Nothing short of total Perl.com domination!
Here’s the direct link for when the main page is updated again.
posted on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 at 13:38 | permanent link | view comments
I made the cover of Perl.com!
Here’s the direct link for when the main page is updated again.
Thanks chromatic!
posted on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 at 12:02 | permanent link | view comments
I made myself a rule for email a couple of weeks ago:
The inbox will be smaller each time I check my mail.
I eventually agreed that the rule doesn’t apply when I’m sending a new message out; this keeps my workflow productive and simple. I’m checking email less often and my inbox is now at 16 messages. Win.
I’m not at rock bottom, because a few of the messages are important but hard to move (things that will take concerted effort over time to finish), but I’ll get there eventually.
posted on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 at 11:58 | permanent link | view comments
On Tuesday when I started this little experiment, I had 359 messages in my inbox. This morning I have 45. I’m calling that a ‘win’.
I have, with one or two exceptions, made sure that each time I checked my mail that there was at least one fewer message in the inbox than before I checked it.
The messages left in my inbox are mostly reminders of important (but non-urgent) things I need to do. I’ll find another way to deal with those in the next few days.
I did make myself an exception that if I was sending a message, that I didn’t have to shrink the inbox. That helped me stay productive with my work.
Have I checked my email less? It could be that I’m just hyped up on the idea of a small inbox and eager to file away my messages. Here are the numbers:
- Tuesday: 21
- Wednesday: 13
- Thursday: 9
A little better… but that still looks like the pattern of an email-checking addict to me. Maybe once my inbox gets small enough (I’m shooting for zero… or smaller!) I can deal with the craving better.
posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 at 08:04 | permanent link | view comments
I broke down and ordered a Wattvision device a couple of weeks ago. Here is my setup experience.
Box arrives
Unboxing
I followed the setup instructions, but for some (bizarre, unknown) reason my MacBook Pro (June 2010) refused to connect to the Gateway’s (the little deck-of-cards-sized device is called the Gateway) IP 169.254 IP address under any network configuration or any browser. I used another web browser on another computer and finished the setup that way.
I should mention that I emailed Wattvision when I couldn’t connect. I received an email response within minutes telling me to call the support number. I did, and Savraj walked me through some things. He took my word that I really couldn’t connect. After going through everything both of us could think of, he promptly offered to send me a new Gateway at no charge. I agreed, but thought I’d try the configuration with another web browser first, which worked (so I called him back and told him not to worry about the new Gateway). +1 for great support.
Now with it working, here’s how I actually installed it. First I “repurposed” my phone utility box (I use a VOIP phone now):
Inside the utility box was a CAT-5 cable going into my house. This meant a lot to me: I didn’t want to drill any new holes in my exterior wall or fish a phone line through a finished basement ceiling. I grabbed my punchdown tool and wired up an Ethernet jack:
I tucked the cables behind the phone test ports for tidiness:
Here is the entire exterior setup. You can see the Wattvision sensor strapped to the power meter. To the left of the meter you can see the white phone cable, which emerges below and goes into the phone utility box:
Next, I found where the CAT-5 cable comes into the 66-block in my basement. I added another Ethernet jack (all standard Ethernet wiring):
I plugged in a standard phone cable into this jack and to the Wattvision Gateway, the supplied power to the Gateway. The lights flickered for a second then went dark. Gasp! Did I kill the Gateway? No, it does it again when I remove and add power. Hm…
I looked at the ends of the phone cable:
Ah! Phone cabling is straight through. I wired the CAT-5 cable as Ethernet, so that means I need to reverse the wires in the phone cable:
Plug it in and voilà.
Certainly, texting while driving is one of the stupidest things a motorist can do. A study published in July by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute showed that drivers who text while driving increase their risk of a crash or near-crash 23-fold compared with those who do not. Reaching out for something moving inside the car represents a ninefold increase in risk; dialling, a sixfold increase; combing hair or putting on make-up raises the risk almost fivefold.
In a previous study, Virginia Tech found that 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involved some form of distraction within three seconds of the incident. The most common distraction by far was using a hand-held phone.
posted on Fri, 02 Oct 2009 at 11:12 | permanent link | view comments
I’ve been saying it for a while: students learn better with qualified, caring teachers and quality teaching materials than anything else, and One-Laptop-Per-Child is an expensive distraction from real education.
