Ultranormal

Category: computing

  • A Small Tip

    If you use one e-mail application to send both Work and Personal e-mail, make sure you choose your work address before sending a big long technical e-mail to the world… Today just gets better and better.

  • Too Many Computers? Is That Possible???

    People at work give me a hard time about the number of computers I have under my desk. Honestly, I think they’re just jealous. Here’s the rundown:

    • Dell Precision P3-733 running Windows XP – the former home of most of my work computing. No longer, since I switched to…

    • Apple TiBook – G4-550 – it’s not as fast or as beefy as I’d like, but I do like taking my work home with me (Jen doesn’t).

    • Apple Quicksilver – G4-867 – It’s fast, but I’ve got everything installed on the TiBook. I’m thinking of coming up with a neat-o rcp syncer so I can work on this beast and still take everything home… BUT, I have the TiBook hooked up to an external monitor and I’m really loving the wrap-around workspace.

    • Dell Precision – Dual Xeon 1.7ghz running RedHat 8 (soon to be 9, hopefully) – This is the uberbox. I love it. It hosts my big intranetEmpire and runs some really funny daily reports. It has two giganimous hard drives and fuels my evil plans.

    • Sun Ultra 10 – 400 – Bleagh. It’s not even turned on, but it’s still here under my desk. It used to be the bane of my existence until the day I was able to turn it off. Sweet monitor came with it though…

    That’s not too many, really! I use all of them on a daily basis to get my work done (well, the Quicksilver may be overkill, but it has my 8.7 days worth of music on it – that I own… really, I do. I swear). The XP box may get demoted to 2000, because XP makes my buttcheeks clench. XP is evil.

    I have no idea where this is going… only that I need more computers. I want a crash PC that I can reformat whenever I want and install goofy stuff on it. It has nothing to do with my job, so it’ll never happen – but it would be fun. When I was on the phones, I had what we called “The Crash Mac”. It was a beige G3 that I installed every flavor of Linux available for the Mac (all of two, LinuxPPC and YellowDog) on and learned all kinds of wicked things you can’t do to Macs on it. It was fun, and a great learning tool. I think everyone should have at least one crash machine. I may go out to Wal-Mart and buy a \$200 crap PC right now just so I have one. Yeah… just try and stop me.

  • They’ve Gone All Communal

    So, I get Dawson to start a blog and now what’s happened? They’ve gone and started a blog commune. They’ve got nine little baby blogs on their site… I’m so proud.

  • Anti-Bloggie Prize Patrol

    Miss Mea-Mea won the best Amazon Wishlist category in this year’s Anti-Bloggies! Her prize (from yours truly) was something from her Amazon Wishlist less than \$25. Her choices (since I thought randomly choosing something was kinda mean) were Pulp’s This is Hardcore and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties The Knot. They’ve both been ordered and are now wending their way through the Amazon ordering system on their way to her door. Congratulations to her and tough luck to the losers with crappy wishlists.

  • OS X Blogging Tools Roundup

    After my full-time switch to OS X, I’m finding all kinds of great tools to make blogging easier and happier. This here is my incomplete list of things that make blog writing/reading life easier:

    • A Local Copy of Movable Type: I knew it made life easier, but when you use the same computer all the time, it makes having a goof-uppable version of everyone’s favorite personal CMS that much nicer.

    • NetNewsWire: It’s open all day long and grabs the latest blogging headlines hourly. It makes the day go by quicker and keeps me up-to-date on the latest gossip. It’s even better when used with…

    • Camino: I use Camino as my default browser. Why? Because you can set it to open sites opened by other applications in new tabs, and in the backgroud, which makes using NetNewsWire almost a religious experience, and also reduces desktop clutter.

    • Kung-Log: Manage your Movable Type blogs through this super-friendly little app. It’s got a great little editor built-in and other sweet tools for managing your blog.

    • Tyrantula: How quickly does your page load over dial-up? What’s actually on your page? Use this handy little app to find out. A great quick-and-painless page analyzer for OS X. Good, good stuff.

