Shanti’s Dispatches

I don’t actively try and monetize this site, but every once in a while someone comes along and practically throws money at me to put a few of their links on here. And I offer up the other URLs to my sites.

Just sold $1,200 worth of links for doing something I probably would be doing anyway, and for another site that’s 99% automated. The beauty of the Internets!

See More Blog Income Earnings Reports for September ‘07, including John Chow clocking in at $20,512.

I used to think it was pretty gauche to talk about how much you make from your ventures. But if you do it simply to show other people that it’s possible (it definitely inspires me to see those kinds of posts), and not to show off or prove something to other people, then I think it’s okay.

Not that $1,200 is all that much in the grand scheme of things. But automated one-off deals like this can add up after a while…

Watch halle live video and chat on Justin.tv

She had 500+ people checking out her channel at one point. This makes for some pretty interesting privacy implications if this kind of thing really takes off.

For the last several years, I’ve been running a dual PC/Mac setup using Synergy.

I’ve always used my Windows XP box as the server, as this was the suggested configuration. It also allows you to use your PC laptop natively.

Just recently TextMate started acting very strangely with this setup. The “enter” key stopped working while in dialog menus. i.e. pulling up the Find menu or Find All in Project menu, after typing some text and hitting “enter”, TextMate would not do anything.

Not sure if this was caused by a recent update to OS X or TextMate. (Synergy hasn’t been updated in a year)

PC Guy in Mac Land

If you hook up your PC laptop to your Mac, one thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that the alt key’s behavior is swapped with the “windows” key.

This article explains more, and totally saved the day!

I still prefer the setup with XP as the server. Mouse control seems very choppy on OS X (tweaking the settings didn’t help either). Could very well be Synergy on OS X that’s the issue here.

Firefox 3.0 alpha nightly builds are available here. Go. Get it — it’s good stuff (though not all of your plugins may work).

As I’ve been using “Minefield” release on OS X now for a few hours, it fixes two huge annoyances that I’ve been having lately with Firefox:

1. Constant crashes lately — not sure if it’s a combination of various plugins I’m running or what, but sometimes I’ve had to force kill Firefox a few times an hour lately.

2. Saving passwords *after* you’ve entered one! Freaking genius. Not having thisf eature has been driving me mad lately, as I tend to use a variety of different passwords these days.

Firefox 3.0 alpha nightly builds are available here. Go. Get it — it’s good stuff (though not all of your plugins may work).

As I’ve been using “Minefield” release on OS X now for a few hours, it fixes two huge annoyances that I’ve been having lately with Firefox:

1. Constant crashes lately — not sure if it’s a combination of various plugins I’m running or what, but sometimes I’ve had to force kill Firefox a few times an hour lately.

2. Saving passwords *after* you’ve entered one! Freaking genius. Not having thisf eature has been driving me mad lately, as I tend to use a variety of different passwords these days.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

In 2006, after living in their house for 6 years, Kristin and Gabriel decided to remodel their kitchen. What started out as a sensible, small, affordable project quickly grew into an enormous and somewhat irrational project.

Link: The Kitchen @ Serafini Studios

Okay not to harp on this again but Bruce B left a very valid comment on this post:

No, it’s not “’nuff said”–rewriting anything usually involves a LOT less code whether you are using the same language or not. This is elementary to anyone who has ever rewritten anything.

Bruce B - that’s a good point, and very true.

Someone seriously needs to do a Web Language/Framework Code-a-thon shootout.

Have some trusted third party (Tim O’Reilly and his crew, perhaps?) come up with a spec (or as much of a pseudo-spec mockup one can reasonably expect) that is kept secret until the weekend of the Shoot-out.

Let all programming language warriors have at it over a period of say 48 hours.

All submissions would be released as open source, including Subversion logs, a la Rails Rumble style. Let the entries be judged by both non-technical experts (evaluating simply the look/feel and adherence to the spec), as well as domain/language experts. i.e. the J2EE people will judge their #1-3 best apps, the python camp will have theirs, ruby, PHP, Smalltalk, Lisp on down the line.

Of course, the point is not so much about expert judges but to get a “reference spec” of the best possible implementations from a variety of programming languages and webapp frameworks.

You hear this refrain a lot: “well, if you just had the very best of our people do it, it would have X number of lines and be so blazing fast, etc.” I believe this to be true, to an extent.

The Yellowpages.com Java => Ruby rewrite went from 100k lines down to 10k. Would the Java => Java Guru rewrite go from 100k down to 50k or 100k down to 25k?

Does it even matter? Well, yes.

I really would be intrigued to see how the same problem (exact same spec) is solved by a wide array of languages/frameworks/etc.

Ideally, the spec would be full/dense enough that time would be a factor. So that 95% of groups would actually not complete all of the items in the spec. This would make it easier to grade on the curve as it were, and see which teams where able to get the farthest using their language/framework of choice.

Will this ever happen? It’s doubtful… Who would really have anything to gain by such a shootout, besides for academic reasons? also unless you get buy-in from heavy hitters of all camps, people can claim that the shootout was “rigged” because X camp’s best people weren’t on board or whatever. I like the idea in theory though…