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zarski

32 karma · joined February 15, 2010

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zarski··on Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium
Can Brow6el work as expected within a Docker container?
zarski··on What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
Just a heads up.

Only Haagen-Dazs Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, and Coffee are no-gums and basic ingredients (i.e. you can understand), their other flavors have all the same crap highlighted in the article.

Aldi's Premium Ice Cream is good less expensive alternative.

zarski··on Desktop Environments Resource Usage Comparison
fwiw: I just put Bodhi Linux v6 (Enlightenment/Moksha) on a Macbook late 2011 model that has 16GB of RAM and a SSD. It is now running great under Bodhi but was butt slow with Ubuntu 20.04.
zarski··on Java Edition is moving house
My kids play Minetest daily and love the game and community.

I'm looking to teach them coding and graphics with Minetest's approachable lua API so I'll be diving in to that side of things soon.

The Minetest team has purposely focused on keeping bloat in the way of excessively pretty graphics/shaders out of the game engine making it playable on old machines and requiring less bandwidth for community play.

Here is a great recent article https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Open_source_game_developer_Pert... interviewing the Minetest creator and leader, Perttu Ahola.

- I can vouch for two community kids-safe servers: (1) The Epic Server (regular survival game) and (2) Capture The Flag.

- Great Youtube Minetest channel => https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdiuryhdSBUxQse2rarVqPg

zarski··on Minecraft Education Edition Worlds Available for Free
Who cares. My kids love OSS Minetest. https://www.minetest.net
zarski··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (October 2019)
SEEKING WORK Location: New Hampshire

Remote:

I build MVPs only. I'll get version 1 off the ground for a fixed fee so you can find product market fit. Once you find fitness I'll help you get a full-time team or individual in place.

https://minimul.com

zarski··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (August 2019)
SEEKING WORK

Location: New Hampshire

Remote:

I build MVPs only. I'll get version 1 off the ground for a fixed fee so you can find product market fit. Once you find fitness I'll help you get a full-time team or individual in place.

https://minimul.com

zarski··on Easily build your own private Git server
That's fine. The point is to get a "little" more control of your private Git repos. I say little because in this case the Git server is still hosted on AWS.
zarski··on Why Angular, Ember, or Backbone don't work for us.
I heartily agree. I had a similar experience when researching client-side frameworks within the scope of minimal viable products.

http://minimul.com/should-i-build-an-MVP-using-a-client-side...

zarski··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2012)
SEEKING WORK - Southern New Hampshire (Keene,Concord,Manchester,Nashua) or Remote

Front-end engineer primarily leveraging jquery and jqueryui. Was doing single page apps back in 2003 and early influences were oddpost.com and webfx.eae.net.

Professional level backend skills in Rails and Sinatra. Built http://simplton.com start to finish in Rails including all design, coding, and system administration.

Professional level Linux system administration skills. Sold Firewall/NAT devices using hand-compiled RedHat. Very comfortable CentOS,Ubuntu Server, and RHEL.

Check out my CV http://minimul.com/cv and https://github.com/minimul

zarski··on Why We Stick With PHP (and don't move to Ruby or Python)
"server side language is just a glue between the front end and the data source"

I agree. Front end work is dominating my time in web app. development. Server side is getting less important day by day.

zarski··on Nielsen: Mega-Menus Gone Wrong
I have a basic javascript implementation of a mega-menu here http://minimul.com/because-mega-dropdowns-are-better.html .

Yes, by default it does columns, however, it also has an option for doing rows.

zarski··on Ask HN: What SaaS apps have a great UI ?
Appreciate taking the time for the feedback. Great advice.
zarski··on Ask HN: What SaaS apps have a great UI ?
Smashing mag. has some good articles on this topic.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/25/designing-user-in...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/12/10-useful-web-app...

I have worked pretty hard on the UI/UX experience for http://simplton.com/screenshots and have been happy with the results.

Also, look no further than Google, their interface work with Google Reader and Docs is excellent.

zarski··on Part time Entrepreneur, fulltime Employee
I don't really buy into this approach especially with young children and a wife. Read all the posts detailing how hard this approach is without a wife and kids. How much time is this guy spending with his spouse? How happy is the spouse going to be with you constantly on the computer. This kind of advice will mostly lead to a divorce. Of course, this is case by case as some spouses may be OK with being totally ignored or perhaps you can convince them that this amazing web application is going to make a fortune and you will be able to purchase an island for her (just a couple more weeks honey I promise!); however, for most this advice will land them in a financial and emotionally devastating divorce. When you get married and have kids you need to put some selfish needs on the back burner. I think a better approach is to take money from savings and quit your job. Or perhaps go to 20 hours a weeks or something like that. And if you can't do something like that than just forget it -- it is not meant to be. Your gold rush web application is just not that important -- your wife and kids are.
zarski··on The Non-Programming Programmer
Good article but didn't he write the same article in 2007 (as he mentions but ..)? This re-posting is a subtle shill for stackoverflow careers. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
zarski··on When tech startups == closed restaurants
The article is is too vague and its advice unbalanced. Sure, you don't want to JUST be ticking off programming related todo list items. Yes, you need to do your marketing (adwords,blogging,emailing,etc.) and you need to watch your burn rate (fiscal management). However, the best marketing is having a great product. The users you do get to sign up you need to keep and in turn have them then do word of mouth. How do you do that with not-so-special software?

I don't like the analogy either as there are not enough details. A lot of restaurant startups I have noticed that tank think quality is everything. The have a two-month burn rate and need to be smash hit by the third (I am speculating). I don't want to contradict what I just said about web application quality but you got to balance and hang around for at least certain duration. I like this article on the subject of duration http://www.dshen.com/blogs/business/archives/lasting_two_yea....

IMHO 30% Marketing. 30% Fiscal management and creativity. 40% Continued application development and enhancement.

zarski··on The Internet? Bah (1995)
Yeah, the Internet can be the good, bad, and the ugly. The good: I provide for my family of 5 by creating and maintaining web applications (an occupation non-existent at the time of my Univ. graduation); primarily because of the Internet I have a home office where, among other benefits, I have been set free from the unproductive, soulless cube-farm. Time would fail detailing other benefits such as enhancements in maps, search, discussion and in general increased access to knowledge. The bad: too much trivial information; work is anytime, anywhere -- no hard boundaries; and temptation for attention sucking ( as the author stated "this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.") away offline life.

The ugly: pornography and perversion at a click; anonymous rage;

Like just about every area of life we need discipline and balance.

zarski··on Full screen, in browser, Flash 10.1 content shown running on a Nexus One
I totally agree that Kuler and Google Analytics don't and have never needed flash. In fact most web application needs don't need the HTML 5 or Flash like capabilities. AJAX and DOM tech turns out to be good enough technology to cover most web application use cases.
zarski··on Ask HN: How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest?
Didn't even know about /newest. I am going to checking it now.
zarski··on Ask HN: Please review my start-up - planergize.com
I like the design of the landing page and the main graphic. I am getting tired of seeing the standard "browser screenshot" graphic on landing pages. As for the copy on the landing page I also couldn't discern quickly what the application was about.
zarski··on Adobe's John Nack: Adobe is "sabotaging" HTML5?
Adobe needs to embrace HTML 5 and start making great tools around the HTML 5 runtimes. Flash, the runtime makes them nothing. Yes, the build tools around Flash, however, they need to stop their belly aching around HTML,JS,and CSS and learn to embrace and profit.