Insomnia

I was reading the latest post on Fred's blog. It hit home for me as well. My personal problem is not that I have too many feeds to read (I prune my list regularly) but that I tend to skip anything that has any substance.

And it is only going to get worse. Apparently, blogging is dead, (many people have claimed that on blogs recently... completely missing the irony). Blog posts are too long for today's spastic readers. It's Twitter nation now. If it is more than 150 characters, you just lost most of your audience. "Smart" people don't blog anymore, they twit.

This translates in our everyday life and in our work habits too. Coincidently, I jut got an email from Fred this evening with a document to review. I read the first paragraph and I closed it. Preferring to respond to the stimuli of my Twitterific icon. This is a really bad habit.

Labels: tech, work

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Last week, Stack Overflow opened to the public. I gave it a look. It is a simple system; people ask questions, people answer the questions. There is a system for upmodding and downmodding the questions and answers. Like many nascent crowdsourced web sites, the content is pretty good so far. Time will tell if the self-ruling system will continue to work or if the content will start to slowly drift towards mediocrity.

I am a lurker in most of the similar sites that I read. For this one however, I started to contribute right away. Why was that? After thinking about this for a little while now I think I have a theory: StackOverflow treats its participants like players in a role playing game.

Like many of the other community-based systems, there is a score that rewards user that create good content. Other sites call it karma, this one calls it reputation. The main difference is that this site gives you a compelling incentive to hoard the reputation points. You have goals, quests of sorts. You need to have gathered 15 points to be able to upmod someone else's content. You need 50 to be able to leave comments. There's a whole menu of things that you can do on the site but you need to gather some reputation to be able to do them.

In addition, the system will reward you with a badge for accomplishing specific tasks. You get the teacher badge for your first answer that gets modded up. You get another badge for completing all fields in your profile.

For me, this makes it very compelling to go there and participate. So, I'll stop writing right now and go see if I can't answer some questions. I really would like to get my good answer badge.

Labels: fun, tech

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Reposting this link from the Voltage Blog.

HP Goes Green and It’s More Than Just Marketing BS | Voltage Blog

I'm not usually using a "green" label as a way to distinguish products. Usually... it is just marketing/PR. In this case, it seems like a genuinely original idea.

Proud to call HP one of my customers.

Labels: tech, work

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I was made aware today of a new RSS utility called AideRSS. It takes the content of a blog, analyzes it and collates a whole whack of statistics related to the relevance of the content, participation of readers, other people that link to it (diggers, reddit, del.icio.us etc...) and gives each post a ranking. That it itself is cool.

But then, it republishes the RSS feed for the blog. But the twist is that it republishes it in multiple flavors, filtered by their PostRank score. So if you follow a lot of blogs, you can subscribe to the "just the hits" RSS feed and you will only be made aware of posts from that blog that generated a lot of "excitement".

Here's what my blog looks like when viewed through the AideRSS tool. It determines that about 50% of my posts are "great". I don't know if that is good or bad.

Insomnia - AideRSS

Labels: tech

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I have been a Foldershare user for a long time. I use it to backup data offsite between my home computer and my office computer. I also use it to share some web work that I do for a local NPO. I was exited to see that Microsoft bought them and integrated this in their Windows Live offering... over 2 years ago.

But since then, nothing. No updates to the software, no apparent updates to the web application and there were a few scary outages recently.

And then surprise! Sometimes in the course of the past few days, the entire site was redone to adorn the look and feel of the Windows Live applications and there is a new satellite application that also changes the look and feel.

Hopefully, this means that the service is alive and well and will receive the support it deserves from Microsoft.

Labels: tech

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Sony is offering a service called Fresh Start^TM that lets you purchase one of their VAIO laptops with none of the preinstalled crapware that usually comes with a laptop. That is cool. What everyone is bitching about (and why I say it is clumsy) is that they charge you 50$ for the privilege. (see here)

What is interesting though is that in one way, this is really honest of them. Essentially, they are clearly stating that all the companies that put trialware and special offers on new PC sponsor your purchase for approximately 50$.

