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Sunday, November 8th, 2009

CPU vs <video>

Having an older Mac that positively freaks out when I try to watch videos or do anything else rather CPU intensive, and even having a relatively brand new one that gets pretty hot doing the same, I was excited to find in my Twitters this morning a YouTube HTML5 Viewer that takes a given YouTube link and renders it using the new(ish) HTML5 video tag. Common sense and the blog post that introduced it claimed to use less CPU than Flash on Mac and Linux. Here were my quick and unscientific findings.

FlashVideo
Safari30-60%80-100%
Chrome10-30%

Needless to say, I was shocked to find the video embed to perform so horribly in Safari and so well in Chrome (Chrome numbers were with a single tab open, all procs combined, for those wondering). I don't know the internals of how the video in rendered in the browser, but it is either not a part of the core Webkit, or it is something the Google folks have already improved upon despite its dearth of use.

I will perhaps spend more time testing this across different OS's (and OS versions--above was Leopard) and browsers, but would be curious what your findings were, were you to do a quick comparison.
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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Underneath Downtown Dallas


GeekBrief.TV #486 from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

I'm pretty sure this is the building with the data center where half my company's servers live. It's just down the street from our offices.
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Monday, November 24th, 2008

So meta and realtime

So I've had a Google search as a saved default tab since last week, and now a comment I left on a blog Saturday is the #1 result for it.
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Thursday, September 4th, 2008

My Conherant Thoughts on Chrome, having spent months researching RIA options, Would Go Here

Chrome: A new force for web applications?
This really is a significant feature, because a well-designed and responsive web application will be indistinguishable from any other desktop application.

I have a fairly detailed, geeky blog post on this subject in my brain, but not enough time to actually write it.
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Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Scaling Facebook

Facebook VP of technical operations: Jonathan Heiliger
Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook speaks to CNET News.com’s Dan Farber about the balancing act between innovating quickly and building a stable infrastructure at a company moving at breakneck-speed. Heiliger also discusses what he’s doing to scale data center operations and support the addition of more than 250,000 customers on a daily basis.
Interesting video for those of us in this business. I've always been impressed to the point of disbelief that Facebook has scaled a PHP application as successfully as they have. There is a bit near the end where he talks about storing data locally that I didn't really catch for the screaming kid, but it sounded intriguing, at least in the sense that they are thinking/talking about that option.
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

What I Read

I exported my Google Reader subscriptions to create some straight-forward XML to build the beginnings of a demo Flex app with, so I thought I would share: Google Reader Subscriptions OPML. ("OPML?" you ask?)

And here is the app, if you are interested. It loads that very OPML file in order to create the list to the left, then just loads the site's URL into a new tab on the right. If you right-click w/in the Flash bits (that is anywhere outside of the iframe beneath the tab bar), you can view source. It took about 6 days, from first downloading Flex Builder, through much head-on-desk pain, to what you see. The good news is, I think I have the heavy lifting done. Now (after maybe another day's tweaking) to re-create the same demo in GWT.
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008

I like this plug-in. Do they make one like it for life?*

AmIOnMySpace.com?
This plugin will alert you if you accidently stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from.
Looks like it's not avail for FF3 yet but you knows when it iz I iz downloadin' it!

* You know, where if someone mentions MySpace in conversation you are suddenly sent back in time to the previous conversation. Or they spontaneously combust in some humorous fashion.
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macheads don't even bother reading this

Just got my new work laptop set up in record time thanks to:
  • Firefox (of course). Thanks to our benevolent Google overlords, so much is in teh cloud that I'm most of the way there with a browser window.
  • Digsby, for all IM client needs, including GTalk and my work-specific Jabber account. Plus a Twitter client. Digsby stores everything in the cloud so there's no re-configuration. Just install, login, and done.
  • Eclipse (the PHP version), which doesn't even have an installer. Just runs.
  • XAMPP, which I discovered upon setting up my new personal laptop two weeks ago has improved greatly and now installs Apache and MySQL (and FileZilla server if you want) as services like a breeze and then has a tiny little "control center" running in the tray in case you need to stop/start/check-up-on anything.
That's all I really need to get to work. There are a few other minor things, FileZilla client to pull down a fresh copy of the site I'm working on, and eventually I'll need to install Tortoise SVN to pull down and/or manage (all mine are a mess at the moment) all the various repositories I work with, but that's really about it. Being a work machine, Office came pre-installed, so I'm using Outlook for the work IMAP account (if I could pull that into Gmail I would, believe me, but it still beats Thunderbird).

