Archive for May 15th, 2013

Quick Thoughts on Google I/O Day One

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

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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