Geekdom
OOo
Screw Microsoft. I’m done with their Office products. I’ve been using OpenOffice for a while, and have now given their 2.0 beta2 a good test drive. It’s simply great. Everything almost anyone could need (including DB connectivity and presentation software) in a 75 meg download. Don’t pay for MS Office when you buy a new computer: just get OOo.
Legally yours
In our modern litigious world, it is sometimes hard to know where the lines lie. Fortuntately, every once in a while someone will step in and help out the laypeople of the world with some plain-English guidance. Take it for what it is worth, but the EFF put out a legal guide for bloggers which I think is pretty cool. I’m only a few degrees of separation from people who have gotten sued or fired because of their personal blogs. This seems like a new, interesting realm of law.
Geeks make better lovers
There is of course quite a little buzz in the nerd/geek world over the article in the NY Daily News claiming that nerds are better lovers than their pretty boy counterparts. There is a considerable amount wrong with the article, but we do have to assume it was written by a guy who was popular with the ladies in high school and thus doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. That can be forgiven.
I do feel the need (as did my buddy Jeff) to point out that there is a difference between a nerd and a geek. I’m a geek. I’m not a nerd. I get a little too excited by computers: I can go on for days about them and spend too much time with them. But I take breaks to talk to humans, go to the gym, and run through the shower periodically.
Nobody wants to hook up with an un-groomed, un-showered, socially inept nerd. But all the ladies want to get with geeks now. Oh what a cross to bear!
rsync and vfat
It took several tries, and a lot of poking around, but I finally have my music collection mirrored to a disk I can take around (most notably to work). The hard part was getting rsync to work right. Finally I got it working after finding a helpful article on the topic. To summarize (in less than 3 pages), I used to following 2 commands:
mount -t vfat -o shortname=mixed,iocharset=utf8 /dev/sda1 /mnt
rsync --modify-window=1 -rtv --delete /data/mp3/ /mnt/mp3
Now I won’t lose them, and maybe they’ll help you. The only reason for having problems is that I was using the vfat filesystem under FC3 Linux (where my custom-built audio archive exists) to make a disk I could plug in to my work laptop. Windows filesystems aren’t so great, they have problems doing mixed case and being very accurate with times. So this makes it work!
WP and Amazon
I’ve decided to make the world a better place by putting out a quick little hack of a plugin for WordPress to take care of linking to ASIN numbers on Amazon for you. It’s really just a thing to handle the fact that I had a similar hack back when I was on MT. I didn’t want to go find all the occurrences of it in my post archive.
I’m also happy to note that a patch of mine made it into the SVN repository although I was not given credit by name. Hrm. That always bugs me.
New CMS, ahoy
So, I’ve switched to the WordPress blog/CMS system. There was just something about MT that drove me nuts. So far, I like that I can everything I want in one place (both regular pages and blog-ness). It is a little awkward, but at least I can easily hack it.
Hooray for Sage
Hooray for the existance of the very cool Sage RSS reader for Mozilla/Firefox, the best browser platform in the universe. Finally I can read all my news in brief and then click through to the stories all in one stable, open platform. I had been using SharpReader, based on evil-IE, but I’m happy to say that Sage takes its place. Now I don’t need IE for really anything at all.
All in order
I swear I have rare moments of clarity. I was really happy when I finally realized how a non-recursive in-order binary tree traversal would work. It’s a piece of CS trivia that I continually forget. I’m also pleased to realize how easy it is to write in python as an iterator class. 16 lines, with comments and some white space.
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Horrifying
I find the recent revelations about EA’s labor pracitices to be utterly horrifying while at the same time making me say, “Duh!” This is how the software industry was and is built. Geeks have special tendancies that make them (1) geeks and (2) highly exploitable. Give a software geek a hard question and he won’t sleep until he’s solved it. Give an art geek a curious vision and she will eschew human contact until she has drawn it in excruciating detail.
This is what a geek is, people! A geek is a person with a borderline unhealthy obsession with a particular topic. It only takes a marginally intelligent manager to see the benefits of filling a cube farm with such creatures. Let them wear jeans, bring in shitty pizza once a week and watch your empire grow.
This is really one of those places where capitalism falls down. When you hire an exempt employee a battle begins. On one side is basic human decency, on the other is your own desire for fame, fortune and advancement. Should you be a “people manager” and send your strung-out programmer home because he lacks the sense to know when to call it a day? Or should you grab the productivity gain opportunity and promise more in less time to your Corporate Evil Overlord?
I think it’s fairly apparent what should happen, and what does. It will likely continue, too, now that the threat of outsourcing looms over the increasingly anemic technical job market. Witness the most highly educated slave-class in history!
No confidence
We’re all supposed to be excited that we get all our HR benefits on-line now. That we have the convenience of doing our elections or allocating our 401k’s via a web interface. I can’t completely complain. It beats the hell out of dealing with multiple forms, finding the right person to hand them to, and waiting much longer than should be needed. But, wow. Without exception the benefits and 401k sites that I’ve experienced are the most frightening sites I’ve ever encountered. They are ages behind in design and layout with an almost indecipherable navigation system. They break. They throw errors. Heck, they even require me to type in my SSN to identify myself (isn’t that illegal now?!).
Case in point: my current employer (which otherwise rules) has a new contract broker organizing our benefits. You can’t complete your elections if you are using Mozilla, Firefox, or IE under Windows XP SP2. If you’re a geek, you probably already guessed the reason: their site uses unrequested popup windows. Yeah, popups. You know those things for which there are dozens of programs designed to stop them because the whole entire universe hates them? Apparently these people didn’t notice this trend. What kind of mickey mouse people do they have building these sites? I’m supposed to trust them? Eek.