22

Jul

My new Dell Mini 10v: The First Day

Since I haven’t bought a laptop in over 3 years, I decided to follow the trend and pick up one of the ultra-portable notebooks / netbooks.   After reading some reviews, I picked up this Dell Mini 10v.  It arrived today, only seven days after I placed the order via a Dell Chat.

Rather than offering an extensive review, I wanted to share some first thoughts.

Arrival

I was extremely happy to find out that the packaging it was shipped in was both secure and minimal: very few things came in the box, and the box itself was small enough to hold with one hand.  The Mini 10v doesn’t have a DVD drive, but it came with a copy of Windows XP and the restore disks anyways.  Hurray!  That fact got a few chuckles in the office.

The AC adapter is not a brick, but instead, looks like my Nokia cell phone charger!  Very nice.  Those brick monsters with two cords make portable laptops oxymoronic.

First Boot

The Mini 10v I ordered came with Windows XP SP3.   I use XP at home and at the office, so it’s cool, but I’m wondering what happened to Vista.  Where is my voucher for Windows 7?  This is an eight (8!!) year old Operating System.   I will be looking into the Ubuntu 9 Netbook Remix very shortly.

The netbook doesn’t come with Microsoft Office unless you’ve installed it, but I’m very glad to have Microsoft Works with the Office 2007 compatibility pack installed by default.  But this is insane: Internet Explorer 6.  IE6 is the default browser – the broken one circa August 2001.  I honestly feel like I’ve been cheated, and need to speak to someone at Dell about it.

More immediately, some fixable things were show-stoppers:

  • The “function keys”, (Fn-F7 to mute, for example) were not installed.  This took me a while to figure out, I just thought they weren’t responding or something.   After navigating the Dell website, I found the utility (or via FTP) and installed it.  Very bad form, Dell.
  • Windows is installed with 120dpi fonts by default on the Mini 10v.  I love this font setting on my big LCD monitor at home or at work, but on the 1024×576  screen, this is bad news.  Most notably many dialogs cut off on the bottom.  In the Dell Wireless utility I could not press “Apply”, “OK”, “Cancel” without blindly pressing Tab and Enter.  So after changing the font size to 96dpi, and restarting, the dialogs became useful again.
  • The preference for “Large  Icons” out of the box is … questionable given the small screen. Cranking down the icon size is available in the Display Properties.

Hardware

Out of the box, the hardware looks and feels way slicker than I expected it to.  It doesn’t suffer from the same “hollow rattle” as some of the old Dell laptops I’ve owned or used; it feels solid and well put-together. The screen hinges particularly stand out as being hard-effing-core.  Having three USB ports is pretty great.

My only concerns are about the touchpad and the screen glare.  The screen is shiny.  I mean SHINY.  I’m sitting here between two other laptops and my LCD, and the Mini 10v is a mirror compared to the other devices.  Hopefully this subsides over time and fingerprints.

More seriously, clicking touchpad buttons is straight up frustrating.  The touchpad looks great, and the material is nice.  Akin to the Apple touchpad, there are no segregated buttons,  and clickable areas are in the bottom right and bottom left.  This sounds great, but the execution is poor (and perhaps can be improved with some driver tuning).   Once you move your finger over to the bottom left to “click” you inevitably end up moving the cursor about a third of the time.   If I do the tasks seperately, it works fine .. but when navigating normally, it’s a constant bother.

Performance

One small note about performance: coming from full-powered dual core machines, going to netbooks is an adjustment.  One recommendation I ignored is splurging for the 2GB upgrade.  I immediately regret that decision.  Do it: buy the 2GB of RAM.

The wireless performance with the Interl (802.11n) adapter is really great, and better (in terms of -db readings) than with my 2 year old, full size Dell Inspiron.

If you do have 2GB of RAM, turn off the page file.    I’ve noticed this is particularly great on laptops that crawl if the 5400RPM mini-drive trird to page a few hundred megabytes of stuff.  I turned off the page file on my 1GB Mini.  It’s noticably more responsive when switching between applications (Firefox, Messenger, and Microsoft Works, for now), but this puts an aggressive cap on the work that you can do simultaneously.

More to come!

