Geek Boy's blog
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Powerbook, switching, and backpack
I've now had my 17" 1.33ghz G4 powerbook for a month, and a Tom Bihn Smart Alec backpack for it for 3 weeks.
All told, switching has mostly been a win.
The powerbook seemed huge when I first got it. Now it doesn't. The 17" seems like a very natural size. The battery life is better than expected (although expectations were low). It can tear through a SETI@Home work unit in about 7 or 8 hours. For comparison, My dual-2.2ghz Xeon desktop tears through one in about 4 hours, and the 333mhz Sun Ultrasparc-II server in my basement takes about 16-17 hours to eat one, but with the ultrasparc, I'd bet the whole thing fits in cache. The ultrasparc has a 2mb cache, and the Xeon and the G4 both have 512kb of cache.
However, the machine sometimes feels slow - the Safari web browser is often slower to render a page (specifically, my my.yahoo.com home page) than Mozilla 1.5 is on my old 500mhz P3 thinkpad. I don't know why that is - my guess is the display model is to blame, doing compositing rather than bitblts. But I'm not sure. And Virtual PC is slower than molasses in january. It feels like a 90mhz pentium - maybe not even that fast.
The backpack is great. Kudos to Tom Bihn for a splendid product. I had thought that the pack would be smaller than it was, but it's actually a very practical size - there's enough room for all my goodies, the backpack looks stylish, and I feel like the machine is safe inside it. Laurel also likes it!
I carry my machine, a writing tablet, some pens, a power adapter, my tungsten-T, my sunglasses, a bottle of water, bizcards, and sometimes full-size headphones. That all fits, and there's room for more. I could fit a couple cans of diet coke, a t-shirt, some CDs, my iPod, a couple magazines, and the backpack would hold it all with no complaints.
The customer service is also award-winning. I carried on a corespondance with someone at their offices before deciding to buy one, and they answered all my questions in detail. Afterwards, when the pack arrived, it was missing two pullstraps on the side zippers. I emailed to ask if that was intentional, and two pullstraps showed up in the mail a couple days later.
Highly recommended.
Oh - and it's not just for powerbooks...
All told, switching has mostly been a win.
The powerbook seemed huge when I first got it. Now it doesn't. The 17" seems like a very natural size. The battery life is better than expected (although expectations were low). It can tear through a SETI@Home work unit in about 7 or 8 hours. For comparison, My dual-2.2ghz Xeon desktop tears through one in about 4 hours, and the 333mhz Sun Ultrasparc-II server in my basement takes about 16-17 hours to eat one, but with the ultrasparc, I'd bet the whole thing fits in cache. The ultrasparc has a 2mb cache, and the Xeon and the G4 both have 512kb of cache.
However, the machine sometimes feels slow - the Safari web browser is often slower to render a page (specifically, my my.yahoo.com home page) than Mozilla 1.5 is on my old 500mhz P3 thinkpad. I don't know why that is - my guess is the display model is to blame, doing compositing rather than bitblts. But I'm not sure. And Virtual PC is slower than molasses in january. It feels like a 90mhz pentium - maybe not even that fast.
The backpack is great. Kudos to Tom Bihn for a splendid product. I had thought that the pack would be smaller than it was, but it's actually a very practical size - there's enough room for all my goodies, the backpack looks stylish, and I feel like the machine is safe inside it. Laurel also likes it!
I carry my machine, a writing tablet, some pens, a power adapter, my tungsten-T, my sunglasses, a bottle of water, bizcards, and sometimes full-size headphones. That all fits, and there's room for more. I could fit a couple cans of diet coke, a t-shirt, some CDs, my iPod, a couple magazines, and the backpack would hold it all with no complaints.
The customer service is also award-winning. I carried on a corespondance with someone at their offices before deciding to buy one, and they answered all my questions in detail. Afterwards, when the pack arrived, it was missing two pullstraps on the side zippers. I emailed to ask if that was intentional, and two pullstraps showed up in the mail a couple days later.
Highly recommended.
