As a long time PC/Windows user I finally got my first Apple computer: a shiny white Macbook.
Macbook is not a complicated machine. It doesn’t overwhelm you with bells and whistles. But everything is there to work. The hardware design is truly the best.
The Mac OS X is a great OS. I didn’t have much learning curve to get familiar with it except to learn all the keyboard shortcuts since I want to stick with the touchpad without a mouse. I found out that you can put two fingers on the touchpad and scroll down a page, which is an awesome feature. One great thing about Mac OS X is that it is based on the Free BSD so I can always use a terminal to do the work. It is essentially a Unix machine with a nice GUI.
Mac app did crash once. My iTunes crashed and a message box popped up so I can end the program. However it didn’t bring down the whole machine and everything else was business as usual. There is another time that iTunes appeared to be in a runaway mode and I had to kill it manually. Seems that Apple has some work to do on the iTunes. But overall it synced with my iPod without any problems. The mac sleep mode also works flawlessly, which I always have problems with my Windows machine.
So here is my short review. I remember some famous people once said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and a Mac reminds me a lot of that.
Google released Chrome yesterday, a new web browser, currently available for Windows XP only.
It is very simple to install and It is very fast based on my experience. I haven’t tried many sites though. So there are probably sites that don’t play well with Chrome. Chrome will not have a bookmark if you don’t import one from Firefox or IE. And also, I can’t use a drop down to see the sites I used to visit from the address bar (or so called omnibox in Chrome), which I think is a big inconvenience. However, upon opening a new tab, a bunch of sites that I have visited will be there to provide some kind shortcuts to the sites that I used to visit.
It is probably still early to say how dominant (or how irrelevant) Chrome will be in the future but it will certainly change the way people access the Internet. I am already using Chrome for my GMail, Google Reader and some other Google apps with Firefox opened for other web browsing and development work. When there are more and more browser based apps available, Chrome may be the perfect choice to run those heavy JavaScript sites.
I think besides the fresh look and some usability innovations of this new browser, the key is its open source root. Looks like the desktop app itself is on a good start, now the next thing is to extend it into other territories like mobile and smart devices, which is quite an open field to get into.
In the Desktop environment I think it is still too early to tell how long it will take to be adopted by the mainstream, considering 20-25% of the web users are still using IE6 today. Google might have to bundle Chrome with some really great browser apps to get it replace IE on people’s Windows desktop. In the meantime Microsoft will keep improving IE so it is still a long way to go for Chrome. But I think Chrome is a real threat to the browsers like Opera today and if when the development of 3rd party add-ons starts to catch on for Chrome, it will most definitely cut into Firefox’s market share.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop which was mainly used by my wife for checking emails and some casual web surfing. I installed Xubuntu on it hoping to get the best performance out of the limited horsepower that this old laptop has. It worked OK, until I changed my wireless network security from WEP to WPA.
I found out Xubuntu doesn’t have the support for it. To better phrase it, to get WPA working in Xubuntu, I have to install some 3rd party software like wpasupplicant and make some configuration changes to get it working. Later versions of ubuntu might “just works” as described in this doc, but there seems to be issues around it.
After following the steps in one of the forum thread and failed to make it work I quit. I have to say I didn’t try very hard at it but I didn’t think spending hours on this laptop just to make wireless working made much sense, with work, business and my 2 year old I am not that kind of geek who spend days to get dialup modem working on my Linux machine any more. So I ended up putting XP (Gasp 
back on this machine. As a matter of fact, when XP runs with least graphic candy the performance is on par with Xubuntu running in graphic mode.
I am a person who is pretty familiar with Linux, as a matter of fact I use it every day. I like it. I would recommend it. But do I think it is ready for a average home PC user? No. It is just not simple enough to get some basic things to work. It could be a great OS to be installed in a more uniformed environment, like a lab in a university or an office environment.
Last week Amazon A3 was down for 4 hours and made a lot of webmasters unhappy. It further proves that it is quite risky to design your site solely relying on A3 to provide the essential functionalities, at least for now.
One way to reduce the risk is to have a copy of the files, for example images, saved in your server and design a flag in your code to pull the file from your own server if A3 downtime was detected. The flag can be controlled by some parameter in a configuration file so it can be easily switched.
One might argu this defeats the purpose of using AWS storage since the load copies take up the space. But I believe the storage cost will worth it in the event of the A3 hiccups. By using A3 service when it’s up and running, you will still save the bandwidth when serving those files, which is a lot more expensive than the storage cost.
Good documentation can save a lot of time to look for the information that you have once obtained. I had been looking for some documentation system that can help me to write down notes and finally decided to use a wiki.
Using a wiki can provide some great benefits:
- It is web based can I can access anywhere.
- My documents can be organized by sites and category so I have a central place to look for things that I have done but not necessarily memorized.
- Easy collaboration with others.
There are several free wiki softwares and I chose DocuWiki after some research and test run. Since I only need a simple interface to create structured content DocuWiki was a good choice for me. This is a nice comparison on some popular wiki software that I also used to help me make my decision.
