I love Metric, but I think for human purposes, Fahrenheit is more useful, and actually closer to the convenience of metric:
Celsius:
0: water freezes
100: water boils
Fahrenheit:
0: colder than Denmark
100: warmer than human blood
If I want to boil and freeze water: hell yeah, Celsius. But if I want to know how hot or cold it is outside, explain it to me in terms I can understand!
You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?
Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.
Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.
Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.
And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.
So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.
If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)
So, I occasionally get anxious when I perceive some trend in word usage, especially when it seems like hyper-correction. I swear that in the past few years everyone replaced “social” with “societal” and in the past few months I swear that everyone (that I correspond with) has started saying “as per” instead of . . . say, “per” . . . for example:
“I did the job per your instructions.”
Or:
“I did the job, as you instructed.”
Has lately become:
“I did the job, as per your instructions.”
I just saw a work e-mail where someone used “as per” in two consecutive sentences and I said “there has to be a way to track this.”
And there is a way. A very crude way: Google Trends.
I wasn’t able to find anything at first: “as per” is dwarfed by “as” and “per” but I confined my search to the past 12 months, then the United States . . . then . . . California:
Cities
1.
San Jose, CA, USA
2.
Sacramento, CA, USA
3.
San Francisco, CA, USA
4.
Pleasanton, CA, USA
5.
San Diego, CA, USA
6.
Irvine, CA, USA
7.
Los Angeles, CA, USA
8.
Milpitas, CA, USA
It is probably just a statistical blip for an incomplete corpus but at least for the moment I feel a little better to see some data demonstrating a measured spike in usage of “as per” in the Silicon Valley . . . I might not be as crazy as I suspect.
Is “as per” bad usage? It certainly annoys me. Some technical writers are grappling with the issue, and it sounds as if English craftspeople prefer to avoid using this weirdly redundant mish-mash of Germanic-Latin.
I just posted a comment on a friend’s Facebook status:
I think the Death of Paper Books has been predicted with the advent of newspapers, radio, television, microfiche, books-on-tape, CD-ROMs, the Internet, portable computers, e-books readers, and smart phones, but it still hasn’t happened yet.
I like books, I like holding them in my hands, and I like stacking them on shelves along the walls of my apartment. I suspect that this love of books will be transmitted to my children, much as it was inherited from my parents. I doubt we’ll have an “unabridged dictionary” or a set of encyclopedias like when I grew up, but hell yeah, as long as I and my descendants have the money to spend, paper books aren’t going to die out.
I think eBooks will serve a particular role, especially in lightening the load in school backpacks. For my normal routine of reading one book at a time, though, and then palming it off to a friend or family member, I am fine with having the pulp copy to thumb through, though access rights if I later want to search the book digitally would be nice.
Background: I am not an Apple fan, but I keep an eye out. Yesterday they said they would make a world-changing announcement, and they gave us: the iPad. Here’s a comment I just made about the iPad:
Lack of an OS? The thing is an extra-large iPhone that can’t place phone calls. It is a Kindle killer but for $500 it can not even keep up with cheapo PC netbooks.
A Dell Mini 10 has a better screen, lower price, keyboard, can run all non-Apple software, video chat, and USB ports so you can offload your digital camera without buying an extra dongle, and you can buy it last year.
I am hoping to see more touch screens on netbooks, going forward.
Another thing I have noticed is that if I trash PCs, Windows, or Linux, people will either agree with me, or not take it personally. “Yeah, things aint perfect.” But if I trash Apple stuff, Apple people quickly become offended. I suspect that a part of the loyalty of Apple users is that they have paid a premium to buy in to the club. Any perception that is positive reaffirms the extra investment they have made into buying only the very best, but any negative perception undermines their self-confidence regarding their investment, and provokes a hostile reaction.
Windows users? Hell they’re just glad if they haven’t had a virus in the past six months.
