What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I saw that Hulu had updated it's Hulu Desktop client to 0.9.7.2. There are a few nice UI changes, and there's supposedly a nice Apple Remote integration with Mac OS X 10.6.2, but the nicest thing (of course) is that House, M.D. episodes are on Hulu. 🙂

It's just my favorite TV Show.

Thankfully, they have not started charging for viewing content. If they do, I'm not sure I'll be such a fan. Face it, I'm already watching commercials, what more do they need? It's going to get worse than network TV if they do commercials and charge for the views.

This morning I saw that The Gimp 2.6.7 was available for Snow Leopard with a 64-bit build. This is interesting - very interesting. I've always liked the Gimp, but I have to admit that since I've started using Acorn, I haven't used Gimp nearly as much. It's just a tool that's not as "Mac-like" as Acorn, and everything I needed to have done, was do-able within Acorn. But with the advent of a 64-bit build, that makes the Gimp a little more attractive as a tool. I'm not sure I'll use it more, but it's more attractive.

Still... with the bug fixes, it's a good thing to get. If you need logos and titles done, this is a great tool.

Today I needed to get a few interesting things done on my web app - primarily all GUI-related, but there were a few things I needed on the back-end for some new functionality I was adding to the administration page. It was very simple on the back-end and on the GUI, and it got me to thinking - Are there really limits to the Web 2.0 paradigm now? I'm not convinced there are that many.

Oh sure, if I was writing a Photoshop-clone, using a web browser is a mistake. But for the vast majority of the apps that I've written in my life, I'm not sure that they could not now be written in AJAX and be just as effective as the original apps.

This web app I'm working with is a great example. Lots of graph/graphics that needs lots of data, but it's working just fine. Sure, I might wish the Google Visualization widgets were a little more full-featured, but that's an implementation issue - not a limitation of the technology.

I have been talking to an old friend about some problems they are having with their patient management system - a successor to one I wrote for them many years ago. That could certainly be re-written in the AJAX framework and probably have a significantly better user-experience. At the time, it was forms-based, and while that was fine for patient management, it's not anything like what we're doing now.

I'm getting to like this idea more and more. In the past, applications like Paradox and Filemaker were the tools that I used to make these applications, but now I could use a Mac Mini Server with Tomcat, H2, and AJAX, and be done with it for next to nothing. This is really pretty impressive. I just need to keep thinking about things a little differently. Interesting what assumptions you challenge, and how your answers change as time passes. Neat.

Fantastic news! This morning I noticed that Apple had released Mac OS X 10.6.2 to Software Updates and with this, I could get quite a few updates, including the Magic Mouse, the "Guest Account" kill switch, and many more. It seems to have done a pretty decent job of fixing the problems I've been having with Comcast's SMTP server, as I'm not getting the disconnects that were so bloody frustrating in the past few weeks.

Gotta love Apple!

Today started off very nicely. I fixed up a few more things on my web app and was able to get rid of the fixed calendar on two pages and replace it with a pop-up version of the same calendar. It allowed me to free up a nice 200x200 px area that I really needed to free up for some other GUI elements. It was really nice to get something done and make progress on something.

I was then able to keep moving and add a new feature to the web app and allow a few interesting aggregations on the client. It was interestingly easy - I took the data, had the mappings from the existing columns to the aggregating columns and then simply run through all the rows collecting the data into the aggregate columns. Simple. One nice little function in the code and a few GUI widgets and we're good to go.

It's been very nice to get real progress made today. No problems with legacy apps... no never-ending performance problems... it's nice to make progress.

Today I finally had time to finish my move to the new development 'server' box in the server-room. It's a little 4-core 1U box, but it's what the "standard" development server is. So be it. I needed access to more memory than my desktop would hold, and this guy is capable of holding 192GB - which is nice, but it'll start with 32GB and see how we go from there.

Since I have no root access, I have to check a few things, ask a few things to be changed, and repeat until everything is set up as I need it. Not exactly hard, but it's detail work that needs to be done right so that should I need to build another box, they'll be able to use this as a template and stamp them out quite nicely.

After I got done with the move, I made a few much needed GUI changes to my web app. The fixed calendar was just taking up too much room and it had to go. Thankfully, it's also easily made into a pop-up calendar, with an INPUT tag associated with the value. It took a little messing with divs, but I got something that looks pretty nice, and now there's a lot more room on the page for new GUI features. Not bad.

I was reading the feeds this morning and came across this little guy, Quiet Read, and thought it might be just the thing I needed to hold onto a few web sites that I might need, or want to hold onto - but not put them in my bookmarks as I wouldn't need them for that long a time.

It's a clever little idea. I might have done the GUI a little differently, but it's an early effort, and if he keeps up with the changes, I'm guessing it'll be very handy to have. We'll see how I use it in the weeks to come.

This morning I noticed that Firefox 3.5.5 was out with a list of several stability fixes - some of which were considered critical. OK, I'll upgrade, sounds reasonable.

Today has been a really hard day. I've worked all day trying to get the speed of this one process hitting a legacy Windows app up enough to make the users happy enough so that they don't ask for features cut to get the speed where they need it to be. I totally understand why they need the speed. I also know what's causing it to be slower - it's the additional features, but there has to be a balance between the two - for there are people that the new features are the more important part, and others that the speed is the more important part.

So I'm trying to get speed and features, but today was very disheartening.

For ten full hours I tried to get the speed up. I tried everything I could think of, and then thought up new ideas, and tried them. I was sure I could find the speed - but I couldn't. I ended the day with the same cycle times as I started with. Sure, they were a lot better than the production values, but that was hardware. Run the process on faster hardware and you get faster times.

Obvious, but it's all I had.

That's what we'll run with until we get even faster hardware for this guy. It's not really rocket science, but it's more than a little frustrating. But like so much in life, there's nothing I can do about it past what I've already done.

I got a tweet this morning from Adium saying that 1.4b14 is out fixing the Facebook problem that popped up yesterday. It's got a lot more in the release, and I'm constantly amazed by the work that's done on this guy, but it's still so useable. I use it every single day. Amazing app.