./databyte

With prices of 16GB USB 3.0 drives hovering around $40, I was looking for a cheap $10 option. Basic throw away drives that I didn’t care to lose, didn’t copy to often but were really small and easy to pack.

I compared the SanDisk Cruzer Blade against the Kingston DataTraveler 108

• both 16GB USB 2.0 flash drives. Both were formatted FAT as most USB drives should work cross-platform as a simple sneaker net.

The SanDisk wins with a cumulative score of 654.6 compared to Kingston’s score of 393.43. Benchmark results available in a gist.

The SanDisk Cruzer Blade won in every single test except Sequential Uncached Read using 4K blocks and Random Uncached Writes using 256K blocks. The SanDisk achieved 4.19 MB/sec and 0.51 MB/sec, respectively. The Kingston pulled in 4.46 MB/sec and 2.70 MB/sec, respectively.

The numbers for the 4k blocks are very close but the gap in the single 256K block is fairly substantial. However, given that FAT32 is in 4k sectors - the clear winner is still the SanDisk.

Have you ever stubbed out the call to url in CarrierWave to trick out your Uploaders during specs?

Well as of 0.6.0, that’ll give you a nice error: 

SystemStackError:
stack level too deep

So you’ll want to change the url method to call super (see gist).

It’s easy to start down the path of creating a feature or just making a change until you hit a roadblock. It may have you cut a corner, half-ass your testing or otherwise do a less than awesome job.

I periodically work with the guys at @gojee and they’re building out this new feature using CSS3 animations. Testing those CSS3 animations in Safari 5.1 look great and it works just as you would expect across Chrome and Firefox (sorry IE, you don’t get animations). However in Safari 5.0, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

It’s easy to say “well, Safari 5.0 is only 7% of our users so let’s not worry about it so much” and degrade them to static images. However, the idea to use CSS3 instead of Flash was someone’s decision.

Guess whose working on making it work across as many cool browsers as possible including Safari 5.0 tonight? Yep, that person who championed the decision but also the entire team. From chickens to pigs, everyone’s helping to change and test the feature.

They’ll end up pwning this issue and not stop until it’s done.

Ask yourself:

• Would you delay your next feature until the current one’s perfect?

• Would you pay extra to have the tools your team wants or needs? And not the same equipment your mom would get (unless of course she likes SSD).

• Would you focus on fewer better features instead of many crappy ones?

After reading Steve Job’s biography and remembering a blog post on ServerFault about The Awesome Factor. The phrases “amazing or shit” and “just make it awesome” come to mind, respectively.

Everyone needs to own their own part. It can’t be one person staying up late testing everything, tweaking and ultimately making it awesome. It should be everyone owning their own change, helping out their teammate and making it awesome.

TL;DR: Own it - Love it - Just make it awesome!