Category: Uncategorized

Kathy Sierra.

Kathy Sierra and her home office in a Silver Streak trailer [here].

We are not worthy.

But the whole idea of a playful office is one that is very powerful to me. The “office” I commute to is a broad open space, with no walls. And as we are growing, the noise is becoming difficult to work around.

With both boys in school in the mornings, it is now much more peaceful for me to work from home. At MY desk, the one I bought. An old oak teacher’s desk, of which there appear to be millions in circulation.

In my chair, the one I feel comfortable in. I have an Aeron at work, and I think it’s overrated.

It is vital to work where you will be most creative, most comfortable.

So far, Google Reader is meeting or exceeding all my expectations in all areas except one: auto-refresh. Bloglines occasionally checks back in and loads up new articles, and it would be great if the Google Reader did the same thing.

UPDATE: Looks the interface does this. My mistake!

Niall Kennedy informed us that the new Google Reader interface is out.

Ummmm….wow.

It’s exactly what I have been looking for in a Web-based reader.

Judging by the flood of mail coming into my account for the last 15 minutes, there was an outage with the GMAIL SMTP servers sometime overnight or early this morning.

Anyone know what happened?

Technorati Tags: GMAIL, SMTP, GMAIL+Outage

Many thanks go out to the technical team for getting the GrabPERF Web server back on the Interweb.

All the good (and bad) news about Web performance is back.

Conrad Black, who gave up his Canadian citizenship to sit in the House of Lords, wants it back.
Problem: he faces eight fraud charges in the US [here] . Takeaway quote from the article:

“I have settled into my new life as a freedom fighter,” said Black.

I think that he should be held to exactly the same standard that any foreign immigrant is when applying for Canadian citizenship.
Can’t wait to hear him explain away the criminal charges/conviction part of the questionnaire.
Technorati Tags: Conrad+Black, Lord+Black, Canada, citizenship, Canadian+Citizenship

I was futzing around with my WRT54G(L) last night and did something wrong. I thought I had bricked the damn thing. Much cursing and swearing ensued as I put a BEFSX41 on the front-end of the network (I have three of these; don’t ask why) and wandered upstairs with the lump of black and blue plastic that used to be the hub of my wireless network.
After much fiddling, I thought I had it working, so I plugged it into the network drop I have at my desk…and the damn thing disappeared!
Not physically, but from the network. I couldn’t connect to it via the network ports, and when I did connect wirelessly, I got an IP address from the wired router..????
Then the lightbulb went on. It appears that when you put a WRT54G(L) on a network behind another router (most likely only happens with other Linksys devices) , it immediately becomes an access point ONLY.
This was the way it was supposed to work.
And people wonder why Linksys/Cisco sells so many of these damn things. With automagic behaviour like this, it makes the world of networking so much easier for morons like me.
Technorati Tags: WRT54G, BEFSX41, WRT54GL, Linksys, Home+Networking, Wireless, 802.11g, Firmware

The GrabPERF Web server has been offline for more than 4 days, after it was moved to a new rack.
Kevin Burton complained about the lack of availability today [here].
I have enquired about an ETA for return to service. None has been forthcoming.
At this point, I guess you can consider GrabPERF offline until further notice.

The folks who host the server are slammed and trying to figure out what is happening. Hopefully it will return to action tomorrow.