mo.notono.us

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Undersore.js Performance Tests Revisited (this time with pretty charts)

Out of sheer vanity, I added my own blog feed to my Google Reader, as I was curious if anyone ever Liked my posts.
Answer: Nope. :-(

Anyhow, I came across my post on Underscore.js, and since MS just dropped Platform Preview 3 of IE 9, I thought I’d redo the comparison in Chrome6, IE8 and IE9 (though I know this is hardly any complete benchmark test, it’s still telling).  The results are below: 

As I said in my last post, I can’t wait for IE9 to replace every previous IE version…  I haven’t been this excited about an IE product since IE4, which was more than 10 years ago.

IE 8 – still a dog.

IE8 results

IE 9 PP3 – Starting to look good!  Faster than Chrome in some tests!

IE9 results

Chrome 6 – still the winner in most categories, though the lead is shrinking

Chrome 6 results

Bottom line, though – if you’re doing a lot of looping/mapping, you should use Underscore rather than jQuery.

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Re: Swype on my Droid

... Oops. And that's what happens when you try to post from your phone using a brand new input device.  As I was saying it reminds me of back in the day when I had a handspring (palm) and I had to learn graffiti. Everything is familiar, yet so very Very different. I don't think I am yet back up at the same speed re that I was at before I switched, but part of that is me simply not trusting myself that I actually know where the letters are on the keyboard (I Do, Really!), and part is simply trusting Swype to do what it is supposed to do, which it does remarkably well, most of the time. (ironically typing, er, swyping that last sentence was quite difficult...).

What is particularly impressive about swype is how amazingly sloppily you can draw the path over the letters and how swype still figures out what you're trying to spell. I assume that when I start trusting both myself and swype more, I won't want to go back, and when I do, I still have my droid slide out keyboard.

Recommended.

On Jun 18, 2010 9:24 PM, "Oskar Austegard" <austegard@gmail.com> wrote:

I installed the Swype beta the other day on my Droid, and today made it my default keyboard. It's been an interesting experience, figuring out how to use a completely new input device. In many ways it remind s me

Swype on my Droid

I installed the Swype beta the other day on my Droid, and today made it my default keyboard. It's been an interesting experience, figuring out how to use a completely new input device. In many ways it remind s me

Sunday, June 13, 2010

IE 9 HTML5 Testing: “Works on My Machine”

One of my esteemed colleagues on an internal forum posted about how great IE 9’s HTML5 support was, based on the result of Microsoft’s test pages.  MS’s tests are sadly self-selective however: meaning they only seem to test for elements that IE9 supports: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

“Cross-browser Test Results Summary:
W3C Web Standards Number of Submitted Tests Internet Explorer 9
Platform Preview
Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 Opera 10.52 Apple Safari 4.05 Google Chrome 4.1
HTML5 40 78% 63% 48% 43% 43%
...”

Compare that to my own results running html5test.com on the 6(!) browsers I have installed:

html5test

Html5 is the first time in a decade that the browser vendors have had a new major standard to fight over; I’m just grateful that this time around we’ll have an army of frameworks such as jQuery that can level the development playing field for us.

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Friday, June 11, 2010

How to Always Run Visual Studio As Administrator

To jum straight to the solution, click here

“Certain tasks, including debugging and creating local IIS applications, require that you start Visual Studio as a user with Administrative privileges. On Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 when not running as the built-in Administrator account, this requires right-clicking the Visual Studio 2008 icon in the Start Menu and choosing Run as administrator.

“To make this process easier, you can create a shortcut and check the Run this program as an administrator check box on the Compatibility tab of the shortcut properties.”
from Using Visual Studio 2008 with IIS 7 @ learn.iis.net

On the last few projects I’ve worked on, we’ve used IIS sites for our development (for a number of reasons I won’t detail here), and the need to open VS in admin mode has been a constant annoyance.  It’s like constantly getting bitten by a mosquito. Today I finally got annoyed enough to spend 5 minutes researching a solution.  (I know.  I procrastinate.)

The solution, or what seems to be working for me so far at least was found at sevenforums.com: How to Run a Program as an Administrator in Windows 7.  Some of these options I knew about, the one I hadn’t tried and which worked for me was this:

1. Right click on the program shortcut or program .exe file, then click on Properties, and on the Compatibility tab. (See screenshots below)
NOTE: If you are doing this while logged on as a standard user instead of an administrator, then you will need to also click on the Change settings for all users button and type in the administrator's password.

Run as Administrator-compatibility_mode1.jpgRun as Administrator-compatibility_mode2.jpg

2. To Always Run this Program as an Administrator -

A) Check the Run this program as an administrator box, and click on OK. (See screenshots above)

The key is to change the compatibility setting of the Visual Studio EXECUTABLE, not the shortcut to it.  I.e., on my laptop, I went to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ and right-clicked devenv.exe and then proceeded as above.

I then had to add one more step – when I now clicked on a .sln file, nothing would happen.  It appears the default Open action couldn’t run, I assume, due to inadequate privileges.  To fix this, I right-clicked the .sln file, selected Open With –> Choose Default Program, and then selected Visual Studio, making sure Always use… was checked.

Presto – my .sln files now open asking to be run as admin, as do my jump list projects.

Itch scratched.

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Wednesday, June 09, 2010

“Old school’s not cool.”

Well, this is certainly an interesting way to determine staleness: stability ;-)

image

But OK, fine – update to Chrome 6.0.427.0 if you must.  At this rate Chrome will have the highest version number of any browser within a year or two (take that Opera!)

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Thursday, June 03, 2010

Diva Girl in Mommy’s sunglasses

I rather like the new personalized background picture for Google – even if it is a blatant rip off of Bing.  Once again, competition improves the field.  Here’s my current background – from our trip to Philly last weekend:

image

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