06 Nov 2007
For the duration of the above processor load shot, my computer remained completely usable. Am running a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ at 2.4GHz (same clock as what I ran my old Athlon 64 3200+ at, haven’t attempted overclocking particularly vigorously just yet) and it’s so much better. Just for the switch-between-applications/preventing being slowed down factor. For the price, totally worth the productivity benefits.
I wouldn’t have ever really got a dual processor system because of the tremendous cost premium they commanded, and I’m still not quite sold on quad-core systems (except for video rendering), but two cores on a single processor die is cheap enough and beneficial enough that I really wonder why you wouldn’t get one these days.
“Beneficial enough” meaning in terms of having an extra bit of headroom to essentially mitigate against crashes in the form of processor hogging tasks. That alone is enough to make it great, aside from the obvious launch/use-multiple-apps-at-once advantage. This is before you even start thinking about multi-threaded apps (mostly just video, but worth considering, especially if you ever do encoding stuff).
Mine set me back $100 delivered and probably extended the usable life of this desktop by about another 12 months. It’s the switching-between-apps thing that makes computers “feel” slow more than anything else, and this technology solves that problem perfectly. Pretty good for a dead processor architecture (Socket 939)!
The only downside to it? Thermal power is up from 67W to 89W… but it’s still cheaper (temperature cost) than two real processors.
03 Nov 2007
A list of International TLDs is available on the IANA website. This includes the 11 IDNA i18n ‘test’ domain names as of today, and excludes .root. Useful for knowing what your regex needs to match for email validation! Shortest 2, Longest 6, Longest inc. IDNA 18. There are no email users in the IDNA space at time of writing (and, at any rate, if they are they probably wouldn’t be particularly well supported by legacy email and DNS systems just yet!).
01 Nov 2007
Boring post subject, I know. But check this out:
Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.
Since when do apps alert in the tray about loading a view? If Outlook didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail waiting), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.
I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any difference when the fault is largely software that sucks. Not saying that it’s just Outlook at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Windows Desktop Search. But it just integrates best… why does Microsoft have to produce products that suck?!
Speaking of which, my iPaq is working again with a brand new extended battery. Apart from the slow processor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any better. Basically, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS functionality on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to connect via my Sony Ericsson via Bluetooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll immediately miss the wireless, but have survived several months without it, and SDiO wifi cards are a possibility for the palm… I doubt they’re particularly common, though. Have been considering a Blackberry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For example, ever tried getting an SSH client on a Blackberry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!
Anyway. Don’t use Outlook 2007 unless you have to. It has nice multi-calendar/iCal support, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS support, the renderer is a regression in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even support background images — IE7 comes out, which is an awesome browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the renderer. Brilliant.), thoroughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capabilities, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (compared to earlier versions).
If it offers groupware advantages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly comprehensive on that front), and chances are they won’t be particularly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guessing here, but not without some reasoning.
Avoid.
p.s. Yes, I’m probably overdue for a Windows reinstall. Unfortunately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d scheduled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will probably hunt down the right product key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the problem, Microsoft apparently expect that home users either buy prebuilt systems with stupid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hardcore tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their workplace). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of different varieties (not to mention previous versions of Windows), and of those a bunch are the same product type (upgrade)… which makes license management and compliance a bit of a challenge!
What I’d love MS to do is create a site-licensing product for SOHO users with flexible and transferable licensing at retail OEM pricing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charging what us mortals pay for OEM licenses, not the volume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be simple, web administered (not requiring a local server), and increasingly relevant in homes which are featuring more and more computers.
24 Oct 2007
People go to tremendous steps to utilise mainstream media effectively. This week, one of my clients has fast-tracked a complete rebuild of their (generally underperforming) website in direct response to perhaps twenty-seconds of primetime TV feature on a highly rating show.
Cost is pretty much no object: the potential gains in brand and business development are entirely unrepeatable. Their marketing & promotion strategy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the single best TV spot outcome one could hope for is direction to a rich information portal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a comparably diminutive cost.
Not only do you get higher conversion rates than you would if a phone number were displayed, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more manageable rate than television would otherwise generate. This week I’m rapidly developing a new website for them, but also aiming to implement a new VoIP mechanism to effectively manage the anticipated telephone traffic surge. This is for a small business with no employees sitting at a desk 9-5 ready to take calls: they require a particularly agile strategy to appropriately leverage this media opportunity.
At the end of the day, the content of the actual television spot is relatively insignificant. If it converts to web traffic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in particular, telephone contact and subsequent relationships) is the crucial component in this marketing mix. It provides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource constraints. Operating on such a limited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it succeed: the limitation is in human resourcing and man-hours, rather than provisioning additional technology to achieve optimum capacity.
This client can respond to close-timeframe business opportunities in days, not months, chiefly through judicious application of Internet-based technologies (and a tremendously concentrated amount of hard work!)
23 Oct 2007
Education is everywhere and essential.
I have about three or four jobs in various workplaces to do with event production and IT development and design, and probably spend about 10% of my time as an educator. I probably spend twice that time learning new things and keeping on top of everything that happens in my corner of the world, but without that thirty-percent education time, the other 70% would be far less effective.
In that thirty-percent time, I stay ahead of the curve and similarly keep my employers ahead of the curve.
At Youthworks, I have spent less advocacy time of late, but the first several months there was alternately spent in learning how people were interacting with technology, and training people in effective (and efficient) use of it to solve ministry problems. My role was first and foremost to learn, and without that time the consequent project would be lacking in vision and engagement with actual need.
I’ve also recently been working again with a past employer, solving some pressing front-end development issues they have faced due to their need for quality training for staff. In the time I’ve spent there, I built a handful of frontend things mostly with technologies I knew, and spent some time looking into and creating solutions with one particular technology I haven’t had much experience with. This is ‘learning’ in a way that isn’t disruptive to conventional employment: my related expertise accellerated the learning to the point that it remained cost-effective for them to allow me to spend time doing that. Apart from that learning time, I implemented some quality testing systems and trained people in how best to apply them, and spent a few hours engaged in front-end development training with another employee.
In freelance work, I find that unless I explain my role and actions to prospective clients, there is a dramatic decrease in efficiency because expectations aren’t properly established. Part of doing this often includes explaining some things about technologies and techniques that are being used. In order for me to do my job effectively, I need to find non-technical ways to explain technical problems. That means avoiding non-essential jargon, having a cache of analogies to apply to a given situation, and patience to make sure everyone remains on the same page.
As someone who brings a particular area of expertise to a problem, it is my responsibility to share that expertise appropriately with everyone else on the team, as well as acquiring (learning) area-specific expertise from others on team in order to effectively solve problems.
There is absolutely no way to do a job properly without constant acquisition or transmission of knowledge. Education is key.