Oh - and it's not just for powerbooks...
Labels: powerbook mac backpack
¶ 5:04 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Hero Miles
Whatever you think about the war in Iraq, it's fair to say that the US, British, and Polish soldiers who are fighting over there, aren't the enemy. When they come home, the Department of Defense deals with getting them from the middle east back to the states, but getting home from there is up to them. The money to fund airfare for our troops was left out of the $87 billion aid package for Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a motion to include funds for our soldiers, but it was not allowed to come to a vote.
Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland's 2nd Congressional District has started an organization called hero miles that provides frequent flier miles for US soldiers to get discounted or free tickets to get home.
If you've got, say, a couple thousand miles on an airline that you don't normally fly, rather that letting the miles sit there until they expire, consider donating them to Hero Miles. For what it's worth, I've just done that with 4K miles on United and 2K on American. I mainly fly Northwest; I haven't been on a united or american flight since 2000. I was never going to use those miles; this way, they're going to a worthwhile cause. ¶ 4:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland's 2nd Congressional District has started an organization called hero miles that provides frequent flier miles for US soldiers to get discounted or free tickets to get home.
If you've got, say, a couple thousand miles on an airline that you don't normally fly, rather that letting the miles sit there until they expire, consider donating them to Hero Miles. For what it's worth, I've just done that with 4K miles on United and 2K on American. I mainly fly Northwest; I haven't been on a united or american flight since 2000. I was never going to use those miles; this way, they're going to a worthwhile cause. ¶ 4:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Friday, December 05, 2003
Bag for ye olde new PowerBook
So - I get this nifty new 17" powerbook, which is much larger than the bag I've got for my thinkpad. Where to put it? After some research, it gets put into a Smart Alec backpack from Tom Bihn, paired with a monolith laptop sleeve.
I thought about both the Brenthaven bags that Apple is hawking, as well as the Spire Volt XL. However, I really wanted as much 'drop' protection as possible, and the monolith seemed to be the thing. However, I need space for my other goodies - iPod, Palm Tungsten T, headphones, cellphone, biz cards, etc, and fullsize headphones don't generally fit into briefcases. So a backpack seemed the way to go.
I've had the bag for a couple days now, and it's pretty sweet. It looks like a classy backpack, but it doesn't scream "I'm holding an expensive computer, steal me!".
More as we go... ¶ 3:28 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
I thought about both the Brenthaven bags that Apple is hawking, as well as the Spire Volt XL. However, I really wanted as much 'drop' protection as possible, and the monolith seemed to be the thing. However, I need space for my other goodies - iPod, Palm Tungsten T, headphones, cellphone, biz cards, etc, and fullsize headphones don't generally fit into briefcases. So a backpack seemed the way to go.
I've had the bag for a couple days now, and it's pretty sweet. It looks like a classy backpack, but it doesn't scream "I'm holding an expensive computer, steal me!".
More as we go... ¶ 3:28 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Why a mac?
Ask Bill Joy... the kicker is the last line of this snippet.
Wired: But innovation is supposed to be dead.
Joy: Nonsense. Moore's law still has at least a decade to go with conventional silicon. That's a factor of 100 in performance, which means that with some work to make the algorithms run faster, we've got maybe a factor of a thousand improvement still to come. If you give me machines that are a thousand times as powerful as today's at the same price, I ought to be able to do something radically better. Thirty years ago a supercomputer was 80 megahertz. Now a personal computer is 2 gigahertz, and yet the software isn't 25 times better. I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk.
Wired: Good for Apple. So what?
Joy: So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory - a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization. But that's not a space I'm going to go into, by the way. People's expectations in three dimensions are so high. On the other hand, existing operating systems, especially the ones provided by the reigning monopolist here, are deeply flawed. So there's enormous opportunity.
Wired: Is that something that you'd want to take on?
Joy: Jini networking technology was a partial attempt. Rather than writing distributed applications, you write a program - the whole system is an application program. But Jini was a solution to a problem that people didn't know they had.
Wired: Which was?
