> Not a fan of Java-based software either, to be honest.

It makes me sad to see this is still something people say. I hope you reconsider this sentiment and investigate some of the really great Java-based software out there, especially Zookeeper and Kafka.

It's worth checking out how Zookeeper and Kafka did in aphyr's testing:

http://aphyr.com/posts/291-call-me-maybe-zookeeper

http://aphyr.com/posts/293-call-me-maybe-kafka

Every Java-based backed service I have come across, be it ElasticSearch, LogStash, Hadoop or PuppetDB, have all been memory-hogging beasts. Part of this is due to the GC, which tends to use more heap space than the program actually needs. Java is fast, but I have yet to see anyone claim it's lightweight.

The worst part is "let's statically preallocate* the heap size like it's 1975".

*Note: never more than 31GB

Kafka seems to suffer from lack of partition tolerance, by the way, according to Aphyr. Not happy about the fact that it will just wipe a partition upon re-electing a new leader.

The app looks pretty great. Being able to incorporate the geolocation data from foursquare, instagram, flickr, facebook, etc. would aid in not feeling like you have to think of your traveling as starting when you downloaded the app.

If you're interested in other examples of this sort of solution, this is how Shopify has tackled this problem: https://github.com/tobi/imagery

It looks like tobi also has played around with porting it to go as well: https://github.com/tobi/imagery-go

I tried to write an interface to ImageMagick's MagickWand in Golang as well to solve the same problem. You can find it here: https://github.com/dqminh/mage

Ends up that passing the file directly to grep will allow it to use tricks to make processing faster than reading from a pipe.

Can you elaborate on the 4S battery life issue?

I've only had my iPhone 4S for a week, but I haven't noticed anything drastically worse than my iPhone 4.

It certainly hasn't ran out of power during the course of a day yet.

I just got a 4S, and it seems noticeably worse than my 4 (which I only had for a few months after its initial release). It might just be that I've been playing with it more in the first week of owning it (coming off a year and a half with no smartphone), but the battery has consistently been down to 5% after 12 hours.

Based on what?

Building really cool technology that you decide to give a way sounds a lot like how many startups have failed.

You've attributed arbitrary value to peoples worth when you have absolutely no way to know if you are correct.

He smelled.

"PBKDF1 is recommended only for compatibility with existing applications since the keys it produces may not be large enough for some applications." — RFC 2898, September 2000

The keys it produces are big enough for this application. PBKDF2 can produce output keys of arbitrary size, which is why PBKDF1 got deprecated, but it's not always necessary.

Why are they emailing developers out of the blue to "claim" their profile?

Please don't base your service off of crawling sites and emailing people who don't ask for either.

I just got one of these spam emails too. Gordon L. Hempton, I believe you are promoting your business in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Please stop.

Really? What is it going to take to get beyond the stupid provocative titles?

Can we work on being constructive? It would be pretty sweet if people started writing post-mortems for crazy bugs they found the way people write them for outages.

What was the process you went through to track down this problem? Were there any interesting tools or processes you employed?

What was the final solution?

What can we (both you and your team and the community as a whole) do in the future to prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

It seems to be more or less universally true that anyone complaining about a particular language, framework, platform, IDE, text editor, etc. is staring into the abyss of whatever outdated, outmoded, outmaneuvered way of thinking that they've invested themselves into. Everyone else is busily improving on what we've got to work with.