Captain’s Log

Let’s see if I can do better than two years ago, where I blew a game in every round.

• Indianapolis over San Diego. Sorry, maybe I’m a little bitter that the 8-8 Chargers are in the playoffs while the 11-5 Patriots aren’t. In any case, I think Indi is the better team.
• Baltimore beats Miami. I really don’t think this one will be close.
• Atlanta beats Arizona. This is a tough one… I’m largely basing this on the fact that Arizona is not consistent, even though I think they’re probably the better team.
• Minnesota over Philadelphia. This one is tough to call. The Eagles are another team that can be really good when they show up, but really bad also. I’d give the edge to the home team, even though Philly is favored.

I released my first CodePlex project today. It’s a plugin for .NET apps to communicate with the Rails-based Exceptional exception trapping service. The site provides a nice UI to your exceptions, allows you to see the ones that hit the most, get e-mails on them, mark them “resolved”, etc.

Rails has spun out a lot of great online tools like this, which I miss after moving to .NET. Thankfully they have a simple web-based API so it’s not too difficult to build plugins like this.

The library is currently in Alpha status, but I’ll move it to release status as soon as we begin using it live on Wishpot.

In every election I throw my vote away vote for change by voting for the person who most closely resembles my political ideology, which has thus far always been the Libertarian candidate. It doesn’t much matter that I’m not helping influence the decision between the two major/viable candidates, because they are always so much the same. This year I’ve been especially amazed by the degree to which people have played up the “change” that’s coming to Washington.

It’s a great story, but I don’t believe it holds up to scrutiny. At least, this is what I know:

(more…)

My dad is in Israel photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just saw the video on CNN here. He shows up around the 2:20 mark. He’s also keeping a blog here.

Congratulations to Jeff, Josh, and Devang at GoTime for going live. If you’re in Seattle and wondering what to do/where to go, this is the first site you should check out.

And so it begins.

I’ve been using Vista as a development machine for a few weeks now. I think it’s prettier than XP. Other than that and the appeal of using “the latest and greatest”, I haven’t enjoyed it.

Some notes so far:

• Searching. The search never seemed to find any of the files I was looking for. I eventually discovered that it wasn’t really searching everything on my hard drive, only areas that were indexed. So, I added C: to the index so it would find everything. Now it actually finds things, but the search results page is amazingly distracting. There are filters and options littered everywhere! It makes the Mac’s mediocre Spotlight look like a marvel of modern usability.
• The command line. It really is amazing. This thing has not evolved in a decade. Copy and paste is still incredibly awkward and broken. Oh, and who needs tools like grep when you have that awesome search?
• Sharing. This was one area where Windows beat the pants of the Mac for as long as I can remember. Sharing in Windows was so much easier. Vista took sharing a step backwards. After sharing a folder (which you can only do after navigating through the various control panel options which allow you to do so) the dialog box says “please wait a few minutes while your folder is shared.” Yup, that’s right, minutes. It used to be near instantaneous. Those were the days.
• UAC. I’ve heard so much about this, but it really was a site to behold. It makes Windows feel like KDE on Linux. Sometimes to edit a file (ex. your hosts file) you’ll have to literally fire up Notepad as an administrator and open the file that way in order to be able to save it. If you happened to open it by double-clicking it from a non-administrator Explorer window, you won’t be able to (and to my knowledge, you can’t in-place switch to a user mode and have to close and re-open notepad a different way). This is part of what used to give Linux such a bad rep for desktop apps. It felt so primitive - like a GUI slapped atop a system that was developed by other people (which, in Linux, is exactly how it is). Windows has now regressed to that point. Thankfully you can disable it.
• The Sidebar. I tried to like it. I like the idea. It should be useful. I found it hovered somewhere between “useless” and “distracting.” I disabled it. When I was a Linux user, I used GKrellM on Linux and really liked it, but when I tried to move to something more Gadget-like (SuperKaramba) I found it distracting. I’m currently happiest with tiny menubar meters in the Mac (in particular iStat Menus) and calling up the Dashboard if I really want to interact with a more serious widget (usually the calculator).

The good things:

• Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) is quite good. Better and faster than any equivalents I’ve seen on any other OS’s (although, in fairness, it was also good in XP).
• The font rendering is appealing to me. I don’t know much about it, but I notice that it’s different from XP and I like it.

Luckily in my case I’m not attaching a bunch of peripherals to it… that apparently has been people’s biggest source of agony. I’ve had no such issues (aside from Vista warning me that my graphics and sound card drivers, which seem to work fine, have problems). I almost wanted to come away saying “well I’m sure it’s a great OS for most people who surf the web, do some word processing, and check e-mail” until I realized what a low bar that is. So, my current conclusion isn’t that it’s bad, just that it’s not very good.

In the spot where Teatro Zinzanni used to be, there is a map depicting a huge, two-tower 41 story building called the Insignia Towers.

After doing a little reading on the Seattle Condos and Lofts Blog it appears development has been put on hold. This is, evidently, becoming a fairly common occurrence in the Seattle market. Similar things are happening with The Heron Pagoda (”…due to a faltering economy, poor local condo sales and lack of financing for parts of the complex…”), the Ava Condo and Hotel, and there’s evidently a standstill with the Stewart & Minor hotel and loft project.

I don’t know enough about the Seattle real estate market to know if this is common, but I found it interesting. Some of these places look like they might be quite nice. The Stadium Lofts design is particularly unique.

If you’re working on a software project of any magnitude, you’ll have a bunch of source files and will often need to jump between them. Most of the IDE’s I’ve used have convenient keyboard shortcuts to let you open a file by name without browsing around with a mouse:

IntelliJ: “Goto File” - Ctrl Shift N
Netbeans: “Go to File” - Ctrl Shift O
Eclipse: “Open Resource” - Ctrl Shift R

It’s a pretty basic command which is used many times a day. Lately I’ve been using Visual Studio, and I’ve yet to find an equivalent. There’s this tip which doesn’t work for me, and the FileFinder plugin which seems to do the job, but it keeps forgetting it’s keybindings after I set them. How do people open files in Visual Studio? Do they really poke around with a mouse?

Sent to me from Nick: Gummy Lighthouses. We both wish we’d had these last year.