duuuh

Dear foursquare,
don't I give you my location with each check-in anyway??

Firefox Sessionstore

As I mentioned in my previous post  "Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?", I managed to get FF8 to behave "normal" again by manually resetting the session store.

In order to learn more about the session store I did some googling...and found several interesting parameters in the FF config.
Check here for a list.

One that might be of particular interest is that you can specify the interval for FF to save the sessions into the session store with browser.sessionstore.interval; the default (in FF8) is 15 seconds, which seems ok... not too frequent, but still enough to capture your sessions...
Might be fun to play around with his; e.g. move it down to sub-second level in order to totally ruin your PC performance :-)
or increase it to 1minute or more and see if it is still useable then, in terms of session-state captured...

Moving

No worries,  this is only about my home PC.

I finally moved off my 8.5 year old 1.2GHz [1] single core 1GB RAM Windows XP machine to 4core Windows 7.

Well it first had Vista on it, and hardly anything worked (try DB2 for a start), then I decided to go Windows 7 before I do most of the migration, so I won't have to re-do everything again.

I have to say, Win7 is really a nice product... especially compared to Vista, but after only a week, I started to prefer it over XP as well. And compatibility is great, all of those nice little tools I had on XP work fine here as well.

And finally I got some RAM and clock cycles to work with... Android development (esp the emulator) is a lot easier now... :)

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[1] or so, I don't even care enough to check this

Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?

I'm running Firefox 8 now since it came out last week.

Not only did I find it to be slow (compared for both, FF7 and Chrome), but also a real memory hog.
~800MB on my work laptop, with only 6 tabs open, and really not responsive at all.

FF7 and earlier never had more than 300-400 MB (roughly) on that machine - with the same tabs and apps open, and the same extensions installed. So this was odd.

Especially start-up was a catastrophe.

Then, yesterday, I got the slow-script warning for sessionstore.js.

Well that about just did it for me ...

I went to my profile directory[1], and found a sessionsstore.js with more than 3MB.
I renamed it, restarted FF... of course with none of the pinned app-tabs open, because I took the session store away... But that's what I wanted.

I manually re-established my pinned app tabs, and voila
FF8 now was back to using 250MB, and the sessionstore.js was around 200kB

So - fixed for now. I think I had the session store build up for more than 1 year now and never cleared it (and quite frankly, why should I). So maybe cleaning it once might really fix the problem, and FF8 is not such a memory hog after all - or maybe it will be back after a couple of months...

Let's see, how this progresses from here...

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[1]  can be found in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

New Dropbox release

Awkwardly Dropbox (of all services) does not have a notification for a new release. Well, a new one is out - 1.2.48 for Windows. I guess, this is to support the new Dropbox for Teams. Anyway, since there is no notification, I took the task to tell y'all :) Download Dropbox

Thunderbird 8 and Lightning 1.0

So, 2 days ago Thunderbird 8 has been released.

The major changes are:

• more restrictive handling of extensions/add-ons, especially those that come from other apps... those will be disabled by default... Thunderbird Installer will guide you through this.

• keyboard short-cuts for the various search options have been changed.

While it has been Ctrl-F for both, the Find within the current message and the QuickFilter for the current folder, it is now

• Ctrl-F for Find (within the current message)
• Ctrl-Shift-K for the QuickFilteron on the folder
• and Ctrl-K is unchanged for the global (indexed) search.

Took me 2 days to get accustomed to the Ctrl-Shift-K.
Well, almost. Not entirely. But I'll manage.

Also I had to "manually" upgrade 3 add-ons that were not declared compatible with TB 8, because no-one cared to update their install.rdf in the XPI file... quite cumbersome... See my rant earlier this year.

Ah, yes, and Lightning finally made it to official release 1.0 ... after years of beta.

Save icons

Is there any reason - except for convention or tradition - that icons for the Save action are still a 3.5" diskette symbol?

Will today's kids actually understand this?
And when was the last time you saved anything to a "floppy" disk?

They joy of forgetting your Kindle at home

Yesterday I was on a business trip in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and wanted take my Kindle with me to continue reading the Jobs bio. However, in the hotel I noticed, that I forgot.

