I use a Mac at home, so I’m used to Safari. In fact, until I recently started a side job, I used Safari exclusively for about a year. It’s fast to start up and fast to render. It has some developer tools built in so figuring out which styles apply to which elements is easy to decipher. Safari on Windows isn’t quite as quick as Safari on Mac. At least, it’s not on my work machine; an aging Pentium 4 with a measly 2GB of memory. This is the one thing kills Safari for Windows for me. I tried using it as a daily browser, but it was painfully slow on this machine. I think what kills it is Apple’s desire to make the application look like OS X and not Windows. Yes, it looks one million times better than windows, but at what cost? I’d rather it run fast on this machine than look pretty. It’s funny how Apple is somewhat hypocritical in this respect as they have strict guidelines for applications built for their own OS.

I digress…

So far (and this is a very short testing period) it’s a very fast and responsive application. It starts right up and renders quickly too. Its interface is minimal and clean yet functional (like most Google apps). It looks like it’s kind of modeled after IE7’s interface in that it does’t have a menu bar like most Windows applications. There are two icons to the right of the “OmniBox” (Chrome’s URL/search box all rolled into a single field); one to handle things like cut/copy/paste, new tab/window, etc and one for global features like options, history, and downloads. Of course there’s the obligatory back, forward and reload buttons and a place for your bookmarks, standard with any browser.

Tabs can be moved around easily for ordering and can be dragged completely out of the current container to create it’s own new Chrome window (a handy feature Firefox doesn’t support out of the box).

For developers, it has the same developer tools found in Safari. You can view source, debug JavaScript, monitor the JavaScript console, inspect elements on a page (which brings up a similar window to Safari’s). You can also view a Task Manager related to Chrome and it’s tabs that shows you how much memory and CPU are being used for each tab/window you have open. It even tells you how much memory is being used for any installed plugins. The Task Manager allows you to kill specific tabs if they are misbehaving as well.

I’m going to use it as my default for a while to see how it stacks up on a daily basis. I am optimistic at the moment, but I did notice some system hangs though those could be related to this massive pile of Java code running under Weblogic 8… which is an entirely different story.

Oh, on the wireless note: The courts here use some third-party provider for access. Kind of like you would see in a hotel. You connect, open a browser and they intercept the initial network traffic and direct you to a page where you either pay or enter in some access code to get connected to the outside world. Well, I had gotten the access code for today and began working on the side gig. Just before lunch, I had closed out all my windows to get ready to leave when I notice a Verify Certificate dialog that had been sitting there for a while. I’ve seen these before, nothing new there. But, this one took me as a surprise and I’m not sure if I should be concerned about it. At the very least, it “super unprofessional.”

Trust me ...it's super unprofessional

I cherish the great people I worked with at Apple, and am proud of my contributions to its historic turnaround and current success. With this lawsuit behind me, I look forward to addressing the greater challenges of social justice and economic disparity.

From Former Apple general counsel Heinen agrees to $2.2M backdating settlement - East Bay Business Times

Hmmm, interesting. I don’t really think she feels that amicable about the whole ordeal. I actually have a copy of the real statement she wanted to release before her lawyers got a hold of it.

I loath those pretentious freaks I worked with at Apple, and am pissed that those assholes didn’t have my back after all of my contributions to its historic turnaround and current success. With this bullshit behind me, I look forward to harassing Steve in the name of social justice and wish nothing but economic disparity on his whole family. Thanks for nothing asshat!

You heard it here first…

And a stupid smudge on the lens. Damn it!

One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year’s supply of condoms… [that] would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

I imagine it’s still going to be uncomfortable the day after.

What was not mentioned in Job’s keynote was AT&T’s iPhone 3G plan pricing. And, why should they; AT&T and Apple have severed their revenue sharing deal they had with the initial iPhone release one year ago. However, don’t let the $200 discount on a new iPhone fool you. Let’s do some math…

The old iPhone plans started at $59.99/mo. If you signed a two year contract you would pay roughly $1,440 over the life of the contract. The new plans, according to the press release, start at $39.99 voice plan PLUS $30 per month for unlimited data. Now you’re looking at $1,680 over the live of the contract. That’s $240 more (per contract) than the previous iPhone plans. Still feel like you’re getting a good deal? You just spent $240 to save $200. No word on family plan pricing or if they have family plans for the iPhone.

