/dev/null

I recently read an interview with Google’s Sean Quinlan about GFS and the problems they faced with interactive Web applications like GMail, which require a certain maximum latency time. The original Google File System design was focused on batch efficiency, not latency. Although the interview is quite long, there are two remarkable paragraphs I would like to quote:

There’s no question that GFS faces many challenges now. For one thing, the awkwardness of supporting an ever-growing fleet of user-facing, latency sensitive applications on top of a system initially designed for batch-system throughput is something that’s obvious to all. [...]

The guys who build Gmail went to a multihomed  model, so if one instance of your Gmail account got stuck, you would basically just get moved to another data center. Acutually, that capability was needed anyways just to ensure availability. Still, part of the motivation was that they wanted to hide the GFS problems.

While searching for some background information about the pros and cons of Google Web Toolkit (the German social network “StudiVZ” wants to use it now, because they think it’s cool), I came across lots of blogs of ex-Googlers. It feels like every employee that quits, writes at least 3 posts about it and places a prominent link on their home page – and then thousands of news portals are quoting it. Just google for “ex google employee”. You’ll get almost 27 million hits! If you search for “google rejected interview” you’ll only get about 9 million hits. When telling my friends what I observe, they sometimes wonder why they’ve never been contacted by a Google recruiter, which is another form of talking about Google.

What I want to say is: As strange as it seems how inferior people feel after they leave Google, get rejected or not even contacted by Google – at least people respect this company a lot and it would be way worse (from a PR standpoint), if nobody talks about them.

Anyhow: Using the GWT to build cool apps (not just intranet portals) doesn’t seem to be fun and it is a good reason to look for a job outside of Google. JavaScriptMVC is so much better!

The engineers at Google are facing the same (concurrency) problems as every other Web developer. Such problems are hard to find with ordinary testing, that does not take small variations in timing into account. To produce this result, you just have to press the back button at the right time:

Ever wanted to buy an iPhone 3GS without T-Mobile contract? Now you can buy mine on eBay! Starting at 1 EUR

So, why is that? I love to embrace change. I hate DRM, and I hate big companies that forget what innovation means, I hate company policies that prevent me from using the full potential of my computing device. Microsoft used to be the evil company number 1, but nowadays things change: I see Apple and Google right before Microsoft. They are the successful ones now, and they need to defend that position (I would do the same). They need to earn a lot of money for the share holders and they need to comply with a lot of different contracts they have with other companies. Probably, they can also not experiment anymore to the full extend. Whatever.

Apple products are still normal products, they don’t offer some kind of enhanced lifestyle experience. I am constantly confused when people start talking about their Apple products and how easy and irreplaceable  they are. It’s true, if you buy one Apple product, than you need another one so you don’t run into compatibility issues. Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft was blamed for?

Fact is: There are other good and quite usable smartphones beside the iPhone. Of course if you managed your whole Music library via iTunes, it’s hard to change. But why do I use iTunes? Right, because I bought an iPod once and then I was forced to use iTunes. Then I found out, that iTunes for Windows is somehow slow, so I had to buy the Mac Mini. Then I found out, that the PC keyboard layout is not really usable on a Mac, so I had to buy a Mac keyboard. Then my gray PC mouse was looking strange right next to the white keyboard, so I had to buy an Apple mouse. And so on. What kind of fucked up lifestyle is this?

I agree that Windows Mobile is crap, if you compare it with the iPhone. Not sure about the next version, but that’s not the point. I gave up waiting for the next Windows version many years ago. Fact is, that Windows devices are no option right now and it will probably still be hard to sync them with alternative operating systems or your Google account in the future.

Then there is Google with Android. I had an Android phone until recently, because I thought I might be interested in app development. I didn’t like the user interface (looks like the last 10 years didn’t happen), I don’t like Java. The music player is not what I expected. Then there are the OS update issues, everyone is talking about. Maybe Google learns how to handle that, maybe not. I don’t feel like that should be my problem.

