Tag Archives: Computers

I’ve been working on instant messaging software for seven years, so I’ve been exposed to a lot of IM protocols. The “protocol” is the structure of bytes that gets sent back and forth between your computer and the IM service. … Continue reading →

Last.fm’s audio scrobbler has an option that “scrobbles” a track after to listening to anywhere between 50% to 100% of the song. So the song is considered listened to if you only listen to 4:30 of a 5 minute song. … Continue reading →

From Firefox I learned that applications should always save their state. When you close and restart an application is should restore its state to what it was previously. Open windows, open documents, which text was highlighted, how far down you’ve … Continue reading →

Google recently made a few changes to the buttons in Gmail. Here’s a before and after comparison: But they got two things wrong: The mouse cursor doesn’t change when hovering over the new buttons. With the old buttons the cursor … Continue reading →

These are the warnings that Firefox 3.0.5 is capable of showing: I once heard someone lament that as soon as a user does a web search and the browser asks “you’re submitting information that’s not encrypted, do you want us … Continue reading →

This whole “computer startup company” thing really is different than what I was used to on the east coast. I mean, I had heard about Google and Yahoo! and PayPal and eBay and Amazon and Netscape, but it’s hard to … Continue reading →

Our de facto method for asynchronous programming at Meebo is to use a single thread with non-blocking sockets and some sort of socket watching/readiness notification (poll, select, epoll, libevent, glib’s mainloop, etc). This is what Pidgin does, too. It is … Continue reading →

Usually when you call a function you can determine if there was an error based solely on the return code. But the functions readdir() strtol() and strtoll() are different. For these functions, if you want to know if there was … Continue reading →

I’ve been using a web-based email program called Open WebMail for the past 7 or 8 years (from back when it used to be called NeoMail). But my spam flagging attempts have become increasingly less effective, and Open WebMail isn’t … Continue reading →

Why do ssh, scp and sftp all have different ways of specifying the port number? I run ssh on my home computer on a non-standard port, and it’s a pain in the calf to remember which one to use when. … Continue reading →

“The general rule of thumb is that it takes $10 to fix the bug during development; $100 to fix the bug in QA; a $1,000 to fix the bug during beta testing; and $10,000 or more to fix the bug … Continue reading →

I’m not very familiar with the iPhone or iPhone development, but here’s a comparison between the two: Android iPhone Programming Language Java. I believe it gets compiled to Java bytecode then run through an optimizer called Dalvik which makes the … Continue reading →

Update 2: See my newer blog post. Update: We’re working hard to fix some bugs, and we’re currently hoping to release this on November 7th. Sorry to keep people waiting, we’re just EXTREMELY busy :-( On side note, if you’re … Continue reading →

I’ve been crazy busy. Here are some bullet points: Finished a version of meebo that uses libpurple 2.4.1. Up until now we’ve been using Gaim 1.5.0. The new code is very stable, it just needs a few bug fixes and … Continue reading →

I mentioned this a while ago… but meebo is hiring. We’re especially looking for JavaScript developers. If you know JavaScript insanely well, and you’re friendly, and you either live in the San Francisco Bay area or you’re willing to move … Continue reading →

It’s always bugged me that I can’t write applications for my cell phone. I mean, it supports Java ME (a mini version of Java designed for small devices), and I know Java, why shouldn’t I be able to write programs … Continue reading →

I love it when my operating system tells me that there are updates available by displaying a little explosion in the taskbar.

Remember about two years ago when some guy made a blog post saying that we needed to have a standard icon for RSS feeds, and he packaged Mozilla’s feed icon for people to download? I’m pretty impressed at how well … Continue reading →