Category: Technology

Back in 2007, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr changed focus from largely software tech companies to “Green Tech”.  Being “green” was hip then just like it is now.  But, with gasoline prices topping $140/barrel last year and with ever increasing awareness of global warming, being green is cooler than ever.

But who would have guessed that the economy would help turn John Doerr into a genius once again?  With the economy in a huge recession, the government is opening up its coffers.  To mitigate negative sentiments about spending gobs of money, Obama has made it clear that he’s going to not just spend money on infrastructure, but specifically he’s going to spend money on green infrastructure!   Of course this makes total sense.  Everyone loves being green and the economy needs a boost from the government. 

I was skeptical when Doerr and company announced their Greentech fund.  But now I am impressed.  This industry is about to get an unprecedented boost as Obama pours billions of dollars into the industries that Doerr started created two years ago.  What foresight!

One thing to remember, however, is that Obama’s public declaration that he wants to invest in Green tech is not a coincidence.  Doerr has Obama’s ear and is actively marketing Green technologies to the Obama administration.  He recommended Bill Joy as a candidate for an Obama CTO (coincidentally, Joy is a partner at KPCB).   And of course he recommends that Obama invest in clean energy sources.   I bet that every one of Doerr’s companies is writing to the Obama administration in hopes of landing a few extra government dollars.  (Not that there is anything wrong with that)

This is good news.  If Yahoo announced a 7 day retention policy, that would be great news!

I hope the major online services of the world get into a war over who has the shortest retention policy.  It’s not that I don’t trust Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft.  I don’t trust the government(s).

From Yahoo Tech:

The major press outlets are abuzz this morning with news of a major new security flaw that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 to the latest beta of IE8….

Virtually all security experts (as well as myself) are counseling users to switch to any other web browser — none of the others are affected, including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera — at least for the time being, though Microsoft has stubbornly said it "cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw." Microsoft adds that it is working on a fix but has offered no ETA on when that might happen. Meanwhile it offers some suggestions for a temporary patch, including setting your Internet security zone settings to "high" and offering some complicated workarounds. (Some reports state, however, that the fixes do not actually work.)

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Vista so far at home.  This week I installed Vista on a machine at work.  While the machine is a slightly older one, its no slouch – its a 2.66GHz Hyperthreaded P4 with 3GB of RAM.  But the machine is as slow as a dog running Vista.  I had no trouble with XP on this system, but Vista is janky; it frequently lags and stalls doing basic operations.

All in all, it makes me think the class action lawsuit against Microsoft may have some merit.  It certainly makes me think Microsoft’s claim of minimum Vista requirements is a joke.

If upgrading to Vista, make sure you’ve got a dual core system.  I’d bet that the vast majority of developers at Microsoft run exclusively on dual core (or better) machines.  [We developers at Google probably do too, but at least I’m still using this one :-)]

At home I use Vista.  At work I use mostly XP.  There is really only one feature I miss from Vista when I’m at work.

Search in the start menu.  I can’t stand XP’s menus on the start button.  I’ve got at least 4 machines, each with different ways of categorizing things in the start menu.  They all are way too cluttered to spot anything, and I loathe every time I have to go these menus.  With Vista, all you do is search.  Type “e”, and you are already at Excel.  Type “programs” and you’re in the control panel.  It’s just great.

I realize you can buy add-on products to XP to do this.  Maybe I will.  This is the most visible feature that I miss from Vista.

If you haven’t read about Google Chrome already, I hope you’ll take a look! This is the project I currently work on at Google.

Features:

• Open source browser based on the Apple Webkit Rendering Engine.
• Multi-process browser.
• A fast JavaScript engine.
• Minimalist approach to user interface.
• “Incognito Mode”, a private browsing interface.

Rather than blab about it – I’ll let you go try it out.  The Google Chrome Comic is a much better description of the product anyway.  Let us know what you think.  We wouldn’t release it if we didn’t think it was quite solid, but please remember it is in beta.  If you have any questions, please ask!

P.S.  Some may notice that this is not the first product I’ve worked on called Chrome!

I’ve noticed that I lose track of a lot of messages people send me, and the problem is getting worse.  Over the last few weeks I’ve realized part of what is going on.  The problem is GMail’s threaded message views.

Before I prove that, let me say that this is somewhat un-intuitive to me.  I’ve always used products that allowed me to thread my messages.  And I complained when I didn’t have these tools at my disposal.  The basic argument in favor of threading is that when you look at a large number of messages, if half of them are related to one topic, they shouldn’t dominate your message list.  This seems logical, and is also usually right.  With products before GMail, the products were primarily message based, and I used threading to keep my inbox small.  With GMail, you can’t avoid the threading; its there and you can’t even turn it off.

The problem, however, is that people write emails, and people do not abide by the strict topic of an email discussion.  A discussion with Joe may be titled “I will be out on Thursday”, and then digress into Joe’s work and whether it will be done before he leaves.  It then may digress into a technical thread about that work.  You’d think that search would save you – just search for the topic of Joe’s work.  But, if you get enough email from Joe which is all about Joe’s work, this fails.  The search result which reads, “I will be out on Thursday” will be the last result you click on.

So, the problem is that computers are too good at threading.  You tell them that this message is about “I will be out on Thursday”, and they diligently file it away as such.  Unfortunately, humans are not good at keeping on topic, and it makes threading fall apart.  The inability to break apart the thread manually and file two messages into different places is the final straw which makes keeping organized in a threaded and search only interface difficult.

I think I still like threading better than non-threading.  But, when I have action items or take-aways from email, I need to be able to extract those action items from the thread and store them elsewhere.  This is a time consuming task I don’t do well.  Maybe I’m being stubborn.

Anyway, if you are sending me email, try to stay on topic.  It helps me 🙂

Well, I finally turned of UAC on my machine.  I must say, I’m quite a bit happier.  I’ll go into the details below.  But what I’d really love to see from Microsoft is proof (or non-proof) that UAC works.

The assertion from Microsoft is that you’ll be less vulnerable to attacks with UAC.  This is a nice claim, but lacks data.  A nice report would be really good.  I’m not talking about UAC on corporate accounts where they lock down the desktops.  We already know there it helps (and you could do that prior to Vista anyway).  I’m talking about UAC for home users.  Are home users with UAC hacked less often then those with UAC off?

The gripes which led to disabling UAC were these two things:

1) Macromedia Fireworks doesn’t work with UAC
In order for this program to run, you have to run it with “Run As Administrator”.  That is annoying, but doable.  But I want it to be associated with viewing all PNG files on my system, and when you double click a PNG, you just end up with a dialog box from Fireworks about not being able to load due to some whacky error.

2) Microsoft Visual Studio Is Silently Broken with UAC
If you do development of anything that uses COM, Visual Studio auto-registers components for you.  To do so, it needs to run as Administrator.  However, if you accidentally run as a non-admin, everything *appears* to work; except when you go to run your program, it doesn’t work right; or it gets an old version.  You end up spinning until you finally come to the realization that you just forgot UAC again.

So, Microsoft is right, most apps work under UAC.  But not all.  And the ones that don’t make it time consuming.  UAC off is better.