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18 posts tagged geek
18 posts tagged geek
The hot new framework for summer 2012.
One of the major drivers of my switch to DuckDuckGo this past weekend.
I figure I’ll spend a week with DDG then try Bing if I’m not satisfied. Then I’ll explore the other hopefuls if necessary. DDG has a lot of geek-friendly features, though. E.g., bang syntax for searching known sources specifically, like Ruby docs.
I did something today that I haven’t done in about ten years: I switched Internet search services. I’m now trying out DuckDuckGo instead of the large-number Mountain View corporation that has been doing some really bizarre and occasionally evil things recently. I had to install the Glims Safari extension to do it, but that turns out to be fairly nifty so it’s been a win thus far.
It was easier in Chrome. Yes, I realize that’s fairly hilarious, but I’m not generating revenue for Google by using Chrome, so far as I know. I like the Chrome incognito window a lot.
I built a machine yesterday to be my development workshop for my current project. This gets easier every time I do it, because cabling gets more & more sensible. SATA cables are so easy to deal with that even I can route them properly.
DanW wanted to know what hardware I chose, so here’s the exact list:
Supermicro X9SCI-LN4F mobo (Intel Sandy Bridge, socket 1155, micro ATX)
Intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2GHz
240-pin DDR3 ECC unbuffered RAM (not yet available in usable 8G size, unfortunately, so you can’t yet hit the mobo’s max of 32GB)
Samsung 64GB SSD (6Gbit/s SATA III)
2x Samsung 2TB HD204 (3Gbit/s SATA II)
SeaSonic X650 Gold PSU (all modular)
Have a USB stick with your Linux distro of choice (for me, Ubuntu 11 server) to boot from. No graphics, no CD/DVD drive, because all this is doing is sitting in our home rack being a server, storing data, and compiling things now & then. It would make a pleasantly capable desktop machine as well if you added some graphics.
About charisma, what that is, and leadership styles. Charismatic leaders, charismatic organizations, how they work long-term. Fascinating article.
Mostly I’ve cared more about the personal essays from people who knew him or worked with him. (Two steps away from me, via General Magic coworkers, which was my first experience of working directly with legendary names, with people who’d made things I admired deeply. It was odd.) I liked this slideshow with brief quotes, however.
As a nerdling writing my first software on an Apple ][, Woz was more immediately inspirational than Jobs, but Jobs was the one who just kept on making things I loved.
Their initial architecture sounds a lot like Danger’s. Unlike the Danger story, this one had a happier ending with the team divisions & software divisions going away as a better approach to design swept in. Danger never got rid of the us-vs-them mentality, and its client phone features only moved forward when they could be implemented without any back end requirements.
Via several ex-Danger peeps on Twitter.
Yellow Drum Machine. You can build it! Via @haineux.
Best Safari extension after the adblockers: rewrites video embeds to use an HTML5 player instead of Flash. This brings me pretty close to being able to uninstall Flash entirely!
Linked to is the latest horror unleashed upon an undeserving net: my “flavors.me” mashup site. Errors out about half the time I attempt to add a new service to it, but eventually succeeds. Great modern use of Javascript for editing, but sadly limited to ugly templates unless you stump up for $20/year.
I would much rather have this mashup hosted on Tumblr than on Yet Another Service. I do yearn to have my last.fm data on my Tumblog, and importing a tiny bit of data into a clumsily-formatted weekly post isn’t satisfying. But I want it here, not over there.
I created accounts on various other social networking services while trying this out. It’s nice that these services are getting a single login, but it’s awful that this login is Facebook’s and not somebody I like and/or trust. I’d have preferred a Google login. So far I have declined to use my Facebook login for anything, since at any moment I might have a fit of ultra-nerdy grumpiness and delete my Facebook account altogether.
One is the raw numbers issue, and I agree strongly with the linked-to writer that we need to deal with it with early education. Grade school is the time to hook women on math & science. The second is the glass ceiling issue, which is more general.
[W]e ran into frustrating timeouts and stalls that made us want to throw the phone across the room. Overall, it’s just a deeply, deeply frustrating and inconsistent experience.
As predicted, then.
I’ve been using Evernote on my Mac and iPhone for a while, to sync drafts of text documents to my iPhone to read on the go. This is secretly my attempt to solve the problem of syncing from my Macs to my pocket devices, a problem that Apple has so far entirely avoided addressing. No, iTunes is not a sane syncing solution. It’s a music playback app that has been ludicrously overloaded by unrelated tasks. MobileMe should be that syncing genie, but is instead nearly entirely useless to me. And yes, I’ve had a Mac.com/MobileMe account since it was released in 2000.
