Tek11

Tek11 is just a month away, and you should come. PHPTek is one of the best conferences I attend, always full of practical, usable presentations. It’s primarily a PHP conference, but also has a great deal of web-related content and awesome people to hang out with.

This year, I’ll be giving two talks.

The first, N Things You Didn’t Know Apache Could Do is a high-speed sprint through N features of Apache HTTP Server (N is currently 25, I think) that, in my experience, most folks are unaware of. And, with the release of 2.4 imminent, much of this content will be focused on the cool new stuff in 2.4.

My second talk, Write A Better FM, is completely new content for me, and is about what it takes to make your documentation and your customer support more customer-focused, and less … ahem … traditional, free software, the luser is an idiot and an annoyance, RTFM style. This draws on my 15 or so years of working in Open Source documentation, in the Perl, Apache, and PHP communities, as well as writing a half-dozen books.

In addition to these two talks, there will be many community luminaries giving a wide range of talks which, if the last 4 years are any measure, you’ll be able to go back to the office and apply immediately.

You should come.

Scree

Scree

Mt. Longonot, 1987

Pebbles, clattering
into the crater.
We, laughing, sliding,
generating avalanches
beyond our ken,
beyond our influence.

We had climbed all morning,
now were running ahead,
our friends taking the more leisurely
way around
watching the clouds from above.

Not for us, this introspection.
We dashed on
leaving the rockslides
to do what they would.

(For the weekend wordsmith.)

Book 13: The Wednesday Wars

Book 13 of 2011 was The Wednesday Wars, by Gary Schmidt.

When it started with the “I am a 7th grader” voice, I thought this would be a book to endure. It very quickly became something that I’d call one of my favorites so far this year. It made me want to read Shakespeare. It made me cry. It made me laugh. The was an amazingly well written book, telling a wonderful story, and managing to really be *about* something.

It was about the Vietnam war, and about finding out who you are, and about learning that not all literature – even Shakespeare – is drudgery and boredom.

Recommended to you, and to your 7th grader.

Chrome vs Firefox, conclusion

Having discovered that Chrome has pinnable “app” tabs, too, I’ve moved back to Chrome, for three reasons.

1) It’s WAAAAAY faster

2) Typing stuff in the address bar consistently loads Google search results for that stuff, whereas Firefox does sometimes, and other times it’ll load whatever site it deems the best match. While I’m sure that’s configurable, I’d rather not have to hunt for it.

3) The thumbnails of my most frequent sites is really quite useful. There’s a plugin to do this for Firefox, but it doesn’t actually do this – you have to manually add each site.

These are all pretty minor things, and of course I’ll still have to use Firefox while developing.

Mail filters

I had my laptop in for service today. When I got it back I had to restore everything from backup. In the process of restoring, I lost my mail filters – the list of rules that sort inbound email into folders.

I have 116 folders in my personal email, and 26 in my work email. Perhaps three quarters of those have mail sorted into them automatically, while the rest are either historic, or actually get stuff sorted in manually.

Losing my mail filtering rules gave me an interesting insight into just how much email I receive, and how little of it I actually read.

Some of it I don’t read because it’s automated sysadmin mailings that I want to be able to refer to if something goes wrong, but which I ignore when nothing goes wrong. Others are mailing lists that I’m subscribed to, but just never get around to reading.

When all of this stuff gets dumped into my inbox, I realize that I get many hundreds of messages a day that I never even look at.

Granted, this is better than it was a year or two ago. Since then, I’ve unsubscribed from dozens of mailing lists. At one point I was getting thousands of messages a day, and reading perhaps a hundred of them.

Looks like it’s time to prune again.

Firefox vs Chrome

Today I installed Firefox 4 and switched back to FF, from Chrome, as my primary browser.

So far, here’s the score:

Overall:

I like it. For most tasks, I really can’t tell a difference. A browser is a browser.

Pros:

Not having to switch to Firefox to use Firebug – something I usually do two or three times a day when troubleshooting something I’m working on.

Pressing / to start searching for something, instead of ctrl-F – just a slightly faster keystroke.

The new “Pin As App Tab” feature is incredibly useful. Never heard of it before – maybe it’s been there a long time, I don’t know.

Cons:

In Chrome, when you have a bunch of tabs open, and click the X to close one, the next one over to the right slides over so that its X is in the same location as the one you just clicked. In Firefox, the tabs resize themselves to accomodate the newly available space, and now you have to move the mouse to click the next X. This is, of course, a small and rather insignificant thing, but it is annoying.

In Chrome when I start typing a frequently-used URL, it fills in the rest for me. Thus, if I type “cnn” and hit enter, I get cnn.com as expected. In Firefox, I get the Google search results for “cnn”, which is one extra click. For CNN, that’s not so bad. For ‘stage.customername’ (which I expect to auto-complete to stage.customername.int) it’s very annoying. Do What I Mean, please.

