The Blog of Maxim Porges

Archive for January, 2008

  • Some Differences In Philosophy

    Apple files a patent.

    Read that? Good. Now read this: Microsoft files a patent.

    ’nuff said.

    2008.01.20 / no responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • HP Quality Center

    We spent last week training on HP’s Quality Center product (previously of Mercury Interactive), which is a web-based server product allowing QA teams to collaborate and store test requirements, test cases, test sets, perform defect tracking, manage releases and test cycles, perform predictive time estimation, and so many other features that I can’t list them all here.

    What a polished product. In about eight hours of total work, we’ve got the thing almost completely configured for our environment. The only items left to go are for us to VB-script it to the point where it meets our needs perfectly. The APIs available in the product and the out-of-box customization are both very impressive and simple to do.

    I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised to see a product in its 9.2 release being so polished, but (as many of you know) most enterprise software sold by big vendors is pure overpriced garbage, with horrible and inefficient UIs and cumbersome customization (if any at all). It’s really been a breath of fresh air to pick up a product that does the job very well out of the box, and makes it so easy to tweak for our needs.

    Well, that’s how the setup has gone, anyway. Let’s see what I think of it in a few months after we’ve been using it. Expect to hear more on our experiences right here.

    2008.01.15 / no responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • ‘AIR’ing On The Side Of Caution

    Of course, you all expected me to blog Apple’s keynote today. What else could I possibly do?

    Time Capsule
    Pretty damn cool. Wish I’d known this was coming before I bought my Airport Extreme. I won’t be upgrading to this any time soon; I’m going to wait and see if they fold and offer the Time Capsule software as a paid update for Airport Extreme (which I would buy). I can’t imagine the technology for connecting the hard drive couldn’t support the existing USB 2.0 interface.

    AppleTV
    I would cancel my cable service and buy one of these bad boys in a second if they just added advertising-free TV show rentals for between $0.49 – $0.99 a shot. With the six or seven TV shows I actually watch each week, I could get away with paying on a per-view basis and not having to deal with cable. In the interim, I’ll keep my old PowerBook G4 for TV duty.

    New iPhone and iPod Touch Software
    Very cool software updates – love the wiggling icons and the web clips especially. I’m still not buying an iPhone until they go 3G and up the download speed to broadband. I now have a legitimate reason to get an iPhone since everybody in the office just got Blackberries and they all seem to have the same ring tone as me.

    MacBook Air
    Good lord, that SSD hard drive is a killer option at $999; a bit of a show stopper for me. The rest of this product looks simply amazing.

    Will I be upgrading to the Air? Well, I was considering going to a faster processor MacBook Pro if they unveiled them today, but I still can’t fault my current one in terms of performance. I may only have an original Core Duo in it at 2.16 Ghz, but it’s snappy as all getup as it stands.

    Clearly, the performance of the Air would be a drop from where I am today, but the thinness and light weight are very attractive. The price point is about right: with the 1.8 Ghz processor and a USB Ethernet port to get around our dodgy wireless networking setup at the office I think I could handle $1,998.00 (with the education discount).

    The CD thing is a total non-issue. I’ve got enough computers lying around the house to deal with whatever may come, and CD burning duty will be completely relegated to the Quicksilver G4 as soon as I get a new dual-layer Lightscribe burner (~$30 on NewEgg). I’m surrounded by desktop workstations at the office and I’m sure I could throw the software on one of them if I absolutely had to install something. Worst case, I could throw my old DVD burner from the Quicksilver in to a dirt-cheap USB-to-IDE enclosure and keep it in a desk drawer for emergencies.

    One feature I consider woefully absent is the FireWire connector. FireWire, quite frankly, kicks the living snot out of USB 2.0 – even in the original FireWire 400 spec. I don’t care what the tech specs say, I have always found FireWire to be around 5x faster than USB 2.0, and it handles parallel operations (for example, reading while copying large files) much better with no noticeable degradation in performance. I really hope Apple doesn’t drop iEEE 1394 altogether from their product line, and I’d especially like to see FireWire in the Air. Then again, there is only so much they can do with 0.76″ clearance, so I guess they chucked the electronics for the interface least likely to be seen in the wild (where the Air will undoubtedly spend most of its time).