I have long said that I would pay extra for a new PC that comes clean from the factory. I can clean a PC myself but I don't have the time. Plus these things never really go away when you uninstall them. They leave dust-bunnies everywhere. Especially the free anti-virus software you get with new PCs. Those things are particularly difficult to fully get rid of.

What PC buyers have to realize is that all these free things are never really free. They rob you of your disk space, your CPU power, and your screen real-estate. Three things that you pay for when you buy your PC.

My wife's HP desktop machine (the one with Vista that I talked about before) came with a lot of pre-installed stuff that just loaded on startup. Making the Vista boot process (which is already painful) nearly unbearable. Plus it added a toolbar to the desktop (in addition to the Vista widget thing) robbing her of precious pixels at the top of the screen and a plethora of icons in the tray that essentially rendered the tray unusable because Windows has to arbitrarily shrink the whole thing to get back some room for the task bar.

Worst of all was the HP care center that must have had a busy loop in there somewhere because the CPU on her machine would always be stuck at 50% (two cores) when it was idle. Finding the culprit and getting rid of all that took me the better part of a Saturday morning and gave her back a machine she could use. Definitely would have preferred to pay the 50$ to get a clean machine.

Labels: tech

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For one of our projects, the customer insisted we use Maven as our build system. At first, I thought that this was a good idea. I had read about this tool but I had never used it in a real project.

The system is easy to install and is actually pretty good at building the software. There are plugins to tie-in with pretty much all the development tools in our toolbox.

As the project progresses, I have a constant doubt in my head about Maven. About the effect it has on the project and our ability to create a stable cutoff of the code for our customer when it is time to deliver.

Then I read this post in Charles Miller's blog. That pretty much gave me the words to express my concerns.

Labels: tech, work

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Interesting debate over at Gizmodo regarding the prank they pulled at CES this year. Seth Godin definitely thinks it is a crime.

I don't really like TVs in public places and if I didn't carry way too much stuff in my pockets already, I'd probably carry a TV-B-Gone with me when I go out. When I saw the video, I thought it was pretty funny. Pranks are often mean... this one is no exception.

However, the debate that it generated became more interesting to me than the prank itself. If you read some of the discussion on Gizmodo, you see a pattern emerge quickly: People who think that the pranksters are responsible and people that think that the exhibitors were careless. That they should have just "put some black tape" on the IR port.

This is interesting because it is a debate that I have heard often about computer security: Who's responsible for the protection of an asset? Better locks or stronger laws?

What is even more interesting is that it illustrates the difference between computer programmers (homo logicus) and the rest of the human race. Programmers like to have to plan for all edge cases. They think that anyone that doesn't is careless or lazy. And that it is their own damn fault if someone pulls a prank like this on them. If you go and read the discussion on the Gizmodo site now, you will see that distinction.

Labels: fun, tech

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If I lived 10 kilometers south of where I currently live, Rogers would likely be my ISP. That news there would have pissed me off severely.

Canadian ISP tests injecting content into web pages

Labels: tech

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This is one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" idea and a "Why doesn't Windows already do that?" idea at the same time.

When you look at a list of pictures in Windows explorer. Why is dog10.jpg shown before dog2.jpg. This is the kind of ordering that only makes sense to programmers. This is why your digital camera adds all those extra zeros when you import files and your dog pictures are called dog0001.jpg.

David Koelle proposes an alternative ordering algorithm that makes more sense to non-programmers.

DaveKoelle.com | The Alphanum Algorithm

Update: Jeff Atwood points out that Vista's explorer uses a more natural sort order. I double checked on my XP machine at work and it still does the "ASCII sort". I was smoking crack. The explorer in Windows XP does it right.

Labels: tech

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I have been using a wireless keyboard at work for while now. I picked it because I liked the shape of the keyboard, not because it was wireless. It turns out that I am sending my password over the air every morning... you just need a good enough, well placed antenna and some software to gain access to all my online identities.

