Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/28/red-hat-rant/
Ahhh, so in my getting to grips with, I have a few gripes about Linux. Some day I may cultivate these into a well-formed, coherent technical explanation, but just now . . . just now, I’ll share with you a special favorite rant of mine.
New install, right? By default, it wants to check the install media (who cares?) then there’s a screen that says “welcome to <version of Red Hat>” where you get the chance to say “ohhh, wrong CD …” then you move on to disk partitioning, and you have to intentionally select that yes you want to erase all data, and enter a bunch of other parameters … network … firewall, SE-Linux … altogether 10-15 minutes if you know what you are doing. Nothing onerous. Lots of “yes, a firewall, and these other things, these are all a good ideas, I’ll just mostly agree to what you suggest.” (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/23/yay-google/
“There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience “About the AOL Announcement”
Unfortunately, I don’t think you could hold them to that statement, legally.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/16/tellme-jazz/
As far as I know, Tellme doesn’t have a “Tellme Labs” in the manner that Google does, though I did spend some time on my own researching the intracies of LDAP and of PXE bootstrap and OS installation.
So it was nice when I was recently clued in to Tellme Jazz. This creature doesn’t explain itself much, but I find:
- You can collaborate on a shared addressbook. For example, the “Former Tellmes” group, or set one up for you family, peeps, co-workers, and everyone in the group can help add or maintain the data.
-
You can record messages, tossing in various “dazzlers” and send them along to individual friends, or groups of friends. (Think “audio Greeting Cards.”)
- Alternatively, you can send text messages . . .
(more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/10/blog-strategy/
So, Jakob Nielsen is the “cranky old man” of web design, but he’s mostly right. Still, when I saw the title “Weblog Usability” I scoffed . . . weblogs suck! Criticizing “weblog usability” sounds a bit like criticizing children for watching cartoons.
But, like I said, he’s usually right. How does my “weblog” . . . I call it a “web site” with an “online journal” that predates that awful awful word, “blog” but . . . I’m running WordPress, this is a . . . a . . . blog . . . well, how does dannyman.toldme.com stack up to Nielsen’s standards? (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/09/americans-cut-some-slack/
Well, so we know that Americans put in a lot more time at work than our counterparts in Europe. We get fewer benefits, but higher salaries. Of course, we tend to commute by car, and live in very hot or very cold places, so we spend a lot more cash on energy, or we would, if our government were not structured to keep energy artificially cheap. As a consequence, we convert valuable cropland into large suburban houses, and spend more time driving SUVs around the freeways.
Anyway . . . higher pay or not, I’m jealous of the five weeks of vacation that I’d get if I worked in Europe. On the other hand, Wired reports that American employers have mostly come to accept the fact that Internet access means some amount of employee slack time:
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access. Today . . . employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
(more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/sony-is-fony/
In Sony’s defense, they are renting the walls that they are defacing:
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/02/google-recuiting-secret/
Well, I have heard time and time again, and experienced myself, that getting a job at Google is a long, slow, frustratingly mysterious process that takes weeks, if not months, in most cases. Typically, you’ll submit a resume for a position, get called two months later for an entirely different position, get a phone screen, then two weeks later get another phone screen, or maybe an on-site, but they’re still not sure, so you’ll get another interview, and each time there’s a week or two delay until the recruiters and hiring managers can complete their meetings, and before they can send you a job offer, your case will be reviewed by Larry and Sergey.
They are very very careful to hire only the very best and brightest. I think it was Marc Andreeson who said that if you start hiring sucky people, they will go and hire more sucky people, and ultimately they will all conspire to destroy your organization. Back at Tellme, we were told to only ever hire people we thought were smarter than ourselves, but that seemed problematic, given that a lot of the first few employees were from MIT. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/19/television/
I have not had a consistent supply of Television since I left home for college . . . ten years ago. And lately I have been thinking that while it was a lonely time, 1996-2002 or so was also something of a “Golden Age” for me, at least in terms of learning stuff, because I ran only FreeBSD on my computers and could only play very few games. (That’s a seperate reflection for another time, and may just be reactionary nostalgia.)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that watching good shows, especially without commercials, is nice stuff. TiVo is bigger than just a “smart VCR” . . . before TiVo I used to worry about whether I could catch a show at a certain time . . . after TiVo, I couldn’t care less when a show aired, if I wanted to watch it, it would be there, a few days later, and when I wanted to unwind, I could fire up the show. (more…)
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/13/japanese-gaming-chic/
“Right now Asian fans really like the Japanese products and culture. They want the package in Japanese, manual in Japanese, they want everything to be in Japanese, or Japanese style. Japan is cool and popular in China, and right now it seems like they don’t want anything else.”
Takeshi Kimura
SNK Playmore
Game Devloper Magazine, November 2005
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/09/sidekick-upgrade-nice/
Hello world!
This is a test post from the bus via my Sidekick II. They recently updated the software on this device and things are nice. Timestamps in my AIM logs and the web browser is now noticeably faster, and prettier. There’s support for JavaScript, at least enough that the Flickrbar appears on my web site, which loads up with full color backgrounds and pleasing-to-me fonts.
Nice job, T-Mobile and Danger! Now, if only I could have per-account e-mail ringtones, so I could check my normal e-mail on the device without the loud “system pager” ring that is my default for email sent to my mobile . . .
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/08/abovenet-rocks/
I am a picky customer. And I have at least one vendor to bitch about once some of the dust settles, but I have to say, Abovenet has always been great. They are honest, they have good sales support, their data centers are nice enough . . . and any time I file a ticket to take care of network trouble or something like a server reboot, they have always taken care of business. Their networking people in particular do an excellent job of offering to help, to the point of offering to take a look at my BGP configs to offer pointers.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/01/civ4/
As posted on Skirv’s blog:
Overall, I think it is an excellent game.
I tried one game on easy level … quit after an hour or so … too easy.
In my second game I’m in 1902 on the almost-balanced level, but still feeling a little too easy to be interesting. But I want to use my panzers . . . and I just trained a spy, which sounds a lot more useful and intresting than in the older games. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/21/smashmyipodcom/
A couple weeks back I was walking behind some grammar school kids, and as we passed the Apple Store, one of them started going on at length about how much various iPods cost for various features, and which, in his opinion, was the best buy, and the girl he was talking to pointed out that they were somewhat cheaper at Target.
And I had this cranky old man moment.
Like . . . grammar school kids should not be expert consumers.
http://smashmyipod.com/
God Bless Canadians.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/19/martin-luther-king-quotes/
We happened by the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco this weekend, visited the Zeum, which was cool, and caught the Wallace and Gromit movie, which rocked, and also checked out this cool monument to Martin Luther King, and brought back some good words that seem to apply to the present day: (more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/10/darpa-ulterior-motives/
For those less dorky than I, the DARPA Grand Challenge was a held last Saturday to see which autonomous vehicle could drive itself on a challenging 125-mile obstacle course through the desert first. Stanford’s Touareg, named “Stanley” came in first, just ahead of a Hummer and a Humvee from CMU, followed by a Ford Escape hybrid, and five hours later, Frankenstein.
I had of course, been rooting for Team Underdawg, but after some accidents and bugs, they did not make it through the Qualifier. So, I rooted for Cajunbot, a cute little six-wheel ORV from Louisiana, but that vehicle did not get so far either . . . in the end, at least, the Hummer didn’t win, so there’s one less reason for assh!les with small penises to buy ginormous SUVs. Yay Stanley! (more…)
2 Comments
« Newer Stuff . . . Older Stuff »
Site Archive
