Safari 5 Reader it’s the shitznutz! I love it.
Posts Tagged ‘en’

Vision and Execution
April 8, 2010Priceless and sadly, often accurate:
Too much vision of execution and not enough execution of the vision.

Ben’s Blogging!
March 23, 2010Ben Horowitz, one my most admired, all-time management masters, has started writing at Marc’s blog (he also wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital publication). The ATD piece was interesting in that it brought back a lot of memories about Loudcloud and the events that transpired back then. I am definitely looking forward to more of his posts.
Update: Now, his own blog!

Finder Error -10810
March 22, 2010I don’t normally curse (ok, ok, when writing) but fuck!
Update: I ended up nuking and paving the laptop after grabbing data via target mode. The effort late last year to finally organize my apps, data, and such is paying off. The FileVault image works, and I was able to mount it elsewhere (so I expect to drop it back in the laptop after I finish reinstalling). Eating my own sysadmin dog food: anytime!
Update: Really, a little thinking about the chain of events that may have caused this. Just before the Finder bent itself into oblivion, I just attached my video camera and (gasp!) poked around its file system from the CLI. I had attached the camera before without problems (but this was the first time I sniffed around). I’m not sure this has anything to do, other than folks seem to think this issue is related to external disks.

Nagios Forked: Icinga
March 18, 2010I found out recently that Nagios was forked into Icinga. It looks interesting, and the new web interface is heading over to sexyland fast. I will take it out for spin soon and see how it handles our current configuration (which relies heavily on object inheritance). The team at Icinga has already built a fair number of improvements for Nagios proper. It may be the fastest path to nirvana to a more usable Nagios install for shops heavily invested in Nagios.

My Displays Are Not HDCP Authorized
March 10, 2010Or so iTunes tells me. No, this isn’t a rant about DRM, iTunes, Apple or anything along those lines. Ranting requires energy, and I rather devote it to more productive matters. I prefer, as the saying goes, to “vote with my wallet”.
A couple of months ago I went on a limb and purchased a HD movie from the iTunes Store, mostly as an experiment. After checking out the goods, I decided I probably would not be buying any more movies, given subtitles (which are generally a strong requirement for a multi-lingual household) are not available. But I wasn’t ready for the surprise of not being able to watch said movie with or without subtitles at all. It turns out that now that I have upgraded my desktop system (which has a Mini Display Port), the movie will simply not play. Jemery Horwitz has a write up on why this is the case. This is annoying, especially given the fact that the system is Apple branded end to end.
I said this wasn’t a rant on DRM, and it isn’t. I subscribe to the mantra of use what works for you, and this doesn’t work for me, so my response is that I will not be buying any movies. I will live, and the $15 I spent on the movie will have to do for SD (vs HD) for that one movie. Live and learn.
Dumb.

Disgestible Iron
January 25, 2010From Jean-Louis Gassée‘s The Apple Licensing Myth at Monday Note:
[...] like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids – I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and found out there was no digestible iron whatsoever in spinach. You don’t get calcium by ingesting chalk, you need a calcium compound that’ll get through the sophisticated filters in the digestive system. Eating spinach gives you as much digestible iron as sucking nails.
It’s the little things that make it all worthwhile. Seriously now, the article is a really good read as a whole.

Mac SVN clients: Versions vs Cornerstone
January 20, 2010Although I am not a full-time developer, I do deal with a fair amount of information that benefits from the joys of versioning (including software I write). A lot of that work today happens in an IDE (Xcode), but a lot of it happens in other contexts, so having a pretty (and above all, useful) tool to navigate a repository is quite useful. I have been using Versions for the Mac since it was beta, and it has proven to be a worthy helper. Recently, I ran into Cornerstone, and I decided to try it out of curiosity. Both are solid apps, and either one will service your SVN needs nicely. Hopefully Git will get one in the near future.
