This morning, Unison 2.0.5 was released, and I know it's in good shape because once again, I was a beta tester for this release. It's not a really hard thing to do, but it does mean testing the code and making sure it's doing what they say, as well as what I need. It's really getting to be an incredible application. I'm very glad they decided to do ahead with the new codebase/design.
I got a tweet today that Acorn 2.2.2 was out with a nice list of fixes and features. It's my favorite image editor for the Mac primarily because I don't have to re-learn anything when I start to use it. GIMP is far too complex, and Photoshop is too, but I don't even try to get that one because it's so expensive for the little work I do.
Anyway, a great tool that works like a champ.
While I'm not a fan of Flash, I do have to use it in my work with the Google Visualization Widgets, specifically the AnnotatedTimeLine, so it makes sense to stay as up to date as possible. I've been reading a lot about the massive improvements in the 10.1 performance on Mac OS X, so when I heard that Flash 10.1.51.95 was out, I decided to get it.
We'll see if this makes a lot of difference, and until Apple makes Flash really well, I'll need to stick with the Adobe player and ClickToFlash to limit the pain, and then do the few things I really need. It's not ideal, but it's the best I have at the moment.
This morning I was running and watching a little TV when I saw a Comcast advertisement for their new high-speed service. It seems they are planning on moving to 100Mbps speed in the near future. Now I'm not sure if this would be a great deal for us... we had the Extreme 50 for a few weeks and weren't really thrilled with the speed. It seemed to Liza that it was even slower than the Ultra which is 30Mbps/7Mbps.
I'm not sure if it was the Comcast infrastructure or Liza just not wanting to pay the extra $50/mo (now it's only a difference of $37/mo). But we went back to the Ultra, and she's happy with that.
But I have to say, if I could really get 100Mbps to the house, that would be very sweet.
Today I've spent a lot of the day trying to get the restart time of my web app down to a reasonable time. The problem is that I need to load upwards of two million rows from a back-end MS SQL Server back-end database into an H2 in-memory database on restart using the fastest JDBC driver for MS SQL Server I've heard of - jTDS. The reason for this is access speed of the web app. There's just so much data that needs to be available to the servlets that if I were to get it from the database, I'd have an access time that's 10x what I have now.
So I need to load a lot of rows from the back-end database. In the past, I had a restart time that was about a minute. Not horrible. Today I realized that I'm looking at something more like seven minutes. That's too long.
So I pulled in the network guys to see if they could find anything in the wiring in the server room, or settings on the box, because there were machines where the SELECT statements were executed significantly faster than my box. The question was Why?
To their credit, the network guys did an impressive job of digging into the problem. Really amazing analysis of the problem. Unfortunately, in the end, they didn't have anything that was going to significantly change the performance of the query processing for me. But I wasn't too surprised, either. There had to be things I could do to clean things up, and I had always suspected it was going to be up to me in the end.
Adobe recently admitted to a nasty zero-day exploit in their Flash player that's already making the rounds of the nasty web sites. This, combined with my current need for Flash in my work, means that when Adobe announced a Beta of Flash player 10.1, I got it. No reason to be careless about attacks, and might as well get the latest and greatest Flash.
I'm still up in the air about Flash. In general, I don't like it on the web. Everyone uses it far far too much for animations and ads. It's annoying. Also, I've developed a little in it. Not the best platform I've seen, but not the worst. Yet still... the Google Visualization widgets are in Flash, and I really like them. So it's really Google that's saving my belief in Flash.
I have wondered about this for a little bit... it started when messages from my InBox on my iPhone disappeared, but they were in my GMail web client. Very odd. I filed a few away, and they didn't show up on my iPhone. Odd. So I decided to do a little Googling... turns out, there's a problem with GMail Push.
This thread on the Google Mobile site explains that it's a bug in their system and they are working on it. Unfortunately, I want the Push email, and I'd like to use GMail as it seems to be the only really reliable push email, but now it seems that I can only see an email for 28 days. That's not so great.
The thread was started in Sept 2009, so maybe they'll get around to fixing it. On the downside, it looks like the primary Google employee that was answering questions on this is now not responding to questions. That's not a good sight at all.
Not a good place to be...
UPDATE: Later today, on the way home on the train, I noticed that I was getting the old emails! Maybe the messing with the date mattered, or maybe Google fixed it yesterday. I'll have to keep an eye on it to see if it stays fixed.
Well, today I got a tweet from OmniGraphSketcher saying that 1.1 Final was out and gave a reference to the notice on the Omni web site.
Looks good.
I usually don't spend time writing about the funny things I read on the net - face it, there's just too much of it to really write about, but this morning there are a few things from Daring Fireball that are just too funny to not pass on.
The first is from Fake Steve on a conversation he had with the CEO of AT&T. In it he says of the talk about the coming soon data limiting plans from AT&T:
He launches into a mumbling spiel about how Ralph de la Vega didn’t really say what all the papers are saying he said, and he was misquoted, and it was taken out of context, but I’m like, Bitch, please, guys at our level don’t get taken out of context, we write the shit out in advance and we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it and every goddamn word has been vetted and gone over by a team of flacks. So please don’t sit there like a zoo monkey throwing your own feces at me through the bars of your cage, bokay?
I laughed out loud on that one. It goes to say:
I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.
I hope that eventually, AT&T will come to their senses and make a decent network for the load. If it takes them losing a ton of customers to balance out the demand, or regulation, or something... I'm hopeful that things will turn around for AT&T.
The next funny was about the fake Walt Mossberg on the CrunchPad-cum-JoJo. If even half of what the sock puppet said was true, then it's an interesting turn of events. I'm not one to think it's OK for folks to go back on their words, but I'm a bigger believer in karma, and you reap what you sew.
These both made me laugh a good deal. Just what I needed this morning.