Weblog by month (July 2004)
A new addition
No, not another child! Heh heh. Finally, after living with the same Mac since 1998, I have a new one. Well, new to
I bought this little beauty from eBay, and it arrived via courier today. Very exciting.
Build a better Bush
Always keen to be topical, I thought I’d post this link. Enjoy!
This November, we Americans pick our President, but until then, let’s pick on our President. Use the pop-up menus to change Mr. Bush’s face.
A new group weblog
Sounds good: 3-C Interop is a new group weblog from luminaries such as Bob Balaban, Amy Blumenfield, Peter O’Kelly, Karen Hobert and Rocky Oliver. It looks like it could be an interesting ride, and what is more, they have something to say about the recent hoop-la over the Radicati Group’s work.
Indeed, with “Keiot” and “Joe Silverstone” it would appear that Buga DiFino, Ed Fisher Jeffrey Franchetti of Cravath Swain & Moore and InsideDomino all now have new competition in the “dumb trolls who just don’t know when to quit” stakes
Alive
Buy this album. It is amazing. Last month, the Red Hot Chili Peppers played three nights in Hyde Park, London. I couldn’t go, but really wish I had. Still, the next best thing is here: a double CD culled from these gigs, Live in Hyde Park. This album came out today, so I had to buy it en route to the office. I’m very glad I did too. It’s worth the price alone just to hear the Peppers’ amazing rendition of I Feel Love! I gather the CD is only available in the US on import , sorry. For once, us Europeans and Australasians get first dibs
Moving on, I’m conscious that benpoole.com has been very quiet of late. This is due to a combination of home commitments (three kids takes it out of you I tell you), lots going on at work, and — of most interest to you — some secret squirrel stuff, soon to be revealed on this site (promise). Actually, some of it isn’t all that secret, but please, humour me.
Exits looking suitably annoying and mysterious.
How offensive!
Is this for real I wonder? Do you know people like the developers described in the piece? I suppose they must exist, but as a “corporate developer” myself, I just find this offensive...
» Jared Odulio: Anatomy of a Corporate Developer. An excerpt:
A corporate developer eats buzzwords for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He/she thinks that wearing a shirt with an IT vendor’s logo embroidered in the left chest is awesome and geeky. He/she never touched a linux box in his entire development career and never heard of Gnome. And normally, his/her language of choice is Visual Basic until Java became so hot, he/she jumped the bandwagon. He believes that good practices aren’t necessary as long as the system is currently working.
Via Erik Thauvin.
New iMacs
More detail has surfaced about the new iMacs due in September this year. Volker picked up on Apple’s surprising admission on their iMac page:
Apple has stopped taking orders for the current iMac as we begin the transition from the current iMac line to an all-new iMac line which will be announced and available in September. We planned to have our next generation iMac ready by the time the inventory of current iMacs runs out in the next few weeks, but our planning was obviously less than perfect. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.
... and now MacCentral reports on the proposed G5 iMacs:
(Apple CFO) Oppenheimer also confirmed that the new iMac coming this September will be based on a G5 processor. The delay in the new model’s release is (sic) supply problem involving the G5 processor itself...
Oooh! I wonder how much money I can save between now and September (my birth month no less!) Erm... OK, well maybe ten quid won’t quite cut it.
Processing stuff
Whilst perusing Rocky’s latest weblog entry, Large-scale doc processing in LotusScript - design considerations..., I noted a link to an older complementary post on AndrewPollack’s site, A faster way to update data! It’s awesome. Faced with comparing millions of rows of Oracle-sourced data, with a relative handful (60,000 documents) of Notes data, Andrew hit upon comparing hashed values: 32 bytes, no more no less, as opposed to the complete data set. This turned a Notes agent with a run-time of around twelve hours to something that whizzed through the data in less than four!
Hats off to Mr. P. I would never have thought of such a thing. I am such a lowly vessel in the sea of programmer brilliance...
One other performance-enhancing tip that Andrew briefly mentions is that of the NotesViewEntry class. This has been mentioned before on this very site, but I cannot emphasise its use enough: skimming a view’s index in Lotusscript is invariably quicker than delving into an actual NotesDocument object. Do it whenever you can (this index-skimming explains why @DbLookup and @DbColumn are speedier than things like GetDocumentByKey).
Fix Firefox
Windows users who run the Firefox web browser might want to go and fix it. Last week a security vulnerability was discovered in both Firefox and Thunderbird related to the shell: protocol. You can read more at the Mozilla site — the link also includes a patch.
Note that this exploit does not affect OS X and Linux users.
Shame Apple UK
Various websites, including Boing Boing and Tom Coates’ plasticbag.org are linking to Matt Webb’s tale of woe concerning his lemon Apple PowerBook. So I’m going to link to this too, because piss-poor customer service and failed promises are all too prevalent nowadays.
An update this afternoon from Matt Webb’s site:
Short story: A replacement will be with me in 2-3 weeks; Compensation gets discussed at that point.
What a shame he had to chase and push for this for so long.
Firefox updated
Version 0.9.2 of Firefox was released earlier this week. I suggest running for your copy!
Whilst you’re at it, you can pick up the new Google Pagerank plug-in.
FairKeys
My previous posts on the topic of iTunes and DRM have linked to Hymn (formerly known as PlayFair), which seeks to free iTunes purchases from their restrictive digital rights guff. Now, Jon Johansen, otherwise known as “DVD Jon” has gone a step further, and released FairKeys. This utility extracts your FairPlay keys for you, directly from Apple’s servers. Lumme!
Joshua Bloch leaves Sun
I hear that Joshua Bloch has left Sun to work for some bunch called “Google”. Word on the street is that Google are going to be the next big thing, so here’s hoping they derive maximum benefit from Bloch’s awesome brain!
For those wondering who Bloch is, he is one of the minds behind the Sun Java libraries, and wrote the excellent (and very readable) Effective Java — a recommended read even for relative newbies like myself.
Crikey
It has been somewhat busy in Poole Towers of late. The seven week-old Toby keeps us busy, as do his brothers. My eldest, Thomas, hit the ripe old age of six last week, and a party ensued. This entailed lobbing small children from an inflatable crocodile into a swimming pool.
Well, they enjoyed it.
Work? It is frantic: Sametime secrets and tokens, XML and Javascript are all keeping me awake at night, along with gearing up my new laptop (yes, a ThinkPad: T41 this time). Continuing the work theme, we had our annual office “away day” last week. As usual, complete carnage in the evening, but some good work for charidee during the day . I would publish some photos here, but that would simply serve to tarnish my on-line reputation further.
Tomorrow brings some heavy duty working from home. I imagine I will end up like Mr. Spence with his ukele.
