Ivo Georgiev

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

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:43:35 +0300

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

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL

Thu, 31 May 2012 11:45:49 +0300

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL:

So hardcore.

Solution to this?

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:35:48 +0300

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

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:48:00 +0300

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

and some things that I consider personal preference

shadows are overused
rounded borders are so 2000-and-late
gradients are too mainstream
dark colors are passé

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

Mon, 28 May 2012 11:54:56 +0300

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...

Sun, 27 May 2012 11:53:01 +0300

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

Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:00 +0300

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}.

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

EDIT:
@lerasplace: thanks, that was really helpful

@allfuzy: yes, web app; I’m writing in JavaScript and running it on Node.js, and I’m not using any large frameworks (like express) because I have to implement routing and templating myself either way (the templating has to be compatible with the Tumblr themes for example).

Windows UI design concept(I still don’t know who the...

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:02:00 +0300

Windows UI design concept
(I still don’t know who the author of that is)

Scalability is important.

Tue, 22 May 2012 04:31:44 +0300

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.

Typography

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:55:35 +0300

Typography

"The principles that I’m applying to the office are the same that made Lady Gaga a star. Or any..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:02:00 +0300

“The principles that I’m applying to the office are the same that made Lady Gaga a star. Or any number of drag queens”

- Michael Scott

Good one, Michael

Microtemplating vs DOM welding

Sun, 13 May 2012 13:31:21 +0300

All web developers are familiar with the concept of microtemplating. However, DOM welding is a relatively new concept. The idea is, we have the entire HTML document represented as a DOM. Which is essentially our tree of elements, parsed, and ready to be modified. So we take a data structure (e.g. JSON) and we directly “bind” it into the DOM, using classes or IDs as identifiers, as follows:

<div class=”post”>

<h1 class=”title”></h1>
<p class=”content”></p>

</div>

For [{title: “title1”, content: “some content”}, {title: “title2”, content: “another content”}]

Will become:

<div class=”post”>
<h1 class=”title”>title1</h1>
<p class=”content”>some content</p>
</div>

<div class=”post”>
<h1 class=”title”>title2</h1>
<p class=”content”>another content</p>
</div>

So this is DOM welding.

Is it better? People familiar with this technology will probably say yes. The truth is, yes and no.

Conventional microtemplating does not depend on the DOM, it uses raw string manipulation. It just replaces an expression in brackets (e.g. {{ }} in mustache) with it’s corresponding variable.

DOM welding, of course, requires the whole HTML document to be parsed in a DOM.

The speed of execution is probably the most important factor when choosing a template engine. Templating is an essential task and taking a lot of time to execute is not a good idea.

So, which is faster? DOM welding is faster when the DOM is already available, which is most probably the client. On the client, since we must always have our page represented as a document object model, it makes no sense to apply the convertion

DOM tree -> HTML string -> template engine -> HTML string -> DOM tree (microtemplating)

When we can

DOM tree -> template engine -> DOM tree (DOM Welding)

Extracting HTML from the DOM is a lightweight operation, but parsing HTML back into the DOM is slow. So we must avoid that convertion.

On the other, hand, on the server we have no DOM by default, so it would be even more inefficient to

HTML string (entire page) -> DOM tree -> template engine -> DOM tree -> HTML string (DOM welding)

When we can:
HTML string -> template engine -> HTML string (microtemplating)

So there it is. DOM welding -> faster on the client, microtemplating -> faster on the server.

Second Life

Sat, 12 May 2012 12:01:35 +0300

Dwight: Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn't have points or scores. It doesn't have winners or losers.
Jim: Oh, it has losers....

Crazy comment

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:02:47 +0300

Crazy comment:

Read wast334’s comment- it’s funny how every single paragraph is even more idiotic than the last one.
But… Fuck yeah. This dumbo got put in his place.

Richard Stallman collapses at a conference

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:45:00 +0300

First comment on HackerNews:

This presents an interesting situation. Is Stallman okay with being hooked up to medical computers even though they may not be running free software? What about the privacy issues involved in being checked into a hospital?

Ok, that might be a little harsh, but I had a hard laugh.

Netherlands the first country with net neutrality

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:33:03 +0300

Netherlands the first country with net neutrality:

“The net neutrality law prohibits internet providers from interfering with the traffic of their users.”

Meanwhile, in the US there are laws to ENFORCE providers track their users.

Stanley (the office s05e01)

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:01:56 +0300

Remind you of something?
Yes…

On Sunday, December 4th, 292,277,026,596 A.D. the 64-bit Unix time stamp will exceed the limit of a...

Sat, 05 May 2012 22:06:00 +0300

On Sunday, December 4th, 292,277,026,596 A.D. the 64-bit Unix time stamp will exceed the limit of a 64-bit number.

The 32 bit one, however, expires on 19 January, 2038 A.D, 03:14:08 UTC.

How Robert should go

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:02:36 +0300

First of all, I do not hate Robert California, he is a great character. But there is no use explaining - people on Tumblr are obviously too childish *caugh*stupid*caugh* to understand that a good character does not necessarily mean a protagonist.

However, since the actor is leaving, let’s think of what the possible ways Robert leaves the office. Of course, it’s obvious that it will have something to do with David Wallace and Andy, but…

He does his job poorly and is forced to leave. If the screenwriters decide on this, it would be better if that happens because of his personal problems and not incompetence - obviously, Robert is a good leader.
He dies. Of course, it would be too extreme and would never happen, but it kind-of matches his character. By this I mean, he is an extravagant person. He may die of, let’s say substance abuse.
He is found out to be a serial killer and, instead of being caught, escapes the country and is never found again. That would be so awesome.

All of those, except the first one, are unrealistic for the nature of the show, but think of how awesome would that last one be…

collegecupofjava: Nothing better than fearing a velociraptor...

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:02:32 +0300

collegecupofjava:

Nothing better than fearing a velociraptor attack when compiling.

Yep. You all better learn your lesson about goto.