R.I.P: Finder/Explorer AKA "the Desktop", 1984-2007

I'm calling it - time of death: June 2007. Its been a long time coming, but it seems clear that the Blackberry, the iPhone, Outlook, Picasa, and iTunes all herald the end of document-centric computing.

The iPhone really didn't create this trend, but I'll say that its certainly a very visible final nail, just as the Macintosh Finder was the "visible" start back in 1984. Today, you don't keep piles of stuff on your "desktop" and activate applications (or applets) against relevant document parts: the vast majority your content is organized against your applications, not the other way around - the iPhone is a computer that doesn't even have a desktop, in any traditional sense.

There was a brief resurgence of the idea that the document was the gateway to your applications in the early 90's with OpenDoc and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Hah.

We're at the starting tip of an orgasmic diarrhea of content creation in the form of e-mail, blog posts, music, photos and videos. And every single one of those is organized against single media form computing - barely a compound document in sight... you go to custom applications to create, edit, organize, and consume all the vast amount of gigabytes and terabytes of data we all share.

Vista Search and Spotlight in OS X only demonstrate even further how increasingly irrelevant the Finder and Windows Explorer are for everyday users.

In a slightly related tangent: What's most shocking to me today is how right Unix got it in the 1970's. URL's and hierarchical file paths seemed like dinosaur concepts in the early 90's before roaring back.

Either that, or we just haven't had the imagination to organize our way out of a paper bag since 1977... there's a parallel here.

Another way of saying "cool idea - wrong problem".

You can't make this stuff up...

My blog is blocked by our corporate firewall... (and I quote):

Access to this page has been denied by web filtering.

If the site you are trying to access is critical to your job function, please open a support center ticket and provide the full address of the site that you were trying to access and the following message in its entirety:

Access to http://sree.kotay.com/ for user adapps.cable.comcast.com OU=Users - CHQ,OU=1500 Market,OU=Corporate,DC=cable,DC=comcast,DC=com\Rouleau-Hellhake\, Shari has been denied for the following reason:
The Websense category "Social Networking and Personal Sites" is filtered.

I guess my blog isn't work related... not really sure WHAT it's related to, come to think of it...

The Great SetWorkingSetSize() Scam...

I saw this post at ZDNet about Firefox 3 memory usage,. Setting aside for a second whether Firefox 3 is better than IE 7 or Firefox 2, this reminds me of one of the great cheats of "small applications" developers everywhere:

SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), -1, -1)

This Windows API makes your application look *very* efficient without actually doing anything, and has been employed by MANY a popularly considered"lightweight" application (and some, um, less light) - because the "Memory Size" column in Task Manager on Windows doesn't reflect memory usage.

"Hunh?!?!", you say?

That column actually reflects the working set of memory for your app - which is the amount of memory currently "realized" (in active use) by your process. Let's look at some use cases to illustrate what that actually means:

1) Allocate a bunch of memory and free it. Your app isn't reserving the memory space, but the working set may still be high - Windows will lazily reclaim if its needed by another application.
2) Minimize all your application windows. This does the equivalent of the Windows API call I listed above, and the memory working set for that application gets *totally* paged out. Then Windows will load back the memory pages as they're accessed - its the equivalent of clearing a cache.

This last is confusing (and illustrates the issue): after SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), -1, -1), "Memory Size" in Task Manager doesn't reflect what's been "reserved" (allocated) by an application, just what blocks of memory are being/have been actively "touched" since the working set was "cleared".

If all that's confusing, fortunately for you, its easy to boil down to a simple action: Use the "Virtual Memory Size" column in Task Manager instead to look at application memory usage. You can find under the "View... Select Columns..." menu. It reflects what the application has requested from the OS, but not yet released, i.e. the real memory consumed by the application!

More info here.

Star Wars Redux

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I watched the "Family Guy" season premiere last night, and quite enjoyed it.

It was an hour long, but if you take out commercials and about 10 minutes of "Family Guy" nonsense (most "Family Guy" humour seems to be of the "its-funny-if-it-goes-on-uncomfortably-long" variety anyway) - it was pretty much a 35 minute shot-for-shot recreation of the first Star Wars film (Episode IV, to be clear).

It may even be my preferred edition of Star Wars.

The CG was good, that action scenes were crisp, the pacing was tight, and Han shot first. Sure, the (voice-over) acting was a little wooden, but no worse than the original :)

Facebook, baby

(First: Sorry for the post dearth - its August, what can I say?)

It started a bit slowly, but since Facebook opened up its doors to all comers, its become quite the deluge from my social circles (way behind on friend approvals still) - it took LinkedIn many years to achieve any critical mass for me.

Zero to hero very quickly... obviously curiosity and, quite frankly, a well thought out product with a positive developer eco-system have been rewarded (remember this idea?). In fact, no coincidence, I think, that developer APIs coincide with Facebook's recent rapid rise beyond the college crowd... this is how you go from narrow to general: by letting your application become a platform.

That is, you succeed best by letting others success feed you.

So, I'd been meaning to blog about this upswing for a few weeks now... and then I ran into this today:
Ick, old married guys on Facebook

It speaks for itself: Perspective is everything :)

Not Steve Jobs

I've been reading the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog for a while... but today's entry (concerning Microsoft's Surface computing device - yes, I'll be buying one) was frikkin' priceless...

An excerpt:
"And what is up with all these stories like this one where the writer gushes about how you can just squeeze photos to make them smaller or stretch them to make them bigger. Golly, can you believe it? Well, yeah, I can, since I introduced this several months ago and I'm going to be shipping a real product that employs this technique in only a few weeks.

This Surface thing is such classic Gates. He copies our idea, but in a frigtarded, impractical way..."

Funny.

Copyright Law Farce

This won't last long, I'd guess. Courtesy of Slashot. Watch it while you can. The, um, chosen "medium" makes it a little tough to watch if you're not attentive, but serious points for creativity and chutzpah - even ends with full disclosure of the creators, and enumerates each clip "borrowed" under fair use.

You know you're a geek when...

So... I got a package in the mail yesterday, but rather than getting the scissors from the kitchen, or (god forbid!) just using my hands to open the package, I just flipped open my laptop, and went to Amazon to see what I had ordered....

Scam I am: Microsoft Vista Advertising

My favorite all-time scam: Guy promises to get you into the college of your choice for $5000 - Money back guarantee... if you don't get it, you don't pay.

The scam? The guy does nothing. People who aren't on the edge of making it anyway won't sign up for this... and some percentage of those who do, will get in - on their own. Those that don't, get their money back... and the rest are happy not knowing any details.

Which brings me to today's topic :)

Now... I like Vista. As I've mentioned, its gots its quirks, but is absolutely a great upgrade from XP... But the ads for Vista (and the "Wow starts now" campaign") are just incredibly wrong headed, if not a borderline scam.

Take, for instance, this ad from Microsoft:


Its not that, subjectively, Windows Vista is nicer, but not a "wow" upgrade... (true, but you knows, its an ad, not the truth :)). No, what, um, boggles me is that, as far as I can tell, *all* of the ads centrally showcase a feature (the "3d flip") that not only will the average user NEVER encounter using the product, and never even figure out how to activate should they so choose - its a feature that tested poorly enough in usability that it was, effectively, relegated to a hidden key-combo for demo-ware only usage....

The "wow, really?" starts now.

High Frikkin' Larious

I mentioned this about Vista the other day, but Apple already got the joke.

And decided to share :)

Ouch.