Wireless keyboards easily cracked - Hack a Day

Labels: tech

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The University of Washington has the entire content of their practical aspects of modern cryptography online. Including full video lectures, slides and assignments.

Short of going back to school and paying tuition. This is pretty cool.

CSE P 590TU: Practical Aspects of Modern Cryptography, Winter 2006

Labels: tech

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I got the robosupport message from Google telling me that my problem is important to them yadda, yadda, yadda...

I am still locked-out after 18 hours so I guess that I am in for the full 24hour waiting period. I went to my ISP and changed the password on my POP account so GMail will stop downloading and removing my emails from there.

I still haven't lost hope but I really wish they would tell me the specific cause for the lock down. So I could avoid doing what I did that warranted the lockout.

Labels: gmail, tech

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Well, my Gmail experiment is not going too well. After using GMail as my main mail access for only 4 hours, I got locked-out of my account again. The first time, I was trying to import thousands of emails from my Outlook PST. I got locked-out for 15 minutes. This time, I was just moving a few emails around from folder to folder. And it has been 5 hours now.

I don't think that the guys at Google that implemented IMAP support talked to the guys that implemented the abuse protection policy.

GMail is under the impression that I am trying to do something wrong. I have no leverage on them. I just have to wait and hope that my account is not locked for the maximum 24 hours.

If this keeps on happening, I am going to have to revert back to my old setup.

Labels: gmail, tech

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Ok, so I finally did it. I migrated my email to GMail. (Thanks to Mathieu for his words of wisdom)

Before GMail, I had the following setup:

• Computer at work running Outlook (always on, has spambayes on it and all my rules for dealing with mailing lists and whatnot)
• Windows Mobile 6 device that I use for voice and data
• Computer at home without an email client. I used the web access of our ISP to access email.
  

To be able to access my Inbox from all 3 locations, I setup my Outlook at work to leave mails on the server for 7 days. This meant that I could get access to current mails from anywhere. However, none of my spam filters or email rules applied to the emails on the server. I ended-up sorting and generally dealing with the same emails multiple times. Not to mention the fact that the spam remained on the POP server for me to download with my mobile device.

So my plan was to move everything to Gmail and use the IMAP functionality to keep everything in sync. The process was relatively painless but there are a few things to watch for. So, if you are interested, here's how it went for me:

1. Changed my Outlook settings to remove the emails from the POP server. I didn't want to deal with those emails that I had already dealt with.
2. Once the POP server is clear, I deleted the POP account from Outlook. Essentially stopped the delivery of messages to my inbox.
   
3. I created the IMap account for Google. This created a new "store" in Outlook with [GMail], Inbox, Junk E-Mail and Sent Items folder. (Howto)
4. I move emails from my old inbox into the new inbox (drag and drop). Once that was done, I went to gmail to validate that the emails had been transfered properly.
   
5. I then setup GMail to read new email from my POP server (Settings/Accounts) tab
6. I also setup GMail to use my business address as my default "send mail as" address.
7. I sent myself some test email and voila.
   

I was functional again. With my inbox synchronized on the gmail server. I setup my windows mobile device to access gmail.

To complete my setup, I had to do the following steps:

1. Change my spambayes settings to read incoming emails from the new inbox and deliver suspected spam in the gmail spam folder (under [Gmail]/Spam)
2. Use the gmail web interface to recreate my mailing list rules.
3. Transfer my >1.5 Gigs of email in my PST files to the gmail server (drag and drop)

So now, I am fully functional, I have search capabilities through the gmail interface and I have a synchronized mailbox. There are a few things to watch for is you decide to follow these steps and migrate:

1. When outlook deletes an email through the IMAP interface, it doesn't go in the [Gmail]/Trash folder. It just gets unlabeled and lands in the [Gmail]/All Mail folder. For now, I am not that worried, I still have 2.5G of free space on gmail.
   Note: If you use Thunderbird, you can set it up to use the [Gmail]/Trash folder as its trash folder and it works perfectly.
   
