Karl Kopp

Chris just MSN'd me a link to an interesting new proof-of-concept from the guys at Digg call MXHR (Multipart XMLHttpRequest). In principle, it groups multiple HTTP requests for any type of content (it supports multiple mime types) into one HTTP stream.

According to the HTTP specifications, browsers are only allowed to open a limited number of simultaneous HTTP requests to a single web server (probably good thing too, as the over head of creating HTTP connections is quite high, and allowing unlimited would add a lot of strain on backend infrastructure).

There are ways to tweak each browser to increase the HTTP connection limit, but the guys at Digg seem to have come up with a very elegant solution. On the demo page, the MXHR stream method is almost 1/10th the time of the normal request in  my testing (Chrome and IE 8). Quite impressive.

I did find one situation where this doesn't seem be the case - opening the MXHR / demo page in another tab! In Chrome, I right clicked on the link for the demo site, and selected "Open link in new tab". The MXHR Stream took 367ms verses 51ms for the normal method. I saw the same behaviour in IE 8 as well. Might need to digg a little deeper ;)

Check out this video of amazing 3D immersion tech:

Imaging playing Quake with this!!! :)

Saw a few interesting videos this morning, showing data centres from Google and from Microsoft:

Google Data Centre

Microsoft Data Centre

Some of the interesting differences:

• The Microsoft Data Centre (MDC) has centralised UPS, while the Google Data Centre (GDC) seems to have a small UPS per server. I saw a picture of the Google server last week and dismissed it as a hoax because it looked like the power supply was massive, but if that is actually a small UPS, makes more sense.
• The cooling in the MDC seems a lot more traditional, while the GDC utilises some interesting uses for water cooling, especially around the water cooled towers. Utilising nature would more than likely reduce energy consumption.
• Probably the most drastic difference is the that GDC uses containers to host the server infrastructure, while MDC hosts it in a large room as per traditional data centres. I know Microsoft is heading in this direction as well, but it would severely reduce build costs, and apparently is far more efficient.

Will be interesting to see where this heads :) Here is a nice look inside the HP POD, similar in concept but for mare dense than Google.

Todays interesting news.

• Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, actually recommends the use of the mega drop-down navigation. After he suggested regular drop-downs are rife with usability issues, it's an interesting result.
• Tim Sneath from Microsoft has a really interesting post on how they created the CoreCLR to fit the .NET CLR into Silverlight, and made it all fit in around 2mb.
• And lastly, a few Next Digital launches from the last week in no particular order: Logicane, McCabe Terrill Lawyers, Hamilton Harbour from Devine, and QInvest.
• Never heard of Joe Hewitt before, but just read he has released a free, open source iPhone library called Three20, after the 320 pixel wide screen of the iPhone. Definitely worth taking a peak if you are building iPhone apps. Got my Mac Mini dusted off and running today because I want to take a look around the new iPhone 3.0 SDK. Hopefully will post some of the adventures I have ;)

Daily update #2.

• On my previous post regarding the ACMA blacklist, I in no way condone the materials hosted at ANY of the sites listed. I just honestly believe the whole concept of using a blacklist is absolutely pointless, cripples the web, and achieves NOTHING - content of that nature pops up faster than you can add the URLs to the blacklist, and those that want to get it will always be able to circumvent it. Today they even blacklisted a tuckshop and a dentist, which casts further doubt on its usefulness. I actually thought the Howard governments NetAlert program was much better, although under publicised.
• ASP.NET MVC has gone RTM.
• We released a new site for Ford Performance Racing today - nice work boys
• The upcoming Umbraco 4.0.1 release will include a sweet new XSLT visualiser - looks awesome! Still would love version control on the XSLT files just like the content :)
• Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is now out
• More details on Mac OS X / Safari hack in a good interview on ZDNet. And from this statement, maybe the SDL Microsoft implemented is working?

Why Safari?  Why didn't you go after IE or Safari?

It's really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit.  The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don't do.  Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don't have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you'd find in Windows.

It's more about the operating system than the (target) program.  Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too.  The underlying OS doesn't have anti-exploit stuff built into it.

Rather than doing lots of small blog posts, thought I would start to round up some interesting new of the day. So I present to you, the first instalment of "A few interesting items crossed my email / browser / rss feeds today":

• Microsoft Expression Web Superviewer allows you to view a web page in different version of IE on the one screen
• Fully patched Mac OSX + Safari was hacked within a few seconds! Seems like IE8 and Firefox got hacked as well, just took a little longer
• VSDL2 looks interesting, and is looking to be rolled out in Australia soon. Have read that you need 6 (!) phones tho.
• I knew it wouldn't be long, but looks like the ACMA blacklist is out and available for public viewing (funny, Wikileaks on Google is ranked 6th, while on Live its 2nd, and on Yahoo its number 1)
• As I posted earlier today, I really love the Google Chrome Experiments. Az asked, is it encroaching on the OS space? Add the new Chrome Extensions as well, hmmm.
• Old skool geekness - I need to look at architecting a MASSIVE existing ColdFusion (like OLD ColdFusion, like when it was just a scripting language!) site into something else (thinking .NET and MVC at the moment) but I don't like having to install other IDEs just to get descent code highlighting (I already have a few, but Visual Studio 2008 is by far the best). So I found this little trick = Open Visual Studio 2008, click Tools / Options / Text Editor / File Extensions and add a new one for .cfm files and map it to the XML Editor - DONE!

Was just getting thru some RSS feeds waiting for an app to compile, and stumped across this sweet new site:

Chrome Experiments

Some mad JavaScript applications! I really like the Coloscube and Google Gravity. They do seem to work in some other browsers (testing in IE and Firefox) but seem to work best in Chrome due to the focus on the V8 JavaScript engine. Take a look at the video below:

Thanks to Digg, I found this very kewl video of some geek connecting 24 x 256GB solid state drives together via RAID. The result?

• 2GBps transfer speeds!
• All of Microsoft Office opens in 0.5 seconds!
• A complete system defrag in 3 seconds

AMAZING numbers! And while it is a marketing video, the numbers are still amazing! And the 'bounce' test is pretty impressive too!

Price? I've read that it will be around the USD $500 mark, so that is USD $12,000 (or $18,580 AUD) just for the drives! $2,000 AUD per GB! Ouch! I got my Thecus N3200 NAS with 3TB of Seagate Barracuda drives for AUD $1,230.

But we all need a dream :)