Disqus - Friends of RedCanary

Re: Casting in late 2007 (Scripting News)

jfedor — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:47:33 -0000

I suppose fits under #5 Lifecasting/event stream aggregation -- products like Onaswarm (my fave) or FriendFeed. Then you get FF in Facebook get this bizarre mirror in a mirror event happening.

Also there's the personal feed aggregation/interest casting -- stuff like RSS Mix or Google Reader Shared Feed.

Re: » I love my city, and so should you | StartupNorth

jfedor — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:44:32 -0000

I'm in the same boat as Leila. Probably because of our shared panel experience. I too have a draft but you've done all the heavy lifting here. Well said especially the competition between cities point.

Re: I love my city, and so should you

jfedor — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:44:32 -0000

Re: » AideRSS partners with NewsGator | StartupNorth

jfedor — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:44:16 -0000

Just for the record Terry and I didn't have disagreement with the direction of AideRSS but rather we were both contractors to the company. NewsGator was one of my last projects at AideRSS and we're still fans and users of the service.

We left to launch our new startup ParkVu.

Re: AideRSS partners with NewsGator

jfedor — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:44:16 -0000

We left to launch our new startup ParkVu.

Re: GumGum reports strong usage, completes funding round

jfedor — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:07:40 -0000

TinEye from Idée is also worth a look -- http://www.ideeinc.com/prod...

Re: Developer Compensation: A New Reality? - Red Canary

jfedor — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:59:17 -0000

When I first read this I was completely shocked. It simply didn't jive with what I'm hearing in the marketplace. Then it jumped out at me, "later stage software clients" which makes more sense. There's a theoretical diminishing of risk in the later stage companies therefore the reward is intuitively less as well.

Additionally the rock star developer typically isn't attracted to the large, late stage company and if they are, they'll likely get handled as a special case. Overall, the market will dictate itself; if a (above average) developer wants the security of a later stage company and retention and incentives are important to them, they'll shop around until they find a home with what they're looking for.

That said I disagree that software developers are suddenly a commodity. I think Red Canary's salary surveys continue to show increases in compensation, at least here in Waterloo. I wish it were true that software developers were equally talented and productive but sadly it just isn't the case. If you've hired right, you pretty much get what you pay for and I wouldn't choose a discount software developer to build my products just like I likely wouldn't choose a discount lawyer to handle a tricky transaction.

Re: Developer Compensation: A New Reality? - Red Canary

jfedor — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:30:17 -0000

Re: One Red Question: What should the comp package look like for this early-stage CTO? - Red Canary

jfedor — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:36:27 -0000

Depends.

Overall what's the driver/need to add the CTO role? To set/develop vision? To manage research of the PhDs? or is the CTO doing double duty and also VP Eng? If cash flow positive is the plan, is there that much research going on or do you really need someone who can drive a development plan -- hint that's not a CTO.

Regardless, what's the value of the role in relative terms to others and the CEO? Beyond keeping the CTO at a state where they're not worried about food and shelter, what motivates them and how does it align to delivering shareholder value for the org and ultimately the planned liquidity event for the company?

I'm always worried about bonus structures, invariably they incent some ugly/dumb behaviours in the messy world of early stage startups. Especially for senior management

Re: One Red Question: What should the comp package look like for this early-stage CTO? - Red Canary

jfedor — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:27:14 -0000

Are they quadrupling as Product Manager too?

Re: One Red Question: What should the comp package look like for this early-stage CTO? - Red Canary

jfedor — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:57:41 -0000

So what are the CTO duties then?

Re: Ruby library for Disqus widgets

njclarke — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:39:08 -0000

Thanks, Daniel. When the API comes out I'll be pretty interested in adding support for it too. I'm using it on a few sites of mine now and so I have a pretty big vested interest in maintaining it. :-)

Re: Ruby library for Disqus widgets

njclarke — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:10:10 -0000

Awesome. I'll look that over and see about adding in some support for it as soon as I can.

Re: friendly_id Tutorial - randomba.org

njclarke — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:58:12 -0000

Sure. In the first example your State and Event models would use friendly_id, and you would just use Rails' normal routing to set up the route with the event embedded under the state.

To get links like in your second example, you can add a method to your Event model to build a slug that includes the event's state. Take a look at this tip for more info on how to do that:

http://randomba.org/posts/f...

