Native boot

By , 2011/06/14 10:35

I’ve been running my development enviroment in a Virtual Box for a while. Ubuntu in a box on top of Windows 7 (on dual 2.2GHz, 3Gb ram).

Best of both worlds right?

Well it isn’t exactly fast. Here’s a few rough timings:

Windows boot cold to online: 170 seconds

Boot virtuel ubuntu maskine to login: 53 seconds

Start Aptana (in virtual machine): 54 seconds

Start rails (in virtual machine): 35 seconds

So I found my old desktop, which I though had died, but fortunetly it hadden’t, cleaned it up and installed ubuntu(a bit old and slower CPU (dual 1.8GHz, 3Gb Ram)).

Boot ubuntu maskine to login: 50 seconds (about 15 of those are bios)

Start Aptana: 20 seconds

Start rails: 15 seconds

Quite a bit faster – and best of all, it doesn’t seem to lock up all the time, like the Virtual machine did..

 

CrashPlan local and online backup

By , 2011/02/07 11:35

I was really excited when I found CrashPlan – The idea of being able to backup to both a local server, a friends server and to the cloud with the same tool, sounded to good to be true.

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Visual Impact Priority (VIP)

By , 2010/12/10 10:55

My job includes the weekly iteration kick off for a development team. We look at the tasks for the week and prioritize them. Some tasks are front-end and some are back-end. Some are look’n’feel and some are more technical. And the end of the week, we demo it for everybody in the company.

I’ve long had a feeling that, at the end of the week, the more visual aspects of the tasks at hand had had less “love” then they warrant. Lets say we add a new page – all the new fields will be there, the new needed functionality will be implemented, but the visual glue, that’s supposed to pull it all together is somehow missing. It gets pushed to next week, where the same thing happens.

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Stop saying that: Everybody is a sales guy

By , 2010/10/27 09:58

I’ve heard this quite a few times in my twenty+ years in business. I’ve had different thought about it depending on time and place – but I think it’s safe to say that most of my thought weren’t that nice.

It’s mostly a question of missing context and having the wrong audience. Allow me to explain.

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A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

By , 2010/09/18 16:30

Long awaited prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. The stories are taking place in the same universe, but are otherwise not connected. I don’t think that it matter what order you read them in – the important thing is that you read them.
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Frameshift by Robert J Sawyer.

By , 2010/09/18 16:16

I’ve waited a bit before I started on this review, in the hope that my feelings for this book would somehow clarify. But the truth is that I still don’t really know whether I like it or not. I’m not even sure that I can classify this book as science fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that – but the blurb on the back cover calls it hard science fiction).

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The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.

By , 2010/09/18 16:13

After the bad experience with Frameshift, I didn’t really want to starting on a new story by Sawyer. But, everybody deserves a second chance and when a friend ruthlessly dumped The Terminal Experiment (TTE) on me, I decided to give it a go. Bad decision! TTE is even more annoying and error ridden than Frameshift and makes for a fairly bad experience that nobody should have forced on them. I’m not sure why I even finished it.

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Preparing for recording a screencast

By , 2010/09/15 10:33

Stuff I do before I start recording a new screen-cast.

  • Something physical. 10-20 minutes before I start, I do twenty push-ups or similar. Something to get my blood pumping. Allow enough time for your breathing to become normal again.
  • Clear my nose. Make sure breathing is as unhindered as possible. Sometimes I use saltwater spray to help.
  • Close down software. Close down Skype, Outlook, etc, anything else that will popup and especially the ones making notifications sounds.
  • Mute phone, and put it away, so that it wont make speakers go woop-woop, when there’s an incoming call. Turn of your speakers if you can.
  • Prepare story. Make sure every step is planned. Make sure every stop works.
  • Drink a bit of water. Yeah, coffee is King, but water removes clears the mouth better.

That’s it. The last one is of cause a bit more involved, but that’s a topic for another post.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

By , 2010/09/15 08:54

This is the first book, by Vinge that I’ve read and it couldn’t have started much worse than it did or end much better. aFud starts off with a family crash-landing their space ship on an uncharted planet, the parents get killed nearly right after planet fall and the kids have to survive in an alien and medieval society. Yuch! Sounds like the basis for a really bad young adult novel.

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Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge

By , 2010/09/15 08:36

Across Realtime is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge.

This is Vinge’s first full length novel. For some strange reason, I’ve never gotten around to it before now. I’m not sure why, but maybe it has been a combination of fear that it couldn’t live up to the expectations that A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky had built and the fact that Vinge has written so little and I didn’t want to bleed that well dry just yet. An endless list of excuses doesn’t make a good review, so let’s get on with it.

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