2. If you have gigabytes of legacy emails to transfer, it is possible that google will suspend your account momentarily. They have a feature that detects this as a suspicious activity. My account was suspended for approximately 10 minutes when I tried to transfer my Sent Items folder with >9000 emails in it. When it came back, I resumed the transfer in batches of 1000 emails.
3. Oh and outlook is completely unresponsive when you transfer emails so, do this when you don't need access to your email (like at night)
4. You lose some of the Outlook functionality (like search folders). However, you gain the awesome search power of Google through the GMail interface.
   Plus, the "label" system in GMail lets you achieve a similar kind of functionality. Essentially, the same email can be in two folders at once. Because folders are labels. GMail provides the "starred" label to track items that you flag in outlook. They will reside in both their "container" folder (like the Inbox) and the starred folder. This is a lot like a search folder.
5. If you setup your outlook account to send emails through the GMail SMTP server, your will notice that GMail adds a copy of sent emails automatically in the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder. Outlook will also make a copy in the Sent Items folder of your personal folder PST. You can disable that in Outlook if you don't want 2 copies.
   

Labels: gmail, tech, work

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When Google announced that they were adding IMAP support to GMail, I immediately thought that this was the end of my 3-locations-for-one-POP3-email-account-problem. I immediately signed-in for a GMail account and waited for the IMAP option to be enabled.

You see, my plan was to have GMail read my POP3 email account (company email) and that I would use IMAP from my 3 machines (Thunderbird at home, Outlook at work and Mobile Outlook on my smartphone). It was going to be blissful, email unification heaven.

Today, the IMAP option was enabled on my GMail account. It works (just tried it). And now, I am second guessing myself. Can I trust Google with my company's private email? Not from a reliability standpoint (can't be much worst than our ISP), but from a privacy standpoint?

Anyone out there with a good answer?

Labels: tech, work

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I am a pretty good software guy but I don't think I ever felt right about the whole rockstar label. I didn't feel that I was better than a rockstar but just different. Ron Evans gets it right by coining this new term: "Jazz programmer". A little cheesy but I like it.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. You probably need both in your team. I would like to take this concept further and check if my team is a rock-band or a Jazz ensemble.

Labels: tech

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Everyone has seen those funky videos of the multi-touch screen. Well it seems that Microsoft has decided to productize this. They aim it at the restaurant/hotel and shopping market.

Of course, this will make it into our homes soon enough. I can't wait for boardgames supported by this technology. All the advantages of a computer game with all the social interaction of a boardgame.

Microsoft Surface

Labels: tech

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I have been taking digital photos for a while and I rarely print them. This weekend I gave in and bought myself a digital picture frame (Smartparts SPDPF84M).

It has a nice wooden frame and an crisp 8.4 inch LCD screen. It has 128M of internal memory and can also handle a wide selection of memory cards.

Unfortunately, I was never able to make it connect to my computer using the USB cable (computer running Windows XP) . So I had to transfer all my pictures using a CompactFlash card. Also, the company supplies a software to automatically scale and prepare the pictures for the frame's 800x600 screen. That was also a disaster. It is a horrible little piece of software that just didn't work and tried to reinvent every principle of UI design ever invented. I finally decided to use the GIMP to resample and fix my images before I transfered them to the device.

Overall I am happy now that it works. It is proudly displayed in my living room on the end table and I can finally show my friends my pictures without booting my computer. Two thumbs up for the hardware, two thumbs down for the software.

Labels: fun, tech

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I already talked about my wife's Vista issues this but it is getting ridiculous.

She is self employed and each month she produces an invoice to the customer to eventually get paid. This is a simple procedure that involved the following steps:

1. Copy last month's invoice (word document) and rename the document
2. Open the new invoice and change the numbers/dates
3. Print the document
4. Save the document

Well. Using Vista... what used to take 10 minutes now takes almost an hour. Copying a file now in Windows is so difficult that it takes over 10 minutes just to copy the file. The file is 45Kb the simple Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to copy the file now requires Vista to spend minutes (an I am not exaggerating, this is a known bug) calculating how long it will take.

