Tech for Lunch!

It is no secret that I like Linux quite a bit. I very much prefer setting up servers on Linux when it comes to web servers and pretty much anything that has to do with networking. I have nothing against Windows, don’t worry, but when you get a chance to test performance on one and the other, you quickly understand why Linux is the operating system of choice if you need something efficient. Here’s what convinced me:

A few years ago, I had a web site with about half a million pictures, all neatly cataloged in multiple albums. One particular folder had 788 pictures in it. I had written a couple of scripts in ASP 3.0 which created the albums and displayed everything on-the-fly when users were browsing them. Naturally, I thought I would run this on my most powerful machine, at that time, an Intel P3, 733mhz with 512mb of RAM. That machine was running Windows 2000 Server, which was the operating system of choice for running ASP scripts because they are Microsoft’s way to go and are designed to run on IIS. The page took 36 seconds to load on that machine, and that is way too long when you’re sitting in front of a computer.

My script definitely was not the problem so I started looking for ways to optimize it. Eventually, I came across a piece of software called ChiliSoft!ASP (which was subsequently purchased by Sun Microsystems) which allowed a Linux machine, running Apache, to compile and run ASP scripts. Having no other machine at hand, I rebuilt my old Pentium 200mhz MMX with 64mb of RAM with Mandrake Linux and installed Chilisoft!ASP on there. On the first run, I got the page to display in 5.4 seconds.

You can draw your own conclusions on this one, but I’ve been quite convinced ever since, and seen it happen over and over again, that Linux is quite the performance beast in many areas.

What made me think of this little story is an article I read about Walmart(in the US only) selling Everex Linux gPCs. These are great entry-level machines that come pre-installed with a custom Linux distribution for a tiny 199$. They had stocked them in stores and online, but the in-store performance was not good enough so they will only continue to sell them online for now. It seems consumers are not quite there yet when it comes to Linux. It has made its name in the Server World, but not quite for desktops just yet. Walmart also carries the Laptop version, the Everex Cloudbook for 399$.

I’m always interested in seeing the incredible amounts of traffic that get generated by certain sites. Google’s numbers are incredible, but they are certainly not the only ones to get huge traffic these days. Social networking sites are a very popular trend. They have been around for a few years and are still going strong. Compete released the rankings for the top social networking sites for February 2008:

Obviously, MySpace is still the leader in this segment and Facebook is rapidly gaining ground. The interesting thing is the sheer number of unique visitors and monthly visits to these sites. 65 million unique visitors and close to 1 billion visits on MySpace pages during a single month is nothing short of impressive.

The next most interesting point in this figure is the growth that has occured for certain sites. It appears that niche sites are the ones that are grabbing user’s interest on a growing basis. Fubar and Cafemom are good examples of niche sites. Fubar is billed as the “first online bar” and cafemom is directly targeted at, get ready for this one: moms. Other great movers are sites which add a technology touch to the whole social networking fad. Twitter is probably the best example of such a site.

I’m very curious to see what the next big thing will be after Social Networking.

Canadian shoppers who bought HD-DVD players before the ” Format War” was over thought they would be stuck with their obsolete players with no more new media coming out.  Future Shop has announced that they will be giving consumers a 100$ credit towards the purchase of an LG or Samsung Blu-ray and HD DVD combo player.  Naturally, this is in exchange for their old players.  A combo player is a good avenue for those consumers because they can still watch their HD-DVD media, so they won’t need to purchase them again in Blu-Ray format.

Canadian consumers who wish to take advantage of this offer have until April 3rd to do so.  The good news is that the offer does not only cover Future Shop customers.  If your HD-DVD player comes from another retailer, you can still take it in for the credit.  The old HD-DVD player, which can also read regular DVDs, will be donated to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada. Estimates claim that 35,000 canadians have invested in HD-DVD players since their introduction in 2006.

Circuit City has also extended their return policy for customers who bought HD-DVD player.  Customers have 90 days instead of the usual 30 to return their players.

Yesterday, I looked at the new Internet Explorer 8, Beta 1 and mostly discussed the internal behavior and rendering capabilities. Today, I wanted to show you what some of the new features are in more detail. There are quite a few improvements, but many of them are “Features” that should have been there a long time ago or were already implemented in other browsers such as firefox. Let’s start with the two most important ones: Webslices and Activities.

Activities add a contextual (usually a right-click) access to an external service, based on what page you are on or the selected text. Typically, these services will allow you to LOOK-UP information, such as a map, news on that subject or a dictionary definition, or SEND information to a blog, email or facebook profile etc. take a look at the screenshot I made in which I highlighted a postal code and got the map for it. You can move around in that pop-up map just like any other map. Notice the domain name(netfix.ca) is in bold in the address bar. That is also a new security feature to allow users to quickly identify which domain they are on to protect against phishing, typos and misguiding URLs.

