moderately inappropriate

Safari on Windows...

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 10:34:47 -0800

Ugh

Safari on Windows is a nightmare for web developers. I am not even speaking to the bugs, or the 'windowsisms' it doesn't do, or any of the other bitching people have done on the topic.

Safari on Windows is bad for web developers just because it has the potential to add a 5th major browser. Right now when you do serious web development, you have to be concerned with how it works in IE6, IE7, FF2 and FF1.5. There are non trivial differences between all 4, and something working in one does not guarantee it will work in any others. Generally FF2 and FF1.5 work pretty closely, but I have been bitten by thinking they work the same too many times to not check.

I know many people feel that Safari is 'standards compliant' and it will work anywhere that FF2 does, so it isn't an additional burden to maintain, but that is just not the case.

I just spent 3 hours yesterday looking at a very heinous safari bug where even accessing the document of a window that was loaded from an external domain caused safari to disappear all the iframes on the page, so simple code that did:

for (var i = 0; i < targetWindow.frames.length; i++) { try { var doc = targetWindow.frames[i].document; // do something with the document. } catch (e) { /* cross domain iframes fail here, but thats ok */ } }

That code, while failing properly on firefox, or ie (any versions) with cross domain iframes, causes all iframes in safari to disappear and not be rendered.

I am looking forward to dealing with more and more of these issues if safari gets enough market share to be something I have to support. *ugh*

Wii owners

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:51:54 -0800

If you own a wii, and like listening to music or watching video you should point your wii at imeem.com for a nice surprise :)

Medsphere

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:38:03 -0800

This is a bit belated, but congrats to the guys over at Medsphere for open sourcing their product.

A long time ago (it feels like lifetimes), I took a job at Medsphere to work on porting a Java MUMPS VM to C#. After completing a proof of concept port, Steve and I felt like it would be a better use of my skillset to port the existing (crappy) CPRS gui to a modern toolkit/language and make it crossplatform at the same time.

Eventually that project turned into a product, and we built a small team around it. I still feel like I know more about USER,PHYSICIAN and parsing ^ delimited fields than I ever would need to.

However, as Christian points out, shit at Medsphere got pretty rough for a while, and I bailed far before it even got real nasty.

Regardless of all that, kudos to the people doing the real work (Anthony, Brad, Peter, Jon) (sorry for leaving any of you newer people out :) ) for getting this out, and sticking with one of the most interesting software projects I have ever heard of.

Hiring.

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 02:34:25 -0800

Yes, we (imeem) are hiring.

Specifically, we are a San Francisco (right in the city, near the ballpark) startup looking to hire a handful of kickass engineers.

Right now, I have open positions for:

a flash/actionscript/javascript developer
a firefox extension developer
generally awesome engineers of any type

So, if you would want to work for an interesting company, who is seeing traffic growth that looks like this, email me your resume.

Update: Apparently this graph is not self explanatory. The Y-Axis is the global rank of imeem.com when ranked comparatively against all other sites on the internet. And it is logarithmic. The source is available here

Good luck

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:53:15 -0800

I wish the best of luck to thejobugroup

Interestingly enough, it looks like they are just going to outsource the work.

Hilarious.

What did you say?

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 01:03:28 -0800

So, recently we have been doing a lot of interviewing at imeem. And sometimes I am very surprised at ho w the interview goes, both pleasantly and not. So here is a list of some dos and donts for interviewing in general, and specifically at a startup.

DO know what the company is about. What it's core goals are, and what it's product is. It is ALWAYS discouraging to interview someone who has no idea what sort of work they are applying to do
DONT be apathetic. Especially when interviewing at a startup. If you are interviewing at Yahoo! or Google, or Microsoft maybe you can get away with it, but at a startup? No way. Startups live and die by employees who give 130%, and walking in and acting like you couldn't care is a great way to hear 'no thanks'
DONT bitch endlessly about your current job. Not only is it not important to me in evaluating if you will fit technically and personally at our company. It is also looks really really bad. All I hear when people start whining about their current boss, or their current job, or whatever is 'blah blah blah blah blah'. And I know when you are interviewing at your next job after you would work for me, you would be bitching about me. 'No thanks, no hire'. However, talking about your current job is fine. Just not bitching.
DONT talk about other interviews you are doing now. Basically everything I said above applies in principle. It is just not interesting. Your opinion on our competitor, or another wank web2.0 startup, or Yahoo! doesn't help me fit you into our company. It just bores me. I live in Bay Area, if I wanted to talk to someone about web2.0 shit, I will just open my door and throw a rock, it will likely hit 3 people working at a web2.0 company. Its BORING
DO ask everyone you interview with questions. Even if someone else has already answered your question, getting more information and more views on questions as simple as "What do you like about working here?" is always good. As well, it is always nice towards the end of the interview to not have to be asking the questions.

I guess this turned into more of a DONT list than a DO list, but whatever :). And as always, if you are interested in interviewing, email me.

Useful site

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 02:20:14 -0800

Finally, a useful cover song database. And even better, it isn't pastel, and it doesn't use ajax, and its actually useful and not in beta. Amazing. And just when the internet looked even more useless than ever...

Snorp <3 Tom Brady

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:19:49 -0800

I have photographic proof:

and

IE7 must die

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:49:36 -0800

After getting fed up with IE6's lack of support for transparent pngs, we went ahead and wrote an image server that would take an image and composite it with a solid color background (meeting 99% of our use-cases).

I was so excited when I found out that IE7 would be support transparent pngs. However, apparently that support is not extended to transparent pngs that end up having an opacity applied to them.

Great. Just Great. So now we get to keep the image server, and if we want to start using it less for IE7 users, we have to make sure the urls we serve back are never going to have opacity applied to them. Way to go IE team....

Update: Yes, I am aware of the alpha loader filter, however its not an option for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to memory leaks, issues compositing images with the alpha loaded dx filter with regular images, etc.

Movers blow

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:54:55 -0800

At least I know I won't be using Northwest Vanlines when I move to the city in a month or so. I am not looking forward to dealing with the move at all actually, its always a total pain in the ass.

Blogging again

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:20:01 -0800

Well, its been a long time since I last blogged. Work has been insanely busy. We have been rolling out tons and tons of changes to our website, and things have been getting crazy.

Other than working what feels like 17 million hours a week, life has been good. Moving into the city soon, and I am really looking forward to that. Mostly looking in Noe Valley, Potrero Hills and the Mission. We might end up somewhere else, but right now, trying to focus mostly in those areas.

I am hoping to find some time in the near future to play around with getting some integration between various awesome C# apps (f-spot, banshee, etc) and imeem, mostly posting from those apps directly into your imeem profile. We will see what kind of time appears in the near future.

Testing

Tue, 02 May 2006 13:06:48 -0800

ignore this

Insight?

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:55:41 -0800

Why do all women like stickers, puppy dogs and rainbows?

I wonder if you could make millions selling rainbow colored puppy dog stickers...

Things like this keep me up at night.

These ducks are fighting

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 21:55:02 -0800

Put up some pictures of some ducks who like to fight.

Apparently some people think that these ducks are just standing around. But trust me. These fuckers are fighting.

imeem

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:11:47 -0800

So, as some others have noted, imeem has released a mac client.

However. I bring to you an exclusive screenshot of the brand new not-soon-to-be-released linux client.

This client shares a lot of code with the existing windows client, and even more with the new mac client. I hacked it together with about 5 hours of work tops, and most of that was spent writing some very specific integration code.

Enjoy.