Linux users? They downloaded a CD and managed to get something non-Windows running, with a little advice from web forums. Some of it is really sweet, some of it is pretty enh.
Mac users get offended that Firefox doesn’t match the style of the rest of their purely Mac applications.
Background: Google Apps is a service where Google will host the e-mail and calendar for your domain. So, instead of going to gmail.com I go to mail.toldme.com and log in as dannyman for dannyman@toldme.com. The annoying thing that has been going on for several years now is that only a minority of the growing array of Google software that features personalized content will support my Apps login, so I have two completely separate Google accounts:
Apps Account: dannyman@toldme.com
Gmail Account: picasasucks69@gmail.com
The first contains an archive of e-mail going back 15 years, my combined e-mail, telephone, and address book of all my friends, and Calendar appointments for the past five years. It integrates seamlessly with my Android Phone.
The second is for all the stupid Google applications that do not work with my Google account and require me to have a Gmail account that I never use otherwise: Picasa, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Voice . . . that last one is especially annoying, because now the brokenness leaks onto my Android phone!
As a big Google fan, I have an Android phone and a Google Apps account, and a Google Voice account. Google Voice is really neat, but since it only supports Gmail logins it is really poor that my Gmail / Android contacts aren’t available in Google Voice. That’s right: since I’m a really big Google fan, the Google Voice application will NOT sync with my Google Phone.
I understand that it is possible to install software that pulls the data out of your Apps Gmail account or Android phone, and then re-copies that back in to the Google Voice non-Apps account. But this requires extra effort on my part to maintain a kludge to have duplicate copies of data stored in two different places.
What I want instead is the obvious and sane solution, where I log in to Google Voice the same way I log in to everything else: with my Google Apps account. My Android phone logs in to my Google Apps account and has instant access to my contacts list, and my hosted Gmail logs in to my hosted Apps account, and has instant access to the very same contacts list shared seamlessly with my Android phone. So, when I log in to Google Voice, I want to log in with my Apps account, and then Google Voice has instant access to all of my phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with my Google Apps login.
Basically, I am asking for sanity, and short of sanity, at least an acknowledgement that sanity is a desired outcome.
This “second class citizen” treatment is really frustrating at times: the biggest fans get the worst support. Any idea when Google Voice is going to stop locking us out? And when that time comes will I be able to keep my phone number, or will it be like when I was forcibly migrated from Google Calendar over to a blank Google Apps Calendar, losing all my appointments and shared calendars, with no option to migrate my data?
I have tried to get an answer from Google Voice to no avail. I would like to think the Google employees behind Apps are working behind the scenes to make Google Voice available seamlessly to paying and loyal customers. Or maybe this simply is not a priority and us common folk Google Evangelists just shouldn’t get too worked up about Google products, and consider switching to competing technologies. Thanks!
These days my Android phone is in a weird way, because I’m starting to use Google Voice for SMS, except Google Voice has no access to my address book, so everywhere I am accustomed to seeing names and pictures for my contacts I see a ten-digit number, because Google Voice has no access to the contacts in my Google account.
A quiet day on-call, cooped up. Mei had to pull a long shift at the hospital, but when she got home we enjoyed the from-scratch Apple Pie she made for my birthday.
1.0h China From the Inside
0.5h Twilight Zone
Tuesday, January 19
Last day on-call.
In the evening Mei took me out for dinner at the restaurant where I had taken her for dinner for our anniversary. The anniversary dinner had been a perfect dining experience, and we later learned that the restaurant had a Michelin star. This time around we had a great meal, but the service wasn’t as perfect. I figured that like many restaurants they may not have their best staff working on Tuesdays.
Pushups: 35 + 35
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Wednesday, January 20
In the morning I biked down to the Tea Lounge. I wrote a follow-up review on Yelp explaining that although I love the Tea Lounge, if you serve diuretics your toilets shouldn’t be traumatizing to sit upon.
