AlexHopmann.com

Dave posts about some great airline experiences and it doesn’t surprise me that the airlines involved are Southwest and Jet Blue. There is this great opportunity for up and coming airlines that emulate these guys to take over and provide a great, efficient air travel system for our country. The main thing holding this back is the lobbying efforts of the old guys. The old guys grew up under the old system of regulated air travel and while they adapted once the industry was deregulated, they never figured out how to escape the trap of their old business models that were based on charging 10x fares to last minute and business travelers compared to everyone else. They also appear to be stuck in a fundamentally hostile management/labor relationship and the combination results in the bizarre poor service that we all see.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about a movement to create a passengers bill of rights. This appears to be driven by people who are focused on the incidents where they have been trapped in airplanes sitting on the ground for 5+ hours. My feedback would be that there are some good ideas in this movement, but they are missing the bigger picture. Passing new rules that protect passenger rights is putting a band-aid on the gushing wound. What we need to do instead is to stop subsidizing the old-style airlines and let the bad ones fail. In the mean time we need to provide good customer information on how the airlines are doing and try to remove some of the restrictions that are holding them back. I understand Southwest still deals with some bizarre rules about flights into and out of Texas, and if you look at the pain that Virgin America went through to get permission to fly in the US, its just a shame. Another great move would be to pursue a more consistent energy policy that helps the airlines have more predictable fuel prices. One of the cornerstones of Southwest’s strong business performance over the past decade is that they did a great job of locking in fuel prices before they went swinging all over. In theory the government could be helping provide this kind of stability for the whole industry and even making it available to new entrants in the market.

I bought an extra 2GB for the “media center” box that I’m using as a workstation at the moment. With the quad-core CPU there is plenty of horsepower for running virtual machines which are useful for all sorts of development purposes. But RAM quickly becomes a limiting factor and I wanted more than my existing 2GB.

So I order a pair of high quality RAM from NewEgg, put them in the other two slots and.. Nothing. The machine won’t POST. The power light comes on, but nothing- no beep, no video, nothing diagnostic that I can see to help figure it out.

Ok, maybe the new RAM is bad. I pull it out, pull the old ones out and put the new ones in by themselves. Works fine. Hmmm. I tried a BIOS upgrade and several other things but so far no luck.

The only hint I can find online is that I might want to try increasing the voltages to the RAM. Since I don’t know what “normal” is this scares me a bit to be honest. Any other thoughts? Each pair works on its own, each is a matched pair, PC6400 (800mhz DDR2), in the appropriate sockets. Similar timings on both sets although they aren’t from the same manufacturer.

Fil posts about a cool library he made called Sistr that lets you use Silverlight to render high quality fonts. This is a good example of the power of Silverlight (since it really enables you to use markup for stuff in your normal HTML page way). But its also unfortunately the kind of thing that isn’t going to be adopted much until Silverlight gets deployed more widely. I suspect no one wants to force people to do a download just for somewhat better visuals.

Which brings up an interesting feature suggestion (which might already be there). If Sistr made it really easy to fall back to the standard HTML rendering (or a PNG file) when Silverlight is not installed rather than pushing the Silverlight install, this could be easier to adopt. Since it supports the same HTML markup already, that should be fairly straightforward, although the rendering can be so different that designers might not like that approach.

Or another approach would be a web-service that creates the PNG server-side for users that don’t have Silverlight. Cache it so you don’t re-render on every request, but make the developer story just as easy as putting markup in a page (as easy as the existing Sistr).

I’ve been a Speakeasy customer for almost 10 years now pretty much since I moved into my house. Now people argue about DSL vs. Cable and they have lots of good arguments one way or another. I’ll grant that an Internet connection from the cable company would probably be much cheaper for comparable speeds. But I really hate the cable companies and the way they treat their customers and exert control. Plus, Speakeasy makes a bunch of the difference by being a relatively clueful Internet provider. They make it easy to get static IP addresses, and I’ve always had great service experiences with them. I’ve had a handful of outages in 10 years and only once or twice were the outages more than brief. Of course they are dependent on the people providing the actual connections (Covad, etc) and sometimes you get some finger pointing, but the general notion that they can interact with technical customers on a reasonable basis is worth the extra cost to me.