The only remaining option is Palm. I thought they will simply run out of money. But now they were bought by HP. For now, I can trust them, if they commit themselves to WebOS. WebOS supports app development with standard Web technologies like JavaScript and HTML, which is exactly what a Web developer is looking for. So, because I embrace change, I ordered the new Palm Pre Plus last week. My first impression:

• After entering my Facebook and Google account details, it already knows all my contacts, my email and my calendar out of the box. The iPhone has a lot of different apps (some cost extra), but the built-in functionality is still very basic.
• It doesn’t wake me at night, just because a new email arrived. Still don’t know how to disable that vibrating alert during the night on my iPhone.
• I can copy any music or video file directly via USB to the device without using iTunes (that means from ANY computer). How cool is that?
• It’s black, features a modern user interface and multitasking. Wow!
• No problems with battery life so far. About the same as my iPhone.

For that reason, I am going to sell the iPhone now. It’s not a bad product, but I don’t feel like it’s the best I can get. I feel like I am forced by Apple to buy things I don’t really need or want. I want my freedom back.

Today, I prepared for the upcoming PHP/JS conferences and had a look at the mysterious bug #883 of Google Chrome and those related to it. Also I read though SquirrelFish source, which is used by Safari 4.

The reason for the odd behavior of Chrome seems to be a if/else construct that is repeated throughout the source of runtime.cc:


// Check if the name is trivially convertible to an index and get
// the element if so.
if (name->AsArrayIndex(&index)) {
return GetElementOrCharAt(object, index);
} else {
PropertyAttributes attr;
return object->GetProperty(*name, &attr);
}


Chrome makes a difference between properties and elements. And they do weird type casts. If you check JavaScriptCore, you see there is a better way:

inline JSValue JSObject::get(ExecState* exec, const Identifier& propertyName) const
{
PropertySlot slot(this);
if (const_cast(this)->getPropertySlot(exec, propertyName, slot))
return slot.getValue(exec, propertyName);
return jsUndefined();
}


Iterating over an objects properties can result in a seemingly random order, it’s always the same order in Chrome, but in a different order for other browsers. I posted this as bug #223 a couple of weeks ago. John Resig posted the same issue as ticket #883 a day later. It was confirmed in the meantime by the chromium developers and described as an expected behavior. Very funny.

Q: Wenn ich den Links zum der Browser-Crash Demo Folge, dann brauch ich
bei der letzten Seite nur noch mit der Maus über den “HERE” – Button
zu fahren und mein ( mit allen Updates versehenes ) Vista friert
sofort vollständig ein… Spricht das jetzt eher gegen Google oder Microsoft..?

A: Der Tenor nach der Veröffentlichung des Browsers lautet doch: Google
greift Microsoft an. qed.

Aus dem heise forum

I just found my first bug in Chrome: If you iterate over object properties (using jQuery’s $.each()) and insert HTML generated inside that loop into the DOM, then that HTML appears in random order. Very funny. Might be a problem with threads or Chrome changes the order of object properties by itself:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=223

There was a posting re “Mozilla’s Thought On Google’s Chrome” on Slashdot today… which has a comment that underlines what I wrote earlier:

IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to “occur” inside the browser?

Google will publish a beta version of it’s own Web browser tomorrow. Sadly, the beta will run on Windows only. Of course, they put some energy in speeding up JavaScript execution as they need this for their own applications. Otherwise they simply won’t be able to provide solutions that can compare with traditional offline applications.

For more information check out the online book about Chrome or the Google Blog.

While visiting the Google Blog, I found out, that a JS warning window appears in Firefox 3, if you hit the back button too fast. You’ll see something like this:


SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
w_xa()@:0
eval("try {\n_WidgetManager._HandleControllerResult('Blog1', 'backlinks',{'numBacklinks': [...]

JSONP seems to be unstable in certain conditions. What makes me wonder is why the browser starts to execute incomplete code and outputs that code in an alert dialog. So, it might as well be the fault of the Google Widgets error handler… but who cares anyway.