Two player fun for all ages!

I love working with a team of cool developers.  Right now we are growing our team and finding the right people is challenging, fun and slow.  We have interviewed a few people and what people we have interviewed have been quite good.

Its awesome to be part of a larger entity that is so much better than you are.  Having someone close to you that can give you a different perspective on the code you are writing is magical.  Not being ultimately responsible for the entire product is equally awesome.  I don’t mind responsibility and accountability, I just don’t want it all.  :)  I am loving the team atmosphere and how we are all in agreement on its style and tone.  Its fun to express that vision in an interview and watch the person interviewing get excited about the team and its possibilities.  Not to say everything is always roses, conflict arises out of mis communication.  However, the team bounces back because ultimately we are all good people with great intentions.

When I was interviewing this was a question I asked everyone:  ”Why is your company awesome?”   I selected a company that seemed to be just that.  Its a startup so if we do well the potential for substantive reward exists.  That said, I am more excited and motivated because it seems like a cool mix of people that love what they do.  Plus the project is exciting and I will learn much.

Its been fun to throw a idea in the “team cooking pot” and have everyone stir it up and we come out with a awesome meal.  The best ideas bubble up and when your team is diverse enough the ideas bubble up in ways you never would have imagined.

I know what my weaknesses are.  Finding people that can cover that will make our product a joy to use.  Plus its fun to see something grow into something you love.  And right now, I have a lot of love for what I am doing.

What up hooligans?  If this where 1995 and you were children I could say: What up Yahooligans?  But its not 1995 and I just ran out of wit juice.

I wanna do right by you, Im holding out not clicking an answer.

A few months back I started using Google Chrome as my primary browser.   Still use it, you should too its rad.

I recently installed the latest Ubuntu stable 10.04 on my desktop.  Its very nice.  I appreciate the new free software nvidia drivers.  Gwibber is amazing.  Empathy is growing on me and ive used Pidgin/Gaim for years.  Unsure what I think about the new Ubuntu status panel for Gnome.  I liked the old one better and haven’t figured out what package to install to get it back.  Rhythmbox sees the iPhone but I am not sure if it can actually add songs to it yet.

My new job got me a brand new Snow Leopard Macbook pro.  It is much faster than my old Leopard Macbook pro.  Boots and is actually usable in a minute or so.  My old Leopard Macbook booted and was usable in 3 minutes or longer depending.  A few things they changed in Snow Leopard don’t make much sense to me though.  In Leopard if you double clicked the app bar it minimized the app.  This is now a setting you have to turn on.  Right click on the huge trackpad is turned off by default too.  I heard Steve Jobs doesn’t like right click?  Odd.  Beyond those annoyances, it really seems like a speed improvement over Leopard.  They changed a few things but nothing warranting much discussion save that when the lights dim the screen dims as well.   I know this is Mac blasphemy but I find modern free software desktops to be just as usable as Snow Leopard.  Plus in something like Debian and Ubuntu you get a robust toolchain included by default.  Installing XCode isn’t too hard but it discludes things like wget and to get functionality like that you need something like macports.   All told, not a huge deal until macports conflicts with a library you have and all hell breaks loose.

With all their flaws, Ubuntu and Mac work just fine for software development.  A free software desktop will always be 127.0.0.1 for me though.  Flay me as you would.

I installed VirtualBox the other day on the new Mac and its now VIRTUALBOX BY ORACLE!!!!!!!!!111one.  Whoa.  Same for OpenOffice.  The Sun logo seemed less intrusive.  I hope both programs stay free.

I still run Quicken 2002 on Ubuntu to manage my finances.  I guess I could upgrade or use something else but it works so well why stop now?

Since Debian/Ubuntu deprecated Grip I don’t know what to use to rip CDs.  I tried a few programs but they don’t allow really terse lame settings.  I want something I can set to rip MP3′s at VBR 320k.  So far, that seems like a tall order to fill.  I know there is the always awesome abcde, but id prefer a graphical tool if possible.  Ill let you know what I find.  I care about audio fidelity in mp3s.

Its cool to work on something that can benefit a free software project.

