Yannblog

The personal website of Ian Littman

The New MacBook Airs

Jun 10

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

My most recent tech purchase over $500 was a computer. Specifically an HP Envy x2. One of the reasons: amazing battery life. Twelve hours or so. The catch: the darned thing pokes along due to an Atom Z2760 CPU. But it’s also $580 so that’s forgivable.

My workhorse notebook is an early 2009 MacBook…with a few upgrades. It’s got the 2GHz Core Duo CPU and nVidia 9400M graphics…backed up with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB Crucial m4 SSD. It’s not the speediest machine out there, and I can’t seem to find a decent replacement battery so I can only get three hours or so away from an outlet, but with the RAM and disk upgrades it’s actually reasonably fun to use.

Why did I just bring up two pieces of old/low-end equipment that have nothing to do with the current MacBook Airs announced a couple hours ago, other than screen size? Because replacing both with a 13-inch Air isn’t out of the question for me…later this year, once the newest OS X edition comes out. That said, there are a few specs that got glossed over during the presentation today, amid all the talk about power efficiency (nine hours on a charge for an 11-inch machine, or twelve hours on a 13-inch, is just excellent). Stuff like CPU speed and upgrade costs.

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Quick Thoughts on Google I/O Day One

May 15

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

This is going to be a bit of a rapid-fire, non-exhaustive list, but…

  1. Having an IDE other than Eclipse for Android dev makes me want to pick up the platform again. JetBrains, the makers of the IntelliJ IDE on which the new Android IDE is based, is a solid outfit (I use one of their other IDEs relatively regularly).
  2. I’m not buying a Galaxy S4 “Nexus Edition”. My S III is just fine, and the S4, in addition to being expensive, has the same problem that the Nexus 4 has: I can’t get 4G where I need it because Sprint is the only carrier that can do that.
  3. I should have gone to I/O. I wouldn’t pay full rack rate for the S4 Developer Edition or the Chromebook Pixel (though I’ve thought about the latter), but I would certainly use the heck out of said devices if they were included in the price of admission.
  4. Watch out, PayPal. Google isn’t the first to do person to person money transfers, but if you’ve got a Google Play account and Google has opened up the new “attach money” feature to you, the amount of effort required to send money to someone else is ridiculously low.
  5. The new Hangouts isn’t the first time Google has done photo sharing through chat (and the makers of Hello did a really good job with the app, speaking from personal experience). It’s been awhile though.
  6. Speaking of Hangouts, the fact that the service has been pushed in the direction of a persistent chat room with video calling et al as a situational add-on is…well…the way it should be.
  7. Per-minute billing (with either one-hour or ten-minute minimums) on Google’s IaaS compute offering is really cool. Nice to see Amazon one-upped at their own game, at least in this small way, and I’m sure that this will make sites that see serious traffic spikes for smallish periods take note of Google’s offering. Until its competitors implement the same thing, of course.
  8. The new Maps looks epic. If only I could actually use it.
  9. I want a H.264 (AVCHD) -> VP9 encoder (CLI is fine…integration into Handbrake is a nice bonus) yesterday. Or a whatever -> VP9 encoder, for that matter. I also want to know how VP9 compares to H.265 (is it inferior like VP8 is compared to H.264, or is it pretty comparable?)
  10. I, for one, welcome our new voice search enabled, auto-image-enhancing, auto-hash-tagging overlords. The competition is a click away, but they just aren’t up to snuff compared to Google in so many of these areas.

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Internet QoS Sucks: why modern browsers use parallel connections

May 15

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | 1 Comment

Earlier tonight (using “tonight” loosely) I attended a meetup that hosted an excellent presentation about scaling AngularJS applications, by a guy who obviously knows what he’s talking about. But this post is, more or less, not about that.

It’s about a comment that I made, in response to a question fielded by a co-attendee of the meeting. The question went something like this: “Why is there a performance gain in delivering multiple code files over the wire to the end user’s browser, versus just one, when you’re going from one server to one client? Shouldn’t a single transfer just max out their connection anyway?” My response: “[incomprehensible mumbling] Basically, Internet QoS sucks.”

That’s an oversimplification, but not as far from the truth as you’d expect. Read the rest of this entry »

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CORS in an API?

May 13

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

I had a question a few days ago, and am going to bring it up at this month’s Austin API meetup: should you use CORS in an API? I suppose that that leads into another question: should your API be built to be used by an application running from someone’s browser that is served on a domain other than your own? Read the rest of this entry »

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…and we’re back

May 13

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

After attempting to install Drupal 8 and use that as my personal website, I relented. This site is primarily a blog, so WordPress ends up being the best fi, until such time as I (or someone else) builds something better.

I’ve (finally) updated my About and Work pages (though the latter is a placeholder for the time being), so the information there is now current. If there’s something you’d like to know, I can’t guarantee an answer, but feel free to ask!

I’ll be posting something later tonight, but I should grab something to eat before everything closes first…

Three Reasons I Like Frontier Airlines

Jan 29

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

Some people don’t like Denver’s hometown airline, which has seen its share of hardtimes. However I’m happy they are still around, even if I’m flying a competitor (typically United or Southwest) on a given day. Here are a couple reasons why I appreciate them, despite checked-bag charges and a rewards program that doesn’t fit my needs very well… Read the rest of this entry »

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Amazon Is Excellent

Oct 31

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

Earlier today Amazon announced that their Prime service, which costs less than a Netflix streaming subscription, is getting even more movie and TV show availability for its on-demand, no-extra-charge streaming system. This streaming will be available on a tablet that they’re selling at-cost ($199), and is available on computers just like Netflix is. Read the rest of this entry »

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