I don't want to get off on a rant here, but....

2009-05-05

Information Week needs to fact check instead of cashing their Intel checks

Information week "reports" on the impact of Intel's newest chip on virtualization:

"The 5500 is really the first chip to escape from the personal computing bias of the original x86 chips. It has a memory controller built onto the chip instead of off-loaded to a separate dedicated chip, reducing latencies encountered as a VM's operating system manages the memory that its application is using."

That's all well and good ... except AMD chips have done this since 2006, so Intel is "cutting edge" by staying 3 years behind the curve. Granted the article doesn't explicitly say "AMD has yet to do this" but it also goes to great lengths not to say "the first Intel chip to not suck by including 20 year old technology."

Makes me wonder just how much ad money comes into Information Week from Intel, considering anyone who knows anything about chip architecture would tell you this has been a huge advantage for AMD the last several years as the CPU was so much faster than everything else in the box you needed to do everything you could to feed it information faster. And when you're talking computers, one speaker at a time 1980s bus technologies are not usually mentioned in the same sentence as "fast."

Of course Information Week targets the people writing the checks, who know nothing about hardware, and will tell their peons "we should buy Intel servers because they made this great technological leap that no one else has yet. Kind of like how at work we moved from Legato backup to CommVault backup (as far as I can tell the only worse backup product than Legato) when suddenly the Legato ads in Information Week stopped and the CommVault adds started up. It's always a sad day when marketing outweighs technology, but if it's good enough for Microsoft why shouldn't everyone else do it too, right? I hope the publish my response to the editors.

2009-04-17

Time Warner Cable backtracks from evil cap plan

The power of complaining wins yet another battle. MSNBC is reporting that due to public and political outcry Time Warner Cable is abandoning it's efforts to introduced metered and tiered internet services. This is a big win for network neutrality as any limits on what, how much, and who on the internet violate the basic principles it was founded on. This is like if your phone company sold you long distance service, but then told you if you make more than 20 calls a month, regardless of their duration they would start charging you an extra dollar per call. People would never stand for it on the phone network, or road systems, but because normal people don't understand how the internet works, they assume that the providers will do the right thing. History has proven time and time again that's just not the case.

2009-04-14

Time Warner 0, Eric Massa 1

Wired has coverage of NY's Democratic Congressmen Eric Massa's attempts to pass legislation banning Time Warner Cable from introducting usage caps and tiered pricing for their Roadrunner internet services. TWC has been trying out these caps and pricing structures in various markets and apparently finally stepped on the right person's toes by starting to record usage data in Rochester, New York. Wired points out that while playing the "woe is us" card, TWC has been raking in the profits, with their own annual report showing that their broadband costs were down 12% in 2008 while revenues were up 11%. Makes it a little hard to justify how the power users are beating your service providings into the ground while you're rolling around in Scrouge McDuck's vault.

2009-04-02

Mr. iTunes DJ woke up on the wrong side of the bed

Stupid new "iTunes DJ" who replaced "Party Shuffle" has a bad attitude when you try to listen to songs he's already got "queued up to spin" as the kids would say

Of course that's only if you "Add to iTunesDJ" because then you might not really want to actually play the songs you just said you wanted to play. If you pick, "Play next in" or "Play in" then the DJ knows you're serious and doesn't ask questions.

I understand building the DJ functionality on top of the existing playlist functionality, but I can only assume that Party Shuffle was the same thing with a different name, and therefore this is a big time annoying regression in the new release. Go go gadget testing.

2009-02-09

Net Neutrality is not something the founders of the Internet take lightly

Tim Berners Lee sums up Net Neutrality:
"Net Neutrality says: "If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level."

That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.
Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will."

Written in 2006, unfortunately it's now 2009 and the telcos are still trying to confuse the common consumer into thinking Net Neutrality is Google trying to trick consumers into paying for Google's internet bill.

2009-01-09

Impact of the New York Times

There's been much brew-ha-ha about the NY Times being in financial trouble, the death of newspapers, and print media in general. For the last couple years, however, the Times has been doing some really great work with flash based visualizations that tie into their print articles, but obviously are available only the web. So maybe the the death of the print newspaper doesn't mean that the big, well known papers will die.

What really interests me is the stuff they've had coming out recently showing that they really are embracing the open concepts that are flourishing on the web. Within a month they've announced Represent and the Congress API, two very cool usages of publicly available data that was previously only available in a mishmash of formats. They're combining, enhancing, analyzing and promoting data in very new and innovative ways.

The Times moving in this direction seems to coencide with a growing call for "open government" which has seemed to start as a grassroots, web powered, effort and will hopefully take hold in the new administration. It seems the Times is uniquely positioning itself within this new world order to become the seminal information source for computers and the autonomous world that it already is for humans. This is a very interesting direction for the Times to take and I'm not sure if it's officially supported from the top. It seems that it either has to be getting discussed in the top echolons or the IT group has a huge amount of freedom to make very bold moves and think well outside the existing dead tree based box. Either way it's the kind of agility and/or forward thinking that could make the Times the Queen of the new web news world.

2008-12-02

Clogging the Tubes

"Oh shit," he mumbled. "I just broke the Internet." Wired has an article on the big DNS flaw. There's been lots of technical re-hashing of this, but I just thought the quote was funny

2008-11-06

Internet Explorer is a browser?

Back when Google Gears came out and they added Google Reader support it was great for riding the train, because I could take feed reading offline and spend time on the train catching up on my feeds. This process went along swimmingly until I installed Firefox 3 beta and the initial public release. Since the Gears version at the time wasn't Firefox 3 compatible I couldn't continue doing this and it wasn't worth it to me to hack the Gears version support, etc. Jump forward several months and 2 or 3 trips without offline Reader and the Gears team released a version supporting 3.0 and I went to the web page to download it. On the page it lists compatible browsers and when I read "Internet Explorer" I started laughing hysterically. I never even considered the fact that I could use Gears in Internet Explorer to keep using the offline support.

