A Bit of Politics, Part 1
I don't write about politics much, nor will I declare support for any particular party in the course of this blog. Rather, I hope to write a bit about the upcoming election in a forum where no party is spared from ridicule :) Here's the first entry, one of hopefully many more.
The US political theater has been quite interesting these days, with many candidates duking it out for the top spot in the US government. This CNN clip shows some interesting statistics:
The interesting part is about 1:22 into the clip - in general, men prefer Obama over Clinton. I don't claim to know all of the answers, but I do believe something like this doesn't help:
Yes, that's right - Mrs. Hillary Clinton, a former first lady of our nation, is crying on stage for the third time in months, possibly weeks. I believe this hurts her in the male vote because she is fitting into the stereotype of the emotional female. In general, females can identify with the stereotype, while men usually view this emotional nature to be a sign of weakness. And who wants a weak leader?
Whether they're real tears or fake, nobody can say with absolute certainty except Mrs. Clinton herself. However, the timing is suspect - look at her last two incidents. It reminds me of another occasion in this election season where the timing is suspect:
Speed Demon has a Change of Pace
First, an apology. I promised more to come on Joel Spolsky's Book Joel on Software in my last entry weeks ago. I wrote part of an entry, but I am unsatisfied with it; I can't add much more to it than simply say, "Go read it." Seriously. Check out the site, Joel on Software, and you won't be disappointed. Be sure to check out my all-time favorite entry, about how multi-tasking (aka task switching) is harmful to developers; it's also one of the articles which will be helpful in other industries.
Anyways, over the past week at work, I've spent a lot of time optimizing various aspects of one of our products such that they work much faster than in the current version. There's been all sorts of tweaks across the board, but we're unable to go much further. The biggest hurdle now is the browser itself. IE6 is our "worst" supported browser, and I wish it would just go away. And, realistically, it is - Microsoft is pushing IE7 hard, which isn't my favorite browser by any means, but it is much more friendly to web developer types. But, IE6 is still an oft-used browser, so it retains a place on our list of supported clients.
What makes IE6 so bad, might you ask? Well, lots of things, including incompatibility with established web standards (or complete lack of support for many of them), and the speed at which JavaScript executes. This is the previously-mentioned hurdle that we're running up against. Put simply, IE6's JavaScript engine is incredibly slow, leaving us unable to go further in making the product faster. IE7 helps resolve the issue, and shows JavaScript executed in an amount of time competitive with Firefox 2.
But what about Safari, might you ask? It's on our list of supported clients as well. Safari 3 blows both Firefox 2 (on Mac) and IE7 (on WinXP) out of the water. I'd always thought it felt a bit snappier, but in JS-heavy pages, Safari is the clear winner. And it's not just a matter of benchmarks either - the fetch-build-render cycle of an AJAX-type listing just plain feels faster.
I was already thinking that Safari was a pretty slick browser, though I hadn't converted to it yet. Then, I found a link on the web, saying that the WebKit nightly builds (Safari is built on WebKit) are incredibly fast compared to existing Safari installs. I'm using today's build now to write this entry, and am pleased so far. It feels like I've got a whole new Mac under my fingertips, and Firefox feels like a dog. Nightly builds are considered unstable by definition, but I haven't found any show-stopping issues yet.
Of course, every decision has its drawbacks. I'm missing a few keyboard shortcuts that I used hourly before - Cmd-Enter to add "www." and ".com" to what I typed in the address bar, and Cmd-K to move to the search field. I haven't yet found these on the web, but please comment if I've missed something. I have found SafariBlock to replace AdBlock, and I've found Inquisitor's Spotlight-like searching to be impressive both as eye candy and in functionality. And just as with anything else new, I'm sure there's other things I'll discover on the learning curve.
I believe I am, by this point, rambling. Time to do something else - perhaps continue working on StudentCodr (more info on that when version 1.0 is released), or fix my RSS feeds for this site so the entry isn't just a copy of the title.
Update: I was able to find out keyboard shortcuts for jumping to Google Search - it's Cmd-Option-F. However, since I've got Cmd-K still in my muscle memory (and it's not assigned to anything else), you can go to System Preferences and create a Safari (and WebKit, if you use a nightly build) keyboard shortcut for "Google Search..." to be Cmd-K. Problem Solved, now for auto-complete....
Joel Knows Best
I've spent most of the last week back in the Midwestern US with Leigh Ann while she's been visiting her family. Of course, I don't know these people too well, and we've been seeing the same people over and over, so I've taken up a bit of reading. After a short trip to Barnes and Noble, and I was the proud owner of Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky.
If you haven't been reading his blog (also named Joel on Software), you are definitely missing out. If there was one person in the software industry whose opinions I respected, it would be him. I consistently find myself agreeing with his writings, sometimes more enthusiastically than others, and I don't think I've ever disagreed with his positions. He knows his stuff.
Anyways, the book. It's copyright 2004, an eternity in the computer world, but still 100% relevant. I've finished part 1, and peeked ahead to the second. I also noticed that my favorite article from his blog is in the book as well: Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. If you find yourself constantly interrupted while trying to get work done, this is the proof you need to convince people to let you be productive.
Later this week, perhaps even on the flight home tomorrow, I plan on continuing through the book, and selecting a few of my favorite chapters for recommended reading.
New and Improved BrianTusi.com!
Finally, a few week after completing redevelopment of my site, it's back up and running. I've completely dumped PHP and rewritten the entire site using the Django framework for Python.
I'd never used Python before this project, only heard of it and decided to give it a whirl. So far, while there has been a little bit of a learning curve, it's been just that - little. As XKCD suggests, it's pretty sweet, and painless to work with. Of course, this blog is pretty bare-bones, but I don't need all that WordPress stuff to write a few words here and there.
So, what can you expect from me now that I've revamped? Well, a few things. First off, I really will try and update more often. Since I've finished school, I've got more free time to write, so I should be setting myself up for more success now than previously. I'm also planning on reworking my senior project in Python, which should clean up a bit of the messy Java I wrote the first time.
And now that that's out of the way, time to start preparing some real content.