Day: September 6, 2008

Google Chrome Is Fast

On By rmascardoIn Chrome, GoogleLeave a comment

Alright, Google Chrome has come out and everyone is talking about it.  I must say that it is really fast.  I almost made it my official browser but some of the web sites were not rendering properly.  Important buttons were missing from the Google Groups pages.

What is interesting is that some of the Google Application pages are displaying with some enhanced visuals such as box bolding or shading.  What if Google were to provide “enhanced features” if you viewed any Google Application through Chrome.  Would that be considered an unfair competitive advantage?  I’m so dependent on a few Google Applications that I would do that.

Maybe Google is slowing becoming the evil empire …

By the way, where is the Mac version dammit!?!

Google Picasa Name Tags

On By rmascardoIn Google, Google Picasa, innovation1 Comment

Just recently, Google Picasa was updated with a new client and web interface.  Unfortunately, they hate Mac users so I stopped using the client in lieu of Apple iPhoto with the Picasa upload client.  Good enough.

The coolest new feature is their support for Name Tags.  Basically, they scan through your photos, do some sort of face recognition and group faces that are similar. After that, you’re able to tag the similar faces all at once.

Why do I think this is interesting?

It provides you with different lens on the same data.  I love that as an innovative concept.  Instead of just viewing the photos by event or chronological order, the photos can be viewed by the most important element, the people.

  • View all photos of …
  • View all photos with the following people …
  • Create slide show with the following people …
  • Share photos with the people tagged …

Best of all, its integrated with their GMail contacts which I just standardized to being my primary rolodex.

The scanning took about an hour on my 750+ MB collection of photos and it did a pretty good job.  The tagging is super easy and view the photos grouped by person is very cool.

It is very cool. You should try it out.

Inversion of Control and New Architectures

On By rmascardoIn Architecture, Inversion of Control, Java, LAMP, Ruby on Rails, software, startupLeave a comment

Here is nice, compact article by Martin Fowler on the Inversion of Control pattern.  I’m revisiting the Spring Framework after stepping away from it for a while.

It’s always important when building a new products to learn from the “pains” of previous projects.  Reminds me of those poor suckers that implemented the full J2EE 1.0 stack back in the day.  Wait, I was one of them. *doh*

Anyway, what’s interesting is it seems that most new architectures are straying away from the Java stack.  According to the case studies at Highscalability.com, most of the new architectures are LAMP, Ruby on Rails or Django based.  I don’t have practical experience on these platforms so I can’t tell you why but folks seem to tell me its a ton easier and quicker to develop.  My biggest fears are …

  • Long Term Manageability.   Well, this is a problem for any architecture but its seems that Java keeps things together cleaner.
  • Performance.  Java has a big head start in this area.

For a startup, these would seem like secondary concerns.  It’s probably a good thing when you start having these problems and by then you can throw tons of VC money at it.

Java verses LAMP verses Ruby on Rails Django

I’m still torn.