Later in the day I called the MTA to get my transit card replaced. They have a new program where you can purchase one transit card and they’ll just charge you more money when your balance runs low. Unfortunately, they send you the same little piece of paper that all the ephemeral transit cards use, so after a few months it was completely shot. They cancelled my defective transit card and said a new one would arrive within 15 days.
Later I dropped by the new orthodontist, who scanned my head in various ways and then got to the business of demanding that my teeth bow to his vision of an ideal alignment.
Pushups: 40
0.5h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Thursday, January 21
I asked Mei if she had any aspirin since my jaw was sore. I never take aspirin, and while I wasn’t quite in pain, my mouth felt sore enough that I’d rather not have it preoccupy my day. The good Doctor hooked me up.
I sent the city another letter explaining how I don’t want to pay them $115 for violating the no stopping zone that wasn’t adequately marked. I also bought some toilet paper which was marketed with the enticing promise “Virtually Lint Free” . . . 1,000 sheets for 59c? I also bought the name brand roll that was 1,000 sheets for 79c, in case Mei found the virtually lint free toilet paper to be exceedingly cheap in quality.
0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
Pushups: 35 + 35
Friday, January 22
Work kept me busy, but I can hardly complain given my commute.
Around 11:30 as we were near bed time Mei asked about these popups she was getting to run the virus scanner that we never installed that said her computer was under siege by viruses and she couldn’t run any programs because everything was infected and she was going to have to upgrade to the premium edition. The legitimate virus scanner couldn’t find anything, so I rebooted into Safe Mode and Windows offered to revert itself about two days, and upon the next boot Windows said it had reverted Internet Explorer and a couple shared libraries. Mei was sleeping by now, so I continued to install Google Chrome as an overall nicer alternative to Internet “zero-day exploits” Explorer, and then I went and scraped about two dozen software barnacles off of her hard drive. Her laptop seems happier with the tune-up. If I were more of a man I would disassemble the thing and solder new connections for the fragile speaker wires that have broken in the hinge. Assuming I owned a soldering iron and had balls enough to wave it at the girlfriend’s laptop computer.
1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Saturday, January 23
After sleeping in a bit, I took Mei to Cheryl’s and then we walked over to the ice skating rink in Prospect Park where her coworkers were having a get-together. I skipped the ice skating since on the one hand its not my thing and on the other hand I’m still Secondary On-Call with the work laptop in my bag. Better to hang out in the sun reading my magazine and synthesizing vitamin D.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the tech community over Google’s Tuesday announcement that they are just totally fed up with the Chinese government’s utter contempt for human rights and for playing nice on the Internet, and that as a consequence they are going to remove either the censorship filters from Google.cn, or Google.cn from China.
I don’t entirely grasp Google’s strategy here, but if a plucky technology company that I admire wants to goad an autocratic government, I’m naturally inclined to sympathize with them.
So, while it is still around, I figured I’d translate Google.cn‘s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: 手气ä¸é”™
手shuo3 is a pictograph for “hand” æ°”qi4 is a pictograph for curling clouds, meaning “air” ä¸bu4 is a pictograph of a bird rising to heaven, which once meant “to soar” but today means “not” é”™cuo4 etymologically combines “metal” and “dried meat” for the archaic meaning “gilt” which nowadays means “mistake”
But don’t get hung up on hand-air-not-mistake as the characters combine to form two words:
手气 means luck ä¸é”™ means “not bad” as in “pretty good”
So, 手气ä¸é”™ translates for me as “luck not bad” and that is what I hope for both Google (è°·æŒ) and the ä¸å›½äºº.
So, it is weird sleeping in when you expected to be on a train. New York City was a winter wonderland, very pleasant to walk around when the cars are driving slow, and the streets are filled with people shoveling snow. A Winter snow storm the weekend before Christmas hits the spot for people to rub shoulders with strangers in a friendly manner.
The snow also means no parking enforcement on Monday. It looks like we will have to move the car before Thursday, as Christmas Eve is not a parking holiday.
