News from the front

Google came up with a really cool idea about a new WebKit based browser with process separation and suitable to run “webapps”. I’m non plussed cause I know all about Fluid.app and have that already.

The V8 javascript engine on the other end seems really interesting. On the even other hand, compiling javascript into machine code sounds scary. But it will probably be exceedingly fast so it might all be very interesting in killing off stuff like Air.

On a side note, Google decided, off the cuff, to release a desktop browser pointed at webapps based on the same render engine used on Android and shipping with Gears. All this happens within weeks of release of Android. This probably means a shift in focus in the whole google apps away from Firefox to Google Chrome and a shiny new interface to be released in sync with the Android 1.0 launch. Bad news for Mozilla. Maybe good news for Symbian. Who knows!

OMFG! I just converted to git. Why, cause setting up a svn repo is a pain and eclipse sync is just next to useless. git has the excellent feature of being totally painless to setup and allows me to work seamlessly on the laptop well way from my intranet.

Got a new Canon S5 to replace my ancient S1. The main reason for the swap wasn’t the ancient bit but the being broken bit. As far as I can tell it’s just the sensor that went bad, lens and display are clearly working but only noise comes out on the card side (btw, if anyone is interested I can sell the S1 as-is).

The concept is basically the same but brought into this century with a (real) 8Mpx sensor, the glass kept IS and was upgraded to 12x, the memory changed from CF do SDHC and the LCD is larger and more useful. The viewfinder is basically the same and so is the general usage.
One non obvious change is the body being a bit fatter as demonstrated by not fitting correctly into the S1 slot on my camera bag. Other non obvious changes were due to about 6 years of DIGIC development, the S5 as face detect which actually works pretty good to my amazement and ISO1600 which is a crappy as expected. The glass is about the same quality as the S1 (but 6-72 instead of 6-60) and shows some magenta aberration on the edges of the image on bright areas when the zoom is fully extended. Otherwise it’s all good.
The lens cover is like a reflex lens cover instead of sticking just by friction which i guess will work better than the S1.

The only annoying thing is the accessory ring changed from the S1 which means I have to buy a new adapter to use 55mm stuff. So, If anyone is interested in a LA-DC52E conversion lens adapter for the S1 (and G1 to G3 iirc) i’m willing to sell mine. It’s part of the LAH-DC10 kit (adapter+parasol), which I can sell complete.

On TWiT 154 the guys focused on how bad the mojave experiment is on changing the common (correct) idea Windows Vista is a pille of dung. They comment the whole thing is centered on how people think Vista is bad and instead of “wow, it’s actually good”.

That reminded me of a Microsoft campaign for some type of managed service or suport service where an office worker works into the wee hours of the night geting consistently more disgruntled at his computer until right at the end when he’s trying to save or print the computer crashes and he loses everything. So the main idea of the campaign is “Microsoft software is unreliable crap that will screw you at the worst of times but if you throw more money at Microsoft they promise they’ll come in and make slightly less unreliable”.

I’m sold!!!

This is the first article on a three part series about the virtues of a programer.

Laziness in this sense goes a good bit beyond phisical laziness. I’ll demonstrate with a short story that sumizes the point.

Back in undergrad one of the unix/c course assignements was writing a program able to solve hanoi towers. The point of the exercise was learning about signals and probably IPC. I forget.
As I walked by the row of vt220s my classmates were particularly busy coding 3 page functions choke full of switch/case and if/else structures. I couldn’t help being amazed at how industrious and hard working they were. And i mean that in the worst possible way.

I got home and stared at the ceiling for about 5 minutes (undergrad!), grabed the keyboard, coded about 7 lines and it worked on the first build. Let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to mess up just 7 lines.

When i went in the next day a good deal of my colleagues were elbow deep debuging a few hundred lines of spagetty code. They got there by being hard working and the wrong kind of lazy which is comonly called being an idiot.
Presented with a task they jumped right into it cause thinking is hard and they much prefered 2 or 3 hours of mind numbing coding. Also, spewing out klocs made them fell productive and geting work done.
I, on the other hand, would rather listen to a celine dion record than spend those 2 hours coding that drivel. So I Iazied out and changed the problem from solving hanoi towers to what’s the smallest amount of code that can solve hanoi towers.
At the other side of the process i ended up with a couple of for loops and a decision matrix. Got a boundry condition wrong ? Debug 5 lines. Piece going left instead of left ? Put the right decision in the matrix. How can you even consider unrolling the loops manually ? Crazy talk!

However, let’s see this from the manager point of view.
First pass: buttoned down developer working hard, weird developer chating on messenger.
Second pass: buttoned down developer still working hard, weird developer appears to be sleeping.
Third pass: buttoned down developer still working hard, other guy gone.
Next morning: buttoned down developer still working hard (debuging his own mistakes), other guy not there.

And that’s why most companies suck.

TED published a 2007 talk from Kevin Kelly about the future of the Web that at some point touchs on my
in the beginning was the X 3 part series on how the data is really important.

Go watch it.

Is it just me or cuil is like altavista with 3 columns ?

Cuil idea guys, now improve search. We know you can!!

If protocol buffers are so cool, why do they look like ASN.1 ??

(continued from Fatty fat client)

I’m bored so enough with the ancient history already. Hotmail went big despite Microsoft earnests efforts to migrate it into the ground and then more and more webmails started poping up and then the gigamail race started and then web2.0 happened.
And in the background all our information was moving into the cloud.
Some people get it, some people don’t. Examples of people who get it are Google and Apple. Examples of people who don’t are Microsoft.

Google was a big part of making moving into the happening by catalyzing the web2.0 thing into gmail/reader/calendar/docs. Google basically realized 2 things, first it’s too damn hard to crawl and scrape the web. Second, there was still a lot of info locked away in silos. Since Google’s business model is making money from other people’s information the next logic step was data hosting and persuading people to give them all their data.
Apple always had a vague idea about all this with .mac and helping people seamlessly (ah!) sincronize their computers and publish publicly on the road. And when they a) got it b) the technology was there or c) both, the iphone came out. The iphone 3g is the mobility/2.0 ipod. Most people didn’t quite get they need it but once the first iphone showed them they could have a phone with an excellent screen and a desktop grade browser the world turned for them. Google is also in the race but well behind with Android.

On the other side we have Microsoft with basically hotmail from 10 years ago, a laughingly bad online experience on their mobile devices and deepening silos. If iphone 3G is the ipod windows mobile and windows live are the zunes of mobility.

The sad loser on all this is Palm. They got it 10 years ago and then lost it somewhere along the way due to woeful mismanagement. Palm could have launched something like the iphone 3g instead of the folio. I bet they’re all very proud now pointing at all the eee pcs and saying “we invented that. too bad we’re bust”.

As oposed to Fedora 8 (which shiped Gnome 2.20), Fedora 9 (which shiped with Gnome 2.22 and the corresponding gvfs) will not show you your fstab nfs user mounts. On the other hand it will show you a given servers exports if you browse /net/servername/ on nautilus. The path is not Gnome choosen (don’t get your panties tied up) and everything works via autofs so go there to configure it.
(this is not new to Fedora 9, it’s just that I never needed it before)