Posted on 12/20/2007 2:25:00 AM by Justin Etheredge
***UPDATE**** I really think people are misinterpreting this post. What I am trying to say here is that if Microsoft can get IE8 out there, and can get the majority of Windows users on it, then it will be a huge step. But I very much question whether this will happen. Read on to find out why. ****
With today's news that IE 8 is now passing the ACID2 test, I started thinking about what that would mean to us web developers. (Well, I'm an asp.net developer, not really a web developer. It is like web development with training wheels, only the training wheels are really heavy, uneven, and make riding the bike harder. :-) Oh come on, have a sense of humor) So, what would a standards compliant IE8 mean for web developers? Call me cynical, but I honestly don't think it will mean all that much for a long long (long long long long) time, and lets look at why I believe that.
Within the developer community, how many people still use IE anymore? (This has nothing to do with overall IE use, but just bear with me) Sure we have to all still account for it when we are doing our development, but how many of us actually use it for our daily browsing? In order to get some sort of idea, I decided to use the traffic from this blog. So, to get some recent data I pulled up Google analytics to look at my browser numbers on my site since December 1st.
This is probably about what you expected to see on a technically oriented site. You have about 70% Firefox, 20% IE, and then the last 10% is split among the rest of the browsers. Okay, this is all fine and good, but lets look at the breakdown of the numbers on Firefox...
Not too bad, we have over 80% on 2.0.0.11, and then over 2% on the Firefox 3 beta. Between 2.0.0.10 and 2.0.0.9 we have almost 8%. Of all Firefox users though, less than 1% are using Firefox 1 and even those are using Firefox 1.5. So, 99% of all of these users are on Firefox 2 or above even though Firefox 2 was only released just over a year ago.
Next, lets take a look at the same breakdown for Internet Explorer...
IE7 was released in October of 2006 as well, and so the time on market is almost identical. So, what is up with these numbers? Only 56% on IE7 and a full 44% on IE6! (Also, why in the world is there more IE 4.01 users than IE 5.5? Ha, that is an aberration if I ever saw one) Now, before you say, "but hey, IE7 is only available for XP and Vista. That is why so many people haven't upgraded!" Well, that is B.S. Look at the numbers for Windows operating systems...
XP, Vista, and Server 2003 (all of which have IE7 available for them) make up almost 98% of all Windows users. So, apparently IE users just don't want to upgrade. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they don't like tabs, or hate the fact that they hid the File menu. The whole point is that if this is IE7's adoption rate after it has been out for over a year, then what do you think is going to happen with IE8? Somehow I doubt that there is going to be a huge uptake, since I would imagine that in the non-technical crowd this problem would be worse. Also, Microsoft doesn't have a new OS release to push IE8 out with either.
On top of all this, it appears that IE8 is going to require a special "head" tag (I keep seeing this, but I don't know where it is coming from, so take it with a grain of salt) in order to turn on IE8 standards mode and if that tag is not there then it will render in IE7 "standards" mode. I completely understand their reasoning for this, but it just makes my head hurt. I guess most of the other browsers haven't had to deal with this because they have mostly supported standards from the beginning and their users actually upgrade their browsers!
So, what does a standards compliant IE8 mean for us? Well, unless Microsoft forces users to upgrade when it is released (which just isn't the way Microsoft does things), it means that sometime around 2013 when IE6 and IE7 are sunsetted, we might finally be able to stop worrying about stupid browser quirks in IE. But on the bright side, at least there is light at the end of the tunnel...even if it is a few light years away. So, what do you think, is IE8 going to change anything? Or am I just being jaded?
Posted on 12/18/2007 10:53:04 AM by Justin Etheredge
I was going through Google reader yesterday and I hit the Larkware News feed (which usually provides a good list of nice articles, but those HUGE, and I mean HUGE, ads really annoy me, but I guess they are a necessary evil) which had a story about someone doing a review of XP and pretending that it was a review of an upgrade from Vista. It was actually quite a clever post and very witty. I really did enjoy reading it. It was pretty much a scathing review of Vista by talking about different features of XP and how they compared to Vista.
