In using my Treo 650, I always ended up typing in either the first or the last name, and inevitably scrolling through all the Sanders in my contact list to find one. I just found a shortcut that makes that easier. The Treo 650 can search by first initial, then last name. So, to search for Scott Sanders, one has only to type ssa on the phone screen to find me in the list quickly. Found this last week, and have been using it quite heavily.
Popularity: 19%
Alex had pointed me in the direction of the Skyroll On Wheels, and with my recent flurry of consulting travel, I decided to pick one up and try it out.
Having now tripped it around the coutry 5 times now, I would have to say this is the bag to have if you are a light traveler. It is small, light, well-designed, and mostly well built. The only problem I have had with mine is that the wheels seemed to not be perfectly aligned, so it does not stand up perfectly straight.
The garment bag that wraps around the case does well with 3 changes of clothes, but not much more. If the clip straps were longer, I believe it could handle it, and it would still not have a problem with being carry-on size. I may need to ‘customize’ mine for that purpose. I also like the top loading compartment, great for the toiletries you need to carry.
If you need a small, lightweight carry on suitcase, and you are a light traveler, this is the suitcase for you.
Overall, I would give this bag a A-/B+, but only from the wheel alignment issue. I have now received 4 compliments on my bag from stewardesses on various flights. It looks very small compared to other carry-on bags (the reason they looked at it in the first place), and then the integrated garment bag closes the deal . If you are looking to try and pick up a stewardess, this is the closest thing to a baby in the park 
Popularity: 44%
Java:
Python:
Note the added Java bits can be automated with Ant and the like, but still take TIME.
Popularity: 27%
Chatting here with Geof while I work on the FeedLounge servers, and he mentioned using the Wikipedia plugin to get the definition of things.
I have used it since I installed Trillian, and love it, but in that totally take it for granted sort of way.
It just helps improve your understanding of everything, and is a great little viewfinder into the genius that is the Wikipedia.
Try it sometime. Many thanks to the Trillian and Wikipedia peeps.
Popularity: 28%
Just installed my new Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW LCD monitor, and I must say wow! It seems huge compared to the 2001 I was using. With the 1900×1200 resolution (as well as 24″ of viewable space), I will be able to see more windows at the same time, to attempt to quench my thirst for information.
The brightness was extremely high, and when I went to change it, the initial setting was 50%. 100% brightness seems to light up the entire room! I set it down around 20, as that seems to work well for me in normal office lighting.
As a bonus, it has a 9-in-1 flash card reader built into the side. Very handy.
Probably won’t have more to say on this unless it breaks, or someone buys me a 30 inch Cinema display as an incremental upgrade. I would recommend this to anyone who has the space. And if you are in the tech industry, you cannot afford to go without in screen, chair, or desk. Those are the basics of comfort and safety in your job.
Popularity: 39%
So, you have some network infrastructure that you need to ‘keep an eye’ on, and you don’t really want to obsess over a terminal window 24×7, at least not after the first 3 weeks.
Give nagios a try. It may not be the easiest or most straightforward install on the planet, but the dividends on this particular investment are amazingly high.
I am now watching servers in 3 states and time zones, and not having to lift a finger, except when the phone wakes me up from a sound sleep with a page alert notifying me of an outage. Much better than your users letting you know via IM or email (those were the days, weren’t they, Geof?).
If there is one package that you install to increase your watchful eye over your hardware, nagios is the one I can now recommend, based on initial experience. Time will tell how that holds up.
Popularity: 26%
Welcome to the second of a series of posts on the development. If you missed the first one, check it out here: FeedLounge development: the parser.
We have feeds being parsed, but we also wanted to help make the world a better place by allowing the end user to know whether or not the feed is valid. As Geof rightly points out, we MUST follow Postel’s Law when parsing feeds (”be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”). Why not give a quick heads-up to someone that might be able to help fix the problem?
So, in FeedLounge, there is a banner near the item content that tells the user the feed is invalid. The user is given a link to click on to see for themselves what is wrong with the feed, using the service from feedvalidator.org.
Hopefully someone will come along that knows the person publishing the feed, and helps nudge them to fix the problem, to make the world a better place for all feed reading entities. If this banner gets too annoying, it can be hidden down to a small icon, and the user can go on with her feed reading. And of course this setting is persistent, so the user does not continue to be annoyed.
Of all the feeds that FeedLounge is currently parsing, validating, and tracking, 34.5% have some issue, 22.5% are NOT valid, and 17.8% are completly broken (404, 304, no response at all, etc). That’s 1/5 to 1/3 of all feeds that FeedLounge might not allow the users to read if we were using a strict feed parser!
As a side note, a large portion of the invalid feeds so far are from some version of WordPress. There are a lot of users out there that haven’t felt that upgrading is important. Please upgrade!!! The security fixes alone are worth it. I hope in a future release that the WordPress team might use one common codebase for feed creation, rather than separate code for each feed format. Disclaimer: dotnot.org uses WordPress 1.5.1.2, and will not change to something else anytime soon. I like WordPress, just offering constructive criticism, and I just want to give the WP team a friendly nudge from time to time 
Popularity: 36%
We have noted in our alpha invitations that we intend for FeedLounge (company, people and application) to be as open as we can possibly be. So along those lines, I will be posting here and on the FeedLounge Blog about architecture, features and development of FeedLounge, so that everyone can see inside the beast, so to speak.
