Carsurvey.org server problems

September 16th, 2009

The server the site is hosted on is having filesystem problems, and someone is looking at right now.  I’ve got a good full backup (I know it restores OK) from Monday, and managed to save some of the newer reviews first thing this morning, but I’m not hopeful about some of the very recent reviews and comments. I think I’m going to spending the rest of the day rebuilding things once whatever hardware failed is replaced.

Hopefully all will be back to normal later (probably much later) today.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

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Model year vs year of manufacture on Carsurvey.org

August 13th, 2009

Since it was created back in 1997, Carsurvey.org has organised reviews by the year of manufacture of the cars. This made sense for European cars, but not for North American cars, where model year is what matters. The site eventually started collecting model year information, but the site structure did not change, as it was difficult to come up with a consistent structure that would make sense on both sides of the Atlantic.

I’ve been aware for years that North American visitors were confused by the site structure, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was better for the meaning of a year on Carsurvey.org to be inconsistent, depending on the region of the review.

For a North American review, the model year (where available) is used in preference to the year of manufacture. This isn’t the case for the rest of the world.

So a list of 2006 BMW 3 Series reviews will contain 2006 model year reviews from North America, and 2006 manufacture year reviews from elsewhere. Not quite the same thing, but for reviews from their own region, it should fit visitor’s assumptions, rather than trying to make them fit the site’s data model.

MotorcycleSurvey.com has also had similar changes made, but in that case, model year always takes priority over year of manufacture, regardless of region, as that reflects the way motorcycles are marketed.

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My Analysis of Google’s Chrome OS

July 10th, 2009

A couple of days ago, Google announced they’d be releasing a lightweight operating system called Chrome OS in 2010. The Blogosphere has spent the last few days speculating on how Chrome OS will compare to Windows in a head to head fight, and whether it will take significant market share from Microsoft Windows in laptops and desktops. I think that’s missing a lot of the point. For what it’s worth, here’s my uninformed speculation.

  • When it comes to browsers or operating systems, I don’t think Google care very much about market share of particular products, but they do care about the underlying technologies. The  Chrome browser has a relatively small market share, but it has had a disproportionate effect on the direction of browser development as a whole. There’s an arms race in areas such as JavaScript performance and HTML5 support, and the Chrome browser gives Google a tool to use to push the technologies it favours. Sure, Google would like you to use the Chrome browser, but if you choose another modern browser with similar features, such as Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4.0, I think Google still count that as a win. A similar argument also applies to iPhone vs Google Android.
  • A small percentage of marketshare in either browsers or operating systems is still a big number of people. If Chrome OS gets 5% of the operating system market, and Google has say 200 people working on it, I bet that looks like a good investment.
  • I’m often faced with casual computer users with old PC hardware. Windows is running like a dog on their system, and often they don’t have Windows restore media for a clean install. Many of these people just about accessing their email, Facebook and some online shopping, not video editing or photo editing. A web browser is enough for them. Currently their best option is Ubuntu (which is still quite heavyweight for old hardware), or some mini Linux distribution. These do work, but there are always some silly issues that spoil the experience. No doubt Chrome OS will have a cleaner interface, will be faster on old hardware, will be kept up-to-date without the user intervening (like the Chrome browser), and will be very secure. If old hardware is supported, it will be by far the best option for basic web users with old hardware.
  • More and more people have secondary machines in their homes and offices, and while a web browser isn’t the only application they need on their main system, in many cases it’s more than enough on a secondary device, as long as the price reflects the limitations. Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad is a great example of a device that embraces this.
  • In response to Linux netbooks, Microsoft have been selling Windows XP at a big discount to PC manufacturers, and have been quite liberal about the hardware specifications of this hardware. With Windows 7, it appeared that Microsoft wanted to tighten up the restrictions on netbooks, and sell the operating system at less of a discount. Chrome OS gives PC manufacturers a club to beat Microsoft with, and may well force Microsoft to discount Windows 7 for netbooks to a greater extent than they planned. I can’t see Google losing any sleep over this.
  • The ARM compatibility of Chrome OS is a very big deal. ARM SoC (System on a Chip) are very efficient in terms of power, and are also very cheap. Sub £100 ($150) smartbooks (like netbooks, but not Intel based processors) suddenly look realistic. 1Gb of RAM, 4Gb of flash storage,  combined with an ARM chip, is already a very cheap platform, and is only going to get cheaper over time.
  • If you can have a modern fast web browser on very cheap and efficient ARM processor, why not embed them in lots more devices, many of which already contain processors and RAM. Manufacturers could very cheaply add Chrome OS to a TV, a PVR, a games console, or a monitor. Spend an extra £20 ($30) on a monitor or TV and get Google Chrome OS builtin. The Nintendo Wii has an optional Opera browser, which is passable, but hardly a great experience, and it presumably wasn’t cheap to develop. Instead, just add a couple of cheap chips and you get a good web experience from Google, with the added bonus that Google look after all the updates and security.

