What's it all about, Alfie?

I've been at The Shop for a little over two years now, and I've had a Thunderbolt Display for all that time. I have to admit that I haven't really used it a lot - until recently, but now that I have - in conjunction with my 15" Retina MacBook Pro, it's really quite amazing.

So much so that I've got one at home, and I'm liable to get another. They are just so amazingly nice, and slick, and Apple is - well... Apple - and it just works and does everything you can imagine needing to be done. Amazing tools from an amazing company.

Wow... it's nice to write nice things about good tools!

I've probably said this a hundred times before, but it's one of those things that you rediscover every few months, and it just slaps you in the face, and you have to come to terms with it.

Open Office Plans are just plain bad.

There's nothing really good about them. Not one thing.

Oh... I'm wrong - Cost. That's what they are good at - they hold down the cost of housing your staff. That's it. And even then, many would argue that it really doesn't save any real costs - it just diverts them to things like retention bonuses... hiring costs... lower productivity... all these and many more are the shifted costs of this style of housing people.

Sure, it may work fine for two or three people - working on the same thing, but even three people - working on different things will need some quiet. And headphones are just an annoyance to the wearer in order to obtain a little of that isolation that is lacking in the Open Office Plan.

Penny wise... Pound foolish. So true.

This morning I saw that HipChat 3.0 for the Mac was out, and I updated. Why not? Well... the changes in this version are really worthy of the 3.0 designation. The UI is almost completely redone, and it's not a really nice facelift. Interestingly, I'm not the only one that thinks this.

The title bar is huge! What were they thinking? The whitespace around each line... and the whitespace to the left in the names column... it's just too much. In these days when people work primarily on laptops, I'm just plain shocked to see a design that so wasteful of space.

Then there's the baseline for the text.

In the larger picture, it looks like the baseline for the text of the name is lower than the baseline for the text. But when you zoom in and draw a line, it looks as though it's just an artifact of the anti-aliased text - even on a Retina display!

HipChat, as a service, is a pretty good service. It's solid, reliable, searchable, and it just works. But the designers they have had on the Mac OS X products just didn't understand that most people want to customize their experience. Why not allow CSS to stylize the display? Or at least offer a toolkit to make themes? Either of these would allow teams to personalize their view so that it'd work best for them.

Propane - the Campfire Mac OS X client - did this. I was able to completely customize the UI. Very cool. This just seems to be something trying to chase the iOS 7 style guidelines... and missing... badly. So much wasted space.

This morning I was working on a simple addition to a suite of applications that does some experimental analysis on data streams, and it was all written in clojure. Wonderful language. The problem is that it's based on the JVM, so if I want to do something small, I still have a relatively long load time due to the JVM.

JRuby had this as well, but then there was RMI Ruby that was very fast to load, and it was great for smaller tasks. JRuby is great for larger projects where you need the JIT and speed you can get with the JVM.

I've seen ideas where you spin up a JVM, and have it sitting there, and then load up a new class loader and load up the code. But that means you have a JVM just sitting there all the time. That's not the answer. And I can understand the case of GUI apps - those are building up lots of buffers, etc. that you don't have to have with a simple command-line app.

Boy... that would be as useful as a really great Garbage Collector. Sure wish it was faster to launch clojure apps.

UPDATE: I have read a few blog posts about this, and I have to say that I've changed my mind on the subject - Java's JVM loader is just fine. It's the clojure loader on the JVM that's bad. So very bad. Tests on my MacBook Pro confirm that Java itself is not bad at all - very fast, once it's compiled. But clojure is still slow. Plenty of reasons for the slowness, but no clear answers.

Today I have spent most of the day tracking down some data in a massive Teradata database, and trying to relate it back to the data I needed so I could make the event stream cover this odd data as well as it covers the normal stuff. While I can understand the need for this, it's hard work because the field I'm getting in the incoming message is permalink, and it's an integer, and now I have to find what field this is in literally hundreds of tables in a massive, multi-TB Teradata install.

I was pretty sure that I had a good idea where to start looking, but I wasn't exactly sure, and true enough, I wasn't right on the money, but I was close. I then had hours ahead of me to get the right answer, and then build the SQL query that would return the rows I needed in a reasonable time-frame to build up the cache of data in redis that I was going to need.

Suffice it to say that it's not a lot of fun when you can't get folks to standardize on indexes or identifying codes in a system as large as this. But hey... it's done.

I was looking at the loading on one of my topologies today, and noticing that it wasn't catching up to a backlog from a restart as fast as I'd hoped. Since I had the capacity, it made sense to expand the topology and give it more workers, and more JSON decoder bolts, and more data filtering bolts. So I doubled the workers to 20, added many more bolts, and restarted it.

And the result was that it was slower. The capacity numbers went way up, and the backlog continued. This made no sense, but then it did. There's a balance to all things in a topology-based system like Storm. You can't increase one thing and expect it not to impact the system in other places.

So I took the changes out, and the speed returned. You can't tweak topologies without getting the performance data, and you can't measure it without upsetting the running of the topology. It's not an easy system to use, but it can be made to be quite useful. You just have to be careful.

I like Google Chrome. I use it everyday for all kinds of uses. But every now and then, they make a really silly change, and I find that it's just amazingly annoying, but there's little I can really do about it. A few versions ago, they added a drop-down in the tab bar for the logged-in username. This used to be a little image in the location bar, but they moved that out, and into the tab bar.

I know it's me - and it seems to me that the simple change would be to look and see how many profiles are defined for this guy, and if it's less than two, then don't show a thing - like it used to be.

I must be in such a minority that it's never thought necessary to fix. But it's ugly.

For the last 18 months, I've done my best to keep going, but today I think I need to really put back in the writing/posting that was a significant part of each day for many years. I've tried to do this many times, and it's been largely unsuccessful, but maybe now is the time to really put more effort into it.

So I'm starting with the new month... the new season... and I'm going to try writing like I used to.