No problem... take the iPad, start the Kindle app, sync to the furthest point read... and continue reading.

And tonight, I'll sync again on my Kindle an continue where I left on the iPad yesterday.

Still, the reading experience is a lot better on the Kindle than on the iPad, but occasionally, when there's no Kindle around, it is sufficient.

Finally someone publishing calendar data

Baby steps, baby steps... both to proper publishing of calendar data and to open data in government/administration.

The municipality of Vienna publishes the calendar of public school holidays for this year as an iCalendar file... (here at
Schulferien in Wien im Schuljahr 2011/2012; German only).

For non-nerds they go so far as to explain what an ICS file is: "for integration with e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Ical or  Google Calendar".

Nice.
Let's hope this is not a one-time, static file for 2011/2011 only, but will become a stream of school holiday data...

Thanks, Martin, for the pointer.

Remember the Milk - new feature

When I moved to an Android device earlier this year, I decided to fully use Remember the Milk (RTM) as my task/todo management tool.

Mainly because
a) stock Android does not have any such tool
b) it is available on the Web (read: PC), on iOS (my iPad) and my Andoid mobile...
There are a lot of plug-ins and other integration methods into other tools as well, listed here.[1]

For the web browser there's a "quick add" bookmarklet that allows you to easily add a web-page to your task list as well.

I was missing exactly this feature for the mobile, so I asked in the support forum for this. Android has the architecture for this, the android.intent.action.SEND intent. All apps implementing/exposing this, will be listed in the "Share" or "Send to" option of the browser and other apps that support this.

Now the feature has been implemented in the latest release of RTM app for Android. And I only noticed because all of a suddent "Remember the milk" turned up in the "Share" menu of the browser.

So: Kudos to the Remember the Milk team for picking up my suggestion and implementing it. Excellent support.

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[1] There's also a Thunderbird/Lightning plug-in as well, but that does not really work with Lightning 1.0 and is no longer supported.

Public Parts - Finished

So I finally managed to finish Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.

The book starts (and ends) with a couple of excellent observations and thoughts on privacy versus publicity... and also how those two concepts came to be.

Good read... but if you know Jeff Jarvis' blog and other statements already, this will not be news to you. Also he devoted too much space on essantially a re-cap of his earlier book What Would Google Do?

I still highly recommend both books.

Nokia did it again...

They still manage to surprise me. Just unsubscribed from one of their newsletters...

Guess what, it will only take them "up to 14 days before" the remove me from their mailing list.

How to build up a 1000+ € phone bill..,

... without you knowing.
And no roaming.
Or doing anything different ... compared to the previous month.

This is what just happened to a friend of mine:
She learned from their operator that she ran up a 900€ data bill, and the month (i.e. billing cycle) was not even over.
Did she have an app running, that kept data open? No.
Did she have a video running in the background? No. [1]
But she did have a 15MB email in her outbox that could not be sent for days.

The email app (on the iPhone) was trying every 3 minutes.
Could be tracked down with the operator's help.

My guess: it failed, because the mail server (or mta) did not let it send a 15MB+ email...
So it kept retrying, without any chance to succeed.

Simple math:
3 minutes a day = 20 times an hour = 480 times a day

Lets just say it successfully transmits only 1MB before the error[2], that's still 480MB ~~ 1/2GB a day.
Continue for a week or so, and you have 3.5GB... and through the 3GB ceiling and you hit the area where it gets really expensive.

And she really did not do anything wrong. Claimed that there was no error message, from the mail-app... And why should there, it kept retrying anway...

Well, the operator in an act of humanity - or to avoid the negative publicity of a court case - found a way to help here. But only because it totally breaks her data pattern until then.

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[1] The operator really asked this... no pun.
[2] unlikely, it probably occurs after a lot higher transfer volumn, so those are best case numbers.

