What's it all about, Alfie?

Far be it from me to say Google shouldn't try new things. I wish they'd try not messing with Verizon on the net neutrality, or maybe just not being so overt about the complete and total lack of privacy from it's upper management, but today they released, in a very haphazard way, Google Instant, and I hate it.

OK, in my book there were a few reasons that people switched from Yahoo! to Google in the early days - one was certainly the search results, but in the beginning they weren't that much better - it still had a lot to do with the terms you asked for, and the best "search engines" were browsers that would hit a dozen search engines for you and bring it all together.

The other big driver - and certainly this was a biggie for me, was the simplicity and speed of the Google homepage. You typed into a box, hit enter, and got answers. You didn't have to wait for Yahoo!'s "portal" to load - measured in seconds, and you didn't have the distractions of the entire page. Simplicity was the rule of the day, and it was wonderful.

This morning Google has been rolling out, in fits and starts, their new offering - Google Instant. Now when you type, it immediately jumps to the answers and updates them as you type. While this may seem like a real time saver, to me it's at least a distraction, and at most, a horrible time waster.

If I need to type in a series of key words, or maybe my search criteria is more than 15 characters. The fact that it starts "searching" for me after four or five is a waste until I get to 15. I'm not done, I'm not liable to stop, and I wanted to get the search string in there. They already do "predictive searching" on the search string, which is nice to a point, because if there's a hit there, I can save myself the time, but there's no way showing me the entire search results is a time-saver. Not a chance.

I was worried that it was ON, and there was nothing I could do about it. But after a few hours, it became clear that it's something that I could turn off. I did so immediately and without a single reservation.

Guys... first, make your rollouts a little smoother - No, make that a lot smoother. There's no need for this to take an entire morning and have so many people wondering what's going on with no way of stopping it.

Next, make sure it's clear how to turn the crud off. You should have learned from Wave, and the full graphic homepage, but I guess that wasn't enough. Here... take the lesson... make it obvious how to disable the new crap. Lots of folks just want what you're good at.

I'm still shaking my head...

This morning I spent the entire morning messing with getting a new machine at The Shop working for me. I'd spent a little bit of last Friday making sure all the software I needed on it was installed, but that didn't prepare me for what I was to experience first hand with Windows 7.

Normally, I'm a live and let live kind of guy for work machines. It's what the company wanted to get, it's what tools the company has supplied, and so I make due with it because that's really the only possible outcome. If I dislike it that much, then it's my choice to leave and look for a place that provides the tools I like. I've turned down a lot of positions in the last decade for Windows development jobs - I just don't want to do it.

So today when I got the new machine - and by 'new' I mean 'different' with Windows 7 installed, I set about making it workable with the software and set-up I needed. A few things I couldn't have done remotely - like the virtual windows and such, but no matter, I had penciled in the morning for just such activities.

So I got the box, and while I'm not a great fan of the look and feel, I can see it's positives, and understand why they did it. But on the hardware that was provided, it was quite literally, a joke.

I am required to use NX Machine to get to my linux servers, and when I did that, I was stunned to see an 80-line Vim session take 2 seconds to redraw. The full screen was on the order of 10 sec. It was amazing... and totally unusable.

I tried all the things I could find on their web site - nothing to address the horrible slowness of the redrawing. Then someone pointed out a setting to skip DirectDraw on the refreshing. It seems it's the "budget" video card and Windows 7 that are at odds here. Had my machine had an accelerated video card, I'd have been fine. But with the hardware I had, I was forced to change the refresh method.

Thankfully, that worked. A little later the head of desktop support stopped by to ask how it was going. I had shared my problems with him earlier, and I was glad to see he was following up. We talked, and he pointed out that he turns off all the "new" Windows 7 features to get his box working quickly again.

Amazing... I go back to a Windows NT look-n-feel to get Windows 7 working OK. I'd have been better off sticking with XP! Really. The cost, and the time, and the now degraded UI... it's a joke. An honest to goodness joke. I don't expect the company to spring for all new hardware because of Windows 7, but they should have had a far more graceful degradation of performance so I could look like XP, and have the Windows 7 engine, as opposed to dropping all the way to NT.

But hey... I'm sure there's tons of people saying "Buy a $100 video card!", and they'd be right. For me. But for the hundreds of other machines? Now we're talking real money. Not so easy to say "Buy $30,000 in video cards so Windows 7 is nice!" But that's really what Microsoft is expecting you to do - invest in more hardware to get the user experience they ship out of the box.

This afternoon I got a tweet that the great guys at Panic had released Unison 2.1 with a nice assortment of fixes - one of which was the little visual bug I noticed regarding the listing of the unread count at the bottom of the window. It's a nice app, and I wish I could spend more time reading the news, but it's nice to know that it's there when I have the time.