The author talked about how reliable XP was and how it didn't crash constantly, about how IE7 didn't crash when reading G-mail (who uses IE still these days?), about how it didn't hang for 30+ seconds at startup, how Windows Explorer didn't crash 3 times a day, how he didn't get codec dialog boxes popping up when he deleted video files, etc... If you want to read the whole post, go here.
After reading about halfway through the post I couldn't help but think to myself "wow, if I had even half of these issues I would have freaked out months ago." But honestly, I haven't had a single problem with Vista on either of my machines. No, really, I haven't. I have a dev machine at work that I run Vista x64 on and I have my desktop at home that I run Vista Ultimate 32-bit. They were both fairly new machines that were purchased with Vista pre-installed though, so that could be part of my good fortune. Although I rarely change operating systems on the same hardware, usually by the time a new OS comes out I am ready to upgrade anyways.
I honestly did expect Vista to be a little less snappy than XP, and it probably is a little bit (I don't really notice it) for me, but I don't get huge lags or crashes like this author is talking about. I mean, look at his stability chart versus what mine looks like.
The author talks about visual artifacts, of which I haven't seen any except for one or two very rarely around my mouse cursor. I also haven't had any trouble with device support, although I don't really use any super old devices. I can't really say anything about gaming, since I don't use my machine for playing many games, I have a console that I play most of my games on. I really do feel bad for this author or anyone who has had to go through this with Vista, but I never realized it was this bad for some people. I just assumed that most people were whining about it because it was a Microsoft product.
And not only have I not had any problems, but in fact, there are several things in Vista that I am used to now that would make it hard for me to go back to XP. Number one is the search in the start menu. Being able to hit the windows key and then just type whatever I am looking for is pretty sweet. And it will find most anything, even e-mails and files. I use this feature several times a day. Another thing is that when I go to rename a file, it doesn't highlight the file extension, that really used to be annoying. Also, Vista is much better with multiple monitors, which both of my machines have. It is much better remember which monitors applications are on, and also can handle multiple resolutions better. Vista is also much better about resizing and moving applications when you remote into a box with a machine that has a smaller resolution or only one monitor. It moves and resizes all the applications and then puts it all right back where it was before. It also has a built in back-up application that can be automated through the command line and backs up your hard drive to a VHD file. It also has a built in screen capture tool which allows you to take full screen, window, free form, or square captures. I know there are probably a few other things that I'm not thinking of right now.
My only real complaint with Vista has nothing to do with the bugs (of which there are a few) or application compatibility, or stability, but with the fact that other than what I named above, there really isn't a whole lot in Vista that was compelling over Windows XP considering the 5 years of development time and the cost. I know that there was a lot of behind the scenes changes that have laid the groundwork for future versions of Windows, but that wouldn't have assuaged me if I had shelled out the huge amount of money that Microsoft is charging for Vista. My point is that Vista is not perfect, but not everyone out there is having a horrible experience with Vista. I really feel sorry for those who are having horrible experiences, and there is no excuse for the number of people who are having issues (at least it seems like a lot), but there are many of us out there who enjoy using Vista and truly are having no issues with it.
Posted on 12/11/2007 2:22:00 AM by Justin Etheredge
If you haven't read the last post first, please go check it out!
What started out as a joke turned into a huge success! So many awesome computer scientists and so little space! I started adding a few to the end of the last post, but when I realized how many more there were that needed to be added on, well, I decided to come back with more. This list is going to include a few less known people, a few that are famous (or infamous), and even a few that don't have a Y chromosome. The last 4 or 5 in the previous post were newly added, so go check those out if you saw the list before it changed!