I think everyone who has been educated knows this instinctively. We can all point to a mentor (a teacher, a parent, a caring friend) who guided us, encouraged us, and cared enough about us to help us learn what is worth learning and what is not worth learning.
Giving a child a laptop does neither of these things. Some argue that simply having access to information will be the child’s ticket to a bright future, but now that the results are in, we can finally stop beating this dead horse.
You will always find exceptions: highly motivated students will learn no matter what you do to them, and giving them access to a computer will certainly give them an opportunity to get the information they want faster; but for the majority of students, giving them a computer will do little good, and will often do much harm, to their education.
The Internet is not a discriminator of information, and this is its chief problem. A classically-based education, as an example, imposes a hierarchy on knowledge. It says, “These things are more important than those things.” And when I say “it” I really mean a classically trained teacher guiding a student through a classical curriculum.
The Internet can’t do that for you by itself. You still need a guide, a mentor of some kind to help you know what’s worth learning. Autodidacts learn this early on and quickly learn which voices in life they want to trust (generally by way of books and other reading material), but the rest of us simply don’t know where to go.
And while we’re on the topic of online learning, did you hear of the recent meta-study by the US Department of Education? Everybody in the tech world is feeling validated, but they shouldn’t. It claims:
The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.
Read the study and notice that it’s a meta-study, largely sampling the results of self-selecting, uncontrolled learning experiements. Highly-motivated students, the kind who opt to take online courses, will always perform better than unmotivated students, no matter what medium they’re using.
The abstract concludes:
Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).
(emphasis mine).
So don’t take this as a validation for K-12 computer learning. Additional studies over OLPC and K-12 computer learning aren’t encouraging:
Under the auspices of the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education and Mathematica Policy Research recently completed a rigorous, two-year test of reading and math software (using programs that had at least some nonexperimental evidence that they “worked”) in dozens of school districts nationwide. With one minor exception, the studies found that children using the software scored no better than peers who did not have access to the software.
and this:
Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals.
and this:
(Leigh) Linden (an economist at Columbia University) also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours-—essentially substituting computers for teachers—actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.
I won’t spoil all the fun of this article, but there are far, far better and less expensive ways to improve education than giving a child a laptop. In developing countries the list includes deworming children, providing tutors, and creating more private schools.
In the United States, computers in classrooms and schools should be removed and with the money not spent on technology, hire additional teachers or give the existing teachers a raise. I’m certain we’d get more of what we’re really looking for.
posted on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 at 11:36 | permanent link | view comments
[Note: You can skip the next 6 paragraphs or so to the mildly amusing anecdote if you don’t like my seemingly endless diatribes. If you don’t like my mildly amusing anecdotes either, you can jump right to the final 4 or 5 paragraphs and enjoy my grandiose moralizing.]
When I bought my scooter last March, a lot of people asked about it. What kind is it? Is it fast? What kind of mileage do you get? Where’s the clutch? Can I ride it? (answers: “a Genuine Buddy”, “60-65 mph on a straightaway”, “90-ish mpg”, “it’s a continuous clutch—just twist and go”, and “no.”).
(a photograph of my erstwhile office)
But the best question has been, “Why did you buy that scooter and not some other kind?” I’ve mostly handwaved my way through that question with something like “I researched it for two years” yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s true that other people who have owned multiple scooters really like it, and that influenced me. There’s also the great support group and local service shop. But every major brand has its loyal following: these reasons are not completely unique to my scooter.
Not-China
In reality, you’re fairly safe with any scooter from not-China: Kymco, Honda, Yamaha, Genuine, Sym, Lambretta, Bajaj, etc. These are all good brands that have been around for a long time. The Chinese scooters you see for sale on every other corner of major thoroughfares are what the cognoscenti call “disposable scooters.” They usually offer 90 day warranties, which I’m told you’re lucky to make it through without incident. If you go to any scooter shop that’s been around for more than a year or two, you’ll find dozens of these sub-$1000 disposables in the junkyard behind the shop and none for sale in the shop itself.
The owners and mechanics of good scooter shops will tell you what the Chinese scooters are made of: $%*#@! In layman’s terms, this means they’re made of inexpensive plastic parts and poor quality, brittle metals that are not designed to last long under heat or stress. They’re the scooter equivalent pressboard furniture: it may do just fine for you if you don’t move it far or often. And keep it out of the rain.
