Ah the classics.

To put this in perspective 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water (WHO/UNICEF [pdf]). The same report notes 2.5 billion “are without improved sanitation”. Roughly 1.17 billion (18% of the 6.5 billion population in 2006) still use “open defecation” or to put it in more crude terms, they crap in the woods, fields, streams, and rivers under the open sky.

There’s something a little disturbing about these trends. In my ideal world more people will always have access to toilets that don’t contaminate their own drinking water than use cell phones.

Simpler + faster = better

Lately I’ve become slightly obsessed with seeing how much I can tweak a website to perform faster. In this case it’s my password generator SafePasswd.com, which I built in 2006 and overhauled in 2009. It’s always been somewhat of a playground for me to try things a little different.

The old site circa 2006 took about 5 seconds to load. It was sometimes a little more if the server was under load. After an overhaul I got down to about 3.5 seconds. A solid and respectable improvement considering the new version is way better.

After my latest round of optimization with a clear cache, I’m down to 1.61 seconds, and I think I can get it slightly lower. Google Page Speed score is now a 95 and YSlow is B (83) or A (95) for v2 and v2 small site respectively.

Most of the improvements were relatively small and simple. A few required some backend changes to make it all work from a technical perspective. Even with a fairly image-centric design it’s possible to get pretty decent performance.

Google AdSense like most ad networks is still a major slowdown. Often ads are implemented via a script which itself can include several other resources (including other JavaScript). Because it’s just a <script/> it’s blocking. It would be nice if AdSense would have an asynchronous version that lets you specify an element where it could insert the ad when loaded by passing an element object or id. It could then be non-blocking and speed up a large number of websites thanks to its popularity.

I can’t find any reason this wouldn’t technically be possible. It would make setup slightly more complicated, but the payoff for those who choose this implementation would be a faster website. Perhaps Steve Souders could poke the AdSense folks for a faster solution.

I’m also still hoping for SSL support. Another place where Google Analytics is ahead.

I’m slightly skeptical that this approach will have much more success than the other attempts in the past. This approach may make sense for Facebook, but I don’t think it will pay off for most smaller (relatively speaking) sites.

I think for most users doing something similar to the Unladen Swallow, an effort for Python which is trying to build a custom virtual machine with a JIT built on top of LLVM would be best. Perhaps even Nanojit could be a potential option.

I suspect HipHop will be a fork more than anything else. Regardless it’s a pretty cool project and some really interesting technology.

Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today. Anyone can develop! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a cryptographic key that (temporarily) allows you (slightly) elevated access to… your own computer. And that’s fine — or at least workable — for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will.

I’m not sure how we got here, but it does now cost $99 to tinker with your iPhone and soon iPad. While your computer is still pretty open, it’s only a matter of time before the iPad can be used for development via Xcode and a new UI builder. Want to share your creation with someone? You need Apple’s permission (App Store) or you can’t easily do so. Back in my day you took a copy of Stuffit (you can use the 30 day demo) and put it on a server with a web page explaining it to the rest of the world.

However the web is still open. This is exactly why HTML5 and the open web is so important. The web is playing catchup to desktop computing and is accelerating. Browsers like Gecko and WebKit are making it more compelling than ever. The iPad like the iPhone is an awesome way to browse the web. Making the web powerful enough to take advantage of the hardware is the near future of personal computing.

There is another possibility. It could be a Zend extension acting as an opcode cache (APC, XCache, etc.) and a FastCGI replacement.

It’s also possible they used Quercus as either a starting point or inspiration and it’s actually Java based, but that sounds unlikely.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.

The most interesting thing is they bumped the OS version to 3.2. I suspect this summer we’ll see a 4.0 for a much more radically changed iPhone than we’ve seen in the past 2 revisions. Otherwise I think they would have called this 4.0.

Some semi-random thoughts:

• It’s an oversized iPhone/iPod touch. It’s software really isn’t revolutionary, at least so far.
• It will be hard to compete with the Kindle. The Kindle’s screen isn’t back-lit hence it’s easier on the eyes. Don’t underestimate this.
• Typing on a solid surface can’t be that comfortable, especially if you touch type. It works on the iPhone since you use your more padded thumbs. It’s not a laptop replacement.
• It may be thin and light, but it’s not as mobile as phone. It’s not a mobile replacement.
• It has the potential to be a GREAT gaming device.
• It has the potential to hurt netbook sales by serving as a handy “around the house” internet device.
• It’s wireless pricing and iTunes are combined to make it feel cheap to own/operate but will still get expensive quickly.
• It’s sold unlocked. They are catching up with Google in that regard. I wouldn’t be shocked if the iPhone is soon sold on similar terms this summer. UMTS/HSDPA.
• That black bezel will likely disappear once they can shrink the internals in future revisions. It will eventually become closer to the iPhone.
• Still a mostly closed platform. The justification on the iPhone was security since it’s a safety device as well. Why the iPad?

Terry McGraw, CEO of McGraw-Hill decided to announce it a day early. Newsweek jumped the gun in 2004 with an iPod update. I’m sure their legal team is working late tonight.

With it presumably comes iPhone OS 4.0 preview for developers.

Either tomorrow or next month Apple will announce an update to the MacBook Pro lineup. It’s now 232 days since the last update (avg 200) and will likely get Core i5 and Core i7’s and slight hardware tweaks. I think Blu-Ray is still 50/50. Apple might hold this until early or mid February so it’s not overshadowed by the tablet announcement.

Likely a few other tweaks to the lineups, perhaps a CPU bump on the Mac Pro’s and perhaps a small tweak to the iPod lineup (more storage, new colors nothing major) though I expect the iPod/iPhone focus to be in June not now.