P16: Practical Progress

RIP delicious?

2010-12-17T16:44:39-05:00

There has been a whole lot of chatter on the interwebs re: the future of delicious.com since yesterday, starting with a Techcrunch story and spilling over onto HN, Twitter, ReadWriteWeb, etc.

We now have an official blog response about this story, now, about 24 hrs too late. And it doesn't dispel the idea that Yahoo! actually wants to close Delicious. Instead, it sounds like whitewashing.

This sucks. I've used Delicious to store and share my bookmarks for a very long time, and I'm always surprised when someone mentions that they follow my bookmarks feed to see what I've been reading. (old friends living across the country, etc).

I could stick around, but now that I know the product is being neglected, I'll take my bookmarks elsewhere. Pinboard.in looks like a nice solution.

Old: http://delicious.com/kangas

New: http://pinboard.in/u:kangas

Pinboard is getting slammed with new traffic today, so it will take a little time for that "New" URL to fill out. That's fine by me. I can wait for Pinboard to catch up on the flood of new users.

But I won't wait for Yahoo to EOL Delicious. I'd rather leave on my own terms, thank you very much.

Re: "Turning on your Reality Distortion Field"

2010-04-22T14:22:38-04:00

A brilliant comment from "sunir" on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1285482

I have always wondered how Steve Jobs' so-called reality distortion field worked, since its myth makes him seem supernatural.

However, if you spend enough time circulating, you start to see how it works. I encounter a lot of people pitching in my line of work. In fact, I spend a lot of time pitching too.

Some universal things I've learnt that lead to getting people on board faster:

0. Listen, listen hard. Understand where the other person desperately needs to head next.

1. Paint a vision of the future that fulfills both parties' desperate needs.

2. Be genuinely passionate about that vision. If you're passionate, it's easier for the other party to be passionate. It's also hard to be dishonestly passionate.

3. Turn that vision into immediately actionable steps.

4. Start moving yourself on your own commitments and lead that person into taking those steps.

Nice small Daylife plug

2009-09-01T17:38:59-04:00

Very nice plug for me and my employer here. Thanks!

Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves (simsblog.typepad.com)

Lie #3: Aggregators are killing my business

No they’re not.

This one drives me nuts. Don’t blame Arianna, Tina, Larry and Sergey or all those Tweeple out there. If anyone killed the newspaper business as we knew it, it was Craig Newmark.

People making this argument always forget that newspapers can be aggregators too. As I asked earlier this week, why is there no HuffPo equivalent in the UK?

You don’t even need humans to do the aggregation. Daylife, Evri, Inform et al will do it for you and in the case of Daylife in particular, brilliantly.

Silly photo of yours truly

2009-08-26T16:43:32-04:00

Silly antics during the break
Originally uploaded by Little Red Fish

This is my brother and myself, at the end of the Five Borough Bike Tour in May 2007. Just found it again in Flickr archives. Would this make a good profile picture? :)

Daylife profile in NY Observer

2009-07-29T11:43:06-04:00

Hey, we got a nice writeup today in the Observer! I believe it's in the print edition as well.

The Aggregator That Newspapers Like – The New York Observer

ps: yes, I work for Daylife. I'm one of those "young engineers". :)

The anti-iPhone

2009-06-18T20:40:47-04:00

I thought my Nokia E71 was the anti-jesusPhone... but no, I was mistaken.

So. Awesome.

RSI watch: Interesting keyboard?

2009-06-03T15:57:50-04:00

Speaking of RSI as a workplace hazard, I stumbled across a link to this keyboard recently:

The TypeMatrix keyboard

Wild, eh?

My first bout with RSI was circa 1994, when I was an engineering co-op. I resolved that by giving up typing for six months. It worked, but I seriously wondered if I would have to consider not working with computers.

After my first real job out of school, I started encountering hand pain again, so I went through a phase of using strange keyboards, hoping one of these would fix the problem. I went through a Kinesis Ergo Contour and a few other odd keyboards, before I realized that my real problem was my posture, and that was easily resolved with a proper keyboard tray.

For the last few years I've used a MacAlly IceKey Slim keyboard at home and at work. It's cheap and feels similar to the MacBook Pro keyboard, which makes it easier to switch from desktop to laptop and back.

This TypeMatrix keyboard addresses one of my biggest gripes about modern keyboards: the number pad. If you're a right-handed mouse user, you have to put the mouse waaay off to the right -- and kink your wrist at an angle, which is bad to do for any extended period of time.

