Interesting Links for 12-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• One year on - how is London's cycle scheme doing?
  (tags: london cycling transport uk)
• Paper, scissors, stone - how the unholy trinity of government, police and media tied themselves in a knot
  (tags: media police government uk)
• An african american women’s experience in an engineering class
  (tags: academia racism sexism usa texas)
• Pratchett’s Women: The Boobs, the Bad and the Broomsticks
  (tags: terrypratchett women feminism fiction)
• The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally.
  (tags: movies music piracy copyright)
• Interesting insight on Google+ from an ex-Google engineer
  (tags: technology google facebook web twitter)
• What role will humans play in the wars of the future?
  (tags: robots war military usa)
• CTV's Quebec Bureau Chief explains why he quit his job, and what's wrong with both TV News and Canada.
  (tags: politics tv media journalism)
• Scientists discover first gonorrhea strain resistant to all available antibiotics
  (tags: health sex disease)
• Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14
  (tags: firefox chrome web software)
• Half of US social program recipients believe they have not used a government social program
  (tags: usa welfare)

Comments

[supergee]

The engineering story suggests that there really is a Sam Houston Institute of Technology in Texas.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I have geek friends who tweet things along the lines of "my life is so much better since I switched from Firefox to Chrome. Chrome is so much faster, I don't know how anyone can still stand Firefox".

This puzzles me a lot since I really can't tell the difference in speed, and
Firefox has the ad-ins that I rely on. Adblock, etc. There may be the equivalent for chrome, but can I be bothered to take the time to find them.

Firefox has my saved passwords. It's just easier to stay there.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I prefer the adaptability of Firefox over Chrome. I've used Chrome and it _does_ seem a little faster, but Firefox is speeding up all the time, and it's not something I actually notice most of the time.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

So long as they all get more functional and faster over time, I'm happy. I don't need to be using the one that's 5% faster this month.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I switched to Chrome a few months ago once all the major addons became available. The main advantage I have found using Chrome is actually stability. When Firefox crashes, it takes all your open tabs with it. If a tab crashes in Chrome, only that tab has to close.

I switched to Chrome

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Quite some time ago, and liked it. Then the last update hosed itself. I'm still using it, but ghod knows why... Fix itself, it won't. Googling or using its help has not been helpful...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised at the description of Google as slow to react. Sounds more like a description of Microsoft!

[andrewducker]

I strongly suspect he's comparing them to smaller startups, which can pivot incredibly quickly. Once you've got your software being used by millions of people, on thousands of machines, you do have to slow down somewhat, to make sure it's maintainable and doesn't break easily. But they're almost certainly still more agile than MS.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

They DO sound slow to me. My max team has only ever been 20 - userbase, dunno, some has been quite a lot, the Jessops/Tesco/etc photo processing terminals were probably the most, but I was mainly working on the "next version" and not bugfxing/upgrades on the installed version. The guys who did that seemed to turn it round fairly swiftly - Tesco *demand* that!

[andrewducker]

Depends on what you mean by "team", my current team is only about 8, but my previous team was about 70 people, arranged in 5 subteams.

You cannot iterate quickly when your infrastructure is used in so many places, unless you do hideous amounts of automated testing - and even then that's going to throw up things that stop working from the most innocuous of changes.

Edit: That included analysts, coders, testers, one solutions architect, and five managers. It wasn't 70 devs.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

unless you do hideous amounts of automated testing

Got it in one, though I wouldn't call it 'hideous' :-) Extensive, maybe.

[andrewducker]

The amount of automated testing you'd need to cover all of Google's code? I'll give you "oodles" :->

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

ah, but that amount of code didn't spring, fully-formed into being an instant - y'know. It was written bits at a time. As should its accompanying test code be/have been.

Of course none of us is perfect at this, certainly not me - and I learned that writing the tests as you write the code is a stonkingly good idea that saves you HEAPS of time in the end back in 1988 on my *SECOND* programming project at Uni (guess how the first one went?)

