bitwalker.nl » apple

Email trends in August

Harald Walker — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:16:04 +0000

After updating the user-agent utility library today, I analyzed the first week of August and compared it with the first week of July. I was curious about the impact of the of the recent iPhone introduction here in the Netherlands. One month since the sale of the 3G iPhone has started, the iPhone clearly is being used more often as mobile device to read email with. The decline of the other platforms could possibly also be explained by the vacation time, as business people probably read their email less frequently.

Next, I was looking at the usage of webmail clients like Hotmail and Gmail. About 17% of the email is being read online with a webmail client. Here Windows Live Hotmail is still dominating. Since Google’s Gmail was opened to the general public on April 1, 2004, it has gained a market share of 7.4%. Good old Yahoo Mail finished as 3rd with 6.2%.

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Oracle 10g Express Edition on a Mac

Harald Walker — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:12:11 +0000

Well, at least on an Intel Mac it is now possible to run and use the Oracle 10g Express Edition, the free version for small projects and software development, which unfortunately does not exist for Mac OS X.

Thanks to virtualization you can install Oracle 10g Express on a Linux or Windows VM and use it from the Mac side (your Java application, Eclipse,…).

I used Ubuntu Ultimate 1.4 on VMware Fusion. Before you can install Oracle 10g express, you have to increase the swap size. In my case the installer reported that the Express Edition requires 750 MB of swap space. I followed these instructions and increased the swap space to 800MB. Since I wanted to use the universal release, I used ‘apt-get install oracle-xe-universal’ to install Oracle (Oracle also offers RPM packages). The rest is straight forward. Just follow the instructions. As you can see in the screenshot, I can contact the 10g database from SQL Developer running on Mac OS X on the same machine. The Ubuntu windows shows the web-interface of Oracle.

I ran the same maven build again (clean install with database scripts and full tests) and now the time went down to 2:50 (from 3:30 with a remote database). The Core 2 Duo of my MacBook Pro had to work hard and memory usage went up to 1.5 GB, but there was enough room to continue working.

So, this is great. Now I have a completely independent mobile software development platform.

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Faster builds with Core 2 Duo

Harald Walker — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:53:52 +0000

Two days ago a developer of our team checked some changes in and broke the build. When asked why he didn’t first run the test locally, he replied that it takes too long and wondered why else do we have an automatic build system.

Build speed matters as you see and it was one reason for me to buy a new MacBook Pro to replace my 2 year old PowerBook, which just became too slow for software development as well as other common tasks.

So, today I ran a small unscientific competition between my two systems on our current project, which uses Maven 2 to build and a Oracle 10g database. To reduce dependency on the network connection to the database server (via VPN), I installed a local Oracle 10g Express on separate machine. Later I will try to install the same on a VM.

With maven I ran a clean installation including all tests a couple of times, also to make sure all dependencies have been resolved.

The PowerBook (1.67Ghz G4, 1.5MB RAM, 100Mbit connection) needs on average 7 minutes (it took more than 20 minutes with the VPN connection!). The new MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, WLAN connection) finishes the same task in 3 1/2 minutes, which is an acceptable speed. Just run your tests when you get a fresh cup of coffee (you should not sit behind the desk without a break anyhow).

It is also nice, that Eclipse 3.x with MyEclipse and some other plug-ins starts 14 seconds faster on the MacBook Pro.

Considering the costs of development hours, esp. if bugs are not caught on time because skipped testing, I think it is foolish to save money on hardware for software developers. Give them the best and fastest you can get. It will not only motivate them (we love good technology) but also improve productivity and probably quality as well.

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