Development on a Shoestring

Getting FriendFeed real-time in your Firefox sidebar

2008-10-16T23:51:09Z

FriendFeed has released a real-time page that auto-scrolls all updates from your subscriptions. There’s a mini window option that allows you to see it in a separate window, but I’ve found the best way to view it is as a sidebar in Firefox.

To get this you need to bookmark the mini-window page, so open the mini window, right click on the page and select ‘Bookmark this page’. Then right-click on the bookmark, select ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ check box & click ‘Save Changes’.

Now when you select this bookmark, the real time view will open in your sidebar - awesome!.

PropertyPortalWatch.com is down, the day it appears in the SMH MySmallBusiness section

2008-10-08T06:27:34Z

UPDATE: And it’s back up again, on http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/ www1.propertyportalwatch.com is on IP 74.124.211.14 where as www.propertyportalwatch.com is on 74.124.210.232. Looks like there was an issue with the server they were sitting on. Apache on www.propertyportalwatch.com is giving a 302 Moved Temporarily over to www1, so looks like it’s a technical failure after all.

Today, in the small business section of the SMH, there’s an article about the ex-CEO of http://realestate.com.au Simon Baker’s new venture called PropertyPortalWatch. Since being kicked from REA, Simon Baker has been working on this site which is meant to “congregate news, opinion and gossip about other property portals and companies around the world, in a one-stop shop for people within the [online real-estate] industry.”

However as of this morning the http://propertyportalwatch.com site has been down, with the site redirecting to an account suspended page on their hosting company’s servers. I can’t imagine that the SMH article got them *that* much traffic, especially seeing as in that article it said that Simon has been pouring a fair bit of cash into it, plus he said they have some “anonymous investors on board” too. As Scott on Twitter said “Never host your new startup on some cheap ‘n’ nasty cpanel hosting companies!”.

They’re hosting with a US based hosting company called InMotion. I can only assume that there’s been some accounting stuff up (as noted in the comments below, InMotion’s business plans all come with unlimited disk space & transfers), and it’s kind of embarrassing that it would happen on the day they get some free press from the SMH. If you still want to check it out, the Google Cache is still available. Simon Baker is still blogging at MyCEOLife. There, he posted about the new site last month, and linked to it from there as recently as last Saturday.

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate

2008-09-24T00:07:19Z

IntenseDebate, a centralised commenting service similar to the Disqus service used on this site, has been acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic.

From the announcement on the IntenseDebate site:

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ experience. IntenseDebate will continue to enhance and encourage conversation on your blog and build your reader community.

This isn’t a surprising acquisition. There have been rumours about Automattic buying a commenting service for a while now, with some suggesting that Disqus was also a possible target. Matt Mullenweg said on his post about the purchase that they’re going to keep the service platform agnostic (for now at least) but they’ll also roll a lot of the features into the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress.

Seeing as they already own Akismet, which processes a large chunk of the blogosphere’s comments, ID will give them access to even more of the comments posted on the web. On the upside this will mean that they will be able to improve Akismet even more by processing the additional data, but it also means the one company has an extraordinary amount of information on what is posted on the internet. The potential for this to be a privacy risk or for them to sell this to marketers is a little bit disturbing, but so far Automattic haven’t given us a reason to be concerned.

However, similar to Google, they are getting by on a lot of community good will. And also similar to Google, they’re now in a position to really abuse that good will if they saw fit. Lets hope that doesn’t happen

Update: Here’s the response to the announcement from Disqus

Today, Automattic (the team behind the WordPress platform) announced their acquisition of IntenseDebate, a competing and similarly-focused comment service. From all of us at Disqus: congrats to the ID team on joining the Automattic family. We’re fans of WordPress here (this blog uses it), so I think it’s good that they’re beginning to pay more attention to the comments.

So what does this mean for us? The Disqus comment system is still the largest third-party comment system on WordPress, yet those blogs represent under 5% of all websites using Disqus. We pride ourselves on being an independent cross-platform service. Disqus will continue to innovate and provide the best discussion experience on blogs. Our company’s entire focus is on increasing the number and quality of your comments and that will never change.

As a true third-party system, Disqus can be open and extensible to other services and platforms, as well as offer unique functionality not limited by a single platform. I’m looking forward to the future of discussion and I hope you’ll experience it with Disqus.

Maths Fail

2008-09-10T05:43:22Z

Maths Fail, originally uploaded by glennslaven.

Apparently I can remove 1023687353 GB of unneeded files from my 10GB drive

Google gets shiny with Chrome

2008-09-03T07:02:06Z

Google has released its experimental browser called Chrome, a new type of browser built on the Webkit rendering engine.

Google have said that this is designed to be a whole new type of browser, built around the concept of web ‘applications’ as opposed to web ’sites’. The idea is that the new breed of sites are now applications that you spend a lot of time in, as opposed to simply sites that you visit briefly.

The major change is that each tab in now running in its own CPU process, which means that there shouldn’t be the issue of one site’s processor-intensive Javascript or some plugin (Adobe I’m looking at you) locking up or bringing down the whole browser.

