Chantal’s Blog

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Google Chrome - Real World Speed Test

September 2nd, 2008 by Chantal
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I just downloaded Google Chrome a few minutes ago. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with it. It seemed quite fast to me (as I expected since it’s based on WebKit like Safari). I wanted to measure how fast it was though using a real world test that applies to me instead of just going by “feel”. I play Pro Racer on FaceBook regularly, so I figured that would be a good place to start my testing. Here’s what I did:

Pro Racer allows you thirty races per day. I loaded up ten tabs (one browser open at a time) to race ten different people three times each. I then used the stopwatch on my iPhone to measure how long it took to complete all thirty races in each browser. I know this isn’t a scientific test, but I did the best I could.

Here are the results:

Chrome 0.2.149.27
Safari 3.1.2 (525.21)
Firefox 3.0.1

IE 7.0.5730.13

In case you can’t see the images above, here are the results in text:

Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 - 2:22.5 (142.5 seconds)
Safari 3.1.2 (525.21) - 2:31.8 (151.8 seconds)
Firefox 3.0.1 - 3:42.3 (222.3 seconds)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 - 4:24.6 (264.6 seconds)

I can tell you what I think, but what do you think?

Note: To be fair to my beloved Firefox, I should mention that I have a couple of extensions: Adblock Plus, Cooliris Previews, Delicious Bookmarks, Faviconize Tab, Forecastfox, Greasemonkey and PicLens.

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How-To: Stream Music and Video to iPhone / iPod Touch

July 30th, 2008 by Chantal
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Sure, you can copy your music and videos from iTunes to your iPhone or iPod Touch. But what if you want to listen to internet radio stations or just stream media (music, video, pictures) to your device? You could buy an internet radio application from the iTunes store, but that won’t give you the ability to stream your own media to the device.

If you’d rather a free option, I suggest you try TVersity. Using this free software, you can stream to a number of devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch, PSP, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360.

As things stand right now, TVersity doesn’t seem that great for streaming individual songs to the iPhone or iPod Touch. You have to tell it to play each song rather than playing an album or playlist at a time. Maybe this will be fixed in the next version. However, it’s great for playing podcasts, audiobooks, videos (in the correct format) and streaming audio. It’s wonderful on my Playstation 3 for streaming anything (other than what Sony screwed up with PS3 firmware 2.20 a while back).

Here’s what you do:


Setting Up TVersity

Easy. At this point, you should be able to stream media to your iPhone. But what about internet radio stations?

  • Go to the SHOUTcast directory
  • Find a stream you want to listen to, then click Tune In!
  • In iTunes, right-click the stream, click Get Info, click Edit URL, then copy the URL
  • Open TVersity and click the + button at the upper left
  • Fill out the form as shown in the image below:

  • Click Submit
  • Rinse and repeat for any other stations you want.


Accessing TVersity on the Road

This is all great, but what if you want to access your media when you are away from home? Well, you can simply use the http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/iphone URL as before. But if you are behind a router, you will need to substitute your external IP address instead. If you don’t know what it is, just go to a site like WhatIsMyIP.com and get it from there. Very simple. Or is it?

What happens if your IP address changes on a regular basis? Your bookmark will stop working at the absolute worst time (like when you are trying to show off to one of your friends). This is where a dynamic hostname service like DynDNS or DtDNS comes in handy. Basically, they give you a hostname that points to whatever your IP address happens to be at the time. That way, you can bookmark something like http://yourniftyhostname.com:41952/iphone and not have to worry about the address changing. You should run client software in the background to ensure that your address is always updated when it changes.

DynDNS Update Clients - http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/
DtDNS Update Clients - http://www.dtdns.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=info.clients

Note: If you have a D-Link router, it’s possible that you can enter your DynDNS account info in your router setup to update your DynDNS hostname with your IP address automatically. This eliminates the need for an update client. It’s possible that other brands of routers can do this as well.

EDIT: Leave it to me to forget something very important!  If you have a router and have more than one computer on your network, you will have to enable port forwarding for port 41952.  To learn how to enable port forwarding, just do a Google search for something like port forwarding d-link or port forwarding linksys.

