Clayton’s Weblog

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.

While the whole article is interesting, this bit from Joel Spolsky’s recent article in for Inc really rang true:

Think of it in these terms: Mama walruses deliver their calves at the end of a 15- to 16-month pregnancy. You might ask the mother to commit to 15 months and she might say, “No problem!” Or you might say, “Fifteen months? Are you crazy? We need this in eight months!” Of course, haggling like this can’t possibly make things happen any faster, and even if you get the walrus to agree to an eight-month timetable, I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’ll never happen. You can have a schedule that says 11 months, but you’ll still ship in 15 months, because that is how long it takes to make a baby walrus. Sixteen, sometimes.

We have a project going on at work now that was originally supposed to be in field trial by the end of the year.  The principal on the project is leaving the company, so now it’s gotten tossed over the wall to us.  We need to come up with a new date by the end of the month.  We only have a rough idea of what the final solution will be, and all kinds of interesting questions about the scope of the project.  Thankfully the project is actually fairly interesting, and our management is generally pretty understanding of justifiable schedule slips.

So after a year or so of nagging on and off, work agreed to buy Macbooks for the people in our group that wanted one.  As a result, I’ve ended up with a 15″ Pro.  So far there are some things I like and don’t like.

• The screen is beautiful.  I wish it were a little higher DPI, but the resolution is better than I was expecting.  The LED backlighting should also mean that I won’t be horribly disappointed that the screen isn’t as bright as it was the first day in a few weeks.
• Magsafe is neat.  Magsafe plugs shouldn’t fit as well into usb ports as they do into the Magsafe plug.  No, this didn’t end badly, but on the 15″ MBP, they’re right next to each other and it’s easy to put the plug into the USB port if you’re not paying attention.
• The keyboard is ok.  I find it a bit awkward, but I suspect I’m just not used to it.  It seems really stupid that I have a dedicated eject key, but no home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, but with DoubleCommand, it’s livable.
• The trackpad and gestures work very well.  I’m generally fairly indifferent about input devices.  I’ve used mice, trackpads, trackpoints, trackballs, etc, and I find that I get used to all of them fairly quickly.  The right click with two finger tap works much better than I expected, but I’d still prefer to just have two mouse buttons.  Hint to Apple: Make it look like one mouse button, but make the mechanicals underneath be able to tell if you clicked on the left or right hand side.  Then make OSX consider the two sides to be one button by default.  That way you don’t confuse anyone, and people that want two mouse buttons have it out of the box.  Consider this my proof for prior art when you try to patent this idea.
• Sound is definitely better than any Thinkpad I’ve used.  It’s unrealistic to expect it to be fantastic, but it’s completely workable, compared to IBM who likes to put speakers on the bottom of the laptop…
• Power brick is kind of large, but no larger than average really.  Power cord is longer than average I’d say, which is nice.
• The thermal design, for lack of a better term, sucks.  The MBP is generally always a little warm, and if the CPU is maxed out then the fans kick up to really high RPMS and it becomes too hot to have in your lap.  None of the other laptops I’ve owned in the past 5 years (Including a CoreDuo and Core2Duo) had any thermal issues.

All and all, I’m pretty pleased with it so far.

Either I’m insanely lucky, or Etymotic ER6’s are incredibly well made.  I ran mine through the washing machine and then through the dryer (on high heat, for about an hour).  I had a horrible sinking feeling when I saw them fall on the floor when I was taking clothes out.  However, the net effect appears to be that the foam ear tips are cleaner.

I’m listening to Pandora through them on my laptop now, and they sound great as usual.