Google Reader

I've switched now to Google Reader over Bloglines after the beta version of Bloglines made a horrible colour scheme that made things almost unreadable and I must say Google Reader has got better than when I first tried it when it was released. This is what makes Google such a force - they start off simple, but get better and better.

I'm probably going to post less articles here now and just share more on Google Reader as I'm lazy. If you want to follow these then you click here. You can also take an RSS feed from there.

Recursive/randomisation DNS testing

IANA have put up a useful little test website here. Found it from this CNET news article which goes into a bit more detail.

A bit scary to run it on some of the local banks....

Acer Aspire One

I got an Aspire One today from Acer as eval kit to give to customers. These are nice little units - run Linpus Linux (what a name!!) which is based on Fedora Core 8. These machines weigh less than a kilo and sell for NZ$500-$600+GST.

Jayne took photos of them and put them up on our website here.

Their performance is quite acceptable - they run on 512 MB RAM and have an 8 GB flash ram which can be extended by plugging an SD card into them. They run Firefox 2, OpenOffice 2.3 and have a decent webcam on them. People have also been playing with Ubuntu on them.

Perfect little machine for travelling, doing presentations etc. If you are interested in them then send me an email at my work address - ian dot mcdonald at datacom dot co dot nz.

Good slideshow on net development

Client Side Performance @ Xero

From: craigwalker, 3 weeks ago

Client Side Performance @ Xero

View SlideShare presentation (tags: saas usability performance xero)

This presentation shares some of the experiences Xero went through to greatly improve our user experience by focusing on front-end performance.


SlideShare Link

Spend in a recession

Good to see this article in the NZ Herald today.

We forgot from history how bad the depression was in the 1930s and in NZ around the early 90s. Encouraging to see someone saying the government should be running their program anti-cyclical and spending to stimulate the economy. I have the feeling that spending on infrastructure will give more benefits too.