My Kindle Experience So Far

I have read a couple of books on my Kindle so far. Here's what I found out:

1. The Kindle is an excellent reading device. The e-ink display has the perfect contrast for reading... Once you started reading on a Kindle (or just looking at it) you'll never ever consider reading a book on the iPad again. Trust me.
   Not surprisingly, the display/e-ink quality was my reason for buying a Kindle:
   My actual craving for this device started on the tube in London, when I first got a glimpse at a kindle of a fellow passenger. My first thought was "This is a mockup". Honestly. I really thought someone just glued some paper on some dark carton, before I realized this was the real thing. (Well, the real kindle... not real paper).
2. Buying books for the Kindle is - of course - even more instant than buying a paper-book on Amazon (which is still amazingly simple). It's a matter of seconds.
3. That said, I still browse for books and buy them from my PC/Laptop. I do this very rarely on the Kindle directly. The userinterface and "browser" speed there is simply not suitable for this. It's a reading device after all. Not a tablet or a PDA.
4. Sharing books - forget it.
   With my wife working in a book store, we share a lot of books. It was quite common that I picked up a book which she just had finished (reading). Well, it's different now on the kindle, because I would have to share the device with her..
   So while I'm reading book A (on the Kindle) she of course cannot read book B (on the same Kindle). This used to work pretty well with real books :)
   Maybe she should get her own Kindle[1].
5. Privacy
   When you read a book - say - on the underground, everyone can see what you're reading. This could be embarrassing... depending on your choice of books. With a Kindle, no one knows what you read.
6. Publicity
   As I just said, with a Kindle, no one knows what you read.There's no visible/public bookshelf - in your home. So you cannot brag with your library. Most of us judge people by their library, in a way. And really, browsing the backs of the books on a friend's bookshelf sometimes gives excellent conversations and recommendations. This will have to work differently with a Kindle. You will have to ...
7. ... share
   So if you want to have the publicity about your reading habits, about your library, you'll have to do this actively, like in a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, on Goodreads. You'll even have a bigger audience there.
8. As for the act and experience of reading itself. NO DIFFERENCE.
   We'll maybe for books with illustrations :-)
   But when it comes to being able to concentrate, or (not) getting distracted, or getting tired... no difference to a real book. I came to prefer the Kindle over books when it comes to the shape and how you hold the thing... it's lighter (in most cases), there's no clumsy page turning (as with thick books), ...

Don't get me wrong; I still LOVE real books. And I still read them... (see the problem with sharing above). But there is nothing to be said against the Kindle. 

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[1] yeah right... like booksellers would buy a Kindle...

Non-hash-tags

So dear Google+, kudos for finally making hash-tags link to the respective search, i.e. allowing # as a keyword marker, like Twitter.

... BUT...

... there are some pretend-hash-tags, that really aren't.  Sometimes a has is just a hash...

Like in
#define
#include
(for the geeks among us)
or #1 #2 ... (again in geek terms #\d+)

But still better to have the link to a pointless search than not have the link at all.

Kudos.

Quoting

Is it really ok to fully quote an article from someone else as your blog post and then just add a "Source: xyz.com" at the end? (In a much smaller font even)
I say no.

But if you do, then you have to cope with the criticism you receive, and you cannot just say "I'm only quoting xyz."

Icecream sandwich approaching?

It seems like the majority of my Android apps from the Android/Google marketplace have been updated during the last couple of days. Some it seems on a daily basis.... This can only mean, that everyone is getting ready for Icecream sandwich... Right?

Meaningful error messages

This calls for a new series:

Excellent presentation on Cloud Computing

Ok, this is a bit old (OSCON 09) but still easily the most fun and solid presentation about Cloud Computing:


Found it via the IT Conversations podcast.

Flight Search - Hipmunk

If you ever wanted to know how fast a search for flights can actually be, try Google Flights. Only US for the time being ... but this is really fast.

But what I really wanted to show is, how flight search results can be presented... Try Hipmunk.

Cool overview; excellent timeline; nice and helpful coloring. Check the above image (click to enlarge)

Also: redundant flights are being masked out, i.e. flights with the same time but different number (code sharing), or just a higher price - but you can unhide them with the dropdown to the very right.

I have yet to search a real-life flight for me to be able to judge it, but it looks promising indeed.
Also available for iPhone and iPad and Android. Granted, on sub-tablet form factors[1] this is less helpful than on PCs and tablets.

Most importantly: it got an animated chipmunk.


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[1] formerly known as smart phones.