NetFlix has great customer service

It's pretty much common knowledge that NetFlix has excellent customer service, but I was just reminded of this and felt it merited a post. I just got back from a trip down to Palm Springs and I couldn't find my Windows Vista installation disk anywhere, but I knew that I had it in my laptop bag when I flew down there. I assumed I must have dropped it on the plane or in the airport terminal and had given up hope that I would find it. A few days later, I get a package from NetFlix in the mail... with my Windows Vista installation disk. Apparently I had accidentally mailed them the Vista DVD while I was on vacation instead of the film I had brought with me. I was pretty impressed that they would return the disk to me in perfect condition and without charging me for the return postage or anything.

Hello Google Reader

I've changed RSS readers quite a bit in the past year. I originally started consuming RSS feeds via the RSS Bandit open source .NET client, which was pretty solid. The project suffered from some stability issues though and the feature set didn't seem to keep pace with alternative readers. I read that NewsGator stopped charging for their premium reader clients (Win32, WinMobile, and Web) so I left RSS Bandit believing I was going to get the best of everything - single user account, synchronized feeds on every device, convenience of web access, fast (relatively) fat client on my Sprint Touch, fast Win32 client on my desktops, etc.

NewsGator initially wow'ed me... but I soon found irritating bugs in the Windows Mobile client, bugs that proved to be a deal breaker. The feed synchronization process just flat-out wouldn't work properly for some feeds. Reddit would only show articles from a week ago, but Digg would synchronize just fine with current articles! On my desktop, Reddit would show the current articles correctly. About half of the feeds would fail to properly synchronize on my phone, which is completely unacceptable.

I exported all of my feeds from NewsGator to the OPML format, then imported them into Google Reader... which is fantastic! ...for now. Google Reader has a mobile view that is pretty easy to navigate and its pretty quick for a web app.

Ruby 1.8.x is SLOW

I was working on problem 35 at Project Euler:

The number, 197, is called a circular prime because all rotations of the digits: 197, 971, and 719, are themselves prime.

There are thirteen such primes below 100: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 31, 37, 71, 73, 79, and 97.

How many circular primes are there below one million? - Project Euler #35

The algorithm that first came to mind was pretty straight-forward - generate all primes under a million and place them in a hash table, then iterate through them and rotate each prime while hitting the hash table to check whether the rotated value is prime. I used Ruby's built-in Prime class to generate the primes for my hash table, but it turned out to be ungodly slow. I did some quick Googling and found that the performance issues with the Prime class and a lot of other areas of Ruby in 1.8.x were fixed in the 1.9 development release. I downloaded the 1.9 development release and reran my original code, which executed orders of magnitude faster.

Ruby 1.9 has an efficient implementation of Prime#each, but Ruby 1.8 has a very slow implementation. The following code is based on the 1.9 implementation, and it illustrates many of the simple tricks that drastically speed up algorithms that find or use primes. You can use this code, or just paste the code from Ruby 1.9’s mathn.rb into your 1.8 program. - Generating Prime Numbers

So if you are disappointed with Ruby's current performance, try the recently released 1.9:

Ruby 1.9.0 Release Download

Ruby

The past few weeks I've been picking up Ruby while working through the algorithm challenge at Project Euler, despite it's relative slow speed compared to compiled languages I've found it to be very well suited to writing algorithms because the code ends up reading like pseudocode - it strips away all the junk that would normally be present in a C# or Java function. I don't expect to be using Ruby professionally in the near-term, but I do find myself coding differently in other languages at my day job due to spending time within Ruby. I'm definitely keeping a closer eye on my code size, now that Ruby has shown me just how much code bloat I have in my .NET applications from get/set properties, strong typing, etc. I also really enjoy being able to decide whether or not to surround if blocks and other sections with parenthesis or not, getting a little thrill out of omitting them when it isn't required to encapsulate some complex logic. The creator of Ruby succeeded in making it fun to code again, I didn't realize how much time I was wasting in .NET and Java creating tons of lines of code that really aren't necessary until I spent some time in Ruby's simple world.

I like Ruby, but I do have a few issues with it. For an extensively object oriented language, its libraries are pretty unorganized. Why do I have to include the 'active_support' gem to get some rather fundamental String functions? It just doesn't make sense to me and slowed down my productivity while I had to Google for an answer. Why doesn't Ruby support tail-call optimization? I'm currently using the NetBeans IDE with the Ruby bundle for development and its pretty slick, especially since I'm familiar with it because I have been doing Java development in it the past few months. I picked up Beginning Ruby from Amazon and read through it last week, it's pretty good although it's targeted at novice programmers.

Zed Shaw, a prominent Ruby developer, wrote a pretty entertaining piece about how he perceives the Rails community... it's a pretty fun read ;) I plan on continuing to develop in Ruby for the short term, but I will be looking into Python as a possible replacement. Ruby is great for what it is, but it still has some rough edges that I am hoping Python has worked out by now.

