Acer C720 - Best Selling Laptop on Amazon!

I just took a look on Amazon's website and the Acer C720, 2GB model is now only $149.  Wow.  This is probably the best bargain in laptops today.  I'll say it once more...this is one amazing machine.  For those that think they HAVE to have a Windows or Mac machine, you really should try this.

Google Docs has a come a long way and while you may not have the exact same features as Microsoft Word, I have not missed MS Office one bit.  Some places where some might have problems: Widows and orphans, formatting the header/footer, tables. In practice these have not been a show stopper for me. Creating even complex spreadsheets with advanced formulas is supported and I've done some really complex pro-formas with Google Sheets.

I've been using Google Hangouts to do some offshore collaborating and the Hangouts experience on the Chromebook is fantastic.  Audio and video quality are very good and I have had no problems talking to people across the globe.

I recently attended the Amazon re:Invent in Las Vegas, and The Acer C720 came along for the ride.  The battery life is fantastic and paired with my free Gogo inlight wifi coupon I got when I purchased the device I was able to work the entire 4 hour trip!  I received 12 free coupons (value = $12).  Not sure if that promo is still valid, but when you consider the free 100GB of storage I got as well, the C720 was practically free.

The light weight and long battery life make this device a must have business travel partner.  The lost cost of the device alleviates the fear of loss factor.

I still love me some Chromebook!

Acer C720 - One Year Later

Well, it's been a year and it's time for a Chromebook blog...

I gave away my C720 4GB and C720 2GB models but not because I didn't love them.  The former to a colleague and the latter as a gift.  I miss me some Chromebook!

After being without my Chromebooks for quite awhile (I was primarily using my Mac-book Pro) I decided to see if there were any new Chromebooks out there and if so, if there was a compelling reason to pick something up other than a C720.  I'll cut straight to the chase...there is no compelling reason to purchase anything except the Acer C720.

After reviewing several alternatives, including the new Acer model that uses the Intel i3 CPU, I can confidently say that the original C720 is every bit as hot "sh*t" as  I thought it was when I reviewed it back in 2013.

The fact is, unless you really feel like spending more money or need a bigger display, this Chromebook is about as big a bang as you can get for your Chromebook money.  You might want to go with the 4GB model if you typically roll with lot's of tabs open, but in practice I have not had issues with performance.

I've researched a bunch of different models (HP, Samsung, Asus), read the reviews read the specs and checked them all out at Best Buy (don't ever ask their sales people questions if you want to get the correct answers).

It can be confusing, especially when sales people give you wrong information and are generally ignorant about Chromebooks to begin with.  Bottom line is that the Haswell architecture is going to give you the best price, performance, battery life of all of the Chromebooks.  If you want to sacrifice a bit of performance for battery life (and we're talking a little more, not a lot more battery life) then the new models with the NVIDIA Tegra K1 chipset should be considered.  The new Acer 13.6" model sports the new chipset and a higher price, but might be best for those looking for a little more screen real estate and as I mentioned, increased batter life.  The other features are pretty much the same (same number of USB ports and interfaces).  The new model supports MIMO Dual-Band 2.4Ghz & 5GHz wifi.

According to the Acer specs, you'll enjoy 13 hours of battery life for their HD (1366x768) and 11 hours for the Full HD model (1920x1080).  I'd probably cut that down by 10-20% depending on how bright you like your display.  It also adds about 1/2 pound to the weight over the original C720 (2.76lbs vs 3.3lbs).

Throwing a C720 on my coffee table is a no brainer.  It's cheap and powerful and I can browse, check my email and even run SSH to do some Linux development.  As a first or second laptop it works for me.  When I travel, I'm not taking my $2k Mac-book Pro, I'm throwing my C720 in my messenger bag and heading to the airport.  One of the great comforts of this is, if I lose the Chromebook, there's nothing on it that someone can steal.  If I do lose the C720, it wasn't all that expensive in the first place.

