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Friday, May 4th, 2007Recovering from my pneumonia is becoming more and more grating of a task. I’m finishing up the antibiotics today, but the lingering cough and “run down” feeling is really starting to get old. Combine that with the fact that I’m ridiculously busy trying to catch back up after missing nearly a week of work and personal appointments.
Aside from recovering my health I’ve been relaxing with video games quite a bit, and doing some reading. I finally beat Super Paper Mario for my Wii, and have been getting back into Oblivion for my 360. I had managed to put down the Oblivion addiction a while back, but with the Shivering Isles expansion out I’ve found myself spending more and more time in Cyrodill. I’ve built (yet another) new character and am focusing on trying to work through not only the new expansion pack, but also all of those miscellaneous little quests that I’ve never bothered to go through – shadow over Hackdirt, Aleswell, and other little one-off quests that really add some depth to the game.
Aside from gaming my reading has been quite interesting. I picked up a copy of Inside the Machine, and illustrated introduction to microprocessors and computer architecture by Jon Stokes. It’s an interesting read and offers a nuts and bolts view of how a computer works from the ground up. I’m about half way through and am simply fascinated by the view it’s giving me into the “world of the machine” that so often slips under the average computer user. Modern computers, operating systems, and programming languages have done a beautiful job of abstracting hardware from software, but the hardware still exists, and knowing how it operates has given me some insight as to why some weird things in the more abstracted levels “work the way they work”.
Getting Scrummy
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007Things are pretty crazy at work - we are going through some growing pains in a new project and things are hectic from a PM perspective as a result. It’s great experience on how to manage rapidly changing requirements as well as an opportunity to learn more about new methodologies. A big part of the stress is coming from my groups conversion to the Scrum methodology.
So far I like Scrum, and will be interested to see how things turn out. It seems much more focused on getting rapid results than waterfall and suits my personality better. I like being able to work through issues in real time (so to speak) and focusing on delivering features rather than documentation. I’ll be interested to see what my take away lessons from Scrum are after we have gone through a few sprints and I feel more confident and educated about the process.
Luckily the week is over half over. Last weekend I didn’t get much ‘me’ time between visiting my grandpa and getting my car taken care of so I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time with my couch this coming Saturday and Sunday.
Unix is cool
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007Last nights rebuilding of Marbles the macbook was a surprisingly easy, quick, and pleasant experience thanks to my recent work with bash scripts for syncing. In the past 6 months I’ve written a number of syncronization scripts to help keep my notebook up to date with my desktop machines and ensure that no matter what machine I’m using it always has the most recent version of my data.
All this scripting paid off via the side benefit of making the rebuild almost entirely painless. It look less than an hour to reinstall OS X 10.4.1 from the DVDs that came with Marbles and then run software update to get it upgraded to 10.4.9. Once that was done I hooked into the gigabit network, copied over a few applications, ran my update script and Marbles was back in action.
I remember back in my Windows days how rebuilding a machine and moving data over could be a day long saga - no more of that for me though - an hour and some Unix hackery is all you need now!
Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that rebuilding fixed whatever system corruption I had that was causing the system hangs to begin with.
Site updates
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007Feeling sick has me unmotivated to do much more than sitting in front of my computer, so sit in front of my computer I did tonight. I took the opportunity to install a new version of the veryplaintext theme (Thanks Scott!) onto the site and hack with it a bit. The new version is a bit cleaner, has more in the sidebar, and most importantly handles different resolutions much better.
The images now scale when someone has a small browser window, and the whole site has a minimum and maximum width to improve rendering. I also did some small tweaks to the typography that help improve the readability of the site as a whole. If you like or don’t like the new theme tweaks, or if it somehow breaks in your browser add a comment to this post to let me know.
Finally I have another shot of my antibiotics to add to the site. I’m not feeling well yet so the idea of leaving the house to go shooting is not very appealing. I really like how this one came out - it was a macro experiment with the Lensbaby 3G macro lens.
