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It's also a bit more satisfying to capture (or literally, "eat") opponents using the checkers-like pieces, rather than the stand-up pieces in western Chess, IMO.

jcsalteregoon An Introduction to Xiangqi for Chess Players

The other big gotcha is kings cannot have a direct line of sight to each other. Unfortunately, this is how I inadvertently lost a game of western Chess because I had accidentally ported over this rule in my head.

jcsalteregoon The Emacs 30 Day Challenge

I've always wanted to know the breakdown within the Church of Emacs of those who use it as everything including the kitchen sink, and those who just use it as an editor.

Does the former alienate a lot of would-be users?

jcsalteregoon Rackspace cloud beats Amazon EC2, by a lot

waaaait for it...

jcsalteregoon Rackspace cloud beats Amazon EC2, by a lot

When Cloud Servers work, they work great.

The pricing and build-out structure is linear when looking at RAM & disk space, so this may or may not fit everyone's requirements. There is no EBS-equivalent, and load balancing has just been introduced formally into the control panel recently. The persistency is something I've taken advantage of, compared to EC2's ephemeral nature (unless one employs EBS).

As for cloud servers going down randomly, Rackspace Roulette can be tough, and the only silver lining is it provides a good incentive to build (or at least, to think about) applications which work around failure.

There is one other lesser known gotcha which is max RAM capacity per account; I think the default is something like 50GB and if you require more (for burst perhaps), you have to get this amount pre-approved. Apparently this is to safeguard against (accidental) abuse of the Cloud Servers API, but it's probably also a good mechanism for capacity planning on their side. At any rate, I've seen/heard the turnaround to be about a couple of business days.

One the flip side, there was a very active thread a while back about how Mixpanel moved away from RS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884685

EDIT: One more note about RS -- resizing cloud servers. It's a great ability to have, but it can be slow. It tends to take longer the more data you have (not too surprising). A good practice is to wipe unnecessary log files before resizing, as I've been told that each resize action actually causes the cloud server to jump to another physical host. Don't quote me though, I'm just on the Internet :)

jcsalteregoon Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS.

There's a flag for that™

jcsalteregoon Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS.

I still use Terminal.app on a daily basis but here are some missing features:

- 256 color support (for your pretty emacs or vim)

- advanced bookmarks, with tagging

- send to multiple tabs

jcsalteregoon Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS.

I would wager part of the excitement is that Panic is an excellent and long-standing company in the Apple community, and they've proven time and time again they can release quality, beautiful software.

As the type of Mac user that has one foot in the console and one foot in the pretty GUI that is OS X, it's pretty great when someone can bridge that gap -- be it a kickass Terminal like iTerm2, or what I can only expect is an excellent app from Panic, Prompt.

Skip the marketing (still good copy to read), find some way to use the app and judge Panic that way.

jcsalteregoon `gosh` is security theater for piped shell scripts

Yeah, but if you pipe the curl output to your shell anyway, this is the same thing.

Unless of course it's some sort of "timing attack" (advance apology to purists if I'm using this term incorrectly) and the server knows you've downloaded this once (with gosh perhaps) and then sends you the malignant stuff the second or subsequent times.

Edit: sorry, the above makes no sense because you will have reviewed it with gosh and probably wouldn't download it again.

jcsalteregoon `gosh` is security theater for piped shell scripts

I'm guilty of this: `wget mysqltuner.pl && perl mysqltuner.pl`.

jcsalteregoon Metrics Metrics Everywhere - Coda Hale at CodeConf

For those who aren't savvy: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091104

jcsalteregoon Metrics Metrics Everywhere - Coda Hale at CodeConf

I use this in Safari/Preview.app -- hope it works across all PDF viewers though.

jcsalteregoon Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

Rackspace does this with their Cloud Servers :'(

jcsalteregoon Mention @somebody. They're notified.

I can appreciate the etymology (assuming you are getting this from UNIX) but it's definitely unnatural to read.

jcsalteregoon Mozilla Glow: Awesome Firefox 4 live download day map

This reminds me of the node.js knockout landing page. I believe there was a map on that one. Unfortunately, I can't seem to dig up that page anymore.

jcsalteregoon Dabble DB shuts down on May 18, 2011

Yes, although the company was acquired less than a year ago -- http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html

jcsalteregoon Rate our pivot: A Python cloud spreadsheet

Reminds me of http://www.resolversystems.com

jcsalteregoon Ask HN: Final Year CS Degree Project

Not so much for business ideas but there are always great ideas for the Google Summer of Code: http://code.google.com/soc/

jcsalteregoon Show HN: Set up a 4 node Cassandra cluster in under 2 minutes

Nice. For OS X users, iTerm/iTerm2 "Send Input to All Tabs" mode (⌘-I) is another way to go about that.

jcsalteregoon Take Control of Your Twitter Data: Introducing Crowdbooster (YC S10) Pro Exports

  4. You will not attempt or encourage others to:

    A. sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate the
       Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party for such
       party to develop additional products or services without prior
       written approval from Twitter;

- http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms

But you never know.