Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

An awesome article on Optimizing Page Load Time from Aaron Hopkins (who works for Google). While his suggestions aren’t quite revolutionary he’s got a lot of data and experience to back up his statements, which is really great when your looking to improve performance. To summarize the best point: high object counts hurt performance regardless of size and broadband connectivity.

According to Rob Enderle, I’ll be pre-ordering Leopard shortly after Christmas. Hopefully Leopard on PPC won’t suck yet. There still millions of us out there with those PPC chips.

Benjamin Smedberg has an interesting post on Ubuntu and it’s effort to be a provider of not only the OS, but the software around it. I think the ’solution’ Ubuntu choose is really a workaround for a fundamental flaw in Linux. Getting software to run quickly and easily without intimate knowledge of the OS is tough at best.

By far the best out there, though not without it’s faults is Apple. Not only are many installs just drag/drop (though that is rather cool), but ones that do require an installer typically use Apple’s installer functionality, providing a very simple interface for the user. Most importantly when Apple switched to x86, they realized users don’t know/care what’s inside their computer, or about the differences in x86 and PPC architecture. The solution they came up with was “Universal Binaries” (similar to how FAT versions of applications were used when moving from 68k to PPC). At the end of the day, the user knows nothing. The software does the work. As good as Apple’s effort is, there is a flaw, uninstalling is not always the best. In most cases it’s just drag it to the trash, but there’s no undo for installed stuff like drivers.

Ubuntu would be best off pushing for the Linux community to follow a model similar to Apple with a few changes:

• Encourage applications to ship in the same package, and encourage distributions to use the same package installation system. Just like Apple, the user will have a familiar and obvious way of adding applications to their computer.
• This is the tough part: 1 download for most popular Linux distributions. So it doesn’t matter what version of ____ your running, you can just install and let the installer figure it out similar to Universal Binaries.
• One up Apple by providing a “roll back” or uninstaller that will remove and restore to what the system was before the installation was done.

Installing software on Linux stinks. Ubuntu is much better than the rest, but I don’t like how you have to rely on Ubuntu in order for that to be the case. There’s a market for someone who can solve the problem. It’s a barrier between Linux and the general user. Until someone solves it, Linux will likely remain a niche product in the desktop market.

Remember when Sony was the gold standard of electronics? Well, those days are obviously gone. Earnings are down 94%. Wow. Part of that stems from the laptop battery problems, but an under-rated portion of that is the lack of clear innovation at Sony for the past several years. Sony still doesn’t seem to think the Walkman is threatened by the iPod.

When will Sony learn to innovate and return to the days of old? Hopefully soon. 94% drop in earnings can’t go on forever, so something must happen.

Firefox 2.0 is out. If you haven’t already, go download, and while your at it, check out the new design (I love how the color scheme matches the logo, and still manages to look really great). If you already have it, then check here for more things to do regarding celebrating 2.0. Even Microsoft got in on the party (raising the question browser wars? Or the rebirth of browser innovation?).

There are some great things for end users, and a few things for webmasters looking to enhance their site experience for Firefox users (Live Titles for example).

In the hustle of thanking the developers, don’t forget the sysadmins and the build team, whose work often goes unnoticed unless things go wrong.

Norton AntiVirus has this strange omission I just can’t figure out. For some reason “Internet Worm Protection” won’t allow for creating a connection to a PPTP VPN. Not very helpful if you have to connect to one of the many VPN’s out there that use this protocol.

First a little primer on making a PPTP connection . You essentially need two ports open, 1723/TCP, and IP Protocol 47 (GRE). Ok, this is pretty basic stuff. We can do that ;). Well in the little wizard Norton provides, to create a rule you have the following choices for protocol: TCP, UDP, TCP/UDP, ICMP, ICMPv6, All (pointless). No way to select GRE.

So the only way I’ve found to connect to a PPTP VPN thus far is simply to disable either just Internet Worm Protection, or disable Norton AV.

It’s rather odd that something like this is not supported. A search on Google didn’t turn up an answer. Symantec’s tech support database didn’t turn up anything helpful either.

I would have expected something like this to function without a hitch. I’m very surprised to see this requires any intervention, and even more surprised to see that even with intervention there’s still no way to get it working.

Wired’s blog Monkey Bites has a small mention on reporter in response to a comment I left the other day. Very cool to get a little publicity for the tool. Those reports really do make a difference. The more reports in the database, the more we know about problems facing users on that wild wild web.