Anxiously Awaiting

Alright people. Here it comes. Finally I shall deliver the flame that I have promised. Without further introduction:

The top 10 things that piss me off when driving

10. Tailgating

This one is at 10 mainly because we all do it. It’s a little more than mildly annoying to have someone glued to your back bumper, but the only time this happens is when I am behind someone going slow. I’m usually driving too fast for people to tailgate.

9. Those who obey the speed limit on 285/75/85N

Yeah you know exactly who I am talking about. Your lane is going 55-65 mph while the other 3 are zipping by at about 15-20 miles over that. Agitating. On a related note: Meditation on the speed limit.

8. Motorcycles

This is less an annoyance more like jealousy. Motorcycles rock. End of story. When’s the last time your car got 40+ mpg (Prius owners excluded from taunt)? Oh yeah? Well when’s the last time you were able to weave in and out of traffic at 80+mph? Motorcycles can go places we car owners simply cannot. Depressing.

7. Bicycles

This flame is directed primarily to people who ride their bikes on Neil’s Gap (affectionately referred to as The Mountain by Blairsvegans) when I’m trying to get home on Sunday afternoons. Not only do I have to find clever ways to pass slow people, but the bicycle riders add a layer of complexity by providing themselves as human road cones for me to dodge.

6. Rubbernecking

Ooo look at the pretty accident. While these “accident moths” are staring that the pretty lights the rest of us are biting our lip in frustration. While I feel bad for the people involved (especially if it’s an injury crash) I have somewhere to be, and 99% of the time I am late to said place. So, stop staring at the Joe Bob’s plumbing service truck that just rammed into a Soccer Mom’s Ford Explorer and step on the gas.

5. Honking the horn at a red light when I already know it’s green

Now we’re talking. Picture this: You are sitting patiently at a red light (after rocketing up to it from the last red light you were stopped at). You are staring intently at the light wishing with all your being that it turned green 10 seconds ago. Wait for it… 5….4….3….2…1…HONK. WTF!! These people expect you to have the reflexes of a mongoose when that light turns green. I’m sorry but I have better things to do than carry a stopwatch and count the seconds it takes for a light to turn from red to green. It’s not a race until AFTER we are moving.

4. Going slow in the fast lane

This speaks for itself. The fast lane is clearly for people who are breaking the law. If you want to obey the law, stay out of the fast lane. Clear and simple. I don’t want to have to get over into the slow lane and then back after I get by you! Stop wasting my momentum!

3. Going slow in curves but speeding up in straightaways

There aren’t enough words that are considered explicatives to describe how angry this makes me. Seriously. People who do this usually end up with pennies, drinks, or rocks thrown at their car. Nah I’m kidding. But this is high on the list for a very very good reason. I don’t know if people do this unintentionally, or if they just have a sick sense of humor.

2. Turning off/changing lanes without using a blinker

You know, I’m really a nice guy when it comes to letting people in front of me in traffic. You signal you want over, I let you over. It’s simple. However, You don’t signal and you get over, and you risk my wrath. I will do everything in my power to make the rest of your drive as miserable as possible.

1. Same Speed in the Fast Lane as the car to the right of them in the slow lane.

GRRRRR! If you want to have your tires shot out, do this. It was a hard decision between this and the blinker thing, but this is definately the most infuriating thing I see on the roadways today.

Alright folks, thats it for now. And in all seriousness, I am not as mean or crazy of a driver as I seem to be. I just don’t like stupid people ;). Add your most hated driving experiences!

I have recently been introduced to this wonderful conglomeration of some older technologies that is Ajax (asynchronous javascript and XML). From what I have read so far the design patterns of this technology are very intriguing.

The way a normal web application works is that most of the heavy duty code execution is server side. The browser simply asks the server for a page via HTTP requests, and then the server does it’s thing (DB hits, miscellaneous logic) and serves the file. The problem is that this methodology tends to lock the user into a very constricted usability context. Presenting the user with new information usually involves a page refresh, or redirection to a brand new page using hyperlinks (and by default around 2 seconds of delay waiting for these things to happen). For some usage scenarios this pattern is needlessly complicated and slow.

For example, lets say that I am a user on a forum and I wish to update some personal information about myself. Normally this would entail logging into the forum, going to a profile editing page, filling in the new details, and clicking a submit button. Each of these three steps requires the presentation of new information most likely facilitated via page refreshes and redirections. The backend of the site would then process the new information and update my profile respectively.