Oh by the way, the project is dotCal* and its a social calendar.

* The bits I work on are the JavaScript widgets, Rails/CalDAV layer & various server side scripts.

NEW!

In a move that might actually come to yield something six months from now, today I spend a bit of time looking around and asking people for advice on how to obtain a new gaming PC. The last time I obtained a desktop computer I snagged the parts from newegg and built it myself. Its been a great computer and I have had no large complaints with it save its getting a bit long in the tooth.

How long? Not much.

AMD64 3000+
DVD/RW
2G RAM (started w 1G)
Nvidia 5400LE 256M
320G HD

In a world of quad core & 8G ram machines, my computer is quaint. My eeebox is nearly as powerful and its 1/16th the size! Time flies in computing for sure.

I went back to newegg to see what is hot these days. I really haven’t kept up on whats new in computing save ATI seems the new hotness in video cards and Intel seems to put out a great quad core CPU. One thing I noticed on newegg is that they have bundles of parts meant to go together for specific purposes. For 1.2K I can get a really nice computer with dual video cards and 6G of RAM. That said, I am not going Nvidia due to its open source Linux support being poor so ATI is a must here. Thinking of trying out Intel this time as the CPU. Ive done AMD for so long I felt I needed to give Intel a shot. No real reason, as far as I am concerned they seem to be on par with each other save Intel is more expensive. That said I don’t mind going with something a bit slower. How fast do I need the four cores to be?

After sending out a email to the people I know that game the most it seems they seem to recommend not going the homebrew route and recommend Dell. At first I checked out some Dell Alienware computers but seem to be morally adverse to paying that much for a computer. So I started looking at the Dell XPS line. The Dell Studio XPS 9000 line that is. I have a few requirements of a new computer. This seems to fit them nicely:

1) It must be quad core and pretty fast. Right now a base quad core has each core at 2.6GHZ.
2) No nvidia
3) Gotta be able to dump a ton of disk in it. Don’t care how much it comes with but you need to be able to add like 2TB+ after it comes.
4) Bluray

Nice stuff:

* HDMI
* sata connection off the motherboard in the back
* USB 3.0 (nothing ive seen seem to support this yet so i guess that will be later)
* Looks great

So far the Studio XPS 9000 meets most of that criterion. Its pretty much the same price as the newegg computer but it may not be quite as powerful. The Dell comes with Windows 7 which is nice as I want to dual boot it for games AND Linux development. Windows 7 seems to be the next Windows direction so its prob good to do that. Plus it can allocate more memory per process than XP, which is nice considering I want 6G of RAM minimum. It would be nice for the OS to take advantage of that.

Anyways, all this is just preliminary work. I am still mulling it all over. Right now I don’t play any PC games that warrant this kind of horsepower but when Starcraft 2 drops that will change. It would be nice to say I had a PC worthy of Crisys or at least the new Wolfenstien game at a reasonable resolution. Then again the PC game my friends and I play the most is Age of Empires 2 and im not even sure that uses 3D! I guess fun games are really timeless.

Then again this isn’t just for games. I also work from home and its nice to be able to slap a jet engine on stuff when you can. Seems like whatever route I go ill be able to.

Woosh!

Super Mario Bros on an 8×8 LED matrix from Chloe Fan on Vimeo.

?

Recently I was reading an article about “Linux on the Desktop being a non starter.” Most of these articles revolve around the author wanting to do something and failing OR it taking way to long to do it. I can accept that. Ubuntu isn’t perfect for everything. Its really great at some things though.

However, this article is so flagrantly poor quality it makes me wonder what quality standards Computerworld has for its bloggers. Obviously few.

Lets go over some of the gems contained in this article.

It claims Linux on the desktop is “still not happening.” Beyond the fact that is is and I know lots of people using it, its also constructed of basically two silly arguments.

* “For a while last year, things were looking up for Linux. Many of the early netbook vendors were forgoing Windows licenses and instead offering consumers machines that ran some form of Linux. That didn’t last long, though. Return rates for Linux netbooks were much higher than for their Windows counterparts, and most netbooks today are sold with some version of Windows, not Linux. What this means is that, though Linux is a great value for many server applications, it’s still a non-starter on the desktop.

