kaffeinecoma

My motivation for this was seeing that people regularly pay freelancers on oDesk/elance hundreds of dollars for this kind of thing. Or perhaps they're paying way less than that, but they're waiting weeks just to get that first buggy 1.0 version deployed.

So I think there is real value here for someone who wants to get their basic webapp 1.0 version out as quickly as possible, and not have to pull their hair out over stupid things like signups, or Facebook integration.

I am in fact sitting on some Adsense ads for this, but first I wanted to get some basic feedback on whether I'm totally off-base or not with the idea. Thanks!

Not a bad idea. I'd be more than happy to give the kit away if it meant I'd get some consulting work out of it. Thank you.

Clickable link: http://armhold.com/quick

SEEKING WORK -- Telecommute, or local to Cleveland

Experienced Webapp dev: Java, Wicket, Lucene/SOLR, Hibernate, Google App Engine, etc.

Work sample: I built http://appgravity.com.

I left a cushy job to pursue freelancing full-time in January. Since then I've been slogging it out on oDesk & Elance. Had a couple of great clients, but it's very hard to make a living on sites where so many people are expecting to re-create Facebook for $500.

I work efficiently. I don't require hand-holding. I produce high-quality code.

Contact info and more details at http://armhold.com/contact.

Yes, good riddance.

As a bonus, I'll be happy to reclaim the "eject" key for some other use. Right now on my Mac Pro (i.e. the tower- not the notebook) I hit it by mistake fairly often when reaching for delete. The drive tray then pops out loudly and scares my dog.

Ah, I knew that Web Sharing used Apache, but I didn't realize that it was packaged in such a way as to be usable for stuff beyond Web Sharing. The conf files seem to live in /etc.apache2. Thanks for that.

Giving this a try now. While I'm waiting for XCode to download, can anyone comment on the best way to get Apache httpd running on OSX? Is there a Homebrew package for this?

I use Apache to front Tomcat on a linux server, but it would be really handy to be able to test stuff locally on my Mac before copying changes up to the server.

How do you bind "switch to app X" to a hotkey? I'm in Keyboard Shortcuts, and I while I can see how to define shortcuts for app menu items and such, I don't see how to specify switching.

I agree with you on the context-switching issue in spaces- it seems counter-productive to have to switch to a separate space for email, terminal, whatever. I like being able to have all my apps in the same space (albeit on two physical displays), and Expose and Cmd-tab seem less disruptive to my workflow than Spaces.

Hmm, my two-finger swipe to move back/forward in browser history via Magic Mouse seems to invoke Spaces/Mission Control now. Anyone know how to fix that? Or what the new gesture for browser nav might be? I don't see anything helpful in System Prefs for that.

I'm a hard-core emacs devotee since 1988, and I used to think the same way- who needs freakin' autocomplete? But a good friend made me try one out, and indeed, a decent IDE really does make a big difference in certain environments.

For example, being able to click through an entire app from Spring XML config, all the way through your own source code, into library files, and even the source for the JRE makes a huge, huge difference in productivity.

And languages/libraries/frameworks change all the time; the IDEs tend to follow these things closely. Having to maintain your own hand-crafted elisp (or whatever) takes a lot of work. I've been there, and I don't plan on going back any time soon.

There is this concept of "flow"- a break in your concentration (for example, because your IDE is too slow to keep up with your typing) can often be enough to push you out of this state of flow.

Sure, if I know my compile is going to take a few minutes I can plan for it, and work on other stuff in the mean time.

But for me the tiny interruptions really add up, and contribute to me not being as productive as possible. This is especially true when you're hunting a bug, or working in a tight TDD loop where you're constantly editing/compiling/testing. Having to wait for the machine is a real morale-killer.

I use BCrypt, and do the following:

1. replace their current hash with "LOCKED", plus some random noise.

2. generate a random string, and store the hash in a "forcedResetToken" field for the user.

3. email them a URL, part of which is the token.

4. when the link is activated, I look up the user account by the hash of the token, force them to choose a new pw, and remove the forcedResetToken.

That's the approach I take in my Wicket Quickstarter project (http://armhold.com/store).

Based on other comments I'm seeing, I'm now planning to also add an expiration of the token (say 24 hours or something).

Is there a public-domain dictionary that sites such as this use?

Try http://www.hnhackers.com.

