teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

I was browsing through my old posts… when I came across this post from over a year ago.

It was interesting to see what I was planning and hoping for back then. Interestingly enough, even over a year ago, my idea of my next system was not too unlike what I’m still picturing. Avoiding the fact that I will probably not have the budget to build one this summer, either… if I were to do such, the specs lined up in the linked post, are not too far from what I would build these days.

Core i7 is here now, so in terms of server chips… we can now get 6 cores on a chip, 12 cores in a dual socket system. While this type of build may not be within my future budget, 8 cores on one chip should be once Intel releases 8-core Core i7 chips. Triple channel RAM is here… so the projection on that front for 12GB of RAM was not bad, and is still perfectly reasonable for todays systems.

I was hoping my idea of a really great system would have changed more substantially by now… but it hasn’t. This makes me wonder if the technology has not improved significantly enough in a year (possibly due to the economy?) or if perhaps I was just looking far advanced of a possible system at that time. Maybe it’s a mix of both.

With that said, I have to say that pretty much any system you can build for $500-1000 these days is definitely plenty powerful for most people, as in… I think technology is finally starting to really be great in all price ranges.

Last night the power went out from approximately 1:30:44 EST until about 5:45 AM. I had to shut down the server since it was due to thunderstorms and I had no idea how long it would take them to repair the lines. Plus, I needed to save the battery power in case it would become useful for other purposes. I did the same with my desktop, but I kept the network UPS running until its batteries depleated. I also have my cell phone charging off of the network UPS, and I had to charge my phone for the next day.

Then I went to school and I didn’t get my server up and running until about 6:30pm. I know, I know. Unacceptable… but it actually spent more time up than it did during my RAID-5 issues of last week.

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to state that the connection this server runs on is now fatter. Previously we had a 7Mbps/512Kbps, now we have 22Mbps/768Kbps. When we upgraded we thought it was supposed to be 2Mbps up… but clearly Time Warner likes to practice false advertising and they refuse to provide that (even though their infrastructure here is definitely capable of providing it, a la download often reaches 30Mbps). Perhaps in the future they will provide such speed. Either way, we have 50% more upload bandwidth, which should help with handling the high volume of traffic my site gets.

This is a log of the events that happened this week. I am posting this mostly to explain what happened, how I resolved it, and also to state that it will probably happen again in the future. This post may be of great assistance to you if you came across it via google. I know I spent a lot of time dealing with these problems, and lost 200+GB of data (although nothing that was of crucial importance).

If nothing else, the problems I had were not excellently documented on the internet, so hopefully this will serve as such documentation for someone. When searching for the specific errors in dmesg, I found people just saying to ignore them as they were frivolous errors. I did just that until, of course, it turned into a big problem.

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Slashdot | The Case Against Web Apps.

After reading that…

I also have a case against Web Apps… and it’s as simple as having to remember those times when your Internet is down. Yes, when the Internet is down it already sucks so much because you can’t check your new sites, blogs, podcasts, e-mail, etc. Add on top of that that you can’t watch TV shows on hulu.com or do anything that requires a connection to the Internet… you are screwed.

Having all your apps, such as Word Processors, and any other apps that you might find yourself using on a daily basis for important work… you find yourself completely screwed not having a word processor with you. What if you have a paper due tomorrow that you simply can’y do because your Word processor is on-line and you are not.

As you can see… Computing entirely in the cloud has a significant downfall. So… proceed with caution on that front.

To me it seems like they do. Especially after the release of the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

And now they just released the new 17″ MacBook Pro onto the heap of ’shit professionals don’t want.’

For starters, they are now CHARGING for the Matte screen that used to be a default on these devices! We’ve gone from “Check out out shinny shit at the same price!” to “We like our shinny shit, so we’ll charge you more to have the superior shit because it isn’t as shinny.” Oh well, it’s not that big a deal at only $50.

I guess at least they offer it on the 17″… because the 15″ is still left hanging with a shitty screen. I can’t believe they even had the balls to offer it on the 17″ and not the 15″! That seriously takes some balls! I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it! Professionals prefer accurate screens, believe it or not! And they do not want lighting conditions reflecting back at them!

But that’s fine… Because professionals always want to carry around a 17″ laptop… or do they?

Moving on… the battery really bothers me. Yeah, yeah, they last upto 8 hours (in reality probably only 5-6hrs and only for the first year) and that’s just fine. However… did they just make it non-user-replaceable!??!?!?!?!? On a $3000 laptop!?!?! Are you fucking kidding?!!?! Seriously. I know people that are still carrying around G4 PowerBooks… and I’m sure they’ve had a few batteries. They do not want to be taking it in to a local Apple store and paying someone to replace it for them.