After this happens, you open the document in Word and edit it. That is still quick thank heavens. Once that is over, printing went ok as well.

Saving on the other hand was not that good. After pushing "save", Word complained that there was not enough space on the hard disk to save the file. The file is 45Kb and there is over 100G of space free on the hard disk. After much searching for a solution, we abandoned and closed the damned thing without saving.

Oh! and after that, the computer didn't shut down. (And I did wait for 20 minutes for the machine to shut down) I had to force a power down. I miss XP.

Labels: tech, Vista

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3 weeks ago, my wife bought a new computer. Of course it came with Vista preinstalled.

This seemingly innocuous event triggered 3 weeks of pain and costly upgrades.

First, many of the software packages that she uses just wouldn't work properly in Vista unless the latest version was purchased.

Second, her PDA (a Compaq Ipaq) was "too old" to work with the Windows Mobile Device Center. So she had to upgrade to one of the smartphone gizmos.

And yesterday, it was the last straw, after spending all the time to move the stuff from her old computer to her new, cleaning up the old computer and setting it up at her mother's place, she decided to buy her mother and herself a webcam to be able to video conference. The Vista driver from Logitech has a problem that disables the computer's audio after installation. So now, she has a working webcam but no more audio. Uninstalling the driver doesn't fix that. The current fix to get the audio back is to do a factory reset of the PC. (link)

Makes me wish I could put all that stuff back in the box and get the same HP computer with Windows XP from the store. But it's a little too late for that now. And they won't sell me a computer with XP installed anymore.

Labels: tech, Vista

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Where I work, we are interviewing and hiring a lot of engineers recently.

We are always looking for new help and techniques in interviewing. Scott Hanselman has an issue about that in his podcast.


HanselMinutes - Hiring and Interviewing Engineers

Labels: tech, work

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Three Laws of Software Development: "Everytime you break one of these laws, Bill Gates kills a puppy"

Labels: fun, tech

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Today, I just surfaced from a rather important feature release in our largest projects. It was a really cool feature and went relatively smoothly. In the end, everyone pitched-in for the testing and it made me think about two tools that people have recommended to me but that I haven't had the time to test.

STAF (Software Testing Automation Framework)

And

QATraq (test case management software)

Labels: tech, work

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Let me add my voice to the chorus of people that are liking the new Firefox 2.0. After only a couple of days of usage. I really like it. Install was flawless, it updated everything (bookmarks, add ons and cached data). It even took care of my multiple profiles.

For me, the main reasons to switch are:

• Spell checker
• Built-in integration with bloglines
• Speed (startup and browsing are noticeably faster)

Go here to download.

Labels: tech

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Last week, I went to an OSEF event. The topic of the event was about testing automation. It was really cool because it was not about tools or techniques but mainly about problems implementing a testing automation process in your software organization.

The panel was varied and included people from organizations large (IBM, Alcatel, FileMaker) and small (MXI, Solacom). Everyone had interesting inputs about automated testing. But everyone seemed to agree that they were an essential part of their quality strategy.

In most cases, automated tests ran the full gamut from top down UI testing all the way to function-by-function unit testing. One of the guys on the panel actually described that their company try to implement Test Driven Development.

Since most of my customers don't agree that this is a good way to spend their money; I have never had the opportunity to try TDD. Like this guy, I am not sure that all tests written this way are useful from a quality perspective. But like this guy, I feel that unit tests are an excellent way to convey low-level design ideas. Even when we don't automate unit tests, unit test cases are part of our patch submission process. We have found that they are a great way to describe in a few words, the general idea of the patch and some of the edge cases to test.

That being said, my personal experience taught me that unit tests could save my behind. It is a good feeling to run a test suite after some bug fixing to discover that the bugfix actually introduced a new problem that causes some of the unit tests to fail.

