Tahoe Blog

Over Labor Day I spent some time ranting about how the quality of jeans and many consumer goods has...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:39:28 -0400

Over Labor Day I spent some time ranting about how the quality of jeans and many consumer goods has been on a steep decline as U.S. companies have aggressively outsourced production. It would be easy to write the discussion off as an abnormal geek obsession. Ok that’s true. But I do believe that the recognition of quality and craftsmanship is important if you, yourself, want to produce a high quality product.

Joel recently released a talk he gave at last year’s Business of Software…

10 years ago, when home internet access was limited to dial-up modems, many discussions in the...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:33:46 -0400

10 years ago, when home internet access was limited to dial-up modems, many discussions in the industry centered on the last mile problem. Completing the last leg of the high speed internet to residences was going to cost far more and be a much bigger technical problem than the commercial backbone. At the time I didn’t own a computer because the access I had at home was dwarfed by what we had at the office. In college I had a glimpse of the future when 10meg Ethernet was run through…

A few months ago I wrote how I was humbled trying to record screen capture demos of our product for...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:42:29 -0400

A few months ago I wrote how I was humbled trying to record screen capture demos of our product for internal training. My original attempt wasn’t too productive. I probably was overly ambitious and set my standards too high. But recently I decided to give it another shot, with the opposite expectations. I lowered my standands and decided to release what ever I created in one take. Well, I was late for dinner, so I had to do it one take.

This was more successful and I was able to…

It has been awhile since I’ve updated my website regularly. In retrospect, I regret this. 15...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:34:57 -0400

It has been awhile since I’ve updated my website regularly. In retrospect, I regret this. 15 years after logging onto the internet, I still believe in the democratization of information that it once promised. Before it was almost impossible to distribute content with any scale, and the media was firmly controlled by the few. If you think the media controls opinion now, remember what it was like before the net.

These days to gain any recognition or influence as a content producer…

Some American made goods for Labor day… Today, while perusing the web site of one of the few...

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:57:17 -0400

Some American made goods for Labor day…
Today, while perusing the web site of one of the few companies in the U.S. which sell the Japanese jeans I wear, I saw a product by the Japanese apparel company, Sugar Cane, jeans made in the U.S., that caused me to pause. I had just documented some of my U.S. made goods, and high quality U.S. made jeans are something I’ve been seeking for years, but they are almost unobtainable in the U.S.

In these days of economic turmoil, huge…

In the last couple years I’ve been entrenched in a project management role which I have...

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:42:33 -0400

In the last couple years I’ve been entrenched in a project management role which I have enjoyed, but for better or worse, I’ve probably spent more time in meetings, than writing code. But recently, I’ve become more involved in development process again, and I’m enjoying my work more than I have in a long time.

To be honest, the guys on my team, which I’m fortunate enough to say are damn brilliant developers, are a lot more in tuned to the intricacies of our current platform. Linq…

We recently shipped a significant release (way to go guys!) of our application. At the end of a...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:09:07 -0400

We recently shipped a significant release (way to go guys!) of our application. At the end of a release cycle I typically demo the app to the other depts to bring everybody up to speed on the new features. Since this release is chocked full of brilliant new features, not to mention a completely updated UI, I had what I thought was a genius idea: create a screen capture demo video.

It seemed simple enough: just go through my normal demo, but record it. To my surprise, this has turned into…

The netbook represents a serious threat to Microsoft’s core OS business. For years,...

Sat, 30 May 2009 20:24:36 -0400

The netbook represents a serious threat to Microsoft’s core OS business. For years, I’ve believed Microsoft was in a precarious position in the market because the cost of software had become a larger precentage of the cost of a new PC.

In 2004 I said:

When PCs cost $3000+, DOS and Windows ran about $100 for OEMs. That amounts to about 3% of the retail cost. Fast forward 10 years. A PC can be had for less than $500. If Windows cost even $50 (which is low), that is 10% of the…

Outside a few choice racing sims, I’ve never really gotten into gaming. I’ve always...

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:12:21 -0400

Outside a few choice racing sims, I’ve never really gotten into gaming. I’ve always found coding itself to be enough of a game to keep entertained at the keyboard. But Jeff Atwood, he’s a gamer, and it makes him a better developer.

