AlexHopmann.com

I’ve been a reader of Slate since way back a long time ago when they first figured out that they couldn’t charge subscriptions to the site. I’ve always found it to be a nice mix of news, eclectic interesting articles and opinion.

Lately they seem to be trying to chase the latest hot Internet trends by offering many of their articles as video under the brand “Slate V”. To me this effort falls totally flat. The type of mental place I’m in when I check in on Slate is not somewhere where I want to be having to listen to the audio and move along at the pace that they set. Now, I understand catering to different audiences, so if this is just a supplement to the existing content, fine. I also understand that sometimes pictures, video, or audio really are important to communicating the story. They have long had slide-shows (and video slide shows) for pieces where that fits. But it feels like many of the Slate V pieces are not available as normal text and would have been much better suited to sticking with that medium.

I’m continuing to use Launch21’s blog as a place to put posts that are more directly about writing code. Since I’ve been working with the Facebook platform late at night the past week I’m working on a set of posts on working with the Facebook APIs. They are all pretty new so there aren’t many resources yet on the Internet to help out so check it out if you are interested. My latest post is about FBML vs. IFrames for Facebook applications.

Some time back I posted suggesting that Google do a version of Google Maps with aviation charts. It looks like Sky Vector has done a pretty good job of this, although (for now) its only the VFR charts. I have to assume that whomever created this is local since they mention their favorite $100 hamburger destination is Friday Harbor, but the site has no data that I could find on the actual people involved.

In any case, good work, and I hope the site does well.

I finally discovered my talk on Maximizing Performance in Aircraft Engines available for your viewing pleasure on the web.

I’d forgotten how embarrassing it is watching a video of yourself… Also, sorry about the feedback at the end.

I’ve been giving some thought to upgrading one of my home RAID arrays lately. I currently have two 6-drive arrays attached to a single server via LSI MegaRAID SATA controller cards. One is using 250mb drives for 1.25gb capacity and the other is using 400gb drives for 2gb capacity. So far they have been operating fairly well.

While more capacity is nice, reliability is the most important thing. I bought that first array back in June 2004, which is just over 3 years ago. If I recall from the Google research on hard-drive reliability (ironic note- I couldn’t find the actual study with a quick Google, only lots of articles about it), age is one of the big factors towards failures, with lots of failures starting to happen when drives get to be about 3 years old.

So one question is about an upgrade process. I have lots of practice with simple usage of this array, at least enough to know not to pull multiple drives all at once. But to be honest I have not ever done anything complicated. Can I upgrade the drive size by just pulling the drives one at a time, replacing each with a bigger drive, waiting for it to rebuild until everything is balanced again?

Or is it much safer to copy everything somewhere else? This sounds like a pain since its 1TB, but then again with drive sizes now getting 1tb of free space somewhere else isn’t as hard as it used to be, just a bit slow.

Apple finally upgraded the Mac-Mini to a Core 2 Duo. The store is not back up yet so the full pricing and options are not available, but starting at $599 this seems like a potential great option for the display I’m working on for the kitchen. Of course I can use the fairly small Asus barebone I bought for that too so unless I have a problem with the Asus I’ll probably stick with that for now.

Slate has an article about how the airlines are seeing record profits while service is at an all-time low. I’d just like to add a few notes to the article.

The article points out that customers can blame others for their misery- the FAA, the TSA, and the weather. Except as far as I can tell the FAA air-traffic system is overall working really well. The airlines try to hype how much of a problem it is, but that is mostly because its their favorite excuse and they hope to make a grab to get other users of the airspace (small airplanes, other carriers) out of their way. As for the weather, it can sometimes be an issue when there are actual big storms, but its not the sort of thing that a well-run airline couldn’t accomodate for. Plus, I’ve caught airlines lying numerous times about either FAA traffic issues or weather as an excuse for late flights. If you are a pilot its not that hard to hear the gate agent blame one of those two for a delay, go sit down in your seat with a laptop and a wireless connection, and check for actual flow-control notices and/or weather issues. So far my experience is that about 50% of the time its a straight-out lie. I’m not saying that the gate agent knows that its a lie, but someone at the airline is spreading false information to pass the blame.