Labels: tech

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After many years of reusing my handful of passwords. I had finally followed Bruce Schneier's advice and I started writing down all my passwords. For this purpose, I am using Password Safe. A simple little utility that encrypts my password database.

And then... this article comes up and makes things complicated again. Given that Password Safe uses strong cryptography. My password list is practically impossible to obtain by anyone else but me.

So, if I get hit by the proverbial bus no one will be able to access my stuff. Not even my wife. So I'm back to square one. I guess I'll go print that database now.

Labels: tech

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Zimbra - Blog - IE 7 vs IE 6 - The Javascript implementation in IE 7 got a good makeover. According to they tests they performed, the browser is twice as fast as version 6.

Also, it seems they solved many of the DOM-related memory leaks that plagued previous implementations of the browser. That is great news for application developers.

(Via Ajaxian)

Labels: tech

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This document from Microsoft is a pretty good summary of secure application writing practices. It also is loaded with security checklists (if you're the checklist type of person).

This is not a "how-to" for application security but it serves its purpose well as an "awareness enhancing" tool.

(via Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day)

Labels: tech, work

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Building code to last - We’re more expensive and take longer because we do stuff you don’t care about.

Sometimes, I wish this was our slogan too. No one likes to create crappy products. It is much more satisfying to create this beautiful work of "art", perfectly modifiable piece of code that is pretty much self-maintaining. (Ok I'm exagerating a bit)

But what I find even more important is not to build "perfect code". It is to create something that will ultimately help my customer. And if skipping a few steps allows me to deliver a product that my customer can afford, and that my customer can use before the window of opportunity closes... well that's what I'll do.

Labels: tech

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Aptana: The Web IDE - A plugin for Eclipse that helps with the syntax of Javascript, CSS and HTML. Installed-it, so far, so good. Biggest feature for me: Intellitype for Javascript, that's sweet.

Labels: tech

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Annotating Your Code with Simple Tests -- Now, that is a great idea. The example that is given here is in C#. But this could be really easy to do in Java/JUnit with annotations.

Of course, this doesn't substitute for more complex test cases but it is a lot like automatically generated documentation. If you keep it close to the code, you have a better chance that it will be kept updates.

Labels: tech

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After my episode with IE memory leaks last week. I was trying to find a way to thank the guys that helped me. I asked Matt (our resident marketing guy) if there was a goodwill budget for that kind of donation. He authorized a symbolic amount that I could give to the project. (I still have to find the "donate" button on the web site)

Then, this morning, I stumbled on this: 5 Ways to Contribute to Open Source Projects Without Coding. This struck home because we use a lot of open-source software that is really complete and needs little help from us in the coding department.

So, the next step is a "reference" section on our website to showcase the OSS that we love and use.

Labels: tech

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I am currently involved in a project to write a good-sized web application with lots of dynamic content (yes, Ajax and all that). The application was experiencing a dramatic performance degradation as the user kept using it. I knew that Internet Explorer had a well known problems with memory leaks caused by its implementation of the DOM. But this was getting ridiculous: It was leaking something like 6 Megs or RAM every 10 clicks or so.

Yesterday, the Drip IE Leak Detector saved me from many days of frustration. After loading the code and building it, I was able to pinpoint the source of the leaks (One was in the TabContainer of Dojo, the others were in the Form and DatePicker component of Tapestry 4.0.2)

Without the help of the leak detector. I would probably still be trying to find these leaks.

Labels: tech, work

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I'm not a very militant man but I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to explain to my mother why the CD she just bought wouldn't play on her computer and she should return it to the store for a refund.

You probably guessed that she bought a "copy-protected CD" that just doesn't play on her PC. I sure hope that she won't get a cold shoulder from the retailer. That would suck.

In case you want to know more about this... Here's a link to one of many sites that talks about this: Campaign for Digital Rights - Corrupt audio disc information

Labels: tech

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