I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so...

To all Japanese/Chinese/Koreans readers out there, my apologies: I have no idea what language this is that Chrome is using. But the song came to mind, and thus the title. The bigger question is: why on earth is this error coming up like this?

Trying Google Scribe...

This morning I was doing some cleaning of my Bookmarks bar in Chrome, when I came across a forgotten Bookmarklet - Google Scribe.  It looks like the Scribe Lab program has since graduated and been rolled into Blogger's 'Draft' program, which is where I'm trying it as I type this. 

On my phone, I use Swiftkey, which works in a similar manner; I start typing a word, and the program suggests not only the completion of the word, but as soon as I type space, it suggests the statistically most probable next word.

Kind of freaky, but highly effective on my phone at least.  It's also interesting to see what it thinks I should be writing.  Example: I will type a word and let Scribe choose next ones:  Suggested words and word completions are highlighted:

The first day of the week and I have to take a break from the past to the future of my children.   

Pure poetry. 

The Google+ killer feature is the menu bar

I don’t know – and don’t want to know – how much time I spend on any one of Google’s sites per day.  Now with Google+ the menu bar alerts me of notifications and lets me share from any one of these sites.

Sites thrive on content – the menu bar integration with Google+ makes it stupifyingly easy to share your content.

IE9 the new king of the Underscore performance tests

See http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html and past tests: http://mo.notono.us/search?q=underscore

"Microsoft has completely lost the web development community."

Last year Mark Pilgrim released a free e-book/site called “Dive Into Html5” (http://diveintohtml5.org/).  The site/book has served as a valuable resource on a recent Html5 project we’re working on here at AIS, and I have frequently gone back for details on topics such as local storage and canvas.  It is an excellent book for any bleeding edge web developer.  It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

This week, Mark posted his observations on how publishing a free e-book (which is also purchasable in print format) works well for him, and that it gives great insight into what parts of the book are being read, and by whom. He then makes the following observation:

6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. That is not a typo. The site works fine in Internet Explorer — the site practices what it preaches, and the live examples use a variety of fallbacks for legacy browsers — so this is entirely due to the subject matter. Microsoft has completely lost the web development community. (emphasis mine)

I forwarded this internally within AIS, and a nice debate ensued.  One common complaint was the hyperbole of the statement, and I agree; a more accurate line would likely be "Microsoft as a browser vendor has lost significant mindshare in the bleeding edge web development community."

Personally one of the things I love about Html5 (using the term the way the hypers would – to mean modern web development with client-driven UI interactions using JavaScript, CSS(3) and some HTML5 semantics) is that it has in some ways unified the web development community:  The debate a few years ago was about JSP vs .NET vs PHP vs Python vs Rails vs someotherservertechnology.  Folks from different camps seldom interacted and learned from each other.  With Html5, the backend processes are completely irrelevant, as long as they don’t muck with the Html (ASP.NET webforms is still a major sinner here, unfortunately) and developers using all sorts of backend software and operating systems are now adding to the collective knowledge, mostly working towards the common goal of getting as much functionality as possible, pushed to end users through mostly standards compliant browsers. 

For instance, our Html5 app is backed by ASP.NET MVC 2 and SQL server.  We do all our development on Windows, in Visual Studio – we’re looking to deploy to Azure.  Clearly we’re MS developers.  But we could just as well have done the app in Php against MySql running on linux and apache, and we’re taking cues from folks using python, java, Rails, Node.js, php and God knows what on the backend.