In summary, I think Google aren’t going for Windows or Mac OS X head on, but just want more machines out there running Google friendly modern browsers at a low cost. In many ways, Chrome OS reminds me of Microsoft’s plans for Windows CE a decade ago. CE never really made much progress beyond Windows Mobile devices, but in this new world where the web browser is king, perhaps Chrome OS will have more success.

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iPhone 3G S Thoughts

June 25th, 2009

Upgraded from an iPhone 3G (OS 3.0) a few days ago, which I’d been very pleased with for the whole year I had it. Paid for the 3G S in full, as I wasn’t due an upgrade from O2.

Like many other reviewers, I’m simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed. In the end it looks and feels like an iPhone 3G, but it also comes with some very useful improvements.

The video and camera auto focus are very nice additions. The video is roughly the same quality as a Flip Ultra, although I don’t think the microphone has quite the same range as a Flip (haven’t done a side by side test though). It’s going to do a good job of capturing social or family events, where a proper camcorder would be overkill.

The photos are a big improvement over the 3G (I did a side by side test for comparison purposes); much sharper, and the touch controls for focus/exposure are brilliant.

The speed isn’t a big deal on simple apps, but it’s night and day on 3D or data heavy apps apps. Google Earth, Evernote, and Spotlight are completely transformed. Safari is noticeably faster too.

Often with the 3G, the phone would stutter occasionally as it was presumably running some background task while dealing with your input, and that’s much less frequent on the 3G S.

App load times are much better too – 1/2 to 1/3 of the old time. Obviously you notice this more on the bigger apps. 3D games also run significantly better.

The compass is nice, but so far it’s just a novelty. Hopefully some 3rd party apps will start to make good use of it soon.

Basically, it’s an upgrade for power users, but probably a waste of time for most 3G users (at least at £200-300 for the upgrade). The harder you push the phone, the bigger the difference in performance. Hopefully this will bode well for future apps.

For new contracts, the choice is easy; the 3GS (16Gb or 32Gb) is a much better deal than the 8Gb 3G, despite the 3G’s lower price.

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hReview Microformat Support

May 14th, 2009

As Google now supports microformats, I’ve added hReview support to all the CSDO Media sites, including Carsurvey.org and the airline review pages. Whilst visitors with normal web browsers won’t notice any changes, the reviews are now much easier for computers and search engines to understand and manipulate.

In case anyone else is looking to do something similar, I found the Optimus microformats transformer to be very useful for checking that my hReview markup was valid.

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General Carsurvey.org Feedback

March 7th, 2009

Questions, complaints about Carsurvey.org? Ask away in the comments.

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No More Tabs on Carsurvey.org

February 12th, 2009

Following a recent experiment with FeedbackArmy, I’ve removed the tabs on Carsurvey.org. They seemed like a good idea when I introduced them, but ultimately they were just confusing and a waste of space.

As a consequence, the links to the other CSDO Media sites have been moved into the page footer, and the search box has moved from the top left of the page to the top right.

I’ve also added the IE8 meta tag, to make sure Carsurvey.org behaves nicely when Microsoft release their latest browser in a few months time.

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2008 – A year of hardware updates

December 31st, 2008

After quite a few years of relative inactivity, I went a bit mad this year and bought lots of new hardware. I thought I’d jot down a few notes on my purchases in case anyone is interested.

8 core Apple Mac Pro 08 with 10Gb of RAM

My new main desktop machine, purchased in February 08 to take over from my Mac mini. Massive overkill for most things, but it’s great to be able to run Mac OS X, Windows and Linux on one box without running out of resources.

Went with the optional 8800GT graphics card and WiFi, but did the RAM upgrade and disk upgrades myself to save money.

I never seem to max out the processors, but run a few different VMware sessions, added to Safari’s usual memory leaks, and 10Gb of RAM actually seems quite tight. Will be upgrading to 16Gb when I spot a good deal on some 2Gb DIMMS.

