Archives

photo credit: bienvu

I’ve been working on a GWT application that makes use of HTML5 local storage to persist state between loads. The target for right now is the iPad and the two webkit browsers — Chrome and Safari.

I wasn’t all that happy with the speed of the local hash storage, so I decided to test out the db versus hash performance. First off was writing. After coding up a quick benchmark and storing 20,000 key-value pairs in both the hash and a db table, I had some really odd numbers:

• Mobile Webkit (on the iPad): 0.96 seconds for the hash, 1.24 seconds for the database
• Chrome 5.0 (Mac): 18.39 (!!) seconds for the hash, 0.31 seconds for the database
• Safari 5.0 (Mac): 0.05 seconds for the hash, 0.17 seconds for the database

What stands out here is the slow performance of Chrome. I’m going to try and do this in vanilla JavaScript, just to take GWT out of the equation. I hope that’s what it is, otherwise this looks like a Chrome bug.

Share/Bookmark

photo credit: herval

I got an advertisement for a workshop about how to develop SaaS products. The title was, “Silly Agility–The Myth of the SaaS Agile Product Manager”. Here is some of the text of the advertisement:

XP was an attempt to replace waterfall development approaches with something new…[References a generic project]…objectively analyzed, [this project] was a failure; after five years the product wasn’t completed and the development effort was terminated.

My first though is that this is a sensational advertisement to get bodies in the door of a poorly conceived workshop. My second thought is that this is damaging to the careers of persons advertising it. Factually speaking: when the Agile principles were defined, it wasn’t an exercise in creating newness for its own sake. Another objection is that an “Agile” project that drags on and on for five years and then finally fails isn’t using Agile principles in the first place. If its going to fail, it should fail fast rather than chew through a budget until the end. They don’t understand Agile principals and shouldn’t be presenting them in a talk on which they expect somebody to spend $200.

I worry about the presenter’s financial future though. My personal experience is that I have never met, or read about, a product manager disliking Agile once they tried it – unless that PM is more focused on the manager portion of their title than the product part. Who is going to come to this talk? I don’t expect these to be people who are taking the industry in new directions. I think this a talk for people who are keeping the status quo. Statically these aren’t the most successful people and not good clients on which to to bet your future. Enjoy your echo chamber.

Share/Bookmark

Bundler is optional for rails 2.3.X. However, it is not a bad idea to upgrade to bundler for several reasons:

• It is stable now and will solve your gem dependency conflicts better than rubygems require.
• You will be better prepared to migrate to rails3 when you are ready.

Instructions for using bundler with rails 2.3 will get you off to a good start. We use shoulda and mocha for our test suite. If you do too, you may run into an issue that Yehuda rightly blogged about here.

Share/Bookmark

photo credit: takacsi75

At Pathfinder Development, a goodly chunk of our business comes from startups looking to develop a software product or service. Some of our entrepreneurs have a great deal of sophistication when it comes to raising capital, but a few others have benefited from our experience and our contacts in the world of venture investing.

In this multipart series, I’m going to explain how angel and venture capital works, identify some other sources of funding, explain some best practices for funding your startup, and provide pointers to some critical resources for the ambitious entrepreneur.

So, first off, it helps to understand the motivations of the investor. Different investors have different levels of sophistication, but they all share a common goal, which leads us to our first rule:

Venture and angel investors are looking to get a multiple of their money back in at most a 5 year time frame.

Why is that? Venture investors raise money from other people and have to return that money plus a return in a certain timeframe. That timeframe puts a clock on their investments. Because of common practices in the venture industry, 5 years is a rough but decent estimate of how much time you have.

Share/Bookmark

photo credit: Arlington County

I’ve been working on an app that stores a substantial amount of data in HTML5 local storage. Works like a charm on all the browsers/platforms I’ve tested, with one exception: mobile webkit on the iPhone and iPad. There when you try to overwrite a key that’s already been stored, the subsystem throws an exception indicating that the storage limit has been exceeded. I’ve reproduced this on OS 3.2, both in the simulator and actual devices.

The workaround is to first delete the key, then store the key/value pair. Not great, but at least it works.

Share/Bookmark

photo credit: vieux bandit

Thanks to some code contributions, I’ve released a new version of JSONWrapper for GWT. New are the addition of Boolean and Integer accessor methods. I’ve been making quite a bit of use of this library recently, lots of it in relation to efficiently storing data as JSON in HTML5 storage. Very handy to have and saves a ton of time. Enjoy.

Share/Bookmark

Anybody who has been to our office knows I am an Android fan. My prediction is that the Android platform will end up with a much, much larger install base than iPhone OS. Originally, I felt this way because you can get a Android phone on every carrier for a lower cost than the iPhone – many of them are now free with a contract. This is good enough, but I have a new insight. The Android OS does a great job of directing your attention to highly important information. As such, its easier for new users to pick up and for busy people to use. How can this be? You should argue that the the Android OS so similar to the iPhone OS. You are right. However, it comes down to usability. The majority of people out there won’t explore their device to find information. They just want the phone to do the work for them. If it doesn’t smack them in the head it might as well not exist. Android has two crucial features that make it a helper more than just a smart phone.

Share/Bookmark

photo credit: anitakhart

I will always think of one word in particular when I think of this recent memorial day weekend…….Spare.

I hosted 25 people for a BBQ on Sunday, and things were going great until the gas ran out as I was cooking the appetizers. Thankfully I always have a spare gas tank, and 5 minutes later we were back in action.

Then. on Monday afternoon I received some SMS and email alerts from our monitoring system that a few of our app servers had stopped responding to queries. Since it was a few app VM’s which failed I went straight to our HP based SAN, which would not respond to either SSH or web access, even ILO showed it as being up. I began to get very nervous thinking about the risk of data corruption on our multi terabyte array…..

Share/Bookmark