274 karma · joined January 25, 2011
If we're talking home made back garden arsenal, the go-to for my generation was the peg gun: https://www.instructables.com/A-Great-Peg-Gun/, which is, in retrospect, absolutely irresponsibly lethal with the right tension elastic bands.
For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for the subsequent books. They all sold enough to pay back that advance and so I got quarterly royalties on top too, but given the amount of toil it required - and quick turnaround times with new Flash releases, meaning many late nights - I would have been better compensated doing pretty much anything else.
That said, money isn't the only, or even necessarily the most important or fulfilling, reward on offer. I got the writing gig because I was spending a lot of my free time on various Flash-related forums answering questions and helping people with their projects. I did that for the sheer joy of helping others along in their learning journey, and saw writing books as a massive extension of that.
It very much mirrors my experience of the public school system in the UK: teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid, but do it anyway because it's something of a calling. In fact, that probably applies to a bunch of other public sector roles too, not least the NHS primary care roles.
It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and melting snow on the ground, and looking out of the window of my bedroom across the street and into the opposite neighbour's front garden - which had been dug over to prepare the ground for vegetable planting in the spring - I saw a sphere of pinkish glowing light falling slowly to the ground. At first I thought it was a balloon, but looking at it more intently it seemed perfectly spherical and as it got close to the ground it hovered there for a good 5 or so seconds, illuminating the ground below. Then it completely vanished without a sound - no bang, no fire, just... gone. I ran out of the house and over to the neighbour's garden to see if I could find any remnants of whatever it was but there was nothing to be found except for what I noted at the time was a weird sharp smell and a small dish-shaped depression in the rough ground below where it vanished.
I obviously can't say for sure that it was ball lightning, and I hadn't heard anything about such phenomena at that point so didn't describe it as such at the time, but every now and again when the topic comes up I can't help but see similarities between what I've seen and some of the reports. At the very least, it's a good excuse to retell this bizarre story from my childhood.
Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the existing players are much more interested in the space stuff.
If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay, though, it really does (or at least has the potential to) add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary installations and the planet surface itself is definitely increasing my enjoyment of the game.
The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the recent patches it's just about performant and stable enough to enjoy.
There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.
0: https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object-funding
I assume this is not exclusive to Stripe.
The backstory that unfolds through your fake inbox actually gives the devilishly tricky game some direction, and the post-solution histograms showing just how many people solved the same puzzle cheaper, with fewer instructions and with lower power consumption than you tug at your ego and keep you obsessing over the same puzzle long after you've solved it. There's even a fun Solitaire variation buried in there for good measure, which was evidently so popular they also released it as a standalone game [3].
1: http://www.zachtronics.com/shenzhen-io/
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12660253
3: http://store.steampowered.com/app/570490/SHENZHEN_SOLITAIRE/
tails.com is a tech-centric startup, using the power of technology combined with applied nutritional science to change the world of dog food for good.
So much more than just a website, our intelligent systems formulate and fulfil bespoke, individually optimised blends of food for each dog, and we evolve that blend over time to match the dogs' constantly changing nutritional needs. Orders are delivered direct to owners' doorsteps every month all across the country; every bag of food that leaves our blending facility is totally unique.
We launched in July 2014 and we're currently expanding the current team of 9 with developers of both front- and back-end persuasions. The platform is Python based, though we've flirted with Go recently too, and with an ex-Amazon architect among our tech founders we of course make full use of AWS in building a robust, distributed set of applications and services.
If you're interested in finding out more, head to https://tails.com/careers or drop an email to steve@tails.com.
1. I had an old FitBit Ultra that stopped syncing to the base station. They sent me a replacement base station but that didn't work, but I forgot to follow it up. Fast forward a year and I find my (now out of warranty) Fitbit in the back of my Man Drawer. I dropped them an email on the off chance that they'd take a look at it for me and instead they sent me a free Fitbit One.
