I blame Twitter!

Now that fall is upon us, I’m going to try and write more than 140 characters on a somewhat regular basis. 

It has not been a terrible experience (High-end dual-core with 8 gigs of ram does help) but I’ve been looking for more.

I’ve heard good things about Win7, and with the recent release of the RC, decided to upgrade.

I must say the process was quite painless and almost everything worked out of the box.  We just got a new SonicWALL Firewall/VPN at work and the client had to be re-installed.  Other than that, a minor tweak to the command-line parameters for Chrome and I was off to the races.

YMMV but I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in my day-to-day activities on the machine. 

I was looking for a suitable publishing tool for Windows and was directed towards Windows Live Writer.

Short answer, it’s nice.  I’ve installed the 2009: Release Candidate and published to WordPress with no problems whatsoever. 

1. Signup for some random service on the internet
2. Receive a confirmation email with your account information

or

1. Forget a password for some random service on the internet
2. Receive an email with your current password

In today’s day and age, I’m not aware of any good reason why we (the services) should be transmitting user credentials (namely their passwords) in an email. The HBC Run For Canada site was the latest example I ran into. If I go to the bank and tell them I’ve forgotten my PIN, are they going to verify my identity and just tell me my old pin or require me to specify a new pin? I suspect the later.

Bearing in mind that I’m slightly more technical than most people but I don’t expect any service to store my password in plain text let alone be able to provide it to me on-demand.

We’ve already got infrastructure for single-use reset password URLs, hints, etc. so let’s use them uniformly. Nothings perfect but depending on your particular audience, something like OpenID could very well be a nice solution to end-user authentication.

The Eclipse Memory Analyzer is a fast and feature-rich Java heap analyzer that helps you find memory leaks and reduce memory consumption.

The Memory Analyzer was developed to analyze productive heap dumps with hundreds of millions of objects. Once the heap dump is parsed, you can re-open it instantly, immediately get the retained size of single objects and quickly approximate the retained size of a set of objects. The reference chain to the Garbage Collection Roots then details why the object is not garbage collected.

Using these features, a report automatically extracts leak suspects. It includes details about the objects accumulated, the path to the GC Roots, plus general information like system properties.

The tool was actually contributed by SAP and is currently an incubation project over at Eclipse. It’s available as both an eclipse feature and a standalone eclipse RCP application.

Kudos to the team for taking the time to provide a standalone package!

It supports any language and currently can hook into Subversion repositories. You can see it running on Google AppEngine. Check it out!

Personally, I’m a big fan of Atlassian Crucible and have quickly come to realize the benefits of doing both on-line (in person) and off-line (web-based) code reviews.

Essentially, some bright fellows over in Japan have developed a bytecode->javascript compiler. There’s a demo floating around that took a Tetris (persumably AWT) implementation and has it running as Javascript in the browser.

John Resig has the best overview of it that I’ve seen so far. There’s a PDF as well if you happen to read Japanese.

I don’t know the fundamentals of what’s going on behind the scenes with their compiler so I can’t comment on how similar this is to what the GWT folk have been doing. Nonetheless, the demo is pretty slick and the concept interesting.

Not quite sure how I feel about it yet. I don’t really need yet another IM solution (beyond Twitter, MSN & Jabber/GTalk) so it’s very unlikely that I’m going to be consistently keeping a Facebook tab open just for this.

We’ll see what the future holds, who knows, maybe they’ll hook it up to XMPP and someone will build an interface for one of the IM tools I’m already using. Even then it’s debatable how big a role it’ll play in my personal communications.

Put another way, every hired CEO is looking to be in a position to look in the mirror , smile and tell themselves they have made it. They are living the American dream. The only way to do that is to grab as much equity equivalents as you can and do everything you can to get that stock price up as high as you can while periodically liquidating the stock and stuffing the cash in your bank account.

In my mind, it’s a game that CEOs can win in one of two ways.

1. Do a sufficiently good job at large company #1 so you can become CEO at larger company #2 (rinse and repeat)
2. Maximize individual equity (the so-called equity/lottery ticket zone) over the collective wealth of the organization (including those in the so-called cash zone)
3. Do both

It’s a simplistic model and I’m far from a CEO (just a pesky technology guy) so I can do nothing but speculate on the underlying motivations. That being said, the successful CEOs that we all hear and read about for the most part seem adept at #3, almost to the extent that their financial gains are often an afterthought. If it’s a matter of performance, equity should no doubt follow company successes.

Shareholders tend to ignore how much stock is given to management, they don’t ignore cash. Companies will always be a lot more stringent with their cash, whether its paid to the CEO or anyone else. CEO cash compensation will go way up, but total compensation will come way down. More importantly , CEOs getting paid huge sums in cash will stand out like a sore thumb when things arent going so well. They will be treated like everyone else in the cash zone and held far more accountable for their work.

Interesting thoughts. Accountability is king. Do a good job and you deserve to be recognized and rewarded appropriately, regardless of position.

A good article if you’ve ever found yourself debugging rendering issues with tree tables.

If only I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen the above problem…