“Biotic lensbaby” by sparktography
Holy sweet visitors (or fun with MySQL analytics)
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006So not only am I getting some search engine love but I’ve just discovered that I actually have viewers! I installed Counterize on Futurist Now a few months back, and then promptly forgot about it entirely. I was just checking out my admin panel to do some maintenance (I don’t get there often thanks to the glory of Ecto) and happened upon my stats.
Counterize does a great job of giving some high level stats, and as well puts a row into a MySQL table for each visitor with some basic information about what is being requested and such for statistical analysis. I broke out the PHP and had some fun.
Now up until now I had assumed I had about 10 readers. Some close friends, perhaps a few random strangers, and of course my mom. I guess I was wrong - I have had over 11,000 page views in three months from 1,827 unique visitors (not including known bots). These figures do not include viewers who view my site entirely via RSS and never visit the blog directly. Given my sometimes blathering rantings I’m actually rather surprised.
Now for the statporn: The highest pageview days are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday by a good margin. Tuesday’s on average get about 23% of the page views of a Friday. The last week in any month has about 10% more page views than any other week. About half of my page-views come either between 8-9am PST or between 2-4pm PST.
I have no idea why this would be, but for some reason I have visitors who only seem to visit me during certain parts of the month. I can see later in the week being more popular because some people are looking for minute little escapes from their jobs on Friday’s, and weekends being popular because people have a chance to “catch up” on their web browsing.
My most popular two entries are about my encounter with Ambien, the saga I went through to get my sweet Oblivion, and an example of my hatred/fear of company parties.
Technorati Tags: blog, ego, FOSS, math, OSS, stat, statistics
Some SEO love has come my way
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Aside from having a great couple of days at work I’m very pleased to announce that my campaign to raise my search engine vanity rankings has gone well. Thanks to all the people who have linked to Futurist now using the word Sparky I’m finally on the first page of results for my own name!
That’s all for now folks! Keep up the linky love that I might keep my own name in cyberspace! Remember: a vote for Sparky is a vote for progress!
Rolling with the big dogs
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006As much as I normally hate 8am meetings this morning’s project kickoff meeting was great. The project I’ve been helping to scope and plan for at work got budget approval and I got to go over to the far reaches of the campus for the big kickoff meeting. It was mostly sitting in a giant conference room listening to big-wigs talk about budget and scheduling but it was fascinating to see what happens on the back end to approve projects and work to get them planned and budgeted within a giant organization like Microsoft.
It’s funny how this entire side of the software development process is so opaque to developers. I remember back in my dev days being handed a spec and really not knowing where it came from or what the process was to create it. Heck – it never even occurred to me that there was a process, I guess I just sort of assumed it magically appeared. Now that I’m on the other side of the house I’m getting my eyes opened to the how and why of the software development lifecycle and the reasons for strong methodologies and planning. Now it seems obvious that a multi-million dollar project can’t just be run by a bunch of teenage developers, but at the time that seemed like the best plan.
Ahh the things one learns as one gets older and wiser. With my quarter century mark looming ever closer I have to stop focusing on the older and start focusing on the wiser though – older happens regardless of intent, wiser takes effort and experiences to draw on.
The quest for a perfect mail client
Saturday, June 10th, 2006I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - e-mail is the ultimate form of personal and business communication. It’s non-realtime, polite, indexable, searchable, cross-platform, and easy to use. The only problem I face right now with my favorite little mode of communication is the perfect way to access it.
I have over 6Gb of server side email with three different IMAP stores spread across the globe. I send and receive anywhere from 50 to 300 emails a day (in my personal life - closer to 1000 if you include my work life) and need a way to manage that incoming email as well as to refer back to it from a number of different platforms.
I use IMAP because it stores my email server-side and allows to to connect and synchronize a number of different clients. I have Windows, OS X, and Linux boxes floating around my house, and a number of phones and PDA’s which I use to keep up to the minute with email on the road. Having my main mail store be a server makes for easy mail setup - just point a new client at my mail stores and let them cache content to their hearts content.
I’ve used a lot of IMAP clients in my day (more than I can count), and none of them seem to really meet my bill of perfect. All I want is something fast, flexible and fully featured that I can rely on to never crash.