In this post I tried to add a huge number of people that were suggested, but remember, they had to have a big beard, long hair, or in some other way look pretty gnarled. I gave a bit of leeway to the females, since they are genetically limited with respect to the whole facial hair thing. This list is also quite a bit longer than last time, so lets hope you can hold in there! Oh, and if anyone is curious, the last post has had just over 100,000 views and has eaten through about 80GB of bandwidth. This post is quite a bit larger and so I have moved all of the images over to Amazon S3. Let's see how that goes. Okay, enough blabbing, lets get this party started!
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...
"Maddog" Jon Hall - If you thought James Gosling had a bit of a "Santa" look to him, then you'll think that Jon Hall is Santa's long lost love-child. This grizzly lookin' dude is the Executive Director of Linux International, which is a non-profit that supports and promotes Linux. He was also the guy at DEC who got the hardware for Linus Torvalds to accomplish his first DEC Alpha port of linux. He also wrote the book Linux for Dummies.
The fantastic three...
Adi Shamir, Ronald Rivest und Leonard Adleman - Is it just me, or does Adi Shamir look like a young David Cross? Don't believe me? Just imagine more hair and a more full beard. Man that is creepy!
I don't know why that creeps me out. Anyways, these three dapper fellows are the inventors of RSA cryptography. Ever wonder where RSA came from? Yep, it is their last names (family name).
The computer trickster...
Manuel Blum - When he wasn't busy impersonating Tony Montana with his stylish white suits, he was doing groundbreaking work in Cryptography and much more recently was one of the people that coined the term CAPTCHA.
The Hawkeye...
Barbara Liskov - In her later years she lost the stylish eyewear, and therefore I had to use an earlier photo. If you think that her Harry Potter spectacles are amazing, just wait until you hear that she was the first woman to receive a computer science PHD. Oh, and she helped develop the first language with data abstractions. And the first distributed language. And she rocked the house.
Robin Milner - Not that Bob Saget isn't crazy, but this guy looks like he wants to eat your children. But only in this picture...I think. Beyond nibbling on little ones, he also developed the language ML which was the first language with type inference and influenced many functional languages that have come after it, notably Haskell. It also has several dialects in use today including OCaml and the recently released F#.
Speaking of the Yetti, errr, I mean Haskell...
Grizzly Adams (aka Philip Wadler) - Man, we have so many look-a-likes in this list! Good thing this isn't one of them. Cause I swear this guy is Grizzly Adams. Check it out...
I had to draw on the glass in order to really give the full effect. Otherwise it would be like the Clark Kent/Superman effect and you wouldn't see the resemblance. Plus I think it just adds a little something extra, don't you? Well, enough about his manly beard, this bear wrestler developed Haskell and more recently XQuery. So while he may be a wild man, he seems to have tamed his computer.
No woman, no cry...
Jaron Lanier - This guy goined the term Virtual Reality. Hmmm...I wonder what kind of reality he might have been in when he coined it. It doesn't matter I guess because he founded VPL Research and led the teams that developed some of the first multi-person virtual worlds that used head mounted displays! Oh, and to back up my earlier point, during college he was a "goat milk and cheese provider." Can you say hippie?
The rising Sun...
Bill Joy - When not tending to his Oompa Loompas he was busy working on BSD. He then co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and as they say, the rest is history.
Bill Gates - While his glasses and hair have gotten smaller, his wallet has become much larger. Here we see Bill in all of his Hunter S. Thompson glory after he was arrested for speeding and driving without a license. He founded a little company called Microsoft, which has many people wanting to see a grown up version of this picture.
The programming language pimp daddy...
Niklaus Wirth - This guy designed Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. His programming seed was spread to almost every language that you now know of. His seminal book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs inspired many computer scientists and is still used at many universities. So remember that face, there will be a quiz later.
Another one of them UNIX guys...
Brian Kernighan - Those UNIX guys love them some beards, don't they? This guy was at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (as seen in the last post) and contributed greatly to UNIX. He is also the "K" in AWK. Brian was also responsible for the name Unics, which was eventually shortened to UNIX. He also wrote the book on C programming, literally.
And from the "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES" department...