At the same time I haven’t used IE by choice for about 5 years, maybe more…

I was asked what I thought MS could do to gain back some developer mindshare – so here goes:

• My thoughts are that if Html5 and the set of bleeding edge technologists that go with it are any kind of priority for MS,  they need to do some or all of the following:
• Find a way to upgrade the legions of IE 6, 7  and 8 users to IE9.  This will obviously not be easy,  but they could do something similar to what Google did with Chrome frame (i.e. make IE9 a plugin for the older browsers),  or they could do something like the makers of the “IE Tab” Chrome and Firefox extensions do,  allow IE to be hosted inside Chrome,  and only activate it for certain sites.  Or let users install IE9 side by side with the older versions.   All of these would have as goal to encourage end users to use the latest possible browser for the task they need it for,  and to make them install IE9 instead of Chrome or Firefox.
• Make IE9 the paragon of standards compliance.   (They are actually getting close to this...)
• Bring IE9 to WP7 and whatever tablet software they're coming out with.
• Reduce the focus of Silverlight as a browser plugin,  and make it more about web-deployed desktop apps.
• Drastically improve the support for css and javascript in Visual Studio, including debugging and unit testing.   And give this toolset away in the form of VS Express.
• Evolve the Dev tools in IE9 to become better than Chrome's inspector and the Firebug plugin.
• Separate the IE development from Windows to allow quicker iterations
• Do more things like the jQuery deal. The world of CSS is a mess (we desperately need mixins and code forks like those provided by media queries), MS could take the lead here…

The point is, whether Mark’s browser percentages are statistically valid as an indication of web developer’s preferences, or to what degree Microsoft is lagging/losing developer mindshare; these are not the pertinent questions.  The fact is that Microsoft is now not a leader in emerging web development areas – maybe they never were – but should they want to be, they need to take action. IE9 is shaping up to be a great browser, and they need to push it aggressively.

Scandinavia in 6 words or less

From the very interesting mashup of what you get when you cross Google Suggests with a Venn diagram, here is Scandinavia:

About right, if you ask me.

Random Info Chart - DC Schools Test Results

Google public data explorer has a slew of interesting datasets, including test scores for DC schools.  It goes to show that you can’t judge every DC school with a single statement, other than perhaps to state that the achievement gap between good and bad DC schools is far too wide:

IE9 Beta test scores against Underscore.js

Another new browser launch, and another obligatory proves-absolutely-nothing-definite/just-a-single-use-case performance test against the Underscore.js utility framework.

Previous tests showed that IE was gaining on the lead (Chrome), and that is still the case: As seen in the charts below, IE is sometimes faster, but still generally slower than Chrome (longer bars are better):

Again, this test proves very little, other than that IE9’s new Chakra JS engine is still slower than V8 for doing array iterations, and faster for mapping, getting property values, and creating list ranges.  IE9 has a number of features Chrome doesn’t have (yet) such as hardware acceleration (the IE Speed reader demo runs 790% faster in IE than in Chrome!) and ES property getter/setter standard compliance, just to mention two random ones…

IE9 beta is a HUGE step forward for IE.  Not sure if it will become my default browser, but this is at great day for the web.  Now if the EU and other governing bodies can just look the other way while MS quietly replaces all prior IE instances with IE9… ;-)

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.

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

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

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

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:

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.

“Old school’s not cool.”

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

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!)

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:

Comparative Performance of Underscore.js in Chrome and IE

I came across the very handy-looking Undersore.js today, and clicked on the test & benchmark link. I first ran the test in Chrome.  The results below show number of operations per second.  Looks like each, map, keys, values, and range are pretty inexpensive operations, whereas uniq and intersect should be used sparingly.  All makes sense. 

Then out of curiosity, I ran the same tests in IE and Firefox.  The exact numbers are not significant as the results vary by 10-20% between subsequent runs in the same browser, but the range is pretty illustrative.  And yes, I know IE9 is harder, better, faster, stronger, so this is not a fair fight.  I can’t wait for IE9 to replace every previous IE version…

	Ops/sec	(higher is	better)
Test	Chrome 6	IE 8	Firefox 3.6
_.each()	20213	510	3249
_(list).each()	13570	493	3161
jQuery.each()	3637	209	910
_.map()	18581	303	5488
jQuery.map()	7084	686	8519
_.pluck()	10852	282	4785
_.uniq()	127	1	33
_.uniq() (sorted)	308	210	84
_.sortBy()	1641	45	359
_.isEqual()	4962	869	1826
_.keys()	22675	1142	4295
_.values()	24551	321	5435
_.intersect()	83	1	20
_.range()	33345	1223	5262

Again, why I use Chrome as my default browser.