Here are my favorite email clients at the moment with my thoughts on each. Do any of my readers have any suggestions of clients I could try that might meet my needs and overcome some of the flaws of their brethren?
Apple’s Mail.app
Mail.app is close to perfect, but not quite there. It’s a friendly, easy to use interface, provides indexing and searching via Spotlight, and easily handles downloading from multiple IMAP stores. It’s stable, has great performance even on older machines, and has a great plugin architecture for adding things like PGP.
It’s flaws: difficult to configure advanced IMAP options (how to handle sent mail, rules support is a little lacking) and a serious bug for IMAP where the read/unread flag on messages sometimes flips about randomly making mail management difficult.
Windows Mail (the Vista version of Outlook Express)
With Windows Vista Microsoft has done a bit of work to help the aging Outlook Express client along. It’s a bit faster, and now includes indexing and search features thanks to Vista’s Windows Desktop Search technology. The interface has not changed in a while, and it’s not the most feature complete mail client in the world, but it would for the most part meet my needs.
Where it falls down? Windows Mail has some stability problems (which hopefully will be fixed before Vista releases) particularly when dealing with large IMAP stores. I have over 6 gigs of mail on IMAP servers across the world, and Windows Mail chokes quite frequently when doing send/receive’s to synchronize it’s offline cache. Windows Mail has built in certificate support for email verification, but no good PKI solution for sending mail to PGP users.
Outlook
In a phrase: Outlook has a fat ass! Outlook is by far the most fully featured mail client out there - in fact it barely even qualifies as a mail client any more and is much more of a portal to the enterprise world. Calendaring, tasks, resource allocation - it does it all. Unfortunately with this glut of features it’s bloated, slow, and only barely more stable than Windows Mail. Outlook is also very Exchange centric. Exchange is wonderful for the enterprise, but with the ability to only connect to a single Exchange server per Outlook install it falls flat on its face when it comes to consumer scenarios. Outlook is also a fairly poor IMAP client insisting on caching items locally, and making the invalid assumption that it’s the only client that will be connected to the server at any given time.
Thunderbird
Thunderbird is the “odd bird out” in this flock. It’s fast, stable, and has pretty much all the advanced security, mail management, and encryption features I could want. To boot it’s free and open source software and has a thriving development community behind it. Given that it’s cross-platform and highly configurable I would use it exclusively if it were not for a few fatal flaws.
Thunderbird has no good indexing and search story - something that is becoming more and more critical as people become more and more dependent on mail clients to manage and store incoming information for them. This would be easy to fix if Thunderbird would abandon their monolithic mailbox store format and adopt a single file per email plain text solution enabling both Spotlight and Windows Desktop Search to index them.
Thunderbirds other fatal flaw: it’s ugly. I recognize that it’s difficult to develop software for multiple platforms and make it look good on them all, but that’s why I feel that Thunderbird should fork their UI development significantly more. Make the OS X version feel more like Mail.app and the rest of the Aqua desktop environment. Make the Windows version feel less like Linux, and more like a part of the Windows family.
Webmail
Webmail can be a good thing - I occasionally use webmail to access a few of my accounts IMAP stores and find it to be an adequate substitute for a real client in a pinch. The fundamental flaw all web based mail solutions offer is that you need a browser and internet connectivity to access them - no working on mail while on the road or in a plane - no offline cached mode whatsoever. Sadly when you are as e-mail centric as I am no web based solution comes even close to being a full time solution.
Gmail gets close, but it’s inability to give a good experience on a mobile device shoots it right in the foot. Yahoo and Hotmail have even worse experiences on the web (with Hotmail being by far the worst), and don’t even really offer a good story when it comes to mail on a PDA or phone.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Apple, E-mail, Mail.app, Thunderbird, OSS, FOSS, Outlook, Technology, Vista, crypto
Mind Camp ROCKS!
Sunday, April 30th, 2006All I have to say is Mind Camp 2.0 ROCKS! I’m here with more than 200 geeks, I have not slept in over 24 hours, and I’ve had some of the most cool and amazing conversations about every topic under the sun from real estate, to DSL, to video blogging (just wait - more on this in a moment), and social networking.
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