Author Archives: Neil McAllister

Inside Google’s Chrome browser

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Chromium logo

For the truly geeky among you: In the latest post to my Fatal Exception blog over at InfoWorld, I’m taking a look under the hood of Chrome, Google’s new Web browser. A lot of articles make mention of how Chrome is open source. I actually put it to the test, by building a custom copy of it myself.

Along the way I found out a lot of interesting information about Chrome’s internals and how Google built it. On the plus side, it’s very clean, well-organized code. On the minus side, it looks like it’s going to be Windows-only for a good while, yet.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this piece (it’s been a long time since I had a legitimate excuse to pull out a compiler on Windows), so if you have the hobbyist spirit, drop on over and join the discussion.

Welcome, Slashdot readers

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Posts from my Fatal Exception blog at InfoWorld have been linked on Slashdot a lot lately. This morning it was my editorial “Was JavaScript a mistake?”, which asks whether we’re spending entirely too much effort trying to standardize a single language for client-side Web programming. Other recent posts to receive the royal Slashdot treatment include “The Web development skills crisis” and “Java is free at last. Now what?”, among others.

Naturally I’m pleased as punch with the attention. The so-called Slashdot effect is well known, and while visitors from Slashdot have yet to bring InfoWorld’s servers to their knees, the mention is always a surefire way to bring in a lot more traffic. It’s especially great in this case, because the Slashdot audience is pretty much exactly who I had in mind when I launched the blog. I’m a longtime Slashdot junkie myself — and in fact, long before you saw any of my editorials linked on the site, you’ve probably seen my posts in the comments. » More... » →

Taking netbooks through their paces

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Asus Eee PC 901A new category of low-cost, ultra-lightweight laptops has appeared recently. It began with the Asus Eee PC and spawned a slew of imitators, including the Acer Aspire ONE, the HP Mini-Note, and the MSI Wind — not to mention a somewhat-confusing array of Eee PC models to follow the original.

HP 2133 Mini-Note

These devices have mostly been marketed to students and home users, with Web browsing and light computing tasks in mind. I wanted to see whether they might also be attractive to business users. So I packed up an HP Mini-Note and Asus’s latest Eee PC 901 and headed off to the airport, with the plan to test each of them in real-world field conditions. My review for InfoWorld, published today, details the results of my trials. » More... » →

Developers: Test your geek cred

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Check out InfoWorld today for some more fun. In keeping with some other, recent features, the editors there had me come up with twenty questions to test your app dev savvy. If you have some experience with programming, run through them and see how you score.

This isn’t a test like you took in college. You don’t need specific experience with any one technology or platform, but you should be well-grounded in a variety of development terms and procedures. It’s equal parts history and know-how. You don’t have to program in assembly language, for example, but you do need to know what it is. Think of it as Trivial Pursuit for the hacker set.

My favorite part about this feature was that I got to write a question that involves Forth, a language for which I will always have a soft spot. But that’s the only hint you’ll get from me! Now, off you go.

Linux for the business desktop

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I’m proud of my latest article, available now at InfoWorld.com. It seems like every few months that somebody publishes another article asking, “Is Linux ready for the desktop?” We’ve seen the same thing so many times now that it’s become almost a joke. (Is it “the year of desktop Linux” this year, again?)

My article is along a similar theme, but it skips all the familiar hand-wringing and prognosticating. Instead, I look at how a company that has decided to replace some of its Windows desktops with Linux can stop hemming and hawing, start making plans, and actually get down to business. » More... » →

My take on EW’s top 100 books

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The Road, Cormac McCarthyEntertainment Weekly is running their “EW1000” feature, celebrating what they call the “new classics” — the best that the various fields of entertainment have had to offer since 1983. Now, normally I don’t think EW is someplace I would turn for literary recommendations, but since they have gone ahead and included a list of their Top 100 favorite books of the last 25 years, I figured, why not take a look and see what they came up with?

OK, so let’s see … best read of the last 25 years?

1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
OK, well, 25 years makes for an awfully crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let’s see what else they’ve got, shall we? Just a few picks, at random… » More... » →

Turning points in technology

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Every industry has crucial events that have changed the course of history. My feature article for InfoWorld this week looks at some of the most prominent ones for the tech industry.

Whether it’s Louis Gerstner’s famed turnaround of IBM or Apple ditching the PowerPC for Intel chips, each of the 15 turning points I cover has helped to craft the computing world we know and love today. There are probably countless more that I’ve missed, too, so if you think there’s an area that I’ve failed to cover, sound off about it here or on the InfoWorld message boards.

What’s happening to the browser?

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InfoWorld posted my latest feature this morning. This one is a look at some of the new technologies that are now appearing on the market aimed at developers of so-called rich Internet applications (RIAs), including Adobe AIR, Mozilla Prism, and Google Gears.

The title they chose to go with was “Is the browser going nowhere?” (or “Do new Web tools spell doom for the browser?”). I guess sensationalism is always a useful way to sell articles, but the actual article isn’t quite so melodramatic. The idea is that the traditional browser experience might not be ideal for every application on today’s Web, and that a number of companies are addressing the need for new tools. What tomorrow’s browser might look like — or to what extent it might disappear altogether — remains up in the air.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

LibraryLookup for Firefox 3.0

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Another minor upgrade to my LibraryLookup Greasemonkey script; a couple of tweaks seem to be necessary to get the script to work in Firefox 3. This fix should have it working in either version of the browser.

As usual, you can download the script here. You should delete the old version by hand before installing this one, because I’ve updated the namespace to reflect my own site instead of Jon Udell’s (finally!).

If you don’t understand what this is all about, check my earlier post on the subject. (And if you don’t live in San Francisco it probably won’t be much use to you anyway. Try a Google search for a similar script that works with libraries in your area.)

If you have any questions or problems with the script, post here and I’ll try to address them.

Unsung technology gets its day

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Over at PC World, my latest fun feature looks at some of the most important technologies you never think about.

Consider, for example, the humble battery. We all bemoan the fact that our portable devices don’t last long enough (or, occasionally, that they explode). But have you ever stopped to think how advances in battery technology have changed personal technology? Without modern lithium-ion batteries the iPod would hardly be possible, and your mobile phone would still look like a brick.

Among the other technologies given an airing are XML (it really is everywhere); managed code like Java and Microsoft .Net; and the mysterious world of digital signal processing, where incredibly complex mathematics gets packaged into chips to let you play your MP3s. Who knew?

Check it out and let know what you think.