When are you building a web based feed reader like FeedLounge, having data to read is step one. Luckily, there are many feed parsers already out there, so the “build vs. buy” decision was fairly easy. Focusing on the development of the user experience of the feed reader, the feed parser part of the application is only a ‘necessary evil’ in the scheme of things. After checking out several possiblities, including using my own Java/SAX framework, we decided on feedparser, the canonical namesake of the feed parsing world. Built by Mark Pilgrim, and currently at version 3.3, this is probably the most forgiving feed parser on the planet. Had I gone with my own solution, I would have spent months and months creating something as good. And with a liberal open source license, I am allowed to use it in a commercial project like this.
Mark, thanks a million. I know you have ‘gone dark’ in the blogging world, but you are still rocking mine.
Popularity: 34%
When I bought my tractor last summer, I didn’t want to say anything until I had actually used it. Now that I have put 80 hours on my new John Deere 4310, I wanted to just let the world know how it has performed. While I do have a bias toward loving it, and have dreamed of owning one all of my life, I will try to be fair and balanced in my review.
After moving away from the city last year, Amanda and I bought a nice little place in Rough and Ready, CA, just outside Grass Valley. The view is beautiful, on a hilltop overlooking the town of Penn Valley. The lot is 5.3 acres (the smallest in the 8 parcel subdivision), with half of the land fairly level and half rolling off the side of the hill. The house is situated on the level part, not quite backing the hillside, so we could put in a nice little backyard. Since we are getting married, we had decided to spend the money landscaping the backyard and have the wedding at the house. That is coming up on May 21st, I am happy to share. The upside was that nothing was done as far as landscaping, the down side was that nothing was down as far as landscaping. Since all of our soil is hard clay, we were going to be importing quite a bit of topsoil/sand/etc to make our land arable. We also wanted to do a bit of terra forming, and thus the excuse to get the tractor was born.
Tractor- 4310 4WD with hydrostatic drive and top-and-tilt option for full automatic 3 point hitch adjustment
Front-end Loader (420)
Box Scraper (Woods 4×2)
Rock Rake
Tiller
Backhoe (47)
The tractor is set up very well ergonomically, and the push button four wheel drive is a godsend. You don’t want to be in 4WD when making a tight turn (or else the turn won’t be so tight and you will be buying new tires more often than necessary), but you do need it when pulling a full load with the scraper, for instance.
With the hydrostatic drive, you hardly ever use the brakes, since letting off of the directional pedal (separate pedals for forward and reverse) will slow the tractor down immediately. No coasting to a stop anymore. This is very useful to increase cycle times, such as moving a lot of material with the front-end loader.
The rest of the controls are in easy reach, and the seat and steering wheel are fully adjustable. It even has cruise control, for those times when you want a constant speed (just tilling for me).
I chose the 32hp size to make sure that I had enough power and weight to do the jobs that I needed to have done. I think the salesman is correct: “You will never regret getting a bigger tractror”. If I had gone with the residential size tractors, I would have ended up with a glorified lawn mower on my property, because it takes the full weight of the tractor (3000 pounds) to move any of the soil from its position on this property.
The backhoe was an absolute must have for the amount of landscaping that we had to do. With it, digging holes for 5 gallon, 15 gallon, and 24 inch box trees was an easy task, even with the 50% clay/50% granite mix of the soil. We made sure to dig all of the holes double oversized, so that we could put good soil back into the holes, to help the tree out health-wise. Since we planted 3 dozen trees, and the tractor still only has 80 hours on it, the investment was well worth it. Keep in mind that a backhoe attachment for any tractor will be the most expensive thing you buy. That is the reason most people don’t get it. But it is worth every penny. The other day, my 82 year old neighbor asked if I could come down and remove two dead trees. “No problem” I said, and headed down the road. He met me out in his little orchard, and in 5-6 minutes, I had removed both trees, and filled the holes back in. One tree came out with the very first bucket! Needless to say, my neighbor now loves me to death, and it only cost me 15 minutes to keep up the neighborly relations. I tend to refuse payment for any tractor work that I do for neighbors, with two exceptions: repayment in things like refueling and washing it, and barter for something else. Cash doesn’t need to trade hands because I enjoy playing (working) on it so much.
With the hydrostatic drive and the 3 speed transmission, the gearing is just not low enough for the hillside that I live on. I think it is set up perfectly for flat land, but the hills are just too much. Consequently, if there is nothing I can do to lower the gear ratios, I would buy a standard transmission if I were to do it again.
The parking brake light is hooked to a switch that is activated by the brake pedals. This light goes on and off at its own whim, and seems to not work, even though I have attempted to fix it several times. It only bothers me for two reasons, one that the tractor is new and shouldn’t have any problems like this, and two, anyone else who uses the tractor thinks that the brake is on, and spends minutes trying to figure out how to turn it off.
