Less is more

It should be an easy concept to grasp:
LESS LINES OF CODE EXECUTE FASTER THAN MORE LINES OF CODE

Yet, some people still need to see proof:

0. Win7 5x slower than XP
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Test-shows-Windows-7-is-5x-slower-than-XP-in-UI-and-apps-load-slower-than-in-Vista

1. Vista: 25% slower than Windows XP
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/microsoft

" We did informal tests, booting both Vista and XP on the same hardware, and Vista was between 15% and 25% slower than XP in benchmarks"

2. Inforworld: WInXP slower than Windows 2000

"Waiting for Windows XP"
http://web.archive.org/web/20071012211343rn_1/www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/10/29/011029tcwinxp.html


" as indicated by results of independent testing performed by CSA Research and confirmed by our work in the InfoWorld Test Center. Our tests of the multitasking capabilities of Windows XP and Windows 2000 demonstrated that under the same heavy load on identical hardware, Windows 2000 significantly outperformed Windows XP. In the most extreme scenario, our Windows XP system took nearly twice as long to complete a workload as did the Windows 2000 client"

3. Win2k slower than NT4...

Microsoft looks to bury test results that show NT is faster than Win2000
http://web.archive.org/web/20061022093046/www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01/03/05/010305opcringely.html

"Microsoft recently threw around its weight -- and its fat wallet --
to squash an independent testing lab from publishing benchmark results
that the lab ran for InfoWorld's sister publication NetworkWorld. The test
demonstrated that SQL Server 7 runs nearly twice as fast on Windows NT
4.0 than it does on Windows 2000 ."

FC

ZDNet trolling for anti-Javascript language, another ´anti-something´ Microsoft tech

Microsoft, like many firms -Google too-, suffers from the "NIH syndrome" (Not Invented Here). And it isn´t hard to imagine they aren´t too happy to see one of the key pieces of the modern AJAX paradigm and web apps is Javascript/ECMAscript, not invented by them, but at Netscape and now developed at Mozilla.

So I have recently stumbled upon this piece by a ZiffGatesNet writer
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-typescript-can-the-father-of-c-save-us-from-the-tyranny-of-javascript-7000005054/?s_cid=e539 outrageously titled "can the father of C# save us from the tyranny of Javascript?" that aims to boost interest in a Microsoft language that wants to dethrone Javascript.

I started laughing when he decided to quote Miguel de Icaza as an authorized ¨open source¨ figure. It seems that not being happy with his Mono Failure (Microsoft .Net clone for Linux) and his Moonlight failure (a failed clone of another failure, Microsoft´s Silverlight) he now wants to give a helping hand in destroying Javascript, as the he and others in the .Net camp have tried to destroy Java -unsuccesfully- for years now.

Back to the story, the headline is eye-catching no doubt about it, as it speaks of this new Microsoft language freeing us from the "Tyranny of Javascript". But when you read the story, there´s no substance about what tyranny we need to be saved from.

So, here´s my two simple answers to this long tirade:

1.there´s no "Javascript tyranny" interesting that the word "tyranny" is present only in the headline, with no substance in the article to back up that claim.
2. The headline asks a question, and the answer lies in "Betteridge´s Law of Headlines" which states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'*
 
So there :-P
FC
PS: Nobody outside of Microsoft and Microsoft-only shops will get to use this language, for the same reasons that hampered .Net and Silverlight adoption: microsoft´s languages only work well and fully on Microsoft´s own OSs. They´re just means to justify Microsoft´s uber-end for the last couple of decades : "Windows Everywhere".

The anti-Btrfs FUD must stop...

If you read the Whackypedia entry on "Butter FS" (Btrfs), you see:

"Btrfs (B-tree file system, variously pronounced "Butter F S", "Butterfuss", "Better F S",^[1] or "B-tree F S"^[2]) is a GPL-licensed copy-on-write file system for Linux. Development began at Oracle Corporation in 2007. It is still in heavy development and marked as unstable"



ewww... SCARY!

