Sydney ALT .NET group will have their first meeting tomorow 30 September 2008. Basically, if you're the kind of developer who's eager to know other alternative technology than .NET, you're most welcome to the group. You can find the official definiton of the group here. I can't wait to attend the meeting, as Im sure I will learn a lot from the meeting and meet people with great minds. I'll definately make a follow up posts in regards to the event.
ALT .NET Meeting (website)
Where:
Level 8, 51 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
[Map]
When:
Tuesday, September 30th
6pm - 8pm
Agenda For The Night:
6:00 pm - Meet & Greet time and then Kick Off!
6:30 pm - "Ruby, Rails and IronRuby from a .NET perspective". Presented by James Crisp
7:00 pm - Munchies & Drinkie
7:30 pm - "Mocking with Rhino Mocks 3.5". Presented by Richard Banks.
8:00 pm - Wrap up & go home.
RWendi
Few days ago I read a news in TomsHardware saying that most google chrome users are back to IE or Firefox. The article states that upon launching chrome, it scooped up a whooping 1.4% share market stealing users from IE and Firefox. It has been few weeks after the launch, and the new stats shows that chrome keeps on losing its user base back to IE and Firefox.
I had not had the time to try chrome. I had been wanting to try it, ever since I read that famous Chrome comic, but I had been so hooked up with the new IE that I completely forgot about it. After I read that news it made me wander, what made chrome to lose its user base? So I decided to close my IE, and install Chrome.
My first impression to chrome that its very simplistic and has somewhat outdated feeling to the design. With the first look, I had the feeling that there won't be much that chrome offers to its users. So I begin in checking what settings that it's got for me, and wow im completely shocked!! There're not much settings to tweak from the web browser. What shocked me even more, there are not much options shown in the security settings. It makes me doubt if this browser is really as safe as its advertised.
Performance wise, I must say it lives up to its expectations. It loads web pages preety darn fast. Tab performance was good as well. Didn't see any lag that IE has when opening a new tab. Having said that, it still has some problems with realibility. It crashed a couple of times for me, especially when I had many tabs opened. Moreover, as im writting this, it doesn't seem to support silverlight very well. Most silverlight websites that I've tried, It's either loads up very slow or it crashed on me.
In conclusion, I have to agree that the chrome performs preety well in most websites, despite its problem with silverlight websites. On average its more or less the same performance as Firefox, and a little bit faster than IE. But all that performance is probably because chrome is a very lightweight web-browser. It doesn't offer many features, and I'd say that the security of the web browser is questionable. In my opinion, it doesn't have the wow factor in it to make its users wants to stay. I can see now why it has lost its user base, there's just no good reason to stay. People go back to IE and Firefox because you get about the same performance, and getting all the other goody features that they offer.
RWendi
"Every computing problem can be solved by adding another layer of interaction" - Scott Hanselman.
I just had to post this... Such an awesome quote... :)
Stored procedure has been known to have performance advantages in comparison to inline sql statement, such as:
- Pre-parsed/pre-compiled SQL statement: also cached for sub-sequent use.
- Pre-generated Query Execution Plan. Query Execution Plan is a set of steps that is used by the database to execute sql statements.
- Reduced Network traffic: SQL statements can be executed in batches.
- Improved security: user can be given permision to execute a stored procedure without having any permission on the underlying data/table.
For all we know DBAs love stored procedure and preffer to use them instead of inline sql statement, but do we really gain much from using stored procedure? Developers may not have the maximum productivity when developing application driven based of stored procedure. This is due to the fact that it's not that easy working with stored procedure. They're painfully hard to debug with those non-descpritive error message, and the fact that they tend to hide business logic makes application to be less consistent.
Having said that, placing your business logic in the database is not entirely a bad idea, especially in a case where your database is used by more than one application. To have a centralized place for your business logic means that there is only one code base to be maintained/managed. Changes in business logic will need to be applied only to the stored procedure, not to every application that talks to the database. This case of course does not apply to database that is used by only one application.
There are also arguments saying that with modern databases, performance advantages that stored procedure has may be negligible. This is right, but not always. Yes it may be negligible, but only for simple queries. For larger and more complicated queries, the performance difference may substantially adds up (time to parse/compile sql statements, and generating the execution plan). More complicated queries may take as slow as few seconds to build their execution plan, when stored procedure is used this will be cached for sub-sequent use.