Dorothy Denning - Geez, the 70's sure did have some awesome eyewear. Where can I get some octagonal glasses these days? Nowhere, for shame. And that ring is also quite a statement. And did I mention the shirt? Nothing about this woman says "world renowned cryptographic expert" but that is exactly what she is. In fact, she was so respected in her field that she was one of the people that the NSA called in to review the Skipjack blog cipher. She has written several books, her most recent of which was Information Warfare and Security.
The knight of sorting...
C.A.R. Hoare - This guy developed the Quicksort, which was originally called the Hoaresort, and while it is still the most awesome sorting algorithm ever developed it would have been even more awesome if I could tell non-technical people that I was "Hoare Sorting" something. They would instantly think that my job was way more interesting than it is. We would probably also have a lot more Computer Science majors if one of the classes involved learning how to "Hoaresort". He is also the source of the quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Help me Obi-Wan...
Ada Lovelace - The first stand-in for Princess Leia...
See the similarities? Again, a little eerie. Well, they were both royalty after all. Ada Lovelace is widely considered to be the first programmer, since she wrote up a description of Charles Babbage's machine, the analytical engine, and then wrote a program for it to calculate Bernoulli numbers. She is also the inspiration for the programming language Ada which was used extensively by the U.S. DOD (Department of Defense) for many years.
Tarzan of the Apes...
Robert Tarjan - For some reason when I see Tarjan, I want to say "Tarzan". The irony here is that Tarzan was cleaner shaven than Robert Tarjan. The main difference is that while Tarzan was a chump, our friend Robert was a world renowned computer scientist who invented several graph algorithms and co-invented splay trees and Fibonacci heaps.
The chatty Cathy...
Jarkko Oikarinen - Again, sorry about the look-a-likes, but just try to tell me that this guy doesn't look like Andy Richter.
Separated at birth? I'll let you decide. Jarkko developed IRC which became the first open internet chat program. So next time someone interrupts your work with a "what you up to?" IM, just look to the sky and yell "Jarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkoooooooooooooooooo"!
Spreadsheet aficionado...
Dan Bricklin - There is just something about this guy's outfit...I can't put my finger on it. Nooooooo...wait....I see it! That yellow shirt peekin' out. He is totally a super hero. He runs into a phone booth, and bam, he comes running back out in a bright yellow suit with a big old calculator. Why a calculator you ask? Well, this guy wrote VisiCalc, the first commercially available spreadsheet application. Which was then promptly crushed by several other companies, but it could be said that he was responsible for the start of a huge push of PC's into the workplace.
The compressor...
Phil Katz - This guy is the inventor of the truly terrible computer person photo. I mean seriously, he looks like he is waiting for someone to start a stopwatch so that he can begin eating his stack of floppy disks. And he doesn't look too happy about it. But he also invented the zip file format and was the author of PKZip. Ever wonder where that PK came from? Well, now you know.
Someone please comment on this guy...
Jon Postel - Although he looked like he should be running moonshine and trying to avoid the po-po, he was actually the editor of the RFC (Request For Comment) document series. Yep, that RFC document series. The one that pretty much makes up all the standards on the internet. Without him there might not be any tubes and Senator Ted Stevens would probably have a little bit of self respect left.
Well, this is the conclusion of my second (and final) entry on this topic. Not that I don't like beards and programmers, but these posts are way too much work. :-)
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the post, please click on digg or reddit below and vote for it if you liked it!
Posted on 12/6/2007 1:53:00 AM by Justin Etheredge
The second part of this post is up, so after you finish reading, check it out!
I really want to know what it is about programming, or computers in general, that makes people want to grow a beard, have long hair, and dress like a slob. I can say these things without guilt because while I do not have long hair, I do have a beard and I do in fact dress like a slob. Not horribly sloppy or anything. I am actually pretty fanatical about hygiene, I just am not big on tucking my shirt in or ironing it or shaving. So who was the guy that started the unkempt programmer code of honor?
Was it this guy?