Huh. So netbooks have a higher return rate than Windows netbooks? OK. Fair enough. The author notes this and jumps to the conclusion that Linux is a non-starter on the desktop. This is faulty logic. There could be a sea of reasons why someone would return a Linux netbook. How bout they thought Windows was on it? You mean customer made a mistake? I think its possible people may click before they read every sentence.

Netbooks are a nascent market in computing. Its like looking at ebooks and noting that Amazon controls the desktop. The author didn’t note how many people stuck with Linux powered netbooks. If the number of people with Linux netbooks is 20% then id say Linux on a netbook is a success.

* “Richard Stallman may not be typical, but you can read all about his setup here. It’s not something that’s going to win a lot of converts among the mass market of computer users, though. As he explains it, he uses a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. “I spend most of my time using Emacs. I run it on a text console, so that I don’t have to worry about accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance. I read and send mail with Emacs (mail is what I do most of the time). I switch to the X console when I need to do something graphical, such as look at an image or a PDF file. Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out.”

Since most of us would go back to using paper, pens, envelopes and stamps before using the open-source text editor Emacs, it still seems likely that it’s going to be a Windows and Mac OS world for the foreseeable future.”

ARE YOU SERIOUS? <sarcasm>Obviously all Linux users have is Emacs and a console. Obviously</sarcasm>. Wait, no thats absolutely ludicrous. I use Gnome. Gnome is pretty, functional and elegant.

Anyways, felt it was worth sharing. I am not a Linux crazy but this kind of poor article makes me want to throw a Firefox at someone.

After dealing with swapping out a newer Nvidia card for an older one on my Linux machine I decided the easiest course of action would be to install the latest version of Ubuntu on it. Plus it would be cool to check out how far Ubuntu has come since Hardy. Ill sum up my thoughts in one sentence.

This free software thing is really incredible.

I think we are starting to see the free software desktop evolve to a point where all the functional parts exist. At this point its not about getting a great browser, image viewer/editor, music player, video player or ability to easily install software. All that stuff exists and in spades. Now the free software desktop is polishing itself to the point of decadence. And I use that word because in the past it was unpolished to the point of frustration. The default stock Ubuntu experience in its latest release 9.10 is like candy on top of cake. Or at leasts thats how it feels to me and I spend 99% of my work life on Mac OSX desktop. Ive used the Mac for 2+ years now and I can honestly say this version of Ubuntu is in ways better than Mac OSX. Im not going to get into specifics its just little things mostly. Like a easier time of desktop switching, resource management bars, middle click paste in linux and the power of apt-get and more. Oh and it doesn’t tie you down to vendor specific hardware…. That said depending on the hardware you can be in for quite a ride. Also the default theme in Ubuntu seems more elegant to me than the gun metal grey Mac OSX theme that seemed so sexy in 2001. Can’t a brother get a theme selection tool native on the Mac? No? OK then.

In Ubuntu 9.10 after installing the closed source Nvidia driver it switched my monitor to a lower resolution than id like. So I decided to simply use the free software 2D driver and not spend time in config hell. Yeah I don’t get the full power of the card but id rather things just work. And beyond that bit of driver annoyance which Ubuntu can do nothing about the experience is quite good. Suprisingly good in fact.

Head over to the Ubuntu site and notice the tour. I am happy to see this kind of progress and thank the free software developers that made it happen.

Good ol days.

“WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!”

I wanted to run my own board but due to no extra phone line, I had to be content to have a setup that my friends could dial in when they called. It was called Demosis Erima, which is hebrew for public desert. Or at least I thought it was? The software I ran was JetBBS and I ran it because it was totally free and didn’t come crippled unless you paid money. I had LORD and Tradewars attached to it. Adam and I both pitched in for a license of Tradewars but LORD was the free limited version. I made the intro graphics in The Draw. I ran it on a 2600 modem which was pretty fast for the time. Later on I upgraded to a 14.4. I never owned a 56k in the BBS days. That was later when dial up internet was the rage.