Archive for April, 2006

Its a conspiracy – and San Francisco hates tourists

Friday, April 28th, 2006

I booked a full travel package with lastminute.com and got a surprisingly decent deal on a flight to San Francisco for Startup School. I also booked a car from Avis for a reasonable rate. Then I booked a hotel.

Big mistake.

The best “deal” turned out to be a room at the SF Hilton in the financial district. Its not a great location but its close th chinatown and north beach. Room was about $42 per night. What they do not tell you is:

1) Parking is an additional $42 per night
2) Internet access is an additional $10 per 24 hour period

and upon learning of these atrocities, lastminute invokes the “all sales final” attitude and is completely unapologetic about the situation.

Henceforth I will never ever book a hotel online without first calling said hotel and asking how much is parking and is there internet service included?

I managed to find cheaper parking around the block for $24 per night. It seems only the hotels gouge their patrons.

BTW, the desk guy told me this room normally goes for over $350 per night. Its not worth it. Its just a room with a really lame view. This also matches my rule “the more the hotel costs – the less they include”.

So that settles it. No more big name hotels in big cities. I would have been happier in one of the small older hotels on Nob Hill.

Now I’ve got to decide between Italian (North Beach) and Chinese (Chinatown) for dinner.

Posted in general, personal | No Comments »

Too many choices

Friday, April 28th, 2006

This weekend I can

1) Go to Seattle Mind Camp again and meet Scoble, Winer, and lots of otheres
2) Go to Smalltalk Solutions and hear about how Avi and Andrew launced DabbleDB
3) Go to Stanford and do Startup School.

I choose 3. Tough choice. Of course, there was nothing going on last week, or next week. I wish these people would coordinate.

Based on the BS review I got from my very clueless manager yesterday, I’m pretty ready to chuck that and join something new and interesting.

Posted in personal, software, technology, web | No Comments »

Boat Maintenance Season Kickoff

Sunday, April 9th, 2006
Its time – warming up a bit I’ve got a boat-load of boat projects to get cracking on. Not quite warm enough to begin working on the brightwork, but there’s that forward hatch cover I started to rebuild last fall, I want an autopilot for motoring (have a Monitor for sailing), radar for the fog, and a new diesel heater for the nights. Lots to do and I hit it today with a vengeance. With luck, I’ll have the hatch cover torn down and ready to build back up by end of day today.

Posted in personal, sailing | No Comments »

Health+=1

Friday, April 7th, 2006

Tara Hunt today mentions she has been putting off dealing with some “minor” health related issues. She says “no more” and I applaud her (much as I applauded her at Seattle MindCamp – she rocks). Its the little things that add up to kill you.

In related news, I went in for my weekly treatment for hemochromatosis and got the results of the first six weeks of therapy – my FE load is down nearly 25%! HC is a classic example of a little thing that, left untreated, will kill you pretty soon. It just doesn’t pay to put this stuff off.

I’m kind of excited that what looked like an 8 month treatment program is now looking like 4. I’m also getting used to the phlebotomies. I’ve worked out my fluid regimen and I can “fill the bag” in about 15 minutes and be out in less than an hour.

Very cool.

Posted in health, personal | 1 Comment »

Try it, you’ll like it

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Apple today anounced BootCamp and I’m probably the very last person to get around to blogging about it. I’ve been trying to decide what the noise is about. I certainly wouldn’t waste the disk space on a Windows partition. I loathe everything about that OS/bundle of hacks and its maker’s steaming pile of crapplications. Certainly I’d never pay money for that mess.

Still, Apple makes the nicest hardware at competitive prices, so it seems likely that execs might start buying the MacBooks and getting their trogs – er support staff – to install XP on them. Of course, Mac OS X will be there by default and curiosity will probably get to the all eventually and they’ll give Mac OS X a spin – just to see. That’ll get em. Probably many of them will never go back. If their developers get ahold of one – that’s it, they’ll never write for Windows again. Its all just too painful.

Clever move. Maybe.

Posted in software | No Comments »

Fighting for the PC Tax

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Microsoft has urged UK PC vendors not to give customers the opportunity to buy a PC without a pre-installed operating system.

