Technology Performance Increases - Why Disk Sucks

In a previous life I looked after the FreeBSD port of Firebird. I still check in occasionally to see what the Firebird community is up to.

I remember Jim Starkey announcing his employment by MySQL to write them a new storage engine (codename Falcon). I thought I'd check out the progress of this engine.

One of the articles I came across was Mike Kruckenberg's blog. One of his entries was on Jim Starkey's presentation at the 2006 MySQL Conference.

The bit that caught my eye was the point list for the technology changes that have occurred over the 30-odd years. The stand-out for me was the reduction in disk access speeds - only a mere threefold reduction. Everything else has undergone changes involving an order (or orders) of magnitude.

This speaks volumes to me. The so-called innovation in disk storage has only really been in capacity. We've only really taken the bit of rust, put it on glass or metal and spun it faster. The last ten years has been about how much rust we can put on the platter and how we align it.

I know his is a cynical comment and undermines the engineering and design feats that have occurred, but let's face it, the most common failure points in a computer system nowadays are the mechanical ones.

I'm looking forward to real innovation in storage - that is, breaking away from the traditional rust-on-platter approach and moving to hopefully a non-mechanical process.

New Business Web Site

I finally upgraded the single page Melbourne IT-hosted site to a self hosted site for my business.
Because I'm a Microsoft registered partner and have access to the Microsoft Action Pack, I decided to see if I could build my own site using Expression Web. I used one of the corporate templates and was able to quickly build my site with my own content. I had installed Expression Web on my Vista laptop, so my initial design was only viewed using IE7.
I then proceeded to use Virtual PC to load up a Windows XP VM to test IE6 and I downloaded Firefox 2.0, the PortableApps version of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.22 and Safari for Windows 3.0.3. The site displayed correctly under all these browsers! For someone who's used previous versions of FrontPage, I was fairly impressed to see consistent rendering across all browsers and proper handling of hand coding by the IDE (ie, by leaving it alone!).
It certainly took me less time to get the site up using the template and modifying it than hand coding it from scratch.
My final verification was to run the W3C Validator, the Validome Validator and the WDG Validator over the site. There were a couple of problems, but these were ones that I had introduced into the site. Microsoft's claim of "Built-in support for today's modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility" - while not rigorously tested by my effort - is backed up by the browsing consistency I saw as well as passing the three validators I used.

IE7 Crash Protection

After yet another IE7 crash caused by Adobe's Flash Player I decided to have one final look for an IE Add-on that could save tab state in the event of a crash. If I couldn't find one, then IE7 was going to be replaced with Firefox as my primary browser.
Thankfully - and without too much effort - I came across IE7Pro. This usful free add-on provides crash protection as well as a host of other useful features, such as Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag Drop, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, and Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform (feature list copied from the afore-mentiond site).
So the combination Flash Block and Crash Recovery should lessen my IE7 frustrations.
Now if I only had a more feature rich tool than TravelLog IE URL History Tool to pull out browser history...