Monthly Archives: March 2008

Less than 3 months

predictions, social networks, tech

Exhibit A:

Facebook will have a huge leak of personal private information. It will turn out to be due to buggy code, which will finally focus some attention on the fact that Facebook’s codebase appears to be really, really bad.

 Exhibit B:

The Associated Press reported this afternoon that its reporters were able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

I still think there’s going to be worse lapses than this by the end of 2008.

Firefox 3 on Linux

tech

I’ve been using Ubuntu at home on one of my computers for close to a year now. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although Gnome struggled on my computer (a circa 2003 Athlon). Switching to Xfce fixed that, and my one remaining problem was Firefox.

For those who haven’t tried Firefox 2 on Linux, it’s pretty bad. If leave a Javascript heavy site (eg GMail) open the browser will slowly grind to a halt over a course of a few hours.

I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 (see this video for how to do that), and it’s made a HUGE difference. The one issue I had was that I could get it to start – I hadn’t realized that the executable was now firefox-3.0 instead of firefox. Makes sense, though.

Why tech predictions are stupid (and a small prediction)

java, predictions, tech

Every year hundreds of tech pundits go and make their predictions for the year – a trend I’m not immune to either. Alan Kay explained the problem with this the best: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. In a field like computing it is so easy for a single person to build something new it makes trying to make predictions a pointless Lose Weight Exercise.

None the less, here’s something that is less of a prediction and more an Lose Weight Exercise in deduction and rumor mongering. Sun is planning to launch a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 in the near future (not sure when exactly, but 2008 for sure). Note that this is different to the existing Sun Grid product (which will presumably continue).