The Ashdar Partners Blog

I attended the inaugural meeting of the Philadelphia Google Technology User's Group (PGTUG) last night. The content of the meeting was a talk given by @kurrik, a Google Programs Engineer, on new HTML5 features. I was the only attendee brave (or uncool) enough to sit in the front row. While I am an admin by definition, I am a coder at heart. For evidence,  I can submit thousands of Transactions-SQL and Powershell scripts. Even so, web development isn't my 'thing'. It was interesting to see what the development community is up to. This was particularly true since the talk was Chrome centric. I drink plenty of Microsoft Kool-Aid as it is. The talk was fast-paced, with 68 slides in less than 90 minutes, including demos. The talk was nominally about items in the HTML5 specification. While competing products were mentioned, it might be more accurate to say that the talk was on Chrome's implementation of certain HTML5 features. The talk did not get bogged down in det...

I have been spending time watching SQL Bits videos lately. So far, the video that I find most interesting is " Designing Highly Scalable OLTP Systems ". The material was presented by Thomas Kejser and Ewan Fairweather, who are both members of the SQLCAT team at Microsoft. Several years ago, I saw a system with the the compilation lock behavior that they describe in their talk. We happened to use the same method that they suggested to remediate the problem with our system. Since the code was in stored procedures, making these changes was not difficult. We measured a transactional throughput increase, but It is always nice to get additional, real-world validation. I am also intrigued by the "hash partitioning" strategy used to avoid hot pages in tables.

I have been using my Android phone for a while. I am pretty happy with it. I am working around my battery issues with nightly recharging.  I also charge the phone at my desk, thanks to the mini USB charging facility. Some of the apps that I have been using are KeyRing, EverNote, Twitter, SugarSync and GroceryIQ. The maps application is also excellent. I find that the phone seems to lock up about once a week, requiring me to remove and reinstall the battery. I hope that the frequency of this will diminish as time passes.

I have been using my new Android phone for a couple of weeks and I am generally happy with it. From my perspective, the pros are: There is a large amount of software available, it seems to be of generally good quality and it is easy to install. The phone feels very responsive to my newbish fingerings, even though my phone does not seem to have a processor that is fast by current standards. The cons are: The battery life is easily the largest complaint that I have with the phone. Even with background sync disabled, GPS and WiFi and Bluetooth turned off, the screen backlight turned down to zero and curtailed web browsing, I can about 1 day of life out of the battery. (I do leave the HSDPA turned on, rather than falling back to just 2G. There no quick way to toggle the 3G on and off, like there is for the WiFi, GPS and background sync, and surfing on 2G is painful.) I can easily run the battery down with an hour or two of web browsing. I easily could get several days of battery life...

First off, this was an open box purchase of a Motorola XT701 from Newegg . As far as purchasing open-box and refurbished gear (Thinkpads and iPods, mainly) goes, I've always had good experiences. This is the first open-box item that I have purchased from Newegg, but I've always had good experiences with them. There wasn't much in the box: the phone, a wall charger and adapter for US outlets, a USB to mini-USB cable, the battery, the battery cover and a couple of small pamphlets/manuals. There was a 8 GB SD card already in the phone. Removing it to insert my own 8 GB SD card seemed more trouble than it was worth, so I'll be transferring my old files over via USB. The box seemed like it had been tossed around a little bit, but nothing seemed to be damaged in any way. The phones' screen is easily bigger and has better image quality than my old Nokia E71. Initially, I had problems getting the phone to take my Gmail and GAFYD credentials. I was chalking this up to be...

OK, so I needed a new phone. What drove me to choose the phone I did choose? Primarily, I use a phone as an internet device/PDA and not so much as a phone. I'm not a talker, and it irks me when I have to burn two minutes to retrieve a voicemail. I'm not worried about call quality or anything like that. I do love email. I am not interested in playing games, so processor speed isn't a big worry as long as it lets me type as fast as I can. I am not interested in streaming HD movies over 3G, or anything similarly bandwidth-intensive. I have 35/35 FIOS at home, two laptops and a HTPC for anything 'heavy'. My main consideration for hardware was whether I should get a phone with a physical keyboard or not. I have mixed emotions about physical keyboards. They make the phone thicker, and I'm not always keen on the keyboard layout. I've never used a virtual keyboard long enough to get used to it. I have had a few people with Droids tell me that they use the virtua...

For the last 1.5 to 2 years, I have been using an unlocked Nokia E71 as my only phone. I used it heavily, often for two or more hours a day. My primary uses were email, calendaring, contact lists and to-do lists, generally done through Gmail, GAFYD and Exchange servers. I also used it for alarms and Google Maps and Google Reader. Starting over the summer, the E71 would go through periods where it would reboot itself a dozen times a day. Sometimes the E71 would reboot when I was using it, sometimes when it was in my pocket and sometimes when it was laying on a table. Sometimes I would be at the office, sometimes at home, sometimes in a car. There would be periods of rebooting, and then the phone would be fine for a few days, or a couple of weeks. The battery always had plenty of juice. There seemed to be no reason to the behavior, it just seems like a disease that E71 phones can contract. I presume that I simply dropped the phone one too many times. Back in May, I dropped the phone...