In Auastralia the plan I've just moved to (http://www.tpg.com.au/mobile/plans.html) gives me enough calls, text and data for $15 a month without any lock in.
I've been looking into US contracts in preperation for a move and was shocked at the rates people are willing to pay.
I think both have their good points. Smaller companies allow more freedom and a wider range of experience. If you pick the wrong small company you'll pick up bad habits (what's version control? backups? testing?). I didn't have a software engineering degree, so wasn't aware of some of the things I was doing wrong (or missing) until I spent some time in bigger companies.
Another issue is that your S3 credentials are stored on your primary server. An attacker who gains access to that machine will also gain access to off site backups, and can completely destroy your business.
I went through SFO on the weekend and said I didn't want to go through the machine. You're made to feel pretty stigmatised, you have to stand there while the TSA officer repeatedly yells out "We got an opt-out. Male opt-out." across the hall.
The pat down itself was extremely thorough but considering how much the TSA gets bagged on Reddit, the officer was incredibly professional. It didn't feel lewd or dirty. Sure, it was violating and I resented having to be put through the experience, but the guy was just doing his job and it was obvious he'd been extensively trained. All up it took about 5 minutes of my time.
What worried me the most was that afterword he asked "The TSA is conducting a survey, why did you opt-out?" I replied that I didn't like my freedoms being taken away. However, thinking about this later, I realised that if in a year they release stats that say "only 1% of people opt-out, and only 5% of those people do so for medical or religious reasons" then it is going to be a hell of a lot easier for them to push for the scans to become mandatory.
Opera Mini stores the page state on their servers. If you click on a JS link then the Opera Mini client treats it like a new page load, but the server is just executing the JS and resending the page.
We only use monospace because there is a lot of symmetry in code, and unlike other forms of writing, a single punctuation characters can completely change the meaning of the text (/.!^,;).
"I use method_missing()to remove duplication ... On the other hand, I usually think twice about using method_missing() for cosmetic reasons, like getting cool method names such as find_by_name_and_address()."
That seems backwards to me. I use magic methods to define methods that can only be defined at run time, like his example of creating methods based on schema introspection.
Using magic methods breaks a lot of tools: IDE code completion, reflection, documentation generation so I always explicitly define methods unless it's not possible.
Are you logging your queries? If you have enough searches you could build your own predictions. You're also proxying results, so you could use those to build an index too.
It would be nicer to see dates further in the future. The error message for exceeding the 4 month window is rubbish too: http://adioso.com/au/bne-to-dps-april-2011. By putting scare quotes around "April" in the underlined text it look like the natural language processing engine doesn't know what "April" means. Also, that error message shouldn't be a "Tip", as it's completely failed for that search.
It would be nice to have an optional advanced search form so I could see exactly what a parameters I can search for. Free form search just lets me try permutations of text until I find one that works.
Also, the related searches bar is really confusing. It looks like crumb trails. Turning the arrow into a magnifying glass could be a good way to fix that.
That's almost what Google Docs PDF viewer does. Each page is a JPG. This is served to the user with a catalogue of text layout then JavaScript is used to simulate selection and copying.
Is there a reason to delete the branch? I don't think I've ever tried to delete a branch in subversion. I imagine it's possible, and can be reversed if necessary, but goes against my thinking of the repository as a canonical log of all development.
> Right now, users are "trained" (to dignify what's happening) to look at the browser URL bar for a name and a lock icon.
If only that were true.
A payment gateway I stumbled across the other day (http://www.centricom.com/flashdemo/POLi_demo.html) gets the user to download an application which they use to log into their bank from. The intro video instructs the user to check the address bar and the lock icon in the fake browser they've just downloaded. The best part is that the payment gateway goes through all this so they can edit the HTML of the users bank and inject payment details.
One of the Australian airlines is pushing this instead of Paypal, and it's getting real world use.