But then there´s another view:

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan/bo
---
LinuxCon Japan 2012 | Presentations
"On The Way to a Healthy Btrfs Towards Enterprise"
by  Liu Bo, Fujitsu
---

Let me quote:
"Btrfs has been on full development for about 5 years and it does make lots of progress on both features and performance, but why does everybody keep tagging it with ""experimental""? And why do people
still think of it as a vulnerable one for production use? As a goal of production use, we have been strengthening several features, making improvements on performance and keeping fixing bugs to make btrfs
stable, for instance, ""snapshot aware defrag"", ""extent buffer cache"", ""rbtree lock contention"", etc. This talk will cover the above"
---

From its web "Liu Bo has been working on Linux kernel development since late 2010 as a Fujitsu engineer. He has been working on filesystem field and he's now focusing on btrfs development".

RHEL 7 to get Btrfs support
http://www.h-online.com/open/imgs/45/8/8/4/6/5/1/43-6b4e69889ee000ca.png

"RHEL 7 will support ext4, XFS, and Btrfs (boot and data)"

Then you have SuSE:
https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/11-SP2/

"With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2, the btrfs file system joins ext3, reiserfs, xfs and ocfs2 as *commercially supported file systems*. Each file system offers disctinct advantages. While the installation
default is ext3, we recommend xfs when maximizing data performance is desired, and *btrfs as a root file system when snapshotting and rollback capabilities are required. Btrfs is supported as a root file
system (i.e. the file system for the operating system) across all architectures of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2*. "

https://blogs.oracle.com/wim/entry/oracle_linux_6_update_3

"OL6.3 that boots up uek (2.6.39-200.24.1) as install kernel and uses btrfs as the default filesystem for installation. So latest and greatest direct access to btrfs, a modern well-tested, current kernel,
freely available. "

So, again, why does people insist in calling Btrfs "experimental" and "unstable"?. Do you think SUSE and Oracle both ship an unstable FS as a comercially supported feature??.

Sheesh, I´ve lost data with IBM´s "supposedly ´GA´" version of JFS for OS/2 once...

Back to Btrfs... it´s in the mainline Linux Kernel since February so with the adoption by RHEL 7, it´ll become mainstream sooner rather than later...

Here is a good video to get you interested on Btrfs and why it matters...

Just my $0.02...
FC

Java is based on reason, like Humanism. :)

I read this funny post "if programming languages were religions..." over here , and couldn' t help writing the rebuttal below with regards to its characterization of Java:

Totally wrong on Java. See, some people -often whom have never used it- continue saying Java "is dead", "is so 1990s" yet, Java continues being relevant ever more each day, and is now free (GPL open source, OpenJDK). Then some said Java was going to die after the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, they were proved wrong once again, with Oracle investing in Java, opening OpenJDK even more, making JavaFX open source (OpenJFX), making OpenJDK the reference implementation of JDK7, and even getting IBM, Apple and Twitter aboard the OpenJDK project. Plus, Apple donated its OSX JRE code to OpenJDK as well.

So does it make it like "fundamentalist christianity"? don' t think so, more like humanism...

See, Java is NOT ONLY a programming language, Java is actually 3 things: a programming language, a virtual machine, and a level playing field software ecosystem. So you can write cross platform Java apps without even writing a single line of Java source code, thanks to dynamic languages that run atop the Java VM. That' s why there' s JRuby, Jython, xRuby (ruby to java bytecode compiler), Scala, JGo, NetRexx (open source REXX for the JVM - www.netrexx.org), and you can even write Java apps with Basic, thanks to Jabaco (www.jabaco.org).

So, in the end, Java understands that all the people has its own beliefs, and people of all beliefs are welcome to come to the Java VM, which is based on the rational belief that "porting code"  from one OS to another is silly, and that all apps should run on all OSs. It' s based on reason, like humanism.

;-)
FC

Top Five Twitter Annoyances

Since I´ve got an addictive personality, I´ve become addicted to Twitter as of late. Before that I was addicted to Facebook, and before that, to e-mail mailing lists (an addiction that is hard to cure and continues to this day, I reckon ;).

