Be sure to read Tom DeMarco's "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency". This concise book does a great job with the business case for policies like this and how to best shape them.
I'm very partial to the "Happy Hacking" keyboard light. PFU has a new version with a 1/T keypad with only slightly larger size and both PS2 and USB models: http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/haphackeyl it1.html
For mice I'm partial to the Elcom Masamune Shiro USB optical mouse. I gave one to my son and am now very envious. See: http://www.powerbookcentral.com/columns/krav itz/Sh inzaMAPP.shtml
Get real! There is an excellent open source ( http://power48.mobilevoodoo.com/ ) emulator for Palm and Sony Palm OS5.x devices. It runs HP48SX, HP48GX, and HP49 ROMS - the only difference is that it runs faster than the originals and you can't feel the click of the keys on the touch screen.
Once around 1985 I was working with a group doing CAD software on the Lisp Machine. We had just had a very productive week of hacking, and through a series of bad luck our two backups of that data were NOT. I came in Monday morning to the message "File System Fucked" on my machine. I spent a week trying to recover the files. Whoever wrote the message, knew what he was doing because that turned out to be a precise description.
Later talking with the folks at LMI, I hear that occasionally management would find out about the messsage and have it removed, but that it would always reappear because of its precise description of the state of the file system.
The Creative Nomad Muvo is a new mp3 player that I was excited to see. I can now summarize my experience with two Muvo 128 units a couple of thousand apart in serial numbers.
Both units show the following common behaviors:
* They cannot play all.wma files. Some files that play fine in MS Media Player and MusicMatch (ripped at 64k) will cause the Muvo to turn itself off at the same point in the music.
* Both units show corruption of the firmware area of the flash memory. In this state the units will no longer turn on until you have gone through a special recovery procedure which reloads the firmware and hard formats the data area. This happens every day or two with the units I bought. One of the units also showed corruption of the file directory.
In addition the Muvo has the following design misfeature which compromise the functionality of the 128MB unit.
* After a power off the Muvo always returns to the first song! There is no bookmarking, so to hear anything beyond the first half hour or so of music you have to do a lot of pressing of the fast forward button.
* There is no way to control the order of the music other than reformatting and recopying everything in the order desired.
Simplicity is more than doing just a few things, it is also doing them well.
I think the Muvo is a great idea, but in my experiece the execution from Creative in functional simplicity and quality leave a lot to be desired. My guess is that these problems can all be fixed in the firmware, but with only a 90 guarantee, I've returned mine and will wait for better execution of this idea.;rob
Slashdot Mirror
Be sure to read Tom DeMarco's "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency". This concise book does a great job with the business case for policies like this and how to best shape them.
find and grep are oders of magnitude slower than the inverted text index techniques that Google uses.
See Lucene for a good open source inverted text index search engine.
I'm very partial to the "Happy Hacking" keyboard light. PFU has a new version with a 1/T keypad with only slightly larger size and both PS2 and USB models: http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/haphackeyl it1.html
v itz/Sh inzaMAPP.shtml
For mice I'm partial to the Elcom Masamune Shiro USB optical mouse. I gave one to my son and am now very envious. See:
http://www.powerbookcentral.com/columns/kra
Get real! There is an excellent open source
( http://power48.mobilevoodoo.com/ )
emulator for Palm and Sony Palm OS5.x devices. It runs HP48SX, HP48GX, and HP49 ROMS - the only difference is that it runs faster than the originals and you can't feel the click of the keys on the touch screen.
Once around 1985 I was working with a group doing CAD software on the Lisp Machine. We had just had a very productive week of hacking, and through a series of bad luck our two backups of that data were NOT. I came in Monday morning to the message "File System Fucked" on my machine. I spent a week trying to recover the files. Whoever wrote the message, knew what he was doing because that turned out to be a precise description.
Later talking with the folks at LMI, I hear that occasionally management would find out about the messsage and have it removed, but that it would always reappear because of its precise description of the state of the file system.
The Creative Nomad Muvo is a new mp3 player that I was excited to see. I can now summarize my experience with two Muvo 128 units a couple of thousand apart in serial numbers.
.wma files. Some files that play fine in MS Media Player and MusicMatch (ripped at 64k) will cause the Muvo to turn itself off at the same point in the music.
;rob
Both units show the following common behaviors:
* They cannot play all
* Both units show corruption of the firmware area of the flash memory. In this state the units will no longer turn on until you have gone through a special recovery procedure which reloads the firmware and hard formats the data area. This happens every day or two with the units I bought. One of the units also showed corruption of the file directory.
In addition the Muvo has the following design misfeature which compromise the functionality of the 128MB unit.
* After a power off the Muvo always returns to the first song! There is no bookmarking, so to hear anything beyond the first half hour or so of music you have to do a lot of pressing of the fast forward button.
* There is no way to control the order of the music other than reformatting and recopying everything in the order desired.
Simplicity is more than doing just a few things, it is also doing them well.
I think the Muvo is a great idea, but in my experiece the execution from Creative in functional simplicity and quality leave a lot to be desired. My guess is that these problems can all be fixed in the firmware, but with only a 90 guarantee, I've returned mine and will wait for better execution of this idea.