This morning I saw that WordPress 3.0.1 was released, and SimpleScripts at HostMonster was telling me that it was time to upgrade. The upgrade took all of 5 min for all my journals, and when I was done, I was once again, safe for the time being. WordPress gets hacked a lot, and I try to stay up to date with it just because of that fact.

Today has been a long and tiring day, but I think finally I have the answers I've been looking for. Specifically, I've been trying to complete my next source/sink pair for the ticker plant that I'm working on, and this pair is meant to use 29West. Their LBM (Latency Buster Messaging) product, specifically. In the past, I've used 29West in what I consider a fairly "standard" configuration - there's a resolver for a large series of services - but separated out for production, UAT, development and possibly even multiple sites. But the point is to make these resolvers handle as much as possible so they actually do the job their name implies: resolve.

Then you have a series of topics like all messaging products, and you start sending and listening for packets on those topics. It's not the most elegant messaging system I've ever used - I think it doesn't encapsulate enough for the user, but that's a corporate design decision, and while I don't agree with theirs, it is theirs to make.

When I started looking at the code from the existing system using 29West, I noticed that it was doing a lot of very specific multicast address stuff, and different resolvers, and I got the feeling that they weren't using it like this at all. In fact, I got the distinct impression that they were using it to bridge multiple multicast networks together.

When we got together and I asked a few questions I realized that they were using it as basically nothing more than a reliable multicast system. The topics were really overly simplistic, but they had independent 29West networks for each of the different message types, and then each of the different first letters in the symbol names. It was really just a reliable multicast library.

When I realized this, I knew the real solution was to get rid of 29West and go towards a more simplistic, yet solid, reliable multicast library. I just had to find it.

Since I've upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, I've been trying to see if it's acting better, the same, or worse than before. I have to say that the Mail app and syncing to GMail with Exchange did not work well at all yesterday. Messages weren't getting to my upgraded phone, and for several hours I wondered if it was going to be broken until we got iOS 4.0.1. It was bad.

Then the camera app wasn't working really well last night, and I was convinced that this wasn't all that great an update for the 3GS hardware. But I'm coming around this morning. I power-cycled the phone, and things are a little better. The camera is better, and email is OK. But there's a wrinkle - the upgrade allowed Google to set the "auto-lock" on my phone to: "1 Minute".

Not good. I just needed to go into Settings, then General, then change it, but by default, it's going to auto-lock your phone. It's simple to fix, but if you didn't know, it could really fluster you. Glad I read about this. I'll know what to do when upgrading Liza's phone.

I noticed this morning that because of Safari 5.0, the CodingMonkeys have had to update SubEthaEdit 3.5.3 and it's available now. The list of fixes is really very targeted to the Safari fixes, but they seemed to have worked on a few other things as well.

If it weren't for the "jump scrolling" of SubEthaEdit, I'd probably use it as my number two editor behind BBEdit on the Mac. It's good, there's a lot I like about it, but that jumping is just a little too harsh for my mind when scrolling, and so I stick with MacVim.

Still... I'll support the guys with new upgrades because I believe they may make it smoother in the future, and deserve a chance.

Well... Panic beat the weekend rush to deliver an update to the problems with importing Transmit 4 Favorites with Coda 1.6.12. It's not something I've done a lot with, but I have moved to Transmit 4 more, and put in all my favorites there, so it's really nice to see that they will be easily imported when the time comes.

Nice. Nothing earth-shaking, but it's nice.

Well, you can't tell from looking at it, but the update for Transmit 4.0.5 has a boat load of new things. It's amazing to look at the list - really. There's more support for OS/400 - like that's a major issue for Mac users... but I guess it's just enough for them to want to make sure it makes it in.

Very impressive. Love this product.

It's still the first week of my new job at The Shop, and when my sole co-worker left me alone two jobs ago, I started to maintain an RTF file on my Mac of all the little things I might need to pass on to the next guy. It started with what he gave me, and I really expanded it. What I didn't realize until long afterwards, was that I should have been using VoodooPad, Acorn and FlySketch to build up this document.

Thankfully, I do learn from my mistakes, and at my last job I started with VoodooPad and it turned out wonderfully. Well, I'm only a day and a half into this new job, and already I have a lot of important information in the VoodooPad document for the new job. It's simply amazing how easy VoodooPad makes this. It's like TextEdit with linking and embedding and then to augment it with Acorn for graphics and images... well... it's just amazing.

The last time I did a lot of multi-media writing is the papers I wrote as an Asst. Professor at Auburn, and even that was on a Mac - just different tools. With the tools available to me now, it's amazing to think how wild and impressive my papers could have been. Sure, they really don't publish based on the "cool stuff", but documentation is writing for an ignorant user (you, in the future) and as such, the nicer and easier you make it to read the happier your user will be.

It's just about the most perfect development/documentation generation system I've ever used. It just takes my breath away. I have to giggle every now and then.