Category: Computers

Everything related to using and programming computers.

Categories
Computers

Want: Intel SSD

intel_ssd

80 gigs is plenty. Geoff got one and apparently it is rather awesome:

AngryParsley: Sequential
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 79.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 64.97 MB/sec [256K blocks] 
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 30.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 206.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: Random
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 65.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 66.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 9.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 177.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: yeah, not bad for a laptop drive

Update: Apparently Joel Spolsky got one and loved it too. And there’s a good review of it on Anandtech. Also, the review reminded me of this piece on latency by an old colleague of mine.

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Categories
Computers

Google Sync + iPhone = Don’t Bother

Update: A bunch of this stuff has been fixed by either Google or Apple with OS3 for the iPhone. I’m using Google Sync now and love it.

I had a warm fuzzy feeling when I saw Google announce that they’d licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft to offer push-based calendar and contact sync on the iPhone (and other devices). I tried to get it set up yesterday, and it was a monumental waste of time. Here’s what’s broken (for me):

  1. Calendar Sync replaces any integration with iCal.
    That means that if you have multiple accounts (like say $WORK and $HOME) on Google, you can only sync one.
  2. Calendar Sync blows away alarms set on repeating appointments.
    This was the biggest non-starter for me. If I can’t set an alarm on an appointment, there’s almost no reason to have the appointment.
  3. Contact Sync loses all sorts of information
    Google doesn’t support a true first name, middle, last name tuple, so it gets consolidated in odd ways. Google doesn’t support near the level of rich contact information that Address Book on the Mac does.
  4. Contact Sync replaces any integration with AddressBook
  5. And the “sync contacts with Google” option in AddressBook is horribly broken. It lost a good number of my contacts, I’m guessing because I had multiple entries with the same email address? No error, just refused to sync them.

So, back to SpanningSync for me. It works well and the developers are very responsive to help requests. You can even save $5 on it (and make me $5) if you use this link.

Categories
Computers

Crack

[Firefox architect Mike] Connor also attacked Opera‘s claims that bundling harms competition. “Opera’s asserting something that’s provably false,” Connor said, referring to Firefox’s ever improving market share, which now stands at just over 20% worldwide. “It’s asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don’t know how you can make the claim with a straight face,” he said.

I’m not sure how he can say that with a straight face. Bundling IE didn’t help its market share? I’d like some of what he’s having, thanks.

Categories
Computers

Copy to clipboard from command line

I just discovered a couple useful command-line tools on OSX and thought I’d share. pbcopy will copy stdin to the clipboard and pbpaste will send the clipboard to stdout.

$ cat somefile.txt | pbcopy #copy a file to the clipboard
$ pbpaste | grep foo #search the clipboard for foo

Handy.

Categories
Computers

window.baz vs var baz. A subtle oddity.

While trucking away at $work, Jim pointed out a subtle nasty edge case in how JavaScript and the browser interact. Let’s say you have the following code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>shared var</title>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      var foo = "awesome";
      bar = "bartastic";
      window.baz = "bazzoom";
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      if(!window.foo) var foo = "not awesome";
      if(!window.bar) var bar = "not bartastic";
      if(!window.baz) var baz = "not bazzoom";
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Foo is <script type="text/javascript">document.write(foo);</script></p>
    <p>Bar is <script type="text/javascript">document.write(bar);</script></p>
    <p>Baz is <script type="text/javascript">document.write(baz);</script></p>
  </body>
</html>

I think most folks would expect the output to be:

Foo is awesome

Bar is bartastic

Baz is bazzoom

and it is on Firefox, Safari and Opera, but on IE  you get:

Foo is awesome

Bar is bartastic

Baz is not bazzoom

Care to guess why?