To me, Internet Explorer does not come up when enumerating web browsers installed on my machine. Internet Explorer is the front end to the 1997 MS best practices lovefest vendor application I have to support and nothing more. Even with the vendor product lock in I still go 1-2 weeks without ever having to open IE. How do people survive on this half baked wanna be browser, and don't tell me they use IE7 or IE8 cause we all know they're just half backed circa 2008 and 2006 rather than 2001.

2008-10-28

Before you take any cookies, don't forget to hand .Net the jar

When you are using the System.Web objects to make a HttpWebRequest in .NET to a page which sets a cookie via Set-Cookie header, and you can't access that cookie in the HttpWebResponse object's cookie collection. This will make you angry, and confused.

You'll dump the page contents and the headers to make sure you're loading the right page an passing the Set-Cookie header correctly. Then you'll find this MSDN library post, and realize that if you don't give the Request a jar (CookieCollection) ahead of the firing GetResponse() .NET just throws your cookies on the floor.

So whenever you want the cookies don't forget:

req = HTTPWebRequest.Create(url);

req.CookiesCollection = new CookiesCollection();

req.GetResponse();

2008-10-21

Why Microsoft never fails to piss me off

How can my Visual Studio compile fail because a file is locked by Visual Studio?

MS owns the OS

MS owns the IDE

MS owns the language

MS owns the compiler

MS owns the runtime

Is using an all MS stack somehow an unsupported combination?

2008-10-17

App Engine adds SSL

Google announced SSL support for AppEngine applications, but currently it's limited to the appspot domain, which is understandable. It would be very interesting and rather game changing if Google came up with a way to issue free certs to Google App domains, maybe startup or buy a Certificate Authority?

2008-10-07

Chrome Dev Builds

When looking for a way to stop Chrome from opening PDFs in Adobe (bad enough) using the in browser plugin (even worse), I stumbled upon this page, which talks about running Dev builds of Chrome. Using the Channel Chooser from Chromium you can choose to be notified when new Dev builds are available rather than new Beta builds. Of course all the disclaimers apply, probably even buggier than betas, etc. etc.

My up-to-date Beta had me at: Chrome/0.2.149.30 Safari/525.13

The latest Dev update got me to: Chrome/0.3.154.0 Safari/525.19

2008-09-24

Chrome's subtile security warning

Just in case the giant red screen wasn't enough for you when you click through the warning about a site not having a valid certificate you get the constant subtile reminder that something is not quite right.

2008-09-23

Avoiding duplicate Event subsubscriptions

I've recently stumbled upon .Net Events, well re-stumbled since I obviously knew about them w.r.t. Web Forms, but they are a painful faded memory at this point, thanks to Monorail. I really like .Net Events for writing code that can be super decoupled from infrastructure concerns like logging, as well as for objects that might need to relay status or other "events" to their parent without having to pass maintain a reference to the parent.

The only real downside is if you subscribe multiple times to an event, += in C#, you get called multiple times when the Event fires. I'm sure there's some upside to this in some convoluted usage scenario, but I sure can't think of it. So I had written a bunch of helper methods to subscribe a given handler to a given event, but do it in a non-duplicate fashion. As far as I can tell there's no way to ask the event who's subscribed in any meaningful way, at least w.r.t. dupe avoidance, so I just remove the handler before adding it:

handler -= value;
handler += value;

This was fine, but it required calling subEvent(handler); rather than using the default += method of associating a handler with an Event. To get around this I found the this very handy post on stackoverflow. This allowed me to handle the call to the duplicate prevention method from add, thereby keeping the normal sytax for Event handlers.

The one gotcha here is you need the protected Event as well, because when you define the add, remove for your public Event you lose the ability to reference it like a normal Event. Some people have done more in-depth IL analysis of why, but for my purposes, I just use the protected Event when I want to throw it or otherwise use it so I don't get "The event "blah" can only appear on the left hand side of += or -=" errors

2008-09-22

NVelocity object properties gotcha

I always manage to forget that NVelocity won't show regular class variables in views, it has to be a property or method for you to be able to pull it from the view. Always waste a little time verifying the object is passed from the controller correctly, checking that the object isn't null in the view, etc. and then remember that I has to be a property or method. It's always the last thing you think of.

2008-09-03

Google Analytics is so Sept. 2nd 2008 at 1:59pm EST

Somebody needs to remind the Analytics team that Chrome isn't Safari ;)

2008-09-03

Chrome has some super speedy Javascript

As the Dromaeo implementation of the SunSpider tests show, Chrome beats out Firefox 3's Javascript engine by some 247%. Dromaeo implements a subset of SunSpider, but it's a pretty good indication of the relative abilities of a JS implementation. It will be interesting to see what kind of performance improvements the JIT pieces implemented in Tracemonkey can provide for Firefox 3.1.

2008-09-02

Google Chrome

Overall it's pretty slick, I like that it'll show it's memory usage vs. other browsers you have open, the interface would take some getting used to, and there's a ton of Firefox extensions that I don't know if I could live without. The document inspector isn't bad but the JS debugging "console" window leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm impressed with the per process model, processes are very svelt and it seems like they were really able to get down to bare bones on the WebKit base.

But most importantly, "Stats for nerds" has to be the best phrasing of "Advanced" I've seen in a long time.

Update: And when you kill a child process you get a pretty funny message and image in the tab:

2008-08-30

New blog

Rather than mixing in technical posts with funny pictures and angry rants against Bush on my normal blog I've decided to start up a separate blog for overtly technical content.