[I’m not bagging on China. I love China (sometimes). Most of the nice things I own were assembled in or have parts from China. But Chinese-made scooters are terrible. Ride a few of them and then ride something from the list above and you’ll see what I mean. Talk to scooter mechanics, ask around. There’s a reason they’re so cheap.]
Another reason I bought a Buddy was the 2 year warranty and roadside assistance (at no extra cost). I always thought roadside assistance was for sissies. I’d never needed it for my car (I somehow always managed to find a phone and call someone), but today I was proven wrong. I am proud to say that roadside assistance is awesome.
Story time: gather ‘round!
I’m cruising north on Geneva Road this afternoon. A dump truck in the left lane and an 18-wheeler ahead of me in the right lane. The truck in my lane is drifting occasionally into the shoulder and stirring up a lot of dust and gravel. My face is being pelted with little objects, so I start to slow a little and BAM and then rat-tat-tat-tat-tat over and over. Something is making a terrible noise in my rear wheel. I slow down and pull off the road. The rat-tat-tat stops, but I dismount to see what’s going on.
Protruding from the rear tire is about a half-inch of a rusty nail. Crud. Air is already hissing from the tire, so I pull the whole thing out. Three-freaking-inches of nail. It was nearly all the way in. Crud. I think I can make it another quarter mile—maybe.
I turn on the hazard blinkers and creep along the shoulder until I get to the next gas station. I can feel the rear tire is completely flat before I get there, so I walk it from the curb to the building and park it on the sidewalk in front of the store. A nice guy on a skateboard mentions a scooter shop nearby (which isn’t there anymore actually, but he didn’t know that, so I just thanked him). We chat a little bit. Then I remember a month or so ago getting my roadside assistance card in the mail:
I call the number, and a pleasant voice asks, “Are you in a safe location?” Sweet. “You bet I am.”
In another minute she’s asked for my policy number and verified all of my information. She asks for my location and where I want it towed. I walk into the air-conditioned convenience store to get out of the 90°+ heat. The guy with the skateboard is charging his cell phone from an outlet behind the garbage can. “Things ok?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I remembered I have roadside assistance.”
“Awesome!” he says. Then he turns away to make a call now that he’s got some juice in his phone.
15 minutes later and the tow truck is there. I sign a paper saying that Larry’s Towing has my scooter. In 30 minutes the truck is on its way to The Scooter Lounge (“the best scooter shop in the universe!”). No charge for any of this—it’s all part of the package. For 2 years. It also covers car rental, but I don’t need that today (I’m hanging out at the gas station’s convenience store writing this until my wife picks me up).
Back to quality
But this essay isn’t really about scooters and flat tires. It’s about quality. There are companies that care first about what they do, and there are companies that care first about making money. Some folks think that you can do the latter without doing the former, and I think in the short term they’re often right: you can fool some of the people some of the time.
While most people care about quality in something, whether it’s the TV shows they watch or the beer they drink, many people don’t seem to care about quality in most things. They’re going to buy the cheapest things over and over, rather than wait and save up for something better. It just doesn’t matter to them.
I don’t know if there’s any correlation between people who don’t care about using quality things and people who don’t care about creating quality things (or doing quality work) but I know that people who care about making quality almost universally appreciate it in the things they use themselves: their cars, homes, food, clothing, music, furniture, plumbing, computers, software, tools, and even scooters.
This is not to say that everything we have must be the best. We make do with many things and budget constraints often force us to temper what’s important to us. But the things that are important should be of adequate quality to give satisfaction.
It’s also important to keep in mind that tastes change over time, often for the better: what was satisfying to you at one time may not satisfy you later on (e.g., making dough by hand used to be great, but a Bosch makes making bread oh-so-much more fun). Having quality nearby makes making more quality enjoyable.
posted on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 at 23:48 | permanent link | view comments
Goodbye QuickSilvεr, Hello Google Quick Search + Proxi + Growl!
I’ve been a fan of QuickSilvεr for years. It’s played a significant role in my life on OS X and I’ve gotten to know and love most of its quirks, crashes, and instabilities. But no more! I’ve found a new love and I’m kicking you out, you beautiful fiend.
My new love is a trio of programs: Google Quick Search Box, Proxi, and Growl. Everyone knows how cool Growl is and probably has it installed, but Google Quick Search and Proxi might be new to some folks. I’ll go through the changes I’ve made in moving from Quicksilvεr to my new trio.
