Category: technology

thousand updates

interdubs technology

The code management system I wrote for INTERDUBS happens to also count the number of updates that I publish to my clients. It just hit 1,000. Of those about 10-20% were cosmetic updates. Like typos or smaller changes in the html to make things more readable etc. Luckily less than 5% were bug fixes. I code in small chunks and those extensively. And maybe it is also a matter of routine. I hope I know what I am doing, and where changes would jeopardize the system. Of course stating this is inviting trouble. A thousand times I changed the running INTERDUBS. While it was in use by clients and admins. And: nobody ever noticed. Flying the airplane and fixing it. I really love this part of the project: Somebody has an idea. I look at it, and can tell them right away how doable it is, or in the best cases the reply email is as terse as “good idea! done”.

The fast majority of all the good things that came in those 1,000 updates were actually customer ideas. The people using the system know best what they need. It is really great being able to listen to them and to implement what they want.

change comment colors in vim

technology

Syntax coloring in vim is pretty awesome. Comments however are by default blue. A color that is hard to read if you have a black background on a LCD screen.

It turns out that this pretty easy to change. For perl you would simply do:


mkdir -p ~/.vim/after/syntax/
echo highlight perlComment ctermfg=DarkGreen guifg=DarkGreen >> ~/.vim/after/syntax/perl.vim

This worked right away after adopting the C example of the documentation. I am sure that php etc will work similar.

numbers: don’t count on it

Apple M$ technology

I am an casual office software user. I write things in vi or text edit. And yes, that’s how they sound. I never was that big in to spread sheets. But graphing solutions I need. I had written my own things for SGI, but even though OS X is OpenGL as well, it is just too much work to maintain.

Since my kids now start using office software I thought I’d get them iWork. Big mistake. Pages is ok (compared to vi and text edit). Numbers however is just outright lame. I hate the fact that Apple is able to pretend that this pile of junk is software that you can make an attempt to sell. Trying to graph anything in this turd of a bloatware reveals how 0.5 ass this thing is. The problem is that crappy software is worth negative money: It took me hours to figure out that it was actual this ‘spreadsheet application’ that was just unable to do even simple tasks.
“Numbers” has no understanding of time. I will download now Mac Office 2008. Which is even reasonably priced these days. Looking forward to use Microsoft software. How weird is that!

monome

art technology

I had not heard of the monome before. I saw one today and it looks very nice. Could be so much fun. If I’d had the time + skills for it. Still a pretty awesome device.

betting on the wrong horse

Apple M$ technology

Years ago when both Microsoft and Apple decided what to put into their next operating systems they had to look into the future. Picking arbritrary one from each company makes for an interesting comparison: Vista got a feature where a memory stick could be used by the operating system to speed things up. Harddrives are 10,000 times slower than memory. USB2 still 10 to 40 times faster than most drivers. Makes allot of sense. It is probably a very tricky thing to implement: the user can remove the stick at any time, and things still need to work. Trouble is: Internal memory got dirt cheap. So a complicated and expensive idea that has no future net gain.

Compare that to “TimeMachine”. The actual concept of a backup is nothing new or innovative at all. But Time Machine makes it possible that people back up easily. External drives are inexpensive and easy to use. Makes 100% sense. The TimeCapsule rip off lets show apples dark side again. But at least they did not extend it to normal drives. The value of a working backup is huge. Once people have stories to tell that TimeMachine saved their Live they are sold for good and forever to run only Macs. Maybe if hey will backup to Memory Sticks in the future …

Astrovlog

technology

If you ever wondered what those astronauts are doing up there:

vloging

no backup will get you

confessions of a pixel pusher technology

Douglas the movie No idea what it was. Looks like allot of work is gone. That can happen.

Digital is binary:

Your data either can be 100% safe. Safer than anything before. Ever.

Or it goes away. Completely. Nothing left.

The real world operates only in matters like life and death on such a binary pattern. Otherwise there is often stuff left. Something to be saved, recovered. Not so in digital.

Google App Engine Error: Over Quota

internet technology

After reading a couple of intro pages I suddenly get this error message at 7:20 am Pacific:

App Engine Error

Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

I have not even created an application yet. Actually I am glad I did not: I would have blamed myself for this. Probably would have panicked, thinking that my application would have caused all sorts of trouble.

I wonder how many applications will be built based on this offering. It is tempting to have all those resources. But being 100% depending on one vendor is a strange feeling. No matter what the legal stuff says, you always are depending on Google. Who else would be able to build a competing infrastructure?

people, programmers and bosses

history technology

Paul Graham writes about people, programmers and bosses. I agree. He left out to mention much came from the Google 20% projects. It does support his theory.

I often wonder myself how big companies can actually stay in business. There is real work. When stuff gets done. The core. Things get made. Be it a line of code or a shoe. And then there is all the work around it: To pay the heating bills for the building that the bean counter sits in that supervises the expenses of the health care plan of the person that buys the spare parts for the forklifts that move the pakaging for the shoes from one side to the next.

Since technology can facilitate inter company communication and collaboration it might be that we will see allot of small companies that work one project. As long interfaces between these unit remain efficient they can keep the initiative of a small group and still work on a project that is of larger size. In an ideal world these groups would compete on clearly defined terms which would optimise everything very very fast.

polaroid – the end of it

history technology

a story in pictures about some of the last Polaroid employees

I really liked my SX 70 and the Time Zero film.