Monthly Archives: July 2005

Konfabulous

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Have you heard the big tech news of the day? Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo! You may ask, what is this Konfabulator thing, and why do I need to use it? Well, here is the exact text from the Konfabulator web site:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

Users of MacOS 10.4 (the Tiger…grrrrr) don’t need to use this because Apple included a similar widget feature with that OS. But for the rest of us stuck in the Windows world (or the few pre-Tigers out there) this is a supercool tool with seemingly endless capabilities. These widgets tell you everything from how much battery life you have left on your laptop to the sports scores of the day. With a simple tap of the F8 key it brings forward all of the widgets and greys out the background.

So, Yahoo! purchased this company, and for what purpose you might ask…to better compete with Google of course. Y! will open up an API for use with Konfabulator and extend their data out to more people. I need to play around with it a little more, but I’m excited to try it out. There is a Gmail notification thing, plus various web search options, so I might not need to keep a web browser open all day anymore. Lots of possibilities, lots of cool toys to play with too :-)

Scratch That

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I know that I’ve talked about this guy before, but he posted another great tool on his blog. This time it’s a slick script that allows you to quickly append text to a scratch file using AutoHotkey. Bren also talks a lot about GTD, and I’m going to start using this AutoHotkey script to try and organize my “to do” crap. So far, in my limited reading of the book, I’ve recognized my failure to get things out of my head and out on “paper”. You can find more stuff about GTD here and here and here.

When It’s Good It’s Good

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When it comes to using a “consultant” for anything, but perticularly with technology consultants, it truly is buyer beware.

I used to work with a guy who, at one point in his career, owned his own consultant company. He very well could have been a really good consultant, but when I worked with him I thought he was just full of himself. He would have been a great consultant with a client who wasn’t technologically confident and needed a lot of direction. He probably would have been horrible with clients who were tech savvy because he would try to dictate rather than work with the in-house people. He probably would also try to force a change of procedures to align it with what he would do rather than what they want done. An example of this was when he was developing a product for use in-house for the company we worked for. He did the initial development according to how he would do things, but the beta testing group wanted it to work a different way. Rather than listening to the beta testers and changing the product to meet the “client” needs he basically told the beta testers that the way it was built is better because of X, Y, and Z. WRONG!!! If you build XYZ, but the customer wants JKL then you give them JKL…or if you can give them RST and that blows them away give them that.

The reason I mention this is because in my current position we are going through a software upgrade this week. I met the consultant that is out doing the upgrade back in March at a conference, and he is quite possibly one of the smartest, and nicest, men I’ve ever met. Nothing is ever assumed, rather I’m asked, “How do you want to handle this? We’ve got a couple of options, which one fits your needs the best?” And on top of that he was able to complete an upgrade that could have taken a full week in 2 days! Yes, you read that right, 2 days. He has a flight to catch tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll be doing some system administration training tomorrow morning…but he started yesterday with a mountain of work and it was done by 6:30p this evening. I am one happy geek :-)

Now Gimme Your Best Roar

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The Schwanz family is filled with world travelers. Some of these travelers also live overseas. I currently have six family members living in Uganda. Swanee (my dad’s next-older brother) and his wife Karen working on lots of stuff, including building church buildings. My cousin-in-law Matthew Robertson, married to my cousin Sheila (daughter of Swanee and Karen), is currently the National Director of Habitat for Humanity in Uganda. Matthew and Sheila have two kids, Karene and Samuel.

Well, 12 other members of the Schwanz family are currently in Uganda, visiting the six there, but they are also there to build two houses as a memorial for two family members. One is for my Aunt Nelda, and the other is for Grandma Myrtle. You can track the progress of the trip over here.

What the What?

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Have you ever been to Portland’s trendy NW 23rd Ave? Nice place to walk around and explore the various shops and restaurants. Well, a former professor at the college I attended was there with his wife. They were going into a restaurant for lunch when a man stabbed him in the back with a butcher knife! You can read the story on OregonLive.com here. Crazy.

Semi-homemade Storage

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I’m currently undertaking a labor of love. My wife would say I’m just playing around :-) I’m building a file/print/web server for use at home. Here’s what it’s currently made of:

  • AMD K6-2 350 MHz
  • 64 MB RAM
  • One 3 Gig HD (/boot and swap partitions)
  • One 120 Gig HD (root partition)
  • Gentoo Linux 2005.0 (kernel gentoo-sources 2.6.11-r11)

I’m trying to update all of the currently installed packages (the core system packages), as well as install the packages that I will need to make it a file (cifs and samba), print (cups), and web server (apache and php).

At a former job I got to work with a network admin who used Gentoo. My previous linux experiences had solely been with SuSE or Red Hat. I hadn’t ever heard of Gentoo before then, but after working with him to setup my first Gentoo box I haven’t turned back. At some point I might check out the Fedora Project, but for now I’m quite satisfied with the customizability I can have with Gentoo. Since my processor and RAM are pretty minimal I’m going to keep this installation very minimal for the time being.