calloc

You can generally ask a manager if he would mind if you opened the product while he is there to make sure it functions for your needs. I've never had an issue with doing that.

I understand that Best Buy has to pay to keep their stores stocked, having physical space to showcase products and let people play with them requires a huge investment that Amazon doesn't have, yet at the same time they charge 2x sometimes even 3x more without giving me anything but the convenience of testing it out without having to receive the product and sending it back to Amazon...

If Best Buy dropped its prices to something reasonable I would be more inclined to purchase my electronics in their store right there and then because there is something to be said for the convenience of instantly having the product in my hands rather than having to wait for something to ship from a warehouse, it just isn't worth 2 or 3 times the price.

I've never returned something because of buyers remorse (I don't purchase something unless I've thought about it for a very long time, and have the money for it) but I will return items when they are broken.

For example, Costco's return policy is absolutely amazing. I purchased an air bed from them and after sleeping on it (ahh, being a college kid) for 7 months one of the ribs holding the form together broke and it had this weird bubble in it. I brought it back to Costco, and replaced it with another one.

I don't abuse it, but I don't think that a product should have to be replaced at 7 months in. I've done the same thing with a foam mattress I bought from Costco, after sleeping on it for 2 years the manufacturer refused to replace it even-though there was a huge "dent" in the middle so that sleeping on the bed meant you rolled into the middle automatically (made it uncomfortable to sleep with my girlfriend, now fiancée). Brought it back and we bought a mattress with springs.

The amount of money I've spent at Costco far outweighs the cost of them doing the replacement for me, and the cost for dealing with the manufacturer.

https://www.dotcloud.com/ does all three (Node, PHP and Ruby) along with many others. You can set up different instances, have them access the same database as well.

When I was in their beta program when they first started out they also gave you shell access to the machine so you could see what was being deployed, and run arbitrary commands (perfect for having an Python app that required running paste for upgrading the DB to the latest version).

In my experience with them I had absolutely no issues, it was fast to configure and set up and their command line tools were fantastic. It used git if you wanted it to, or could use any arbitrary directory and upload the contents.

Not only that but you could modify the nginx config file to change redirects and set static directories that shouldn't be handled by WSGI so that you could take a load off the Python app from serving up requests for static content.

I haven't used dotCloud in over 8+ months now, if not longer, their pricing just didn't make sense for me, and I found it cheaper with all the sites I host to just go with a single dedicated server rather than use their services so maybe a lot has changed, but they sound like what you need.

I've backed quite a few projects on Kickstarter, out of the 17 I have backed, so far only one has been a real disappointment (Juicies), 5 are still building their products/shipping in the near future (and are looking good, posting updates, I am confident in them), I have received 6 of my awards for projects I have backed.

So far I have been happy with the projects I have backed and received my reward for, and I've been happy with the progress shown on the other products I have kickstarted. Ultimately it is a gamble whether or not you get something back for your money. At this time I feel like I am giving someone money to try to get their dream goal fulfilled, and worst case I don't get anything in return but they have oodles of experience on what can go wrong and why, and how they could fix it the next time around or what they could do better. Sometimes believing in something/someone is better than just dismissing it outright, especially when it is just money. If you can't afford to lose it (or gamble it) then really you shouldn't be putting that money into projects on Kickstarter you should be using it to pay the bills.

Does is suck when you lose money? Absolutely, but it hasn't stopped me from actively backing more projects. Juicies was my first project I backed, if I had stopped there because of the guys failure to actually complete in time then I would have missed out on helping friends from college and I would have missed out on awesome rewards from many of the other projects I have listed below who did come through and get me my award.

That being said, the only production of physical goods I have backed were (I've also backed a couple of games/art/shows):

Not Funded yet:

Pebble: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...

Waiting on reward/Funded:

Mobilemount Suction Kickstand: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/674303746/mobilemountsuc...

Twine: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

Elevation Dock: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hop/elevation-dock-the-b...

Received Reward:

CEE: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/itdaniher/cee-the-usb-an...

Prop: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makecollab/the-prop

Revision 1 - Drafting Themed Cards: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onefreehour/revision-1-d...

Pulse Sensor: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342192419/pulse-sensor-...

The Present: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scottthrift/the-present (Although, I didn't opt for a clock, I opted for "Something" as a reward level)

Disappointed/Given up hope on ever receiving reward:

Juicies: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laudowicz/juicies-colorf... (My first project)

I pay Comcast $60 for 20 Mbit / 2 Mbit up, with 250 GB a month (with threats to disconnect me after that and ban me from ever being their customer).

I don't have any other Internet providers that service my house...

I really dislike it when someone posts something controversial so a couple hours later someone posts the opposite based on their experience.

This doesn't add anything useful, post it as a link on the original thread. It is just a bunch of noise cluttering up the frontpage of HN!

My sleep schedule naturally is all over the board, that is just the way my body is designed, I can't help it, and I have found my days running together in some sort of glob, like there is nothing in between.

To me it is a weird sensation, but being a work-aholic I hardly noticed it till I started being off by a day or two and my boss caught me on it. I started making sure to take the weekends off and it has slowly corrected itself, now I take the weekends off and do what I want to do not work and it is absolutely fantastic.

Many people do still want to run FreeBSD, and it may not be you the original developer that has to port it, but the ports maintainer that puts it in the FreeBSD ports tree, or a company that already has everything running on top of FreeBSD (think Yahoo) wants to use the software, now they have to take the time to port your Linux only code, when using standard POSIX compliant code would have made it much simpler, possibly as simple as a ./configure && make rather than introducing extra work.

Why limit your audience to one single operating system?

