Cam reports on Cory Doctorow’s talk in Melbourne last night on the evils of DRM.
… sharing stories and songs from person to person isn’t called theft or piracy – it’s called ‘culture’.
Author Archives: daniel
Considering graphics tablets
I’m considering buying a graphics tablet — a Wacom or similar — to stave off any hint of mouse-related RSI. I know I use computers a lot, at work and at home, and recently I have had noticeable wrist pain on occasions. Accordingly my work mouse is now on the left, and my home mouse is on the right, taking advantage of my mouse-ambidexterousnous. (Is that even a word?)
I don’t even know if there are any brands other than Wacom to look at. No others appear to distribute these kinds of products in Australia. (I think I recall Wacom being around in the 80s… they must be doing something right.)
From the looks of it, using the pen/tablet is relatively straightforward, with the only gotcha being that right clicking is marginally more difficult. Left click, double click, drag and drop, all easy. Some of the Wacom packages actually come with a mouse, but I wouldn’t see the point of this; I’d assume I’d keep my old mouse.
They do appear to be primarily aimed at graphics use, which is not my primary concern, though from time to time I do graphics work which would benefit from it. Wacom do have some information on tablets reducing RSI. The smallest size has an A6-sized pad, which on paper provides enough accuracy to handle even big screens.
Two ranges, the Intuos3, which appears to be aimed at professional use, starting at AU$349 ($305 street), or the Graphire4, aimed at domestic use, starting at AU$149 ($139 street). The Intuos does have a number of extra features and better performance.
Will go shopping at some stage and try them out, I think.
I’ve also been told that a few minutes daily squeezing a tennis ball is a good way to help ease any mouse pain. Will try that too. A tennis ball is cheaper than a tablet (though probably less geeky fun).
The rise and fall of Commodore
“On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore” tells the oft-missed-by-the-geek-historians story of Commodore. The web site has some free chapters, including one describing the creation of the Commodore 64:
If you’ve ever wondered why the C64 has the same case as the VIC-20, it’s because we didn’t have any time to tool anything up. We just put it in a VIC-20 case and spray painted it. Everything about the Commodore 64 is the way it is because of just an unbelievably tight time constraint on the product.
Making programmers productive
Oh God, yes! Joel Spolsky on what makes a programmer the most productive:
A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that’s so comfortable you don’t feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1. (Here’s something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)
For myself, it’s silence that’s missing from my workplace. Ringing phones, the printer, the guy with the loud sneezes… all of these conspire to slow down my day, with music via headphones helping to minimise it.
Outages and response times
Cam ponders web hosting SLAs and wonders what’s reasonable. For his hosting, they guarantee 99.99% uptime, which works out to 52 minutes per year. (His outage was about 9 hours, or about ten years’ worth).
Bad stuff happens. We all know that. Even if it’s the most reliable setup ever. But there’s some major factors in determining what’s acceptable:
Frequency — If it’s happening too regularly, then there’s a reliability problem. They need better hardware, better software, whatever it is, needs to be fixed. Cam reckons it’s the second time in a few months.
Response — Obviously, you want a quick response, and a quick (and reliable) solution. There’s also sorts of monitoring tools out there these days. Typically anything like a full outage should be known about within minutes. A reputable web host will have substitute hardware ready to switch-on and go just as soon as that nice recent backup is restored.
Communications — Any third party like this has to keep the customer informed. There’s no excuse for not doing so. SMS alarms, emails, phone calls, whatever. (I wrote about alarms recently for my work blog.)
BTW, Cam’s also having troubles with his iPod… or more accurately, Apple’s 90 day warranty on replacement units.
I reckon he’s jinxed, myself.
Windows on Mac
Apple launches Boot Camp, to allow Intel Macs to run Windows. There’s already some screen grabs of it running.
As one commenter said: Wow – this is GREAT! Now I can combine the overpriced hardware with the inferior software!
As Ed Bott points out running Windows through virtualisation would be even better. MS’s Virtual PC doesn’t currently run on Intel Macs, but evidently they’re working on it.
All the money gone from the virtual server market
First VMWare made VM Server free.
Now Microsoft have proven they can copy that idea as well as anybody: MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now free.
Word’s insistence on US English
Anybody who lives outside the US will know that Microsoft Word does evil things, with little bits of text changing unaccountably into US English at seemingly random times. Suddenly a perfectly spelt word like… well, spelt could be a contender actually, will get that curly red line underneath it.
And I’ve seen proof. Yesterday I was working on a document with revision marking turned on, and low-and-behold, in the middle of editing, it claimed I’d reformatted a table cell to be US English. But I hadn’t. Tried to undo it, and couldn’t.
Evil, that’s what it is. Evil. Particularly since my Word default is EN-AU, which also matches my Windows regional settings.
Next thing you know, it’ll be switching my A4 paper to Letter, as well.
Google… just a little evil?
Google, once seen as huge and corporate but “not doing evil”, is scraping away at that good reputation. First it was the agreement with China. Now they’re teaming up with Nike, one of the more despised of western multinational conglomerates.
Test numbers
Here’s a nice list of Australian phone system test numbers, with perhaps the most useful being 12711 (check long distance carrier preselection) and 1800 801 920 (check own number).
Ctrl-Z in real life
Ah, so I’m not the only one: SMH’s Alexa Moses reaches for the Undo button in real life.
Sometimes I’ll be wandering around the house looking for something, wishing there was a real life grep.
Not to mention seeing something up-close and thinking to myself “Wow, this image (eg from my eyeballs) is really high-resolution!”
The summer time blues
So, here we are, still in summer time in AU, in the week’s extension. Of my two machines at home, the XP one was patched, and is okay. The Win2K one wasn’t, and moved by an hour yesterday. Despite wider media awareness of the issue last week, I’d expect a lot of systems with automatic switching to be effected. As ever, it’ll be those that get switched manually (eg most household appliances) that have no problems.
PS. 10:30am. Amongst the high-profile clocks that are inaccurate today is Melbourne’s famous Nylex sign.
PS. Wednesday 8pm. Due to lots of hits via Google, there’s some more discussion of this topic here.