1032 days ago Short URL 7 Comments

Software Development

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23

Mar

Techno-update: Feedly, Twt.fm, and Super-Cache

Newsfeeds were all the rage a few years ago when the news agencies and blog platforms started syndicating content this way.  For the most part any blog, newspaper, TV station, or anyone who needs to syndicate a stream of information (articles, posts, comments, scores, etc.) has done so using RSS or Atom.  This is great, but there is a lot of concern about how useful and usable newsfeeds are to the average web citizen.

Feedly: A great news aggregator

Like most people I find myself going to the same six or so places on the Internet for news every day:   Digg, Yahoo Sports, IHT, CSMonitor, Globe and Mail, and so on (BAM,  roasted Sarah Palin)   All of them have RSS feeds (the little orange icon ).  Rather than having to visit page individually to decide if I want to read the articles, I can aggregate their newsfeeds to a single place.  As far as what that “single place” is, there has been a LOT of competition:  My Yahoo!, Google Reader, Sage, etc.

Of all of these tools, my favourite by far is Feedly.  It’s an add-on for Firefox (sorry Internet Explorer users, you have other options I’m sure).   It allows you to (with a single click within Firefox) to add a feed to your own custom little magazine landing page.  Usually RSS readers make your landing page look like an email inbox.  The layout makes it very readable, and the simple category support is easy to use.  From their website:

Feedly weaves your favorite content into a magazine-like start page. Based on Google Reader, Twitter and Firefox. Insanely Well Integrated.

Feedly Screenshot

Feedly Screenshot

As a side note, I love when developers of software have really interesting developer blogs, especially with posts about use cases and new features.

Twitter Music

I’ve been twittering up a storm, kinda.  On Monday, some people participate in #Musicmonday, which means they twitter about a song they would like to share with the world.  This is great, but in order to listen to the song you’d have to track it down.  So as a courtesy, the good people at twt.fm have built a web app to tweet your #musicmonday song with a link to either the complete track or a preview (whichever is available on imeem).  There are alternatives to this setup, some much more established.

twt.fm (its a little prettier now ..)

twt.fm (it's a little prettier now ..)

WP Caching (after 2005)

Now something for those of you who run your own blogs on your own servers. WordPress has been a wonderful blogging platform, especially since they added automatic downloading and installing of plugins!  One of the plugins I’ve battled with in the past has been WP-Cache.  No new version since 2005.

Nobody told me, but now there is WP-Super-Cache, and it fixes much of the disagreements I had with WP-Cache. From the authors blog:

WP Super Cache version 0.9.1 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website. Major changes under the hood in this release, and many bugfixes.

1153 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Software Development

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13

Mar

Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner on the chaos and rewards of open source

On March 4th TorCHI hosted Mike Beltzner (blog) who is the Director of Development at Mozilla, though he prefers to call himself the “phenomenologist.”  His talk focused on how Mozilla has harnessed the power of the open source community to build Firefox: managing the chaos of open source and have good ideas rise to the top.

I’d like to share some of the notes from his talk, as I have a feeling I’ll be going back to them in a few years when I’m an open source superstar.

Listening to People

When you have an open source project, your developers aren’t your work friends and users aren’t people you can call.  Thus there have to be very well defined and implemented listening channels.  Examples of which are (from lowest fidelity to highest):  crash reports, form-based feedback, bug-trackers, wiki’s, forums, IRC. All are important.

Ideas on voting:  in open source projects, voting (“+1!”) works as a great pacifier. It can be used to measure impact, severity, and interest, but should not steer what is of primary importance (or really used to make any important decisions on things).

Designing by/for People

Despite the fears and chaos, design-by-community has rarely steered Mozilla wrong.  Though it may be chaotic, the community has very strong and hierarchical leadership. Through effective leadership, good design ideas rise to the top.  More on that later.

Design-by-community is very different from, say, what Apple does.  Apple has one persona: Steve Jobs.  That’s great as long as Steve doesn’t miss any ideas (which he will), and if he doesn’t love things that aren’t all that super-great (Cover Flow).  Apple doesn’t have a succession plan for Steve.