Edsger Dijkstra (most know for Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm) Here we see him in a suit and tie, but hey, he was born in 1930. All people wore a suit and tie back then, even women and children.
Or how about this guy?
Alan Kay - Doesn't he look like a sad Burt Reynolds? Stop laughing! This is one of the fathers of object oriented programming. All hail! He does have the mop and a nice 'stache going on though.
What about this one?
Bjarne Stroustrup - I would say that this looks like the kind of guy I would expect to see on a "wanted poster" somewhere, but this guy brought us C++! I couldn't talk trash about a guy who made C++.
And this one?
Charles Bachman - Nothing unkempt about this guy, except that hat! Damn son! He had a hand in early database technology and won the Turing award for his work.
The list keeps going...
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson - Are we programming here or going to a Hell's Angels meeting? But seriously though, being that I am a Microsoft programmer I'm not sure that I am supposed to like these guys. Dennis was the original developer of C and one of the core developers on UNIX while Ken was the man responsible for UNIX and the fact that I don't have to pay 8000 dollars for a copy of Windows since MS has some competition now. But seriously, these guys are gods.
One of my personal favorites...
John McCarthy - Long lost relative of Colonel Sanders and the original designer of the Lisp programming language. This guy had some serious programming cojones. He even predicted in 1961 that one day computer processing would be sold like a utility. That is the kind of prediction that makes Nostradamus look like a sissy. Again, not too terribly unkempt, but that crazy hair and beard mixed with the suit says "serious by day, party animal by night."
The A-list celeb:
Donald Knuth - If I have to explain what this guy did for computer science, then you need to stop reading this and go to the book store. Again, not an unkempt guy, but nothing says "Computer Programming God" like flannel. You really have to wonder where his beard or mustache is though. He is a real computer scientist, isn't he?
Cha-ching...
Martin Fowler - I'm not sure he should be in the list with some of these other guys, but he is a personal hero of mine, and man this picture is great. I could not have asked for a better example of this article if I had requested a picture from him. He has written quite a few books, of which Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture are my favorites.
And the freedom fighter...
Richard Stallman - Like him or hate him, he is a seriously influential person in the computer world, and again he looks like he'd fit in better at a wood chopping competition than at MIT, but who am I to judge? The man is the founder of GNU, need I say more?
And the fruit...
Steve Wozniak - What is a list of crazy computer people without Woz? He co-founded Apple (duh) and is the poster-boy for hippie style programming.
This one is a gem...
Yukihiro Matsumoto - I just threw this one in for the search engines. Just kidding! This the man that brought us Ruby and proves that even in the land of the rising sun, programmers still need beards. Or at least a five o'clock shadow.
By popular demand...
Larry Wall - This guy brought us Perl and sports a nice mustache and hair that would make Fabio jealous.
And I can't believe I left off this one...
Alan Cox - Holy crap. Alan Cox and Richard Stallman must have been long lost brothers. This guy was one of the earliest developers on the linux kernel and apparently has not shaved since he started.
The programming santa...
James Gosling - This guy brought us Java and is wearing a shirt with the java mascot playing an electric guitar. I have nothing else to say. I think I am out of smart-ass comments.
He's a cold hearted snake...
Guido Van Rossum - This guy brought us Python and he is seen here without his beard, but he has an afro that would make Snoop Dog smile.
I know I said Fabio before, but wow...
Grady Booch - This guy does commercials for Herbal Essences shampoo and in his spare time he invented UML. Oh, and he wrote a little book called Object Oriented Analysis and Design, you may have heard of it. :-)
And saving the best for last...
Justin Etheredge - How'd that tool get in there? His picture doesn't deserve to be in the same folder as these guys, much less in a list with them! Bah!
So there you have it, my totally incomplete list of bearded, long haired, casually dressed visionaries. Except that last one. Sorry, but I'm not sure how that last one got in there. Now what other field (except maybe physics) would accept these people, much less make them their idols. Got any other great pictures of any computer scientists/software engineers? Let us know in the comments.