We went to brunch, then some light shopping, and back home for a relaxing afternoon. Mei has one last night shift this evening, and since the car is well and buried, I escorted her to the hospital on the train.
I like going out in the snow. Must be that Viking blood. On my way back I noted that in the working class neighborhood surrounding the hospital, there was less commercial activity, because there is less money to spend. Without a critical mass of people with sufficient disposable income, you don’t get the retail services opening up which help employ the working class, and that is why modern small towns tend to be somewhat dead. I started thinking about how in SimCity 4, commercial development always lagged in a new town until a certain point . . .
Later that night I looked up the new MMO city simulator, Cities XL. For $10 / 30 days I thought I would give it a try. I didn’t go to bed until 5am, though to be sure I didn’t get the game running until 3am due to download issues. The game feels pretty “beta” but from what I seen the interface is pretty slick, and the graphics are beautiful. It seems pretty close to the idea of a game I have been wanting to play for years, where you build your city on a planet with other cities, and cities have effects on each other. The first two things I have seen that have been missing from SimCity is that the very first thing you need is a road coming in from outside, and then a consideration for local natural resources, which give your new town a back story and a context, which is a more satisfying start than an abstract sandbox.
Monday, December 21
Brian: Okay, cats riding Roomba pretty much justifies Google’s purchase of YouTube. Me: Amen! It is all about . . . the long tail!
Tuesday, December 22
Brunch with Mei. We ate at Tom’s which is this famous place that is never open. I ate there once before and enjoyed their French Toast, but this time through we found the food quality somewhat lacking.
After a relaxed day at home, it was up to Penn Station, and on to Chicago. Mei accompanied me to Penn Station to see me off, but as I was concerned with finding the Amtrak check-in kiosks and then a good place to wait for the track announcement I kept speeding off ahead of her. She wasn’t too pleased about that but was gracious enough in saying goodbye. I got a nice seat on the train and a Japanese Literature Post-grad named Steve sat next to me.
The train was running a little late, and they never did go through coach for dinner reservations, so as the train pulled out of Albany at 7:30 I walked back to the dining car, where a long line of confused and uninformed guests had gathered, knowing that they typically stop serving dinner at 8pm. I had a lamb shank, sitting across from a guy who had been in computer sales for the past half century or so. Right now he is retired but helping some guys in nano-fabrication get running in business. Cool stuff.
There was a fair amount of talk of politics. The guy was Republican who had voted for Obama, and the lady sitting next to me said her husband was a Tea Party protester. I started to laugh in sympathy then realized that hey, sometimes you have sat down to eat with Republicans. I listened as these business folks tried to make sense of the role of government in the modern world. They disdained the crazy right-wing types who oppose all government programs.
I slept better than I had the first time I rode the train in November.
Usenet’s big “problem” is that nobody ever wrote a user-friendly web interface for it. Instead, the people who really wanted to chat found it easier to hack up web forums filled with animated emoticons using PHP and MySQL, rather than figure out some bitchin’ gateway into the great gray world, ruled by curmudgeons content to seal themselves off from the hoi polloi.
Wednesday, December 23
We were repeatedly woken in the morning by loud announcements regarding the fact that breakfast could be had in the dining car. I took the L home through a landscape I most remember from high school. In the evening I showed Machinarium to the family, which everyone found to be adorable and engaging. I ended up playing the game until 3:30am.
Thursday, December 24
We headed down to Grandma’s house for Christmas Eve. There was less family around than other years but neighbors dropped by. A lighter year than usual, so we had a lot of leftovers.
Around 10pm we opened presents. I went to set up the webcam I had gotten Grandma, but when I plugged it in to her Mac nothing happened. Further investigation revealed that the UVC feature that enables webcam support was introduced in OS X 10.4 and that if you have 10.3.9 you’re just a sorry twat who can not use webcam software. Okay, so how much to upgrade? Well, the latest and greatest is only $30! That’s not so bad, let us do this! Woah there pardner, you can’t have the new Mac OS unless you have 1GB of RAM and an Intel processor. Your vintage Mac Mini just isn’t going to do! Uhhh, okay. How about 10.4? Well, Apple doesn’t publish that any more, that is a collector’s item, you see. The current market rate for a used copy of the old Mac OS on the resale market is around $150.
