplete or plain wrong. So there's a LOT of reverse engineering and guesswork involved, which makes writing a SMART tool both frustrating and interesting at the same time. But if you need just the "dying / healthy" indicator, it's a very easy thing to extract from a drive.

Comment · 10 years ago
I wrote a tiny DNS filtering daemon that does exactly the same -

https://github.com/apankrat/dnswhisperer

I've been using it routinely for past couple of months and it works really well. It blocks web ads, but it's blocks in-app ads and tracking as well. Tailing a log when launching an iPad game make for an interesting read. If anything slips through, just check the log, add the offender to the blacklist and restart the daemon.

Comment · 10 years ago
I originally posted this on Dribbble, but I think it might actually be of more interest here. This was ultimately an experiment in software marketing, so what follows in as a postmortem for others to learn from. Hope you, guys, find it useful.

  <cite>
A couple of years ago I had a weird idea to try and enter our software product into the Red Dot Award [1] competition. Somehow a thought of being able to stick that swirly red sphere on our website was highly appealing, so I emailed them and asked if there was a way to enter with a software product.

Surprisingly, that exact year they decided to start collecting money on that front as well and included the Interface Design sub under Communication Design category. For mere few hundred euros one could submit their work for their expert analysis on condition that they were prepared to part with additional 1.5K upon obtaining an award.

Long story - short, we applied, paid the fee and I then killed a couple of weeks of drafting this presentation. Mind that there were absolutely zero guidelines on what they expect from it except that physical products should be shipped well in advance. One of the options was to submit a link to the presentation (rather than a PDF), which is what we ended up doing.

Being expertly versed in modern web technologies we added a couple of lines of Javascript to report some events from the page when it was viewed.

The judgement time comes and we get a page hit.

Very exciting as you can imagine, but then we look at details and see that they read through about 1/3 of the application, looked at one animation, scrolled to the bottom and left. And that was it. In and out in two minutes.

You'd imagine that judging an Interface Design competition entry would involve, you know, trying out said Interface or perhaps reading through the actual application, but I guess that'd be setting the plank too high. So needless to say that was quite underwhelming and as you can probably guess we won a nice round zilch.

In any case, here's our application in all its three-color glory. I still like it and I still think we did a pretty good job with this particular piece of software, Interface Design included.

  </cite>
[1]
http://www.red-dot.de/
Comment · 10 years ago
If you want an answer, drop me an email. I'd rather not disuss this in public, but we have no hiring restrictions per se. In fact, we routinely contract out bits of work.
Comment · 10 years ago
Cantonal requirements beyond our control.
Comment · 10 years ago
Pipemetrics | Switzerland | Remote within Switzerland

• C/C++ programmers with considerable Windows experience

• Backend programmers with LAMP experience

For details see here - https://pipemetrics.com/hiring

We develop simple, elegant and highly performant desktop software with particular focus on rigorous engineering and meticulous UI design.

We have a large and very enthusiastic fan following and we are now working to create more products built on the same design approach.

Comment · 11 years ago
This was literaly the first AB test I did in my 20+ years in business and to say that I'm imressed with the results would be an understatement. First time's a charm I guess :)

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