Gave great example of the development of the UI features involving closing tabs in Firefox. Ultimately he admitted that Google Chrome got it right, Mozilla got 80% of the way there, as per normal :-)

Organising the Chaos

Expect chaos in open source.  Managing chaos begins with managing the design, rather than the code itself.   In any design decisions, opposite camps form very quickly – especially spurred on by half-finished designs being released as Alpha products.

To manage this chaos, you have to infuse some order.  First point of order is having a public and well defined road-map or a cheat-sheet of where the product is going.  Then build the product in layers, and introduce every major change as an Add-On first.  Educate contributors about “why” things are happening.

Discussions should be supported by research and data (possible cross-over with academia here, especially for people looking for small M.Sc. projects).

Disagreements ultimately end in negotiation, but never forget BATNA .. what’s the worst that will happen (typically “Screw you guys, I’m going to Opera”).  No you won’t.  And if you really disagree with the design change, write an add-on to correct it (yey!).

Leadership and Playtime

You need to identify and elevate in importance people who are “good” contributors – reward them with ownership of small modules in their expertise domain. Form small teams with well defined scopes of responsibility.  The leadership of these teams can be concentrated around these good contributors.

The modules of code are led and owned in a heirarchical manner. Ultimately, someone is the sole owner of the whole thing.  In the case of Mozilla, it’s Mike Connor (youtube) from Toronto, who is kinda hilarious.

Give your contributors complete and absolute freedom to explore the system.  They will reward you with neat things like add-ons to inject random stanzas of poetry into web pages, and localised versions of your product.

Localisation as more than Translation

This came out of the discussion portion, but he spent a great deal of time discussion on the localisation challenges involved with marketing Firefox in China.  He wrote extensively about it on his blog.

The bottom line is that localisation has to be more than translation: it involves studying the interaction of the people with the product, and changing the design of the browser.  Not the technical core of the browser – you should be able to adjust all necessary behaviours and design via add-ons. Discussed how Maxthon benefitted by being included on a very popular pirate build of Windows.

Lesson here is that customisation via add-on’s is ultimately key to solving many design problems.

1163 days ago Short URL Comments

Software Development

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28

Apr

How to get invited to Web 2.x betas

It seems that the most interesting up-and-coming web applications go through a private, invitation-only beta phase before being launched to the public. This was certainly the case with Google Mail, the Yahoo! Mail do-over, and one service that I’m particularly interested in: grono.net. Unfortunately, none of my friends or relatives use that service, so getting an invitation isn’t likely.

There’s obviously a need here that needs to be filled: begging strangers for invitations to web beta’s. I’ve found a few places to share invitations, but by far the most beautiful and appealing is InviteShare.com. What a gorgeous, well-thought-out design.

Continue reading →

1482 days ago Short URL Comments

Software Development

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01

Mar

Alternatives to WP-Cache

After spending far too much time trying to get WP-Cache2 plugin to work on a very vanilla WordPress installation, I’ve given up on it.

I’m sure it’s super amazing when it does work, but in my experience as a competent *nix user, it’s difficult to get working/debug (and silly to remove because of this stupid symbolic link that many FTP clients can’t remove).

1 Blog Cacher

Anywho, I started hunting for alternatives, and the one that I installed successfully (and confirmed working) on the first try is 1-Blog-Cacher.

Installation

The installation was NOT simple, at least not compared to WP-Cache. I followed these instructions:

  • Create the cache directory /wp-cache/ in your WordPress directory (/wp-cache/) and make it writeable (chmod 777).
  • Upload 1blogcacher2.0.php file to /wp-content/plugins/ WordPress directory (/wp-content/plugins/1blogcacher2.0.php).
  • Upload advanced-cache.php file to /wp-content/ (/wp-content/advanced-cache.php).
  • Add this line to the wp-config.php file (/wp-config.php): define(‘WP_CACHE’, true);
  • Activate the plugin and take a look to «Options > 1 Blog Cacher» in the WordPress panel.

… and there were helpful prompts in the Options panel if I forgot something. Changing the settings isn’t simple, as you have to open up the advanced-cache.php file with a text editor, and re-save/re-upload it when you want to make a change.

But anyways, it works.

1539 days ago Short URL Comments

Software Development

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