botWerks

a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away i was perversely interested in audio/video codecs and the xiph program.  now it turns out that google is funding an ARM optimized implementation of the theora protocol, aka Theorarm. personally, i find this interesting given the opportunity to move  video codec function to lower power general purpose CPUs and alleviating some of the hardware requirements for speedy video decode without requiring offload hardware.

interesting sponsorship of an open source program.

yesterday, i horked up something in my .emacs file which broke the manner in which my on-the-fly spell checker (flyspell) worked inside of emacs. if i’d been thinking i would have had the whole thing under the current version control system. but somehow, this portion of the home directory tree missed out on that.

setting aside that bit of silliness on my part, i noticed something. while i was grinding out real work and answering emails between the discovery of the breakage and repair, i discovered that my work flow had developed a dependency on having an automated “checker” come back and clean up after me.

now, i’ve had this realization in the world of MSFT Word and other packages with built-in spell checkers, but clean-up of typos was one of those things that i did in a batch manner, my fingers hadn’t actually adapted to the use of an integrated spell checking function like they had in my normal work tools. (read, emacs)

i’ve always had some level of pride in having relatively decent spelling skills. but the power of ctr-; and _knowing_ what your tool would do, has had an interesting impact on my productivity. one that i’m not entirely convinced is for the best in the long term.

this is definitely one of the more interesting slide decks i’ve run across in the past few months.  it’s been making the rounds as of late.  there are some refreshingly capitalist notions of how attract strong employees and to drive business direction.  however, i find their assertions re: scale of an organization interesting.  last i checked netflix was a relatively small company with ~400-500 employees.  a good chunk of their staff i suspect is associated with the packaging and handling of the DVD content and as they move online with more content they’re going to improve the efficiency (in terms of revenue / head).  but i find myself wondering how many of these principles apply to large organizations with lots of business units and departments within business units.

is there a practical limit to how well these principles scale? or do you simply look to subdivide the application of these principles to new and smaller contexts?  as corporations grow, a level of process emerges or you have chaos.  or at least that’s what i’ve been told. i’m quietly reserving judgment.

saturday afternoons don’t really get a lot better than yesterday. bike down to the park, hit the archery range, mosey on over to get the groceries, meander back home (with a side trip to pick up ice cream).

overheard today.

“i made that pirate ship.”
“oh? what did you make it out of?”
“playmobile.”

apparently playmobile is a raw material these days.

in running through some of my archives and scrubbing in prep for a new year, i ran across this list of OSX nits from my first days with OS X. i’m actually a bit surprised by how many of these have been admirably addressed over the years. where this warrants update and/or commentary, i’ve added them – prefixed with (>>)

$Id: osx-nits.txt,v 1.4 2001/05/03 11:50:52 sulrich Exp sulrich $

# os x nits
## general os and interface nits

 * when i hit the cmd key in a modal dialog box - i'm not presented with a
   list of keyboard short-cuts for the dialog box. it's a capital letter
   crap-shoot!  it would be nice to be able to hit the cmd key and have the
   corresponding keyboard shortcut displayed.

   >> it bears noting that this interface nit still stands.  however,
   >> i've come to terms with this to some extent.  changing the
   >> extension on a file from the finder is no where near as annoying
   >> as it used to be.``

 * it would be nice to have a real print manager that worked. the current
   printer controller is really lame and doesn't allow you to view the
   configuration of current devices.  it looks like the menu item is there
   but it's grayed out.

   * further to gripe about the printer support there appears to be a lack
     of real definitions for printer description files that you install.
     meaningful names for the printer definitions that are there would be
     really nice.

  >> this is an area where i have to say apple really stood up and did a
  >> good job. i admittedly have rather modest printing requirements,
  >> however, for a guy that has to add printers in foreign offices at
  >> work all the time, the support is wide and the hassle is minimal.

 * what i wouldn't give to be able to remap the apple key in terminal to
   behave like a meta key.

   >> this gripe stands. i've ameliorated this to a large extent through
   >> the use of the shipping X11 implementation and the use of
   >> xterm/rxvt. still, this leaves me with a nagging issue wrt cut and
   >> paste.

   just a follow up to this - you can kind of do this in emacs for mac os x
   with the option key but that is just a little too awkwardly placed for
   my tastes.  looks like i'll be an escape-key emacs user for a while

 * why must changing the desktop background color be such a chore? if i want a
   solid color why can't i just select one w/the color tool? i surmise that i'm
   missing out on something fundamental here but it's really annoying

   >> this gripe still stands. sure, there's a solid color option there,
   >> but you still don't get the color tool.

 * teeny hardware nit here.  why is the escape key so small?  the ~ is
   in the right place though and this is nice.

 * virtual desktops! - i'm running out of screen space and there is no
   virtual desktop functionality that i can find anywhere.

   >> spaces. need i say more? sure spaces isn't perfect, but it's
   >> pretty damn close and it's built-in with reasonable defaults.
   >> color me tickled.

 * make the PDF generation access a little more prominent on the print
   dialog.  while i love the ability to have PDF output i hate having to
   select that option repeatedly.  i'd like to make pdf output my default.

   >> well, you still can't make PDF generation the default, (to my
   >> knowledge.)  but it's featured much more prominently and there's
   >> slick integration that's taken place with the ability to direct
   >> output to applications.  which has my Yep! setup quite happy.

## terminal
 * terminal performance over the long haul is horrible.  this needs to be
   sped up considerably.

   >> fixed this, but i still don't use terminal - ref gripe re: cmd key
   >> utilization and emacs keybindings

 * more on terminal.app - this needs some real work on the termcap side of
   things.  there doesn't' seem to be a really consistent mechanism for
   making sure that you're dealing with the terminal on this.  what i
   wouldn't give for just really decent xterm support.

## airport / wireless
 * how about some meaningful stats regarding signal strength?

   >> still sucks if you ask me.

 * opening up the driver interface on the airport cards to support things
   like airsnort.

   >> improved considerably. there's a pretty wide range of support here
   >> and folks have filled in a lot of the gaps relative to tools for
   >> sniffing out additional wireless APs, etc.

## general networking
 * IPv6 support (addendum - looks like this will be in jaguar)

   >> pretty damn good support if you ask me. 

 * multicast support (w/support for IGMPv3)

   >> grrr. still outstanding. 

 * i would really like dummynet or some form of queueing for network
   traffic.  this would let me use my mac for testing some network
   configurations. altq would be heaven.

   >> no progress here.  understandably, this is a consumer OS after
   >> all.

 * pf would be preferred vs. ipfw (in all honesty i haven't had a chance
   to see if the necessary kernel hooks are there for pf)

   >> there's been a lot of forward progress on the firewall front. i've
   >> added to this with the use of little snitch which provides a lot
   >> more granularity in terms of the per-application visibility that
   >> you'd be interested in. still. pf is pretty much the bomb for this
   >> stuff.

overall, i really have to say a lot of my longstanding nits have been admirably addressed. if you look at this from the perspective that there are a fair number of nits that are purely networking dweeb oriented in nature, and you keep in mind that this really is a consumer oriented OS, you have to be impressed at how well they’ve addressed the spectrum of user requirements.