Binary Balance

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my ISP to tell me the email account attached to my ISP plan had been broken into and was being used to send spam. They understandably were forced to change the password on my account and called to let me know what had happened. This marks the first time in my relatively long history of Internet use that I’ve had an account broken into and it was something of a wakeup call for me. Read more...

Late last year, I wrote a post entitled ‘Is it time to chrome my web browsing?’ wherein I took a look at how Chrome stacked up in comparison to Firefox, specifically in relation to the Firefox Add-ons that I used and could not do without. At that time, I decided that – for me – the day was not yet ripe for a move.

Fast forward to ten months later and the situation has changed. For the last four months or so, I’ve been trialling Chrome as my default web browser for both day-to-day browsing and development. Enough time has passed now that I can say with some certainty that I won’t be going back. And it seems that I am not alone as Chrome is set to overtake Firefox as the second most popular browser before the end of this year. Read more...

For what amounts to a long time in the short history of the Internet, Google has been a synonym for large scale. I vaguely remember a quote from a Google employee who – when talking about their work and just how early they need to start thinking about scaling a system up – said something like ‘One day you get something kind of working and the next day you have 5000 users’¹. There’s not many places where a developer is forced to deal with scaling issues basically from the very beginning of a project. Google developers must scoff at warnings about premature optimisation.

The amount of data that Google stores for people and about people is impressive, mindboggling, constantly growing and more than a little scary. The launch of Google+ adds a new dimension that depending on your perspective, could exponentially add to the scariness factor of the information Google is keeping on us.

Every now and again a horror story will come along which deftly highlights the fact that ‘customer service’ and ‘Google’ appear to be mutually exclusive concepts, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Accounts disabled, important data or one’s entire online identity lost, with no recourse. Certainly #FirstWorldProblems if ever I’ve heard one, but none the less I don’t think calling them horror stories is an exaggeration. Read more...

I watched the video of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address from RubyCon 2010 the other day. It was unapologetically pro-Ruby, and delivered with the flair and showmanship that has made DHH and 37Signals the polarising force that they are. Being quite fond of Ruby, I found myself nodding along to most of what David had to say. But I don’t wish to add even a small amount of new fuel to the programming language wars that seem to go on endlessly around the place. The purpose of this post is not to join in on any Ruby circle-jerking.

One of the things that particularly stood out to me in DHH’s keynote was a quote from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language:

The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil. This is a great quote and it rings very true for me. Along with some other parts of David’s address, it got me to thinking about how the uniformity that we enforce in other aspects of life in order to minimise the potential for evil may also be minimising the potential for good. Read more...

I remember when I first heard of Google’s new browser, dubbed Chrome. I was sitting at my desk at work, reading the news and for a moment I thought I could almost hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth emanating from clear across the other side of the world at Redmond.

There were some obvious wins for Chrome right out of the gate. Independent processes for tabs meant that if a page crashed it wouldn’t take down the whole browser with it. Security was also enhanced with this model of tab isolation, if I remember correctly. There was the V8 JavaScript engine, tests by Google in September 2008 showed that JavaScript execution in Chrome was about three times faster than Firefox 3.0 and about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7. There was some debate over the real world applicability of these results, but little doubt that Chrome was kicking ass at JavaScript. A modern browser made to support the quickly burgeoning age of JavaScript heavy web applications. Read more...

I’ve been working in the web industry for about a decade now. My first job was customer facing technical support for an ISP, but I soon moved towards web design and development.

Throughout my life and career, I’ve never kept a blog (until now). I almost exclusively posted on forums, mailing lists, chatted on IRC etc. under a pseudonym. I stopped really even thinking about it, it became just the way I rolled.

I only created a Facebook account in late 2007 mainly to see what all the fuss was about and to appease a friend who wanted to initiate me into the Transformers Archive. I got onto Twitter in early 2009. I suspect that I created a LinkedIn account only last year also. So what’s the reason for this impressively late uptake of some of the most popular online social networking sites, especially for a person who works with the web every day? Read more...