    The only other thing I really wish I had in my MBP was a larger hard drive, and the 80 GB standard in the Air (with no upgrade option) is just too small for me once I’ve dropped a 15 GB Windows installation in to VMWare (gotta have my Dawn of War and software suite for work). A new laptop drive for my MBP would cost a pittance, and would handily last me for the interim.

    Apple traditionally works out bugs in their first releases of new hardware, so that’s another deterrent. I think I’ll just hold off for Otellini’s wizards to squeeze out a little more juice from that tiny chip, and for the hard drive size to increase in the standard model (or for a larger paid-for option to surface).

    Summary
    Overall – nice work, Apple. It’s a very sexy product line and a great way to start 2008. I think a lot of people will pick up the Air and Time Capsule just to be on the latest and greatest, and I imagine that the frenzy will mount (iPhone style) as people start seeing wicked-thin laptops and get the bug to buy. Time to swoop in and pick up some more AAPL while the market is getting hammered…

    And here’s an idea – why not make that Remote Disk feature available so I can still rip CDs and install software when this happens? :)

    2008.01.15 / no responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • CD/DVD Stuck in MacBook Pro

    We’ve owned seven Apple laptops in my immediate family, and I have only had this happen twice – but it happened again tonight.

    I’ve been importing all of my CD collection in to iTunes so that I can put it away in to storage once and for all, and to speed things up I’m doing half on my MacBook Pro and the other half on my old Quicksilver G4 tower. I got through about 120 CDs, and then came back to my MBP to find it had a CD stuck in the drive.

    Those of you who have experienced this before know how annoying this is. The drive basically just makes a noise like it’s ejecting, struggles a bit, and then remounts the disk. Last time this happened, it was with the CFUNITED 2006 CD, and all I had to do was hold my MBP upside down with the CD drive pointing at a slight downward angle to get it out (although it took me a few days to figure it out). Sean Corfield had the exact same problem with the exact same computer and CD media from CFUNITED.

    This time, that trick wasn’t working. I dug around in Google a bit and found that some people had had success by holding the CD drive pointing toward you at a 45 degree angle (facing you as if you were going to type on the keyboard). I tried that, but the CD was still stuck. I tried sliding a business card through the slot to “guide” the CD out, but that didn’t work either.

    Finally, I tried the 45 degree angle thing again, but holding the computer somewhere between 30 degrees and 45 degrees. Finally, the CD popped out – actually, my Mac spat it out at speed like it had really wanted to get it out, which was kind of amusing.

    One of the articles I found suggests that CDs or DVDs that are warped are likely to get stuck. This makes perfect sense, of course. I took the offending CD and laid it on my glass desk, and sure enough, it was bowed upwards so that the center of the disk was about 2-3mm above the flat surface. So, once again, this problem was media-related rather than a hardware issue per se.

    Even so, it’s a pretty stupid problem to have. There is no manual method for ejecting the discs if they get stuck on my MBP model, so I’m basically rolling the dice every time I stick a CD in there. It would be nice if Apple provided drives that either had slightly higher clearance, or some way to force eject manually if something gets stuck. Again, this has happened twice in seven Macs over the course of three years, so it’s an edge case, but a very annoying one nonetheless.

    2008.01.13 / no responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • Backwards Compatibility is Backwards

    Couldn’t agree more with Eckel here. Java’s had some strange feature bloat in recent years. I really like Java 5, but I think if they keep throwing stuff in to the language it will get worse, not better. LeGros would probably argue that Groovy is our sanctity.

    Eckel’s post made me think of something that I believe is a true death-knell to all technologies: backwards compatibility. I’ve argued strongly and consistently over the years that I believe a big key to Apple’s success and some of Microsoft’s failings have been due to Apple’s willingness to break backwards compatibility to move forward.

