akavlie

Main advantages are:

  1. Accessible to those who don't have expertise or interest in setting up their own IRC bouncer
  2. Usable from any web browser
  3. More friendly UI
  4. Usable by sites that want a chat room for their users (look at twit.tv -- embedded IRC client front and center).

There is no proprietary backend; the whole client, and the library powering it (node-irc), are open source.

What tech stack would you use, if you built a client like this?

Haven't done any work (yet) on a mobile interface. I think it would scale down pretty well by simply cutting out the sidebars past a certain screen size threshhold (via media queries), and making them dropdowns or something at the top. I'm not a designer though, so making that look good is the challenge.

The other collaborator here. I started with a similar client called web-irc, to make a better open source web IRC client. I combined forced with thedjpetersen because his tech stack was almost identical. And it looked better, to boot :-)

Tech used: Node.js, node-irc, socket.io, Backbone.js, and MongoDB for optional message logging on persistent connections.

Feedback and contributions welcome.

This article is linked to the github repo, but you can use the client directly here: http://ridezap.com:3000/

The app still works in IE, it just requires page refreshes on every page load.

I had been wondering when Harmony was due. The end of NEXT year? Wow, that's a long wait.

To be clear... are you saying you ask contractors to not use features like CSS rounded corners, gradients, and box shadows?

When I saw the domain name I was expecting some juvenile propaganda, rather than serious analysis. I was not disappointed.

My experience with hardware support was not so hot either. On a ThinkPad X220 with latest Ubuntu, I would get random crashes when unplugging the DisplayPort adapter, or right in the middle of working. Also, lack of proper built in fan speed control. And panels doing stupid things when switching between signel & dual display setups.

Switched to a MacBook Pro, and it's been rock solid.

Ideally, yes... though such a move would probably void most of the reasons for using PHP in the first place -- ubiquitous availability, and popular software that is built in PHP. Take those away, and mess with conventions that all the current PHP developers are used to, and why not just use another language?

I expect that this petition will be just as effective as all the others.

Version 2.0 (current version is 2.1). Apparently upgrading is not trivial (due to Spring framework or whatever... I don't know, I'm not familiar with the Java stack).

You mention an example where JSP fares best; there are a lot of examples that don't come out looking too great though, such as time/date/decimal conversion, the obnoxious syntax for if/else, etc. A lot of Django's other filters just don't exist in JSP.

But that aside, there are larger scale issues -- composition of templates via blocks in Django/Jinja, which is a lot easier and more flexible than Apache tiles; the lack of auto-escaping in JSP; and the forced XML syntax, even at the expense of valid HTML (see what it does to script includes or empty divs, without a <!-- --> in between).

That wasn't meant as a criticism of LinkedIn's adoption of it, more my own circumstances and the fact that frameworks are still using JSP by default in 2011.

JSP is an archaic template language. I'm on a project with JSP on the front end; compared to Django, Jinja, or any of the other Python template languages it's really limited and verbose.

It's interesting that LinkedIn chose dust.js as it doesn't get much attention compared to some of the other JS template languages (e.g. Mustache & Handlebars.js).

Just posted another update, with a snapshot of Google Analytics visitor count by service provider. Amazon.com Inc. ranks at #2 with 350 visits.

Not completely sure, Cox (my provider) says in the small print:

"Static IP addresses may be required or dynamic IP addresses may be assigned without a static IP request, depending on location."

http://ww2.cox.com/business/arizona/data/pricing.cox

I don't take notice of my IP address much, so I can't say if they assigned a static IP address in my case. If they're filtering on IP addresses, I imagine that they get a lot of false positives.

I have no experience doing a PR blitz as you've suggested in your other comment; it would be tough to fill in all the details you didn't spell out. Might be worth it, but it sounds like a lot of work.

UPDATE: Amazon just reinstated my account (with an equally impersonal email). I updated the post to reflect this.

A partial victory, but it's still not really satisfying. Had I not taken the effort to blog about this, and gotten lucky by hitting the top spot on Hacker News, I don't think Amazon would have reinstated my account.

All of my weekend listing was done from home. Don't remember accessing my seller account anywhere else recently.

Unlike eBay or craigslist, items on Amazon are listed under fixed, pre-existing products, with variations (in condition, included accessories, etc.) noted in its comments field. On a baseline seller account, it's not even possible to create a listing for a new item that doesn't already exist on Amazon.com.

So I found an X220 listing with different specs, and noted the specs of mine in the comments. The other two used listings had done the same.

That makes sense. Still incredible that it had so much energy that it was still going after making it through a door and a wall.

It's also surprising that it could bounce so high (at least once) after hitting a floor.

The physics at play here (at least as reported in the article) are hard to fathom.

It went through the front door, bounced around the home, UP to the second floor, THROUGH the back wall...

And enough energy still remained to send it across a road 50 yards, UP again to a roof, and finally smashing through a van window.

I wish they could have captured this with high-speed cameras from multiple angles, like they do with experiments that go as planned.

The problem is, it's pretty useless without Firebug compared to Chrome, at least for me -- much of my browser use is for web development. (this may change with the built-in debug tools set for Firefox 10.0 -- let us hope)

I'm also a bit perturbed by the fact that Mozilla has always touted extensions as a key feature of Firefox... only to say you should disable them all if you want good performance.

Thanks for making a presentation that's useful to readers. While I'd still prefer to see video, this stands on its own.

I see a lot of presentations hit Hacker News that aren't very useful on their own because they were meant to accompany a talk -- and a good talk usually omits the best material (or a at a minimum, important context) from the slides.

Staying with IE6 is arguably less safe, considering all the popular sites (Youtube & Facebook among others) that no longer support it.

So it's based on inbound links (aka popularity)?

I wish everyone who defends the patent status quo could read and understand this. The ideals they espouse have no resemblance to the reality you describe. Thanks for sharing your insight.

What did you use for all the UI and widgets that JQUI gives you? Did you find that a tough gap to fill in when you dropped JQUI?

It's close enough that it can be swapped for jQuery in Backbone.js, and many jQuery plugins work.

(Disclaimer: haven't use it myself)

No, IE8 is not a modern browser by most definitions.