Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

I’ve started using Google Calendar to manage my activities, and I’m very happy with it so far. It’s exactly what I was looking for: full iCal support, very clean and simple interface, and very easy to use. I don’t have a public calendar for my own schedule, but I’ll post an update if I create one.

I’ve seen some people express interest in inexpensive tools to help with database administration and development. Here are a few suggestions of tools I’ve used to manage various databases. All of these products are compatible with multiple platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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I password-protected the discussion threads attached to the article about Chris McKinstry’s death, a few days after I published them. I’m suddenly getting a lot of criticism about that. (75 comments in three hours!)

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At 6:00 PM EST, the Off-Topic discussion forum at Joel on Software will permanently close. This may be why.

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I’ve become a recent fan of Reddit, an online “social bookmarking” service that was a project of the Y Combinator Summer Founders Program during the summer of 2005. Anyone can post a link to Reddit, of a website or article they find interesting. Other Reddit members can read the article, and vote it up or down. Based on a super-secret magical formula, “hot” sites with a lot of recent points end up on the Reddit front page. The hot ranking mode works really well here, ensuring that the front page is usually full of fresh and interesting content.

The Reddit community is not a balanced representation of the whole Internet. It has an overabundance of hackers, specifically programmers, and more specifically people working with Lisp and other scripting languages like Ruby and Python. There are other social bookmarking sites with more well-rounded content, including Digg and del.icio.us. But Reddit’s niche makes it interesting to me.

Reddit recently added a comment feature, where users can write their own commentary on links posted to the site. This is a very useful feature, but its implementation is problematic. For example, here’s a link to the commentary about an article titled “Best Buy Sux.” There are three ways to view comments: the default view of hot (combination of most recent and popular displayed first); new (most recent shown first); and top (most popular shown first). This is unlike every other message board on the web, which all display messages chronologically. If you want to read through an entire thread, you can do so from top to bottom. But with this display, there’s no way to do that; you’d have to switch to new and then read from bottom-to-top.

More importantly, users appear to be moderating commentary based on whether they agree with it or not. As a result, important and articulate messages end up at the bottom if too many users disagree with them. For example, on the Best Buy Sux commentary: a user named jedberg posted a comment defending Best Buy’s actions in this situation. (Disclaimer: I met jedberg in person earlier this year, and he seemed pretty cool.) While it may not be the most articulate comment on record, he makes a decent argument, and it’s the precursor to a whole bunch of discussion later in the thread. But because people disagreed with him, or disagreed with the way he stated his opinion, his comment ends up at the very bottom. I couldn’t understand half the thread until I scrolled down, found his comment, and then scrolled back up.

I have two suggestions which I think will make the comments easier to understand. I recommend that Reddit add a traditional mode to view comments, where the oldest comments are listed first. I also think Reddit should change the default so that comments are viewed traditionally unless the user overrides it. If a lot of users do like the hot mode, the Reddit software could allow each user to set their own default view, like a user preference or through a cookie. But the hot mode doesn’t work well for commentary. New users shouldn’t be deliberately confused just because Reddit has a cool ranking algorithm.

I received an inquiry from another WordPress blogger regarding a WordPress support inquiry I had opened in August. He wrote:

I was searching for answers to a very pesky “Cannot establish connection to database!” WordPress error, and read your thread about database persistent connections. I was wondering if you could give me a hand optimizing the database for WP, I am not a programmer by any extent of the imagination, and know nothing of servers, just got one by chance. (Edited slightly by Ryan.)

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Tim Bray thought about switching back too, and he’s raised some interesting points. Of course, for him, “switching back” means back to one of Sun’s Unix-like operating systems, either Java Desktop System or Solaris. (Tim works for Sun.)

Well, last Friday I went ahead and ordered a Dell. (Sorry, Dan!) I got a great deal on a Dimension 9100 desktop, by using a coupon for 35% off which I found at FatWallet. It should arrive early next week!

I’ve been looking at PCs for the last 24 hours. Dell is so annoying.

Identical Dimension 5100c systems are $300 different depending on whether you buy through Dell Small Business or Dell Home.

Four identical Dimension 9100 systems all come up with four different prices, with $195 range between them, depending on how you buy. And they come with 3 different monitor types, because you have to buy a monitor if you order via one method, and you have to buy a nice monitor through another method.

This whole pricing scheme remind me of the airlines. No one on the plane thinks they got a good deal for the flight — they all assume someone paid less.

So I’m thinking about Switching Back.

I bought an iMac in May, a 17″ model, with a G5 processor, the newly-released Tiger operating system, etc. There are a lot of things I do like about it. OS X is indeed very pretty. There have been very few hardware problems: generally hardware has Just Worked. Some of the included iLife tools, like the Address Book, are great applications. The seamless Bluetooth synchronization has been fun too. I got a new cell phone last month and transferred 200 phone numbers with the push of a button.

But at the same time, I just don’t feel like it’s really doing anything for me. I still don’t feel nearly as productive on the Mac as I did on the PC. There are a lot of things I avoid doing, like balancing my checkbook, or doing Java work with Eclipse, or connecting to the VPN at work. I tend to make some silly mistakes, or just get confused about how to get something done. I probably could learn to be more productive with it, but I just haven’t had the time or energy. It doesn’t help that I’m switching back and forth every day between a PC at work and a Mac at home.

Anyone have any thoughts on this dilemma?