I guess if you keep spending money on upgrading your Mac everything will be dandy but if you’re the sort of human trash who only upgrades her computer maybe twice a decade then Fuck You, Grandma! If this were Windows or Linux someone would have figured out how to support a nice webcam. Hell, on Linux I can even use the cheaper “Windows” webcam because, unlike Mac OS, someone figured out how to get the auto-focus working . . . the fact that Microsoft can only manage to squeeze out a potentially mandatory OS upgrade once or twice a decade begins to seem more virtuous. Apple really should let you easily upgrade components of their OS without much hassle, but selling computers is how they make money.
Fuck you, Apple. Well, I’ll find her an upgrade to OS X 10.4 for non-Intel computers on CD-not-DVD and there may even be a store around that will happily get her a memory upgrade, because something tells me that even if the Apple Store has a Genius who could, by appointment only, fill out the form to mail the computer off for a memory upgrade because woah basic maintenance on a Mac Mini is effing rocket science I suspect that when they find out it is an old computer stained by a half decade of tobacco that they will just condescendingly laugh at my horribly backward Grandmother and I’d finally snap and go in there and beat the crap out of some wannabe-hipster douchebags.
Next time Grandma gets a PC.
Friday, December 25
Cleaning up Grandma’s house. Uncle John started to explore the netbook that we got him for Christmas. Janice came by, and we were all glad. John set up an old-fashioned 120mm “dual lens reflex” box camera on a tripod and some lights and took some family Christmas photos. We also looked over some rifles that had been sitting around in Grandma’s house from the previous owner, before heading back home.
Saturday, December 26
Mom treated me to brunch, and Jessica brought the posters she got me for Christmas to her shop to frame them. Then, Mom drove me down to Union Station, for my 9PM train back towards New York.
The History Channel recently aired a show called “Modern Marvels: Banks” which first caught my ear early in the show when they reported that: “soon it may even be possible to do your banking in the kitchen, using a microwave oven . . . today there are less than 10 million consumers doing online banking, that’ll be over 100 million in the near future.”
WHAT!? I press the Info button on my television and see the show was produced in 2002. Back then my bank’s online service wouldn’t let me log in because I wasn’t running Windows.
Later in the show they cover the Gold Rush, the San Francisco earthquake and firestorm, the rise of Bank of America, the failures of banks during the Great Depression, and then they started talking about Roosevelt’s New Deal, starting with FDIC, and:
Narrator: The Government also took drastic action that split the banking industry into separate parts. Richard Sylla: It was decided that because of the stock market crash and the Depression that it would be a good idea to break off commercial banking from investment banking. Commercial banking deals with loans and deposits. Investment banking deals with underwriting securities, issuing new securities. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 decided that bankers would have to choose either to be commercial bankers or investment bankers, but they couldn’t be both. Narrator: It was thought that banks would be less likely to fail if they were not operating as financial “supermarkets.” Economists today believe that bigger financial institutions are much safer, because their risks are diversified. The merger between Citibank and Traveler’s Insurance that created the financial behemoth of Citigroup would have been illegal had the Glass-Steagall Act not been repealed in 1999.
Those economists of 2002 were right in that larger banks were less likely to fail, but this is because of government intervention to bail out financial institutions deemed “too big to fail” rather than diversification of risk. Just as economists were buying into the “bigger is safer” philosophy, my industry embraced a philosophy of small, cheap, redundant parts which could fail individually without bringing down the entire system. They built Citigroup, and we built Google.
Fortunately, these days I can do my banking from Linux, and my microwave never touches my money.
WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
Somewhere in Pakistan there’s a kid nick-named “Windows” hanging outside a cave with a laptop computer hooked up to a diesel generator. When the drones get in range, someone runs to Osama and says “Windows has detected a Predator Drone that may be trying to kill you. Take cover now? (Y/n)”
I received an e-mail with the subject “Amazon Associates and Google Blogger Now Integrated” and I was amused in much the same way that I am amused when I see a dog enjoying someone else’s vomit. The e-mail invited feedback via Twitter, but I went to fill out a form. This is what I wrote:
Hello,
I received an e-mail with the subject “Amazon Associates and Google Blogger Now Integrated” and I was like “oh, trainwreck!” Then I realized Google had added a feature so associates could link more easily. That’s cool.
Except, Blogger is a horrible, horrible, truly awful platform. Hopefully you are working so that bloggers on other platforms, like WordPress, can do stuff effectively. (I know I stopped years ago as it wasn’t worth the effort.)
This was troubling: “The new tool allows Bloggers to add links and images . . .”
Why is it troubling? Because there are bloggers, and then there are users of Blogger. I realize that “Blogger” is short-hand for a “user of Blogger” but it also implies that Amazon is thinking that the only bloggers that count are the ones with a capital B.
But the real punchline was:
“Please tell us what you think of our new Amazon Associates for Blogger feature using hashtag #AMZN4BLGR on Twitter”
This is awesome on two levels:
1) “We should collect feedback from users. I know, we can assign our users a hashtag and they can communicate with us on Twitter! We’ll be trendy cool social media mavens!”
2) “Gotta think of a hashtag! Okay . . . let us take the words Amazon and Blogger, remove the vowels, and smash it together with the number 4. Because, after all, if we’re collecting feedback from users and limiting them to 140 characters on Twitter our hashtag should look like a car’s license plate!”
Maybe instead of having a giant social media marketing boner over integration with the most technically awful leading blogging platform you could focus on delivering core functionality to users that should have been delivered four years ago.
So, I tried Windows 7 beta, and recently scored a copy of Windows 7 for my desktop PC, via employee discount. (I’d be willing to pay $50 for the OS, so $25 isn’t a bad deal. The again, Microsoft sent me some very large checks for my Tellme equity in 2007 so a very small Capitalist part of me is rooting for them.)
It is pretty nice: basically a refresh of Windows XP, with extra spit-and-polish. Zippier, too! It boots and shuts down faster than XP or Ubuntu, and manages OS updates without requiring my intervention and subsequently breaking things, like Ubuntu does. I was musing to my coworkers that if it had the following, I could switch from Linux:
I turn my computers off when I’m not using them. I like that Firefox will remember tab sessions. But waiting for an OS to boot is wasted time.
Despite recent improvements, Ubuntu still takes way too long to boot, and seemingly forever to shut down. Windows 7, by contrast, is pretty darn zippy. I like that!
Winner: Windows 7
System Updates
So, for the record, I’m thinking to turn off system updates on my Ubuntu environments, because they aren’t worth it and they keep breaking my stuff. I’ll just refresh twice a year when the new release comes out, therefor managing the pain of upgrades. Windows updates are more important, given the constant security threats. Fortunately, Windows does that for me without my noticing, save the stupid “I will forcibly reboot you in 5 minutes” thing that hasn’t hit me (yet?) on Windows 7.
Winner: Windows 7
Software Packaging
Windows seems to have made some improvements with software packaging, and I gotta say it is convenient to go to a web site, click on an installer, and a few minutes later have the application running. Of course, then there’s another icon on your desktop and the Yahoo! tool bar has been added to your web browser . . .
On Ubuntu, though, most of the time I go to a shell and type:
sudo aptitude install foo
And there I go!
Sometimes software isn’t available in the central repositories, but 9.10 has made adding some PPAs easier. And sometimes I go to a web site, click on a link to a .deb file, it downloads, the system asks for my password, and the software gets installed without leaving crappy toolbars in my environment. Victory!