As such, I´ve started to realize a number of annoyances with Twitter, and most important, how Twitter could fix it... of course "...for fun and profit". ;)

#1. DMs. Direct Messages. The user interface is a mess. The chat-like presentation might be good for short exchanges, but once the "conversation" and exchanges of DMs progresses, this becomes a wasteful choice, and a long string of short messages dilapidating screen real state.

#2. Twitter should embrace OPEN PROTOCOLS, more on this below.

#3. Twitter DMs could offer an e-mail gateway. It´s simple, by creating an email gateway to the Internet world, yourtwitteraccount@twitter.com becomes your e-mail address. Anything received at yourusername@twitter.com becomes a DM to you. Of course, to keep up with the twitter spirit, messages would have to be stripped of all attachments, and plaintext messages cut to the first 140 chars. Not doing so would create lots of problems to twitter (capacity problems, storage cost, viruses, phishing, etc)

#4. Likewise, it should be possible to access your DMs Inbox via an open protocol. For this, nothing better than IMAP. You should be able to point any e-mail client to, say, imap.twitter.com, and check your DMs "Inbox", your "Sent" folder, etc.

#5. There is no easy way to download all your old tweets directly from the TW interface. As Google offers the option to "back up all your data", with its "Data Liberation Front" initiative, it should be possible to log-in to your Twitter "my account" area and choose to download a .zip compressed file of all your tweets, everything you have said on twitter both since the account creation, or the last month, or the last week, the user´s choice. I know, you´re telling me that´d be "too expensive" both in CPU and resources, when, how about making this a PAID option, only for people who pay a small yearly fee. (I´m thinking $10/year would be the magic number. Do the math.)

#6 Like Google´s Blogger email posting feature, it should be possible to create tweets by email. IE email yourusername.somepersonalid#@twitter.com and whatever you put on the subject line becomes a tweet.

What´s this for? it´d be great for script writers, to automate the sending of tweets effortlessly without having to deal with oAuth, Twitter APIs and the like.

That´s, imho the top-five Twitter shortcomings. (I know I said five.. )

FC

Forget VNC, TurboVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, RealVNC... the good one is Tiger, TigerVNC

It seems like it was only yesterday that a team of very creative people at a joint research facility in Cambridge, UK -operated at the time by Italian firm Olivetti and US database giant Oracle (talk about strange bedfellows)- created "Virtual Network Computing" or VNC for short.

Then, over the years, the concept of a free software implementation of a "remote desktop" began to catch on (once upon a time people would buy propietary products to do this sort of thing, like "PC Anywhere" or IBM Desktop on Call, Win2You, etc, just to name a few).

Well, the problem with VNC was that while the underlying RFB protocol was very strong, some bean counter *ssholes at AT&T who first bought the reserach labs later decided they´d rather use the money more wisely and proceeded to shut down the ORL research labs in Cambridge. The Guardian lamented it here.

Over the years, people started making VNC stronger, faster, and forks of the original VNC started to appear: TightVNC, TurboVNC, UltraVNC, and finally... RealVNC.

So, fast forward to 2010... What of all flavours of VNC to use?.

My answer: none of the above.

My choice is TigerVNC.

TigerVNC is a fork of RealVNC, incorporating many of the improvements from TightVNC and better security (which on RealVNC are features in the paid/commercial version only).

See:
http://tigervnc.org

Windows and linux builds are available at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tigervnc/files/

From the site: “TigerVNC is an advanced VNC implementation. It is based on the fourth generation of VNC. TigerVNC also includes features from the TightVNC and TurboVNC projects.

This includes accelerated JPEG compression. TigerVNC supports the latest X.Org X server.”

Hope this helps...
FC

Gavin Clarke is an utter moron, once again

[I wrote the following to The Rogister's Gavin Clarke, the anti-Sun, anti-Java pundit always too happy to write something to smear Sun, or now, trying to muddy the Java landscape a bit more]

"In many ways, IBM succeeded. Eclipse became a more widespread and grass-rootsy movement than the top-down, closed-shop style of the JCP that alienated technology creatives. In pure market share, Eclipse become the preferred open-source IDE for Java developers."

