ExpanDrive

A great comment yesterday from WagCurious, in response to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s asinine letter of resignation from Yahoo.

Oh yeah, I get it. Big corporations are evil, because they diversify. If they just stayed wildly successful in one small, narrow market then people like him that have one great idea can stay on top. Why do I get this feeling that he added no value to the other divisions whatsoever.

Think hard before selling your narrowly focused idea into the arms of a giant corporation. It might not be where you belong.

All highly successful large projects battle bloat and complexity. Sooner or later, lighting a controlled burn can really help out. Microsoft has done a great job with this in their Office line. Office 2003 did a lot to reduce code size and speed launch times. Office 2007 does away with more than a decade of familiarity in favor of a new and more thoughtful user interface.

Phoenix was born out of the need to cast off the horrific bloat and instability that characterized the Netscape/Mozilla suite in 2001. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted a lean and mean browser that would load and run faster and provide a simple and extensible way of defining the user interface. They did a great job.

Renamed Firefox, the project just hit the 400 million download mark. Despite all this success, I can’t help but think that somebody needs to start a controlled burn on Firefox. Each month that passes I find myself progressively more dissatisfied with Firefox. Launch times are ever increasing despite my progressively newer hardware. It is wildly unstable on OS X - crashing daily. On Windows it is better, but not much. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t make me run IE.

Somebody get moving - build me me a better browser

Although it isn’t the newest news, it is new to me.

I recently found YSlow, a nice plugin to Firebug [easily the best Firefox plugin ever]. Made by Yahoo, it plugs in some nice features to help you gauge and optimize performance based on an arbitrary set of rules for high performance sites.

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

I’ve been using it lately to optimize load times on our site and it has helped quite a bit, if for nothing else than being a convenient way to actually measure load times. In particular, it pointed out some laziness on our part in regards to rule #6 and rule number #1. It helped quite a bit.

Nice screencast here.

Joyent Slingshot, which we helped develop, has just been released to the public as an Open Source project under GPL v2. Along with Slingshot, Connector is being made available too. Grab the source, help make it awesome.

We recently added a screencast to the front page of SftpDrive.com, it’s a good place to start if you’re not entirely sure what SftpDrive does or what it is different.

Screencasts are an incredible way of cleary conveying what a program does or how it is supposed to be used. It allows you to walk anyone through a complex sequence of events at a specifically chosen pace and add however much additional instruction or annotation that is needed.

The tough part is making them. You’re often confronted with a choice between a small file with blurry images or a gigantic file that is still imperfect. To get it right requires some experience and finesse. You’ll probably also want some expensive software if you’re going to do a real bang up job. Forget about all the effort it takes to learn how to use it.

What if you want to just make a simple screencast and not have it suck? I thought I’d write a bit on how we attempted to achieve that lofty goal. (more…)

I’ve always hated MySpace. With a passion. Today, however, they rose one notch higher on my death list:

From:    MySpace Events
Subject: Girls Gone Wild DVD Collections has invited you to:
Girls Gone Wild - Free Videos! - Check it out

Girls Gone Wild DVD Collections has invited you to an event
on MySpace:

Girls Gone Wild - Free Videos! - Check it out

Click the link below to view the event details:
http://events.myspace.com/...

-------------------------

At MySpace we care about your privacy. We have sent you this
notification to facilitate your use as a member of the
MySpace.com service. If you don't want to receive emails
like this to your external email account in the future,
change your Account Settings to "Do not send me notification
emails."

Click here to change your Account Settings:
http://www.myspace.com/reloc.cfm?c=11

The content is sadly illustrative of much of what there is to hate about that tasteless also-ran (which has enjoyed an infuriating degree of success, given how completely unoriginal, not to mention monumentally user-unfriendly it is).

However, it’s the ending of the message that really got me.

This was sent directly to an address which I never gave them. Clicking on the nearest thing to an “unsubscribe” link, I can’t take any useful action because I have no account associated with this address. This is just straight-up spam, pure and simple.

Yet more than half of the message body (with which I was spammed) is dedicated to platitudes about their respect for me, my time, my attention, and my privacy.

Just one more reason to despise Newscorp.