From the Google Blog announcement

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

My first impressions are very positive. It’s fast, very fast. They’ve optimised the heck out of the Javascript engine. You can see the comparison between Firefox 3 & Chrome’s Dromaeo test results: Firefox’s 1983.40ms compared to Chrome’s 574.60ms. That’s almost 1 & 1/2 second’s difference. Sure that was a fairly unscientific test, I wasn’t controlling for other processes, but the massive difference is indicative of a major improvement in JS performance.

So here’s what I’ve found so far:

Layout

The UI is very spartan. There’s no ‘File, Edit, View …’ menu, the tab menu is integrated into the top window bar where the title is on most browsers. There’s no search box, it’s integrated into the address bar (I’ll get to that in a minute). There isn’t even a status bar down the bottom, the link url appears down there when you hover over a link and the ‘Waiting for http:// …’ when you start loading a page. Oddly, I can’t show you an image of what it looks like because the status message box isn’t captured when you print screen. One annoying thing about this is that the box that appears is a fixed width, so if the url you’re hovering over is longer than about 65 characters it will get truncated.

The find in page interface is different too. When you click CTRL-F a textbox drops down from the top menu bar with what you’re typing & it highlights the first occurrence in the page in orange & all others in yellow. There’s a count of how many times it’s found on the page & you can cycle through the list. It also puts yellow marks on the scroll bar where all the occurrences of the word are. Anyone who’s used Resharper in Visual Studio would find this very familiar. One thing to note. If you do a find & cycle through to occurrence 5 of 10 say. If you find again for that term it will start you at the 5th occurrence not the 1st. Handy, but it threw me the first time because it jumped me down to the bottom of the page.

One other thing worth noting is that there’s no ‘home’ button. You can, in the options, set what URL to open on a new tab, but that page will be opened on every new tab.

Functionality

Despite its very clean layout, Chrome is not lacking in features. The address bar is a combination of the Firefox ‘awesome bar’ and the search box. If you just start typing in there, it will pick out urls from your bookmarks & your history. However the search box functionality is also available here. If you have any search engines installed (it has a list of pre-installed ones, plus it will import them from Firefox), if you type the keyword for that search engine it will display a message to click tab to use it

Also, if you hold down CTRL after typing, it will automatically wrap the term in www.[term].com. i.e. if I type google and hold down CTL:

It doesn’t do .net & .org with shift & CTRL-shift like Firefox does, but I think doing it before you click enter is a bit more intuitive.

Helpfully, it automatically picked up my country & set the default search to Google Australia, and while Google is the default, it has all their major competitors (Yahoo7, Sensis, NineMSN, etc.) listed as options too. These can be changed by right-clicking on the address bar and selecting ‘Edit search engines…’.

There are a whole bunch of nice little features that just make things easier:

If you drag a tab out of the tab-bar it becomes its own window.
When you open a blank tab, it takes you to a page with thumbnails of your most visited pages, plus a list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs. It also has a bunch of search boxes, one to search your history and then one for each of the search tools you’ve recently used
CTRL-clicking or middle mouse button clicking on a link opens the new tab in an un-focused tab. This is either a good or a bad thing depending on what you’re used to, but annoyingly there currently isn’t an option to change this.
You can view your full history in a page that look suspiciously like the Google Web History interface.
You can open a link in what’s called the ‘Incognito’ window, which ostensibly is for privacy. But lets face it, we all know what most people will use if for. It’s what the internet is for after all.
All multi-line textboxes can be resized by dragging the bottom-right corner. This is available in Firefox by a plugin, but it’s a nice feature to have natively.
The downloads interface is very similar to the Downloads Status Bar Firefox plugin
The browser comes setup with built-in phishing protection, and one major feature of that is showing when the SSL certificate doesn’t match the URL, leading to an error if you go to https://gmail.com/

But it should be noted that with the phishing protection turned on, Firefox does exactly the same thing.

Stability

Nothing serious. I did manage to make the browser crash by opening every bookmark & then closing them all at once, but it’s worth noting that when it came back up, I did it again & it coped fine. When it did crash it gave me a popup message

And then once it restarted it had a message up the top of the new tab with an option to re-open the previous windows. This is much better than IE habit of auto-reopening the page, as if it’s the page that’s crashing, you can never stop the browser crashing (without killing the process).

On the topic of processes, one of the major changes is the fact that all tabs and plugins (ie Flash, Acrobat) run in their own processes. This is a shot of Process Explorer with 3 tabs open:

You can see there’s a master process (PID#2220) followed by 3 browser processes. The bottom process is the process for Flash. In Chrome in the page menu under the Developer submenu there’s an option called Task Manager. This shows you the same information, but identifying which tab/plugin is using the memory

You can kill any if the processes (except the Browser process obviously) and the browser will keep running. If you kill the flash process, the tab(s) that are using flash will have a little message come up that says the plugin crashed. If you reload the page, it will come back up.

Developer Tools

Out of the box, Chrome seems to have been designed with web developers in mind. One of the things that always stopped me from upgrading to the latest version of Firefox straight away was the fact that plugins like Firebug didn’t work, and I need them for my work. Chrome comes with a Firebug clone built in, with the full DOM inspector capabilities. You can edit HTML & CSS on the fly, and one nice little feature is that you can right-click on any part of the page & ‘Inspect element’ is an option in the context menu. This will open up the inspector with the element selected. It also has a JS console built in.

