Jeff's TumbleLog

08/02/2010

Jason Fried | Co-founder, 37signals | Big Think

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Text posted at 13:40

Happy Camper | Linux.com

I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week.

I got the original G1 phone from google when it came out, and I hardly ever used it. Why? I generally hate phones - they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever - and a cellphone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are. Which is not a good thing.

At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I’ve had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc. But my hatred of phones ends up resulting in me not really ever using them. The G1, for example, ended up being mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights, since I had almost no reason to carry it with me except when traveling.

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody - now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

Linus Torvalds

via linux.com

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07/02/2010

Paying with Paper

via youtube.com

Cleverness.

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05/02/2010

"Lots of files there..."

Enjoy the little things.

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04/02/2010

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

via ted.com

Thanks, Vinny.

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The Coolest Server Names

One of my inventions, of which I was the most proud, was a server naming scheme I came up with at a previous employer. It was called the RFB scheme. We had a tradition in place of using rather tasteless humour for determining systemic nomenclatures. Previously, we’d employed a convention a friend of mine had suggested, using euphemisms for vomiting ( yak, ralph, hurl, chunder etc. ) but this had leaked up towards management who freaked that it might offend potential customers if the hostnames were somehow exposed, via mail headers or some such, and firmly suggested we change it to something tamer.

So we needed something innocuous, memorable, preferably with a payload of appropriately tasteless humour somehow opaque to everyone bar the tech ops. I remembered reading a list years previously, either on a BBS or USENET which I’d found morbidly amusing. Supposedly representative of a survey taken from Surgery magazine, of various objects removed from patients in emergency rooms, called the Rectal Foreign Bodies list. It was perfect, even coming with it’s own snazzy sounding cryptic Three Letter Acronym. The RFB cluster was born.

This scheme was successfully deployed for a few years, I think without the management types ever cottoning on to just why these innocent, random sounding computer names used to elicit such childish smirking and nodding between members of their technical staff.

via serverfault.com

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03/02/2010

Mind the Gap

Materially and socially, technology seems to be decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor, not increasing it. If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

via paulgraham.com

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