Supplying base systems, or ‘naked PCs’, is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft’s head of anti-piracy.

Writing in Microsoft’s Partner Update magazine, which is distributed to computer dealers, Alexander estimated that 5 percent of computers sold in the UK in 2006 would not include an operating system.

Alexander is keen to bring that number down, even though customers could want a base system because they want to install Linux, or because their firm already has a licensing agreement for an operating system such as Windows.

“We want to urge all system builders — indeed, all Partners — not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business — with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services,” wrote Alexander.

Linux vendors and free software supporters, though, believe these base systems can play an important role in supporting the open source market. Some are concerned that Microsoft may be attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper competition.

You don’t suppose that 5% of users wants to avoid paying Microsoft for product they’re not going to use, do you? I’m particularly interested in how hardware vendors are risking their businesses by supplying what people want. That wouldn’t be any kind of threat would it? Because we’ve been all over that before.

Posted in software | No Comments »

One more day

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

and I’ll have my job automated to the point where I can do it in 15 minutes a week. Thanks to Squeak, Seaside, a bunch of code I have laying around, and good old fashioned focused laziness, I expect I’ll have my current function fully performed by a little web app and 15 minutes of manual updating.

You can’t touch this kind of thing in Java.

Posted in seaside, smalltalk, software, squeak | No Comments »

Why I hate Microsoft Software – part I

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

At work we have a bunch of web pages that display information in tabular format. I have a project that needs to track a bunch of changes to the data in the database displayed in web pages in tabular format. I manage projects in Excel because MS Project is impossibly complex for the average person and Project X isn’t ready yet.

(When it ships, Project X will rock – it uses ObjectiveCLIPS which means it will be easy to hack its behavior and, more importantly, will act logically in the first place. But I digress)

Anyhow, I need to update my spreadsheet copy of this tabular data from the web page every week to make status reports. It seems to me that the sensible thing would be for html tables I select and copy to be put onto the clipboard in some format that Excel understands means TABLE. That would be the sensible thing. Which is likely why it doesn’t happen. Pasting a copied HTML table into Excel results in all the text being concatenated into a single field as one long string. What idiot thought that was the right thing to do? So much for application integration. They own the entire thing and they can’t make it work sensibly.

Instead, I had to rely on Squeak and the HTML parser I built to do http://www.badpage.info’s validator to extract the data into a tabular format (I used an array of dictionaries) that I could then use to output a csv file (comma separated values) that Excel will recognize.

Which resulted in me writing an entire app in Seaside and pitching Excel altogether. I mean, if I’ve got to write code anyhow, hey.

I do think this is one of those tasks that DabbleDB was made for. Pity its not out yet.

Posted in seaside, smalltalk, software | No Comments »

Microsoft’s Iowa Problem

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

Cringely has a great article on Paul Allen and his efforts to distance himself from Microsoft. Of course, the real kicker is this:

My reason for bringing up this topic at this time is because it will all shortly be back in the news as Microsoft goes to court later this year in what might well be its last-ever anti-trust trial. Remember those 19 states and the District of Columbia that settled over time for software vouchers and promises from Microsoft to no longer do evil? Well only Iowa remains, represented by a lady lawyer from Des Moines named Roxanne Conlin whom I have met. Roxanne is not in any way impressed with Microsoft vouchers, no matter how many there are. Looking for real money for the people of Iowa, Ms. Conlin is about to dredge-up all this old news and put a new spin on it.

Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.

We can only hope.

Posted in software, technology | No Comments »

Intel native Squeak VM for Mac OS X

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

I’ve finally figured out how to build an intel version of the Squeak VM for Unix. Thanks to some generous help fromJohn M McIntosh I’ve managed to get the Unix VM running faster than usual. I stick to the Unix VM to avoid any compatibility surprises as I develop on my Mac, but deploy to a Linux box in a hosting facility. The Unix VM has some advantages for interfacing with command line tools as well. If you’d like a copy, go ahead and grab it.

On the other hand, if all you are doing is playing on the Mac, then the Carbon based VM that John maintains is about 20% faster. It is also a universal binary. The Unix build I provide is Intel only.

Posted in smalltalk, software, squeak | No Comments »