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Aurora Feint Pulled from iTunes Store - Update

July 25th, 2008 by Chantal
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See updates at the bottom of this post.

Aurora Feint has been pulled from the iTunes apps store as of July 23rd. It appears that there has been quite a bit of spyware concern centered on the “Community” feature. This feature asked you for your email address and phone number. In return, it was supposed to automatically add your friends so they could be in your party within the game. But it wasn’t immediately obvious how this was to magically happen.

The intent was to add the community feature with as little typing as possible because according to the developers, “everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it“. Apparently, they used an API that would download all of your contact information stored in the Contacts app on your iPhone. The contact details were to be transmitted in clear text to their server.

This is part of what the developers had to say:

In the 1.0 version of the game we just didn’t get around to doing everything we wanted to do in time for the launch: remember we tried to do a high quality game in 10 weeks flat. So, if you opt-in to the community feature, when you refresh your friends, the data is sent unencrypted to our web servers. Before you freak out though, let me explain why this was done. We just thought that it was a cool feature and that we’d implement security stuff if we became popular. To that end, the web server we launched with was a teeny box with almost no power. We spent the first few days scrambling to scale our servers. We really had no idea how popular we were going to be. We added this feature in near the end of our development cycle and simply decided that we didn’t have enough time to spend to make it secure in advance of knowing if it was even going to be a hit.

The developers say that they have revised their application to use
HTTPS for data transfer and it has been submitted to Apple for review. They are also
working on another version which has the community feature completely
removed.

If you play the game and want to continue, make sure you don’t delete it from iTunes. You might want to think twice about enabling the community feature if you haven’t already done so. If you have already enabled the community option, your data hopefully shouldn’t be transmitted unless you choose “Refresh Friends Data”.

I read through the posts on the Aurora Feint forums and it seems to be
a mix of those who are concerned about security and those who don’t
think it’s a big deal. What do you think?

I imagine this is going to take a while to straighten out …

Read more on the Aurora Feint forums.
See their privacy statement.

Edit: Looks like this isn’t the first time there has been an issue with an application in the app store.

25 Jul 2008 - Update: Version 1.0.0.1
has been released. It contains bugfixes, “additional networked
features” and more magicbooks. The developers also advised that they
disabled the community feature as of July 18th as soon as they realised
they were becoming popular. They do not store the data and have
assured us that they have deleted all personal information stored on
their servers. Make sure you update, because your game data will no
longer be saved to the AF servers with the old version.

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Deaf Grandma - Ruby Code

May 18th, 2008 by Chantal
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I’m working on Learn to Program by Chris Pine. This is one of the exercises mentioned in chapter 7 (chapter 6 in the online version).

Poor Grandma can’t hear very well. You really have to scream at her, but even then, she doesn’t quite hear what you’re saying. You have to be careful too because she often tries to plant sloppy, toothless Grandma kisses on you.


# Deaf Grandma with random years

say = ‘Ew. Grandma wants a kiss!’
puts ‘Grandma stares vacantly at you…’

while say != ‘BYE’
# STDOUT.flush
say = gets.chomp
puts
puts “You say, ‘#{say}.’”
if say == say.upcase
# She hears you … sort of
year = (2007 - rand(101))
puts “Grandma says, ‘NO, NOT SINCE #{year}!’”
else
# She yells at you
puts “Grandma says, ‘HUH?! SPEAK UP!’”
end
end
puts
puts ‘You head for the hills before Grandma steals a kiss …’

Unless you YELL at Grandma (in uppercase), she just complains that she can’t hear you. When she does hear you, she’ll just say something in reference to a random year in the past. When it’s time to leave, you have to yell ‘BYE’ to her (or just wait for her to doze off in her rocking chair).

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99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall - Ruby Code

May 17th, 2008 by Chantal
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Here is my (very simple) version of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall in Ruby. I the only fancy thing I am doing is “while”. I don’t like the fact that the song is duplicated to handle one bottle, so I will eventually change that. I have a couple of ideas, but I am not sure which I want to use.

