January 2011
12 posts
Replacing Books With iPads? No thanks... →
ginandjesus:
elbles:
…
Bottom line, I’m quite skeptical of any “study” like this. It reminds me of when my school tried to force tablets upon us, and went to great efforts to suggest they increased productivity, and other kinds of inane bullshit. Shockingly, a professor I had, who happened to be one of the biggest proponents of then-new tablets, had his research sponsored by Microsoft....
Replacing Books With iPads? No thanks... →
I’ll be the first person to advocate technology when it’s an improvement over “the old stuff,” but I think this is a very bad idea. I’m less than two years out of school, but my memories of classes are still very distinct. If I was going to class to learn, I left the laptop in my bag, and got out my pen and paper. A laptop offered too many distractions to be...
Rolling Your Own IM Server →
Ars has a pretty good primer on getting your own XMPP IM server going. That said, I’d throw in a few comments about ejabberd. In the one install I saw of that, it was a mess. We were using it with a LDAP backend (synced with AD), and we had a myriad of issues: High CPU utilization, seemingly random issues with shared roster groups (buddy lists), frequent crashes, et cetera. This was with...
Teaching Linux →
My school required CS majors to take an “Intro to UNIX” class, and used Linux to do so every year I was there (it was probably Solaris a few years prior). It wasn’t and isn’t a hard thing for CS majors (or similar) to learn, and it’s something they’ll almost certainly come across in their careers at some point or another. But the idea that a CS major has to...
Is Facebook The New/Next AOL? →
John Dvorak sure seems to think so. It’s been forever since I’ve read anything from/in PC Magazine, but I did find this interesting. You can argue the usefulness of Facebook (and there’s plenty to find useful about it), but in my opinion, it’s just yet another in a long list of sites and services. From Usenet, to AOL, to MySpace, they’ve all come, and mostly gone.
As...
A Late Christmas Present →
A bit too late, I’m afraid, but I’m thrilled just the same. Maybe the Eagles will finally has a defense that can make in-game adjustments next season…
Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone? →
marco:
I was going to write about this angle of the Verizon iPhone, but Watts Martin already did a better job of communicating what I wanted to say, plus more, in this post:
But in the US market the great Google vs. Apple Fight Fight Fight! has been a lot less of a real competition than either the technology press or the cheering fans make it out to be. With Verizon getting the iPhone and...
Vista: It Doesn't Suck
When my new-to-me ThinkPad showed up, I needed to put an OS on it (it came with Vista Business loaded by the seller, but I don’t trust installs I don’t do myself). My initial inclination was to go with Windows XP—I’ve used it for years, it would have been blazing on the ThinkPad, it’s pretty solid, et cetera. But the XP installer didn’t recognize the hard drive...
My Last FWD Car
After driving in some of the worst conditions I’ve ever seen in my life last night, I can say unequivocally that my GTI will be my first and last FWD car. It’s not that I don’t like the car. I love it, actually. But I hate FWD in the snow. I always have. In some cases (but not all—I’ll get to that in a second), FWD gets you that little bit of extra traction (due to...
Long Day
I took a nine hour drive today. I used to take them fairly often when going between school in Virginia, and home in Connecticut. Today, it was from my office to my house. It’s a 40 mile drive, and normally takes around 75 minutes. But not today. Nine. Fucking. Hours. Way to go, CT DOT, you really took care of the roads tonight…
Hello Again, ThinkPad
A while ago, I was pondering replacing my MacBook Pro (last generation discrete 15” model) with a ThinkPad. That hasn’t happened (yet), but I do have a ThinkPad once more. A few days before Christmas, I was using my trusty old Dell Latitude C400 (bought three years ago, and now eight years old), when I noticed the display was awfully loose. I took it apart in the hopes of tightening...