In conclusion, using stored procedure is definitely a good practice, especially with those performance benefits. But for simple queries, it may just be sufficient to use inline SQL statement, as those performance benefits will be negiligble in modern database. Who knows years from now, maybe stored procedure would be completely redundant. Moore's Law lives on!!
Had this for lunch... God, I love this stuff... :)
As a software engineer, I keep on doing my bad habit of "Thinking too much"!! Yes, too much thinking can do you no good. Too much thinking may lead you to forget the most important thing, which is "To do something".
My initial step in doing something is to think and plan on how to go about of doing it. Once I've got a potential solution, it gets more complicated from there. These questions are what usually come to my mind:
- Is this the right/best solution?
- Is the solution general enough?
- Is there anything that might break the solution?
- Is there anything the solution might break?
- Is there any better solution?
This train of thought is usually my standard train of thought. On more complicated issue, more questions usually arises in my head. One leads to another, another leads to other ones. It just keeps going in an infinite loop.
It's not necesarilly a bad thing to have this kind of habit. Afterall by thinking you may have a bit more assurance that you're doing it the right way, not to mention you will be more prepared to anticipate any issue that might arrise surrounding your solution. The thing is, you just won't know the exact answer to these question without having to try it.
In Short, by thinking you may gauge but the real answer lies when you start implementing your solution. Thus every time my infinite loop of train of thought has started to run, I would put a big break point that says "Just Do It!!".
After some times, finally decide to install IE 8 Beta 2... Abit reluctant to install it at first, due to the fact that once you install it, you cant remove it under XP sp 3... Then I thought that I will always have my mozilla anyway,nd a so I installed it...
As a developer, a web browser is very important thing to have. With many browsers out there, including the recent release of google chrome, choosing the "best" browser can be a difficult task. No doubt that mozilla has been the standard browser for many people these days, and It's still my favourite browser. My biggest question everytime Im trying a new browser would be: "Will this browser be as good as mozilla?".
There are many new features added to IE8, which can be found here, but Im mainly interested with tab grouping feature. I usually have dozens of tabs open in my mozilla, and it gets very hard to find a specific tab. With tab grouping, you can group tabs into one logical unit, and those tabs will be coloured. When you open a link to a new tab, it will automatically group the new tab with the old one. I find this very usefull, because you'll be able to keep track of your tabs. Moreover, it gets easier to find a specific tab, because when you group a tab, it will create a seperator on your tab list. I honestly love this tab grouping feature.
Another enhancement on the tab control is now IE will create a new process per tab (similar feature as in google chorme). One big difference of this feature with google chrome is that, when a process crashes, rather than showing a sad face as in google chrome, IE will try to reload the tab few times, and ultimately shows an error page if its unable to reload it. Now it also offers the functionality to reload the tabs opened on the last session when you launch IE.
One of the best news of IE 8 is that IE finally decides to ditch its text searching mechanism (god, I hate that text search dialog box). In IE 8 it will have a similar search mechanism as Mozilla, with the toolbar and stuff. Not sure if it has "search as you type" feature though.
In terms of performance, im finding that it feels faster when rendering web pages. BUT its tab performance was VERY slugish. Everytime you open up a new tab, it takes IE a bit of time to fire up a new process for the tab. its not overly long, but its noticeable (like half a sec). I have to say in terms of stability, I don't think its stable yet. Well thats why its still in BETA.
All in all, I think that IE 8 is a very promising browser. If the release version doesnt have the stability issue and tab performance issue, I might just jump ship to IE 8... Of course that would depend on my impression of google chrome (haven't tried it yet).
After some tinkerings to the css files and the theme template files, I am finally satisfied with the look and feel of the website. Well, at least for now. Took me a while to grasp how this blog application hangs together, which made me realise how rusty is my web development skill. Maybe I should try to keep up more with the web development world, by developing small web-apps just for fun. I do like to read articles and stuffs, but never really attempted to try to code them. Anyway, can only hope that I would have the time for that. :)
Okay, just realised that there's a major issue with the template layout on the comment page. Despite of that, I think commenting should still be working fine. Going to have a look at it when I have the time.
Quite a Big day today @ work, 3 people got promotions:
Jim Lim --> Leaning towards product manager role.
Paul Doessel --> Software Architech.
Abhinov Gulati --> Team Lead.
Congratz guys, you deserve it!! Cheers...
Finally, I am able to get this website up and running again, after losing it to one of those company who buy and sell website. I am still in the progress of configuring and setting up the dasBlog, which is a pretty amazing blog software by the way. It is easy to deploy, and has so many amazing features in it. Highly recommended, you can get it here.
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