News aggregator

Cool Tool: It’s All Too Much

As my battle with clutter continues, one of my favorite people (and one of the smartest guys writing for the web, period), Kevin Kelly, noticed my efforts and took note of my affection for Peter Walsh’s wonderful book, It’s All Too Much.

My review for Cool Tools is indeed adapted from a few posts that originated here, but I think it’s worth pointing to because, a) that book has had a huge influence on how I think about my relationship to “stuff,” b) I’m honored that KK liked what I’d had to say about it, and c) if you aren’t already reading Kevin’s sites — particularly his consistently insightful The Technium column — you’d do yourself a favor to get acquainted fast. Kevin’s the real deal.

I also like what Kevin had to add to the review, regarding the need for an “anti-stuff tool”:

Merlin Mann’s review turned me onto this fantastic book. We’ve rethought our household because of it. We were reminded that life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable. For a world of expanding stuff, this book is the necessary anti-stuff tool.

plumber pup iz asleep on da job

read more

Eltin Jon Dog iz redee fur conzert now

read more

Thx loudribs

Honesty WIN

read more

Sure everyone knows about DoubleClick, but Google has bought a lot more than just that company. Ever who they all are. Check out this Wikipedia list.

BACON?!

read more

jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield takes a look at the latest KDE beta and finds it wanting: 'Very likely, KDE users will have to wait for another release or two beyond 4.1 before the new version of KDE matches the features of earlier ones, especially in customization.' He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say, 'Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake.' I'm not too sure about that — really, 'everyone?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

go on… pull my tail

read more

Thx retroK

Threesome WIN?

read more

In A Developer's Second Most Important Asset, I described how buying a quality chair may be one of the smartest investments you can make as a software developer.

In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I've come to one conclusion: you can't expect to get a decent chair for less than $500. If you are spending less than that on seating -- unless you are getting the deal of the century on dot-bomb bankruptcy auctions -- you're probably making a mistake.

I still believe this to be true, and I urge any programmers reading this to seriously consider the value of what you're sitting in while you're on the job. In our profession, seating matters:

• Chairs are a primary part of the programming experience. Eight hours a day, every day, for the rest of your working life -- you're sitting in one. Like it or not, whatever you're sitting in has a measurable impact on your work experience.
• Cheap chairs suck. Maybe I've become spoiled, but I have yet to sit in a single good, cheap chair. In my experience, the difference between the really great chairs and the cheap stuff is enormous. A quality chair is so comfortable and accommodating it effortlessly melts into the background, so you can focus on your work. A cheesy, cheap chair constantly reminds you how many hours of work you have left.

• Chairs last. As I write this, I'm still sitting my original Aeron chair, which I purchased in 1998. I can't think of any other piece of equipment I use in my job that has lasted me ten full years and beyond. While the initial sticker shock of a quality chair may turn you off, try to mentally amortize that cost across the next ten years or more.

Choice of seating is as fundamental and constant as it gets in a programming career otherwise marked by relentless change. They are long term investments. Why not take the same care and consideration in selecting a chair as you would with the other strategic directions that you'll carry with you for the rest of your career? Skimping yourself on a chair just doesn't make sense.

Although I've been quite happy with my Herman Miller Aeron chair over the last 10 years, I've always been a little disenchanted with the way it became associated with dot-com excess:

In the '90s, the Aeron became an emblem of the dot-com boom; it symbolized mobility, speed, efficiency, and 24/seven work weeks. The Aeron was a must-have for hot startups precisely because it looked the least like office furniture: It was more like a piece of machinery or unadorned engineering. The black Pellide webbing was durable, and hid whatever Jolt or Red Bull stains you might get on it. Held taut by an aluminum frame, the mesh allowed air to circulate and kept your body cool. What's more, the chair came in three sizes, like a personalized tool. Assorted knobs and levers allowed you to adjust the seat height, tilt tension, tilt range, forward tilt, arm height, arm width, arm angle, lumbar depth, and lumbar height. The Aeron was high-tech but sexy -- which was how the dot-commers saw themselves.

But baby-faced CEOs weren't drawn to the Aeron only for the way it looked. The Aeron was a visual expression of the anti-corporate zeitgeist, a non-hierarchical philosophy about the workplace. An office full of Aerons implicitly rejected the Fortune 500, coat-and-tie, brick-and-mortar model in which the boss sinks back in an overpriced, oversized, leather dinosaur while his secretary perches on an Office Max toadstool taking notes.

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a newer Herman Miller Mirra chair on a trip, and I was surprised how much more comfortable it felt than my classic Aeron.

The Mirra chair was an excellent recliner, too. I've been disappointed by how poorly the Aeron reclines. I actually broke my Aeron's recline pin once and had to replace it myself. So I've retrained myself not to recline, which is awkward, as I'm a natural recliner.

All this made me wonder if I should retire my Aeron and upgrade to something better. I liked the Mirra, but the comments to my original chair post have a lot of other good seating suggestions, too. Here are pictures and links to the chairs that were most frequently mentioned as contenders, in addition to the Mirra and Aeron pictured above:

Steelcase Think Chair

Steelcase Leap Chair

Ergohuman Mesh Chair

HumanScale Freedom Chair

HumanScale Liberty Chair

There were also some lesser known recommendations, such as the Haworth Zody chair, Nightingale CXO chair, BodyBilt ergo chairs, Hag kneeling chair, NeutralPosture ergo, and something called the swopper.

