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I like the design, but I think it could do with three improvements;

1) Allow for greater time ranges than 1 Month, as some of the projects I work on only have a couple of commits a month.

2) Allow us to change the bar graph to show other things, as well as commits per user.

3) A more important "pulse" would be time from open of a commit, to close. Rather than just the number opened / closed.

DomBlackon Get up to 50% OFF JetBrains Tools and Support a Good Cause

I was two weeks anyway from buying it at full price when that sale happened.

I can't recommend IntelliJ enough, second only to Visual Studio. Nothing in the Java world beats it, plus all the framework and other language support it has is just great!

DomBlackon A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo

ZeroMQ is not persistent: if your server crashes you lose all your queue contents.

With my requirements if I haven't processed the message quick enough then I don't care if it gets lost, as it would already be outdated data.

DomBlackon A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo

ActiveMQ or ActiveMQ Apollo?

ActiveMQ, haven't looked too much into Apollo since almost it's original announcement. How is it from a stability standpoint?

DomBlackon A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo

I'm interested to see ZMQ being compared to the traditional brokers as I've been considering swapping from ActiveMQ. Although not surprised at it's results. It very much re-enforces the ideal of keeping software simple and barebones, rather than bloating it with stuff most people never use.

Mainly because I'm finding the latency from ActiveMQ is starting to affect my overall system latency. RabbitMQ was the next broker on my list to test, but ZMQ makes more sense (if you don't mind writing the broker part).

Background; I'm currently running a system which at peak runs with about 15 million messages per hour using ActiveMQ, with several producers and consumers on the same topic. Apart from speed, not had any issues with it.

DomBlackon Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

I have found in my time, some programmers have never heard of them, nor understand why you would ever use them. That said I've also found if you sit down with them for 5-10 minutes and explain they see the light and become interested enough to go and play with them.

DomBlackon Raven Software releases source code for Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast

Raven did this for Elite Force quite a number of years ago (after much pestering from the RPG-X team and myself).

Our copy of that engine (heavily modified over the years); https://github.com/UberGames/rpgxEF

DomBlackon A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

I only just started reading the Culture, after the first book I was already hooked. He is a great writer.

DomBlackon Announcing Backbone.js 1.0

No, it was for a work project.

DomBlackon Xkcd launches wikipedia fundraiser, xkcd-style

As if watching "Time" wasn't enough, we've now got another comic updating every couple of minutes... Thanks Randall.

DomBlackon BitTorrent's Bram Cohen Patents Live Streaming Protocol

Link to patent application; http://www.scribd.com/doc/132418122/Bittorrent-Live-Patent

DomBlackon If PHP were British

This is worth a patch to PHP core... not that it would get accepted.

DomBlackon Announcing Backbone.js 1.0

I agree completely. I've started using Backbone for the models and validation.

Although I would like to see reactive fields built in; that said I've written an extension to Backbone.Model which gives me that (just ugly syntax)

DomBlackon Show HN: Password.ly - Per site password generator from a master password

Have a look at your competition such as; http://supergenpass.com/

Your system is creating the passwords server side and so taking the user's "master" password in. Where as SuperGenPass is purely javascript based and runs completely in the browser; thus is safer.

Also being a bookmarklet make's it more convient, as you can just click the button from within your browser toolbar, rather than having to go to a sepearte site, remember exactly what you put in the "Create password for:" input, did you put the domain with a www or without? with http:// or https:// ?

DomBlackon Java 7 New Features

These features are already possible with the existing byte code in JVM 6. Because it is all implement and possible using Scala.

DomBlackon Introducing the Redesigned Bitbucket

I personally prefer the simplicity that GitBox gives. (OSX only though)

DomBlackon Xkcd's world - pieced together with AngularJS (warning: big images)

Great work, much easier to explore now! I spent far to long this morning dragging myself down a tunnel.

DomBlackon What PHP 5.5 might look like

Every hashing algorithm allows it, even bcrypt. Very simple example; md5($salt.$pepper.$clearText);

The problem with this API is that if you pass in the "salt" as $salt.$pepper then the output hash also contains the pepper.

The whole point of a pepper is to keep a second salt out of the database. The user salt would be in the database, but the pepper should only be in the application code.

If your database is stolen, but your application code is safe the pepper increases the complexity of brute forcing, as they need to work out what the pepper is

DomBlackon What PHP 5.5 might look like

The problem with it in it's current form is it does not allow for an application pepper.

Also I'd prefer it to support scrypt as well as bcrypt.

DomBlackon "Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop CS6, which addresses these vulnerabilities"

This is completely stupid, what ever the fix is;

Why can the not just take the patch file from the commit which fixed the flaw, apply it against previous versions of Photoshop and release a upgrade for all versions instead of making people charge for it.

A better bit of advice would be "Do not use TIF files unless you have brought CS6"

DomBlackon A High Frequency Trader's Apologia, Part 1

I've also looked at this before, and with transaction fees of 3% of the total traded, I can't see how they make money. Unless they have a deal with brokers for lower transaction fees or something.

DomBlackon Ask HN: Would you still by Apple stock?

I work with stock market data daily (providing charts and technical alerting to end users) and the kind of growth Apple is having is just not sustainable, I mean it's gone from $320 last Jan to $532 today!

I am a fan of Apple products, but I just dont see it as a good investment, I would suspect that it will either level off or have to talk a fall soon.

So my personal preference is do not buy Apple, I wouldn't (even if I could stomach $525 per share!)

DomBlackon PHP: v8.js

I'm in complete agreement with you. Having a CI server is great for PHP work, but it would be better to have the one CI server process both PHP and javascript unit tests together.

DomBlackon YouPorn passwords available for download, thousands of users exposed

Do you have any links to articles regarding being able to easily crack a single round hash?

I'm wondering what sort of time frame you'd be looking at for a single round password, i.e; md5(salt.cleartext)