Vanderbrew » Computer http://vanderbrew.com/blog Beer, Food, Code, Writing, Creativity, Life Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:10:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 en Tech Podcasts http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2008/01/14/tech-podcasts/ http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2008/01/14/tech-podcasts/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:25:24 +0000 matt http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2008/01/14/tech-podcasts/ I received a new iPod for Christmas as my old 2nd gen device had a sketchy battery life and a tendency to forget where I was in an audiobook. Going from 10 gigs to 80 gigs is really a neat experience and it let me feel like I could branch out into more material than just carefully selected music and a smattering of audiobooks.

In the last few days I’ve been really listening to podcasts a lot. Any time I’m driving or washing dishes or doing some other monotonous task without my family around (since it’s rude to listen while there are others in the room) I tend to listen to an audio book. I’m trying to expand my tech horizons this year and tech podcasts seem like a good avenue to support that.

I’m currently subscribed to several of them including:

There’s been some great stuff from each of them and I’ve got plenty of listening material as I work through back catalogs.

Far and away, though, my favorite has been FLOSS Weekly. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte have put together some really interesting and engaging sessions that discuss both technologies and languages that I’m familiar with as well as those that are knew to me. Each and every session I learn something new and I’ve started keeping a tech journal where I keep track of bits of info that caught my interest.

If you’re interested in tech podcasts with more of a Unix/WebDev/Open Source flavor check out FLOSS Weekly (not that it’s really weekly, that was just the original intent) or any of the others listed above and I think that you’ll find something interesting to listen to.

Any other tech (or other) podcasts that you listen to? I’d love to hear about them.

]]> http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2008/01/14/tech-podcasts/feed/ Filing/Organizing Electronic Data http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/07/12/filingorganizing-electronic-data/ http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/07/12/filingorganizing-electronic-data/#comments Thu, 13 Jul 2006 04:11:29 +0000 matt http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/07/12/filingorganizing-electronic-data/ So, I’m reading Getting Things Done and I’m enjoying it. I think that there’s a lot of good info in it and it will be very useful. However, I’ve run across one snag…

The author, David Allen, is really big on having a good general knowledge filing system. He seems to think it’s the cornerstone of keeping your life in check, but the filing system described in his book is entirely paper based. He even talks about printing out emails you want to save so that you can file them.

I “live my life online”. I work on a computer all day. I telecommute. I deal with email, IM, PDF, HTML, etc. Almost all of the data that I would want to index and search on is electronic. To make things worse, I’ve got a work computer and a personal computer which are two different OS’s.

How does one keep all of his (or her) electronic bits in order and organized so that you can find what you want when you want it? I’ve got Google Desktop on my work machine and Spotlight on my personal machine but I’ve had less than stellar success with each of them. I do use Yahoo!’s MyWeb to tag and aggregate bookmarks that I care about but it’s an effort to go there because the system isn’t integrated with my desktop, it’s separate and online. I’ve heard about del.icio.us and ma.gnolia and they’re in a very similar vein to Yahoo!’s tool, but they all feel like they’re intended more for discovery and sharing, not storage and organizing.

Also, this completely ignores emails. I can use the above-mentioned tools to tag URLs and this provides a rather sophisticated, if simple, tool for organization, but I don’t have a similar means for email (that I know of). At work I use Outlook and at home I use Mail. I’d consider a different mail client at home if it was stable and did everything I needed but I don’t know of anything out there that meets my needs (IMAP is a big one).

Anyway, I don’t have a solution, nor do I expect to find the perfect one anytime soon. I’d be interested in hearing about how others are solving this problem and I’ll definitely let you know if I figure out a better way.

]]> http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/07/12/filingorganizing-electronic-data/feed/ Customer service and software development in the 21st century http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/03/14/customer-service-and-software-development-in-the-21st-century/ http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/03/14/customer-service-and-software-development-in-the-21st-century/#comments Wed, 15 Mar 2006 05:57:08 +0000 matt http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/03/14/customer-service-and-software-development-in-the-21st-century/ So I just had a really incredible customer service experience.

I use TextMate (a fantastic text editor for OS X) and I’d been having some trouble running a particular set of commands. I hit the correct key sequence, but nothing happened. I’ve been just ignoring it for a while and getting by with other stuff but finally I decided to try to find out what was going wrong and how to fix it.

I jumped onto the #textmate channel on IRC and started describing my problem to see if anyone else had experienced anything similar. Allan (yes, the Allan) responded and he worked with me to try to figure out what was going wrong. Turns out it’s a bug related to how keystrokes are sent from laptops and how TextMate interprets them.

Allan updated the Rails bundle (a package to extend TextMate functionality) on the subversion server and I just pulled it down and all of my Ruby on Rails-related commands are working correctly in TextMate.

Recap:

  • Matt has a problem with some software not working as expected.
  • Matt is able to communicate with the software developer (Allan) immediately, in real-time.
  • Together Matt and Allan determine what is going wrong.
  • Allan updates the code in version control to provide a minor fix until the next release.
  • Matt is able to download the update immediately.

I love this stuff!

]]> http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/03/14/customer-service-and-software-development-in-the-21st-century/feed/ Happy Times http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/28/happy-times/ http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/28/happy-times/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2006 06:32:45 +0000 matt http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/28/happy-times/ A cold, hand-(and self)crafted brewskie, music (Ani right now) and hacking on a project in Ruby on Rails.

]]> http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/28/happy-times/feed/ If you can read this, I’ve got a new hard drive http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/12/if-you-can-read-this-ive-got-a-new-hard-drive/ http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/12/if-you-can-read-this-ive-got-a-new-hard-drive/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:02:23 +0000 matt http://vanderbrew.com/blog/2006/01/12/if-you-can-read-this-ive-got-a-new-hard-drive/ Yes, I know, I could have posted this from anywhere, but I wanted to do it from my iBook. Earlier this evening, I removed my old 30 gig 4200 RPM drive and replaced it with a brand-spanking-new 60 gig 7200 RPM drive. The upgrade process was more painful than I expected and I’m very glad that I don’t do laptop repairs for a living, but I’m pretty happy with the results.

I’ve got everything back together and most of the user software re-installed (the distinction being because I haven’t even started with Apache, svn, RoR, etc). So far, the disk is great. I think it’s faster, I’ll know for sure with some extended usage. It’s definitely quieter. Amazing how quiet this disk is.

With that, I think that I’ll go to bed and let mdimport do its thing.

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