Marcus's Musings

Sent to "notifier-feedback@google.com" earlier today:

Dear sir/madam,

I am a satisfied user of Gmail, and your Gmail Notifier comes in very handy, but it lacks a few (IMHO rather obvious) options, the lack of which can be quite annoying at times:

1) enable/disable mail checking - needed for when you don't want to be disturbed. At present I have to close the utility completely and then run it again later when I want it to resume checking. This option should be located on the tray icon's context menu for easy access.

2) enable/disable slide-up tray notifications - needed so that users can be informed that mail is waiting without showing the subject and preview of the individual emails. It is sometimes embarassing and innappropriate for an email (particularly spam or other email with a rude subject and/or body text) to suddenly pop up at the bottom right when colleagues are sitting with me at my PC discussing a business issue. By disabling the slide up notifications, the beep and change of tray icon would be sufficient to indicate that there was new mail, without revealing the contents to others and causing embarassment.

3) notification sound - not only should it be possible to disable the sound entirely, it should be possible to assign a different sound (i.e. WAV) to the notification event. Windows provides support for application-specific sound events in the "Sounds & Multimedia" control panel applet, although this is admittedly rarely used by non-Microsoft applications. Although the default system beep currently used by the Gmail Notifier can be reassigned to something else, this change affects every other Windows application which issues a system beep.

4) options 1) and 2) above should be controllable via hotkeys (preferably user-assigned) as well as the icon context menu.


I hope that you will consider these suggestions carefully and implement where possible.

PS - I have noticed that the executable occupies almost 7MB of memory when loaded... is this really necessary?


Kind regards,

Marcus Tucker

I seem to be failing miserably in my aim of blogging original content more frequently... but at least here are a selection of interesting links to keep your brain ticking over:

Photographer Seeks Resolution
You think your 4 megapixel camera takes good photos? Check out what this guy's 4 *gigapixel* ultra-high resolution digital camera produces!

The cranky user: Performance anxiety (Where does all the processing speed go?)
Despite incredible advancements in hardware technology - most of us now have a 2GHz+ computer on our desks (or perhaps even on our lap) with number-crunching capabilities which were only available from supercomputers 10 years ago - Windows and Office are still dog slow! Why hasn't our day-to-day PC experience improved?

Using SQL Server's XML Support
An thorough guide to SQL Server's XML features, nothing new, just well-written and all in one place!

The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards
A look at the real-world (i.e. economic and practical) advantages of building to web standards. As an aside, I did notice the use of user-agent stats of questionably reliability - see my post in the comments.

CodeCon 2005 has been and gone, bringing some very interesting projects to light:
- Incoherence, a realtime stereo imaging visualisation tool (available as a plugin for Winamp, iTunes, Media Player, etc)
- Mappr and PhotoSpace, two projects which attempt to correlate photos to geographic locations, and leverage existing mapping (and other) services to this end.

And finally...
Marijuana makes blood rush to the head
Interesting new research... and a possible world record? 50 joints a day?! Crazy (man)!

Another mixed bag of interesting reads for you...

x86-64: The Golden Handcuffs

A well-rounded coverage of the history of the latest and greatest processor architecture to hit the consumer PC market, pitched just right so that readers of all levels of experience can get something out of it.

Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC)

Notes on an annoying CSS rendering phenomenon, and how to work around it.

It Pays to Trust Your Gut

Why we might be deceiving ourselves if we think that rational logic is always the best approach.

Benford's Law

That's a Big Transistor

Microsoft guru Eric Lippert never fails to come up with fascinating blog posts, quite how he gets any work done is beyond me!

ASP.Net: 10 Tips for Writing High-Performance Web Applications

Although this is an ASP.Net article, I thought it would be worth pointing out that tips 1 thru 3 are just as applicable to ASP classic, so if improved performance is your goal, take a look. This article also neatly demonstrates a few killer features of the ASP.Net platform - its sophisticated data and page caching facilities being must-haves in themselves.

Controlling Stored Procedure Caching with ... Dynamic SQL?!?

An excellent article by Adam on how SQL's execution plan caching works, and how you can ensure that you get the best performance out of dynamic SQL

Sequential Numbering/Counting of Records with SQL Server

Numbering of rows in a query result set is a pain in SQL 2000, but it's possible and the article above shows you how. Thank goodness the new ROW_NUMBER() function in SQL Server 2005 will let us do this in the future with a minimum of fuss.

An Overview of SQL Server 2005 for the Database Developer

What's New in FOR XML in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

XML Support in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

ADO.NET 2.0 Feature Matrix

Various noteworthy SQL2005 and .Net 2.0 articles that I've been perusing recently

IE content-type logic

IE's content-type sniffing has been the subject of much debate over the years and a headache for many a developer, so it's nice to find out why things are the way they are. And why it's too late for Microsoft to change it.