I have had to dig out multiple research/expect references to back up my estimates to management (in teh past) purely cos even other developers fidn it hard to believe that test code takes AT LEAST as much time to write as the 'actual' code - and moreover that that total time is less than what it will *actually* take you to get a solid, reliable product if you don't take that time to write and run those tests.

And I STILL haven't quite pushed that far enough at the current job - but I will do on Friday now I have actual dev figures out of JIRA's work logs >:-)

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I found Chrome slower and went back to Firefox. I also tried lots of other browsers, some very obscure.... Firefox still best performer (except for some aspx based websites where IE can be quicker as we have found in testing our own web app at work. Dunno why, some optimisations, no doubt).

[steer.livejournal.com]

But a residual concern remains who is using the scheme: overwhelmingly white men aged between 25 and 44, many of whom earn more than £50,000 a year

As a former transport researcher I'd say this is pretty much exactly who you'd want to get using it. These are among the people most likely to be using cars. If these people are using bikes to commute that is brilliant.

If you get people out of cars onto bikes that is a huge win for environmental reasons and transport network efficiency reasons.

If they'd said that the majority of people who used it were 20-25 and not earning much I'd think the scheme a failure as it was merely making people use those bikes instead of different bikes, walking or public transport. In those scenarios it's a pricey way to not achieve much.

[fearmeforiampink]

Depends. According to the story "If you look at the normal demographic for cycling, it's exactly the same," (as the 25-44, >£50k/year). So it's getting more of those sort of people cycling, but not more people cycling overall.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That's just lazy journalism I'm afraid. The "normal demographic for cycling" refers only to the age part not the wealth part.

gripes+

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

compare that ex-Googly to a current Googly on the G+ tech team.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Have jumped from Firefox 5 (release) to Firefox 7 (Aurora) today and it feels noticeably slicker, even just in switching tabs, etc. Even LiveJournal has gone from slow to merely sluggish to load!

Application load time is vastly improved too and the memory footprint has dropped dramatically. That was the one thing that was really getting bad with Firefox. Aurora with my current tab set (around 20 tabs) is approx 220MB. Firefox 5 was around 630MB.

Me like!

[andrewducker]

I'm trying to have the patience to wait a month or so until it arrives bug-free. I'm worried that I'll end up with something not working properly otherwise.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Yeah, have to admit that, as an alpha, there are still a few glaring bugs in it but it mostly works pretty well.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

That TV downloading article is a few years out of date in many ways since the point of downloading TV illegally becoming commonplace is well past, and would be better if it replaced references to TV with references to books because then it would be about something where there was still a point in shouting at the industry :-)

[fearmeforiampink]

I still love Opera. Sure, it's only recently joined the extensions game, but the core features of the browser are wide, and work well together — I can get a mouse gestures extension for Chrome or Firefox, but Opera has it built in at the base level, and in a very good way.

Also, there's the fun of new features built into the base program, which then generally get nicked by other browsers a bit later; stuff like tabbed browsing and speed dial, stuff that's yet to be nicked is tab stacking and actually seeing tiny previews of all the pages in the tab bar.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I always recommend Firefox to new users, even though I'm a stuck-in-my-ways Opera user myself. But I was surprised to learn a few weeks ago that someone to whom I'd recommended Firefox had spontaneously switched to Opera, without any prompting from me. They just liked it better in the end.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

As an addendum to the TV download article, I've just seen this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/13/bbc_dr_who_facebook/

First time I've seen TV offered via social networking (I can see that some would count YouTube as a social networking site but I don't). Novelty or the new way forward?

[andrewducker]

Just another channel.

The silliness is that the BBC will have written some software to get their stuff working with Facebook, and so will every other broadcaster that uses it, rather than there being standards that can be use with Facebook, and every other channel.

(Edited to not use the word "channel" in two different senses. I meant "method of distribution" rather than "TV channel".)