    • jEdit: This app runs a lot better now that Apple’s decided to give us Java 1.4.1. It has great tag completion and markup coloring. A solid text editor for those of us who can’t afford BBEdit.

    • Transmit: The best FTP program I’ve ever used on the Mac, OS 9 or X. The best part, it supports SFTP, and reads symlinks correctly!

  • Unstarted Projects

    I want to build another CMS. Why? I’ve built two already (for work, a loo-ooong time ago), and there are already so many good ones out there. For blogging alone, there are several that people should look into. I know you know what they are. But, I’ve got some ideas for one that could include not only a web interface, but I think provide some features not available in the other personal publishing tools.

    I’m not sure when I’ll have time to start it, but thinking about it kept me up all night. I want to create something easier to use than the ones out there now, and more flexible. It’s a tall order, especially with Movable Type doing it so well already. As good as Movable Type is, it’s a little beyond the typical Blogger user. The features lacking from Blogger are legion, but it is the easiest to get started with (at least that I’ve seen – if someone has one that’s easier to get started with, please let me know). How do you combine Trackback, Comments, flexible templates including the ability to make “other” pages, more flexible archiving formats, a WYSIWYG editor, etc and make it easy? It’s a huge problem, and it’s keeping me up at night.

    I’m not even sure why it’s keeping me up, but it is. Maybe I just need to start drinking. Or take TylenolPM. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  • A Microsoft Free World

    The switch to OS X is going well. I finally downloaded and installed OpenOffice. Other than it taking a year to start up, and requiring X, it’s doing fine so far. I just opened up a gigantic Word doc and it handled it fine. It reads the fonts OK (although without anti-aliasing), and only slightly munges tables. I think I can live with it. For someone who uses Word or Excel all the time, it might not be a good solution, but I only open Word when I absolutely have to in order to read product requirement docs, and only open Excel when I get reports – which isn’t very often. I write all my docs in HTML.

    The Powerbook is straining under the weight of the dual displays and all these open apps, but it’s not bad enough yet to consider moving to the big machine. I am loving having two monitors hooked up to one machine. It makes things so much nicer. I have an old SGI monitor with a digital input, so I may try hooking my Quiksilver up to that (it’s an 867 with a ton of RAM, so it should handle better than this, but then I’d have to install all the toys I’ve put on the Powerbook which could take days).

    My computing environment is completely free of Microsoft’s influence now. I no longer worry about what info my computer is sending back to the “MotherShip”. This may not bother most people, and if it doesn’t bother you, then by all means, use XP. It bugs the living crap out of me. It’s my computer. It’s not Microsoft’s computer. I bought and used Microsoft’s software, but it’s still my machine. Microsoft has no business knowing what I have installed or how often I use those programs. What else does my computer tell Microsoft when I’m not looking? Does it send them the names of the documents on my computer? Does it send them the list of e-mail addresses I have in my address book? With them, there’s no way to know because everything is a black box. In OS X, it’s just BSD with a pretty face. If I wanted to, I could get under the covers and see exactly what’s going on. Not so with Microsoft products.

    This is why Open Source will ultimately win. It’s not because it’s inherently better. It’s not because it’s geek friendly. We’re (ok, by we I mean me) tired of being lied to and manipulated. We’re tired of spyware. We’re tired of prohibitive licensing and insane software prices. We’re tired of being told with the products we’ve purchased. We’re tired of being treated like criminals. I don’t steal music or software. But, the software and music I buy, I want to be able to use as I see fit. I want to rip the cd’s so I can listen to them at work without having to bring the CD everywhere.

    Whew… Ok, I’m done.

  • The True Nonconformists

    It’s confession time. I love Swatches. I’m not sure why I do, but I do. I own six or seven of them. Most of them have dead batteries and a couple have badly mangled bands. I found my first swatch the other day in a drawer. Other than a dead battery and some scratches, it looks fine.