Sure, you can do lots of things in the signal handler, if you are careful, but that is the point, it is more likely you will make a mistake than not. It is very simple to think, let me add this to the signal handler it will make my life easier and cause all kinds of weird issues that happen randomly like a heisenbug...

The Linux man page on signals is surprisingly helpful in that regard: http://linux.die.net/man/7/signal

There are certain race conditions if you rely on signals to interrupt system calls and the interrupt happens before the syscall is called (after setting the signal, but before the syscall happens).

Since your code could have been anywhere in the execution path you can only do very limited amount of things within the signal handler that won't cause catastrophic issues otherwise.

One thing to please keep in mind (knowing that it is called the linux programming blog ...) is that if you program your app around specific Linux only signals/and or methods (aka signalfd) it might be and most likely will be more difficult to port your code to other platforms such as Solaris/BSD/HP-UX/AIX and the like.

Having ported my fair share of code from open source projects that only ran on Linux to FreeBSD I feel like too much emphasis is put on using Linux only stuff making it difficult or extremely hard to port code in a clean manner.

I have no idea and didn't get the time to do full debugging and or looking into it. We had some more requirements and decided that it would be in our best interest to rewrite it in C++. So far we have gotten at least 4 times the performance that a single Python frontend would get, and it has meant we could remove some load balancers on the frontend and is going to save us money in the long run.

Upstream as in gevent_zeromq or in ZeroMQ itself? I haven't found this issue yet in our C++ written one which uses libev for event handling from ZeroMQ...

Also, this looks to be a fix in recv(), I am having issues in send() hanging randomly blocking the entire process. I ended up using a with timeout block around it so if send blocked it would eventually get back to me...

  sent = "WAITING"
  with gevent.Timeout(0.5, False):
      sent = self.socket.send_multipart(tosend)
  
  if sent is "WAITING":
      print "__incoming_consumer: Timeout fired"
      # We are going to try again
  
      with gevent.Timeout(2, False):
          sent = self.socket.send_multipart(tosend)
  
      if sent is "WAITING":
          print "__incoming_consumer: Timeout 2 fired"
          continue
  
  gevent.hub.sleep(0) # Yield to other gevent's, we can be fast and never let up ...

This fixed it for a little while, but even then every so often it would hang, and it was causing us to have to restart our frontend processes (accepts incoming connections for processing) so we decided it was worth the time and effort to re-write it in C++ with libev as our event handling mechanism. So far we have put it under more load but have not had any lockups or failures.

Where I work we are doing something similar more by hand though in that we are using ZeroMQ with protobuf.

I've had quite a few issues with the gevent_zeromq package not scaling. Especially when you start dealing with over 50 concurrent requests I was seeing issues whereby something would go haywire with gevent_zeromq and it would hang in the ZeroMQ send() function blocking everything else. This was just about 500 clients connected to a single service all making requests as required.

Compilation time is becoming less of an issue as well with compilers getting faster and faster. For example the same codebase using GCC 4.6 and clang 3.0, clang is almost 20% faster at compiling the same codebase.

Even so, making heavy use of templates I have not yet found any major issues or that compile time has increased so drastically that it became a concern for the project.

I ran OpenSolaris on the desktop for a little while. That experiment lasted only about two weeks before I gave up due to various things just not working correctly.

I wonder if things are any different with Solaris 11, or more likely I'd be running OpenIndiana which so far has worked really well for the server work I have it doing.

I can honestly say that I have not read any single one of those books. My first C++ book was C++ for dummies, after that everything I learned was from online tutorials, from actually doing it, and then by the time I reached college my knowledge was already above what the instructors were teaching in class.

I have quite a few programming books, mostly cookbooks though, that show little examples/snippets and or O'Reilly reference books that I used to purchase when starting a new language to get an idea for the syntax. The best book that I have ever bought and read was "Advanced UNIX Programming" by Marc J. Rochkind. It helped me get a much firmer grasp on Unix programming and along with it C which I was lacking at the time.

I've got a copy of the Dragon book sitting on my desk, it is waiting to be read, waiting to be devoured and played with, but so far I just haven't had the time.

One book I would like to read and wrap my head around is the Gang of Four book, it seems like it is important to know the various different design patterns, but so far I don't feel like I have missed out and can recognise good design practices based solely on how they feel while I am writing them.

Yes.

Luckily once we all switch to IPv6 we will no longer have TCP checksums :-)

If you do have issues maybe you can use that justification in an attempt to get it passed anyway.

Or why maybe using random() is a terrible idea. Use arc4random() instead on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Mac OS X for a MUCH better random number generation, and best of all it is auto-seeded.

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/221/

I am not sure if I am the only one, but having read some of Rands longer pieces I have found that I have identified certain traits in myself that I hadn't realised before. I couldn't list them off if I wanted to right now, and generally it was some sort of epiphany that I had after thinking about a certain essay of his for a little while, but it has made me a better person.

Using some of the ideas and knowledge in his essays has helped me understand people better, and as I said before myself a better person. Through understanding myself better I know what to ask of others around me to accomplish greatness. It allowed me to be more confident and self-assured.

His "Nerd Handbook"[1] is probably one of my favourite essays, if you haven't read it; I suggest it.

[1]: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_ha...

Remember that when you are accounting for those you also need to remove all of the stuff that is paged into every process and is the same across them, such as shared libraries and the like. Most likely Chrome is using less ram than you think.

So ... does this mean other outside companies can bid on this new process and maybe we will see IANA managed by someone completely separate from ICANN?

Yeah, and you only get the content if you visit from Google and not go the URL directly.

Are you able to name your VM's on Linode?

It will be very interesting to see whether or not there is an upward spike in media purchased. Although I have a feeling that there will be none or close to none and that any "spike" will be considered statistical noise.