More Clouds

So Microsoft has just officially announced their cloud layer - Azure. Time to accept this is the way things are headed me thinks, with Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and now Azure all competing for world domination in the hosting/dev markets.

It'll be intersting to see Steve Ballmer talk about it next week when he's in Sydney. I'm anticipating a sales pitch... complete with air fist pumping and shouts of "we love developers!", but we shall see.

I wonder if Apple will go the same way? I doubt it at the moment being more hardware focused - but maybe the iphone app store is a sign of things to come.... after all, it's just another thin client hooked into the brain that is the Internet.

Clouds

The Web Services division of Amazon has had a new platform for a little while now called EC2, or the Amazon computing cloud. Just yesterday they announced support for Windows Server – which means they are going to be offering a “Bulletproof” like hosting service – except on a frickin huge scale. You’ll be able to get you own Virtual Machine(s) powered by Amazon datacenters.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/coming-soon-ama.html

It’s a little bit like the start of the Matrix. :)

Over the next year or so it’ll stir up the hosting reseller market big time too.

Download Day

I just made my pledge on the firefox 3 download day site. woop woop!

geek humour

hehehehehehe

Results only work environment

Tim Ferriss has posted a good blog interview on the concept of ROWE, or results only work environment. It's a concept from a new book about to come out called "Why work sucks and how to fix it". All I can say is - excellent. This is my kind of working environment. Away with the unnecessary pompous attitudes of self important leechers! Away with the negative attitudes!(public servants take note... not that I'm stereotyping, but from personal experience I run across them in this sector all too often).

Shut up and get it done - get rewarded for the results, and not how long you've sat at your desk trying to look busy.

The Internet loves good lists

Nothing gets a better reaction on a blog then a good list. Top 10 peeves. Top 10 web design sites. Top 60 AJAX scripts. Top 10 books on animal husbandry. Most popular articles for the last 7 minutes.

Why do lists work so well?

An article from Seth Godin touched on it - lists are great because there's so many infinite possibilities. It easier to choose a book you would like to read based on a list of top recommendations for any particular subject. I'm a victim of this myself - I find it very difficult to buy a book now unless I know it's been rated highly on Amazon. I don't want to waste my money on some equivalent of a steaming pile of dog poo.

A year or 2 ago, somebody caught on and created listable.com. It was a nifty little web2 site where you could create a top list of anything you wanted and publish it on the site. Then the porn kings caught on to listable and abused it. Now the domain just goes to a holding page. But that was the problem with listable - it was just lists. Some of them were good, but mostly not.
So what makes a good list? Anyone can make one. Here's mine:

• A list will absorb the readers attention more readily (a kind of "user friendly" reading?).
• Ability to contribute to the list from qualified commentators.
• Ability to refine the list from qualified commentators.
• Ability to publish the list to a wide audience and attract qualified commentators.
• Be easy to find for the right audience.
• Quality filters to keep out the noise, commercial influence or unrelated content.

Got anything else?

Google Visualisation API

This API has some excellent potential - we have recently started using Google Sites as an extranet platform, as it works well in a multi office environment and damn easy to use and update.

A nifty feature of Google Sites is that you can plug in Google gadgets anywhere throughout the site, which was nice. But now that I've seen these gadgets, it's not just nice, it's FANTASTIC! Pick a graph type, give it an XML feed and away you go.

The Gantt charts will be nifty for scheduling. I can just spit out a feed from my task system. Org charts so everyone knows their place. Gauges and pie charts and heat maps.... oh my!

Excuse me while I go and calm myself down.

Innovation with James Gosling

The Sydney Morning Herald had an excellent article this morning on James Gosling - the principal creator of Java.

The Gosling creed

• Reward risk and don't penalise failure.
• Innovation is about risk and thinking that risk and failure are good things.
• You have to learn to trust crazy people. It's the people on the edge that have the most interesting, insightful comments.
• Have confidence in yourself. People you think are oracles of wisdom - they're just making it up.
• Listen carefully, and try to figure out what the problem is to solve.

Test Driven Development

Steve from the Newcastle coders group did a informative session on test driven development on Wednesday night - and used Eclipse with JUnit to develop some unit tests. Was good to check out eclipse, and interesting to see his methods of testing.

In fact - I'm now beginning to take the following perspective...

Bad computer performance

During my illness earlier this week I decided to do some mind numbing tasks to keep me occupied - coding was giving me a headache, but my mind was still overactive so I got down to some good ol' fashion XP speed tweaks.

One performance issue that was bugging me big time was my laptop's sluggish performance using Outlook 2007 amongst other things. It was so slow it was unreasonable, especially for a core 2 duo with 2GB ram. I hadn't run a defrag since I first got the system so it was due for a reshuffle. The following quickened things up a bit (run in this order to get best results):

1. Delete all the junk. As much email as possible (my mailbox was over 2gb), all that crap freeware that I only ever used once, temp internet files, old log files, etc, etc.
   
2. Run a system wide defrag:
   (all programs > accessories > system tools > disk defragmenter)
   This will take a long time to run (e.g. 3 or 4 hours) if it hasn't been done for a while.
   This operation will most likely skip a couple of files because they are in use – mainly outlook and desktop search. After the defrag has run, run it again, but instead of doing a full defrag, just do an analyze. In the analyze feedback, take a note what files are still significantly large and fragmented.
   
3. Then use the “contig” tool to defrag individual problem files that the windows disk defragmenter can’t fix. You can get the contig tool here.
   
   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx
   
   Be sure to install it in your windows/system32 folder. It’s a command line tool that you’ll need to follow the instructions as set out in the link above.
   
   Outlook.ost and the desktop search index file are the main ones you want to defrag individually as they are huge files (my outlook file was 2.7Gb in 650 fragments. My search index file was 345Mb in over 3500 fragments). If you're a gamer who plays Guildwars or similar, running contig on the ".dat" or main game files should also speed things up. Only do this after a full system wide defrag, and you have stopped the processes in task manager (e.g. outlook.exe, etc) as the first 2 steps free up large amounts of continuous disk space needed for the larger defragmented files.
   
   More info on the contig tool here: http://whall.org/blog/2008/02/02/defraggle-rock/#more-1812
   
4. As a last resort, reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. Say goodbybe to 2 days minimum to get things back the way they were.... especially when apps like Visual Studio take hours to install.
   
5. Next time you get a new computer - get a faster hard drive. Laptops especially have slower RPM hard drives to save battery life - but once alot of files get piled on the system slow down will happen. Solid state hard drives should become more mainstream this year, get one if you can live with slightly less space.
   

Firefox gaining market share

According to reports - 31.1% of the oceania region browser use is now Firefox. This and more brow raising facts here:

http://www.webappexpo.com.au/content/view/136/45/

Will be interesting to see how IE 8 goes.

Thanks to Andrew V for the link.

Data Portability

John Dyer, the author of freetextbox amongst other things, has written a nice post about the introduction to data portability. It's almost a utopian idea that you should be able to move all your data from one site to another - for example all your friends and posts from facebook into the next new social network, or all your photos from flikr to photobucket to microsoft live to who know what else.

I like the idea. It gives way for a more democratic, less commercial ideal across the web from a user's point of view, and makes companies who want your patronage work harder by ultimately making better apps.

It's a long way off, but the liquid nature of the internet could welcome it with open arms if done properly.