Ben Galbraith’s Blog

My last two upgrades have not gone well. My upgrade to Vista has resulted in a machine that spontaneously reboots three or four times a day. My upgrade to the MBP 17″ has resulted in a machine that because of various problems needs to be restarted about once a day — hard-restarted (i.e., not saving your work kind of restart).

The Vista machine isn’t mission critical, so I deal with it. Its relatively old hardware, and its a new Microsoft OS, so it comes with the territory (though is stable on WinXP and Win2k).

But my Apple? Man, this is killing me. Just yesterday, I unplugged the laptop from the display and went into another room to work. The laptop was closed while driving the external monitor, and when I went to open it, the display never came up.

And today, whilst doing a half-dozen things, the UI just dead-locked. And stayed that way for five minutes before I gave up.

And two days ago, it didn’t wake from sleep. And so on.

This has fast gone from an annoyance to a real problem.

Dion wrote about Enso, a product which I would eagerly use if I were on Windows more than 1% of my time (though Vista makes that 1% much more pleasant — when it’s not blue-screening; ahem). I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Aza Raskin at the last Ajax Experience and seeing an Enso preview. I’ve been a fan of Jef Raskin for many years, chatted with him on the phone for a few minutes back in 2002, and signed up to help him implement his humane editor in Python — though I never did contribute any code.

I got a kick out of the Enso team’s latest blog entry which describes their “quasimodal” preference setting. As I suspected, Googling this term puts Enso at the top of the list. Kind of funny that a usability company has to invent a new word to describe “holding down the key.”

Glenn Vanderburg posted an interesting anecdote on a mailing list we’re on a few weeks back, and I’m very happy to see it posted on his blog today. A great illustration of pragmatism trumping methodology. Give it a read.

It took some of us (e.g., me) longer to arrive at the party than others, but I thought there was now general consensus that XML makes for a poor programming language, with Ant being the vehicle by which most of us in the Java community learned that lesson. (I’d link to Duncan’s essay but am too lazy to find it since the original disappeared).

And now, Chris Anderson (the WPF architect at MSFT aka ChrisAn, not the Wired Magazine guy) thinks “XAML [is] a better C#“. I know Chris and respect him, but err… not quite sure where you’re going with this one, Chris.

When Adobe donated their JIT-compiling JavaScript VM to the Mozilla Foundation in Nov. ‘06, it had some pretty huge implications. The VM boosted Flash’s own JavaScript execution speed by 10x — seeing those kinds of improvements in Firefox could enable a whole new class of “thicker” web applications. So, when will we see it? And, why did Adobe donate the code?

Over at Ajaxian, I just posted a ~30 minute podcast exploring this issue, featuring interviews with Brendan Eich (CTO, Mozilla), Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect, Adobe), Alex Russell (Dojo Lead), and many others. I had a lot of fun recording the interviews and editing this together, but I probably spent a little too much time doing it.

I’m interested in knowing if folks enjoy this kind of “feature” podcasts that involve more of a narrative than traditional monologue or interview podcasts. They take a lot of time to produce, but I kind of like having the information dense and relevant to a particular subject…