A tutorial on website bandwidth, RSS outsourcing, and image outsourcing

Coding Horror: Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage is an excellent, brief, tutorial on the state of the web art. Among other things, I learned about image outsourcing with Imageshack, why people use FeedBurner (outsource the RSS burden), the huge cost of badly written RSS readers, HTTP compression (ok, I knew about that, but it's rarely mentioned), JavaScript and CSS optimization. An excellent reference to keep at hand.

I do need to learn more about FeedBurner. There's evidently a reason it's so popular.

Update: check out the comments too. S3 is mentioned a content host a few times.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Impressive

I'm impressed. I tried Adobe - Photoshop Lightroom (OS X) when it was in beta and I wasn't that keen on it, but it's come a long way. Editing tasks are quite fast on my G5 iMac, certainly faster than Aperture, but even quicker than iPhoto. You can actually edit a date in Lightroom, which you can't do in Aperture (still). (Ok, so there are bugs in dates prior to 1600 or so ...)

The relatively small number of keyboard shortcuts are just right to make quick work of editing. I quickly got the hang of ~, R, G, Cmd-U, etc. The auto-correction and several tools for saving and applying sets of editing operations worked quickly and well.

I don't see the powerful querying and image management tools I used during my Aperture trial however. They may be there, I haven't finished looking at the app yet.

If Adobe had decided to support migrating from iPhoto I'd be strongly tempted to buy it. Of course they didn't. Lightroom is not a good option for anyone with a great deal of metada in iPhoto, but it may be the best bet for just about everyone else. This 1.0 release of Lightroom seems better put together than Aperture 1.52.

Did I mention the user interface is clear and readable -- unlike Aperture's bizarre non-Apple GUI?

Apple needs to get in gear. They're already losing a race that's barely started.

Update 3/8/07: I've found my first nasty bug. On occasion Lightroom reports it cannot import an image. It may even say it can't be read. On a retry Lightroom reads it. Image Capture, iPhoto, etc have no problem with the same image.

Jon Udell tackles the multiple calendar problem

Jon Udell wrote some fabulous columns for BYTE magazine in its heyday [1]. He always looked harder and farther than anyone else. So I'm delighted to see he feels the multi-calendar pain, and he's writing about it ...

Calendar cross-publishing concepts � Jon Udell

... The private URL [Google Calendar] is what we’re looking for. And in particular, the iCal flavor of the private URL. That’s what other calendar programs, including Outlook, can latch onto to subscribe to this calendar. The URL that Google produces starts with http:// and, when you plug it into Outlook 2007, bingo, there’s the family calendar nicely merged in with the work calendar...

Huh!? Outlook 2007 will integrate an iCal source with the work calendar? Maybe Office 2007 isn't all bad after all.

This does mean that family events go into the work world, which I dislike. I'd much rather have the work events to to a secured family calendar, but of course my employer doesn't care for that. Jon says Outlook 2007 will publish to a WebDav server:

... When you publish your Outlook calendar to WebDAV and then try to subscribe from Google Calendar, you’ll fail if the calendar is secured with HTTP basic authentication. (However, Apple iCal will succeed in this case.) If you instead allow anonymous access to the WebDAV-hosted calendar it’ll work in Google Calendar, but only if you alter the sharing URL produced by Outlook, changing webcal:// to http://...

Hmm. If I sign up for .Mac I get a WebDAV server and a family Calendar sync. If I can also integrate my work calendar ...

The multi-calendar problem is driving me bonkers. I remember the blessed days when I could sort-of-get Outlook to selectively sync certain categories with my Palm. Back then, I had a full calendar view on my Palm and at home, and a work only view at Work. Alas, an immense number of bugs and design flaws made me give up on that solution; I've had two cursed calendars ever since. The problem is all the more painful given that there was once a pretty decent solution ...

[1] There's nothing like BYTE in the world today. I'm convinced its demise set back progress in personal computing by several years. I'd always felt Microsoft's relative enmity (PC Magazine wrote whatever they wanted, so they got the goodies) was partly responsible for BYTE's demise, so it's a bit ironic that Jon now works for the Empire.

How to manage office space for growth

Office Space Calculations - Joel on Software

A handy guide for anyone considering a startup.

Vista is slow. How to make it tolerable, the perfomance penalty of antivirals, and OS X rules

Coding Horror is a Windows guy. So when he says that the default configuration of Vista is substantially slower than XP, you know there's a problem. It turns out, however, that you can configure Vista to behave a bit like OS X, in which case it's about as fast as XP. Until you add anti-viral software, then it's slow again.