I’d been thinking about looking into faster connection speeds for a bit and today I read that they have a new service called ADSL2, offered at 8, 10 and 15Mbps download (all the uploads are 1.0Mbps). I’m apparently far enough from the station that I only get 8Mbps, but that should be fine. Its not cheap, but comes with 8 static IP addresses (I’d been paying extra for those) and since I’m working at my home office a lot the extra performance is fairly easy to justify.

My connection should be installed in about 2 weeks- I’ll let you know how it works.

I’m working on a project that involves Javascript and I just got stuck for something like 2 hours. For some reason my .js file was mysteriously not running. IE was not showing any errors, just not running anything in the script. I tried using the debugger, but nothing. I tried putting an alert(”begin”) at the top and alert(”end”) at the bottom and nothing.

After spending far too long spinning in circles I thought of trying to run the file from the command line. Sure enough it spits out a syntax error. I had written
if(myobj.value ! "")
and left off the =. It should have been
if(myobj.value != "")

Still, it was very annoying that IE wasn’t spitting out any error messages. Even more annoying was how long it took me to catch this. I think I’ll use the cmd-line to syntax check Javascript more in the future.

Today I check the app I’ve been building and I get a spew of dozens of errors-

CSS Error (line 0 char 113): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.
CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property.  Error in parsing value for property.  Declaration dropped.

I’m pretty sure its the way I’m setting the margin property which is valid CSS, but might not be the precise syntax they are expecting-
<div style=”margin: 10px 20px 0px 20px;”>

This goes back to the point that they can change the platform and how they parse FBML at any time and without warning break you. I wish they provided a “staging” server. The idea is that you can develop your app there, test it there, and any platform changes they do get rolled out at the staging server for at least a week before the move them to production (except of course for any fixes to exploits). This at least would give developers a fighting change of staying on top of this stuff.

The other big issue this brings up is the perception of the cause of the problem. I’ll give the Facebook folks some credit for using fairly neutral language in their text, but the implication is still that the problem is with the app developer. TechCrunch just ran a piece on Facebook apps and how many of them are failing to scale. Of course, the catch is that while many of these apps might be done by some non-professional folks on a shared hosting server that can’t handle the load, that is not necessarily the real story.

My app is running on a dedicated machine in a datacenter. The machine is a fairly high performance dual-core machine that is typically running at less than 5% usage. My uptime as recorded by various tools has been 99.86% for the past 8 months (with pretty much 99.99% for the past 3-4 months). I can hit my site directly and I never get a failed request. Yet when accessing my Facebook apps on the same machine I see the same error messages that TechCrunch is attributing to poorly designed unscalable apps.

There are lots of possible explinations. It could be a bug in the code of my app where it hangs somehow. Unlikely, but its possible. It could be a complex interaction in Facebook calling my server and then my server making callbacks to Facebook to server the request. But in any case something is turning out to be less than commercial-quality reliability and it doesn’t feel like its in my control.

Makes you think twice about exposing your brand to these kind of issues. I’m planning on following up with some other developers I know to see if they are encountering the same sort of things.

It seems like Facebook has been getting slow lately. It wouldn’t be surprising if they are having scaling problems, especially on the custom apps side. I’ve been getting the message that my app isn’t responding more and more frequently although as best as I can tell my server is responding to direct requests just fine. Also some of the main Facebook pages are slow too so I suspect its them, not me.

Anyway, just an observation. It can be tough dealing with the type of growth they have had lately and the whole developer platform aspect makes it much harder too.

I’ve been rethinking what video card to put in the new workstation that I’m going to build this fall. Since this machine will also be something that I want good high-end 3d on (for high end WPF work, games, Flight Simulator, etc) I want a step up from the NVidia 8600GTS that I put in the media center box (which I’m using as a workstation in the short term).

My initial thought was to go with the NVidia 8800GTS (640MB version). Many of the reviews say the 320MB version is just fine and the extra memory is unnecessary, but I run on a Dell 30″ monitor at 2560×1600 pixels so I’m going to opt for the extra memory.

The 640MB NVidia cards run about $360, but at right about the same benchmark scores and price (about $380) is the top of the line AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 2900XT. Most of the write ups score the two cards just about equal head-to-head.

