Can you recommend me a nice monospace font with “machine”-styled serifs?

Solution to this?

Find the min, max of A = 5sinX - 12cosX

My solutions

• Input f(x) = 5*sin(x) - 12*cos(x) in the calculator and get -13 and +13 in the plotting
• Find an y for which 5/y and 12/y are valid cos, sin of the same angle. For that, we need (5/y)^2 + (12/y)^2 = 1, and y=13; Now we can transform the expression to 13*(5/13 * cosX - 12/13 * sinX), where 5/13 and 12/13 are sin(z) and cos(z), and that becomes 13*sin(X-Z), and the min, max of sin are -1 and 1, so the answer is -13, 13

Anything simpler?

Trying not to suck at graphic design

I’ve always considered myself bad at graphic design. A friend of mine said “good programmers are bad at graphic design, that’s how you know they’re good”, but I don’t want to fit in a stereotype like that one.

Since it is a useful skill, I have been trying not to suck at it for some time, and here is what I learned

• “keep it simple” is not a bad approach
• the type face is your greatest weapon
• white space is your friend

I still suck though. Can you recommend me some reads? And please don’t say “you either got it or you don’t”

Edit: Thanks for the tips.

@ischedesigns: “if the design you are doing takes less than 4 hours to do, you are doing it wrong”  - great one.

deviantArt

Is there a way to globally exclude manga & anime from any deviantArt search results?

Please fill in this survey to help us with a study on blogging.

https://docs.google.com/a/linvo.org/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDFLZ2dJSHdWZGE2ZXB0OVk0MTlkQXc6MQ

Selecting an WYSIWYG/rich text editor

I am currently developing a blogging platform - and one of the biggest setbacks was the rich text editor.

Since it’s targeted towards the general public, I cannot simply use markdown, so I started searching for an editor. My initial plan was CKEditor - I have always liked it and considered  it superior to the industry leader, TinyMCE. I implemented CKEditor, but after a while I decided that I can do better and decided to choose another. My all-time online rich text editor is the one Google Docs has, Kix - but that is proprietary.

So, I composed a list

Posterous: TinyMCE
Tumblr: TinyMCE
Blogspot: custom ( http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42239 )
Wordpress: custom
Evernote: TinyMCE
Docs: Kix

And another list with all the editors I considered. After a while, I narrowed it down to https://github.com/xing/wysihtml5/ and TinyMCE. TinyMCE seemed the most reliable choice.

However, I am regretting it now. Creating skins for it is painful, it’s bulky, full of legacy code and in my case, it seemed to behave horribly. Also, I have encountered buggy behavior while using it with Tumblr.

Now I am considering going  back to CKEditor or choosing WYSIHTML5.

Which is your favourite editor? 

Anyway, if this product ever becomes popular, I will put a Dropbox-like service for power users that syncs your blogs as a directory of markdown posts, so you can use {your favourite editor}.

Related articles

• WYSIHTML5 - A Better Approach To Rich Text Editing (functionn.blogspot.com)

Scalability is important.

Around 3:00A.M, an earthquake of 5.8 (initial info was 5 to 5.8, but news reports quickly decided that only “5.8” sounded better) magnitude was registered here (Bulgaria).

10 minutes later, most Bulgarian news websites were down. Funny thing, when I have to deal with the traditional model of creating a website - a PHP CMS on a hosting provider, I am always kind of a doomsayer - I say, “if this website gets a surprise hit in popularity, it’s down”.

And obviously, I’m right. All (ok, all I know about) bulgarian news websites are built that way. Some on Wordpress, maybe some on Drupal, maybe some are custom written, but the point is, it’s a LAMP stack (or at least AMP) hosted by a web hosting service, or in the best case a stand-alone server.

Use the cloud, people! Especially for news websites where usage is unpredictable. If we’re talking about a service, like Tumblr, or Pinterest, scalability is more predictable, and still - it’s more common to see cloud appliances in those kind of services (e.g. Instagram) than in news websites.

The point is, the cloud / elastic scalability are concepts that are unfairly unpopular for news websites. Besides from usage being unpredictable, having a persistent uptime is also something extremely important - think of it - humans usually panic when something like this happens, and humans will panic even more if the first two news websites that they think of don’t open.

// stupid explanation
Why does unpredictable usage fit so well with the cloud? Well, you pay exactly for the resource you use - Say the server capacity is measured in cherries.
Using your own server or hosting gives you 3-6 cheries, but the users you have are handled with 1 cherry. So you have 2-5 cherries to spare in case a celebrity dies or something dramatic enough to make people rush to your website happens. However, this is rare and you have to pay for extra cherries. Plus, if something really dramatic happens and you need 10 cherries, you don’t have them. Even worse, you cannot just buy more cherries because the website architecture would not allow you to utilize them. So basically, the cloud gives you as many cherries as you require, no more, no less - and bills you by the cherry.