2. My wife dropped her Fitbit One on the school run and didn't notice until later in the day. On the way back to pick up our daughter she found her Fitbit by the side of the road with half of the electronics hanging out due to having been under more than a few car tyres. I suggested contacting Fitbit to see if it could be repaired or if they offered refurbished units, and again they sent her a brand new Fitbit One completely free of charge.
I'm sure the level of customer support varies geographically, but since the above I've had nothing but good things to say about Fitbit UK's customer support.
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/commitment-high-street-banks-ret...
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/commitment-high-street-banks-ret...
"At the end of 2015, the combined market share for IE8 (8.95 percent), IE9 (6.67 percent), and IE10 (4.18 percent) was 19.80 percent,"
Sure, use flexbox exclusively if you want to push away nearly 20% of visitors. Also notice how the older of those browsers has the highest single percentage of use, and reflect on what that might mean about how likely those users are to upgrade.
I prefer the more customer-centric method of looking at what browsers my customers use and supporting them, rather than the more developer-centric view of "X is hard, I don't want to do X anymore and it's no longer supported anyway so there!".
By all means keep an eye on the browser usage for your audience and drop active support for older browsers once they fall below a certain percent, but don't take another company's actions as a license to screw over your (hopefully paying) customers.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rthree/
Looking at the source now, I think we might have been trying to use every pattern in the GoF book in one project.
Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates for the PHP-based frontend servers to evaluate at request time. The idea was that you put as much of your logic as possible into the template generation layer, leaving the request-time logic to handle the stuff that changed request by request.
Now, that all sounds quite reasonable, but the two layers were written in different languages. The pre-template-generation logic was written as inline Perl (plus a little custom syntax, because why not), while the dynamic frontend logic was written in PHP. Perl was frequently used to generate chunks of PHP code to be executed by the frontend servers, and sometimes this PHP code wrote chunks of inline JavaScript. To say that debugging said JS was fun would be an understatement.
https://alas.aws.amazon.com/ALAS-2015-473.html
As usual, the Elastic Beanstalk team (with their forked yum repositories) are lagging behind on a fix.
That said, you also need to be careful with concatenation. It's tempting to go for a 'concatenate everything into one file' approach, but that can be suboptimal. When you've got a large library like jQuery that changes infrequently, concatenating that with your constantly-evolving application code results in your users paying the download cost for jQuery every time you make a change (albeit without the connection overhead). Instead, it make sense for some applications to bundle third party libraries into one file, and the application code into another.
As I said in my original article, the most important thing you can do to improve the performance of your site is to measure client-side performance from your real user traffic, establish a baseline and only then try various techniques and see which ones have the greatest impact for your site and your visitors. There are various techniques that /might/ help, and some are more universal than others, but you won't know for sure if a change helped or hindered if you can't look at your stats.
[1] http://statichtml.com/2011/google-ajax-libraries-caching.htm... [2] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/03/18/http-archive-jqu...
Just yesterday I had a fish finger and salad cream sandwich for lunch, followed by a crisp sandwich for dinner. These tasty snacks - along with Pot Noodle sandwiches - fuelled me through university many moons ago, and are delicious enough that I'm still making them now that I'm married with two children.
I must admit that I'm not totally sold on the plain recipe for a toast sandwich, though I could see it being tasty with a bit of garlic butter rather than just plain butter.
Here's a series of photographs of major cities around the world done using this technique by Lucie & Simon:
http://petapixel.com/2012/03/28/post-apocalyptic-photographs... http://www.lucieandsimon.com/works/silent_world
Gerstmann and GameSpot's John Davidson spoke quite candidly about the acquisition [2] at the time, including the thorny issue of Gerstman's previous departure from GameSpot. Makes for an interesting watch if you remember when the original scandal broke over the original Kane & Lynch review.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.history#...
http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pir...
In another life I wrote technical books, which at the time were only available in physical formats. That didn't stop electronic versions of the more popular books from appearing on usenet.
http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459
Over a decade ago I was a moderator on the FlashKit forums[1], and this page turning effect was all over the place.
[1] I'm surprised this is still here (in all its cringeworth glory) after 12 years: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?243303-NETbre...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/kissmetrics-trackin...