Things I’m digging today

FreeMind – free mind mapping tool.  Love the simplicity, and that I can copy a branch and paste in an email as a well-formatted nested list.

Fiddler2 – back in the day (v1.x) I remember it as complex to use – now it’s dead simple.  Maybe I got smarter, but I fear the reality is that the tool just got better.

Buzz – I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords…

(Ok, I admit it – I just wanted to see how my blog posts appeared on Buzz, and I had nothing better to write.)

Subtle Google Map/Search Usability Bug

When searching for a company in Google, if Google can determine a map result it’ll show it, along with a crowd-sourcing link to let you verify the accuracy of the business listing:

Only problem is that the confirmation message asks the OPPOSITE of the original question:

…

Gmail Voicemail coming soon?

I just started using Vonage, and get my voicemails delivered to my gmail account.  So I tried setting up a filter:

It certainly makes sense that Google Voice and Gmail would be integrated one of these days…

Gmail’s number one missing feature

IMAP Client Mode.

I can access Gmail through IMAP, using Gmail as an IMAP server.  But I can’t access, say, my work email (which is an IMAP server) through IMAP, using Gmail as the client.  I can through POP, but that is sub-optimal at best.

Come on Google, I know you can do it.

Help the internets are down?!

Seriously, how can someone as big and distributed as Google have network issues?  (And when my blog is on Google, how can I gripe about it?)

This morning’s tracert (and confirmed via a quick twitter search):

C:\Users\oskar.austegard>tracert google.com

Tracing route to google.com [209.85.171.100]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     6 ms     4 ms     4 ms  xx.xxx.xx.xx
  3     6 ms     5 ms     8 ms  xxxxxxx.verizon-gni.net [130.81.xxx.xxx]
  4     6 ms     8 ms     5 ms  so-3-0-0-0.LCC1-RES-BB-RTR1-RE1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.29.0]
  5     8 ms     5 ms     6 ms  0.so-1-2-0.XL3.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.37.117]
  6    12 ms    14 ms     7 ms  0.ge-6-0-0.BR2.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.41.149]
  7     9 ms     8 ms     9 ms  te-11-3-0.edge1.Washington4.level3.net [4.68.63.169]
  8    10 ms    16 ms    17 ms  vlan69.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.17.62]
  9    11 ms     9 ms    10 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.145]
 10    28 ms    35 ms    28 ms  ae-2-2.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.69]
 11    27 ms    27 ms    29 ms  ae-1-100.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.113]
 12    54 ms    55 ms    54 ms  ae-3.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.61]
 13   103 ms    92 ms   104 ms  ae-2.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.69.132.53]
 14    92 ms    92 ms    92 ms  ae-21-52.car1.Seattle1.Level3.net [4.68.105.34]
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18   369 ms     *        *     64.233.174.125
 19     *        *      285 ms  64.233.174.99
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21   375 ms   347 ms     *     74.125.30.134
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *      350 ms  cg-in-f100.google.com [209.85.171.100]

Trace complete.

Google Docs Gets Drawings

So will this become the new de-facto wire framing tool too?

Nah - too simple.  More like online MS Paint (with snap to grid, and every shape a layer)

Update: Not to mention that the Drawing links are broken when you export the doc as a blog post.

SharePoint 14 Wishlist

While 14 may not be coming down the pike until next year, the Alpha bits are in controlled distribution, and while I haven’t actually seen them yet, I have hopes for some major changes. 

Rather than posting my wishlist here, I thought I’d create one on Google Moderator…

See http://moderator.appspot.com/#16/e=295af – go nuts!