Andy Grove's Blog

I've started looking around for a new laptop now that I'm returning to the freelance/contract market. I've been using a Lenovo ThinkPad T60p for the last 8 months and have been pretty impressed with the performance as a desktop replacement machine. I just saw that Lenovo have announced the T61p ThinkPad, which runs Vista and will ship later this month.

It's not exactly cheap, but with Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors, 1920x1200 native resolution, up to 4GB RAM and an excellent keyboard it will be ideal for development work.

Labels: hardware

My PC died a few days ago. It's a fairly new (less than a year old) machine with an Intel Extreme X6800 core duo 2.93GHz processor. For no apparent reason, I started getting the dreaded "blue screen of death" (BSOD) when booting into Vista and I noticed when I rebooted that the CPUs had dropped their speed down to 1.6 GHz. Inspecting the CPU temperature in BIOS showed that the y were running way too hot, exceeding 70 degrees celcius. I checked inside the case and there was quite a bit of dust covering the surface of the heat sink, which must have been blocking the flow of air. I removed the heat sink and cleaned the dust out but that didn't fix it so I've sent the PC back to PC Specialist and hopefully they'll be able to resolve this for me. In the meantime I'm using a relatively low-spec Dell PC running Fedora Core 6. It will actually be interesting to see how I get on using a Linux desktop for a week or so.

Labels: hardware

After only a couple of days using the 2.0 Beta of Windows Live OneCare on 64 bit Vista, I can definitely recommend *NOT* installing it. OneCare hangs during a virus scan of my PC, getting stuck on an Outlook PST file contained in a gzipped tar file. Also, SlimServer has stopped working. To make matters worse, I can't remove OneCare as the uninstaller is hanging.

Labels: windows

I picked up a free copy of Head Rush Ajax at JavaOne this year and just picked it up again as I've been meaning to find out more about Ajax for some time.

I've used roughly similar principles in the past, long before the term Ajax was invented. Back then, around 1998, it was often referred to as DHTML. As part of a project I architected for BSkyB at that time, I built a web interface onto a TV sheduling application that used Javascript to send simple GET requests to a servlet which then returned data in a proprietary text format and the Javascript parsed this text and called document.write() to render the data within the web page.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the discussion around using JSON rather than XML to receive data from the server. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the native text representation of JavaScript objects and is arguably more suitable than XML for return data to an Ajax client for two reasons:

1. JavaScript can convert the JSON text to a real JavaScript object using the standard eval() function, whereas XML data needs to be accessed via the DOM, which requires more code.
   
2. JSON provides a more concise data format, therefore reducing network traffic.

JSON is obviously a much simpler format than XML by design and can not support the same rich data structures that are possible with XML. At the same time, for certain applications it may well provide sufficient functionality at a far lower cost in terms of parsing performance and document size.

One observation I had while reading the book is that Ajax doesn't seem like a great acronym really, since without XML it would really just be "Asynchronous JavaScript". Mind you, having a catchy name for this approach has certainly helped it gain popularity.

Labels: ajax, json

I upgraded my desktop machine to Windows Vista x64 some time ago and purchased Windows Live OneCare, only to find out during the installation process that it only supported 32 bit editions of Windows XP and Vista. I've just received a mailshot announcing a new 2.0 beta, which now apparently supports 64 bit platforms.

Labels: windows