The only thing I failed to mention above is Photoshop, which is both the beefiest application on my must-haves list, and the only one that's not free!
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Give it a little while. It's worth it.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.
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Monday, June 9th, 2008

More Four Letter Bad Words in All Caps

Aaand, just two days after purchase, just when things started to purr along nicely, my new laptop has two dead pixels. Good thing I bought the service plan. Bad thing it takes two days to even start getting a laptop up to speed around here.
mood: pissed off
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Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I can has new laptop.

No matter which OS I go with, a computer is as utilitarian as the electric company that fuels its evil heart, and will never excite me the way a new web app will. Given that sitting in front of the hardware and interacting with the OS is where we actually spend most of our time, that is a shame.

From a very high level, I know exactly why all OS's--or all large technology projects, for that matter--fail, but I don't have many ideas on how to fix technology on that scale. The same things that make tech interesting are the things that make it fail so often.

I would tell you the long story of how my old laptop died* and what I did to try and save it, but** I'm almost done with my coffee and I have to shower and pack. I'm off to Florida for a few days of working vacation, followed by a few days of proper vacation.

* technically, only the windows install on a partition on my MacBook failed. So now it's just a Mac. Which is great. If the only application you need a computer for is iTunes.

** it's really boring stuff to non-geeks.
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Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Finally a good explanation of one of the things that bugs the bejezzers out of me on Macs

Coding Horror: Mouse Ballistics
So what's wrong with Mac OS X's mouse acceleration curve? Simply put, it's the wrong shape. For mouse motion to feel natural (at least for most people), the curve has to start by moving upward fairly moderately, then gradually flattening out as the value of X increases. Mac OS X's, curve, however, starts off by being too steep, staying too steep for too long, and then flattening out too abruptly. In practical terms this means that, frequently, as a user tries to use the mouse to move the pointer from point A to point B, the pointer motion feels sluggish. The user then tries to compensate for the sluggishness by moving the mouse faster, and the pointer suddenly goes flying across the screen and overshoots point B. A comfortable and useful curve is actually shaped like a curve. Mac OS X's curve, however, is shaped more like a cliff.
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Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Loaded adverb

Create a GWT project - Google Web Toolkit 1.5
This means that GWT can seamlessly work with whatever server-side framework you happen to use, be it PHP, Ruby on Rails, or even ASP.NET.
...emphasis mine. I love how hierarchies are subtly communicated. Interestingly, Python isn't even on that list, despite being what Google App Engine uses (for now, more langs promised for the future).
music: Ladytron
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Random Fact of the Day

"If everyone could kiss you, there would be world peace."

"I think there are more people in the world than seconds in a life."

"Well, you wouldn't have to kiss the men, and what about one country? Could you bring peace to one country?"

How often one would have to kiss a new woman to kiss every woman in the US w/in a 100-year-long life

Check my maths, eh?
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

If there was EVER a solution looking for a problem

Dear Jeff Bezos (one-week Kindle review) [Scobleizer]. Good lord. Yes, you are a geek. But the worst possible kind. There is a fine line between "This suxs" and "Fire! Burn! Loot!"

And as for one's reasons for wanting ebooks go, those are horrible.

The book is going to be very hard to beat. Yes, the "Web" has killed text--in the way of newspapers, fliers, instruction manuals, dictionaries and encyclopedias--but in terms of the aesthetic a well-designed book achieves in terms of
  • Is typically a complete work
  • Requires no other device to consume
  • Utterly portable
  • A consummate consumable: Can be both held on to indefinitely or thrown right in the trash
...it is going to be a long time before there is any technology that can beat it. I mean, come ON: the image above is from Amazon's own promotional shots! That's like advertising Arial by putting it right next to Helvetica.

If anything, the return of The Fray as a paper publication is the best content-tech news of the week.

All via I Started To Write About How Fickle We Are, But Then I Lost Interest
mood: sick
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Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Ambient Technology (cross post)


Late Train
Originally uploaded by wild
Non-linear: Ambient Technology:
This oft-neglected blog might appear to be solely about ARG marketing/gaming and digital art, but this thing I've labeled as "nonlinear" since 2001 is finding a new presence thanks to Twitter, Last.fm, etc. And this thing is getting a new name; I've been calling it Ambient Technology...
I posted on my other blog today for the first time in a long time, particularly if you count more than just links...lots more to say in this area and I think that is the venue for it (as opposed to here). Two words of the day (phatic and osmotic) and pretty much the concept of the day over there.
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Friday, October 5th, 2007

"dedbtddy.exe" is a trojan installed by Love4Evar, Inc.'s "Prego" app, popular in the late 90's and early 00's. The "Prego" app was, among other things, supposed to free up resources on your computer so users could "focus on more important things." "dedbtddy.exe" was originally a forgotten about and never-executed portion of the "ddy.exe" code, but at some point a nefarious developer compiled it into its own application and packaged it in "Prego", hiding its execution behind "ddy.exe", which would at a slow but ever-increasing rate ferry its requests to "dedbtddy.exe".