You´re an utter moron, I´m convinced now. WTF does JCP, an enhancement-request process, has to do with Eclipse, which is an IDE?.

Sun has its own ide, Netbeans, and in any case, it´s as succesful -if not more- than Eclipse, why? Because it´s cross platform, it's written in Java itself, and it includes everything developers need, unlike Eclipse which needs commercial "plug-ins" for many things.

FC

Google continues ignoring SeaMonkey and firefox derivatives...

Google has recently started informing users of Firefox 2.x that their browser will soon stop being supported for its web sites and web apps.

And they recommend other browsers that people can upgrade to:

IE 7.0, Safari, Firefox 3.6, and Opera...

Well, ¿Where is SeaMonkey?. SeaMonkey is based on the same Firefox 3.5+ engine, so why not mention it?. In fact, Firefox IS the son of the Mozilla.org browser suite, formerly known as just "Mozilla" and then renamed to SeaMonkey.

In fact, Google should stop sniffing for Firefox versions and instead check out GECKO RENDERING ENGINE versions. Plus, they should mention and point towards SeaMonkey, too.

All Mozilla-based browsers use the same rendering engine, and it's good programming practice not to check for browser version but actually checking Gecko in the user-agent string sent by the browser to the web server, as suggested by Mozilla.org itself.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Browser_Detection_and_Cross_Browser_Support

IDEA: Hey Google, why don't you guys suggest people using an unsupported or soon-unsupported gecko engine to upgrade to "a newer Mozilla.org based browser" and point towards http://www.mozilla.org/projects/#applications , which includes not only Firefox but also SeaMonkey?.

FC

Every software program should include a reinstall script

It is my belief that every software program should include a "Re-install" script. Something that we can run from the command line and have all configuration values set up as new, without actually downloading and running the installer package again.

This allows moving apps from one system to another effortlessly, and recovering from a backup much easier than having to run a dozen installers and click a dozen times for each. Yes, I'm a command-line junkie.

IBM, back when it was a software firm with a clue, had the very bright idea to include a "rebuild.cmd" command line util with its IBM Works productivity suite included with OS/2 Warp 3.0 onwards.

Hence, the "reinstall.cmd Software Movement" is born, today, to replicate that kind of functionality as widely as possible for popular applications. Target systems are Windows mostly, but could also include OS/2 and Linux for closed source apps that might benefit from it.

I´ve created a redirector at [http://bit.ly/reinstall] that leads to this post, which will be updated to include new reinstall script developments.

My first target? Sun's Virtualbox. Find my re-install script here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbox-users/files/

I will release every one I code under a GPL license (they're just command line scripts anyway).

FC

GUI Design: will Egyptian Hyerogliphics replace CUA text menus?

I am excited to join Mike Magee´s latest tech site, "Tech Eye" (www.techeye.net) as a regular writer, in addition to my ocassional INQUIRER piece.

Here´s my first article ... inspired by Google Chrome´s "Monkey Wrench" icon and the total disappearance of CUA menus.



Is this the future of GUI design, and are CUA menu standards going down the tubes, fast?. Should we despair?


And what´s with Google ignoring CUA on one app, but implementing CUA menus in Google Docs?. Guess that people ARE used to CUA style menus after all, huh?.


Feel free to read the article, and have your say in the comments section...
http://www.techeye.net/software/software-gui-design-going-to-hell-in-a-basket

FC

PalmSource / Access doesn't need a miracle

With the upcoming entrance of Google into the mobile-OS market... the OpenMoko project... the LiMo Foundation and Palm's own solo Linux development, code-named "Nova" one has to wonder what the future holds for Access Software's own "ALP" Linux based OS with backwards PalmOS compatibility (Access Linux Platform).

One would think that Access needs a Miracle. But nosssir, they do not need a miracle.

They already have one:



Sorry, couldn't resist.
:-P

FC