But back to the problem: I have text documents on my Macbook Air that I want to stick onto an even more portable device so I can ponder them and maybe make small edits to them. Think car ride, train ride, nice long soak in the bath. Until a couple of weeks ago, that portable device was my iPhone. Now, that portable device is the iPad.
I originally tried Evernote to see if it would give me the sync I longed for. And mostly, it does. There are clients for Mac, iPhone, and a bunch of other phones. They have a server that handles over the air syncing for all documents managed by the client. The clients are free; they make their money by displaying ads in the client & by selling subscriptions to a premium more-bits-synced-per-month service free of ads. Since I loathe ads but like supporting software developers, I pay for the premium service.
Evernote has lots of features I don’t care about. I only ever sync text documents, for instance, not images, so I never get anywhere near the bandwidth limitations for even the free version of their service. They have a lot of nifty features that make more sense once you’ve stuck images into your notes or geotagged them. But the syncing does work the way I expect it to, the way I wish it worked for all of Apple’s apps. I make edits on the desktop and they sync. I launch the portable clients, and they sync. My data gets distributed without me having to think about it.
It’s gorgeous on the new iPad client. It’s perfect for reading what I’ve written. I really like the document browser at the top of the document read view. I’m particularly fond of the “all notes” view. The “tags” view with the luggage-tag violator is a little too twee for me. I can imagine take advantage of the geo-tagging feature and the “places” view the next time I go road-tripping.
So for viewing my documents, it’s great.
Editing on the remote clients is a disaster. Okay, I exaggerate. But I’m not happy with it, and it’s the feature of the app I use least. Here’s how I use it: I never edit in the Mac client, save to decorate a document with tags. I always copy and paste from my real editor, BBEdit. Then I’ll read on the pocket client and attempt to make small text edits.
The first problem is with syncing back. I have constant problems with syncing from my iPhone & iPad to the server. My documents often fail to sync back to their service with the message “unknown synchronization error u11”. This error has been present in their iPhone client for months and it’s also there in their iPad client. The problem appears to be with escaping urls in text. (Remember: You have a problem and decide to use XML to solve it. Now you have two problems. Enjoy!) My usual fix is to switch from straight html-formatted urls to Markdown-formatted urls, which I can handle later with Markdown preprocessing. But still, what an embarrassing error to leave in your software for so long.
Next problem: Accidents happen to my line endings/paragraph breaks whenever I get text back from remote clients. As in, they vanish. I cannot copy from Evernote and paste back into BBEdit because everything ends up as a single line of text. (My workaround is to email the document, which is, let me tell you, a stupid thing to have to do.) Maybe I’m an unusual case, in that I am not editing formatted text, but instead Markdown-styled plain ASCII text, but really, I find this mucking with my content unnecessary. If you attempt to be clever, you have to get it absolutely right or it’s worse than doing nothing at all would have been.
Interaction problem: Editing is distinct from viewing a note, for some reason. So, for instance, I will be reading a long stretch of text and find a spot mid-way through where I’d like to make an edit. I can’t edit immediately. Instead I have to press an edit button and be taken to a new view… which is scrolled to the very top. I have to scroll and scroll and scroll down again until I relocate my edit target. My first reaction was, why not stay in edit view all the time? That makes the read-only view useless, except that I like the read view because it also includes the nifty navigation/thumbnail widgets for the rest of my notes. The edit view doesn’t have the navigation. My suggestion for a fix would be to find some way to make editing happen inline. Tap on the view pane to make it live? Sync after some period of inactivity, or if the simplicity of a Save button is needed, make one appear when the document has been changed.
Text editing on the iPad is agony sans keyboard, but that’s hardly Evernote’s fault. Also, it’s not really what the iPad is about. I am at peace with its content-consumer focus.
My final assessment is that my use of Evernote is the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut. What I really want is for Apple to make my MobileMe subscription worthwhile and handle over-the-air syncing to and from my iPad, for documents of all kinds. And then I want some kind of text browser/editor on the iPad side. I love the document browser portions of Evernote. I’d gladly give them some money for that user interface. Even more money if the editor were Markdown-aware. (Yeah, I’ll bet that’s too geeky for most potential users of an app like this.)
“SHIPMENT IS HELD TO VERIFY COMMODITY DESCRIPTION WITH THE CUSTOMER FOR CORRECT CLASSIFICATION / BROKERAGE RELEASED SHIPMENT. SHIPMENT IS SUBMITTED TO CLEARING AGENCY FOR FURTHER CLEARANCE”