Or... you get a keyboard try with a mouse pad that can cover up the keyboard numkeys. Or take a Sawzall to your keyboard and chop the numpad off, and hope you don't lop off any important circuits in the process!

The Happy Hacking Keyboard does a nice job of addressing this problem too. I've never owned one of 'em, but I do periodically wonder if it would be useful. Prior to my RSI problems, I was a fan of the "clacky" IBM Model M keyboard. I've still got one! It's great so long as (a) you don't touch the mouse much, and (b) sit in a soundproof cage so your coworkers won't hate you for making so much noise. :)

PS! If you're suffering from RSI, please read the Typing Injury FAQ. It's a wonderful resource. Thanks to jwz for pointing me in this direction some years ago.

Mac users: Switch "Spaces" using F1-F4 keys

2009-06-03T12:37:05-04:00

Hola! It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Since January I've been largely occupied with:

Getting married
spending way too much time at work tuning MySQL databases

I plan to write about those topics... well, soon. :) Today, I just have a tip for Mac folks who use Leopard's "Spaces" feature.

Switch directly to a "Space" using function keys

Apple added Spaces as part of OS X 10.5 "Leopard", and hacker types have been criticizing it ever since.
But I'm already too old to care about customizing the heck out of my desktop. I'd rather have something that works by default, and Spaces largely works.

Spaces lets you to define N virtual desktops, and to switch to each desktop via "<modifier>-N", where N=[1-9] and <modifier> is one of (ctrl,command,option). This is a pretty good way to do things by default; it's flexible, and doesn't conflict with other apps.

I've also had intermittent RSI problems for years. Unfortunately for me, pressing any key-combination hundreds of times a day is bad for my hands. I'd rather make it a single keystroke, so my hands don't have to perform gymnastics on such a regular basis.

I haven't found a clean answer yet. But I do have a dirty hack that works.

1. Download Proxi from Griffin Technology.

It's a free app which helps you customize how your Mac responds to input devices -- keyboard, mouse and other controllers like Griffin's Powermate and AirClick. (Don't have 'em, but I think they are nifty :)

2. Start Proxi and define some Triggers

I use 4 "spaces", so I define four triggers in Proxi. One for each space, mapping:

F1 to Space #1
F2 to Space #2
etc

I chose F1-F4 because, well, I don't use them for anything else. I know F1 sometimes means "Help" and F4 sometimes means "Close Window". Those date from the old, PS/2-era IBM CUA guidelines. But in practice, I never use these keys on a Mac.

Open System Preferences -> Spaces. Unselect the "switch directly to a space" modifier key, but remember which one it was -- we'll use it below. (I use "option")

Switch to Proxi and define some triggers, one for each space.

Gear on bottom left: "Insert trigger -> Hotkey Monitor"
"Set" the hotkey. Click "Set" button, tap the F-key (F1 for Space 1)
Gear, bottom middle: "Insert task -> Key Press"
"Set" it to your old direct-switch keystroke combo. (Option-1 for Space 1)

Repeat for each space. When you're done,

F1 should trigger "Option-1"
F2 should trigger "Option-2"
etc

Go back to System Preferences -> Spaces. Re-enable the "switch directly to space" modifier key, setting it to "Option" or whatever modifier you used above.

Now try pressing F1, then F2. You should see your Mac switching from Space 1 to Space 2!

3. Leave Proxi running

You'll probably want to go back to Proxi's Preferences and select "Start at Login". The triggers only work while Proxi is running, so don't close it.

Yeah, it's a hack...

Like I said earlier, this solution is somewhat hackish. A better solution would replace the "Key Press" task with a direct "Change Space" task, perhaps implemented via Applescript.

Does anyone know how to improve this recipe? If so, please let me know!

reblog: "Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores"

2009-01-20T13:14:12-05:00

Here is a great overview of the current landscape of freely available distributed hashtables (DHTs), by one of the founders of Last.fm.

Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores

I've looked at several of these systems in the past, but was delighted to see coverage of even more recent developments like Project Voldemort -- apparently used by LinkedIn.

I still have a need for some system along these lines. My "excerpt server" BDBs are 120 GB and growing forever, with periodic bit-rot errors cropping up, necessitating reconciliation between replicas. I'd love to have a solution that I can throw more data+traffic at that just works.

My dog snoozing in my sweetie's lap

2009-01-06T00:31:16-05:00

Aww! Snug!
Originally uploaded by mattkangas

This is my dog Buckley, snoozing in the crook of my fiance's arm during the long drive back from North Carolina on Dec 28. Hank (below) may be doggone cute, but Bux is my boy!