Also, from what I could tell from the pictures shown… the bottom is “sealed” off. I saw no hatch for hard drive or memory replacement. I will not go raging about that until I hear it confirmed that these parts are not supposed to be [easily] user replaceable, but from the looks of it, it seems like they don’t want you opening it yourself… A huge step back for a professional laptop.

(And as a side note on that… if the RAM isn’t user upgradable… no one in their right mind is going to pay $1200 for 8GB of RAM. Is Apple crazy?!)

All-in-all… I really think these recent Pro laptops from Apple are huge leaps backwards when they are supposedly aimed at professionals. It really seems like they are more influenced by the normal consumers than the professionals. Why can’t Apple keep the MacBooks separate from the MacBook Pros? The only practical differences now are the screen size and firewire on the Pros. They even run the same damn chipsets. I really would expect more distinction for a Pro laptop other than size of the Screen and cost.

Apple is really screwing the professionals now. Here is to me not buying another Apple laptop ever again (unless they turn this terrible behavior around). ::clink::

Let me just get it out there… these new MacBook Pros suck.

I was expecting them to make these things better… not worse.

I guess I can start with some things I like about them… so that I’m not all negative. Hmm, I guess I like the fact that it is using an nVidia chipset. The performance gains with the 1066MHz FSB and DDR3 (almost the first use of that in the laptop industry) are certainly good. The new manufacturing process is good, and I’m sure these laptops feel very solid. Also, the fact they are letting you swap out the hard drive now is a plus.

And that’s the only changes I like. I’ll move on now to the things I’m neutral on… the touch pad is very iffy to me. Sure, it’s nice that it’s bigger and multi-touch… but I know about having the whole thing be the button. This is something I will have to try and use in person to see whether I like it. The magnet latch is just fine, as well. The overall design and look of it is just a normal update… and I’m sure it’s fine.

OK, now the biggest section of my gripes. The following things suck:

• The battery — The battery is smaller… and you have to remove a whole door to get to it, should you want to swap out a second battery while traveling. A smaller battery means that the battery life suffers, and it does. Before they claimed 6 hours (and it got about 4.5). Now they claim 5 hours (so it’ll probably get about 3.5).
• The display — I have not seen a single glossy display laptop that I like. The glossy displays absolutely suck. Matte is 100 times better than glossy. Enough said.
• The keyboard — Sorry if you happen to like the old MacBook keyboards with the gaps between the keys… I personally don’t like the gaps… but that can be gotten used to, I guess.
• The display port — These wouldn’t be so bad if they fucking included the needed adapters. The fact that they charge $29 for each one (and there are probably at least 2 you may need), really sucks. Plus… I don’t think these new ports are industry standard. I think Apple really wants them to be.
• The Dual Graphics cards — First off… this is really dumb. They have the balls to put 2 separate graphics chips in these things… and NOT SLI them for improved performance. What the hell? Secondly… why not condense them into 1 chip (talk to nVidia a little more) and just use the 9600M GT chip?  To save battery life… all you do is dynamically clock the chip (which yes, is possible!).

I have to say the most important thing that sucks is the glossy display. And right behind that the battery. If they would have left those 2 things alone or improved them… I would have been sold. But those 2 things are the deal breakers for me.

Update: Interestingly enough, I’ve seen some benchmarks on these new MBPs… and there is no significant upgrade in performance… unless of course you get the 2.8 Ghz chip. In some cases, the previous generation is actually faster.

Dear Facebook,

What you have done is very hurtful. You’ve taken a site that I’ve always loved using since the beginning… and turned it into, pardon the french, complete shit. The new layout you have spent months developing is honestly an embarrassment. As a web developer, I can appreciate all the work that has gone into the back end and such, but the front end is, as as they say, “Epic fail.” I know a lot of people say this without specific reason, but I will spell out some of the specific problems with the new layout.