Also, this list is clearly in jest, if you are offended by having your picture on here then please let me know and I will take it down. Just send the request in writing to me with a signed copy of your book/source/picture and a personal letter of recommendation. I will then dance because you have fallen victim to my trap.
And one final note, I can't believe you guys read this crap. :-) All this technology and what do we use it for? To make fun of the visionaries of our time. Man I love these here internets.
If you enjoyed it, go read part two!
Posted on 10/26/2007 11:49:22 PM by Justin Etheredge
I was going through the my usual feeds today and I came across this entry by Roy Osherove. It is about him leaving his current job and considering what is he going to do next with his life. (I definitely wish him all the luck in the world) The thing that really caught my eye was what you will see in the pic of the feed below…
Do you see what I am seeing? An ad for Castrol Syntec that tells us to “Take Your Ride on a Power Trip.” Now, I know that we have come a long way in the last few years with being able to try and detect context from web pages in order to display meaningful ads, but I do believe we still have a long way to go. I can’t tell you how many times I have been on digg.com and have seen ads for birth control. Now I supposed that most of the population on digg could be an *argument* for birth control, but certainly not a target for it. In this instance though, I believe it to be fairly obvious that this post contains the keyword “adventure” or “adventures” more than once. This combined with the term “leaving” seems to have triggered the ad system to display an ad for motor oil, which in terms of the context of the post seems to be a good fit, but it doesn’t fit the context of the site. In this case the context that we are sampling is too small or too constrained in order to be accurate.
On the flip side though, how many times have you seen this?
Before I point out the obvious first problem that they are showing an ad for power boats when it is almost November (let me know if I am wrong, but I would think the winter months might not be the best for power boating or boat purchasing in general), but what does this ad have to do with Slashdot (which this screenshot obviously came from, and if you didn’t know that you should be ashamed of yourself J)? I would like to think that there is some really deep link between geeks, gadgets, and power boats…but I’m just not too sure. I refreshed the page quite a few times and I saw ads for Dice.com, AMD, Rackspace, Tutor.com, Barracuda, and HP. Now all of these I can completely understand, even Tutor.com. From what I have heard about the demographic on most sites like this, this could possibly make good sense. But what about this ad? I can’t see anything obvious on this page that would trigger it, so lets look a bit further.
So I decided to run Slashdot (right away, to capture the same content that the ad was placed on) through the page analyzer tool over at Seoworkers.com to try and see what googles search engine/ad engine were seeing. The top keywords in anchor tags look like this…
There really isn’t anything here that points of in the right direction and so I looked next to the Keywords found in the alt tags on images. But since Slashdot isn’t an image heavy site, there really wasn’t anything at all useful there. So next I turned to keywords in general…
And, not really surprisingly, there isn’t anything that I can discern from this either. So, it appears that there is nothing related to boats, boating, engines, Honda, etc… anywhere in this site. Unless of course “Thursday” has a strong coorelation to click-throughs on boat advertisements. This appears to be a problem of a whole different sort from the one that we saw in the first section. Here there appears to us to be no context, but undoubtedly the google adsense engine has detected something in this page either historically or based on information that it has gathered from other sites in the same genre. The issue appears to be that the context may be too wide. As if they have gone fishing and cast their nets so far out that they are catching things they didn’t want to catch. Now *obviously* I could be wrong. There could be some very strong correlation between boating and geek sites. But my point is that from the context of the page there appears to be no link, so how do you know that the ads displaying on your site are properly targeting your audience?
P.S. On the other hand, the Honda ad is also seemingly targeting the engine and not the boat, but when you look at that ad all I see is an ad for a boat. But when you click on it, the ad takes you to a page at Honda’s site that shows off all of their technology. So, in this instance, it appears to be an issue with the ad’s content (or my perception of it) and not the actual target of the advertisement. Maybe I was looking a bit too far into Google’s adsense engine and maybe all the context we need is right in front of us. What do you think?