Reading this post by David Welton it seems that Slicehost’s choice of x86-64 architecture wasn’t a good choice. x86-64 is supposed to have performance advantages, but David’s results are not showing any (in fact it seems proportionally slower). I am interested to see what Slicehost says about these results.

Today I informed my remaining customer that I am departing from Epic. This marks the start of my official departure from Epic and the start of my journey as an entrepreneur. What’s next for me, you ask. I am going to be concentrating my energy on ShopFiber. ShopFiber is an exciting new service that will help you be a better online shopper and allow you to easily connect with your friends. For more information about ShopFiber make sure to checkout our blog. I will continue to blog on this site, but most of my energy will be focused on ShopFiber. Wish me luck! :)

Oh, and by the way, I will be attending the Future of Web Apps conference in February. I am excitedly looking forward to that conference because I finally get to see and possibly meet some of the people that are the “voice of internet” (Michael Arrington, Joel Spolsky, etc.). Hope to see you there!

This is a very useful command if you are using subversion for version tracking. I just found out about the -u flag last week and I am loving it. It tells you exactly how an svn update would affect your working copy. This way you can decide whether you want to update to trunk with confidence. Previously there were times when I would update to the latest version only to realize that merging my code would take a little time, now I run this beforehand and decide whether to proceed right now or wait till I have more time. Enjoy :)

Cache’ Object Script is an interesting language. Take a look at the following two loops

test
	s done=0
	f ln=1:1:10 d  q:done
	. w !,ln
	. i ln=5 s done=1
	w !,"ln after loop "_ln
	q
test2
	s done=0
	f ln=1:1:10 q:done  d
	. w !,ln
	. i ln=5 s done=1
	w !,"ln after loop "_ln
	q

The goal is stop after five iterations and then use the ending index to do something more. Executing the above code results in…

PLAY>d test


	
1
2
3
4
5
ln after loop 5
PLAY>d test2

	
1
2
3
4
5
ln after loop 6
PLAY>

Can you spot the difference?

So, with Service Pack 2 beta installed on my Windows Vista x64 machine Windows Explorer would crash every time I would mouse over a program entry in the taskbar. After a few crashes I noticed that UltraMon was causing this behavior (even with the smart taskbar disabled). I was running UltraMon 3.0.2 and checking on UltraMon’s site I noticed that they had 3.0.3 beta available. So, I upgraded to that and now the crashes are gone. Hopefully this will save you some time in case if you have UltraMon installed and are trying out SP2 beta. Other than this issue everything else seems pretty good (I have only used it for a few hours now).

Upgraded the tablet to Vista Service Pack 2 Beta, let’s see how this goes. So far things are pretty good (the hard disk seems to be quieter, but that might just be psychological).

Lately I have been playing around with Minefield (i.e. the development of firefox 3.1) with all its goodness of just in time (JIT) Javascript feature. Today I was browsing through its source code viewer and noticed something different. The JavaScript, CSS and other includes were actually links! How nice! :) Now you don’t have figure out whether something is coming from the root or some other intertwined directory, just click and you are good to go. You can even drag and drop image reference to a tab and it will load from the correct location.

Take a look at the screenshot below to see for yourself :)

I just posted a new article about fixing offline files in Windows Vista. Take a look!