...more recent posts
Hilariously clever stealth ad for Widgetfinger CMS and hosting tool (make sure you read the box at the bottom of the page.) Via Daring Fireball.
Anandtech review of Intel X25-E SLC SSD vs. Seagate Cheetah 15K SAS vs. Western Digital 1TB SATAII RAID Edition.
...[T]he fact that eight [Intel X25-E] SLC drives need 129W less power than eight SAS drives while offering 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance is a small revolution in storage land....For me these SSD (i.e., solid state drives - no moving parts, data is stored much like it is in memory) are still too expensive. The Intel units run around $12 per GB, while the monsterous WD 1TB drive comes in at an amazing $0.19 per GB. But the SSDs already make sense for some applications, and in a few years the prices will come down. I can't wait. CPU speed almost doesn't matter for what I do (well, it does matter, but they are already so fast and scaling well,) it's disk I/O that is always the bottleneck. So SSDs are how computers in my life will get faster. If not in my next server for sure in the one after that.
[T]he Intel X25-E is nothing short of amazing: it offers at least 3 to 13 times better OLTP performance at less than a tenth of the power consumption of the classical SAS drives. We frankly see no reason any more to buy SAS or FC drives for performance critical OLTP databases unless the database sizes are really huge. From the moment you are using lots of spindles and most of your hard disks are empty, Intel's SLC SSDs make a lot more sense.
Flash z-index problems supposedly solved.
Q & A with Charlie Miller who won $5000 by compromising a fully updated MacBook through a Safari vulnerability. Ouch. To say he's unimpressed with OS X would be putting it mildly.
More campaigning to stop the madness that is Internet Explorer 6. Of course it won't work. But I did learn that Windows 2000 doesn't have IE 7 or 8, so a lot of businesses (that's mostly who would still be using Windows 2000) have no choice but to use 6 if they're going to use IE.
In case I get the new client I'm talking to this is the first thing I'm going to send him: The 300 million dollar button.
Pretty important Clay Shirky article: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
Accept credit cards anytime, anywhere, using the iPhone. Wow, that looks amazing.
A couple cool new to me tools: htop is top on steroids, and iftop is like top for network usage. Very nice.
Rumors that IBM might buy Sun. I'm generally skeptical about huge deals like this. But I definitely want the cool Sun technology - especially ZFS - to stick around and mature. And if that means IBM needs to buy them then I'm good with that.
2009 web safe font survey. Not sure about the validity of this but it's interesting. Franklin Gothic Medium?
I have a new blog at jim.datamantic.com where I am going to be blogging about Geneva. Probably not of interest unless you are trying to use the software. If you are there is a fairly long first post that might be helpful, although honestly I haven't even proof read it yet.
Open source perceptual hash library: pHash. Would this be interesting to run over a music library? Could it identify duplicate songs with different encodings?
Whew, that was hard. But just finished the much more robust image gallery system for Geneva. And this is what I've been waiting for to move forward with some other projects that involve uploading binary media files (although not necessarily images.) Damn that took me so long to figure out. Not the technical programming parts, but the conceptual aspects of how to make the data structure.
Holy cow, WebKit just implemented, per the HTML 5 specification, multiple attribute on file inputs (i.e. <input type="file" multiple>)
The Safari 4 beta has it already supposedly. Hallelujah! I cannot understand why this took 10 freakin' years.
That'll teach me. I just wasted 3 hours trying to fix a website that had been working perfectly. Turned out I linked to some jquery files stored at jqueryui.com (in the /latest/ directory) and they updated while I wasn't looking. I had meant to download the files and link to them locally, but in the rush of development I forgot about that. When they updated their ui plugin libraries everything stopped working with my older code. Arggg! Took forever for me to figure it out.
Cache locally Jim, cache locally!
Well it's March 4th, and time to march forth. In that spirit I am announcing the launch of Geneva, my web publishing platform.
Geneva will be in a not very restricted closed beta as I iron out some kinks, but large parts of it are definitely usable. Drop me a line if you'd like to try it out.