Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/10/14/rip-good-time/
According to Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley is now officially in survival mode.
The advise to startups is to focus on must-have products, cut deep and be ready to go for a year without income. That’s good advice for those of us who work in the Valley, as well. Good luck, everybody!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/28/google-opposes-gay-marriage-ban/
Go go Google!
We do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues . . . however, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
Sergey Brin,
Official Google Blog
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/24/android-g1/
I hate mobile phones. I have had a Sidekick2 forever because it lets me jot down notes and do e-mail and IM and check things on the web. But I fricking hate talking on mobile phones! I have been tempted to ditch the expense and hassle of carrying a device around all the time and move back to index cards and save myself $50-$60 per month. Alas, a mobile phone is basically required of any SysAdmin. In the past year I have had the good fortune of working at a larger company, where I’m only on-call for two weeks every other month. So, I have begun to leave the mobile device not-on-my-person when I’d like to relax. It is kind of a bummer for people who want to call me, but the tranquility does me good.
Anyway, the HTC Android “Google Phone” was announced yesterday. I bit the bullet and pre-ordered an upgrade for my trusty old Sidekick2. After all, a lot of the same team who designed the Sidekick went to work on Android, and the large company I work for is sending out the bonus checks this week. I’m starting to get a little excited at the idea of having a GPS device, because mapping is so hot. But the other win for me is to annoy the iPhone people.
Because I am a cantankerous old mobile-phone hater, I’m also naturally annoyed at the whole iDong Mac fanboy spectacle. The iPhone is that first fancy phone, but my soul reviles at the thought of paying a premium to get locked into the whole iTunes racket and . . . ugh. It is a toy! The open development platform is going to be a nice improvement on the Apple-mediated iPlatform. Anyway, the other reason I’m looking forward to getting the new Android is to steal the self-satisfaction from my iPhone comrades. “My phone does all that janky stuff too, but it costs me somewhat less and I have greater freedom.”
What is neat about mobile phones and other “micro-computers” is that there is no dominant operating environment yet. Apple and Google are trying to get in early, and doing a better job at it than Microsoft, and it is refreshing that Google’s device emphasizes open source and platform portability. We’re going to get to replay the “OS Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s all over again and I honestly think the Android platform has a lot of potential to dominate. I personally believe that in the next few years it will have surpassed Apple a great deal, because much as MS-DOS was licensed to a growing horde of PC makers, Android seeks to live on many devices, and Apple, just as in the old days, will become that special province with 10% market share of loyal Apple weenies. I liked Apple weenies a lot more when they were persecuted oddballs. These days they’re just irritating.
Anyway, blah blah blah blah, The Joy of Tech has the best analysis of why Android will whoop Apple’s ass.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/24/dating-advice-do-not-answer/
The following bit of advice, while not of my creation, has been well-received of late:
You’ve been meeting folk but there are those who you’d rather avoid, and you delete them from your phone. Later, they call and you answer because the number looks familiar: maybe it is a family or coworker! Awkwardness ensues.
Solution? Keep the number, but change the name to “Do Not Answer” — especially if you may have a tendency to get drunk / lonely.
I do not actually use this strategy, but I read it a couple years ago and its re-telling was recently well-received, so I thought I’d share.
/d
Me? I recently changed my voicemail to explain that I tend to avoid my mobile phone altogether and that e-mail works far better. I really dislike talking on the damn thing. It makes my brain warm and leaves me feeling anxious. Yeah, I’m weird.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/09/10/spore/
Will Wright’s latest software toy is out, and while I would be excited over such an ambitious project, I have also been underwhelmed by SimCity 4 and other games of that type in the past several years. There’s also a protest afoot against the game’s copy protection, so it has just over one star on Amazon.com. On a mailing list at work I explained that instead of rushing out to buy the new game, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach:
My interpretation is that it is an intriguing idea, but rather than building an interesting and educational toy, EA smashed it into an over-hyped high-priced bauble aimed at mass-market appeal. You can download the creature creator for free, but instead of being constrained by say, the amount of metabolism your creature would require or how fast it could reproduce given all it attributes, the only trade-off I could find was that if you spend more “money” you can buy more “features” . . .
