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jamesotron

Whenever chef deploys a new revision the site is broken until bundler has finished running. Lesson: don't deploy so frequently :)
Re:Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page. on Monday March 28, 2011 @10:55PM (#2381162)
Hi.

Thanks for your feedback. I will be adding more details about the difference between free and pro over the next week or so. I am hoping that I can get engineers to use splinch for their configuration management for free and then find a reason why it is essential for them to upgrade to a Pro - ie more devices or multiple environments (production, DR, etc). You're right, the pricing is based entirely on my gut feel, and unfortunately my guts are wildly oscillating between "people pay hundreds of grand for one of the existing solutions" and "if I price it too high no one will buy it."

I was planning on waiting until I had some screenshots and maybe a screencast available before putting too much effort into the sales side of the site but I'm waiting for a few of the features to be a bit smoother around the edges before I do that.

Thanks for your feedback, I'll give a few network operations managers I know a call and see what the think about pricing.

Re:Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page. on Monday March 28, 2011 @08:07PM (#2380720)
doh! thanks for the catch.
Re:Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page. on Monday March 28, 2011 @06:39PM (#2380437)
Thanks.

All the text shadows or specific ones? I used it only in places where I thought that it made the text _easier_ to read because it helps increase contrast. I'm probably mistaken :)

I'm really surprised by people telling me to make the site fixed-width, all the work I have done with accessibility, etc has taught me to make it scale nicely and avoid using absolute units wherever possible. I'll modify it to include a fixed width on my dev environment and take a look.

Sociable is the name of my company, Splinch is the product. I note that basecamphq.com has a great big 37 signals at the bottom of the page too, but I take your point and will reduce the size and add text explaining what it is.

Re:Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page. on Monday March 28, 2011 @06:34PM (#2380415)
Thanks! I've already made a few of your suggested changes to the site.

Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page.

Hi all.My expertise lies in networking and development and not in marketing and business development. I'm probably not best suited to the life of an entrepreneur, but with the help of friends like @peterc, and keeping HN in my feeds I have learned an awful lot over the last year or so.I am launching http://splinch.it/ in July. Splinch provides automatic router and switch configuration file...

( Read More... | 9 comments | 5 points | on HN )
Re:Open source Arduino based USB/MIDI foot controller on Tuesday March 08, 2011 @04:44PM (#2302707)
I am shocked and amazed to see one of my projects posted to HN by someone other than myself. Apparently someone else cares enough about what I'm doing to tell their mates about it. Thanks.
Re:Startup Update: Notifo iPhone App v2, More on Thursday September 02, 2010 @05:58PM (#1657854)
I guess that makes sense, I would be pretty annoyed if Facebook sent me a notification every time they roll out some random new feature.

I like the idea of bots, but I don't see a lot of consumer grade users using it. Seems more like a toy for the nerds amongst us, although I am sorely tempted to whip up an Eliza bot for notifo. That said, I also wanted to modify a z-code interpreter to allow people to play infocom games over twitter.

Re:Startup Update: Notifo iPhone App v2, More on Thursday September 02, 2010 @05:41PM (#1657799)
Nice work guys. I'm really impressed with the App updates today and the website update. One thing I was surprised by was that you don't have an option for "Allow Notifo to send me information about service updates and new features" and then have this announcement out to peoples devices. The other thing is that if you're going to use Paul's blog for announcements then it would really pay to have a mobile friendly version of the blog given your target market.
Re:The Greatest 404 message I've seen in awhile on Sunday August 15, 2010 @04:55PM (#1605912)
It's one of the default themes from Roxen webserver (roxen.com).

Ask HN: Payment processing in New Zealand

Hi all. I'm a small startup based in New Zealand. My product needs to have recurring billing and I was hoping to use a payment service like Chargify so that I don't have to deal with any credit card details and not have to worry about PCI compliance. Turns out Chargify has no support for any kind of sales tax (in New Zealand we have to add GST to sales to New Zealand based customers)....

( Read More... | 1 comment | on HN )

Ask HN: web dev houses, how do you handle continual improvement?

So, your customer says "give me a website that does X", you say "sure" and go about throwing together an app to meet the spec. What happens after the jobs done and there is a new framework release, or a security problem with the existing app? How do you handle approaching the client for additional funding to "keep the rails version fresh" or "fix a potential issue with XSS"? Do you bake it...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 5 points | on HN )
Re:Learn new words and shorten URLs at the same time... on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:34AM (#1284175)
there are ~230k words. once it runs out will start randomly hyphenating two words togther. in the mean time I'm looking at using wordnik's API for word selection - apparently they have ~4M.
Re:Learn new words and shorten URLs at the same time... on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:30AM (#1284167)
Yes, it lets you use the same URL twice - bit.ly does the same. Potentially different people want to share the same link and see their own stats:

http://s.mashd.cc/stats/nonsubstantiality http://s.mashd.cc/stats/mispage

...although I see I have a but with the impact calculation :)

Re:Unix recovery legend on Monday March 22, 2010 @11:40PM (#1212146)
I have experienced this very thing with a SunOS box at the remote end of a satellite link. It was in the US and we were in NZ. Let's just say that you can do a lot with bash and a single root shell.
Re:Poll: How many legitimate emails do you receive daily? on Monday November 30, 2009 @05:06AM (#967602)
Funny, I wrote an blog post about this last week.

http://blogs.auckland.ac.nz/z00m/2009/11/24/signal-to-noise/

How many of you are binge coders?

Okay. Here's my workflow: - block out at least three hours of time - stock up on coffee and shutdown all distractions - code until my brain breaks. This has implications for office work, because it means I can't do anything other than randomly browsing the nets, meaning that I go to work all day for fun, come home and binge until I fall asleep. Kind of screws the work/life balance we...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 6 points | on HN )
I contributed a lot of code to Caudium back in the early 00's even going to the Pike/Caudium conference in Paderborn, Germany in 2003 (which is quite an expensive proposition for someone from New Zealand). My biggest open source project at the moment is a Pike library which reads in packets from libpcap and builds a table of active TCP and UDP flows, including all the metadata about the flows (and optionally the payload) with various callbacks so that you can easily build analysis, diagnostic, accounting or logging applications.
Re:Ask HN: What would you love to work on? on Sunday August 09, 2009 @08:50PM (#751632)
My most beloved hobby is radio controlled helicopters. I would love to do something involving autonomous aircraft. Control systems and navigation. Should have gone to school, I guess.
Re:Cram your test driven development up your ass on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @11:09PM (#707131)
(which of course you didn't)
Re:Cram your test driven development up your ass on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @11:09PM (#707130)
Pretty random rant, if you ask me.
Re:Engineyard Challenge Python Code on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @08:58PM (#706961)
I found this academic paper on finding collisions in SHA1, but unfortunately I'm not smart enough to figure out what it's telling me. http://people.csail.mit.edu/yiqun/SHA1AttackProceedingVersio...
Re:Engineyard Challenge Python Code on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @03:07AM (#705306)
Ahh, I see that you're generating an entirely new random string each iteration. Interesting.

I've done mine in Pike, which will be faster (though not as fast as C).

http://github.com/jamesotron/HashChallenge/tree/master

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