Joy: Reliable and secure systems. We all know that now - 4,000 known Microsoft viruses later, The Wall Street Journal says.
Wired: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux.
Joy: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux. ¶ 12:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wired: But innovation is supposed to be dead.
Joy: Nonsense. Moore's law still has at least a decade to go with conventional silicon. That's a factor of 100 in performance, which means that with some work to make the algorithms run faster, we've got maybe a factor of a thousand improvement still to come. If you give me machines that are a thousand times as powerful as today's at the same price, I ought to be able to do something radically better. Thirty years ago a supercomputer was 80 megahertz. Now a personal computer is 2 gigahertz, and yet the software isn't 25 times better. I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk.
Wired: Good for Apple. So what?
Joy: So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory - a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization. But that's not a space I'm going to go into, by the way. People's expectations in three dimensions are so high. On the other hand, existing operating systems, especially the ones provided by the reigning monopolist here, are deeply flawed. So there's enormous opportunity.
Wired: Is that something that you'd want to take on?
Joy: Jini networking technology was a partial attempt. Rather than writing distributed applications, you write a program - the whole system is an application program. But Jini was a solution to a problem that people didn't know they had.
Wired: Which was?
Joy: Reliable and secure systems. We all know that now - 4,000 known Microsoft viruses later, The Wall Street Journal says.
Wired: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux.
Joy: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux. ¶ 12:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, December 01, 2003
The latest JSP fun
So, this web app that I'm writing needs to pull images out of the database. I was fretting about how to get them out to the browser. Turns out, it's been less than 2 hours of research and coding.
SQL Server's IMAGE type comes out as a byte[], which is perfect, and I can dump that into a model object with no problems. I then ship that over the wire with my web service, and on the web-server tier, I have a simple JSP that generates no HTML at all. My test page looks like this (to fetch photo ID #5):
<%@ page import="org.cpnonline.ws.*,
java.util.List,
electric.registry.Registry,
java.util.Properties,
java.io.OutputStream" %>
<%
String baseUrl = "http://www.somesite.org/ws/services/;
String photoFactoryURL = baseUrl + "photo.wsdl";
IPhotoFactory photoFactory = null;
PhysicianPhoto photo = null;
photoFactory = (IPhotoFactory)Registry.bind( photoFactoryURL, IPhotoFactory.class );
photo = photoFactory.getPhotoID(new Integer(5));
// getPhoto() returns byte[].
response.setContentType("image/jpg");
response.setContentLength(photo.getPhoto().length);
OutputStream output = response.getOutputStream();
output.write(photo.getPhoto());
%>
And that's the whole page. I was kind of surprised to discover that it was that easy, but hey, sometimes Java surprises! Now to add some caching for this, so that we don't have to hit the web service every time... ¶ 5:48 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
SQL Server's IMAGE type comes out as a byte[], which is perfect, and I can dump that into a model object with no problems. I then ship that over the wire with my web service, and on the web-server tier, I have a simple JSP that generates no HTML at all. My test page looks like this (to fetch photo ID #5):
<%@ page import="org.cpnonline.ws.*,
java.util.List,
electric.registry.Registry,
java.util.Properties,
java.io.OutputStream" %>
<%
String baseUrl = "http://www.somesite.org/ws/services/;
String photoFactoryURL = baseUrl + "photo.wsdl";
IPhotoFactory photoFactory = null;
PhysicianPhoto photo = null;
photoFactory = (IPhotoFactory)Registry.bind( photoFactoryURL, IPhotoFactory.class );
photo = photoFactory.getPhotoID(new Integer(5));
// getPhoto() returns byte[].
response.setContentType("image/jpg");
response.setContentLength(photo.getPhoto().length);
OutputStream output = response.getOutputStream();
output.write(photo.getPhoto());
%>
And that's the whole page. I was kind of surprised to discover that it was that easy, but hey, sometimes Java surprises! Now to add some caching for this, so that we don't have to hit the web service every time... ¶ 5:48 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