My approach for now is to boycott the initial sales to see if they come around on the DRM, and wait to hear what other folks think of it, as well as maybe a price drop.
2c,
-danny
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/08/17/systems-administrators-salary-survey/
When people ask me what I do I answer either “computer stuff” or “Unix systems administration” and when asked what that means I answer that I keep the servers up and running. If you happen to be curious about my technical background you can review an old copy of my resumé online.
SAGE members and survey participants now have access to the 2007 System Administrator’s Salary Survey at http://www.sage.org/salsurv/. It is nice to check in an see how well one’s compensation aligns with that of one’s peers. I like the summary:
“A technically challenging profession that pays its entry people as much as US$50,000/year is an interesting one. System administration appears to be a fine way to make a living. Experience, education, and enhanced skillsets seem to be the growth path of choice.”
My current employer is known for its generous compensation, and the current survey is an affirmation of that. More importantly I’m enjoying my experience of my present employer and with any luck may actually hold this job for a few years.
I still hope to eventually return to Chicago to work. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest average salaries, though Chicago averages not much less. The catch is that most Chicago jobs are in the financial services industry, and that is a less enjoyable work environment than the Silicon Valley culture.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/07/01/tesla-san-carlos/
Ed tipped me off that the North American factory for the new electric sports car, the Tesla Model S, will be in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Carlos is about half way between San Francisco and San Jose. It was thought the factory would be opened in Mexico, which offered government incentives. California offered its own incentives, and The Governator owns a Tesla Roadster. (And a Hummer.)
Gay marriage and electric sports cars! What awesome new stuff will we embrace next?
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/26/dont-reinvent-penis/
O’Reilly has some fun and insightful reading on the whole Microsoft-Yahoo! drama. The idea is that instead of chasing the competition because you have “penis envy” and spending your time and energy re-inventing what someone else already kicks ass at, you should figure out what awesome new things need to be built, and go do that instead. Yahoo! shouldn’t waste its time on search when what it is really good at is building a great media portal and user experience. Similarly, Microsoft should probably focus on building better network-enabled user software.
“So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t.”
I kind of figure that building search is a waste of Yahoo!’s energy, and that if Microsoft wants to ditch their own failed effort and give Yahoo! a chunk of cash for its also-ran technology, well then hooray for Yahoo!
I was also reading about Sugar, which I have gotten to play with on the OLPC XO-1. It is somewhat frustrating to deal with because I really really really like having access to the file / folder metaphor for tracking my work. I do like the “history” interface to “activities” via the Journal, and the built-in collaboration, although I have not had a chance to actually “collaborate” with any one, seems like a really big win–the sort of thing that has a lot of potential not only for education but in the office environment that we adults use as well. It is too bad that collaboration via shared applications is such an under-developed idea. That strikes me as the sort of thing that ought to be within Microsoft’s grasp to run with, and a nice answer to the Google “spreadsheet in a web browser” mentality.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/28/yahoo-hostile-takeover/
Marc Andreessen had some lawyers do an analysis of the current situation between Microsoft and Yahoo, and then posted an excellent summary on his blog on what could happen, what is most likely to happen, and how things work. It is a good read, and a compelling conclusion:
We are learning that hostile takeovers have arrived in our industry. This is the second major hostile takeover so far — the other was Oracle’s takeover of Peoplesoft — but there will be more.
This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn’t work because the target company’s employees would bail and the target company’s business would collapse.
It turns out that as technology companies become larger and more mature, acquirors are becoming increasingly convinced that neither of these assumptions hold. Perhaps employees of large tech companies aren’t that bonded to current management, and perhaps many of them would actually prefer to work for a larger, more dominant combined company. And maybe as a consequence, the target’s business would do just fine in the wake of a hostile takeover — in fact, maybe it would do better, due to advantages of combined size and scale.
My bet is that hostile takeovers, particularly of larger and more mature companies, are going to become increasingly common in our industry.
One theme is that Yahoo’s corporate structure leaves it more vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and that as hostile takeovers becomes more commonplace in the technology industry, you should see more companies willing to adopt conventions like the dual-class share structure you see at Google.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/25/wordpress-251/
There’s a notice on the WordPress dev blog that WordPress 2.5.1 is out. Alas, they neglected to link to the upgrade documentation. My favorite? Upgrading via Subversion:
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~> cd public_html/toldme 0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~/public_html/toldme> svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/ [ . . . ] Updated to revision 7839.