Keyboard

I’ve been using the same keyboard for the last ten years – a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. It’s pretty much the only Microsoft product I use on a regular basis. I’ve been using it at home and at work since when I was at TCG, which was starting in about 1999 or 2000. I actually had two of them – one for home and one for work. One of them broke several years back, but that’s fine since I work at home now.

A month or so ago it started dropping keystrokes, and about a week ago it started getting stuck in CTRL or CMD mode, and only unplugging it would reset it.

I’ve replaced it with the new Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, which is the same keyboard, although with a few more bells and whistles. It’s got programmable keys that actually work on OSX, and it’s got a little zoom scrolly thing in the middle. It’s got the same basic shape and split keys, which is what I’d gotten used to, but the key layout is just slightly different – enough that I’m missing keys every now and then. But I’m getting used to it pretty quickly, I think. It’s happening less today than it did yesterday.

I don’t think I’ll use the programmable keys much – never felt the need for them before – but the volume keys and the play/pause key is already getting a lot of use. They Just Work out of the box and do the right thing on OSX without any special programming, controlling the volume and iTunes, respectively. Oh, and there’s a calculator button that’s slightly useful – at least, I think it might be.

There’s also a back and forward key down front, and I don’t know why anyone would want that. But fortunately it’s not actively in the way, so I probably won’t press it by mistake.

I looked around a little before choosing the same keyboard. But much of what I do on a daily basis is all muscle memory – this is why I still use vim as my editor, after trying dozens of other editors briefly. After using vi for 20+ years, my hands want to press :wq when I’m done, and they want to press x and dd and so on when doing basic editing. So I went with the keyboard that my hands already know, even though I got several recommendations for other keyboards.

Book 12: Mona Lisa Overdrive

And last night I finished Mona Lisa Overdrive (by William Gibson). It’s not as good as the first two of the series, but it’s still a great story, and answers some of the questions left by the other two books. I think of the three, Count Zero is my favorite. Strangely, every single review of the series that I’ve seen says Count Zero doesn’t measure up to the others, and that Mona Lisa Overdrive is the best, so I suppose it’s all about preference and which characters you most relate to.

Now I’m reading Master and Man, by Tolstoy.

Book 11: Count Zero

In college I took a overview of Science Fiction with Richard Sherry. We read, among other things, Neuromancer by William Gibson.

It made no sense to me at all.

I read it again, years later, after working with the Internet for a few years, and it made much more sense.

A few weeks ago I started reading Mona Lisa Overdrive, and realized about half way into it that it was the same people as in Neuromancer, and that Count Zero came between them.

I finished Count Zero yesterday, and am now picking up where I left off in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Overdrive is one of those science fiction stories that folks tell you you’re supposed to read, along with Foundation, and Snow Crash, and Hitchhiker’s Guide, but for whatever reason I never did, even though I started the trilogy 20 years ago.

I don’t know how anybody could understand the story, however, without having read Neuromancer, but many of the people I’ve talked to who have read Overdrive, haven’t read the first two. I think I might go back and read Neuromancer again, to clarify a few points.

What I enjoy the most about Gibson – and, indeed, much of the science fiction written around the same time – is seeing what he got right and what he got wrong about technology, and what he predicts is still to come as we run out of resources, but continue to push the envelope with technology.

Ideas of March

As Chris eloquently mentioned, Twitter has had the unintended (although not unforeseen) side effect that we all blog less. It’s easier to make a 140-character semi-coherent sound bite than to write a well-worded, thought-out paragraph. Unfortunately, within the ever-flowing Twitter stream, the noise often drowns the signal, and the signal is so much harder to find after the fact as it scrolls relentlessly by.

Which is all fine to say, as a consumer of that stream, but as a producer, perhaps I can do something about it.

I read blogs via Google Reader. I used to use Bloglines, until it got fragile. However, it appears that since their acquisition, their product has improved enormously. Anyways, with a good feedreader, reading blogs is as convenient, and much more satisfying, than Twitter.

I like blogs because:

* Ideas don’t have to be boiled down to 140 characters that may or may not be sufficient to contain the idea.
* Ideas can be discussed in a comment stream that is obviously and permanently attached to that article.

That pretty much covers it.

But I use Twitter because it’s easier. Yes, it’s lazy.

I often post something to Twitter with the intention of coming back and writing the whole idea, but it so seldom happens, because life is busy. But many interesting projects have come out of posts that I’ve taken the time to write thoroughly, rather than just being content with a one-liner.

So, thanks, Chris, for the call to action. I’ll see if I can be more intentional about this in the coming weeks.

The Margin Is Too Narrow