1. While tabs are a great idea for keeping pesky applications out of sight, the execution on this was awful. Putting the info section on a separate tab is extremely inconvenient. Moreover, the tab labeled “Wall” is NOT my wall. You’ve taken the very well accepted definition of the wall and completely destroyed it. I can not even see the entire wall anymore… so there goes going back and reading old wall posts. I can’t even get a number of how many wall posts I have! I actually made a goal this year to get up to 1000 wall posts… and I was well on the way to this… but now I will never know. Thanks for ruining my little goal… and one of the entire “coolness” factors on facebook. And while STILL on the subject of the tabs… the tab named “Boxes” is completely undefined. I do not know what that means. I’m still trying to figure out why you would ever call that tab “Boxes.” I think it is some sort of Applications tab… but I might be wrong. Maybe you’re trying to change the name of the applications to “boxes” for some unknown, pointless, and unreasonable reason.
2. Good job wasting so much more space with the status updates. Not only is it listed at the top of my profile…. but there is also a separate larger font box for updating it! Apparently, clicking it to change it on the spot was not good enough.
3. Good job making it blatantly obvious that this remake was intended to bring MORE ADS! to Facebook. I understand that you need to have sponsors… but what was wrong with keeping them under an existing column where they were actually out of the way. Now they have their own column on the page… that happens to really make it look like a lot of space is wasted further down in the page. It makes me want to write a script to change that so that I can gain that space back, thank you very much.
4. The varying font sizes and indentations on this new “Wall”/mini feed/wtf thing is nauseating. I think I’m finally starting to see some pattern to it… but I don’t like it. Having status, feed items, wall posts, comments, and everything else you felt like throwing into this creation really sucks. There is so much going on with it that I have to take extra time to figure it out before I start parsing what info it tries to provide.
5. Back to those application, or boxes, or whatever you want to call them. I have an idea! What if were were able to put some of our favorite ones on our main tab!? What is our main tab? What comes up when people click on my profile? Sometimes when I click on peoples profiles I just get the “Info” tab, and other times I get there “Wall” tab. (Don’t even think about making that consistent). While I do hate most applications (when you guys launched those I knew it was trouble brewing), some of them are rather tame and I would actually want people to see them when they come to my page. But now… I actually have to hope they decide or want to click on my “Boxes” tab. Thanks. Now I can’t promote my blog posts with ease. Or have a “Box” for my rss feed presented to people.
6. It took me literally 30 minutes to find my groups. I almost thought you got rid of groups! Then… I randomly noticed that at the bottom, next to some Start Menu type thing, that there is a little icon for groups! Thanks. Now there isn’t a list of my groups on my profile. You’ve completely taken the idea of the profile and ripped it apart to something I would be embarrassed to release if I developed for Facebook.
7. Again with the wasting space. On the Home screen, there is a grey box on the right side… that is too wide for its purpose… and when that box is done… under it is just a bunch of white space. (That’d be a great place for ads, maybe. Just kidding.)
8. I randomly have some stupid “Application Feeds” on the Home Screen… under an arrow tab. Best thing, though… I can’t get rid of these feeds! I don’t know where they came from… and I can’t get rid of them!
9. I love how you half ass-ly put the latest 3 status updates at the top of the News Feed. No options for maybe how many of the latest status updates we want to see… no mixing it randomly in with everything else (the general theme of this new layout). Nope… just randomly placing it there as if it was an after thought that we might want to see the latest 3 updates. Like in the old, yes… but if I remember correctly, when you were only testing this new layout, those 3 latest status updates were not there. So… it was an after thought.
10. How wide does the birthday list have to be? If I had to guess… a nice random number of 318 pixels. That may or may not be the actual number of pixels. And… 207 of those pixels are wasted grey space to the right of this list. If I do the math… that works out to actually only needing 111 pixels for this list. To make it a more normal number… we might go ahead and stretch it to… say… 150 pixels. Sorry, I notice these things as a web developter. This also translates to those 318 horizonal pixels being completely under this grey box on the Home screen.
11. Back to the Profile… apparently when we go to the “Boxes” tab… we no longer want that panel on the left with our picture and other Info. We do however want that on the “Info” and the “Wall” tabs. Where is the option for that?
12. The light colors make everything seem…. blurry or hazzy. Interesting. Perhaps a reference to the design itself.

This is just what I could come up with in about 20 minutes. Facebook… I seriously hate the new layout. Trust me, I can add so much more to this list. I am begging you to switch it back and perhaps try again. I am seriously hurt by your complete lack of listening to the users of your site. I have repeatedly left my feedback on the shit you’ve come up with… and it seems my suggestions went unheard. I am eagerly awaiting the next big social network… ready to switch at any time. I switched to facebook for its very nice, clean, minimal design. But I see it is just becoming bloated and corrupt; adding more focus to ads, not caring what the users want, and creating a completely disorganized layout.

Thanks.

–Todd