When I logged in to post this little note, it blocked me and ran the upgrade procedure, then I had to log in again, and here I am!
There’s a further note about the secret key setting:
Since 2.5 your
wp-config.phpfile allows a new constant calledSECRET_KEYwhich basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.
It leaves me to wonder: if the secret key can be randomly generated by a machine, why not go ahead and do that and then stash it in the database? There may be a good reason for that . . .
In unrelated news, I upgraded to the newer Ubuntu release at home yesterday. The only trick I have noticed so far is that it runs with Firefox 3.0, which is beta, and I lost use of my foxmarks plugin, for now. So, I’m waiting until that is supported before I upgrade my workstation.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/04/08/special-election-day/
Today was a special election for my congressional district. It was an open primary for Congress–two Democrats, two Republicans, and a Green. I voted for the Green candidate in part because he is the only one who sent any campaign literature, and because this is a safely gerrymandered Democrat district anyway.
I was the first citizen of my precinct to try the electronic ballot. To explain the touch screen, the staff boasted “it’s just like an iPhone!” I dug around in English and Chinese and explored the “large print” zoom feature, then I had to ask how one actually casts the ballot. (The user interface places commands on the bottom of the screen, but the “review screen” had a big box in the middle that said “press here to review your paper ballot” and below that the standard “review” button to review the electronic ballot . . . I kept pressing the little button, until the guy showed me that the big box in the middle is also a button.)
I was pleased at the paper trail. On my way out, I noted that the optical scanner had counted three ballots thus far, so this morning’s exit poll is running at least 25% Green.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/03/09/computer-literacy-decade/
It is fun to see how people change over time, and how they stay the same. A decade ago I wrote a “Computer Literacy Narrative” for an English class:
The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.
I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.
My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.
“Wow.”
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/02/01/please-stay-yahoo/
Much buzz about Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo!
I am a big fan of Google and their myriad products, but sometimes they get on my nerves. I like having Yahoo! as an alternative. I love Flickr. I would hate to see Yahoo! swallowed up my Microsoft, leaving the biggest players on the Internet being a choice between the Google and the Microsoft.
I prefer an online world that isn’t simply black and white, but which also has a weird shade of purple to it.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/01/26/deader-than-amiga/
I have been playing with Google Trends, which will be happy to generate a pretty graph of keyword frequency over time. A rough gauge to the relative popularity of various things. This evening, I was riffing off a post from the Royal Pingdom, regarding the relative popularity of Ubuntu and Vista, among other things.
I got started graphing various Linux distributions against each other, XP versus Vista, and trying to figure out the best keyword for OS X. Then, I wondered about FreeBSD. Against Ubuntu, it was a flatline. So, I asked myself: what is the threshold for a dead or dying Operating System?
Amiga vs FreeBSD:
Ouch! Can we get deader?
Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS:
To be fair, the cult of Amiga is still strong . . . BeOS is well and truly dead. But how do the BSDs fare?
Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD:
NetBSD has been sleeping with the BeOS fishes for a while, and OpenBSD is on its way. And that’s a league below Amiga!
In Red Hat land, only Fedora beats “the Amiga Line”. For Unix in general, nothing stops the Ubuntu juggernaut. But there’s a long way to go to catch up with Uncle Bill.
(Yes, it is a rainy night and the girlfriend is out of town.)
Postscript: Ubuntu versus Obama
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/01/24/20000-siphon-coffee/
“If you just want equipment you’re not ready,†Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.â€
It looks a bit overly-involved to me, but whatever floats your boat.
“Siphon coffee is very delicate,†[James Freeman] said. “It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it’s almost moussey.â€
I have long preferred brewed coffee to espresso. That is a combination of my proletarian roots and my experience as a barista: I have a strong sense of what I want from a dry cappuccino or dry cafe-au-lait, but this sense is not easily found in a cafe, and I lack the technology to do it myself, so let us keep it simple, right?
(In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.)
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