Enter Ajax. Ajax breaks the server centered paradigm by placing some client responsibilities within the web browser via a callback mechanism. Now we can delegate the browser some functionality instead of having to solely rely on the web server itself for post backs. Heavy duty processing and database hits are still server delegated responsibilities, but Ajax provides a rich client interaction model that ultimately makes the application appear to be faster, slicker, and easier to use. Back to our forum example. If we treat the browser like it is serving an application instead of serving a file, we can enhance the bland experience of updating our profile. In this case the browser application collects the updated profile and asynchronously uploads it to the server to be processed. At the cost of a heftier download when the user first visits the site, we completely eliminate a linear point and click interface and the need for page refreshes (which is usually where a convential web app would upload the new data). Our user can seemlessly go back to posting on the forum instead of waiting for his profile to update. This gives the appearance that the application is more responsive.

Note that in order to use this wonderful technology you need to design it into your infrastructure. It’s no trivial matter to integrate it into a long standing request oriented system. Ajax apps tend to have a much larger codebase than conventional web applications.  So far Ajax has proved to be a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bland usability paradigms of web applications. Unfortunately javascript has long since been known as the red-headed step child of scripting languages, and is responsible for a lot of web annoyances (click the monkey for a PSP!1). Hopefully javascript’s bad reputation will not reflect upon people’s perception of Ajax. Security should always be of the utmost concern when choosing what technologies to use and there are certain dangers involved in delegating some responsibilities to an unknown client in an unknown environment. Nevertheless, the dynamic and asynchronous features Ajax presents are very exciting in a world dominated by a linear point, click, and wait schema. The usability enhancement supplied is more than worth a little time spent making it tight and secure.

It’s getting closer to our date and I would like to ask everyone to begin praying for us. Im 100% sure that the show is gonna rox my sox, but we still want it to go in the direction that it needs to. Pray that each one of us would be the vessel that we need to be, and those of you that can come please do! I would love to see some hometown folks or even some Atlanteans (sp?) around. It’s going to be in the parking lot of a really big church in Athens that Ben goes to on Sundays. I’m really pumped about this show! It’s been a while since I have been on stage so pray that I act accordingly =).

Ill post more accurate directions after I get them from Ben. See you guys there!

One thing that constantly puzzles me about the open source world is their reluctance to use a technology because it was written and designed by Micro$oft (yes, the dollar sign is intentional). Although I am the first person to admit that MS hasn’t had the best track record in the past couple of years, there is a modicum of good in the evil empire that Bill built.

I think one reason why Windows has a bad rap with the geek l33t is because of the amount of publicity associated security flaws. Take the W32.Sasser worm for instance. Once this random kid in Germany found and exploited the lsass.exe flaw the media be all upons. There seems to be a new virus coming out for Windows every week. But if you look at the vast majority of them they are mostly botnets, trojans, or keyloggers. The kind of stuff that the user has to be naive *cough* enough to install on their machine via an email or a malware website. On the flip side of that, some of the errors found in Windows are just dumb mistakes. Take the recent WMF (windows meta file) vulnerability. Some people think that this particular “flaw” was actually a built in backdoor. I don’t know if I buy that, but there are definately a plethora of errors, screwups, and just plain bad code in Windows. The meta file stink ended up being a very circumstantial exploit (most are), but very dangerous. Google windows meta file exploit if you want to read up about it. It’s rather amusing.

But. I don’t think that Microsoft deserves all the spite they are receiving. Bill Gates put a PC in everyone’s home. If you buy a new PC whats the standard OS? Windows. He’s doing something right folks. We can only hope that his lackeys up on CA actually learn from their mistakes and write better code. Regardless, I will continue to use MS products. Well, everything except Internet Explorer. Oh and Office too. That junk costs too much money.

I went in to meet with Keith Edwards today to talk about doing research for him. About 10 minutes into the conversation I realized that this was going to be exactly what I am looking for at Tech. The research has a heavy HCI (human computer interaction) piece, but it also has a heavy networking piece. My favorite classes at Tech so far have been graphics and networking, and we shall see this summer if I can add HCI to the list.

I will post a little more about my piece of the research and the overarching theme when I get a little more time. As of right now its time to chill for a bit. I have been overworked in the past week.