One annoying thing I did notice is that you can’t edit everything in the DOM inspector. You can edit the attributes of an element or the text contents of an element, but you can’t add attributes to an element without attributes, and you can’t just add or remove elements as you like. This isn’t really a big problem, but it is a nifty feature of Firebug.

Summary

This is a good browser. I know Corvida didn’t like the fact that there’s no integration with Google accounts, and to be honest I’m surprised about this myself. But it’s not really a big deal to me. The browser is fast (really fast, I mean it’s crazy fast) and it has the developer tools I need to do my work. All the other features are really nice & the complaints I’ve listed I’m sure can be addressed in future releases. This is, after all, only the very first public beta release.

I’ve not heard whether they are going to be opening the browser up to allow user-developer plugins for added features like Firefox does. It is lacking some of the things I really like about some of those Firefox plugins, so it would be nice if that happened. For the moment, all Chrome knows about plugins is things like Flash & Acrobat.

I would suggest that if you spend a lot of time online, this browser is worth checking out.

Oh noes, the LHC caused a resonance cascade & took down reddit!

2008-08-22T05:12:24Z

Reddit has gone down, & they’re blaming it on CERN. Hopefully Alexis got the crowbar sent off in time for the world to be saved! In other news, I want a pack of these.

Updates & stuff

2008-08-19T05:44:33Z

So I’ve been pretty much offline for the last 4 days or so because we’ve been moving house (I’ve got some photos on Flickr). I’ve had a fair few support requests come in in the last couple of weeks for the FriendFeed plugin that I just haven’t had a chance to respond to. I’m sorry, I’m not ignoring you I will try & catch up over the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime there is a beta version of the plugin sitting on the WordPress Plugins site that may fix a number of problems, especially those around WordPress being installed in a subdirectory & the plugin not playing nice with jQuery. So if you’re having issues with the plugin, please download it & try it out. If it all goes wrong the current stable version is always available too.

RIP Bernie Mac 1957 – 2008

2008-08-12T11:58:12Z

Comedian & actor Bernie Mac has died in a Chicago hospital after being admitted earlier in the week for pneumonia.

Mac’s character Frank Catton in the Ocean’s movies was hilarious, the ‘cracker’ scene with Matt Damon & Andy Garcia was a classic.

Sad condolences to his wife & daughter.

Google Maps now has Street View for Australia

2008-09-07T14:36:54Z

First, here’s the obligatory Harbour Bridge & Opera House shot.

Now, Google has introduced it’s Street View imagery for Australia. And when I say Australia I mean all of Australia

Except Darwin. Sorry Mum & Dad, no street view for you.

Those blue lines are roads where street view is available. This means that some poor guy had to drive all the way across the Nullarbor in one of the camera cars.

Anyway it is quite amazing, privacy complaints notwithstanding, how much detail you can see. Here’s the Esplanade at Manly Beach, where you can see the blurring effect (actually you can see it being a little over-zealous, it’s blurred the traffic light too!) . Here’s the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the ANZAC statue on the ANZAC Bridge, looking back down Leura Mall or down the main street of Beechworth.

It’s a bit of a pity that it was overcast on the days when the shot a lot of the Sydney imagery, but this is very cool. It’s a game changer for real-estate too. The real estate agent hasn’t got a shot of the outside of the house? Doesn’t matter, you can probably look it up. Trying to find a location, now maps can not only give you the directions, but show you what the place looks like too.

This was actually quite handy today. I needed to find a factory to pick up a new trampoline mat & thanks to Google Maps, not only could I find how to get there, I knew what the building looked like when I was looking for the street.

The Google Australia blog has more details and a video about the new release. So go check it out.

Removing the Apple MobileMe Preferences from Windows Control Panel

2008-07-22T05:45:29Z

I gave in this week & installed iTunes, purely so I could purchase Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. Of course as all Whedon fans who don’t live in the US now know, when you try & buy it you get this

Not. Happy Jan.

So now I’ve installed iTunes for no good reason at all!

I’m really not a fan of Apple’s client software, they tend to be bloated & they have a nasty habit of installing stuff that you weren’t expecting. Unfortunately iTunes is no exception to this rule. After installing it I went to my Windows Control Panel & I see this little icon there

MobileMe is Apple’s new sync application for the iPhone & iPod. Now I don’t own an iPhone or an iPod (not through lack of *wanting* one) so I’ve got no use for this software. I didn’t do the custom application when I installed iTunes like I normally do with new software because I was in a hurry, so there may have been an option to not install it there. Either way, I never said to install this & I’ve got no use for it.

Removing it

Removing it is actually fairly simple. Go to the Control Panel & click on Add/Remove programs (or whatever the Vista equivalent is). You should see an entry for Apple Mobile Device Support. Click the remove button on that. It may complain if you have Outlook open, but you can ignore that.

Once that’s finished (it took a surprisingly long time on my computer) refresh the control panel & the application will be gone.