My Coding Blog

Test Google Crawl Entry

2008-11-03T18:13:00.001-08:00

I am not sure whether google is still crawling my site. Writing this entry just to test to verify it.
thaiicetea
android
iphone
sf

Yahoo! still the most visited sites

2007-03-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Back in November, ComScore's report showed that Yahoo! was dethroned by MySpace as the most viewed site based on page views. Many people argued at the time that it is simply because Yahoo! had ajax'ed many of its properties, including it's flagship product, Yahoo! mail. But it is still interesting to find out how close exactly other sites have catch up to Yahoo. With the emerging of Ajax applications, page view is clearly no longer the correct metric to compare the popularities and usages among sites. A user actively engaged in an ajax site would record a handful of page views versus possibly hundreds of page views for a traditional site.

ComScore recently released its Media Metrix report for February 2007. It uses “visits” instead of "page views" for the metrix. The “visits” metric, by their definition, is the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes. This is certain a better metric. For the engaged user scenario above, both will be registered as one visit. But clearly, it is not perfect. A user spending hours on one site chatting with friends is considered one visit while a user occationally checks email once every hour is recorded as multiple visits.

Nonetheless, this gives us a better picture of the landscape. From the report, Yahoo! once again comes up on top, in both unique visitors as well as average visits per visitor. Based on unique visitor report, it seems like sites such as Microsoft and Google are up to Yahoo's neck. For example, Yahoo haa 128M unique visitors while Google has 114M. That represents only a little more than 10% advantage for Yahoo. But the "visits" report tells a different story. Yahoo has 28.6 visits per unique visitor while Google has only 17.7. That means their users visit Yahoo more than half the time they visit Google.

The combination of these reports shows an even bigger gap. Multiplying unique visitors by visits per unique visitors gives you the total visits for the month. Therefore, Yahoo has 128M*28.6 or 3661M total visits versus 114M*17.7 or 2018M total visits. Yahoo has almost double of Google's visits! Now, lets look at how MySpace fares with Yahoo. Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, has 78M unique visitors and 16.9 visits per visitor. That gets 1318M visits. Yahoo has nearly triple their visits!

So for now, Yahoo is still the King.

Microsoft Vista - Impression after one week

2007-03-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

It has been one full week since I installed Microsoft Vista. Initially, I did not plan to use it as my permanent operating system. There are quite a number of softwares in my system reported to have problems running under Vista. My original thought was to switch over when most of these softwares are patched or updated to support Vista.

But the more I use it, the more I like it over XP! Partly, I think it is because of the new Aero3D user interface. It is always nice to see something flesh after using the out-of-the-box XP UI for the last 4 years. I know there are a lot of theme softwares to customize the UI for XP, but I am not the type of person to fiddle with them. Most of them are not original and simply imitate other UIs. The others are either straining to look at or not intuitive. Companies don't spend a large amount of effort doing usability and user acceptance tests for nothing.

Another reason I continue to use Vista is because most softwares seem to be working fine. The first thing installed is Java SE because I am a Java developer and many of my softwares are Java applications. Apps such as Intellij, Eclipse, Azureus, and Tomcat all seems to be working flawlessly. Next, I install a bunch of utility softwares I use regularly. I realized that most of them already have version upgrades for Vista already. They include Nero, Winrar, iTunes and audio video codec packs.

Next, I will try out the rest of my softwares, such as Photoshop, Office, Partition Manager and Perfect Disk to see if they have issues.

Microsoft Vista - My first hands-on

2007-03-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

Last night, I did a new installation of Vista onto my computer at home. I did not foresee it replacing my Windows XP soon because many softwares are still not compatible with Vista. In fact, the tool that Microsoft provides to check for compatibilities reported more than 10 applications I am currently using have problems running under Vista. As more and more software companies provide updates for Vista, I will eventually switch over. For now, I just want to get a feel for it.

The installation is surprisingly simple and fast. It no longer shows the dos mode setup screen which you see for the previous Windows versions. I had it up and running in less than an hour. The Aero3D user interface is very cool. I especially like the change to the Alt-Tab menu that shows thumbnails of the windows. As screen sizes get bigger and more people are using their LCD TV as the monitor, Microsoft is more liberal in using more of the screen spaces. Icons and menu items are much larger than before. They make it a lot easier for me to navigator on my 40" LCD TV. :)

Performance has also been improved. Typically, you would expect new softwares to be more hardware demanding, thus running sluggishly on "not-so-new" hardware. But in the case of Vista. I found many things to be faster. For example, IE 7 is running very smoothly on Vista. Especially while browsing client intensive applications, such as Yahoo's new Web 2.0 mail client. I am guessing many components of Windows have been rewritten to take advantages of multi processor machines.