#99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

bottles = 99

while bottles != 1
puts “#{bottles} bottles of beer on the wall, #{bottles} bottles of beer.”
puts “Take one down and pass it around, #{bottles -1} bottles of beer on the wall.”
puts ”
bottles = bottles - 1
end

# Do this when there is one bottle left so we don’t have “one bottles” of beer
puts “#{bottles} bottle of beer on the wall, #{bottles} bottle of beer.”
puts “Take one down and pass it around, no bottles of beer on the wall.”
puts ”
puts ‘Time to buy some more beer!’

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Twitter Problems due to Ruby on Rails scaling?

May 15th, 2008 by Chantal
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I’ve noticed that Twitter has been going down quite a bit lately. I have heard that the Twitter people are looking into switching from Ruby on Rails to something else. Since I am learning Ruby (with the intention of learning Rails as well), I am interested in knowing why Twitter is having problems with RoR.

Everything that I have read so far indicates that they are having scaling problems. They feel that you have to give Rails more and more CPU power and resources to keep it going with such a large site. I wonder how Rails compares to other frameworks in terms of how much resources it needs as the applications and databases get larger.

Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails

5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne

Comparison of web application frameworks

Follow me on Twitter

It doesn’t appear that this is an easy question to answer, so I’ll have to do some reading on this one. In the meantime, I’d welcome any thoughts on this from people who are more experienced with web frameworks … or from anyone else who has a thought.

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Maple Glazed Salmon

May 13th, 2008 by Chantal
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If you can’t make this, you probably can’t read either.

1/4 c Canadian maple syrup
2 tbsp soy sauce
splash of lemon juice
1 tsp grated ginger
2 tbsp dijon mustard (or less if you want)
2 tbsp diced onion
4 salmon fillets

  1. Mix everything together except for the salmon and pour over the fish, saving a bit for later. Tip: The fish should probably be in a container when you do this.
  2. Marinate the fish for half an hour or more.
  3. Heat the oven to 400F.
  4. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until the salmon flakes when “forked”.
  5. Take the salmon out of the oven and pour the rest of the marinade over the fish.
  6. Done.

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Lemon Garlic Tilapia

May 13th, 2008 by Chantal
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I don’t often do recipes, but here goes:

2 tilapia fillets
1 tbsp butter
1 clove roasted garlic
2 tbsp lemon juice
pepper
parsley

  1. Heat the oven to 450. Spray the baking dish with non-stick spray.
  2. Put the fillets in the baking dish. Pour liquid over the fillets, and top with garlic, pepper, parsley.
  3. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes (or until the fish flakes when “forked”).
  4. Eat.

This recipe will probably work for almost any sort of fish. If you don’t like too much lemon, try 2 tbsp butter and 1 tsbp lemon instead. If you don’t like garlic, you are a freak and you should not read my blog.

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WordPress 2.5.1 Upgrade = Not Fun

May 12th, 2008 by Chantal
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I’m really not sure what went wrong. I did the Dreamhost upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 and it fried my entire blog. The database was fine (along with the config file pointing to it), but none of my posts were visible. I tried several things, including deleting the entire blog directory and re-installing to no avail.

In the end, I just restored my backup of the old blog. Maybe I will try the upgrade again in the future, but I have had enough “fun” this week. Maybe I will create a dev environment to experiment with future upgrades. Though this is just a small personal blog, this experience was very frustrating and annoying.

For anyone who has a blog, make absolutely sure that you keep backups of your blog, your database and maybe even export your blog posts. If I didn’t have backups, this would likely be my “first” post.

If anyone notices anything strange, please, please leave a comment. I’ll be playing around with themes for the next while until I find something I like.

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UC Berkeley Ruby on Rails 1-Day Course

May 10th, 2008 by Chantal
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I found a one day Ruby on Rails course from UC Berkeley on YouTube. I haven’t watched the videos yet, but hopefully they will help improve my understanding of Ruby and Rails. With any luck, they won’t be 1 hour rickrolls.

I’m fairly certain that a short course won’t give you a full understanding of how Ruby on Rails works, but this should be a good start. To go from video to video, click the arrows at the edge of the player. There are five six videos.

Edit: The slides can be hard to see at times, so you can download the PDFs to follow along with the videos here.

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