News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sthulbourn

Re:New Tube for London on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:45AM (#8432276)
The line is equipped with an Automatic Train Operation system (ATO); the train operator (driver) closes the train doors and presses a pair of "start" buttons, and if the way ahead is clear, the ATO drives the train at a safe speed to the next station and stops it there. This system has operated since the line opened in 1968, making the Victoria line the world's first full-scale automatic railway.[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_line

The BBC use the pre-baked AMIs exclusively for our deployments, we have a concept of a "bakery" which creates a full formed AMI which we then use in our launch config.

The idea being that when you do a deploy, the launch config is updated to use the new AMI ID. The old instances are terminated and the new ones popup in its place. You can play with the scaling options to set an update pause time. We can get a 0 sec downtime with this.

Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @09:15AM (#7347000)
We use pretty aggressive compression on images at the moment, so yes. We need to start work on guessing the user's network speed so we can show higher quality images.
Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @09:13AM (#7346994)
Clear all BBC cookies
Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @07:29AM (#7346563)
We might consider removing the pinch-to-zoom lock, previously a dependency caused us to enable it.
Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @07:29AM (#7346559)
Hi,

I'm not sure why you think we're using bootstrap, we're not. Everything in our code base is bespoke (with the exception of jQuery 2). As a result, we get to choose our breakpoints, and they're flexible for now (there's a lot of movement before we go to the next one).

The iPad in portrait mode doesn't have the available width to show the second column without cramming the stories in the main column.

We settled on the breakpoints we have due to the amount of devices we want to offer our content on. We're a service that's trying to work on as many devices as possible, from Nokia 100s to modern desktop browsers. So we did the logical thing of splitting devices into groups, feature phones, smart phones, tablets, and above (desktop & TVs). Some of the larger screened Android phones cause issues since they have a massive resolution, but can't display content as a tablet because it would be hard to read.

You're right, we don't have volume settings right now, so we can't emphasise any of the stories except to make them the "top" story. We haven't got to that point yet, we are after all in beta. All I can say is it will come.

I can't comment on editorial context, just the technology.

The most read functionality is being worked on to be richer.

Thanks :)

Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @06:20AM (#7346378)
I'm one of the developers working on this site.

For those of you who are on a wanting to see the site mentioned in the page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news?view=beta

You can ask us about any of the technical points of our site here: http://github.com/bbc-news/feedback

Re:BBC News website: responsive design in beta on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @06:19AM (#7346368)
Yes there are. I'm one of them.
Re:GitBucket: A Github/BitBucket clone in Scala on Friday October 04, 2013 @10:30AM (#6495548)
That's why it's called enterprise
Correction: Every time you see or hear "terrorists" replace it with "citizens".

> Lord Blair told BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme: "The state has to have secrets – that's how it operates against citizens.

Re:Wraith – A screenshot comparison tool from the BBC on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @05:12PM (#6136875)
... I had a prototype that did that.
Re:Wraith – A screenshot comparison tool from the BBC on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @05:11PM (#6136873)
We don't want pixel perfect on all browsers, we know it's unrealistic.
Re:Wraith – A screenshot comparison tool from the BBC on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @05:09PM (#6136859)
It does, kind of crudely though. You have to comment out a method and then comment out another.

There's a ruby refactor that allows you to just specify an environment var.

Re:Wraith – A screenshot comparison tool from the BBC on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @05:08PM (#6136849)
Disclosure: I'm a developer of this tool & work for BBC News.

We use this for catching things that we'd never spot, a good example of how it has helped us is after a giant Sass refactor, we ran this tool against the old CSS site and the new CSS site, this showed us where things were off by a pixel or two (as well as big formatting changes).

We've found this tool rather valuable, we're not saying everyone will, or that others should use it. We open sourced it because it might help someone.

Re:Show HN: Trello for GitHub Issues on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @05:08PM (#6022830)
I have this new system for "agile". You write everything down and then cross it out when it's done, continue until everything is done.
Re:Show HN: cisimple - CI for mobile (iOS and Android) on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @01:22PM (#4387027)
How does it handle developer certs from Apple? I'd rather not share mine with a 3rd party or my code. One could easily just run jenkins/hudson/travis (with plugins) locally and do it, which would probably be faster too since it would have less contention.
Re:Why is the BBC future site not accessible from the UK? on Thursday June 14, 2012 @06:04AM (#4110584)
They can't. The content isn't owned by BBC UK, it's owned by BBC Worldwide, and BBC UK would have to: pay to licence the content from BBC WW or BBC WW would have to display ads.
Re:Why is the BBC future site not accessible from the UK? on Thursday June 14, 2012 @05:53AM (#4110547)
I work for the BBC and can confirm this.

The content on /future is generated and created by BBC Worldwide and thus, unavailable to the UK because of this...

They can't show adverts on this page and allow people from the UK to see it because this would cause confusion and make people wonder where their licence fee is going.

Re:A review of RubyMotion on Friday May 04, 2012 @10:37AM (#3928543)
The only clear win I can see from this is the REPL.

Everything else is down to preference... I'd rather write native Obj-C code, but the guy next to me would rather write in ruby.

It's very subjective and down to coder preference, I can only hope that the ruby world has a great work around for the very verbose selector names in the iOS SDK; I was expecting some sort of wrapping for the iOS SDK to make it simpler.

Re:RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS on Thursday May 03, 2012 @06:22PM (#3926096)
It's nice, I'm new to using ruby (I've been an iOS dev for a while now), I'd give it ago.

But I assume it uses storyboards in the same way as ObjC, set it in the target and in the Info.plist, and it figures it out... it'd be nice to see it working though.

Older »