Ruby Programming Language
Try Ruby in your browser
NetBeans IDE (Ruby pack available)

HDHomeRun Networked Digital TV Tuner

It's rare that I purchase an electronic gadget that "just works" but the HDHomeRun is one of those exceptional devices that I am completely satisfied with. The HDHomeRun is a device that allows you to record clear QAM content within Windows Media Center by pretending to be an OTA antenna. As far as I know, there are no other comparable devices on the market that allow you to do this. There are specialty computers that include cable-card capabilities, but they are very expensive and are only available from a few PC manufacturers - there are no affordable upgrades to add the ability to record clear QAM in WMC to an existing PC aside from the HDHomeRun. This is probably for good reason, as the HDHomeRun works so well that the competition would likely have a hard time competing with it. It's an unassuming, small network device with dual tuners to allow you to record 2 channels simultaneously to a WMC computer. The setup is a bit cumbersome, but the instructions on Silicon Dust's website are always up to date for the latest versions and easy to follow. Once the device is setup, you can completely forget about it because it works flawlessly. I would highly recommend the HDHomeRun to anybody with a WMC PC that wants to record digital or HD content via clear QAM, it's a superb product.

HD HomeRun at Silicon Dust

Mint.com - Excellent free web-based alternative to Money and Quicken

I've become more interested in managing my personal finances the past few months, since it's become a necessity after taking on an excessively large (for my income level) mortgage payment. I've researched Quicken and Microsoft Money and found they are both reviewed comparably as solid, but not perfect, products. I downloaded the free trial of Microsoft Money and was impressed with its ease of setup; I quickly imported all of my online checking, money market savings, and credit card accounts. The UI was very good and gave me a lot of control over categorizing charges and reviewing spending trends and amounts per category. One particularly troublesome issue that I came across was payments that I made to my credit card were categorized as payments, yet still showed up as expenses - thus throwing off my actual expense totals, trends, etc. I spent a couple of hours Googling the topic and found other people had encountered the same problem, with no simple solution.

I had opened a Mint.com account a few months prior but had only used it briefly before letting it languish, so I decided to give it another shot to see if it also had the same problem. Thankfully it did not, Mint.com was able to properly handle credit card payments and offered a nice, although inferior to Money, user interface. Mint.com was able to import all of my accounts just as easily as Money. It is more time consuming to enter information into Mint.com because of the slower web-based user interface, due to the latency issue but also because it is more difficult to make a web-based UI that is comparable to a fat client. In Money, for instance, I could click on a segment in a pie chart for a spending category and peruse the individual charges easily - Mint.com cannot do this and I have to switch tabs and perform a search to get the same result. Another issue is the alerts, they are incorrectly calculating my spending - summing up the last 3 months of spending and showing alerts that I have exceeded my normal spending amount for the month. For instance, saying I spent $9k on my mortgage payment this month, even though those checks were from the past 3 months combined. This is likely a minor bug and should be simple to correct on their end. The actual dates for the checks being processed are correct... Unit tests anyone?

Mint.com claims they are currently working on adding loans, investments, and mortgages to their list of account types that you can import - this will be amazing, once it is done I really will have a single website to monitor my finances and it shows they are responding to user feedback. I like being able to review my finances from home, work, etc. via the web, that is a huge plus for me. It also means that I don't have to backup anything, like I would have to with Money, but it comes at the cost of entrusting Mint.com to secure my financial data. All of my financial data... In one place. It's a bit scary, but I would hope that security is a top concern being that their entire business will disappear if there is any hint of a security hole. The best part about Mint.com is the price, it is FREE! Despite its shortcomings, I highly recommend Mint and will continue to use it. I believe it has a good business plan and is offering a service that isn't currently being matched by the Money/Quicken fat clients.

Mint.com

Unfuddle: Excellent off-site source control

I've had some issues with RAID driver stability on my primary development machine, so when I started a few small projects recently I decided to look for off-site source control solutions. I figured that this would give me some additional safety if I were to lose a hard drive or have issues with RAID again, since I would be maintaining copies of the source both locally and in the off-site repository. This would eliminate the need to setup any sort of manual or automated local backup process to an external drive, making it pretty much idiot-proof. I've used Visual SourceSafe 6.0 and 2005 for personal projects in the past and while working at previous positions. Both versions served me well on personal projects but seemed to cause all sorts of issues when team collaboration came into the picture. At my current position, we use Subversion as our primary source control system and it works wonderfully. I decided that I wanted to find an off-site source control solution that would allow me to use the excellent Tortoise+Subversion combination that I have grown to love over the past year. I Googled around and came across Unfuddle.com, which had a very clean and professional interface and offered a FREE(!) personal account for small projects that are under 15MB and are only used by a sole developer. I've been using a personal account for the last couple of months and have had a very pleasant experience; I highly recommend their services.

-Unfuddle.com