    There was a place in Tucson that sold used Swatches for \$20. They had the older, more collectible ones for more, but I only wanted the \$20 ones. I bought three or four there. Then, last week, I saw on our little employee site that we could get a selection of Swatches for \$15 a piece – all brand new. Of course, I went nuts, buying two before I remembered that my birthday is next Thursday and I should probably wait. Me, wait? Oh no. I got this one and this one (it’s not pink in person, all orange). They arrived yesterday and I couldn’t be happier.

    And then, I went into a meeting today and someone said, “Hey, nice watch. Lose a bet?” No, no I didn’t lose a bet. You’re just old and don’t get it, man. Swatches are my youth reclaimed. They’re cheap, durable and keep good time. They’re interesting to look at and are more fun than your chrome hunk of metal that probably loses minutes every week. My watch is cool. My watch is orange as hell and has a picture of mountains on it. Oh, and it only cost \$15, which means I could go buy another one next week without even thinking about it.

    Did I take too personally? Yeah, probably. But, as much as I tend towards conformity, there are times I just don’t do things like other people do. Ok, that’s complete BS. I’m a nonconformist. But, in saying it, I know you’re thinking of those goth babies with white faces or long-haired greasy guys in record stores railing against the system and the man. I’m not that kind of nonconformist. I’m a geek. I just don’t care what everyone else is doing. If I like something, I’ll do it. If I think something is stupid, I won’t do it.

    I’m not sure how this turned from my new watches to a post on conformity, but hey, here I am. Let’s go all the way. Nerds and geeks are the only real noncomformists left. Most of the other noncornformists I’ve met or still know may not follow society’s norms, but they definitely conform to their own little group’s ideas. Take the goth babies for instance. They wear black, they wear makeup and pierce themselves. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen most of them. They listen to the same music, worship at the altar of the same authors, etc. Nerds and Geeks? If you’ve met one, you’ve met a truly unique individual. Their geekiness and nerdism surfaces in weird and wonderful mutations that change with the frequency of batcrap in Carlsbad. Embrace the Rainbow of Geekhood. We’re out there, weird as hell, and really don’t care what you think about it.

  • Documents, Changes and Mood Altering Substances

    I hate writing documentation. I hate writing concept documents. I hate writing project plans. I like writing code. I’d gladly write code for almost anything over writing the documentation for that code. Unfortunately, I’m pretty good at writing documentation, and that means I get to do it more often than I’d like.

    After reading this last week, I’ve decided to start out this week forcing myself to use OS X and finally break my Windows habit. I realized that using my Quicksilver G4 isn’t really an option because I don’t use it all the time. I take my Powerbook home every night and surf for a couple hours after work, and during our blizzard, I worked from home on it and got it in a usable state with jEdit, MacCVSX, NetNewsWire and AOL. I could actually do my job on it without thinking about it. The problem with translating that to work is it’s not very comfortable to use a trackpad and laptop keyboard at work all day. My solution? Plug the powerbook into my KVM switch! It’s great! I usually have the Powerbook open all day with NetNewsWire and Camino open all day anyway. Now, it’s still open with the same apps, but now I have AOL, CVS and jEdit open on my monitor, and can use my regular mouse and keyboard. Bye-Bye XP, may you rot in hell.

    Computing is all about habits. Breaking old ones and creating healthy new ones is difficult – just ask anyone who’s ever dieted. Computing habits are sometimes harder to break. I’ve been using Windows for eight years to do my day-to-day job functions. Switching to a new platform, even one I like very much, to perform those functions is not easy. But, I can do it. I really really can…

    After the good news, much come some bad. This weekend sucked. We spent all weekend cooped up with a sick Max (he’s feeling much better) and an ailing (sore throat, also much better) and stircrazy Jen has done horrible things to my mood and sleep pattern. I’m exhausted even though I got eight hours of sleep last night. I’m also cranky and out of sorts. I’m hoping everyone and everything getting back to normal will help. I could really use a nap though.

  • Another Lawver Google Appearance

    Not sure how this happened, but I’m up at the top of the results on Google for “how does google make money”. My post about Google’s Acquisition of Blogger is number one, above TechTV, ABC News and Motley Fool. Ummm, I don’t know whether to be afraid that Google got this so wrong, or proud that Google thinks I’m more relevant than the big boys.