bart's blog

Andy's side business

Teh Andy Store

Aha, I found teh Andy store.

A milestone

The late crew

We're getting ready for a first private beta of our software in the near future. Everyone's in town, including Robin who flew in from Germany. We're working the late shift right now, including the obligatory liquor.

Round Two is hiring

Round Two is hiring. Please spread the word. If you're interested in applying for one of these positions, please go to http://www.roundtwo.com/contact/ and tell us more about your background and interests.

Senior Programmers
Round Two, a Silicon Valley startup that will make browsing the web even more fun, safe and productive, is looking to hire two full-time Senior Programmers. We are looking for developers who are proficient in developing on multiple platforms and at least two of the following three: PC, Mac, Linux. The ideal candidate has a passion for developing world-class user friendly client software that will be used by tens of millions of people, and extensive experience in developing client applications, specifically Internet client applications. Experience or mastery in one or more of the following technologies is also a must: Mozilla application development, XPCOM, C++, PERL, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and XUL. 5+ years of development experience required. Positions are based in Silicon Valley.

Build and Release Engineer
Round Two, a Silicon Valley startup that will make browsing the web even more fun, safe and productive, is looking to hire a Build and Release Engineer. Candidates should have a strong understanding and appreciation of good software development processes, and experience with working on major development projects. You will be responsible for maintenance and enhancements to our automated Tinderbox build, release and deployment systems. You will be working to improve our tools for building, unit testing, regression testing, and problem isolation of build, packaging and product problems. Here's an excellent opportunity for you to use your talents to help us develop, test, and maintain quality products that improve the web experience for millions of users. Position is based in Silicon Valley.

signed

This is a first.

Round Two launches

The site is up. Check out our announcement or the story on News.com. I've also posted a blog post here. Time go get some sleep now.

Windstruck

Watched Windstruck, a Korean movie, last night. This movie is a bummer because it starts off great and Jun Jihyun puts in an awesome performance. It's a prequel of sorts to My Sassy Girl, which is still my favorite Korean movie of all times.

Check out the first few minutes, and then get ready to have your expectations mostly crushed if you actually watch the full movie.

Bye bye comment spam

I'm sick of comment spam so just enabled Movable Type's Typekey authentication system. The UI seems kind of clunky, so I'm not sure it's working just right yet.

You say frappuccino, I say smoothie.

Jamba Juice just launched their green tea smoothie. It's called Matcha Green Tea. I love it. 75mg of caffeine. I'm not going to sleep anytime soon.

Anyway, I just realized that the Matcha Green Tea is exactly the same thing as the Green Tea Frappuccino Starbucks sells in Korea. You say smoothie, I say frappucino.

iPod, iSight don't mix

I just installed my iPod on my shiny new iMac G5. To my surprize, data transfers were incredibly slow, like something's wrong with my iPod hard drive. After a few hrs of trying to hard reboot my iPod, I ran over to the Apple Store and waited an hour at the Genius bar, and then the guy reformatted my iPod. Things worked great at the Apple store but when I got home, I once again got miserable performance. I plugged the iPod into my laptop and it was nice and fast. After spending another 30 minutes on Google, I came across a post explaining that iPod synch'ing may be slow if another Firewire device, such as an iSight, is plugged in. Sure enough, when I disconnected the iSight, my iPod updates worked fine. Of course it's a pain to have to disconnect the iSight each time I want to sync my iPod, so I tried swapping the Firewire cables and just shutting the iSight lense. So far so good. Maybe I've found a work-around. Still pretty miserable. Tons of people are experiencing this problem - hopefully Apple will fix this soon.

Hijacking Firefox

Did a Google search on Firefox and checked out the AdWords.

I got served up the three ads above (your results may vary).

The first one was for a site called FreeDownloadZone. The site first requires you to enter a name and email address, promising to then take you to a download page. Except, it doesn't. It takes you to a page with a link. So I clicked on that. Now I get to choose my billion option ("68% Discount, 55% Discount, or $9.97"). And then it's on to the credit card page.

The second one was a legitimate ad that takes people to Download.com where they can download Firefox. This ad only shows up from time to time, so you may not see it.

The third ad was for Stop-Sign.com, which appears to be some sort of security software. Lots of ways to download their software, but I couldn't find any links to download Firefox.

Now that Firefox is becoming more successful, there'll be more people trying to ride the wave. Some will be legitimate, like the Download.com ad, and some will be poisonous, like the other two. Hopefully the Foundation will enforce their trademarks to protect users against the latter kind.

Rendezvous nightmare

Brought my iMac G5 home and everything went to hell. All of a sudden I could no longer using iChat Rendezvous between my laptop and my desktop and my TiVo Desktop didn't work anymore either. Sometimes the machines would show up, then they'd disappear again.

In despair, I went to TiVoCommunity.com, which is an AMAZING resource. Probably the best corporate/community support site I've ever used. Turns out I can't use letters, spaces or other special characters in rendezvous machine names. So calling my machine "iMac G5" caused all this trouble. Very un-Mac-like.

It's coming

That was good

This weekend I finished the best book I've read over the last year AND saw the best movie I've seen over the last 12 months or so. It's been a phat weekend.

Kafka On The Shore is Haruki Murakami's latest. It's a book about a boy who takes off on a quest for his past and himself. Touches of magical realism but not tacky.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring Again is a Korean movie about the life of a buddhist monk. The cinematography is awesome (some of the most beautiful images I've seen in a long time) and the story is really touching.