tcprstat – TCP response time
Here’s a handy tool to help you troubleshoot busy servers — TCPRSTAT, beta software from the guys at Percona, who see a ton of problematic servers under load. Quality stuff.
Sorting a ListBox the C# WinForms way:
lstFooBar.sort = "true";
Sorting a ListBox the C# 4.0 Widows Presentation Foundation way:
lstFooBar.Items.SortDescriptions.Add(new System.ComponentModel.SortDescription("Content", System.ComponentModel.ListSortDirection.Descending));
… this is an improvement?!
Note: You can also do this in the XAML. I haven’t tested it, but it’d look something like:
<CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions> <dat:PropertySortDescription Direction="Descending" PropertyName="Content" /> </CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions>
Trek Tech Today
I remember when the Motorola StarTac came out — the first “flip” phone. It reminded me of the Star Trek communicators from The Original Series.
Now we’ve got the iPad — which resembles, even in name, the PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (We’ve got a lot of other things, too, including flat panel TVs and room controls, voice recognition…) Chris Foreman of Ars Technica wrote a great feature about the similarities.
The article ends on an interesting note: What’s really going to happen next? Unfortunately, Star Trek stopped innovating in the technical set design that’s guided our tech for the past thirty years or so.
Obviously, the “Minority Report” style of motion detection is probably going to start developing further. You’ve got the Wii’s motion input controls, and the coming Microsoft Kinect, not to mention the multi-touch interfaces that are in development for various purposes.
Voice control isn’t a very efficient method of input. However, one place I can see voice control used is for brief instructions — such as the household “lights: dim” instructions in ST:TNG — and in places where the other “input devices” on the human body are already in use, such as for helicopter pilots or in industrial applications. Another issue with voice control is privacy. We’ve got the Jawbone inductor microphone headsets, which work well when they’re in contact with your jawbone. We’ve already seen (literally) bleeding-edge scientists implant chips in their own bodies — and now they’re working on implanting computer chips in individual cells. How long before you can implant a Jawbone in your … jawbone?
Oracle’s Really (not) Ruining Things
MySQL and Java are apparently doing horribly under Oracle. </sarcasm> … despite all the temper-tantrums the OSol guys are throwing.
Windows 7 Home First Boot Experience
A friend of mine is doing me a favor with some house stuff this week, and in return, I set up his new computers this weekend.
What. A. Pain. In. The. Arse.
Just as even Windows developers are waking up and smelling the coffee where the iPad’s concerned, it’s plain how badly that most PC manufacturers miss the boat. It took me two hours to boot a new Compaq laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium, to click through all of the ‘user experience aids’ that you have to accept or decline before you can even get to the desktop, and then to install updates, reboot several times, and install Firefox and an antivirus application. And this is a dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, a DVD-RW, and a 15″ screen. $329 new from Best Buy, for the record.
It’s a sign of how spoiled Apple people are that we bitch, moan, piss, whine, and complain to all comers that we have to plug the iPad into a USB port before we can use it.
Abstract of NTSB Report on US Air Flight 1549 — worth reading by or forwarding to Frequent Fliers or those interested in aviation.
We’ve been barreling rapidly towards a Microsoft environment at work with a migration to using Exchange, which I’m sure will be followed quickly by all the other Microsoft things since MS refuses to let them talk to anything else. Since I need an organization suite BADLY, I tried out OneNote for giggles and kicks. I like it, but there’s a few big killers. First, you can’t export things smoothly except to PDF. “Blog This” — yeah, right, I use WordPress. You can’t even copy and paste things to Word. Second, the layout and mind mapping functions suck. I still haven’t figured out how to re-color a text box.
I’ll probably be posting reviews separately as I try each one for a week or two, but here’s my personal list of organization and note-taking software that I want to try…
- Together
- Circuis Ponies Notebook
- MacJournal, seems focused mostly on blogging and groupware.
- Curio
- EverNote – I have tried Evernote in the past and liked it — until I hit a place where I didn’t have internet coverage on the iPhone and it crashed pretty hard. That was a deal killer and I haven’t tried it again.
- SoHo Notes
- Scrivener – More towards writers, but a lot of what I do is writing.
I have been a long-time user of OmniOutliner, but it doesn’t quite make the cut in my mind because of it’s very hierarchical outline form. I usually think in trees, not outlines — which are almost the same, but when the thoughts branch like a tree an outline can quickly become unwieldy.
Worth noting that Journaler used to be around, but it’s development was discontinued in Sept 2009.
I’ll link reviews as I write them.
Why I Don’t Program Much Anymore
There’s been some great discussions about the state of programming. Confession: I’m much more of a sysadmin and architecture guy than anything else at this point. If it doesn’t have a quick configuration file or a GUI, at this point, I don’t do much with it because I don’t have the time to learn everything. That’s even after focusing our core web environment on two technologies (php/python) and doing our best to reject anything that doesn’t fit into them.
Here’s the first one: Whatever Happened to Programming @ The Reinvigorated Programmer, and here’s it’s second part: It May Not Be As Bad as All That.
Pay special attention to the addendum in that second article. The money quote for me was in the big pull from a comment by jdeitrich on HackerNews:
We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?
It’s the death of the hobbyist programmer. There’s a new framework release in Symfony or Zend Framework every time I re-surface a week or two later. Even with 10 years experience with programming, unit tests, and a decent level of comfort from the experience with 0.x versions and up of these frameworks, I spend all the time I *should* be coding with my nose in the docs updating code that’s been deprecated or migrated. Just keeping up in one framework can be a full time job.
How can anything get done like this?