The scaper model that I bought is one size too big for the tractor, so the 3 point hitch is always trying to re-raise it when the tractor is just sitting with the scraper lifted in the air. Although this is non-optimal, the extra weight of the larger model is necessary for the tough clay soil here, so I would leave this as-is.
The tractor seems a bit top-heavy on the hillside, moreso than I would like. I don’t know what I could do to compensate for this (I believe that the tires are already loaded with water). I guess I just have to learn to live with it. A wider stance would have been great, but I don’t think you will find an option for that in this portion of the market.
Switching implements between the 3 point hitch and the backhoe is a genuine pain-in-the-ass. I have started to look around for things that need finishing with the current implement before I consider switching. I really wish this could be made easier, but I think the fact that the backhoe really needs to attach to the tractor frame for strength is going to keep this particular problem from being completely solved.
I noted that the size was a good thing, well it is also a bad thing. In certain instances, I really wish I had a larger tractor (lifting that 1500 pound boulder, digging up that 1500 pound boudler, etc). This is really more of an inconvenience than anything else, but just remember to size the tractor for the largest job that you need to do, not just the average job.
Overall, I am happy with my purchase and use of the tractor. I tend to use it almost every weekend for one thing or another around the house. It is too big to mow the lawn, but I can live with that I would also say that you will not be disappointed with the purchase of a John Deere 4310, just keep in mind what I said about transmission selection. That is the one thing that I really would change if I could. If you have any questions about the tractor, please don’t hesitate to post a comment here on the site, and I will answer as soon as possible.
Note to self, don’t post 2 pictures side-by-side in HTML. It looks a bit funky.
Popularity: 91%
I have now moved into my new office, even if it is still not finished yet. Since I do work on 3 different operating systems, I have 2 machines on my desk. The first is my portable, a 17″ Apple Powerbook. The second is a Windows XP Dell Dimension 8400 desktop machine with a 20″ LCD screen. All of my Linux machines are remotely accessed (as they should be for a commandline junkie like me). Since I built the desk in the office to be 2 L shapes back to back, I don’t have enough space to operate both machines comfortably. I installed a keyboard tray to hide one of the keyboards, but still have to swivel significantly to get to the laptop, where email resides. This was causing a lot of neck and shoulder pain, which is not good for a programmer.
Then I remember talking to Alex about Synergy. Synergy is a software program that runs on multiple machines and allows the machines to share one keyboard and mouse. Excellent, I thought to myself. I am in just the position for this to work. Does it work on Windows and Mac OS X? It sure does. 2 downloads later, and one simple configuration, and this post is now being written on my Dell keyboard, piped over TCP/IP to my Mac, where the letters are dumped into the screen in Camino. This software makes my week! Now with the laptop sitting on my iCurve, the 2 LCDs are sitting side-by-side at eye level, and the keyboard/mouse are down at a resonable height. I wish I would have done this sooner.
So, I’m working along, thinking I am the smartest human on this planet, and then the need to copy/paste between the machines hit again. I usually use to IM logins to do this, but it just so happens that Synergy supports a common clipboard between the machines. BRILLIANT! These guys are great! No more need to keep 2 IM logins active just for copy/paste. And I can use the machine that is natural for the work presented.
Donation via sourceforge on the way. Keep up the good work guys. I know drag and drop support will be a huge pain, but it will truly put you over the top! Simple drag and drop for files only is good enough for this guy.
Alex, you really have to try this bad boy. It is better than it sounds.
The real power in Synergy will be the integration (copy/paste, drag/drop, etc), not just the keyboard sharing.
Random thoughts on integration through Synergy: cross-platform, shared quicksilver anyone? Common notification system?
Popularity: 26%
Started at the end of the WordPress upgrade (20 minutes ago), and I am now finished. Thank you Alex for making it this easy:
Software upgrades really can be this easy.
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I was first introduced to it at the codehaus, and now I am in love with it. The HTML colored diffs even go down to a word level, which is just awesome.
Check it out at: http://www.badgers-in-foil.co.uk/projects/cvsspam/
I was using the apache.org log_accum.pl to send the commit diff emails for my own repository, but you can bet I will be switching to CVSSpam for all my code. Nice job guys!
I had it installed and working in 15 minutes flat! And my abs are flat now!
Seriously, the only wish I have is that it worked for my subversion repositories as well, as the tool is head and shoulders above anything else out there.
MHO, of course
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I have been using CVS for years, and Subversion for about 8 months. The difference now is how easy Subversion is to use. Here are some examples:
svn add some directory, it adds all of the files and directories underneath it. No more cvs add foo, cd foo, cvs add bar, etc.What I don’t like about Subversion: all the dependencies and problems I have had/will have with other tools, such as SWIG, neon, etc. Although I will note that these problems are with code external to subversion. So if you just pick up a binary build, you should be completely happy with it.
Will talk about subversion GUIs a little bit later.
Popularity: 15%