But the article’s main point is true- most people believe this stuff, so the airlines manage to dodge the blame for their mismanagement.

Of course to call it mismanagement in the technical sense would imply that its poor business for the company involved. The amazing thing with the screwed up situation with this industry is that the companies have managed to position themselves so that not only do they make big profits while treating the public like crap, but we also subsidize them to the tune of billions of dollars to do it. I guess when you put it that way, maybe it should be written up as a nice Harvard Business School Case Study “how to treat your customers like crap and make billions”.

My favorite example is what I realized American Airlines is doing with overbooking in my little incident with them. The article points up that the load factor (filled seats) has risen from 66% to 78% over the past decade. Handled correctly this is a good thing for everyone because it results in a more efficient economic system. The catch is that there are supposed to be protections in the system against the airlines pushing it too hard in their favor.

If they overbook an airplane and have to bump you, they owe you some money. So if they do it too much, they start to lose money. Except that American has realized that by causing passengers to miss their connections, even when its 100% the airlines fault, they get out of the bump fees. Everyone misses the flight they were booked on and winds up on the next flight, but with no rights to any compensation. The airline gets all the money from filling every seat in every flight, working their bizarre pricing schemes to maximize the pennies they wring out of every passenger.

And THAT is I guess what you would call good management. Hand out those big bonuses!

It looks like Intel is on track to ship the 45nm Penryn chips sometime in Q4 this year. I’m hoping that means October (2 months from now), not December (4 months from now), but I guess you never know. There are more details out on the improvements and I’m glad I’m waiting for the new workstation machine.

At the same time the Media PC is fully built except for the tuner and I’m very happy with it. The Q6600 quad-core 2.4ghz chip is plenty fast for what that machine needs to do and its 3x faster than any of my existing machines so I’m going to be using it as a workstation for the next couple of months until those Penryn chips actually release.

I’ll write up some more details on the build and the Zalman HD135 case soon. I got some step by step pictures. One thing I can mention write away is that the case is a lot deeper than I was really thinking. It is close to square- 17.5″ wide, 16.5″ deep. For my applications this should be fine (the place I want to put it has plenty of room behind), and it makes it fairly easy to lay things out since the drives do not overlap the motherboard at all. Its also a little thicker than I was thinking. While they advertise that its 135mm thick (HD135), its actually closer to 160mm, because it has little stands and the power-supply has a cut-out so it goes lower than the rest of the case. This is actually a good thing- I was a bit concerned when I unpacked the power-supply and thought it might not fit. As long as you have 160mm of space + a little extra room for exhaust, its a nice design.

From the biking trails at Whistler.

I’ve been playing with building apps for Facebook the last few days. Mostly it is going pretty well, but there are a couple of little issues I’ve been struggling with. I’ve noticed via email and comments that some of my posts about technical problems I’ve faced and solutions have been the most popular, so I’m going to try to keep up a good flow of these.

Their documentation doesn’t really have step-by-step explanations of what happens over the wire yet. I think all the details are there somewhere, but it took reading the PHP sources to fix some issue with the app I was building in .NET. The big issue is that the example sources showed doing a redirect when a user is first connecting to your app and hasn’t authenticated yet. However if the user is accessing you in the “canvas” (IE- inside Facebook), a normal HTTP redirect is NOT the right thing to do. Instead you need to return the FBML for a redirect-

Response.Write(”<fb:redirect url=’http://www.facebook.com/login.php?api_key=” + AppAPIKey + @”&v=1.0′/>”);

Another issue I hit is that it feels like I really need two accounts to test my application and its interaction with other users. I have not gotten notifications to work yet. The catch with this is there is a checkbox that hides your application from people other than yourself while you are developing it (’developer mode’). But while that checkbox is checked, my second account can’t access the app. So this is a bit of a catch-22.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that Facebook won’t let me be signed in from more than one computer at a time. I typically am using 2-4 computers at once and really appreciate that most of the Google sites, GTalk, and others let me be signed in all over and they just work. Its a real pain when testing stuff that whenever I use a different computer to access Facebook it makes me sign in again.