Jacob’s Technical Blog

According to a Slashdot article, 62% of Americans who access the Internet with a slow, dial-up modem, don’t want to upgrade to a high-speed connection.

This may seem alarming to many. Why wouldn’t people want a faster connection to the Internet? I think cost is the biggest factor. I keep seeing TV commercials for dial-up accounts for under $10 per month. A broadband connection, on the other hand, would cost at least two or three times that amount. Why should people pay perhaps another $150 per year just to download their email and favorite recipes a few seconds faster?

Interestingly, about 3% of the visitors to this website access it through a dial-up modem.

Another interesting stat, for an e-commerce site that I run, dial-up visitors generate the highest per visit value. Dial-up visitors are more likely to make a larger purchase than broadband visitors.

These are mostly personal notes. I’m not sure if they will make sense to others.

I had a problem with a line of code like this:
int x = atoi(getenv("MYVAR"));

If this line was in daemon-ized code started at init level 2, it would segfault. (I’m not sure if these conditions are necessary, but those were my conditions).

getenv("UNKNOWN_VAR") == NULL
atoi(NULL) should == 0

But for some reason, things were segfaulting. I corrected the problem with:
if (getenv("MYVAR") == NULL) int x = 0;
else int x = atoi(getenv("MYVAR"));

I released version 1.2 (download) of my little GDocsUploader program. After being published on a few websites and having over 4000 downloads, I thought it might be nice to update the app a little.

There are bug fixes, better error dialogs, a new icon (used under a creative commons license) and uploading of photos into Picasa Web Albums. A bulleted list of changes is published in the project wiki.

GDocsUploader is a small Mac OS X program that I wrote to quickly upload documents to Google Docs, simply by dragging and dropping a document icon onto the uploader icon.

I created this project entirely in my spare time. If you would like to support further development, please consider a donation:

A couple of weeks ago, I claimed that I was prepared to ditch Yahoo! if Microsoft bought them. Now that Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo, I’ve decided to make efforts to use Yahoo more than I have in the past.

Yahoo’s ability to withstand a Microsoft bid was based in Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s claims that Yahoo has more potential and is worth more than Microsoft was willing to pay for it. Yang wanted Microsoft to pay $37 per share, and Microsoft only offered $33 per share. Now today, analysts are saying that if Yang is on a limited time line to get the trading price of Yahoo stock above $33 to prove he was right about not selling out to Microsoft.

I believe that Microsoft ownership of Yahoo would be very bad for the Internet. While Microsoft has currently withdrawn its bid, there is always the possibility that Microsoft will, in the future, attempt again to buy Yahoo. High stock prices are the biggest deterrent from future buyout attempts.

I want to do what I can to allow Yahoo stock prices to increase. I figure that I can do this by giving Yahoo as much legitimate business that I reasonably can. The easiest way to start is by switching the default search engine in my web browser to point to Yahoo. Perhaps I’ll find additional ways to give Yahoo more of my business. This is my small role in keeping Yahoo away from Microsoft.

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

A Cnet News blog claims that Yahoo! might be bought out by Microsoft this week. If this happens, I am prepared to cancel all of the Yahoo! services that I currently use. I have little or no faith that Microsoft’s management of Yahoo! services will be satisfactory, so upon any sort of merger announcement, I will start looking for replacement services that I believe will better serve my interests.

As a developer, I currently trust the openness of Yahoo! developer APIs, but I would have serious concerns if I could depend on a Microsoft Yahoo for continued support of these APIs.

Some reports say that the Microsoft bid is simply to buy Yahoo!’s user-base. I refuse to be bought like that, and will remove myself from the user-base when it comes time.

I have a friend who is trying to sell her 2004 eMachines computer. Please comment on how much you think this would actually be worth. After a few answers, or in a day or two, I’ll post how much she actually wants for it. Here are the brief specs that she’s posted:

-2.70 GHz Intel Celeron processor
-40GB hard drive
-Read/Write CD drive
-512 MB of Memory
-internet ready (LAN and Modem)
-Intel Extreme Graphics 3d video card
-Windows XP installed (I have the OS disc, and can reinstall a clean copy for you)
-Microsoft Office Student edition (I can leave it on the computer, but I can’t give you the install CD)

So how much is this worth, with accompanying keyboard and mouse? She also is selling her matching 15″ monitor, so she says.

Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

While Google is perhaps one of the most innovative web development companies out there, sometimes I am slightly disappointed because they fail to meet my exceedingly high expectations. Google has developed and released very few applications that I would consider as world changing. The short list includes Search, Gmail, Maps, Spreadsheets, and Calendar. That isn’t to say that Google hasn’t purchased and developed other emerging technologies which might also been revolutionary–Blogger, Picassa, Writely, Keyhole, and YouTube–but those applications got their start outside of Google. That also isn’t to say that Google hasn’t developed other standards and technologies which have greatly furthered the Internet. I’m simply making the point that Google has developed, from the start, only a few applications that most Internetizens would consider life-changing.

There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.

I came across this line of code today, and while I don’t normally hate other people’s coding style, this one has something in it that really bothers me:

i = ((unsigned int)(crcAccum >> 24) ^ *dataBlkPtr++ ) & 0xff;