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Vista performance and Aero

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

Misinformation everywhere

Do a search for Vista performance tips and you will get dozens of hits, most of which will be espousing the same advice – if you want better performance on your Vista machine turn off Aero.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with Vista Business installed. It’s a fairly high spec machine and should be pretty snappy, however coming from using XP at work and Ubuntu at home I found Vista very slow. I followed the advice of a number of different sites and (among other things) switched of Aero. I noticed a marginal performance improvement (probably due to switching off search indexing) but still wasn’t happy.

Switching Aero on improves performance

Just the other day I decided to switch Aero back on. It was like I’d found the turbo button. My machine was much more responsive and Visual Studio went from taking around 30 seconds to load to starting in 1-2 seconds.

In retrospec it kinda makes sense. Vista has support for offloading the rendering tasks to the GPU so why would you force all this work back onto the CPU by switching Aero off?

It worked for me…

Turning Aero on improves performance (at least in my experience) so if you’ve previously switched it off, try turning it on again – you might be in for a plesant surprise!

Superstring theory 101

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I thought I’d post this presentation Brian Greene did at TED in 2005 given that it seems a few people are interested in the book I’m currently reading:

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The presentation is a fantastic primer on Superstring theory and, should it wet your appetite, the book will certainly appeal.

We’re typists first… really?

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

I read Coding Horror on a semi regular basis, and generally Jeff has a pretty engaging writing style and his posts are fairly interesting. I was really surprised when I read this one though.

Jeff ascertains that “We are typists first, and programmers second”.

Well, I vehemently disagree. While typing ability is obviously important in the job and a necessary skill, saying that we are typists first places very little value on the technical skills required of programmers to do their job well (not to mention the years at university most of us have spent earning our Computer Science degrees, Masters and in some cases PhD’s!).

Personally I don’t even like the label “Programmer”. I feel it undervalues the skills I have. Software Engineer is far more accurate description of the job most of us do. Writing a non-trivial application these days requires an understanding of many challenging concepts.

Todays Software Engineers need to consider concurrency issues, network theory, efficient persistence mechanisms, efficient search algorithms (the volume of data we are dealing with is growing exponentially), but to name a few.

Let’s not sell ourselves short by calling ourselves programmers.

Returning to Jeffs’ typists first allegation though, one comment on his post summed it up nicely for me:

I’ve always really liked your blog Jeff, but this is a BS post

Thoughts?

MooTools slide effect and Internet Explorer CSS

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

Have you struck a problem with MooTools slide transition and CSS styles not appearing correctly in IE? I ran into this exact issue the other day where I was trying to slide a DIV element up and down based on a click event elsewhere on the page. The CSS style applied to the DIV looked something like this:

#slidingDiv {
    padding-bottom: 10px;
    background: white url(../images/box_bottom.gif) bottom no-repeat;
}

The problem seems to be that IE can’t calculate the height of content in the dynamically resized DIV correctly and thus the padding-bottom and hence my background image (nice rounded corners in this case) wasn’ showing.

The solution

The fix turned out to be simple enough, I just made the height of the DIV fixed in the CSS. Once IE knew how big the inner content was supposed to be everything started working correctly.

The Big Bang Theory, the best thing on TV right now?

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

If you haven’t yet seen The Big Bang Theory you should make an effort to rectify the situation immediately. It really is an excellent show based around intelligent witty humor rather than cheap laughs and tremendously funny.

The story focuses around two ubergeeks, Leonard and Sheldon and how their life changes when they meet Penny their new “normal” (and very pretty) neighbor. I love the fact that the show celebrates the geeky, ultra intelligent side of their characters and although most of the laughs come from their lack of ability to deal with normal every day social situations, the writers do it in such a way that is funny without making Leonard and Sheldon the butt of every joke.

The Big Bang Theory manages to mix in enough scientific content and references to keep us geeks happy while still being incredibly watchable and entertaining for those with less of a penchant for things science.

Check out a few snippets from the first show of season one:

If you haven’t seen season one it’s already out on DVD, grab your copy now, you won’t be disappointed!