SEEKING WORK

(REMOTE, or local to Cleveland)

In a couple of weeks I'll be wrapping up work on http://appgravity.com an Android search engine I'm building for a client.

Java (10+ years), Wicket, Google App Engine, GWT, Hibernate, Solr/Lucene.

Most of my experience is server-side, but I've also done both iPhone and Android apps.

Contact info at http://www.armhold.com.

How do you "reverse" transactions that live in a peer-to-peer network? Or are you saying that MtGox has some kind of buffer of transactions that haven't been "executed" onto the network yet?

I use the built-in OSX "Keychain" app. It's integrated into the OS such that if you use the "save password" feature of your browser, it ends up in the Keychain anyway.

It also generates great passwords, so now I generate a new pw for each site rather than re-using a handful of common ones.

Apparently if you ask them (and have decent credentials) you can get an invitation easily. I did.

You're aware that there's already careers.stackoverflow.com, right? That said, is anyone else disappointed by the lack of response there? I'm not actively looking, but in ~2 months on the site I've had "search hits: 8, employer views: 0". Kind of disappointing, considering all the hype.

I find this site useful: http://www.nxdom.com

I think it was done by a fellow HN'er, if I'm not mistaken. Helped me find my latest: http://pixlshare.com

It's not hard, but it is very slow: create MtGox account; create Dwolla account; add your traditional checking account to Dwolla; initiate a xfer from checking -> Dwolla; wait (days) for xfer to complete; initiate Dwolla -> MtGox xfer (wait days); buy bitcoins with USD funds on MtGox.

I started that process purely for the fun of some small-time speculation, but the whole hassle of the process made me realize why Bitcoin is important.

I've been following Jeff's SSD stories for a while now, and I came here today thinking maybe it was time for me to take the plunge and get one myself. But this latest post just frightens me.

Even if you can avoid catastrophe with regular, automated backups (I use two Time Machine drives myself), what about bitrot? If the SSD you've been diligently backing up over months has been slowly rotting, can you have any faith at all in the backups?

Presumably, but I haven't tried running it. I'd kind of like to know how to turn off something that's going to do port-forwarding on my machine before starting it up.

Perhaps I missed it in the FAQ, but how do you turn it off? CTRL+C?

I understand that you're aiming for simplicity here, but it would be handy to have a menubar icon (or whatever is appropriate for the given platform) to indicate that it's running or not.

Or maybe you actually have that, but it's not clear that you do from the website.

"There is simply no good way to define a user interface in Java, and that is a language problem"

I'm curious what he really means by this. Language-level GUI implementations? Or perhaps he's referring to language support for validating user input.

I quit my job this year and have been making a reasonable living via Elance and oDesk. Mostly GWT/Google App Engine projects, but starting to dip into Android as well.

On oDesk I was lucky enough to meet a great client almost immediately. I got an ongoing project with him for ~30 hours/week. I think I'm grossly undercharging him, but it's a steady gig that leaves me able to pick up other projects on the side.

For fixed price projects I generally don't even bother considering anything under $5K. I try to stand out by bidding high rates (by Elance standards). So far it's working fairly well. I hope to develop enough happy customers so that eventually I'll be able to move off of those sites and just get clients by word of mouth.

A lot of the speed difference comes from having spent one's time learning the basics. After you've spent 5 hours debugging a mis-placed semi-colon, you tend to remember that kind of mistake and avoid it in the future.

But if the idea is to prevent wasted time while learning, there's a simple solution: have the students do pair-programming, preferably with someone who's already learned the basics. Or at least let them all do it in a lab, and have the prof walk around to help out students who are stuck. Not for their entire college career, but perhaps for CS 101.

Generally speaking I'm not a fan of pair-programming, but this seems like a good application for it.

Can we all pitch in and buy John Gruber a nice, legible font that's larger than 9pt?

I'd like to see a remote login implementation for OSX that allows you to login remotely, and also adjusts the screen size to match that of the actual physical device you're on.

The existing implementation of screen sharing is frustrating for me to use because I'm often remoting in from a 15" Macbook to a Macpro tower with two heads @ 1920x1200 each. So the options are scale to 1) down the display (slow, fuzzy) or 2) scroll all over the place.

An ideal solution would be to let me log into a virtual display that matches the size of my physical remote terminal. In other words, make the server think it has a head the same size as the client.

Sounds like a great project for someone: realcostofliving.com