David Jeffries

With the 2008 Macworld only 2 days away here are my predictions:

• 13" sub-notebook
• iPhone/iTouch SDK
• Faster processors on all apple computers

That's about all I can think about for now. The sub-notebook will be, obviously, the talk of the conference. There have been many rumors about it and I think it's pretty obvious it will launch at Macworld. Contrary to the rumors, I think that it will have a DVD drive. Apple's crazy like that - they'll squeeze it into a < 1" thick notebook somehow.

DVD drive or not, it will surely have better battery life than current laptops and I really hope that the laptop is Macbook Pro style aluminum, rather than the cheap Macbook plastic.

It should be a good conference.

The domain name registrar network solutions has been pulling some pretty sketchy moves lately. There were some reports that they were registering all domain names that were searched for and registering the name themselves. This, of course, will only allow people to buy the domain from them exclusively. This is a pretty big no-no in the domain name industry.

To prove that they actually were registering every domain searched I decided to do a little test. I searched for the domain davidjeffries-registeredbynetworksolutions.com. A little while later network solutions had plastered the domain location with their logo and a nice little button to buy the domain for "as low as $19.99."

This might seem ok, except now when going to another registrar, in this case GoDaddy, I got the nice "domain already taken" message. How can network solutions get away with this? Why aren't other registrars freaking out? Something needs to be done - network solutions shouldn't get away with this for much longer.

GoDaddy Domain Search

Facebook has been working with ABC for a while now working on their U.S. presidential election advertising/application. The idea is pretty good and hopefully it gets more people educated about the candidates and out voting.

Why are Canadians seeing this stuff?

Here's the deal: I'm Canadian. I really do not understand why Facebook is pushing this stuff to Non-Americans. Personally, I'm quite interested in U.S. politics, but I'm sure the majority of Canadians aren't.

So with Facebook developing all their awesome advertisement targeting software and utilizing the vast amount of information they have about me, why don't they just target it properly? page views? I guess ABC paid a pretty hefty price for so much attention.

Since every one else is doing it, I may as well too. Here are my predictions for 2008:

• Mixx will be the next Digg. Mixx is like Digg with groups - and I think it will take off pretty quickly. The only problem with a small company (Mixx) taking on a big one (Digg), is that Digg could easily develop and add the features that Mixx has, and leave them with nothing. Either way, I think Mixx will give Digg a hard time.
• Apple will launch a camera at MacWorld in January, as well as the ultra portable laptops everyone has been talking about.
• Facebook's momentum will slow down.
• I will launch something big.
• I will blog more (hopefully).
• More devices will be internet connected - WiFi will be in things that we wouldn't expect, but will still be useful.

I'm not going to get too carried away because I know that most of these will not happen.  Personally, I think that 2008 is going to be a very important and exciting year and can't wait to see what happens.

BlueFur.com is in my opinion the best web hosting company around. Their Unix hosting plans cannot be beat if you are just starting to run a couple sites. Some people opt to run their own servers in their own house - but it isn't worth it. First of all, you are going to pay more for power to run your server 24/7 than the $6.95 you pay at BlueFur. You will also not have the guaranteed uptime (redundant power and network), or network speed. In short, the small monthly fee is well worth it.

Why I Love My Webhost

Just look at that picture. Even on my "mini" account, I can run up to 10,000 different websites off one hosting package. I can have 10,000 MySql databases as well. I don't know of any other host that offers basically limitless add on domains and databases.

The freedom of having as many websites as I can works perfectly for me as I'm always building or testing something; I have to have a host that can give me the flexibility that BlueFur provides.

I installed leopard yesterday and today I'm reading my daily rss feeds and a whole bunch of items show up talking about all the new updates Apple has released.

I already knew about the Java update, which was the reason I finally switched to leopard. There was however some more updates that I didn't know about. One of the issues with leopard that I read about was the Macbook Pro keyboard freezing issues. I was worried that I would be affected, but it didn't really bother me too much. Well, today it turns out that Apple has released an update to fix the problem, as well as OSX 10.5.2 which fixes 76 bugs!

I guess it really was a good time to upgrade.

So far the leopard experience has been amazing. Tiger was the first Apple OS that I used full time, and I did enjoy it. After upgrading to leopard though - all I can say is: amazing. Stacks, the new dock, time machine, tonnes of awesome new features. If you are planning to upgrade, do it now.

Finally Java Support

I would have upgraded right when the OS came out, but from what I heard it didn't support Java 1.6, which I need for school and to run my various projects. Java 1.6 can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection website, and runs about 75MB. From Apple:

Java SE 6 Developer Preview 8

Apple has recently released a new developer preview of Java SE 6 for Leopard via the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) site at http://connect.apple.com.

The Java SE 6 release for Leopard is targeted at Java developers. This version of Java for Mac OS X requires an Intel-based Mac capable of running 64-bit applications, including computers with Core 2 Duo processors and any Mac Pro computer. Java SE 6 takes advantage of Leopard's 64-bit capabilities to offer unique performance capabilities for current and future generations of Macs. Please see the release notes included with the Java SE 6 download for additional information about this preview release.

When I saw this I was so happy that I could finally upgrade to leopard. I backed up my stuff and it was onto the install.

Installation

I put the leopard DVD onto a partition on my external hard drive, so the install went really fast. It was smooth and in about 15 minutes I had a fresh install of OSX Leopard. There were no problems, and even my bluetooth mouse was automatically detected. By the end of the installation, I was really impressed.

Post-Install

I was a little bit worried that the programs that ran perfectly on tiger would not run on leopard. Well, so much for that - everything runs perfectly. It seems like things are even running faster than with tiger, and certainly faster than windows. I have absolutely no complaints about leopard, and I hope I don't find anything too big that makes me hate it because with these features I don't think I could use anything else.

Thanks to the Google reader shared items and the twitter widgets, you can now see all the links I find interesting as well as keep up to date with what I'm doing. You can also subscribe to my shared items, twitter, and this site too.

Twitter Widget Too Slow

Twitter is a good service, but it has been having growing pains even after they got some VC money. The twitter widget showing my updates slows the site significantly. Ah JavaScript widgets, what would the speed of the internet be like without you?

Typical Firebug output:

Twitter seems to go between .5 of a second and 2.5 seconds, with an average of ~1.3 seconds. I guess my next quick project will cache my twitter updates every 15 minutes to this sites database, rather than requesting it from twitter at every page load.

So I'm guessing that the site Famebook.us is losing quite a bit of money. I log into Facebook today and see the following:

Interesting. I've never really seen a news feed ad, so I decided to go on to Famebook.us.

Uh oh, someone maxed out their hosing plan. I'm guessing they're not getting a very good ROI on their advertisement investment. Hint for next time: don't go cheap on the hosting and hard on the advertising - your CTR may be higher than you expected.

The obligatory first post of DavidJeffries.com. This blog is intended as a place for me to put my ramblings about the internet, programming, and anything else that interests me.

A little about myself: I am graduating with a Bachelors of Computer Information Systems in April 2008. In my spare time I work for a small software development company, as well as on my own projects.

Thats pretty much it about me, I'm sure I will put some more stuff in here as time goes by.