Overall, I am very impressed with Vista. But it took Microsoft so long to deliver it, it better be good. I hope my softwares will be Vista-ready soon so I can switch over for good.

Prefactoring

2007-03-07T23:09:00.000-08:00

I am reading this book by Ken Pugh called 'Prefactoring', which talks about how to get the code right the first time to prevent the need for refactoring at a later time. Personally, I don't think it is the right approach. As requirement changes or with addition requirement, refactoring is almost always inevitable. Instead, we should aim to write code that are adaptable to changes. Anyway, the book touches on a lot of different topics including validation, error handling, naming strategy, etc. Granted, most of the suggestions here are really common senses, such as "don't reinvent the wheel", "don't repeat yourself", and "separate concerns." As I was reading it, the techniques feel more like reminders than new ideas.

Other than mentioning the obvious, the book is very well written with a easy flow to it. The examples are relevant which help make the topics stick to your mind. I would recommend this book for those beginners who are looking to improve their coding techniques.

A bad day at work

2007-03-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

I came to work early this morning, after a relaxing weekend, prepared to have a productive week. I needed a source control for a small project I am working on with 2 other coworkers. Recently, I noticed that most major open source projects such as Apache Software Projects and Hibernate, have switched over to Subversion. So I decided to give it a try. Documentations are well written and installation is a breeze. The only road block I ran into is the loader having trouble reading config files with the UTF-8 BOM marks. I edited one of the config files with Textpad and it automatically added the BOM mark causing the config loader to complain about "Section header expected".

Anyway, after I came back from lunch, I noticed a BSOD showing on my Windows machine. I tried rebooting the machine couple times with different start up options, but still fail. I figured at this point, it is a hardware failure which I can't fix. I contacted IT, 4 hours later (now), I am still waiting for the guy to show up at my cube.

Luckily, I have a freebsd box with KDE installed, which I have never used before, sitting next to my feet. I decided to fire Konqueror up and do some blogging while waiting for the IT guy to show up. But I am really disappointed with KDE. I couldn't finish this blog because in less than an hour, Konqueror crashed 3 times on me. Then I decided to write my blog in KWrite and copy over. In a short while, KWrite crashed on me as well. I sure hope the IT guy can fix my machine early in the morning tomorrow so I can get out of this KDE nightmare.

Intellij code inspection

2007-02-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

I recently done an interview with a candidate who uses IntelliJ Idea for her java development. Just like me, she is the only one in the team who choose to use it as the primary IDE. The rest of my and her teams use either Eclipse or NetBean. But as I was talking to her about the benefit of using IntelliJ, it was shocking for me to hear that she never heard of the inspection feature!! To me, inspection is by far is the number advantage of IntelliJ over other IDEs.

The inspection is a tool designed to assist in maintaining and cleaning up code. It accomplishes this by searching for bugs or inconsistencies and then suggesting solutions for any problem found. Currently, it overs over 600 bugs ranging everything from detecting performance issues to locating 'dead' code.

The best part is it checks automatically for you on the fly as you code. Whenever it detects a problem, a yellow line appears in the small column on the right. Clicking on the yellow line brings you to the line which it thinks the problem occurs:

So if you are using IntelliJ but not using this feature, give it a try. Or the next time you get into a heated conversation on IntelliJ vs Eclipse, bring up code inspection and see what the other guys have to say.

Dive into greasemonkey

2007-02-28T12:01:00.000-08:00

I recently had to write a browser client tool that checks for advertisements on Yahoo! pages and displays detail information about the it. I first thought about writing a browser plugin to do the task. Then I came across Greasemonkey for Firefox and decided to give it a try.

They have done a great job is writing the tutorial documentation. I followed the instructions here and I got it up and running in a matter of minutes. But there are certain things I would like to point out about this tutorial.

1. The 'Better way to delay calling a function' example in section 2.3 actually does not work at all, even though it says that it should. The problem has to do with passing the callback function, helloworld, as a string. In this example, the helloworld function has no reference to it after the page is rendered. Therefore, it will be garbage collected. The correct way should be this:

        window.helloworld = function() {
         alert('Hello world!');
       }

       window.setTimeout(helloworld, 60);

Passing in as object makes a reference to the function and keeps the function around by the time it is being called.

2. Section 2.4 on editing your user script is unclear. At first, I made trouble getting it to work and the part on associating you favorite text editor for .js files confused me. I associated js files to textpad on Windows and that did not appear to work. I then found out that I need to associate it in Firefox using the 'about:config' command.

I finally have everything ready to start my little project!!