Month: November 2003

iBook first impressions

If I hadn’t already bought this thing, I’d do it now. I like it a lot. It’s lightweight, has excellent battery life (4 hours: the best my Thinkpad ever got was about 90 minutes and now it’s down to about 20), is totally silent with no fan and a well-insulated hard drive. The screen is clear and bright.

The fit and finish aren’t quite what I found on the Thinkpad, but at about 1/3 the price (unfair, since the ‘pad is three years old), I can deal with it. It just doesn’t feel as solid (of course, it also doesn’t weigh almost 8 pounds). The trackpad seems to go haywire periodically, making the pointer jump to the top of the screen and stay there. On the other hand, I’m sitting 8 feet away from the Thinkpad and it’s amazing how much noise it makes, just accessing the drive periodically. I miss the pointer mouse thingie, but the trackpad is becoming more comfortable when it works (perhaps a visit to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store on Monday is in order). And of course the additional mouse buttons would be nice.

Trying to find something this full-featured in the Intel world at this price point would be a challenge, I’m sure. I don’t even know if you can get FireWire on Intel laptops, and I have built-in 10/100 Ethernet, a modem, and 2 USB ports as well as the AirPort Extreme card.

The out of the box experience is where these really shine: from unpacking to using the system is a matter of 10 minutes, and the instructions are still sealed in their packing materials.

fun with OmniGraffle

Network diagram

I have no idea if this is better than Visio but I found it to be quite useful. I diagrammed my home network as it will exist after I make a couple of machine swaps. There is one machine that’s not on the diagram that will be retired: it’s the entirely too slow machine that has been hosting this weblog and sundry other stuff for the past couple of years. It will be replaced by red, as shown in the diagram: this website will go from being hosted by a 233 MHz Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM to a 700 MHz Athlon with 256 Mb, to say nothing of the much faster drives and bus speed.

I have no idea if I chose the right networking symbols/colors, but I think the idea is clear enough.

Hmm, there’s one other system not shown: we do have a WinXP system that’s not powered on. Perhaps I’ll add that later. A steal from Boeing surplus — a 933 MHz Pentium III for $350, still in warranty from Dell.

More FUD and spin from Ballmer

GROKLAW

As someone wrote me the other day, Windows comes from a box. Linux comes from a community.

Interesting article: it demonstrates that for arbitrarily chosen time periods, one can claim that one OS is more secure than another. But in all the IT jobs I’ve held, the only time period you get to work in is the present. If things are broken now, reflecting on some random quarter from 1999 where things were fine doesn’t fix the problem.

If the brain trust in Redmond could buckle down and make the the hard decision to fix things instead of making these foolish comparisons, they would be better off.

iBook: good thing in a small package

Apple – iBook G4

The world’s best-loved consumer portable gets an impressive makeover with a superfast PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine, a new architecture, a slot-loading optical drive and enhanced wireless networking capabilities.

I have a new iBook, the 800 MHz 12 incher, and so far, it’s really nice. Functionally, it’s quite similar to the ThinkPad A20m it’s replacing, but it’s so much better in so many ways . . . . .

newspeak

Chasing Bush – Tracking George W. Bush throughout his UK visit

Free Speech Zone, noun; tightly controlled space for protests and informational displays located outside viewing and hearing distance from anyone who could benefit from the words being spoken.

The Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988 had “protest zones” that were fenced off from the sidewalks, but they were located directly across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center where the convention was being held. Where one was designed to minimize inconvenience and traffic problems for the general public, the new method seeks to protect members of government from hearing from the people they represent.

hidden costs? not very if you look

Survey: employees overworked, stressed out, fed up – Nov. 11, 2003

More than eight in 10 workers plan to look for a new job when the economy heats up, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Professionals. While there’s a difference between looking for a new gig and actually jumping ship, that kind of number is “very, very high,” says SHRP spokesman Frank Scanlon.

I hope those who have enjoyed the “buyer’s market” of these past few years are prepared . . . .

For example, a national clothing chain must sell 3,000 pairs of $35 khakis to cover the price of replacing a salesperson who quits, including recruiting, training and lost productivity.

The tab to replace a typical white-collar middle manager runs about $100,000.

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of working in a purely academic environment, as I was until this week. The cost of turnover — in lost continuity, in advertising and interviewing, in training and development (such as there was of *that*) — has never been factored into the costs of running the institution at which I worked. Staff were expendable and interchangeable, and the lower the salaries, the better.

You can’t move forward if you keep starting over when people leave.

picked the wrong day to do sysadmin

An error occurred:
Can't locate object method "p" via package "Apache::Request" (perhaps you forgot to load "Apache::Request"?) at /usr/www/mt/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 827.

<grumble> Not having a lot of success installing MT-blacklist . . . . . . this means some work with the ports collection. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but the system that hosts all that stuff is having issues with it’s CPU fan: I get a persistent alarm when the fan stops running, though the temperature seems OK (it fluctuates between 87 and 93 degrees).