Dear Apple: iTunes Library Sync

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I’m sitting here pondering why I drank so much on the eve of New Year’s Eve. What better way to pass the time while the aspirin kicks in than manually syncing my iTunes libraries? Um, no. You know, if there’s one thing I wish iTunes had it’s the ability to sync the libraries across multiple computers. I have four machines I do work from, all of which have iTunes on them. There’s my home PC, a custom-built machine running Windows XP. There’s my work PC, a Dell running Windows Server 2003. There’s my work Mac, a dual G4 running 10.4, and then there’s my laptop, a Dell running Windows XP. Apple already lets me authorize all of them for playback …

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WordPress 2.0

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Holy crap, the upgrade from WordPress 1.5.3 to 2.0 is freaking painless. I think it took me five minutes, including the upgrade to the test copy of my site. Now that is the way software should work. Good job guys! The new editor interface kicks total ass, too. In unrelated news I have received my first comment spam. Three of ’em, actually. I don’t know whether I should be excited or annoyed. 🙂 I’d say that I’ll check out the Akismet plugin that comes with WP 2 but the problem isn’t that bad (yet). Update: It took a couple of days but the official announcement is finally out. Freaking awesome!

I Love my Days Off

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It’s interesting to note how I’ve changed my thinking regarding vacations since I started being able to take them. I’m on vacation from my day job right now, and its blissful. I used to take a vacation day and just basically work from home. Now I take a vacation day and do nothing. I sleep in, I make myself a nice lunch and/or dinner, watch a movie, clean the house, work on a personal coding project, do whatever I can but I never open my email. Never. As soon as I look at my email I get sucked in, in the same way that projects die. “Oh, this will be quick,” I think to myself. It never is quick, though. …

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Standardization is Vision

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Standardization isn’t a task. It is a mindset, a very long-running process. Standardization isn’t staying the course. It’s adjusting the course to stay standard. Standardization isn’t a manager’s orders. It is a grass-roots effort. Standardization isn’t one month. It’s two years. Standardization isn’t a fad. It is a religion. Standardization isn’t manual labor. It is repeated, evolving, simple automation. Standardization isn’t overreacting, or mountains from molehills. It is fire and motion. Standardization isn’t some herculean effort undertaken periodically by organizations. It’s something to be done every minute, with every task. Standardization isn’t “how do we make this server look like the rest?” It is “can we make all the other servers look like this one?” Standardization isn’t a procedure. It …

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Loose Interpretations

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This post inaugurates the “outright rant” category in this blog. Today it’s remedial English, specifically the unforgivable mistakes that scream “I’m a total and complete idiot.” Now, I can and do excuse people who speak English as a second language. I know enough Spanish to not get into serious trouble, but I’m positive that I sound like a complete idiot to a native speaker. Having had that experience I’m not going to hold second languages against anybody. Hell, my gripe isn’t even with people who can’t spell well. I’ve got a friend who just isn’t wired to spell anything properly, but when it matters he has someone check his work. Half of the native English speakers in the U.S. speak …

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New Year's Resolutions?

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OMFG, I haven’t posted since the beginning of November. The last 30 days have been basically a crisis a day, and this blog has suffered. Sorry. My friend Finch was commenting the other day that we should ditch New Year’s resolutions, and go for the Martin Luther King Day resolutions that start with “I have a dream.” I like that. I have a dream that I will post once a day on this blog, for the entire month of January. Hopefully by January 30th it’ll be a habit. It’d be funny if my New Year’s resolution for 2007 is to stop blogging so much.

William Blake

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There are a few blogs that I read, well, just to read them. I like to think that maybe some people read my blog for that reason once in a while. One of these blogs is caterina.net. I don’t know how I found her blog once upon a time, but hey, she’s got a good quote today: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.” – William Blake Right-on.

Regurgitating the Documentation

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My favorite blog posts, forum posts, and web sites are the ones that just regurgitate the documentation for a product. Any moron that gets the product documentation can read it. Sure, I’ll give some people a break if the docs are awful. But, for instance, Oracle has documented the living crap out of installing their products on Linux. Why do people feel the need to type up how to install Oracle products on Linux? Is it just to steal search-engine results away from the company itself? Installing Oracle 10g on Linux is a great example of this B.S. I know, for a fact, that if you grab the Oracle quick-start guide they tell you exactly how to install their product, …

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Perpetual Betas and Version Numbers

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I was just reading the notes on day one of OSBC over at RedMonk, and the idea of a perpetual beta sorta annoyed me: Perpetual Beta: as popularized by Google, this is the notion that software is a process rather than an end state. But the key insight here was that the customer appetite for this dynamic evolution – which Adam Bosworth might term intelligent reaction – is likely to be proportional to the business importance of that application. In other words, Google News can afford to experiment in ways that Google Search probably cannot. I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, but it’s a good point. Then I read through the Wikipedia article on release stages. My …

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Rube Goldberg Lives in My Machines, Part 1

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I really feel like I’m pulling explanations out of my ass lately. You know what I mean? It’s like I’m inventing a damn Rube Goldberg machine in my head to explain the weird stuff at work. “Hey Bob, the patches that you applied last week to our machine are causing serious I/O problems. We need them off of there ASAP.” “Really? We’re running those same things on identical machines, and all manner of different machines, and all of those work really well.” “Huh. Things are really messed up. What are you going to do?” “I’ll get one of my guys to look at it. Hang on.” “We really need those patches reverted.” “Yeah. Let me make sure it’s the patches …

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