Ubertwitter Beta 7.1 Mini-Review
I've been playing with Ubertwitter for the last few days and wanted to share some first impressions.
Pros:
- Tons of features.
- Support for photo and video uploads.
- Location awareness.
- A good looking and readable GUI even on my wee Pearl.
Cons:
- The application setup presents you with a seemingly endless series of screens, with no indication of when you're going to be done.
Recommended. Free download with ads, or ad-free with a paid annual subscription. BlackBerry only.
Wordpress for BlackBerry 1.1 Released
The open source project Wordpress for BlackBerry has released version 1.1 of it's mobile blogging platform. The official announcement covers the list of new features - I'm personally excited about this release because I contributed some code that makes it's debut in version 1.1.
Wordpress 2.3.2
Upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.3.2. Had to upgrade most of the plug-ins as well, but it was time to do that anyway. As always, drop a comment if you notice anything odd about the site
Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade
I upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.2 last night. As always, feel free to drop a comment if you see something that just doesn't look right. Of course, it's probably my fault and not WP's. Also, I added a new plug-in called Bad Behavior that purports to eliminate, well, bad behavior by such menaces as spam bots. Basically, it keeps them from crawling the site and posting comments, thus saving on web hosting traffic and my time managing the site. An interesting concept, and seems well worth experimenting with. If anyone has experience with Bad Behavior, post a comment and let me know how well it works.
Programming Flex 2
In a recent post entitled "Flex Flexing It's Muscles", Tim O'Reilly discusses the success of the recently published Programming Flex 2. Describing the recent announcement of Flex-like products from Microsoft and Sun as "Flash Envy" he mentioned that interest in Flex has been very strong and growing, based on his experience as a technical book publisher. The Flex book has been one of their hottest sellers in some time.
I took a quick look at Amazon today and was amazed at how well this book is doing. At press time it is ranked #581 among all books, and #4 in the General Programming category. It does slightly worse in the Web Development category, although that category is jammed with Photoshop how-to books and similar titles that skew the rankings.
Abode seems to be taking this product in the right direction, and is gaining similar momentum with the new Apollo environment. After years of being margainalized for being "not open source, and not Microsoft", the former Macromedia (former Allaire) tool set is starting to get the attention it has long deserved.
ZoneAlarm Revisited
After continued slowness, I finally bit the bullet and did a complete uninstall of ZoneAlarm. The Zone Labs site has a good writeup of how to do completely remove the product - although it turned out the uninstall program did a good job of getting rid of all traces of the program. It turns out that over time, the database ZoneAlarm uses can get corrupted, which causes the problem. No amount of patching the executable will solve the problem.
I got a small scare once I had everything cleaned up, and was ready to reinstall. On my account page, I was unable to download the latest version of ZoneAlarm because I hadn't bought "download protection". However, I just installed the latest evaluation version, and everything was fine - the license key was still stored in the Windows registry, so I didn't have to do any additional work. I'm not sure why Zone Labs would go to the trouble of maintaining each user's "download status" - unless of course they hope to make money on "download protection."
ZoneAlarm and Windows Slowdowns
Over the last few weeks, my otherwise snappy computer has been very slow when starting up and starting programs. During startup, you can sit and watch the system tray icons pop up one by one - with about a minute or so between each program starting. When starting any program, there is a delay up to a minute. Also, when doing simple tasks in Explorer, sometimes I'd get a file locking error because I would be clicking on an icon before Explorer had a chance to fully render it's icon. I thought it was a virus, or trojan program - however, numerous scans turned up empty. Knowing that any program took up to a minute to start, I tried out an experiment. I kept Task Manager up while starting a few different programs. In each case, a process called vsmon.exe would appear, using up just 5-10% of the CPU, but still sticking around near the top of Task Manager when sorting by CPU usage. Invariably, this process would disappear once the program finally started. A little poking around, and I find that this process is actually my ZoneAlarm virus scanner - apparantly scanning each program as it starts. ZoneAlarm had been bugging me lately to install an update, so I did so. Everything is running much smoother now, although I do see that vsmon.exe program running for a second or two before each program starts up. Doing some more research into this issue, it turns out that others have run into this problem and resolved it by always uninstalling ZoneAlarm and reinstalling each new version, rather than doing an upgrade. I may try this to see if I can things back to the fast startups I had been experiencing, although I'm loath to need to retrain ZoneAlarm on which programs should be allowed to access the Internet. More on this later.
Update: After a day or so of acceptable (but not great) performance, things ar back to the way they were. Maybe not quite so back, but starting the computer takes a long time as each process is examined by ZoneAlarm for 5-10 seconds before starting. I guess an uninstall/reinstall is in my future.
