Posts

I’ve never been a big on making New Years resolutions, but I have come up with them on occasion. Generally, throughout the year, I also set goals for myself that are usually unattainable in that they would involve completely changing my lifestyle or personality in some way or another. I’ve decided to dispense with all that, semantically anyway, and instead try to improve myself through experimentation. There’s very little pressure when it comes to an experiment, even if it fails you’ve still learned something. For example, one of the things that can kill my productivity is thinking about one thing while I’m doing another. If I’m trying to write some code but I’m thinking about something I wanted to write about here, it makes my coding less productive. If I have two projects and I’m working on one but thinking about another, I’m not really optimizing my time. So my current experiment is trying to do whatever I’m thinking about. If I find myself reading a book but thinking about work, I’m going to try and get up and do the work, rather than having a sub-optimal reading experience. If I’m having a conversation with someone, I’m going to try to concentrate on the conversation either by focusing on what we’re discussing or turning the discussion toward whatever it is I’m preoccupied by. It will be interesting to see if I can even succcessfully perform the experiment and whether or not it makes me more productive. (It seems to be working so far – I’m writing this piece because I was thinking about it while I was trying to get something else done.) ...

At work we’ve been having an ongoing discussion about how to manage identity for our internal applications. We have a number of functions we need to implement, all of which will need to be tied to a user’s identity. We’d like to use a mix of applications we write ourselves and off the shelf applications, and the big question we’re facing is how to manage identity across all of these applications. This sort of goes back to a post I made awhile back noting that increasingly people are just tying into the user registration system for packages like PHPbb as a quick and dirty solution to this problem. ...

Shelley Powers posted a a brief review of eMusic, which differs from other music downloading services in that the tracks are available in the MP3 format and are unencumbered by DRM of any kind. They offer over 600,000 tracks, although major label current releases seem to be missing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They offer a two week free trial during which you can download up to 50 tracks, so it sure seems like it’s worth a shot. ...

Let’s say you need to include a link to Microsoft’s Jscript reference in a print document. The URL used to be http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/jscript/. Now it’s this crazy, lengthy URL with another URL nested inside it, and the inner URL actually ends with a GUID. I think we can pin this one on lazy content management system developers. In any case, it’s sad to see a perfectly good URL die. For the record, here’s a link with the new URL. I would have just posted it but it’s so long that it would have thrown off the layout of this page. ...

I have seen some discussion of MacBook Pro prices, but few of them seem to be comparing Apples to apples, if you get my meaning. To make a true comparison, you have to compare the Mac to a similarly equipped PC notebook from a business-oriented line of products. (Business-targetted laptops are better built and more expensive than the ones targetted at consumers.) Here’s an article previewing Core Duo-based Windows notebooks, and it sure looks to me like the price of admission is $1999 regardless of manufacturer. Gateway advertises a much lower price than that, but as soon as you start customizing it to match the specs of the MacBook, you find that you’re right at the same price point as the Apple laptops. ...

Tom Coates has a good post on the new “feature” in iTunes, called the MiniStore, that prompts you to buy music from the iTunes Music Store while you’re browsing your music library. The first time I opened iTunes 6.0.2 (which came with a new EULA, a warning sign if there ever is one) and looked at the library, I had the classic, “What the hell is that?” reaction. I have since learned that not only does the window take up some of my precious screen space with content I don’t want, but it also sends a list of whatever I’m looking at in the library or listening to back to the mother ship so that it can supply me with recommendations tailored to my tastes. ...

I have been watching Lost obsessively since the series premiered, and one of my great worries has been that there will never be a satisfying conclusion. That’s what happened with the X-Files – the creators of the show didn’t know how long it would last, so they just stretched it out until they didn’t get renewed, and the storyline eventually fell apart. When I started watching the show, “conspiracy” episodes were my favorite, but by the end, the “moster of the week” episodes and funny episodes were the only ones I really loved. (I still contend that Humbug is one of the greatest hours of TV ever.) ...

It’s hard to see how the Apple relationship with Intel isn’t paying off already. The new MacBooks sure look to me like they compare very well price-wise with business class laptops from PC vendors, and they’ll have Apple’s fit and finish to boot. According to Steve Jobs’ keynote, all of the Mac hardware will be migrated to Intel by the end of the year, so I guess if your heart was set on a desktop system other than an iMac or an iBook, you’ll get your wish soon enough. ...

I just wanted to post a brief update on where I am with the memory leak problem that I described back on December 19. I tried out both JProfiler and YourKit until the evaluation periods ran out, and while I was not able to isolate the memory leak with either of them, but to me, one came out far ahead of the other. To me, JProfiler is vastly superior to YourKit. I have to say, YourKit didn’t get a completely fair shake because their telemetry features only work with Java 1.5 and I’m using Java 1.4. I know it’s not impossible to write such features for Java 1.4, because JProfiler provides them, so not being able to take advantage of them was a bit frustrating for me. However, even for features that both products provide, I found JProfiler to be more robust. It does a better job of showing a comprehensive view of which objects exist and how much memory they’re using. I didn’t get to use either product enough to reach a fully informed opinion, especially because I’m not very experienced with profilers, but it sure seemed to me that JProfiler is a much more advanced tool. ...

Did you know that Guy Kawasaki has a blog? I’m surprised that it has taken the inventor of company evangelism so long to pick up the habit. Now that he’s started, though, he’s on a roll. His posts on the Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs and the Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists are particularly good.