Webslices are done by website developers who will make a portion (or a slice) of a page available to users. Users can subscribe to that slice and get updates regularly from wherever they are on the internet. When you subscribe to a slice, it gets added at the top of your IE8 window and turns bold when an update is available. You could use webslices to get weather, ebay auctions, news feeds, facebook friends statuses, stumbleupon buzz etc.. Basically anything that gets updated so you don’t have to navigate to that page everytime you want to see what’s going on. I think webslices will be like sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista and we will see slices for just about anything eventually. That’s probably one of the reasons why IE8 beta 1 is for “developers” ;-) Notice in this screenshot that the domain is also in bold in the address bar.

So this covers the two main new features of IE8, but another one that is worth mentioning for those of us who had to wait for it, is the developer tools. You can now debug HTML, JScript and CSS directly in the browser. Tools like these have been a part of firefox for quite some time, but hey.. better late than never! Most of the other improvements are for stability and speed. Rendering of HTML and CSS as well as JScript should now be a bit faster with IE8 and more improvements are set to be released with the next betas. We’ll just have to wait and see what the community’s feedback will be and what Microsoft will do about it.

When I heard that Microsoft had released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for programmers and designers, I knew it was pointless to resist the temptation. I always like to see new products and what new features they have come up with. Internet Explorer has always been a somewhat controversial browser because it did not respect the community’s standards for development and rendering of CSS and other common tags found on today’s web pages. Version 8, however, is supposed to be much better at these things and allow developers to use the same code without any modifications to work for Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer(along with many other browsers).

Previous versions of Internet Explorer, were using more “proprietary” code and rendering methods which forced developers to use some code variations (sometimes known as hacks) to allow their pages to appear correctly on IE6 and IE7. The problem with CSS rendering was, of course, much more defined in IE6 because CSS was not as widely used when IE6 was developed and shipped. Internet Explorer 7 has much better CSS rendering for standard pages, but most certainly did not respect the community’s standards. This has been discussed extensively in the past and you can find results or even test this for yourself using the Acid2 tests.

Here comes Internet Explorer 8. This time Microsoft say they listened and designed this version to be compliant with the community and allow a better development and user experience. The layout is pretty much the same as it was with IE7. Same look and behavior overall, and this version passes the Acid2 test, which is a pretty big deal for a Microsoft product. I gave IE8 a quick test and it seems to work pretty well, but this is only a beta release, so bugs are to be expected and they did show up too. I had a couple pages that did not look right at all.

There are many new features in this version and I will cover them in the next post because it would be too long for a single post. The ones worth mentionning are certainly the “activities” and “webslices”. Activities add a contextual menu to the text you highlight and allow you to, for example, select an address and see a map of that location directly on the page you are browsing in a pop-up window. Webslices allow you to add a “slice” or a part of a page to a favorites bar at the top and keep an eye on it for any changes. The example I saw was for an eBay auction, so anytime a bid gets added, the page notifies you and you can see only that part of the page as a pop-up rather than having to navigate back to that page.

I will cover the new features, with screenshots, in the next post ;-)

I figured that since I was on a streak of writing about online applications, I might as well cover one of the most popular ones in recent news. Mint.com offers online banking and money management services to it’s users, and all of it for free. Only US banks and services are included at the moment.

Eliminate the need to manage multiple Web sites to get a comprehensive view of your personal finances. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions. By adding your bank, credit card and investment accounts to Mint.com, you get a complete perspective of your finances in one, easy to use location. Planning your personal budget just got a lot easier.

You can use this service to manage every account you have in a single place, including your Paypal and E-Trade along with regular bankin, mortgage, loans, or investment accounts. Mint makes money by providing various offers to their users to help them save money, invest better and manage their finances better. They get compensation from the banks and companies who provide the offers.

As I have said before, Online Applications are a very interesting way to go and Mint is one of those applications that just stands out for it’s ease of use, great presentation (all done in javascript, by the way) and it’s free.

Those who know me already find me extremely annoying for it, but I have been saying for quite some time that the future of software is definitely in web-based applications. Many different variations on the terms have been used such as Software-as-a-Service(SaaS), web-based, or even subscription-based applications. The trend is easy to notice and more and more users are leaving standard software to move to the web.

Microsoft has announced that they will be expanding their online services to integrate many new products in a beta phase. New online services being tested include Exchange Server and Office SharePoint Server software handling tasks such as email, schedule calendars and online conferencing. Of course, you need to go to the beta web site to register and get a chance to try the products before they go live. Microsoft has targeted the second half of this year to make the products available to the public.