Chair fit is, of course, a subjective thing. If you're investing $500+ in a chair, you'd understandably want to be sure it's "the one". The thing to do is find a local store that sells all these chairs and try them all out. Well, good luck with that. Don't even bother with your local big-box office supply chain. Your best bet seems to be back stores, as they tend to stock many of the more exotic chairs. Apparently they have a clientele of people who are willing to spend for comfort.

Reviews of individual chairs are relatively easy to find, but aren't particularly helpful in isolation. What we need is a multi-chair review roundup. The only notable roundup I know of is Slate's late 2005 Sit Happens: The Search for the Best Desk Chair. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, but it does have most of the main contenders. Notably, Slate's winner was the HumanScale Liberty. Update: I found another good multiple chair roundup at CrunchGear as well.

If this is all a bit too much furniture porn for your tastes, I understand. As for me, I'm headed off to my local friendly neighborhood back store to figure out which of these chairs will best replace my aging Aeron. By my calculations, the Aeron cost me about $7 per month over its ten year lifetime; I figure my continued health and comfort while programming are worth at least that much.

[advertisement] Read the largest case study ever published about lightweight peer code review in Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. Free book, free shipping.

bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thx My Very Own

read more

I’m just going to write this once, and point back to it in the future.

read more

Thx Chuck S.

read more

Engadget’s editor-in-chief Ryan Block will be leaving parent company AOL shortly, sources say, to l

read more

read more

It was mentioned to me that when transferring files on an internal network that by selecting a different cryptographic cipher you could improve the file transfer performance.  So, since I had a few spare minutes and elected not to scratch my bum I whipped up the following little script to test the theory.

I elected to scp a random ~700Mb file I affectionately called disc1.iso  (it was actually just random data, but you get the idea) to my localhost.  That is, I transferred the file from system A to system A.   I’m not interested in getting the highest possible speed with this test, i’m more interested in the relative performance of the ciphers.   Doing this creates a ‘relatively’ stable environment to conduct the comparisons.

I added my ssh key to allow myself to talk to myself - sort of like this blog really with the number of readers I have :-)  Then I did the following (a man ssh shows the valid ciphers for protocol 2)

This creates a results file which in my case looks like this :

Now, according to the man page aes128-cbc is the default cipher for Protocol version 2 so if I use this as the baseline then the relative performance becomes  :

Based on those numbers I really wouldn’t bother trying to select a different cipher for the file transfer.

Note 1: This was performed on a run of the mill core 2 duo system running Ubuntu Hardy, you will possibly find that certain architectures have better results with certain ciphers possibly due to the instruction set being a better fit for a certain algorithm or in the case of higher end servers the availability and use of cryptographic hardware.

Note 2:  The seq 1 1 allows you to run the test multiple times, just change it to seq 1 10 to run each test 10 times.  I just did it once for the purposes of putting it in the blog.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about DTrace, and Tim Bray’s tweet finally got me moving. It looks like some people are trying to make DTrace a topic for this year’s Linux Kernel Summit. I hope they succeed. I also hope that those folks pushing for user level tracing have their voices heard. I was amused to read one of the messages which claimed that DTrace is:

DTrace is more a piece of sun marketing coolaid which they use to beat us up at every opportunity.

My experience at Sun thus far is that people generally don’t really appreciate the benefits of DTrace. It stems from a view that I also saw in the LKS threads, which is that DTrace (and tools like Systemtap) is a tool for system administrators, because it reports on activity on the kernel. That’s not how I look at it. DTrace is a tool for dealing with full system stack problems, which initially manifest themselves as operating system level problems. The fact that DTrace can trace user land code as well as kernel code is what makes it so important, especially to people building and running web applications. Because of all the moving parts in a complicated web application (think relational database, memcached or other caching layers, programming language runtime, etc), it can be hard to debug a web application that has gone awry in production. Worse, sometimes the problems only appear in production. Tools which cut across several layers of the system are very important, and DTrace provides this capability, if all the layers have probes installed. When a web application goes wrong in production, you see it at the operating system level - high usage of various system resources. That’s where you start looking, but you will probably end up somewhere else (unless you are ace at exercising kernel bugs). Perhaps a bad SQL query or perhaps a bad piece of code in part of the application. A tool that can help connect the dots between operating system level resource problems and application level code is a vital tool. That’s where the value is.

One of the cooler features of DTrace is that you can register a user level stack helper (a ustack helper), which can translate the stack in a provider specific manner. One cool example of this is the ustack helper that John Levon wrote for Python, which annotates the stack with source level information about the Python file(s) being traced. On an appropriately probed system, this would mean that you could trace the Python code of a Django application, memcached, and your relational database (PostgreSQL and soon MySQL). That would be very handy.

I’d love to see DTrace on Linux, because I have it on OS X and it’s in OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but I’d also be happy to see SystemTap get to the point where it could do the same job.

2muchcoffeeman writes "Former Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony — whose relationship with his former employer has turned acrimonious, to say the least — reported on his blog that Xandros and Linspire signed an agreement in principle for Xandros to buy Linspire June 19. Carmony includes a scan of the memo to Linspire shareholders announcing the deal, which requires the former Linspire company to change its name. According to the memo, the stockholders voted to change the company's name to Digital Cornerstone, Inc. Despite the wording of the Linspire memo to stockholders, this deal apparently came as a surprise to Carmony and other stockholders. Some here may remember that both Xandros and Linspire signed patent protection deals with Microsoft in 2007."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.