"dedbtddy.exe" can effect the system in many ways, but its most common symptom is resource hogging and spawning new "Love4Evar" processes that steal directly from the original "Love4Evar" application installed by the user. Sometimes "dedbtddy.exe" processes exist at lower levels, not stealing many machine resources, but attempting to interfere with the process threads of more "productive" applications like Life, Happy, and Survive.

"dedbtddy.exe" is typically impossible to remove without removing the entire "ddy.exe" portion of the "Prego" app (which in turn is impossible to remove). There are a FEW documented cases of "dedbtddy.exe" removal from "ddy.exe", but only by professionals and often involving hours (if not days) of sysadmin time. Sometimes users are able to install a new version of "ddy.exe" without the "dedbtddy.exe" trojan. Typically this "ddy.exe" ships with less features than the original, although without "dedbtddy.exe" performance is vastly improved.
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Saturday, August 18th, 2007

while ($life)

while ($life) {
  for ($days = 11680; $days < $death; $days++) {
    coffee();
    $luck ? $work = "good" : $work = "bad";
    work($work);
    while ($sober) {
       wine();
    }
   }
}

...super extra bonus points for anyone who can expand on this. feel free to rewrite in your own syntax of choice...
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Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

opportunistic bullshit economy

Jenny woke up with something new (to her) on the brain. She swung her legs gingerly out from under the duvet and spread her toes on the hardwoods. With a brief detour to press the coffeemaker's "on" button, she settled at the computer. The Idea Copyright Database website was in her bookmarks, her search query submitted within seconds and with nary a touch of the mouse. The annoying "please wait" graphic a throwback to 2007, when the (then called) Apple computer popularized the hypnotic spinner. Government websites were always a solid decade behind the times. "This thing gets slower every damn day," she mumbled under her breath, and stood to retrieve a cup of tasty caffeine.

1004 results matched your request... "Shit," Jenny thought, "not specific enough yet," and sipped her coffee faster in an attempt to facilitate the process. She only had 15 minutes before she had to start getting ready for work. She managed two more keywords and searched within the results. This brought the list to a manageable two pages' worth. She scanned the abstracts and clicked through to a couple. Finally, towards the bottom of the second page she found what she was secretly hoping not to (having long ago stopped worrying about the ironic causality of the process). She mumbled some obscenities and clicked through to the Execution Permits. Already a three-year with two more years left on it, and three more in the queue.

"These," more obscenities, "people," Jenny said loud enough to elicit a groan and some rustling from her lover, still in the bed. "They need this shit like so many trophies on their shelf. What would they talk about at parties? How would they know how to feel about themselves, how to rate their self esteem against all the other similarly-but-not-too-similarly-now dressed people in their precious little peer groups? Oh, I'm sorry: communities. What ever would the world do without their precious little ideas, codified by Big Brother for all to see."

"Oh, for the days when a freakin' domain registration was as far as these nascent mental masturbations need freakin' go, when there were actually TLDs to be had."
music: A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario
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Thursday, March 29th, 2007

You down with OOP? Yeah you know me!

"Does class Love extend class Sex or does class Sex extend class Love?"

"It depends. They both inherit from each other."

"How can they inherit from each other, wouldn't that be impossible? Wait. Are they in different includes? So if I do include Love then I can instantiate Sex and it will inherit from Love, but if I do an include Sex then I can instantiate Love and it will inherit from Sex?"

"Something like that. No. Wait."

"Love and Sex both inherit from something else."

"Yes."

"But what?"

"Life?"

"Ooh. But I could swear sometimes Love inherits from Sex and vice versa."

"I think the namespaces are all fucked up. Love is under Life but also under Sex which is also under Life. And Fucking is under all of the above."

"You have to be really careful how you instantiate those classes, man."

"Seriously."

"They should scrap the whole object model and start over."

"Too late to refactor?"

"Well, would you want the job?"

"I would do Sex but only if they moved it into the root namespace."
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