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Book Review: CSS Mastery

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As a web developer I’ve had to do a certain amount of CSS development over the years but never really felt like I understood it. CSS can be a bit of an esoteric beast and I wanted something to clear the fuzz away.

CSS Mastery was the solution I had been looking for. Andy Budd writes in a clear and engaging manner and the book is extremely readable for a technical text. Andy starts by getting right back to basics covering the Cascade and the Box model in the first two chapters.

The book covers most aspects of CSS with concise and easy to understand examples used through out. Andy also spends a good amount of time on cross browser compatibility issues where appropriate, as well as including a whole chapter of hints and hacks on this topic at the end.

If you are just starting out with CSS, or like me have used it for years but never really understood it at a visceral level then I urge you to give CSS Mastery a try.

Why new website startups fail?

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I’ve been under an enormous amount of self induced stress lately due to the fact that my startup business still isn’t online. This is due to a number of contributing factors of course, but it got me thinking about some of the reasons why it’s taken so long.

Manage Scope: Trying to do to much too soon

It would be my guess that a large number of failed business (particularly online ventures) are guilty of this one. If nothing else this experience has taught me that you need ensure your initial offering constitutes a realistic amount of work. You can then build on that by making small incremental improvements adding features and new offerings to your business over time with much less effort than trying to do it all in one go.

By all means, have a grand all encompassing vision, in fact I’d almost consider this a prerequisite, but break it down into realistic bite size deliverables. To make a software analogy; you want to take a rapid iterative development approach rather than attempt a huge waterfall model project.

It doesn’t have to be perfect

There is always a tendency with geeks (myself included) to try and engineer the best, most flexible, and high performance solution first time round. Unfortunately this flies in the face of getting a new business off the ground. As a new start up you have limited time and money and you can’t afford to waste either trying to come up with the “ultimate solution”.

Any coder worth their salt is going to try and anticipate performance bottle necks and design and develop their software to avoid potential pitfalls. However you’ve got to keep your focus on the goal of delivery at all times and not get trapped in refining and improving your product without delivering. It doesn’t matter if you have the best website in the world if no-one can use it because it isn’t online yet!

Don’t forget the business

Project planning, it’s not fun and certainly not something most geeks enjoy. Unfortunately it is absolutely necessary to make your new business a success. You need to have a clear idea of what your deliverables and deadlines are, and what your outstanding tasks are at all times. There isn’t much point getting to the end of development, having built an outstanding best of breed product and suddenly realising you don’t have a company set up, bank accounts, tax registration, contracts, lawyers, accountants and all the other mundane things that are prerequisites to running a business.

Are you trying to get a tech startup off the ground? Do you have any advice for other would be entrepreneurs?

background-image position in IE6 with png images doesn’t work!

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

After spending about three hours hacking CSS and searching the web today I’ve discovered that IE6 doesn’t respect the positioning of your background-image if you are using png’s. Both gif and jpg images work as expected.

So if you’re wondering why something like this:

background: White url(../Images/promobox_bottom.png) no-repeat center bottom;

isn’t rendering correctly in IE6, try a different image type.

Book Review: Iron Man: Extremis

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This is the first Iron man comic I’ve read (Extremis is actually a 6 part series grouped into a single volume) but I absolutely loved it. I got inspired to give Iron man a go after seeing the recent movie which I also really enjoyed.

Extremis covers the genesis of the modern Iron Man character, although it is slightly different to the movie version. The comic doesn’t dwell on the back story but drip feeds the reader with a series of flashbacks. This makes it interesting without feeling contrived.

The artwork is simply excellent; the storyline is compelling and well written with the exception of a couple of pieces of weak and slightly mellow dramatic dialogue.

I particularly like the modern references to both technology (Bluetooth, WI-FI, 3G phones) and people (Dean Karmen, Edward Teller and Clive Sinclair). It helps to anchor the story in a contemporary setting and prevents the dated feeling you get from some comics (although that will go against it in years to come!).

All in all I really enjoyed Extremis and am looking forward to reading “Iron Man: Execute Program v. 2” next!