Re: friendly_id Tutorial - randomba.org

njclarke — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:06:47 -0000

You haven't really made it clear what you want to have in the friendly_id. Maybe you can show me what you want the URL to look like?

Re: friendly_id Tutorial - randomba.org

njclarke — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:10:14 -0000

In this case I think what you need to do is consider the registration a separate model/resource and not just a join table. Rather than using has_and_belongs_to_many, you would make a registration model and use has_many_through.

Here's a sample pastie:

http://pastie.org/446180

Re: My idea for installing gems from Github - randomba.org

njclarke — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:45:01 -0000

I'm not sure it's so important what directories the actual gems are installed into, I'm more concerned about the user interface of the "gem" command. Following the steps I outlined above you could continue to store the gems locally just as they are now (i.e., with the username), but simply allow "gem install mygem" to either automatically install an intelligent default, or ask which one you mean.

Re: Why I quit my job to work on open source - randomba.org

njclarke — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:01:29 -0000

Thanks!

Re: To "I Hate Seattle"

njclarke — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:54:32 -0000

Just a couple of guys from Seattle. Well in my case, formerly from Seattle since I now live in Buenos Aires where it rains a lot less. One day we saw the domain name "ihateseattle.com" was available and decided to just put a quick site up and see if anyone wanted to use it. Initially we intended it as somewhat of a joke and I've been a little surprised to see the passion of some of the comments posted here.

But our idea has always been, more or less complete freedom for people to post whatever they want (except for anything illegal). We don't interfere editorially because I think it would ruin the site. And I'm glad to see that some people have found it as an outlet for real frustration and pain, as well as a good laugh once in a while.

Re: The 10 stages of open source project hacking - randomba.org

njclarke — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:25:24 -0000

Well if you want, get to step 6 and send me your patches. :-)

I think the idea of tighter integration with ActiveRecord is interesting, but then again the reason I use Disqus for commenting is because I specifically don't want to have another model in my application. Disqus makes it easier to have a full-featured blog using something like Sinatra, and I think that's where its strength lies.

For code highlighting, you might want to look at some of the Javascript code highlighters out there, such as this one:

http://code.google.com/p/sy...

I'm using that in a soon-to-be-released project and am pretty happy with it.

Thanks for the comment and enjoy a Berliner Weisse for me. :-)

Re: [Off-Topic] Signing off from Locaweb - AkitaOnRails.com

njclarke — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:44:30 -0000

Good luck in your next endeavor, Fabio, though I'm sure you won't need it. I've always had a great deal of respect for your attitude, your work ethic and your results. Looking forward to meeting up with you again at Railsconf in a few months!

Re: Keeping Code Aesthetics in Perspective - Norman Clarke

njclarke — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:51:23 -0000

Thanks!

Re: I was wrong - ORDER BY RANDOM is slow - Norman Clarke

njclarke — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:26:49 -0000

Sure, it could certainly return empty rows; I guess you could loop until you get the number of results you expect, knowing that with a large dataset you'll almost always be looping only once.

If caching the results is doable, then I'd prefer to just periodically cache the output of an ORDER BY RANDOM; like you said, you could randomly select 1000 ids once per hour and store them in memory, shuffle them as an array, or maybe just use them in an IN or EXISTS clause followed by another ORDER BY RANDOM. Perhaps it would be a good idea for a Rails plugin.

Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation

njclarke — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:10:32 -0000

Are you referring to InnoDB? Oracle has not changed the MySQL community edition, only the commercial version. You are only affected by the change if you are distributing embedded MySQL code in your app without providing source. The breathless hype yesterday on Hacker News about Oracle "nerfing" MySQL was just FUD. Unless you are buying a commercial license for MySQL you are in no way shape or form affected by what Oracle has done to MySQL.

Virtual Box, like the MySQL community edition, is released under the GPL. So Oracle is pretty limited in what they can do to screw the project up; they could decide to make all future updates released under a commercial license, but if this happens then the GPL codebase will likely just be forked and maintained as a separate project (like is already happening with Open Office, and MySQL/Drizzle). Virtual Box is a very popular project and isn't going away any time soon!

Re: Sadly, You Are Probably Several Years Ahead of the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator - SocialTimes.com

njclarke — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:10:18 -0000

The Web 2.0 bullshit generator is pretty much passé. This one is way more up-to-date: http://bsgen30.com/