Quicksilvεr is cool
If you’re a QS user like me, what attracted you to QS in the first place was the elegance and the economy. With as few keystrokes as you could want, you can accomplish common, useful things. And QS just makes your Mac feel really cool, even when it’s starting up:
But we need a little something new every once in a while.
Quicksilvεr’s slow demise
Even the hardiest fans of Quicksilvεr must admit that it’s suffered greatly in author Nicholas Jitkoff’s absence. It hasn’t had a significant update for months; the last stable release was at the end of 2007. It has some memory corruption problems that manifest themselves by the icons disappearing and the triggers stop working after about a week. I haven’t minded restarting QS, knowing that this is the price to pay for such useful software, but recently I started wondering if there wasn’t anything else out there yet.
I tried Google’s Quick Search Box for OS X last year (also written by
Nicholas Jitkoff, who is now a Google employee), but it wasn’t ready
for prime time. I’d also used Proxi off and on for trigger-related
events that I couldn’t get to work in Quicksilvεr, but it also seemed
to get wedged occasionally (note: Proxi still hangs occasionally after
closing iTunes), remedied only by a kill or waiting a while.
But with the latest releases of GQSB (2.0.0.1147) and Proxi (1.5), I think I’ve found the perfect combination for what I used to do in QS.
If you haven’t yet, go get a copy of Google Quick Search Box (GQSB) and Proxi and install them. We’ll look at GQSB first.
Google Quick Search Box
Here’s how I set mine up. I’m an emacs user, so I can never have
^-Space for my launch trigger. If you don’t use emacs, you might enjoy
a little more pinky room there. In any case, once I turned off
Quicksilvεr, I had my old ⌥-Space keystroke freed up for GQSB. Let’s
look at the first preference page:
I turned off the ⌘+⌘ key trigger after an hour; I’d already found that I accidentally seem to hit that key combo a little too often.
Here’s the second pane:
I’m a bit of a privacy freak, so I turned off the Google searches. With these enabled, this little tool becomes a little too powerful for me. It’s kind of scary, but for the fearless, you’re going to flip out at how slick this is.
In the “Under the Hood” section, change these to suit your tastes. I’m sure I’ll continue tweaking these for a while (scroll down if you only see one option):
Now we’ve got a new search/launch tool installed! However, if you’re like me, you’ve added a lot of triggers and AppleScripts to QS and really miss the shortcuts. It’s important to bear in mind that GQSB is only a search tool and launcher; it doesn’t have triggers like Quicksilvεr does. For those we now introduce Proxi.
Proxi
Proxi definitely took its cue from Quicksilvεr when it came to superfluous effects:
Proxi is obviously a self-serving bit of software for Griffin Technology, which hasn’t fully been able to engage the larger development community behind it. Fortunately, they’ve put enough useful general-purpose, non-Griffin functionality in it to make a truly useful tool.
Proxi is a really only a trigger manager at heart, but it does a decent job of it. Here we’re going to take an old trigger from our Quicksilvεr setup and do the same thing in Proxi. Here’s the trigger in Quicksilvεr:
This trigger launches an AppleScript, that launches Stick ‘Em Up, my favorite sticky program by Jim McGowan.
Now open the Proxi Editor by clicking the gear icon in your menu bar:
And make a new trigger:
I’m going to call it “run stick ‘em’ up”. When you select the new trigger in the left panel, on the far right panel you’ll see the settings for this new trigger. Here is where you assign the hotkeys. I’m using ⌘⌥^-S in this case:
Now we add a new task to this trigger. You can add multiple tasks to a trigger if you want:
One excellent thing Proxi can do is to run Applescripts inline. Here we make a launcher for an application:
That’s all! Just close the Proxi Editor and it’s running.
Proxi still suffers from some lag occasionally; I haven’t found any kind of consistent pattern to it, but by and large I haven’t had much trouble with the latest 1.5 update.
Fin
Between Proxi for the common hotkey shortcuts and Google Quick Search Box for the blazing fast hard-drive searches (and I use Growl to listen for iTunes track changes, just like Quicksilvεr used to do for me), I’m back in the saddle in under an hour.
posted on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 at 12:59 | permanent link | view comments
Goodbye QuickSilvεr, Hello Google Quick Search + Proxi + Growl!
I’ve been a fan of QuickSilvεr for years. It’s played a significant role in my life on OS X and I’ve gotten to know and love most of its quirks, crashes, and instabilities. But no more! I’ve found a new love and I’m kicking you out, you beautiful fiend.