Will I get one? Probably. :\

Update: Looks like there’s no special treatment for new iPhone users and the standard plans and rates apply. It makes it a little easier to swallow a family plan at $59.99/mo for two lines of service but I have yet to find out if the family plan is available for the iPhone 3G. Interesting thing I found looking for answers to the question What plans are available for the iPhone? I Suppose they should update this if it’s not true.

Update #2: I just spoke with a Karen George in AT&T customer service and from what she told me the iPhone plan is the same, just going up in price $10/mo (this kind of contradicts the press release though). She also confirmed that the family plans are available for the new iPhone. I asked if the new iPhone plans will still include the 200 text messages and she said yes. I also asked if the MEdia(TM) Max Unlimited data plan (which, at $35/mo includes unlimited data and texts, seems to be a better deal) would be available for the iPhone and she said yes. I’m a little skeptical about what some random customer service rep says at this point, so take it with a grain of salt. Especially when she tells me they (customer service?) are not being told ANYthing about the details of the new iPhone and/or plans.

NB: If you’re wondering about the ‘AT&T Gets the Skins’ bit of the title, I’m referring to the San Bromista Cat Ranch.

This screen shot was grabbed at approximately 12:10PM PST on 06 June 2008. About 30 minutes ago I was simply getting a “HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

Update: I did manage to get the home page at about 12:22PM PST, but after clicking a link, I get the same “We’re Sorry!” page.

Techcrunch has a post on it as well with a note from Amazon PR (if you can call it a note).

Update #2: Cnet speculates Amazon could potentially have missed out on close to $1.4M USD in the 90 or so minutes they were offline.

Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don’t include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

I feel bad for the poor schmucks who had to sweat this one out.

The researchers rigged the software agents to implicate three laserjet printers, which were then accused in takedown letters by the M.P.A.A. of downloading copies of “Iron Man” and the latest Indiana Jones film.

The Inexact Science Behind DMCA Takedown Notices - Bits

I’m not a database programmer per say, but I’m expected to be one at work (even though I’m a code jockey). I don’t mind it most of the time, but there are times when it becomes really frustrating. Especially when you come across some schema that is poorly implemented. Normalization is a double edged sword. On one side, normalization is good for data integrity. On the other, it becomes a pain in the arse to get at your data. There are ways around the later (Views, de-normalized tables), but, a pain in the arse it still is. The one thing that really bugs me is normalization done wrong. We use Microsoft SQL server at work, but this should apply to any relational database.

Recently, at my day job, I’ve been working on a particular project which involved consuming data from a third party for use in a .NET web service. We were already consuming data from this vendor but they recently changed the schema (and data) and are deprecating the old format. The new feed is basically a complete dump of their data and schema. Not all of their data, just data we subscribe to (about 1M records total). Instead of modifying our import process to accommodate the current (old) schema (which would have been a huge effort on our part), we just created a new import process and modified the web service.

After working with this new schema for a couple weeks, I have come to the conclusion that, well, it’s crap. First and foremost, it’s not normalized properly. If you have an column in a table that looks like it should be a foreign key, then by all means, make it so. For example, say I have a table called Widgets with several columns. One of those columns is called WidgetTypeId and another called WidgetTypeDisplayName. There’s a prime candidate for another table. I don’t care if you only have two WidgetTypes, it belongs in its own table. Here’s why: When selecting records out of the table and filtering on WidgetTypeDisplayName, it gets really expensive. Sure, you could add an index on that column, but it still would be slower compared to joining on a WidgetType table. If I had ten million widgets and only 100 widget types, I’m only filtering 100 records vs. ten million.

What about filtering on the WidgetTypeId column? BZZZZZ. Where did you get that ID? Did you select it from the same table? Guess what, same difference. Maybe you hard-coded it in the query. That’s not smart either, especially if you have multiple environments that could possibly be out of sync (i.e. WidgetTypeId 4 in development might not be associated to the same thing in production). Put it in it’s own table.

I ran into this several times with this new schema at work and it was a complete pain. For one thing, in development, the queries were always relatively quick to return. In production, however, not the same. This database sat on the same server as another production database so there was more load on it. Enough to make the queries perform poorly. On the order of 10 to 40 seconds to return data in some cases. That’s not good. My solution: create a single de-normalized table (for some reason, we don’t use views) of commonly used data points. The result was millisecond returns and simple queries. Furthermore, instead of filtering/joining on tables with half a million records, it now filters on less than 20 thousand, properly indexed records.

The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system’s original Unix servers, according to the FAA.

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