Rather than doing a RAID setup, I went with a single 750Gb SATA disk, a Seagate ST3750330AS, which had a 5 year warranty compared to the usual 3 year warranty on most hard drives. Hopefully that means the disk is pretty high quality. The 750Gb main drive is backed up to a 1Tb Western Digital disk configured for Time Machine. Note the different drive manufacturer (in case one manufacturer has problems), and I went for one of their 5 year warrantied server class drives, the WD1000FYPS.

Then to make things safe against natural disaster, I have a pair of 750Gb Iomega Ultramax external disks backed up by Carbon Copy Cloner. This pair of drives are alternately rotated out of my house to another location, so I have a safe backup offsite.

Dell Vostro 1500 with 3Gb of RAM

This is my workhorse laptop. Came with Windows XP (don’t want Vista on a basic laptop), now dual boots XP and Ubuntu. 1.4Ghz Core2Duo and Intel graphics, so nothing too powerful, but no compatibility issues.

Had a Vostro 1400 for a while with Nvidia graphics, but ebayed it when the recent Nvidia overheating problems were announced.

The 1500 is pretty heavy, and the 15″ screen doesn’t have the best viewing angles, but it’s very solid, and was very cheap for the build quality. 3Gb of RAM gives me enough space to run a VMware session fairly comfortably, should I need to develop on the move.

Samsung NC10 netbook

Dumped my Nokia N800 this year, having bought an iPhone 3G. Picked up an MSI Wind, which I really loved, but the battery life was pretty appalling.

Ebayed the Wind and picked up a Samsung NC10 (upgraded to 160Gb). Amazing battery life (6-7 hours), and great build quality for the money.

Only downsides are the screen and touchpad aren’t quite as nice as those on the Wind.

This little machine can do 90% of the things a Macbook Air can do, for less than a quarter of the cost. Runs Firefox and Google Chrome very well indeed. Prefer Firefox as the fullscreen F11 mode is a godsend on netbooks.

NEC 1970NXp with Neo-Flex stand

Picked this old NEC monitor up of eBay very cheaply. It’s an MVA panel, not like the usual TN panels found on cheap monitors. Attached an Egrotron Neo-Flex stand, rotated it through 90 degrees, and it makes a great portrait monitor for reading RSS feeds and documents.

Dell 2709w monitor

After a brief romance with a 30″ monitor, I decided to replace my old Dell 2405FPW with a 26″ or 27″ display, as it would easier to read with tired eyes (yes, I should spend less time on the computer). Initially bought a Hazro 26″, but ran into lots of quality issues with that, so went for a Dell 2709w instead.

No entirely convinced with the touch sensitive buttons, but the display itself is great. A 27″ display at 1920×1200 turns out to be perfect for my eyes.

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Autosaving Draft Comments and Reviews

November 12th, 2008

Carsurvey.org now autosaves draft comments and reviews every 30 seconds, as long as JavaScript and cookies are enabled in a visitor’s browser. This is similar to the autosave features in WordPress or Gmail.

For most visitors, this means:

  • If your browser crashes and you return to the site, your in progress review or comment will be automatically recovered for you
  • If you’re writing a long review or comment, you don’t have to do it all in one session, as drafts are stored for 7 days

Getting this feature working across browsers was made much easier by the wonderful jQuery JavaScript library; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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My 10 Favourite iPhone Apps that you’ve never heard of

October 30th, 2008

In no particular order:

Cocktails – The typography and design of this drinks app are gorgeous. I especially like the way the page colour reflects the recipe age

iSSH – For anyone who manages remote servers, this SSH client is an essential download

PuzzleManiak – 15 great puzzles in one affordable package. Loopy is my personal favourite

Shufflepuck – Great presentation, and the skill level is set just right. Better than any of the bowling games I’ve played

Wings – While nowhere near as sophisticated as X-Plane, I just love the chilled atmosphere of Wings. Reminds me of Pilotwings 64

Zone Warrior – Elite, meets X-Wing, meets the iPhone

Darkness – Best of the sunrise and sunset apps that I’ve tried

Locly – Good local information, but I especially like the local Twitters

GeoPedia – For some reason, this has much more comprehensive coverage than the other geographic Wikipedia apps (at least where I live)

iLaugh – I know it’s only a front end to a website, but this is very well executed, and sometimes it’s just nice to have funny stories or jokes available at one click

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