I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with CloudAtCost before here and here. In essence, I like the low cost but hate the poor reliability. At one time I had seven web sites up and running on servers bought from CloudAtCost, including this one. But over a period of weeks and months they all failed for one reason or another. Some of the failures could be fixed with a ticket to tech support.
It’s common knowledge that the JavaFX user interface toolkit is single-threaded. When your JavaFX-based program is doing things that can take some time, you need to run those tasks on a separate thread(s) to keep the interface responsive. Recently, I’ve been working on a program that can spend a lot of time reading and writing to the disk, but at the same time I want to retain the ability for the user to change views of the UI as the work proceeds.
Just a short note on mixing Linux utilities with Windows. I wanted to set up a single button deployment of updates to a static web site. I had been using an rsync script, but it required me to manually enter authentication credentials every time it was used to send updates to a remote Ubuntu server. I set up public key authentication, but it would not work with the permissions of the key files on the Windows machine where the updates were coming from.
It was very unpleasant for me. I’ve been a user of Evernote almost from the beginning, and a Premium user for almost as long. But today I erased all of my notes and deactivated my account. “Why?” you might ask. Let me tell you. The price increase. Earlier in the Autumn, Evernote announced a price increase. It was pretty substantial, at least for me. At about the same time, they announced that they were moving our data to Google’s infrastructure in order to take advantage of improved economies of scale among other reasons.
I’m kind of sad today. I erased all of my notes from Evernote and then de-activated my account. I had been a Premium user for years and had thousands of notes. I used it on the web (when using Linux), on the desktop under Windows, and on my iPhone and iPads. I liked that the data was available on all of those devices. I really liked the web clipper. But the killer feature that got me started on it in the first place was the ability to search in images.
(Update: 27 Mar 2018, Despite what the rest of this blog post says, I have reinstated CDNs. This site now uses the Cloudflare CDN due to the inability of raw GitHub Pages to serve sites with custom domain names over HTTPS. See this) Everyone wants their web site to load quickly using as few resources as possible. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a very attractive way to achieve this. You can put parts of your web site on someone else’s servers.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the movies, something we don’t do very often. (Arrival, which I highly recommend, just like the short story it is derived from.) We arrived at the theatre, one of those multi-screen megaplexes, about 15 to 20 minutes before the advertised start time for the feature. Of course, while waiting, we were exposed to the various advertisements shown before the start of the film.
Those of you who visit this site regularly may have noticed that is has been down for a few days. Here’s why. About a week ago, I attempted to reboot the server after applying a few updates. It wouldn’t come back up. As I’ve written before, this site is hosted on CloudAtCost. Sorry to say that it is a regular occurrence for servers not to reboot. Usually, I can just file a ticket and get help in a day or so.
The Elm language is often cited as an up-and-comer for web front end development. I was attracted to it largely because of the compiler’s friendly and extremely helpful error messages. It’s really attractive in many ways. But when I started looking at examples, I often found myself thinking things like “Why is this so inconsistent?” or “Why is this syntax so complicated?”. And it finally occurred to me that I’ve been ruined by the way Clojure/ClojureScript/Lisp/Scheme do things.
Many years ago, back in 2009, during an infrequent upgrade of my desktop computer, I finally bought an HD monitor, actually, slightly better than HD at a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. My reaction was along the lines of “Ooooh! Pretty!”. It was a big 27" unit. Easy to view, lots of screen real estate. Very clear text rendering. I thought I was set forever. Since then, I’ve purchased a few Apple products with Retina displays.