Archive for the 'Beta Testing' Category

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Screenshots

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 5, 2008
in Announcements, Beta Testing, Commentary, Cool, Geek Toys, Internet, Microsoft, Reviews and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

I threw together some screenshots and comments on Flickr while I was quickly giving IE 8 a run through tonight, if anyone’s interested.

IE 8 Beta 1 gallery

Desktop Icon

What’s with the Vista SP1 Delay?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 11, 2008
in Beta Testing, Commentary, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and Work
. 0 Comments

Vista SP1 was RTM earlier this month, and they announced a laid-back release schedule.

Their plans for slowly rolling it out to end users sound great, but I have to wonder why Microsoft doesn’t plan on releasing SP1 to IT Pros through TechNet until it’s publicly available for users to download.

This seems like negating the entire point of the TechNet community if you ask me. It’s there so its members can get their hands on essentially all of Microsoft’s software for testing and pre-deploy purposes. Several Windows 2008 Server builds have been on TechNet, and it was available for full download the day it went RTM. Why, then, is Vista’s service pack different?

Update: Per the rumors, the release schedule for SP1 has indeed been changed, so that technical users get updates sooner than expected.

  • Beta testers got it Friday (RC2 was identical code, so they actually already had it), because that makes so much sense.
  • Volume License customers will get it the end of this week.
  • MSDN and TechNet users won’t get it until later this month.

I still don’t understand why we’re waiting for TechNet. If nothing else, those users should get it at the same time VL customers do - they’re likely one and the same people.

I was waiting to rebuild my Vista box at home1 until SP1 was available, but it looks like that’s still going to take too long. Maybe I’ll move ahead with my plan to make that box a Windows 2008 Server and using my Ubuntu laptop as my primary machine…

  1. Which I’ve pretty thoroughly trashed. [back]

Democracy 2.0 Beta Test

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 19, 2006
in Beta Testing, Incoherent Code, Links, Public Opinion, Questions, Random and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

Just testing the Democracy 2.0 poll system. Nothing exciting, just a simple question… What’s your favorite RGB color?

{democracy:2}

One Stats Plugin to Rule them All!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on August 31, 2006
in Beta Testing, Commentary, Internet, Links, Reviews, Techno-Babble and Wordpress
. 4 Comments

I’m testing a new plugin for Wordpress that keeps track of visitors to your website.

Firestats is still in beta, but it’s looking incredibly attractive already. One simple plugin activation in your WP admin panel, and you’ll start getting in a flood of information about who (and what) is visiting your website.

Unlike most other stats packages available, where Firestats really shines is in its ability to drill down to the information you actually want to see. Its big feature as of the 0.9.x beta release is the ability to filter your stats, eliminating bots that are constantly crawling your website. By eliminating all that extra crap data, you can actually (and easily) see the user data you really care about.

Thus far, I’ve been particularly impressed. Omry, the developer of Firestats, hangs out in the Wordpress IRC channel, and is very responsive to suggestions and bug reports. With his excellent start on this plugin, I’ve been able to easily realize just how few real viewers I have, and just how many bots are out and about crawling around the web on a daily basis.

It’s not the most feature-packed plugin available (yet), but it’s off to a good start. If you’re looking for a new stats plugin, or just want to see what kind of development progress is made, I highly recommend that you check out Firestats and see for yourself just how much of your blog’s traffic isn’t real traffic.

Coral Cache Problems

Published
by
Chris Meller
on June 26, 2006
in Beta Testing, Commentary, Incoherent Code, Internet and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

So I was working on a new web app today, and I thought it’d be cool if the URLs it accepted were passed over to the Coral Cache so that a copy of the page was always on file somewhere, just in case it disappeared.

After realizing that I didn’t have to use PHP’s parse_url function to manually create the URL, that I could simply pass it to http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url= and let their system do the rest of the work, it was a simple matter of file_get_contents‘ing our newly-constructed redirect URL so it would end up cached.

And there enlies the problem. You see, it seemed like such a good idea…

Unfortunately, the Coral Cache network isn’t known for its speed. It was taking absolutely forever for the script to complete each call, being held up by that one simple line of code.

The only solution I see at the moment is writing a cron job that’ll parse out any URLs that haven’t been marked as having been sent to the cache, but that seems very disconnected and ugly. I’d really like to keep all of this code in one spot (like it is now), if possible.

So, any suggestions from you coders out there? Got some bright ideas for a PHP’er in need? It’d be great if I could just do an AJAX request to their server and wait for it to return whenever it finished, but that’s not possible (for a variety of reasons, the least of which is the inability to HTTP request cross-domain).

I await your collective brilliance…