I particularly appreciated the comments on antiviral software. I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention, any serious geek has loathed the performance drag and bugginess of antiviral software ever since it came out. I had to retire my mother's Win 98 box, for example, not because it was too slow to run Firefox, but because it was too slow to run Norton Antivirus. One of the reasons OS X is faster and more stable than XP is because you can use it quite safely without antiviral software. Here's more from CH (emphases and annotations mine):

Coding Horror: Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

... For best performance, the first thing I do on any new Vista install is this:

1. Turn off Windows Defender
2. Turn off Windows Firewall
3. Disable System Protection
4. Disable UAC

I've had friends remark how "slow" Vista feels compared to XP, but when I ask them whether they've disabled Defender or UAC, the answer is typically no. Of course your system is going to be slower with all these added security checks. Security is expensive, and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. [jf: I'd say OS X is still a free lunch. For now.]

You might argue that three out of these four security features wouldn't even be necessary in the first place if Windows had originally followed the well-worn UNIX convention of separating standard users from privileged administrators. [jf: I'm amazed that some people run OS X as an admin. There's no reason I can think of to do that. It's just dumb.]...

... If you're really serious about security, then create a new user account with non-Administrator privileges, and log in as that user. This isn't the default behavior in Vista, sadly. Post install, you get an Administrator-But-Not-Really-Just-Kidding account which triggers UAC on any action that requires administrator privileges.

...Vista is probably the first Microsoft operating system ever where you can actually work effectively as a standard, non-privileged user. As a standard user, you get all the benefits of UAC, Defender, and System Protection.. without all the performance drain. [jf: This is how OS X works, except escalation to admin privileges is available when needed at the cost of entering a username and password. It's no bother, I rarely switch to my admin account.]

... Speaking of retrograde, band-aid, destroy all my computer's performance security, the one security feature Vista doesn't bundle is anti-virus software. And nothing cripples your PC's performance quite like anti-virus software. This isn't terribly surprising if you consider what anti-virus software has to do: examine every single byte of data that passes through your computer for evidence of malicious activity. But who needs theory when we have Oli at The PC Spy. Oli conducted a remarkably thorough investigation of the real world performance impact of security software on the PC. The results are truly eye-opening:

Percent slower: Boot CPU Disk

Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender 5% 8% 54% [jf: Microsoft's product. I bought this on the theory Microsoft would be most likely to limit performance hits]
Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%

The worst offenders are the anti-virus suites with real-time protection. According to these results, the latest Norton Internet Security degrades boot time by nearly 50 percent. And no, that isn't a typo in the disk column. It also makes all disk access sixteen times slower! Even the better performers in this table would have a profoundly negative impact on your PC's performance. Windows Defender, for example, "only" makes hard drive access 54 percent slower...

...I've never run any anti-virus software. And Mac or Linux (aka UNIX) users almost never run anti-virus software, either. ..

I don't agree with removing antiviral software from an XP box, though I do disable antiviral realtime software when I need to do major database work. Sooner or later some goof-up happens, and before you know it the machine is a spambot. I do think that Windows 95 or 98 users might be able nowadays to go without, a lot of viruses won't run on such old machines and OSs.

I may end up switching my Parallels Win2K VM to Vista Lite if I can get a cheap license, so it's nice to have this recipe at hand.

StuffIt Expander: A parasitic spawn and hideous evil

My new MacAlly keyboard came with stuffit compressed drivers. I almost returned it. StuffIt, once a respectable product, became a scourge under new ownership. It's buggy, adds no value to native solutions, can break the native OS X zip archive, and the distribution process requires one to sign up for spam.

I kept the keyboard, because it's about 10 times better than the egregious junk Apple ships, but I did pass on my concerns to MacAlly. Alas, they didn't seem to get the problem.

All of which is to say I found this blast from an ex-"Apple Genius" very validating:

ungenius - Third Party Apps

... I have some special words about StuffIt Expander, though. StuffIt Expander is a scourge upon our industry and should be viciously and stubbornly squashed, mashed, neglected, and uninstalled from all encountered computers at every opportunity. With the prevalence and openness of ZIP, up to and including its status as the default archiver for OS X, and The Unarchiver there is absolutely no reason to inflict this hideous evil upon another soul. Expurgate it from your repertoire and don't hesitate to call upon the services of a licensed exorcist if necessary.

If you ever see .SIT on a file you download, send the vendor this link or a link to the Apple Genius site. If you can suggest better links please add them in the comments below. We need to get vendors like MacAlly to see the light.

Google maps and traffic: includes MSP

I was playing with Google maps on my phone the other day, and I was surprised to see it included traffic flow data for the twin cities metro region. I just checked, and now it appears on the standard google map for the twin cities as well.

Official Google Blog: Stuck in traffic?:

.... I'm happy to tell you about a new feature on Google Maps that can help. For more than 30 major U.S. cities, you can now see up-to-date traffic conditions to help you plan your schedule and route. If you're in San Francisco, New York , Chicago, Dallas, or any of the other cities we now include, just click on the traffic button to show current traffic speeds directly on the map. If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing....

The Google integration is very nice, but I'm most impressed with how it works on my phone. The MN DOT provides a similar service with integrated webcam views.