We are looking for an awesome Graphic Designer to jazz Sampa up and do some awe-inspiring work, creating new Templates for our users from a wide range of themes, re-working some of the sites widgets and elements (like the photo album viewer) and re-design the Sampa.com website. We are looking for an artist with passion for the Web medium. We are not looking for a web developer that can do some design.
On the skill side, you should be able to not only create breathtaking concepts, but also implement them on HTML/CSS. We don't do Flash.
This is a progressive part-time position. Uh? We will give you some assignments, and according to the results, we might assign you more Templates and tasks. We want to create a long-term relationship with many designers because we are just scratching the surface of what Sampa will be and design work will be plenty. You must be located in the Seattle area.
Contact us at jobs@sampa.com with your resume and a link to your portfolio. If you don't have a portfolio online, don't bother sending your resume, you are not right for us.
PS: We are in a hurry, and will make a decision on who we'll hire by end of next week.
It has been a while since I wrote a tip of development. This one is pretty good, I think.
In .NET 1.0 and 1.1, each ArrayList would pre-allocate space for 16 elements, which means 64 bytes just for the pointer storage. Then, the .NET team did something very smart. They instrumented several real world applications and they found out that most of the ArrayList created had... zero elements!
That is right, most of the ArrayList allocated in an application are never used. So on .NET 2.0 they changed the default allocation to only 4 elements, which saves 48 bytes per ArrayList not being used.
I thought that change was great, but it had near zero impact on Sampa, because I knew the cost of allocating an ArrayList so I always delayed it until I knew I would use it.
But I went one step further.
As the .NET development guidelines recommend, if your function returns an ArrayList, it is better to make it return an empty array than a null pointer. If you are consistent, you avoid having to compare for both cases when calling a function.
Turns out, that a lot of functions will return empty ArrayList on Sampa, and probably on your application too. The solution: Create a static ArrayList with zero elements and used it every time you'll return an empty array instead of allocating a new ArrayList and return it.
Just make sure that static ArrayList is created properly with readonly flag on the variable and read-only attribute on the array:
static public readonly ArrayList EmptyArray = ArrayList.ReadOnly(new ArrayList());
That saved us a ton of memory. Each request might be "using" 300 hundred or more empty ArrayList. If each ArrayList takes about 40 bytes, we are saving 12KB per request. At 100 requests/second, that is 1.2MB less (or 30K objects) that the Garbage Collector needs to worry about (per second!).
TechMeme is this fantastic website that rolls up the hottest topic on the blogosphere at the moment. For example, if you write some that insterests a lot of people, and a lot of bloggers notice that and write themselves referring to your original post, you might appear on the Homepage of TechMeme.
That works fairly well, but it has a fundamental flaw, IMHO. Blogs that are popular, like TechCrunch, Scripting News or Scobleizer will get lots of link if they write something interesting or not, just because of the sheer number of readers.
Well, this is where a handy IR (Information Retrievel) technique might work. And this is how it goes...
In text analysis (this is an oversimplification), words that occur the most are not as valuable as words that occur a few times. If you look at papers about lung cancer, the word "Mesothelioma" is more relevant in a document than the word "are". Not because of the instance count on that document per se, but because of the instance count of all words on all documents.
Now, if TechMeme really wants to surface the out of the ordinary news, that are popping on the blogosphere, they should apply a factor to each blog inverse proportionally to the average number of daily links to that blog.
This way, if TechCrunch averages 500 links per blog post, and they get 5,000 for a single blog post, that is worth noticing. But right now, they get less than 500 and appear every day on TechMeme.
I thought the Blogosphere was about distributing power, not shifting from a single group (Mainstream Media) to another (A-list bloggers).
In a few minutes we will deploy a new version of our Page Layout system. This will fix a few bugs and help simplify how users choose the column layout of their pages.
After this upgrade, your site might look different!
If you find a bug on the next few days, please, report to us as soon as possible so we can minimize the impact to other users: bugs@sampa.com
Subject: articles about how to create a web page for sampa.com
I'm assuming that sampa.com (Create a Website for Free) is your site.
I'm doing research for a company that will be writing an article about how to create a web page. This company is considering featuring your site in this article. If your company is selected, they would place the article on their popular, online publication.
I would need to hear from you soon if you're interested in being featured. You can either reply to this email or call 877-838-9862. Leave a message and I'll forward it to them so they can return you call.
Thanks,
Jennifer
ECyberScreen
6245 Bristol Parkway, Suite #101
Culver City, CA 90230-6983
877-838-9862
I looks like spam. They extracted key phrases from the page (or a search engine, maybe del.icio.us?), to make it look very appealing and send an email to press@[domain]. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure they will charge a PR fee, or publication fee or some other scam like that.
Over the past two years I received dozens of press emails and they never look like that. Usually a reporter says that he is going to do a story about X and he is interested in knowing if what we are doing fits into that. They always, always say who they are (I can find them on the web) and which publication they work for.
No, you have not gone crazy. They did appear on the blog.
I tried to use Sampa's "Post by Email" feature to forward a funny email I've received to my blog. Turn out there was two bugs that preventing it from happening.
First, it was not necessarily a bug, but the content of the email was not properly formatted HTML, so the system rejected it. More on this later.
Second bug was that the email came with a bunch of pictures. When you send an email to Sampa with a bunch of pictures, the pictures are saved automatically to an album (that you choose), and then the blog post is created. So, the pictures were saved, but once the system tried to save the blog post it failed because of the invalid content. The bug here is that we should validate the content before we save the pictures.
About that first bug, it happens because Outlook/Word generate an amazingly junk HTML. Sampa doesn't like that because it would litter the users website. I create a "WordCleanup" method to take care of that, but apparently it is not working well. I'll investigate more and put a fix soon.
This week has been completely out of the ordinary for me. First, this is my son's transition week into a daycare. He is 1 year old, and 4 out of 5 mornings I had to take him there and stay anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours there. A few days I had to pick him up as well, early. Which left me working less than 6 hours per day.
Then, on Tuesday morning I came across a customer complaint about a layout issue. Heck, I've made a major fix for a bug last week, what it could be? The fix broke his layout. Turns out that I was a deadlock with the current layout design. There were two scenarios that could not co-exist. Either one worked, or the other. This is a clear sign of poor design, since there was no way to fix in the implementation.
So I decided to bite the bullet. I had been planning on re-designing that feature anyway, and took a deep breadth and coded non stop for six hours. Finished the feature and started testing it. The problem with changes on layout features is that you cannot automate the test because it requires you to look at a page to see if it is ok. With more than 30 variations on Columns Layout, it took me more 6 hours just to do basic testing. I end up working until 10PM.
Then, the rest of the week I was working on a feature to make it easier for users to invite others to see their site, or the new content on their site, in a semi-automated way. The problem with that is Norton Anti-Virus is a pain in the ass. This application hooks into the SMTP port and does some stupid things, and I can't send emails from my computer. I tried to disable that feature with no luck.
Now, I decided I had enough distractions trying to get my Dev machine to send email so I'm un-installing Norton Anti-Virus (Protection Center) and installing some other product, I'm leaning towards CA's eTrust.
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website is extremely slow today.
October, 2007