Until recently I didn’t think that gaming could improve my understanding of general application design, but it is becoming clear that Jeff’s appreciation for the psychology of gaming (aka fun computing) is helping to make Stack Overflow a…

Note: This is a work in progress, and I’m interested in soliciting feedback. These are the...

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:12:49 -0500

Note: This is a work in progress, and I’m interested in soliciting feedback. These are the guidelines I use with my own team, but this is my first attempt at formalizing them.

Often when there is a recommendation to omit goto from a language developers pointing out the edge cases where goto can make sense will argue for the inclusion of the construct, and surprisingly even relatively new languages often contain a goto statement.

There are extremely few cases where a goto is optimal,…

I happened to be looking through some old emails, and I found my review of ASIO. In my opinion...

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:45:31 -0500

I happened to be looking through some old emails, and I found my review of ASIO.

In my opinion the library should be accepted. This is the best example of an asynchronous library available in either C or C++. All other major program platforms Java (NIO), .NET, Python (twisted) have well accepted asynchronous networking support, and I think this is important for C++ as a high performance networking platform going forward.

I do have one concern, but the over all design of the…

In the last year I transitioned from lone cowboy developer to project manager. In this roll I find...

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:41:04 -0500

In the last year I transitioned from lone cowboy developer to project manager. In this roll I find that I am called upon to make quite a few judgment calls both on the behavior and the architecture of the application.

I am really fortunate to work with a great team who I respect and are far better developers than me, so generally this goes pretty smoothly. But occasionally, either due to my own biases or experience, I find myself in disagreement with a recommendation of one of the team…

CARPE+ITEM: januar 2008 Really big task lights

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:10:45 -0500

CARPE+ITEM: januar 2008
Really big task lights

Product Review Here are some examples of using anthro carts as hi-fi racks

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:12:14 -0500

Product Review
Here are some examples of using anthro carts as hi-fi racks

Stefan Didak’s Home Office Using this as the gold standard for the ultimate geek home...

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:10:58 -0500

Stefan Didak’s Home Office
Using this as the gold standard for the ultimate geek home office.
Newegg.com - LG W2452T-TF Black 24” 2ms(GTG) Widescreen LCD Monitor 400 cd/m2 10000:1 DCR with HDCP support - LCD Monitors
Looking at this monitor for a inexpensive 24”. Realized it won’t work with ergotron monitor arms, so it is out. Blah.

Links for 2007-08-10 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Room & Board - Chelsea in Angora
Have all but decided to buy this sectional, but can’t pull the trigger.
facebook data store api thoughts - snarfed.org
This looks interesting.

(via christopher baus.net)

Links for 2007-08-09 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

mohair wool beige sofa
mohair wool for $375?
vintage Knoll side table / coffee table chrome & walnut (?)
MOOTS YBB SUPERLIGHT TITANIUM MOUNTAIN BIKE SIZE 17
dream bike
One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t…
“”If I want to manufacture biological weapons with my copy of iTunes, I will, fascists. “”
Mega hands-on: Virgin America’s Airbus A320 with Red in-flight entertainment - Engadget
SOunds like Virgin is going to put a whopping to everyone.

(via christopher baus.net)

Links for 2007-08-08 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

(via christopher baus.net)

Links for 2007-07-27 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

uncov, uncovering web2
Still don’t get the strategy of developing a web2.0 company while bashing everyone at the same time.

(via christopher baus.net)

Twitter Malfunctions

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:43:00 -0400

I think Twitter is neat. The concept of aggregating brief messages from multiple sources is simple but fun, useful, and technically interesting (well to me anyway). But I have had a couple strange malfunctions in the past couple days. The most disconcerting was that SMS notifications were turned on in the middle of the night unleashing a small torrent of messages on my phone, walking me up.

In a stroke of good luck it turned out to be a good thing because I needed to get up and check the status of some long running processes anyway. But it took me awhile to figure out how to disable the thing (the setting on the home page wasn’t working), and was on the verge of killing off my account. Anyways, I’m disconnecting for a while to go home to Jamestown then onto NYC. I’ll plug back into the Matrix in a couple weeks.

(via christopher baus.net)