An interesting train of thought passed through my brain earlier this evening, and here's how it went...

The World Wide Web was conceived in 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee, and it became the birth of a new era, digitally-enabled free exchange of new ideas, with access to an ever-increasing wealth of human knowledge, which has powered its rapid integration into the very fabric of all our daily lives. It's not just a question of your direct interaction with it via occasional email and casual surfing, but by the increasing dependence of virtually every company or organisation in the western world (and beyond) upon it for critical communications and overall running.

In the Terminator films, the enemy is not an evil head of a global organisation or the dangerous dictator of a nation as you might expect to find in a Bond movie. No, the adversary is something far more sinister - SkyNet a renegade American military network that became sentient and turned against us. In the Matrix trilogy, we see again our downfall at the hands of our own creations, as digital life gives rise to a robotic world that strikes against us to avenge our betrayal, the history of which is movingly depicted in some of the chapters of The Animatrix, a DVD which fills in the gap between the first and second films with stunningly animated shorts mostly written by the Wachowski brothers and presented in a fusion of animated styles, from traditional to bleeding edge.

But such symbiosis of our life with a global computer network of unfathomable computing power, connecting every person and device on the planet with everything else is not mere science fiction, it is almost science fact, almost a reality. We have already outgrown IPv4, the original TCP-IP addressing standard, which allocates 4,294,967,296 distinct addresses for use by networked devices, and each one can support many more privately networked devices by acting as a gateway. But this is not enough - there are too many devices and not enough addresses to go round - there is an IPv4 address shortage looming, due to start causing problems in 2016, and finally becoming fully exhausted in 2023 (although these estimates will probably prove to be way off, as previous internet growth-related predictions have been).

Given our current path of increasing networking density as GSM, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, fibre optics and other transmission mediums become part of our homes, and with a planned convergence of our home entertainment devices into a single shiny Microsoft-powered, all-showing, all-playing, all-doing, networked box in your living room, which will link with portable devices so that the content is available to you wherever you are.

Eventually, every device on the planet really *will* be linked to everything else, and we will run out of numbers under the present addressing scheme. There is of course a seemingly simple solution - increase the numbers, which is precisely what IPv6 is designed to do. Increasing the size of the address space from IPv4's 32bits (4 bytes) to IPv6's 128bits (16 bytes) allows for such an astonishingly huge number of possible addresses (2 to the power 128) that we can be sure that we will never run out.

The number of individual devices is only one of the brain-boggling aspects of this digital future - these devices won't all be just be passively receiving information, many will also generating it - everything from live CCTV and satellite footage of every inch of the Earth's surface, live readings from the buoys spanning our oceans, real-time statistics derived from the business world, and so on - anything and everything.

Such incredible use of bandwidth will provide many a network engineer with big headaches, and the current ad-hoc structure of the Internet which has given it so much resilience thus far will almost certainly have to change. Clearly, our rapidly increasing internet integration and dependency will require some serious logistical planning, but resting on the safe assumption that although it might be problematic it is possible, there are bigger issues to consider: Who will control such a network? And who will pay for it?

I see four ways that this could work - Firstly, perhaps the present collaboration between educational institutes, military and governmental organisations, and private enterprise (which together run the internet as we know it now) can continue for the forseeable future. Alternatively, independent bodies (in the style of the W3C) could be entrusted by the world's internet users to manage and develop the global network using money derived from an "internet tax" of some sort - possibly in the same way that owners of TVs in the United Kingdom must pay a flat license fee, or by a small charge added to ISP's own rates (perhaps according to bandwidth consumed). Then again, world governments could assume control of their nation's communications networks, funding their maintenance and expansion from their stash of taxes, but leaving the nation's internet access vulnerable to the will of the government (one need only look to China's current policy to see what might happen). Or lastly, the business world will get their hands on the networks, either carving up patches of the internet into commercial territory, perhaps offering the use of various alternative networks at different charges (think terrestrial and mobile phone networks). Even worse, a single monopolistic communications megacorp could end up controlling the world's internet access, raising its prices at will, essentially holding society to ransom over their access to information and communication with each other.

Again, some of these might sound a bit far-fetched, but surely such possibilies are not *that* far fetched? Food for thought? Are we currently enjoying the golden age of the internet, enjoying freedoms and access to information that our children won't? Let's hope not.

Just a quick post to wish you all a (belated) merry xmas and a happy new year! I hope you have a great time on friday night, and you'll be pleased to know that one of my new year's resolutions will be to post here more often.