There are a lot of talks around Yahoo’s move recently. Y’s decisions to reject the Microsoft deal and partner with Google on search advertising market don’t sit well with a lot of people. Some think Yahoo is making stupid decisions.
I beg to differ.
Being bought by Microsoft will make a lot of shareholders happy today. But if bought by Microsoft, 3 years from now, will Yahoo still be relevant at all? Choosing to remain independent will give Yahoo a chance. But what about the shareholders? Well shareholders don’t RUN the company. They can make their influence by choosing the board, or cast their vote by selling the stock. I don’t own YHOO so this might sound insensitive. But company shareholders having disagreement with management team is not new and opinions from shareholders who want to sell the stock and cash in should not be used to judge the company’s direction.
Will Yahoo+Google deal hurt Yahoo in the long run? It might hurt Yahoo’s advertising network. But Google is already so dominant in search market and Yahoo may never be able to catch on with its technology today. The key is for Yahoo to innovate and find new ways to establish a stronger brand, not necessary all in the search market though.
Some also have concerns that Yahoo is helping to create a monopolistic Google which will turn evil in no time. Google has 60% search market share because so far its search technology is the best. And it is not so dominant in other areas and Yahoo’s deal will not make it be. I think the key is to believe that technology is alway moving forward, today’s big players will be replaced if they stay still, and there will always be newer and better things coming out. Technology is simply not a business that can be established upon monopoly.
Having said that, the challenges ahead of Yahoo are obvious and I wish them the best of the luck.
Recently I started looking into both JQuery and ProtoType to simplify the Javascript works on my site and first decision to make was to which one to choose. Besides these popular options, MooTool also caught my attention since it appears there are some very loyal followers on the web.
I found this article best explains the differences between JQuery and Prototype from the level of the framework itself.
In short, Prototype does what a “framwork” is supposed to do. It is a layer between the HTML dom objects the developer and functionality is done through a set of classes.
JQuery is, for lack of better word, a straight DOM manipulator. It also provides a layer between the JavaScript and HTML, but it is more direct and simpler so it is rather provided as a “library” than a “framework”.
I guess which one to pick largely depends on the developer because neither could really go wrong. It is really about how you look at HTML frontend coding, or whether you are more comfortable with treating the HTML dom as an individual entity and Javascript as UI helper; or JavaScript as a UI driver and HTML is a product of it.
I personally enjoyed using JQuery and I like it a lot. And I believe JavaScript should stay small in the whole HTML UI design and not to be too complicated.
Dr. Graham’s new article made the reddit.com’s front page. It talks about the programmers’ natural unfitness to work for a corporate environment. Being a programmer myself I can totally relate to what he had to say. I have a day job, its bring me the money to support my family; but my true passion is in my own “moonlight startup”. Comparing two kind of work styles can be interesting and Dr. Graham said it perfectly.
“Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn’t—sometimes because the company wouldn’t let him, but often because the company’s code wouldn’t let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to.”
This is so true. Working in a big corporation environment really frustrates me sometime because knowing how NOT to do things is such an important skill and you have to master it. I guess the extreme goes to the government job.
As a programmer, what attracts me starting up my own project is the freedom of thinking. My idea may succeed, or it may fail; but I learn and grow from it. The freedom of implementation also makes working such a fun thing.
I guess people are different. Some enjoy working a corporate, but not for the good programmers.
If you run a website or websites, you understand how spam is such a pain in the butt. I guess this is one of the things a webmaster has to deal with. With the technology today, it is a lot easier to create content on the web, including spam. So separate yourself from spam becomes an inevitable task for a web builder.
Blog
If you use wordpress, Akismet is THE plugin that you need to activate.
Forums
I have forums using both vBulletin and Simple Machine, and Akismet can be used to handle the spam filtering too. For vBulletin, there is readily made plugin that you can download and install from vbulletin.org. And I wrote a simple Akismet API for my Simple Machine board and it worked fantastic.
POW (Plain Old Website)
If you code your (or someone else’s) site all by yourself, there is no readily made “plugins” for you to use. But on the other hand you will have more power to customize since you know the code throughout. There are a few things you can implement to reduce or block spam.
Country Ban
Not trying to discriminate but there are certain countries where a lot of spams are originated from. If your site’s visitors are mainly from US, you can pretty much block all the foreign users from accessing certain pages such as registration, contact, etc.
To identify the user’s country, you can use the IP to country mapping database from maxmind.com and ip2location.com. Both companies provide trial versions of databases and APIs to use. If you like the result, you can purchase a basic version for only $50 from maxmind.
Ip Ban
I don’t normally use the IP ban since a spammer usually has multiple IPs to use and it is not that hard to hide the real IP.
Akismet web service
I love Akismet!
Is Facebook worth really this much?
Personally I don’t think so. Unless there is some secret revenue making channel that I can’t see.
Is this a good move for Microsoft? The key is not how small the percentage of the FB stake that MS gets, it’s the stake of the FB ad netowrk. And the victory of blocking out Google in the deal. Comparing with the other ad network deals happened earlier this year, it is possibly good move from MS side.