Miscellaneous

My new laptop – 2010 edition

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:19:00 GMT

Well, it arrived two days ago, but I only just finished doing the bare bones installation. My new laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad W510 (4319-29G, if anyone really cares). I have been a happy Thinkpad user for a long time, so it seems to be a natural choice. One think that I did directly off the bat, though, was to replace the HD that it came with with an SSD one.

It seems to be a pretty nice machine, so far.

I find it highly amusing that the slowest part here is actually the memory.

One thing that i do find unforgivable, however, is the install from scratch experience. Since i replaced the HD, I installed the machine using Win7, and after a successful installation, the computer could neither connect to the internet or use USB. That meant that in order to get drivers (you know, so I can connect to the internet or use USB) I had to burn a CD. It felt so 90s.

Even more unforgivable?

After being able to go on the net and download all the drivers for my machine, I still can’t get USB to work. There doesn’t seem to be any USB drivers for my model, which I find extremely puzzling.

At a minimum, I would expect Lenovo to include a drivers disk.

Suggestions for a new laptop?

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:43:00 GMT

Okay, the previous time I asked this question, I decided that buying a big desktop machine would be preferable, but I am currently traveling and I am pained at the speed of my current laptop.

Therefore, I am going to need a new one. I am the happy owner of a Mac Book Pro, but I can’t really justify purchasing a new Mac given the cost of a new Mac vs. a comparable PC. The Mac tax just doesn’t pay for itself at those levels for me.

Any recommendations? I want something 15” with enough horsepower to be a major development machine. If there is something like the Mac’s touchpad, I would love that.

Any ideas?

My secret project: Alexandria

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

They say a picture is worth a thousand words:

Just to head off the obvious, this is a sample application, not a real world project.

Three brownie points to the first guy who figure out why I posted this, though.

Stupid support emails, #4

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:00:00 GMT

I am having a friendly competition with a friend about the stupidest support questions that we get from random people we never met. I posted about this previous, but I really can’t resist posting the content of something that I just received, it is either that or figure out how to send a nuke via email.

Hi,

Im f[removed] from Malaysia…. I has look at ur website about SOA. Did u do SOA application? Actually im a new learner, my knowledge are 0 about programming. I take an e-commerce course, at here I just do like a practical for 6 month and now I need to do on SOA. If u can help, I need some information about SOA, how to integrate the application, service and database. I help u can help me…

Thank you,

Best Regards;

F[removed]

This is the actual email text, I merely removed this guy name.

Therefore, I unilaterally declare myself the winner of the stupidest support emails contest.

Army Reserve Duty

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:18:00 GMT

I’m currently on the way to several days of Army Reserve Duty, with limited to none internet connectivity.

I am making this announcement because the last few times I dropped offline for some time people started speculating that I am dead, which I sort of resent.

Why all the performance posts?

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:00:00 GMT

For the last week or so I have been posting just about performance. Can you figure out why? Yes, I just finish doing a heavy optimization for the profiler, but why so many posts?

The answer is quite simple, but I want to see what conspiracies you are going to put out.

What should I work on next?

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:38:00 GMT

As we near completion with EF Prof, I am starting to think about what the next project* would be. I got some ideas, but I would like to see what you think.

Note that I won’t necessarily follow this, but it would be a good indication about where to proceed.

A small explanation about the choices:

Entity Framework Caching Layer is an idea about adding 2nd level caching (similar to the way NHibernate is doing this) to EF, giving you transparent caching integrated into Entity Framework.
Production Profiling means that you’ll be able to connect to a production application with the profiler and see what statements it is executing, without paying any performance price when you are not connected.
LLBLGen Prof – as the name says, adding a new profiler profile that would support LLBLGen
DAL Prof – this is interesting, instead of supporting a specific product, this is meant for users who have a custom DAL, but still want to get the profiler benefits.

And anything else that you might want to suggest.

* Please note that all options discussed here are commercial ones.

If you want me to buy something, I want a queue, damn it!

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:00:00 GMT

And no, I don’t mean a queue in the technical sense, I don’t care how you build your stuff. What I care about is the customer experience.

Here is a simple problem, I go to your site and see three things that I would like to buy, but I am only going to buy one thing right now. In most cases, I have no real way of putting away those things that I am interested at to a later time.

A common examples, both of which are really annoying: Amazon Kindle.

I usually buy books after spending some time looking for them, which takes time. But I generally don’t buy more than one Kindle book at a time, simply because I often get distracted by something else and skip reading the second or third book in a particular order. So something that I would have loved to see is a way to put away a book for later. You know, something like a wish list? Except that those aren’t available for Kindle for some strange reason (probably someone figured out that immediate satisfaction negates them).

I am left with tracking this sort of stuff externally, and that just add more work. If you want me to buy something, make it easier for me to do so. And I want to come back later, you really want to make it easier.

The wave experience

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:00:00 GMT

I had the chance to take part of a multi people conversation on Google Wave.

Overall, I have to say that it was an interesting chat experience, but it lacks some very important things. Chief among them, if you are going to allow multiple people to edit at the same time and expect to give a real time experience, you have to provide good experience when people are editing “beyond the fold” (the areas of the documents that I am not currently viewing.

Replaying stuff is nice, but it isn’t working for the real time edit portion, which is the most interesting bit.

Overall, I have to say that I found it to be somewhat like IRC, and I dropped out of that years ago, because it had a real time requirements that I could not justify. I much rather use something that is by nature async, with a sync-like experience, like email or twitter.

Does history matters?

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:00:00 GMT

In Gmail, right now, I have 65,290 (non spam) messages, stretching back over 3 years. I routinely (once a week or so) need to refer to something that is at least six months old. I just had to dug in old backups to find an instant message log from 2006, because I had some information there that could not be found anywhere else.

My take on that is that yes, history matters, a lot. Moreover, being able to get to that history matters as well.

Today, I cannot imagine how I would try to manage myself without Gmail there to help me, being able to efficiently & easily search my entire history is the number one reason I love it so much.

Oh, and also important, make sure you have the backups :-) That IM log that I was talking about survived about 4 different computer transfers.