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akent

1,415 karma · joined March 31, 2009

Software engineer, embedded C, Python, Android etc. Whatever needs doing.

Sydney, Australia.

@akent on twitter.

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akent··on Four&me – Connect with great people and get together for amazing activities
What's the logic in restricting it to meetups of maximum five people?
akent··on MacBook Pro Repair Extension Program for Video Issues
If you have this problem, you definitely know about it. Complete system lockups, glitches all over the screen, you name it. It's not just a simple software error.
akent··on MacBook Pro Repair Extension Program for Video Issues
I downvoted you because you simply can't draw that conclusion just based on the evidence of one anecdotal account from an affected user and from your own ignorance of the problem. Of course this has damaged their reputation in the minds of some affected users.
akent··on The billionaire’s typewriter
For me the end-of-line word hyphenation also detracts from the readability.
akent··on Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382

akent··on Drop dead
Why do you do this to yourself?
akent··on Indoor mapping with Estimote Beacons
Low energy bluetooth is neat technology and I'm impressed with Estimote too.

My question is what happens when the batteries die in these beacons if you have set many of them them up in a constellation like this for intra-room location? Do you have to replace all together and reconfigure or is there some easier way to replace individual beacons that have gone flat and reconfigure them to act exactly like the one they are replacing?

akent··on The New Streamlined Look that Facebook will be Moving Everyone Over to
Here's the original from Facebook rather than this bizarre rewritten blogpost about it: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/A-Streamlined-Look-fo...
akent··on Weak passwords brute forced
People have private repos too you know.
akent··on Apple iOS 7 surprises as first with new multipath TCP connections
And what of it? Here's another unrelated whinge: no Apple stuff supports WPS even though it's highly useful for getting your device on the network quickly.

Way to find something negative to say when this MPTCP deployment is overwhelmingly positive no matter what you think of Apple vs Android.

akent··on The Number One Trait of a Great Developer
Maybe it's just because the post is out of date now (2011) but I'm not sure why "new technology", "rockstar" and "produces unmaintainable code" are all conflated together.
akent··on Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (2004)
Probably worth a (2004) tag.
akent··on Google Latitude retired
Which app in particular are you thinking of? All the ones I've tried so far haven't been all that impressive.
akent··on A new Google Maps app for smartphones and tablets
"My Maps functionality is not supported in this release but will return to future versions of the app"

-> Deliberately regressing, so sorry, we'll add it back later.

Um what?

akent··on Using Nginx and UWSGI
The author of gevent Denis Bilenko himself says, in a nutshell, don't use gevent directly in production, use gunicorn. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7855343/run-web-app-with-...
akent··on An App Store Experiment
Australia is almost completely metric, people only use imperial occasionally for old recipes and the like, also we often use pounds per square inch for car tire pressure, but weather related pressure is in pascals.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly comprehensive article on Australia's metrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia

akent··on How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs
Thanks for the link. Particularly interesting is the Q&A post where they discuss HTML5 vs GIF http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/
akent··on Usability vs. Security in the Context of Apple iOS Mobile Hotspots
The real weakness is because iOS default / suggested passphrases aren't very secure: "As the hotspot wordlist consists of only 1842 entries followed by a four-digit number, there are only around 18.5 million possible combinations."
akent··on Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
The lecture slides are in Comic Sans, ugh.
akent··on Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers
"But previous studies didn't take into account the amount of time parents typically spent with their children on a daily basis."

I'm saying the new finding that "more time -> better able to recognize" is also not surprising.

akent··on Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers
TL;DR: Parents, including fathers, who spend more time with their babies come to recognize their cries better.

Not sure if that's really as counter-intuitive as the article suggests.

akent··on Punchfork shutdown inspires Open Recipes
I'm surprised the ArchiveTeam / archive.org scrape of Punchfork before it was removed didn't also get a mention in all this mess.

http://archive.org/details/archiveteam_punchfork

akent··on A game when games were new
Did you even read the post, his point was that modern tools and frameworks make it easy today to do what once had to be done at a lower level.
akent··on Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on Xen
"Over capacity"

"The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service your request. Please try again later."

Um.

akent··on What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
Note the date; this one was from 2010.

His most recent post is http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

akent··on Goodbye Google Reader
In case there's any confusion, the article's actual title is "Goodbye ubiquitous digital service" and uses the phrase "most ubiquitous RSS service of our time" as a euphemism for "Google Reader", hence the headline here.
akent··on Gunicorn 0.17.0 released
Changelog: 0.17.0 / 2012-12-25

    - allows gunicorn to bind to multiple address
    - add SSL support
    - add syslog support
    - add nworkers_changed hook
    - add response arg for post_request hook
    - parse command line with argparse (replace deprecated optparse)
    - fix PWD detection in arbiter
    - miscellenaeous PEP8 fixes
SSL support is probably the big ticket item here but I imagine most people already have an SSL termination solution already.
akent··on Mona Lisa in 50 polygons, using a genetic algorithm (2008)
Also of interest: MonaTweeta, using genetic algorithms to fit Mona Lisa into a 140 "character" tweet. http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/3518306770/
akent··on Police concerned with Apple iOS 6 mapping system
Belatedly, it looks like it is seen more broadly, here are a couple of examples: http://pic.twitter.com/M4JRKQW9 http://pic.twitter.com/epOUWKDd
akent··on Police concerned with Apple iOS 6 mapping system
Nice sleuthing, but if that were the case wouldn't the same problem be seen more broadly?
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