My new love is a trio of programs: Google Quick Search Box, Proxi, and Growl. Everyone knows how cool Growl is and probably has it installed, but Google Quick Search and Proxi might be new to some folks. I’ll go through the changes I’ve made in moving from Quicksilvεr to my new trio.
Quicksilvεr is cool
If you’re a QS user like me, what attracted you to QS in the first place was the elegance and the economy. With as few keystrokes as you could want, you can accomplish common, useful things. And QS just makes your Mac feel really cool, even when it’s starting up:
But we need a little something new every once in a while.
Quicksilvεr’s slow demise
Even the hardiest fans of Quicksilvεr must admit that it’s suffered greatly in author Nicholas Jitkoff’s absence. It hasn’t had a significant update for months; the last stable release was at the end of 2007. It has some memory corruption problems that manifest themselves by the icons disappearing and the triggers stop working after about a week. I haven’t minded restarting QS, knowing that this is the price to pay for such useful software, but recently I started wondering if there wasn’t anything else out there yet.
I tried Google’s Quick Search Box for OS X last year (also written by
Nicholas Jitkoff, who is now a Google employee), but it wasn’t ready
for prime time. I’d also used Proxi off and on for trigger-related
events that I couldn’t get to work in Quicksilvεr, but it also seemed
to get wedged occasionally (note: Proxi still hangs occasionally after
closing iTunes), remedied only by a kill or waiting a while.
But with the latest releases of GQSB (2.0.0.1147) and Proxi (1.5), I think I’ve found the perfect combination for what I used to do in QS.
If you haven’t yet, go get a copy of Google Quick Search Box (GQSB) and Proxi and install them. We’ll look at GQSB first.
Google Quick Search Box
Here’s how I set mine up. I’m an emacs user, so I can never have
^-Space for my launch trigger. If you don’t use emacs, you might enjoy
a little more pinky room there. In any case, once I turned off
Quicksilvεr, I had my old ⌥-Space keystroke freed up for GQSB. Let’s
look at the first preference page:
I turned off the ⌘+⌘ key trigger after an hour; I’d already found that I accidentally seem to hit that key combo a little too often.
Here’s the second pane:
I’m a bit of a privacy freak, so I turned off the Google searches. With these enabled, this little tool becomes a little too powerful for me. It’s kind of scary, but for the fearless, you’re going to flip out at how slick this is.
In the “Under the Hood” section, change these to suit your tastes. I’m sure I’ll continue tweaking these for a while (scroll down if you only see one option):
Now we’ve got a new search/launch tool installed! However, if you’re like me, you’ve added a lot of triggers and AppleScripts to QS and really miss the shortcuts. It’s important to bear in mind that GQSB is only a search tool and launcher; it doesn’t have triggers like Quicksilvεr does. For those we now introduce Proxi.
Proxi
Proxi definitely took its cue from Quicksilvεr when it came to superfluous effects:
Proxi is obviously a self-serving bit of software for Griffin Technology, which hasn’t fully been able to engage the larger development community behind it. Fortunately, they’ve put enough useful general-purpose, non-Griffin functionality in it to make a truly useful tool.
Proxi is a really only a trigger manager at heart, but it does a decent job of it. Here we’re going to take an old trigger from our Quicksilvεr setup and do the same thing in Proxi. Here’s the trigger in Quicksilvεr:
This trigger launches an AppleScript, that launches Stick ‘Em Up, my favorite sticky program by Jim McGowan.
Now open the Proxi Editor by clicking the gear icon in your menu bar:
And make a new trigger:
I’m going to call it “run stick ‘em’ up”. When you select the new trigger in the left panel, on the far right panel you’ll see the settings for this new trigger. Here is where you assign the hotkeys. I’m using ⌘⌥^-S in this case:
Now we add a new task to this trigger. You can add multiple tasks to a trigger if you want:
One excellent thing Proxi can do is to run Applescripts inline. Here we make a launcher for an application:
That’s all! Just close the Proxi Editor and it’s running.
Proxi still suffers from some lag occasionally; I haven’t found any kind of consistent pattern to it, but by and large I haven’t had much trouble with the latest 1.5 update.
Fin
Between Proxi for the common hotkey shortcuts and Google Quick Search Box for the blazing fast hard-drive searches (and I use Growl to listen for iTunes track changes, just like Quicksilvεr used to do for me), I’m back in the saddle in under an hour.
posted on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 at 12:59 | permanent link | view comments