Dev::Blog

Sure, you could buy this book through the link on the left, and you’d be smart to do so - it’s one of the best business-related books I’ve read this year - but you’d be almost as well off by just reading The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker, a profile on the author in Inc. by the co-author. The book’s a longer version of the article, which isn’t a bad thing - there’s a difference between taking more time to explain concepts and filling out an article into a book, and the book’s well worth the price. As sneak previews go though, you can’t go too wrong with the article.

I know Apple’s Mail.app junk filter is bad, and I shudder to think of the people who actually trust it enough to have it automatically put junk mail in the junk folder, but there are times when it just blows my mind away.

Like just now.

When it flagged a message FROM ME, TO ME, as junk (I’m on a group distribution list.)

The original’s in my sent folder.

It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it’s not like I was trying to sell myself Rolex watches or anything…

You know those times when you’ve been fighting a bug for an hour or two, and nothing’s working, which means it’s got to be in the “stupid error” category, but you just can’t figure out what you did wrong while drinking that pint of gin, and then you finally find the problem, or at least you think you have, and you’re waiting for the test to run to know for sure, and you don’t know if you want that to be the problem or not, because it’d be nice to be done with it, but at the same time you don’t want the last two hours to have been wasted because you had, say, a stray control that wasn’t inheriting the right parent?

[Inhale]

That’s where I live.

There oughtta be a name for that place. It sure ain’t Funkytown.

FYI, if you’ve got a USB headset, you might appreciate SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba - it lets you change audio input and output devices from the menu bar.

New additions to the Lab:

Plantronics DSP-400 Headset: I’ve been meaning to pick up a headset for a while for late night Skype calls, mostly for the microphone - there are 2 doors between the office and the bedroom, but shouting at the computer when there’s a bad connection isn’t the best way to help someone sleep. I was going to just get a cheap headset with the separate headphone and microphone jacks, but in the end I opted for a USB model. I’m really happy the the decision. The cable is 3 metres long, so I can actually get out of my chair, and the volume control on the remote controls the main OS X volume. The only thing I wish it had was a way to detach just the headphones (leaving the USB connection) for those moments when you need to go more than 3m.

Inspired by my new monkey powers, I also sprang for Skype voicemail. Now, if they’d just offer Canadian numbers with SkypeIn, I’d be a happy happy guy. Skype’s not the best VoIP service I’ve ever used, but the mobility and productivity it gives me is awesome. (Y’all can call if you want - I’m ThrustLabs. No guarantee I’ll answer, but hey! Voicemail!)

D-Link DI-524 wireless router: My Linksys router gave up the ghost last week, and after a horrible experience with a Netgear repacked model (I will never, ever, ever again buy a repacked piece of hardware), I was up and running with the D-Link model. It’s smaller, and seems punchier and more reliable - I might even give the ol’ “running a home server” option a try, what with my static IP and all (if not a web site, possibly some persistent services on other ports that would normally require a dedicated box).

Belkin Firewire 6 port hub. If you use Firewire, get one now. Especially if you’ve got an iMac, as I mentioned earlier. All of a sudden, stuff is working. My external hard drive that wouldn’t mount, that I thought I was going to have to go all DiskWarrior on? It’s moving files as we speak. The iSight and iPod are both on (note to self: figure out something to do with the iSight. Nobody needs to see my ugly mug), and I’m itching to transfer some DV, something that’s actually an option, thanks to my backup drive. Rawk.

Now I just need to generate some revenue for all the other stuff that’s on my list…

For a collections junkie like myself, Microsoft’s LINQ technology looks pretty damned cool - it’s basically a way to get query languages integrated nicely with code. I’m not going to get too far into it, since I imagine it’ll all change before C# 3.0 gets out.

And that’s the point.

My former job was in a large, enterprise-sized company. When I left earlier this year, they still had Windows NT on a lot of the desktops. I would claw my eyes out every day reading about the cool features that would solve real problems, all available Right Now, but I knew that the company wouldn’t have the infrastructure rolled out for at least another year, and there was a good chance that IT would leave out some DLL that didn’t matter to anyone but me (yes, I could get it included, but it would take a fight and 6 months to deploy).

In the meantime, Microsoft would go and pitch the Next Big Thing, like they did this week with C# 3.0. If I’m not mistaken, version 2.0 isn’t even out in a non-beta, production-supported release yet.

Don’t get me wrong - I chose to subscribe to MSDN so I could get more access to these toys and better plan the technology roadmap for my new company’s products. I’m working on what I hope will be my last .Net 1.1 project right now, and I’m screaming at VS.Net 2003 every day for no better reason than the fact that I know 2005 will be so much better. It’s just too bad that 2005 is doomed from the start, because it doesn’t support version 3.0.

In the last job, open source stuff like Rails, etc. were incredibly exciting for me because they represented fewer roadblocks to getting things out the door. Now that the new company is firmly in the MS camp (although we do use MySQL), and it’s mostly my fault decision, I can see a bit clearer - the frameworks we create with whatever tools we use are the exciting part, and while MS’s 5 year (or whatever) vision may help us keep things exciting (or make some of our frameworks obsolete), at the end of the day, it’s the bandwidth from our brains to the code that has the power to depress or exhilarate us.

Via Boing Boing, Google’s got a new blog search tool that’s a whole lot faster than Technorati (OK, what isn’t these days?). I’ve now got an RSS feed for the last 100 mentions of vegan, which may or may not help my work. We’ll see. Unfortunately, and this might be where the “beta” comes in (although there are days where I think it’s a new Google brand), doing something like an ego search for your blog might just turn up every entry you’ve ever written (OK, it only gave back 88 results, but the first 6 or so pages were my own entries).

The performance disparity between this and something like Technorati has a lot to do with having something like 900 million servers and the infrastructure behind it, and Moore’s Law notwithstanding, it’s going to take a significant algorithmic shift for anyone to catch up, MS or no. I see a common trend in the business world where a company grows and later realizes that some by-product of their business (usually IP-related) has become a significant asset on its own, sometimes more so than the initial business offering. What do you suppose that means when the by-product is a copy of the internet, i.e. everyone else’s IP?

Homework: get copy of The Search.

A quick “while I think of it” update that could also be a “while I wait for installs and reboots” (my ThinkPad got wonky while I was installing WinXP on the iMac - hardware jealousy or just a bad omen?):

If you can’t copy files from your iMac to your iPod, try unplugging your iSight (like you ever use the damned thing anyway). The Firewire ports on the iMac G5s are pretty low-wattage, apparently, and an external hub might not be a bad idea.

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this earlier, but my MSDN subscription includes not only Virtual PC for Windows, but the OS X version as well. Sweet!

I don’t expect I’ll be using it a lot, but if it does a better job than the OS X version of Remote Desktop Connection (only one connection at a time???), I’ll be happy.

The rest of the MSDN pack looks pretty cool, I just have to find enough disk space on my ThinkPad to be able to take advantage of it beyond the desperately needed copy of Visual Studio that I downloaded as soon as I got my welcome email. I’ve already bought two computers this year, and it’d be real swell if I could last until January before buying another (although I already have a spot picked out for it in the new office…)

Don’t get me wrong - I still love my Mac, but C# pays most of my bills. Uh, I guess that includes my MSDN subscription bill…

Update: Wow, that took a long time. Slooowwww…. Granted, I haven’t changed any of the settings, but I can’t imagine running anything on the “listed as supported” G3. On the other hand, since I only wanted this for the odd Remote Desktop Connection session, and in those cases the processing power is done elsewhere, it’s actually pretty comparable to the same work on the laptop - network lag is just enough to cover for the emulation layer.