I love me some Chromebook!

Redis & Bedrock

Been playing a bit with Redis, a really cool in-memory database based on keys and values.  It's a key/value database on steroids and has a lot of applicability for web applications that need to scale or just want better performance.

A Perl module is available on CPAN, appropriately named Redis.  One might therefore be tempted to do something like:

<plugin:Redis server localhost:6379>
<null $Redis.set('key', 'value')>

Great idea, however it turns out that didn't work.  Is Bedrock broken? Hmmm...let's find out.

Perl modules like Redis that utilize a large number of AUTOLOAD subroutines and do not implement an appropriate can method are not going to present a code reference when Bedrock's parser calls the module's can method...so as a recognition of this possibility the Func.pm module within Bedrock's parsing does this:

my $funcref;

$funcref = $obj->can($func);

...

if ( $funcref ) {
    @ref_v = $funcref->( $obj, @funcargs );
  }
  else {
    &log_message(
     undef,
     "$self: eval function in case implemented via AUTOLOAD\n\@ref_v = $obj->$func(\@args);"
    );

    eval '@ref_v = $obj->' . $func . '(@args);';

    if ( $@ ) {
      if ( $@ =~/TagX::Scalar/ ) {
  die "attempt to invoke possibly non-existent method ($func) on a possibly non-existent scalar\n";
      }
      else {
        die "$@\n";
      }
    }
  }

Hey, umm...what's that? @args? Shouldn't that be @funcargs? Yup....bug.  Fixed in 2.4.1-snapshot today.  Okay, so anyway...

What can we do with Bedrock and Redis?

Well, generally we can use it as a persistent storage mechanism similar to the way we use the $session object.

<null $Redis.set('foo', 'bar')>

...on one page and then...

<var $Redis.get('foo')>

...on the next...

Of course that example is like saying you can use a brick to prop open a door!  There are lot more interesting and exciting things you can do with Redis.

How about counting page hits from unique IPs?

<null $Redis.pfadd('home-page', $env.REMOTE_ADDR)>

Using Redis' HyperLogLog (requires Redis 2.8.9) facility we can add a member and let Redis keep track of counting unique hits.

<var $Redis.pfcount('home-page')>

Or resetting a counter at midnight by specifying a time value (seconds since the epoch) to the expireat function.

<sqlselect "select unix_timestamp(date_add(curdate(), interval 1 day)) exp">

<null $Redis.expireat('home-page', $exp)></sqlselect>

...and of course we can store serialized data to Redis.

<null $Redis.set('env', $env.json()>

and deserialize it later to a Bedrock object...

<null:user_env --json $Redis.get('env')>

Yup...this is cool!  ;-)

Pretty Print JSON objects

Added --pretty as an option to the <var> tag for pretty printing JSON objects.  Changes pushed to git master.

<sink><null $header.content_type('application/json')>
<hash:foo red 1 blue 2 green 3>
</sink><var --pretty --json $foo>

...would yield

{

   "green" : "3",
   "blue" : "2",
   "red" : "1"
}

AWS with Bedrock

I'm starting to tinker with using Amazon's web services from Bedrock pages.  Embedding AWS in Bedrock applications is not new - particularly if you are running Bedrock on an EC2 instance, RDS (hosted MySQL) or you are using Amazon's S3 object storage system.   There are other Amazon web services that are particularly useful in any web development environment, exposing these to Bedrock pages looks interesting.

Plugin Bug

Fixed a bug in the <plugin>  tag.   Class names were not being parsed correctly if there was more that 1 level to the namespace.

For example, Amazon::SNS::VerifySignature was being incorrectly parsed as Amazon::SNS which happens to be valid Perl module.

Fix pushed to master.

Amazon SNS - Verifying Signatures

While creating a Bedrock example of using Amazon's Simple Notification Service, I was surprised to find that Googling for a Perl example of verifying the signature from an SNS notification message came up empty.  So I wrote my own...