Winner: Ubuntu
Virtual Desktops
Ubuntu’s Gnome interface would be nicer if I could drag windows to the side of the screen and they’d pop over to the next screen, like the fvwm2 pager. But, I’m pretty well content with Ubuntu’s virtual desktop ability.
You could probably install a decent hack on Windows 7 to get this, but really, virtual desktops and pagers should be built in.
Winner: Ubuntu
Command Line Environment
So, with Ubuntu I can fire off command shells with wild abandon and do what I need to do. (I’m a Unix system administrator, so I relate to computers mostly by typing commands and scripting.) Windows 7 has a new “PowerShell” feature that implements a few Unix commands. After half an hour of searching I discovered that you can get to the PowerShell by hitting Windows+R and then typing “powershell” — heck forbid we should put this in the start menu or make it available by searching for “shell” but okay . . .
With Ubuntu, I can highlight text by dragging and clicking my mouse. This is just like other environments, but instead of hitting control-C (or, ahem Open-Apple-C) to copy the highlighted text into your clipboard, and control-V (I mean, Command-V) to paste from your clipboard, with Unix, whatever you highlight goes straight to the clipboard, and you paste by tapping the middle mouse button.
That can be a little scary sometimes but once you get used to the convenience you really can’t go back to having to mouse and keyboard to cut and paste.
Hit Alt+Space to bring up the console menu, then type ‘E’ to bring up the ‘Edit’ menu and then ‘k’ to start copying or ‘P’ to paste the text in the clipboard to the console. In ‘copying’ mode, you just use the arrow keys while holding down the shift key to select text, and hit Enter to add the selection to the clipboard.
“Ah, hello, Microsoft? Yes, the 1980s called and they want their primitive user interface back. Thanks!”
Update: You can launch PowerShell is a window that supports text highlighting by dragging the mouse via Start > All Programs > Windows PowerShell > Windows PowerShell. It looks like you can copy highlighted text with control+C and paste with the right mouse button. (Getting closer, I guess!)
Winner: Ubuntu
Focus Follow Mouse
Down in the accessibility menu, there’s an option for “Activate a window by hovering over it with a mouse” . . . but checking that option doesn’t actually change the behavior . . .
I’ll give Internet Explorer some credit; I can type whatever crazy thing I want into the URL bar and the second it realizes I didn’t type a URL, it goes over to Bing. Nice!
But then the default behavior is to create new windows all over. Seriously: what is the point of tabbed browsing if you don’t put stuff in the tabs? The big fail though is that for whatever reason the WordPress HTML editor in Explorer keeps jumping up to the top of the text input window, which made working out this post a seriously annoying experience.
A quick install of Google Chrome and my web browsing experience not only interfaces well with WordPress and pops new windows into tabs, but I can type whatever crazy stuff I want into the URL bar and in a not-be-evil sort of way, it shunts me with due humility over to Bing. So, Chrome is my new default web browser for Windows 7. (And I’ll continue trying out Bing, even though I’m a Google fan-boy.)
I remembered a dream this weekend. I was walking in Bangkok and it occurred to me I should turn off the data on my smart phone, lest I get raped by the service provider. Then I was kind of pleased to see that my smart phone was my Sidekick 2, because that thing was just wonderful.
Then I said to myself “I’m in Bangkok with a smart phone and its a Sidekick 2 when I know I own a G1, so like, am I dreaming?!” And so my unconscious was like shitshit, no look, it says Sidekick 4! Whoo! Shiny! Wouldn’t that make an awesome Android phone!? And I was like “damn, that rocks! When did we come up with this?”
Many appreciate what he has to say, but then again, he is basically articulating what we all know, and plenty figure that maybe his writing is no longer fresh, and he is just cranking out articles in order to shill his warez:
“This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum. Once a week, the team gets together, in person or virtually, and reviews the previous week’s work. Then they decide which features and tasks to do over the next week. FogBugz would work great for tracking this . . .”
