Timeshifting Interactive Blog

Browser plug-ins are a mixed blessing. They add useful functionality, but at the same time heighten your risk of viruses and other malicious code by increasing the browser attack surface. This is always a trade-off and sometimes the inconvenience of making sure the latest security updates are installed is worth the hassle. Google Analytics and Xero without Flash, for example, would loose their interactive graphs greatly reducing the functionality of both applications.

However, there’s a difference between a plug-in you’ve chosen to install, and one that just installs itself along with another piece of software. Worse still are those plug-ins that you just can’t uninstall. iTunes is particularly annoying in this regard, there’s no uninstall and deleting the plug-in files causes iTunes to reinstall itself (and the plug-in) on next run. Sure you can disable the plug-in in the browser, but I’d prefer it not to be there in the first place.

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The calendaring on the iPhone is great; unlike Outlook you don’t have to be at your desk to get reminders of appointments and meetings.  However entering calendar items on the iPhone keyboard is a pain, and the UI doesn’t expose a full range of reminder options, e.g. ‘1 week before’.

Of course one can sync between the two using iTunes, but this is tedious to say the least and not exactly practical if you use your Calendar and To Dos a lot.  The iPhone OS 3.0 introduced Exchange ActiveSync, allowing medium- to enterprise-sized businesses with an Exchange Server installation to do 2-way wireless sync.  For smaller enterprises this may not be an option, even if they have Exchange, due to the increased security concerns of making their mail server internet facing.

It is possible to have 2-way sync without Exchange, by using a Google Calendar as intermediate store and synching both the iPhone and Outlook against that.  Internally we use ‘Google Apps for Business’ for our e-mail, mainly due to the excellent spam filtering, and that also provides calendar accounts.  However any Google calendar account will do.

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Solid State Disks (or SSDs) using flash memory chips instead of a rotating plater/head assembly like traditional hard drives are great. All of my systems here have one as the primary disk. Especially in a laptop situation the extra reliability and a computer that is completely silent are very welcome, as is the speed. They are fast, really fast when reading data of the disk—Windows starts in few seconds and applications near instantly.

The problem is the write performance, and it gets worse with time. Writing data to a SSD* first involves first clearing a whole block and then writing data to it, and this block clearing is slow. To compound the issue, the filler/more used the disk the less likely there will be an already clear block. To the end user this clear/write cycle is worst with small random writes (e.g. a web browser writing to its cache, or version control software updating meta data—yes Subversion I’m looking at you!), and causes the whole machine lock-up for as much as 10 seconds at a time.

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