    At CFI, we have consistently “wasted” three to six months per year of development effort on “upgrading” our Oracle database and application servers. In most cases, the databases have become slower and the new features added between releases have made very little impact to our environment; we’re basically just upgrading to stay PCI compliant and guarantee Oracle’s support. Each time we’ve gone through this rigmarole, we’ve had to modify our apps in slight ways to make them compatible. This would be an example in my mind of trying to make a technology backwards compatible with a software application.

    This “waste” has been a fixture of mine as we set up our new software architecture. I don’t ever want to be held back from a new technology or have to rewrite anything at any point in time. Of course, we’ll make decisions on upgrades and changes, but I’m fine with that so long as our hand is never forced the way it has been in the past. Oracle’s Forms technology has a horrible coupling between the application server and the database, and this was something I knew we had to avoid as we move forward.

    Luckily, the ESB and SOA principles seem to offer real hope here. All of our current services and apps are being written in Java and Flex, and but it won’t be long before we add Ruby, and maybe even some .NET for really tight integration with some Windows-only functionality. Because everything speaks XML and SOAP (and those technologies that don’t can provide something we can transform in to one of those two) it’s going to be pretty simple to make switches as we see fit. Sure, there is always an overhead to adopting a technology, but that will just be another element we factor in to the decision. The choice will always be ours to upgrade or not, and in the interim I can run Flex 1.5 alongside Flex 3 talking to a mix of services written in Java, Ruby, or access our legacy apps via messaging over Oracle’s AQ (an example of 100% painless backwards compatibility, with no constraints imposed). They can all run on different OSs for all I care; that’s the beauty of the service architecture.

    So, I say this: make things evolve, or watch them die. I’m already convinced that CF is on its way out, and I think Java is destined to be dethroned in the coming years (although I bet it has five to ten really good years left in it before that happens). Either way, it will be fun to watch.

    2008.01.05 / 3 responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • Cocoa is a Series of Tubes

    My mum (English spelling) got me a Cocoa book for Xmas off my Amazon wishlist (donations gratefully accepted). I already had another Cocoa book, but this one seems far more immediate.

    I’m on Chapter 5, learning about Delegates. It’s interesting because we decided to call the primary remote Java object in our Flex apps at CFI Delegates, too, and they fulfill very similar responsibilities (although in entirely different ways due to the technology differences).

    I’ve now grasped the concept that, unlike the Internet, Cocoa is a series of tubes. Messages can go from anywhere, to anything. One object declares itself responsible for handling events for another (as its delegate) and Cocoa doesn’t complain. Objects pass themselves to each other with no regard for type or compile-time checking. There’s an element of trust involved that I simply don’t count on myself to be able to provide to XCode. Sorry, XCode.

    For a Java developer, it’s both liberating and intensely terrifying at the same time. Of course, this isn’t my first experience with dynamic languages so I knew what I was getting in to, but I find it interesting that such a beautiful and stable OS as OS X would be written largely in such a strange (read: trusting and uncompiled) beast of a language.

    I look forward to later chapters in this book and the next (also provided by mum) where I will learn just why this kind of flexibility is what Cocoa developers are always gushing about on mailing lists.

    2008.01.03 / 2 responses / Category: Uncategorized

  • IMO, How Stacks Should Have Debuted In The First Place

    Man, I’m really psyched about this. I love the original Leopard Stacks behavior for folders like the Downloads folder, and I love the old Tiger behavior for folders in the Dock. I knew Apple was going to address this, but was worried that they’d give you an all-or-nothing option.

    Nope. You can have your cake and eat it too. Stacks for stackable stuff and folders for lists of icons, all presented in glorious Stacks-style animation, and with a sort order preference so you don’t have to order your directories in Finder to control their behavior in the Dock.

    Love it.

    2008.01.02 / no responses / Category: Uncategorized

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