My position is that most stuff we read is mediocre, and Joel at least writes well, and Joel wears his ulterior motives on his sleeve, so when he starts figuring FogBugz can cure what ails CS curricula, I just figure “and now a word from our sponsors” and my brain hits the fast-forward button.
I think Tom actually has the best reaction to the issue Joel brings up, in that he adds that different people have different learning methods:
We all know there are students that are “visual learners”, “audio learners” and “kinesthetic” learners.
We all know what? Okay, yeah, and “everyone” is talking about this, right? Anyway, Tom, like me, is a learning-by-doing kind of guy who didn’t always “get” the formal CS curriculum:
When I took my undergraduate class on software engineering methodology I felt it was useless because I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was being taught. Most of my programming had been done solo or on a small team. I could not take seriously the problems that were being “fixed” by the software methodologies discussed in our lectures. “Code size estimation? Bah! Impossible, so why even try!”
In my CS days, the bits I enjoyed most were the learning-by-doing: compiling my first C program, bending my mind around recursion and functional programming to complete assignments in MIT Scheme, implementing a virtual spanning tree, and coming up on my own with the idea of a finite-state automaton to parse NWS weather forecasts. (Okay, that wasn’t a CS assignment and I didn’t know how to talk to girls.)
The parts where I fell completely flat were the theoretical classes where we considered bizarre hypothetical problems that didn’t make sense, using Greek letters that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. One day my ECE roommate asked how, as a CS major, I would go about sorting one million integers. My response was “why would you want to sort one million integers?” Later I slept through multiple lectures where the best methods of sorting integers were discussed at length. I skimmed the slides so I know that Quicksort performs well and in-place, but that Bubble Sort may work better if your data is mostly sorted, so in my mind that just means that if anybody asks how you would sort one million integers, the correct answer is to ask some questions as to why they need to sort one million integers.
Uh, yeah. Anyway, what was I nattering on about? Joel’s schtick is that CS students aren’t taught to manage large, complex, “real world” projects with lots of moving pieces. CS mostly focuses on the “interesting 10%” like how you would sort a million integers and skips over the boring 90% of hard work like implementing the interface for the customer to provide their million integers and retrieve the results. And Mark Dennehy’s reaction was “of course we focus on the interesting ten percent: the other 90% is constantly changing and best learned on the job!”
But, addressing the “how do you tackle big projects” thing, I think Joel has a point. And his point isn’t new. The point is extra-curricular activity.
Whether you’re a visual learner or whatever, the biggest secret to learning things is to find the thing that you are studying interesting. The very best computer programmers are all fucking fascinated by the challenge of getting the computers to do things within given parameters. Computer programming is fun because when you get down to it, it is a lot like computer games: a person at the interface banging away until they get their dopamine fix by either beating the level boss or getting the damn thing to compile and spit out the correct result.
Well, that is for the learning-by-doing types. Some computer programmers get their jollies by trying to fathom a new and novel method of sorting one million integers. Whatever floats their boat, I guess.
Anyway, long story short, I’m thinking the learning-by-doing types tend to get a little queasy after a few CS theory classes and end up majoring in English in order to score a bachelors degree, but they keep tinkering with the computers along the way, and end up, like Tom and me, as systems administrators, figuring out the best way to keep 1,000 computers running in order to make it possible to sort billions of objects with map-reduce algorithms in constant time.
Oh yeah, and that I agree with Joel that motivated CS students ought to find non-class projects that they are passionate about, and thereby gain chances to collaborate with others on the sort of “real world” challenges that they are likely to face in their professional careers. Back at Illinois the ACM played a big role in this. I myself did some time apprenticing at NCSA and at an ISP, and the big win these days it would seem are the oodles of Open Source projects ready to put interested volunteers to work. And that’s why Google’s “Summer of Code” just sounds like a fantastically great idea.
