There is a whole lot about Final Cut X that is really good (like its new 64 bit architecture built on Core Video and other modern APIs instead of the old, crufty QuickTime and so much more), but for some reason everybody writing reviews on the internet seemed to have decided that Final Cut X was never going to be updated, and it was as fully featured as it was ever going to be. This was the end. Apple wasn’t going to add any more features. Apple hates the pros! They’ve abandoned us!

That idea, though, is completely wrong, and just plain silly. Apple has released a set of frequently asked questions about FCX that addresses almost all of the concerns I’ve seen, and is pretty much exactly the same as what I had been saying about it. For instance: multicam support – not there but it’s coming in an update. AAF, XML, OMF will be available via an API for third party developers soon. Monitoring through cards like AJA’s KONA 3 card will be possible when drivers are updated. More import formats are coming.

There are some people saying that Apple should have communicated better from the start, but I thought it was all fairly obvious…

But apart from the customer service and all that, the biggest problem is that the 3G is just terrible. Unreliable is probably being too kind – most of the time it just downright doesn’t work. I’m in Brisbane, and on most towers, 3G requests will frequently just time out. You often have to repeatedly stop and refresh the page loading, sometimes for several minutes before anything will load. Sometimes, this will not work at all, and you have to either reboot the phone or switch to aeroplane mode and back, and then try repeatedly refreshing to get it to work. An example of this was when I was in the middle of Brisbane’s central business district one night (if your carrier has good coverage somewhere, you would expect it to be in the CBD!), trying to transfer some money between my accounts using the Commonwealth Bank’s NetBank online banking site. It took about ten minutes before I could get any part of the login window to appear, and in the end it took about twenty minutes to do a transaction that would have taken two minutes on WiFi.

In Sydney, the 3G was somewhat reliable, but still slow. But it’s certianly nowhere near the good reliability that my brother’s iPhone on Optus or other relative’s phones on Optus and Telstra have.

I am looking through the contract to see if there’s any way to get out of it without paying exit fees – certianly common sense would suggest that by not providing an adequate level of service that I’m paying them for, they are in breech of their contract, but given my experience with their customer service, I don’t know if they really care.

If I am unable to leave, there’s no way that I am staying with Vodafone Australia after my contract expires, and I expect that I will never purchase any product or service from them in the future. I only went with Vodafone because it was slightly cheaper than Optus, but given my experience and the far superior service my brother (who is on Optus) gets, Vodafone was just not worth the saving at all.

I, though, think that writing web applications using C++ really has a lot of benefits. First of all is the speed of compiled code – interpreted languages like Ruby, Python and PHP really are pretty rubbish when compared to the performance of an application written in C++, and this is especially important when creating web applications. This is mainly all about scalability – for a large site, the more requests you can handle per second on a single server, the less servers you need (of course, scaling the data store and using caching is also important to this). This is one thing that Facebook found out very quickly. It prompted them to write a compiler that converts PHP code into C++ and compiles it into a binary along with a built-in, threaded web server.

I’m sure that the biggest problem most people have with using C++ for web development is that it is hard. This was one of Facebook’s concerns too – since PHP is easier to learn, they are able to hire more people to work on their code, and can write code faster. I find this quite concerning though. One thing that my experience in software development has taught me is that bad coders can write bad code in any language – and the easier the language, the more bad coders there tends to be. Now, of course I’m not trying to say that PHP is a bad language, and that you shouldn’t be using it (in fact, I like and use it for small projects and prototyping), but choosing it for Facebook’s reasons makes it more likely that they hire more substandard programmers than they would otherwise. And as for being faster to develop in – well, a good C++ web framework should help here, and to be honest, often what happens is the faster you code, the less care you take and the more bugs you write into it.

I’m writing my own framework to make development faster and easier, called Corpus. It runs in a normal web server (my preference is the extremely fast Cherokee web server, but you can use Apache, nginx or lighthttpd if you wish), and is based around the FastCGI++ library, which is excellent and provides a far superior C++ API than other FastCGI libraries I’ve looked at.

Now, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Ubuntu – like the fact that they’re using their netbook-intended Unity shell for the desktop instead of Gnome Shell, but really, the fact is that Ubuntu just works better than other distros I’ve tried.

The biggest thing is graphics drivers. I think it’s good that the Fedora guys are standing up for free software and not shipping the binary Nvidia drivers, and I reckon that Nouveau is really great for being so young, but right now I want to use graphics drivers that can actually run games… It was not the most difficult thing in the world to install the drivers (I used the RPMFusion repo, if I remember correctly) but it was far harder than it needed to be. The worst problem though was that every time there was a kernel update, the Nvidia package would not come in for another few hours (even sometimes up to a day or two). So if I accidentally didn’t notice and hit update, my system would break (because you had to disable the Nouveau drivers to use the Nvidia ones, so you’d have all sorts of graphics problems).

I love tinkering with Linux and everything, but Fedora was just a bit too maintenance heavy in things like that… I still use it as a server OS, but as a desktop, I far prefer Ubuntu’s integration.

I think that source packages are coming soon. He’s eventually going to have custom hardware, which is pretty cool too.

Proto-AVR Development Framework »

I don’t care much about backwards compatibility or rubbish browsers, so I didn’t look to see how it degrades in IE or anything.

Everybody knows about HTML5 features like video and canvas and so on, but I think that the coolest feature on show here is a little known feature which really helps make web apps viable for me – being able to push history states. Before, ugly hacks had to be used like using a hash symbol to be able to change parts of the URL, but that still didn’t work with the back button and created ugly URLs. Now, using the history.pushState function lets you change the entire URL (apart from the domain name, of course), and each state shows up in the history. You can then catch the event triggered when the user hits the back and forward button, and act accordingly. Now you can have proper history, proper back/forward action, and nice URLs, all without any page reloads! It may seem like a pretty minor feature, but it’s the little things like this that are actually making web apps viable.

The micro I have has features like USB, 10/100 ethernet, and so on, but the new ones add in features like an external memory controller, an memory protection unit, an SD/MMC card interface, and most exciting, a display controller that can output true-colour graphics at a resolution of up to 1024×768. For a cheap, tiny microcontroller, they will be extremely powerful.

Take a look at the new models on NXP’s LPC17xx Series page.

Especially pleased with the new Gnome Shell work. It was really lacking in the previous versions. There’s a lot of awesome work that’s going into Gtk+ 3.0 and Glib as well – heaps of old depreciated stuff is gone, now all drawing is done with Cairo, there are some useful new layout widgets and the paint system is going to be redesigned to make it work better for animations (taking inspiration from Clutter).