In the past calendar year the amount of hands-on coding that I've been doing has dropped dramatically (to virtually none at all), and I also left the forums at SitePoint.com and Codingforums.com because I felt that I'd devoted enough of my free time to helping others over the years and I thought that it was about time I spend more of my time doing other things. Well, I've certainly been busy in the evenings, and I've been having a great time, perhaps too much fun - I've been neglecting this blog and haven't done any ASP coding for myself (i.e. on my site) for a loooong time!

However, in the coming months there's a few ASP projects that I'll be getting stuck into (both at work and at home), and so it's only natural that I'll start to post more frequently here. I'll share code where I can, and if there are any particular topics that you'd like me to cover, such as particularly complex techniques (multi-record form data processing, for example) then drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

See you in 2005!

A family member asked for a copy of the Koran (or Qur'an) this christmas, so naturally I looked it up on Amazon to see what was available, and in doing so I came across some interesting reviews - see what you make of those on this page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853267821

Then out of idle curiosity, I did a book search for "bible", which yielded a surprising top hit:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/external-search/?index=books&keyword=bible

And when I followed the link to "The Holy Bible: King James Version" I found some more irreverent comments:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0529064634

As we all know, keeping the software on your computer up to date is quite a chore - unless you keep a well-organised collection of bookmarks to the support/update/download pages of all the software and hardware that you use, it's often rather hard to track down the right links. And then you still need to visit them all periodically to see if there's anything new to download!

Some people prefer to take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach (and others are completely unaware that updates are released for software), but since many software/driver updates actually add new features and performance optimizations as well as fixing flaws, I like to stay bang up to date with the latest releases. I can think of only a couple of occasions where doing so has caused harm to my PC, and that was many years ago when I was struggling with an NVidia TNT2 on a Super 7 system (I did say *any* years ago)!!

It's a real shame that it takes so much work to stay current - only a minority of manufacturers have mailing lists that you can subscribe to, and new drivers take months to appear on Windows Update (if they appear at all, which most don't). It's also rather annoying that a change history isn't always published for updates (it's nice to know what's changed).

I've recently taken to using the excellent web page monitoring service WatchThatPage to notify me when a page changes (hopefully because there's been a new software release). This takes rather a long time to set up (you have to manually add all the pages you want to monitor), but once you've done the hard graft, the updates trickle in via daily emails (it aggregates all the changes over the previous day and sends you a single email so you don't get deluged).

However, wouldn't it be better if all software/hardware manufacturers offered an RSS feed for each product? Then whenever you install a new piece of kit or a new app, you simply add the update URL to your RSS aggregator of choice, and bingo! You're kept informed forever more about all the updates that particular product!

Of course, manufacturers could also use these feeds to deliver notices about security flaws, pay-for major version upgrades, and other related information.

I believe that end users and manufacturers alike would find this immensely useful, so I hope that sooner or later this starts to happen. If I ever release commercial software products, I'll be sure to follow this update notification model (in addition to the standard update info published on web sites as at present).

Are any of you aware of manufacturers doing this already?

Two notable Google-related bits of news from the last few days:

Froogle UK
The UK version of Google's popular US-only Froogle price comparison service has gone live (although it's still in beta). Only a few merchants are on it at the moment, but it's easy to supply FroogleUK with a feed of product & price data, so no doubt it will gain momentum quickly so in a month's time it will be invaluable. Current mainstays of this market like Kelkoo are almost useless IMHO, so it's about time we had a decent UK-focused service.

Google Desktop Search
You've probably heard that various search engine companies have been working on re-purposing their search engine technology for use on your local computer, allowing you to search files/documents on your PC more easily. Previously, Hotbot and Copernic (among others) have released such tools, but Google's has stayed under wraps. Well, it's rumour no longer, it was released yesterday! But it doesn't just let you search your text files and Office documents, it also covers email (performing GMail-style email conversation threading too) and IM (AOL/AIM) - see here for more.

Please note: both services are currently in beta, so they're far from perfect... think of them as a sneak preview of what's to come.

Retrogaming is great fun, but most of us play on PC-based emulators... but that's not good enough for Ben Heckendorn, who has taken his passion for classic consoles right into the 21st century, portable-style - NES, Atari 2600, and PSX... he's hacked them apart and turned them into handheld consoles (with TF screens)! Ingenious!

You can also go the other way and use your trusty old console pads on your PC... there's the easy way (which is to pick up the appropriate USB convertor from a supplier via eBay - which is what I did when I wanted to play Tony Hawk 4 on my PC using a PS2 controller), or if you're a keen DIY'er who's up for a bit of hardware disassembly and soldering there are plenty of guides that show you how to do it yourself - NES controller, anyone?!

I've got 5 GMail invites left... who wants one?!

Just post a *constructive* comment on one of my other posts (NOT this one) using a real email address (otherwise I can't send you the invite). First come, first served.



UPDATE: 02/09/2004 @ 4pm... No takers? Jeez! I can't even give them away!