matehat

Hello, I'm Matt D'Amours, a developer from Quebec City. I push bits around, including some open-source projects.

[anthonyconh]

Mis vacaciones.

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Pretty much

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This song is amazing

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Startup abortion

Until this afternoon, I was leading a startup endeavor. Starting today, I don’t have a tech project keeping me awake at night, for the first time in three years.

Three years ago I left my studies to build a startup. The project we had morphed into another, that one into yet another and so on until this afternoon, where financial imperatives halted the Markov Chain of Hell. Of course these imperatives are what they are, but hubris tend to turn them into simple details. The hubris left months ago, and FounderFuel gave a rejection this afternoon, after we made it to second round.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, rejection feels good for the first time today.

[danielodowd-deactivated20170124]

Lauren Davison

[chels]

People ask me what I’m proudest of and what are my biggest frustrations as President. My biggest frustration is that this society hasn’t been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do damage. We’re the only developed country where this happens. And it happens weekly. Our levels of gun violence are off the charts.

President Obama sharing the difficulties of trying to change a culture in which school shootings are commonplace. (via whitehouse)

I recently exchanged a few tweets with one anti-gun-regulation person, and I must say this whole situation is jarring.

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Slickness is not the problem

I’m probably not a designer, but I think I can find my way around.

Jason Fried, a prominent designer, has written about the over- and misuse of “slick” design. The argument goes that we can now find a lot of websites around that look all pretty much the same, many of which fail to properly emphasize content over form. Substance over style:

Most of these designs can be described like this: First, you see a huge photo with some text over it. Then, as you scroll down, the background slides away and another big photo with more text on it pops up. And so on….

He goes on to give examples of successful websites that are heavy on text, and light on images.

The folks at 37signals have strong opinions and I admire that. I don’t agree with this view, though.

First of all, most people on the web are not related to the web design world, so they don’t see as many of these “what’s hot in web” sites. They don’t see as many websites that all look the same. If you’re making a website for the general public, chances are your visitors won’t have this thought at all.

Visual similarity is not a problem per se. Talented web designers want to create designs that look unique, and their clients want their brand to look unique. For visitors, though, familiarity yields comfort and helps direct attention on content rather than ornaments.

If a visually-rich design fails to emphasize the right things, it’s a failure of the design, not of the idea of visual richness.

Text over a large blurred image, it is everywhere on the web. Take a step back and look at your laptop (or smartphone) screen, and notice the visual context around it. When reading on the screen, you’re looking at text over a large (fullscreen!) blurred image that spans your whole visual field.

This web design trend is a metaphor for what happens everyday when you consume text. It’s putting you in a controlled visual context, thereby setting the emotional tone for the content you’re about to absorb. It can surely be misused, but it’s nowhere near a bad idea.

[9gag]

[nevver]

Jorge Luis Borges

[parislemon]

Good motto.

[matehat-blog]

Totally agreed

[nevver]

Why I Love Headphones

[parislemon]

Yep.

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True

[seekquality]

[minimalmac]

A sign of truth.

[parislemon]

I’m positive I’ve reblogged this before. And I’m positive I’ll reblogged this again.

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Confirmed almost every single day

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Best way to remove a tag from a remote Git repository

Every now and then, I need to remove a tag from a remote git repository. Yes, it doesn’t happen very often, and of course it’s on Github. At the time of this writing, the first google result for doing this (because it’s not obvious), is from this really nice guy. However, it’s still an obscure command (at least to me), so I almost always have to google for it when I badly need to remove a remote tag. So I got angry and decided to make a shell command.

function grt() { git push origin :refs/tags/$@ }

If you put this in your ~/.bash_profile, you’ll be able, next time, to simply type:

grt some_tag_to_remove

and that will take care of removing the remote tag. A lot simpler to remember!

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A complete Erlang client for Cassandra

Meet CQErl.

Up here in Quebec City, we are secretly working on stuff that will blow you mind off when we launch (me thinks). Turns out the best tools for our particular needs were, among other things Erlang and Cassandra. For starters, the first is a programming language coupled with a comprehensive platform for developing resilient distributed systems. The second is a horizontally scalable database used throughout the industry, with great features and tunable CAP properties.

Maybe it’s because there are other (amazing!) databases written in Erlang out there (e.g. Riak and CouchDB), but there weren’t any client library for using Cassandra from an Erlang application that seemed actively maintained and that took advantage of the most recent features in Cassandra. Because we needed them, and because we use so much open-source technology for free, we decided to contribute in turn and build a new native Erlang client for Cassandra from the ground up, that would support all the latest goodness and optimizations of Cassandra.

[parislemon]

Jarring, a little nauseating, but more magical. 

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WANT

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The pack (or herd)  is what makes the brand, and brand is what makes the pack (or herd.) Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Burberry are brands because they created their own herds and herds needed their symbolism to mean something.

[parislemon]

Young Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates from this WSJ post.

[via @jyarow]

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Meet Objective-LevelDB

Today, I am releasing a really simple database library, Objective-LevelDB that’s a thin, thread-safe layer on top of Google’s LevelDB, providing a familiar Objective-C interface to LevelDB’s awesome embedded datastore.

Objective-LevelDB is the first of a series of projects that we have been using internally for a while. It’s the lowest-level of all. The other ones builds on top of one another, the highest-level being an encrypted, indexed, query-friendly, real-time, graph (not SQL) object management system.

With Objective-LevelDB, you create or open a leveldb database on disk, and deal with it much as you would with a NSMutableDictionary. You need to setup its encoder/decoder, which can be anything you want, as long as it goes from id to NSData * interchangeably and consistently. You can iterate through it in order since that’s how the db is laid out.

LevelDB features snapshots and writebatches. The first allows you to obtain a consistent immutable view of the database, even though other processes may be altering it. It exposes all the reading API of the main class. The second allows you to accumulate updates and apply them atomically. This one exposes all the writing API of the main class. You can obtain both as simply as -[LevelDB newSnapshot] and -[LevelDB newWritebatch].

Get it and fork it while it’s hot!

[lessig]

So this has been a week from Apple hell. Apple did a major upgrade of its suite of software — from the operating system through applications. Stupidly (really, inexcusably stupid), I upgraded immediately. Every Apple-related product I use has been crippled in important ways.

I’m going to...

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So in a line, it is indecent for Apple to sit by silently while its customers waste thousands of hours (in the aggregate) trying to deal with the problems its “upgrades” create, when the simple act of describing what it intends to fix could save its customers those thousands of hours.

Maybe Apple wants to give itself the freedom to treat the issue either way. If it proves itself untenable, it may receive the attention an embarrassing bug would. Not responding explicitly prevents Apple from taking a position that they might regret down the road.