The Office suite has always been a foundation in Microsoft’s revenue and they are being careful not to break that income stream too fast. Google, Oracle and quite a few others have started offering online services which are slowly eating away at the market share so Microsoft is not taking any chances. Bill Gates mentioned that users should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility in all of Microsoft’s products in the future.

There are some problems to this approach for the moment such as slow or unreliable internet connections or the unwillingness to change. Security is sometimes a concern as well because all your information keeps going back and forth on the internet. Naturally, none of these problems are really any more important than the ones users currently face with standard desktop applications. There is always a way to get to your valuable information if someone really wants it ;-)

The bottom line is that software on the web will be more and more a reality for everyone and this will most definitely be something I will keep and eye on to cover again in the future as it develops.

it’s no secret that I like to try out new software and I love to review new web sites and applications. Xobni is no exception to that statement. If you are an Outlook user, then you must surely have heard of this little plugin that can completely change your user experience with your e-mail.

“Xobni Insight is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers effortless email management and provides instant access to the most important information in your email.

After a quick install, you’ll see the new Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook - and suddenly your Outlook productivity will burst to life with blazing fast email search, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more.”

This little plugin application truly is a gem when it works properly and can significantly improve the usability of the Outlook client but I know of a couple of people who have had many problems with it as well. We have to keep in mind that Xobni is still in Beta testing and many of the problems should get worked out before the product goes into a final release. Even more so, if Microsoft actually get their hands on it. It seems there was an offer that was refused from the company previously, but the discussions have started over again.

Perhaps Xobni will simply get assimilated into the Microsoft machine and become a standard part of Outlook.. or maybe Microsoft will take the opportunity to turn this product into a social networking tool to increase their already very long reach.

Imagine taking life with you…anywhere.

A man sitting next to me on the subway took out a Samsung Q1U-V ultra mobile PC from his backpack which got a lot of attention from the other passengers. I got to see him play around with it; listen to music while answering his emails and opening document after document to fiddle in.

I have read up on this little gadget and it is pretty amazing. The screen has a really great display it’s has the best sound quality of any device of its kind, it is small and lightweight so it doesn’t weigh you down and you can fit in any bag or purse even! It comes with a hand strap and there is a built in stand on the device. The keyboard buttons are small and might be hard to read if you don’t have good eye sight, but then again, you don’t really need to look at the keys when you are typing… and you have to be pretty agile with your thumbs to write fast. But over all, it seems like a really cool thing to own. It is a bit pricey for the capability and size of the device but you can purchase one for just over 1000$ USD. There are also many variations on this same device. This is the model that I saw, but there are quite a few on samsung’s site, so perhaps a different one could be a better fit for your needs.

What’s in the Box? The Samsung Q1U-V ultra mobile PC comes with:

• Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC
• Battery
• Samsung Q1 Ultra Getting Started Guide
• AC adapter & Power cable
• USB Data Transfer Cable
• Pen
• Travel case
• Hand Strap
• Samsung System Software & System Recovery Cd’s
• Safety instructions guide
• Samsung Recovery Solution II / reinstalling Vista guide

You may want to take a look at the Samsung micro site for all the details on this little gizmo. The thing I found most interesting about it is that it runs on Windows Vista Business, and not some stripped down mobile version.

Well, it certainly looks like HD-DVD will not be the standard for High-Definition media releases.  Paramount announced (about a week ago) that they will be dumping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray and the scheduled releases are getting harder to find.  Paramount’s decision comes after Toshiba announced that they would no longer manufacture HD-DVD equipement.  Toshiba was the main driving force behind the standard.  The fact that Sony has integrated the Blu-Ray technology in the Playstation 3 has probably played a role in these decisions.

On a technical stand point, there are several differences between the two formats and there was a format war, just like for Beta vs. VHS, to determine which would be the format of choice for consumers.  The main difference between the two is that HD-DVD can hold a maximum of 30gb of data, while Blu-Ray can hold 50gb.  There are others, but nothing that is really noticeable by consumers.  Personally, I had not made a choice yet, so I’m happy there is a standard on which we can rely from now on.  What this means for consumers is that we will be certain that all movies will be coming out on a single format rather than on having to “hope” your favorite movie comes out on the format that you have a player for.

The computing side is affected by these decisions just the same.  Computer users also had to make a choice on one format or the other, but not anymore.  I’m happy to see that we should be able to store 50gb on a single disc eventually.  We will have to wait for prices to go down a little bit, but I think we can expect the same chain of events as we saw for the DVD format.  Sooner or later, we will just take it for granted and not even worry about it anymore.