Clayton’s Weblog

I bought a three pod Aerogarden a while back, and I’ve been experimenting with growing my own seeds in it. I came up with an Omnigraffle template for the labels to go on the top of the seed pods. It’s a double sided template where one side is a label for you to write on and the other side is a cutting template. You can run it through in duplex mode if you have a printer that supports that, but I’ve found that depending on the printer you can get better alignment by running it through the printer twice.

Originally I had printed this on card stock, but in hindsight that was obviously a bad idea. It ended up waterlogged and started molding after about two weeks. I ended up ordering some Rite in the Rain waterproof paper which is supposed to be mold proof.

Here is a picture of the Rite in the Rain labels:

More photos: Flickr

I glue these on using rubber cement. I’m not 100% sure with that, because

Download Template: PDF | Graffle

So I think Metacritic’s game reviews are a great idea, but their RSS feeds only have the title of the game, and a very short sentence. That’s a not great, but the bigger problem is that they publish games to their RSS feed immediately, but don’t score games until there are at least 5 reviews.

To work around that, I’ve put together Atom feeds that you can use instead of the official feeds, which include the short blurb that Metacritic provides, but most importantly these feeds don’t publish review information until there is a critic score associated with the game.

Here is a list of the feeds that I’ve put together:

• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Wii
• Nintendo DS
• PSP
• PC

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

We’ve been doing architecture for geographically disperse, highly available systems at work for a few years now.  We have mostly been coming up with “things that work” without spending a lot of time on research.  I ran across Werner Vogel’s post on this sort of thing a month or two ago and thought it would be worth mentioning.  It really crystalized for me some ideas that intuitively made sense to me and it is something I can point other people to.  We were talking about the architecture of a new system today at lunch and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone when I originally read it. 

Werner’s entire post is well worth reading, but a more succinct explanation of just the CAP Theorem can also be found here.

I used Fluid to put together a site specific browser for Hiveminder, but the favicon scaled up was really ugly.  I hit Jesse up, and he sent me a SVG version of their logos, and I converted the Hiveminder bee to a high resolution PNG.  I promised him I’d post it, so here it is. 

It would be nice to use the Fluid javascript hooks to display the number of outstanding tasks, but I’m not sure if there is an easy way to get that information out of Hiveminder.  Let me know if you try this and have any problems.  I’ve not distributed anything as a DMG before, so it’s entirely possible I did something wrong.

You can download the DMG here.

And if you haven’t checked out Hiveminder before, you should!

Technorati Tags: gtd, hiveminder

So I don’t use full screen Expose on my Mac very often, but I was looking for my Time Machine progress bar, and found this:

At first, I thought that the “Trust me…it’s super legit” was some value in the certificate, but it’s not.  The cert is apparently from the blue socket wifi gateway we have here from work.  I was puzzled as to where this came from, until I realized the icon here must be from the application, and that the icon over the lock is almost certainly the Plaxo icon.  I’m sure someone thinks they’re “super funny”, but this is pretty lame, and likely to freak out anyone that sees it at first glance.

I’m guessing some developer at Plaxo never imagined that their Mac client would get back an invalid certificate when making a request to the Plaxo servers, but again, this is pretty lame.  I’m guessing this is also a Cocoa dialog (or OS level dialog).  If so, this is pretty lame on Apple’s part to not force the application name into the dialog somewhere.

Here is a screenshot of the details view.  Click on it for a full resolution version.

Technorati Tags: plaxo, security

So, I checked my FIOS order status late Friday night, and it was around 80%.  I also checked the “Reschedule Installation” option, and surprise they had a slot open for today, 8am to 5pm.  I spent a few hours cleaning out the basement Saturday, and then rescheduled.  I sat around all day playing Lost Odyssey and finally around 5:10, I called Verizon to find out if the guy was going to show up.  As you’d expect he showed up while I was sitting on hold.

The whole install took about an hour or so.  After he was done I hooked my laptop up to the Actiontec router they give up, and got 15mb symmetric on Visualware’s speed test.  Then the installer said I had to install some software on my PC, or else they would cut me off in 30 days.  I’m not sure if that’s just bullshit they tell the installers or not, but I tried installing it on my Mac, and it never wanted to finish the install, so he said I could install it any time in the next 30 days and it would be fine.  That was about it, and he headed out.

One thing I knew I wanted to do was figure out how to put the Actiontec router into bridging mode.  I’d read already that they suffer from a really small NAT table, and when they run out of entries (1k max), you just can’t make any more connections for 3 minutes.  I found a guide on dslreports, and screwed around with the Actiontec for about an hour, and finally got it put into bridging mode. 

Seems to be working pretty well at this point.  I downloaded some stuff from news and get about 1.7 to 1.8mb/sec downloading.  One problem I did run into is that the version of SABnzbd I was using was old, and was chewing up about 1.5gb of virtual memory on a box with only 768mb of RAM.  Turns out someone else picked up development of it, and turned it into SABnzbd+.  Works really well and out of the box never went over 40mb of memory used.

So while that’s downloading, I’m installing the Verizon software in a Parallels VM.  After the install finishes I’ll just roll the VM back to the snapshot I made before, and not have to worry about what crap it installed.

As far as the title goes, after I got all the routing worked out, I went to check my order status, and this is what I found:

Technorati Tags: fios, mac

So my order status has moved to 59%.  I’m not real sure how this is supposed to work.  Perhaps it is keyed to the time left, or maybe the number of customers waiting for install?

Technorati Tags: fios

I have a simple suggestion: put a single mouse button on your laptops but put two switches under it, one on each side.  Have the OS ship configured to treat both sides as the same.  Give me the option to tell the OS to treat each side of the single mouse button as left and right mouse button.

PS: I’d rather have dedicated page up/page down keys than a two enter keys and a dedicated eject key.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac

Verizon’s provisioning system is impressive:

Somehow my order is now 58% complete, even though I’m 5 days into the 30 day waiting period for my install!  At this rate I expect it’ll be installed by the end of the coming week.

FWIW, I’m getting the 15/15 package, for $70/mo.  While this means going back to having a dynamic IP at home, it also means I’ll have upstream fast enough that it’s basically like being on my home LAN most anywhere I go that has decent net.

Technorati Tags: fios

Lately I’ve been reading more software engineering/development books, especially those with more of a project management slant.  I got a copy of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams in the mail today and I’m about 30 pages into it and so far I’m really digging it.  I particularly liked this quote which was mentioned in a section about Parkinson’s Law:

In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project team, and the project goals.  In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much.  When a worker seems unable to perform, and seems not to care at all about the quality of his work, for example, it is a sure sign that the poor fellow is overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work.  He doesn’t need more pressure.  What he needs is reassignment, possibly to another company.

As an aside, I also finished reading Rapid Development over the holidays, and it’s what got me thinking about this sort of thing in general.  I had someone at work the other day ask me why I’ve started reading more about this sort of thing, and I think the first few pages of Peopleware kind of summed it up.  Most of the problems on most software projects aren’t with the software, but it’s what most people would call office politics, and what I see as more of as project management and process issues.  I didn’t really have to deal with this sort of thing much at RCN, but with larger groups working on projects at TWC, it’s definitely something I have to deal with on a regular basis.