Saturday, July 7, 02001
I've turned on the karma and comment features supported by Greymatter.
I doubt anyone will actually use them, but we'll see what happens, eh ?
I know I have at least two regular readers, and at least one of them will probably enjoy adding comments.
Posted at 06:47 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Ben, in Perl looks to be a kepper. Smells a bit like jessamyn.com, but with source code. Sweet. Got to it trolling sites from the twenty things project, which also has keeper-potential.
On other fronts, my Windows machine has died. I got sick of having two sets of keyboards and mice on the desk and swapping the monitor cable everytime I wanted to switch machines, so I went out and got some black box that everything connected to and all I had to do with push a button. After getting the box and all the extra cables (and a good book on Z, damn myself) I ended up having to shell out $200.
Everything worked like a charm, I got both machines up and running with the black box. But then I got greedy. I figured, "Hey, Now that I've got all this cabling, why don't I move the CPU's over to the other side of the desk so I have some more room....." Well, picking up the old box was enough to kill the hard drive. I poped it open, playing around with the BIOS settings for a while, and then the graphics card gave out. Poof. Dead computer. No more Windows games. No more Quicken. At least that's all I was using that machine for. I could probably get the harddrive installed in the Linux machine, but I'm not risking it now. The dead computer will sit where it is for a couple weeks, until some rainy weekend I poke around with it again.
At the very least, it could have given me some sparks or a shock before it died. Some smoke maybe. Something that would say "Hey, we're through. The past couple years have been fun, but really where is this relationship going ? I've got to move on to other things now." Things like, I don't know the scrap heap. Sigh. How bad is it when you start anthropomorphizing break-ups with things like computers and cars ?
That all said, I will be moving over to Moneydance this weekend. It's not GPL'd, but at least it works on Linux. Plus it looks like it supports electronic funds transfers. What more could I ask for ? Certainly not the yearly bloat from Intuit.
Also in the news: The pwan OCL project has been raised from the dead ! Version 00.00.02 is out, after a year of inactivity. The whopping changes ? The removal of a bogus file from the CVS repository, and a renaming of the installation directory. Maybe version 00.00.03 will have some source code changes. Hopefully it will be out before 02002.
I can't explain the recent increase in the post lengths. Perhaps it's because they're being posted from home instead of from work....
Posted at 06:38 PM EST [Link]
Friday, July 6, 02001
Today's tidbit is an interesting call for electric cars from the makers of the Gizmo.
Why do we need to back a 4,000 pound minivan out of the garage (find the garage door opener) just to drive six blocks to the DariMart for a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread and Kleenex?
Four Gizmos can park in one car parking spot.
Posted at 02:05 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, July 5, 02001
I went to see Startup.com at the Visions theatre today. The movie tracks the rise and fall of the govWorks.com startup.
If you're a techie who thinks this movie may show some of the 80-hour crazy work schedules, terribile engineering practices, etc involved with startups, this isn't the movie for you. Software development takes up about 3 minutes of the entire film, and when this happens it involves upper management types over-reacting to last minute bugs they are finding in the software.
I was hoping for something a lot more like PBS's Code Rush from a while back. This film is nothing like that. Even Code Rush fell short of what it feels like to be on a death march project, probably because their product was successful for the most part, and people actually got rich. That hasn't been my experience in such projects...
What this movie does show is some people running around to various venture capital firms pitching an idea for a website, giving some pep talks, and getting angry when the software isn't up to snuff. Umm, so this whole time someone was actually developing something ? Where was that happening ?
I couldn't get over the feeling that I was being force-fed "the winners" version of history, especially as the more technical founders of the company were being forced out of the company, especialy when the young developer I suspect actually wrote most of the code for the system is forced out early in the film. I left the film feeling scammed. There was no explanation of why the company fell apart, or what could have been done differently. There was no lessons to be learned, besides the lame "put people before profits" that seemed forced.
But in retrospect, perhaps the lesson is found in looking at what wasn't covered in the film. Isn't the lack of an engineering viewpoint in the film indicitive of what a lot of the dotcom crash was all about - people focusing more on the idea of making money rather than the mechanics of actually getting it done ? That getting funding is more important than being sustainable ? That putting design and testing behind marketing hype is a sure path to disaster ?
So what was I hoping for ? The dotcom movie I would like to see would follow the life of a lowly software developer. It would start with his interview at the company, where the stock options and cool technology were discussed, and follow the path as the company gradually consumed his entire life, where he was spending all his waking time at work constantly putting out fires. It will show the employee losing the once close contact with upper management as the company grows and new layers of management are added. Eventually it will show the collapse of the company, with the employee being escorted out by an armed guard, and close with him trying to put his shattered life back together.
(One final point is the color of the film wa pretty bad - everytime they showed the govWorks logo, I wondered why on earth anyone would make a logo with a fellow waving a huge Socialist flag. It wasn't until I put this post together that I saw the flag was supposed to be orange. Still doesn't make any sense to me....)
Posted at 01:49 AM EST [Link]
Monday, July 2, 02001
Today's Song of the Day is Michelle Shock's When I Grow Up
When I grow up I want to be an old woman
When I grow up I want to be an old woman
Oh, an o-o-o-o-old, an old, old womanThen I think I'm gonna find myself an old man
Then I think I'm gonna marry myself that old man
An old, an old, an old, an old, a really old man
Posted at 06:19 PM EST [Link]
It looks like some of the press outside of the Midwest is finally starting to pay attention to the Waagner debacle.
The first is an article from the Guardian which is probably the best coverage I've seen so far, putting it into perspective with other incidents of anti-abortion violence.
The second article is a rather disppointing piece from Salon. Apparently it didn't occur to the author that Waagner might not have been the author of the propaganda on the AOG site, which is surprising given Salon's normally good coverage of Internet-related issues.
Hi DOJ'ers ! Shouldn't you stop wasting my tax money surfing the web, and get back to working on this case ?
Posted at 01:45 PM EST [Link]