But the balance might tip to the Radeon because the Intel chip-sets (the current P35, and the X38 that I hope to get) only support the AMD “Crossfire” dual-card option and don’t work with NVidia “SLI”. Its pretty ironic that the Intel chips are likely going to tip me towards an AMD video card, but there you have it. I’m not planning on buying two cards right away, but it gives me the option to get a second one a year down the road (although by that time there will probably be a new generation of cards and I’d be better off just replacing it with a single new card).

Kevin Garrison writes a good article on AvWeb about Aviation delays and debunking the myth the airlines have put forth that small aircraft are the cause. This from the perspective of someone flying one of the big jets for a major airline.

Two things are worth noting. The first and most important is that the pilots for the big airlines are not the guys at fault in this situation and are usually sympathetic to fighting the con job their management are trying to pull off. These guys have been the biggest victim of the management incompetence of the major airlines as they have tried to deal with the shifts in their wacky business models. Their work conditions get worse, they get screwed out of their pensions, and meanwhile they feel like they are being encouraged to lie to their customers.

The second is that he points out the real cause of these traffic screw ups- the major airlines for some reason tend to schedule just about every airplane they are flying to take off and leave at the same time.

Now, it may make the schedules look clean at your major hub to have every arrival at 3pm and every departure at 4pm. I bet its even easier on the scheduling software. But its not going to actually work. Unless of course your aim is to intentionally make sure passengers miss their connections so you can avoid having the pay the bump-fees. Hmmm…

So just a reminder. Next time you are out on a taxiway in a line of 20 airplanes waiting to take off. Its not the little-guy holding you up. Its unlikely that we are taking off from the same runway and when we do, we tend to slip in between the jet departures (since we can often take off quickly and turn out of the departure path to get out of the way). Anytime there are 20 jets stacked up other than some major issue with the runway, its a clear sign that the folks running the airline you are flying couldn’t figure out how to coordinate schedules to spread things out a bit in a more sensible way. For organizations responsible for billion dollar machines flying through the air, this stuff should be pretty basic.

A shill for the “Copyright Alliance” was given a venue to write on news.com and wrote a piece that could have come right out of the movie “Thank You For Smoking”. Maybe if they do a directors cut of that movie they can add the copyright guy into the back-room along with the smoking, alcohol and gun lobbies.

Copyright is indeed an important thing for our society and as someone who creates intellectual property for a living I rely on it quite a bit. But the take that Patrick Ross takes in his piece deliberately misstates the origin and concept behind copyright (and patents for that matter). Both were created intended as a balanced sets of rights and responsibilities between producers of creative and innovative works and industry. With both copyrights and patents the idea was that the creator would be given exclusive rights to their creation for a limited period of time in exchange for making it publically available and adding it to the body of human knowledge. This was always explicitly balanced by the notion of fair use that these copyrights and patents could not be used abusively.

Now forward in the current era, greedy folks are making land-grabs to increase the value of their intellectual property and lobbyists like this guy are trying to confuse the public about their fair use rights. Copyrights were supposed to expire after the death of the creator, but various entertainment interests (especially Disney) keep pushing Congress to extend their copyrights almost indefinitely. Meanwhile the copyright lobby keeps trying to diminish your traditional rights to purchase a piece of creative work and use it as you would like and protect it with backups by layering on DRM, the DMCA, and hostile legal threats at the beginning of videos and TV programs. Not content to sell you a song for a buck or two, they want to charge you an extra $1-2 for a 30-second excerpt of that thing you already own, but used as a ringtone. They want you to have to buy new copies of all your media every few years as there are new technological shifts and as the CD/DVD media you own wear out.

Lets be clear. There are vibrant and creative entertainment industries and despite the fear-mongering by the copyright lobby, they are not going away. Sure, they are going to have to shift and adapt with new times and new technologies. Some industries that have made money in the past as middle-men might be going away (for example the big record companies and tv networks) as these new technologies reduces the need for their role (and creates new middle-men like Google, Amazon, Apple). But just because a given big record company isn’t healthy does not imply that musicians are somehow going to go away.

Anyway, I’m fairly annoyed with news.com for running this propaganda piece without enough context and wanted to call it what it is.