Embracing Chaos

Here’s a little hacker tid-bit for those of you with phones running WM5. It’s the closest thing to task manager that I’ve found without installing a 3rd party app. If you want to get a list of running tasks and actually stop one as opposed to push it into the background, follow these steps: Press Start Select Settings Choose the System tab Run Memory Choose the Running Programs tab Happy terminating!

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At Foo Camp this past weekend, I took notes using three different technologies. The results have led me to some interesting conclusions. Here’s what I used: Day 1: I took notes on my Treo Day 2: I carried around my MacBook Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook My notes from the first day are brief, but useful. They are generally just names and short phrases. They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on. I used the notepad function in my PDA. It was pretty easy to pop it open…

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I just got back from foo camp, a small unconference-style event held on the Sebastopol campus of O’Reilly. FOO stands for Friends Of O’Reilly. (The name came out of a joke about having a “foo bar” at a conference. This bar served me too much wine over the course of the weekend.) Tim O’Reilly likes the conference because it helps him spot upcoming trends early, which is an important part of O’Reilly’s business both as a publisher of technology books, and as an organizer of large public conferences. The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there…

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I’m writing this post from an OLPC. It’s on wifi here at Foo camp running a gecko based browser. First impressions -it’s hard to type on. I’m switching to 2 finger mode. The browser is a bit slow but runs ajaxy sites well. Hardware looks good. Screen is nice. A number of folks in our discussion group led by Ian Bicking wants to send a bunch of these prototypes to burningman to see how they hold up in a harsh physical environment. More later on a better keyboard…

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So Apple is releasing the Safari browser for Windows. My first reaction is “great, just what we need — another minority browser.” It’s a funny move for Apple because IE will probably remain the #1 browser for quite a while just because of inertia, even as Firefox gains shares based on markedly superior features. So realistically the best Apple can hope for is #3, which really isn’t their style. Their claims about speed just aren’t going to win over users because application performance just isn’t that important for browsers on full-sized computers. On small computers with limited CPU people generally…

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I recently started using Outlook 2007 for corporate e-mail as a POP3 client. Since “upgrading” whenever I receive e-mail, the whole system locks up for about 3-15 seconds. Doing something. Who knows what. Task Manager says Outlook has the CPU, but it’s got it with a high enough priority thread that basically nothing else can run. No other office apps. Even Firefox is non-responsive. Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest. But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic. What takes so long I have no idea. After a…

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A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software. They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively. Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net. They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it. All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up. For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album…

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My girlfriend has an auto-immune skin condition called psoriasis that gives her rashes. For some people the condition gets serious enough that patients and MD’s turn to drugs that suppress T-cells, the part of the immune system which causes the inflammation. Turning down the volume level on your immune system has all sorts of easily predictable side-effects, but for people whose immune systems are just a little too enthusiastic it can be the right choice. My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable. But instead, she’s opted to do something much more…

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A fair bit has been written about a security fix for IE that Microsoft pushed out about a month ago — the now infamous KB931768 fix. This security fix has a bad habit of making IE unusable for a lot of people, particularly Vista users, because of problems opening the “navcancl” file. A couple of coworkers and I have had a slightly different problem. For us, as soon as we open IE, we get a file download dialog asking what to do with the HTML file that it should be displaying, and IE shuts itself down instantly upon answering the…

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In an attempt to focus this blog on business and technology trends, this article has been federated to Safety Fourth, a blog about biking and other outdoor activities.

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