Urville is a city invented, drawn, and documented by 28-year old Gilles Trehin. (Link courtesy of the Kirscher Society, via reddit)
He’s been designing it since he was 12, and it sounds like he has a book coming soon. Looks pretty cool, if you ask me; this is the sort of stuff I spent my time doing when I was 12, except that I was usually designing either “Lord of the Rings” type worlds or drawing spaceship schematics (yes, okay, I was a huge nerd), and I was always abandoning one project to move along to another — also, Gilles drawings are a lot better than anything I was doing.
Very cool stuff.
10 steps to a better IT support process is worth reading… probably even if you aren’t in IT.
Nothing but asides for awhile, but that won’t stop me from pointing to this article about a student who tried to spend spring break at Wal-Mart.
A noble effort; he made it for 41 hours. Evidently he got very little sleep, spent quite some time in the home and garden department, has now seen Chicken Little many times, and knows where everything in Wal*Mart is located.
If you’re a Comp Sci student, formal or self-taught, you’re almost certain to be interested in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures.
In a nutshell, it’s 20 lectures delivered to HP employees by Abelson and Sussman, two of the authors of the Wizard Book, also known as the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Win!
Saw this on reddit… but in case you don’t read reddit (and… why not?) this is Worldmapper: “The world as you’ve never seen it before”.
Basically, it’s the world map with the various nations resized to reflect a particular statistic; population, births, tourism, and so forth. It’s actually quite an interesting concept; a lot more visually striking than a bar graph, for example.
It’s COMET; AJAX 2, electric boogaloo.
Did we need a new buzzword? ;-)
I‘m using Novell’s Suse 10, currently. It’s the first time I’ve used an RPM-based distro for an extended period in about two and a half years; so far, the experience has been pretty positive.
A few thoughts on the install and use of Suse 10, the “personal” (read: free) version.
- Install was extremely well done; Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Ubuntu and other Linuxes have had good installation systems for some time now, but this one was not only technically good, but extremely user-friendly. That is, a relatively unsophisticated computer user could install it quite easily.
- It intelligently installed itself around an existing Windows partition; no need to be very concerned at all. I didn’t even really see the option to overwrite Windows (it’s probably there, but I wanted to dual-boot, so I didn’t look too hard).
- GNOME and KDE are now fully fledged option during the install; you pick which one you’d prefer fairly early on. I believe that hitherto, KDE was the default, and you would have had to install and switch to Gnome separately after the installation.
- Getting 3D acceleration working took a reboot or two, but I think it was still fairly painless. My main thought on that is that an the average user might not have known that this needed to be done, and would have been disappointed that it wasn’t working “automatically”. I don’t see any real way around that, unless we start seeing Linux pre-installed on PCs… which I hope we do see more of.
- Because it’s a free edition, and it’s a corporate product, it also does not include any software that might violate copyrights or patents — so no playing mp3s, DVDs, or most other video formats “out of the box.” Again, this wasn’t too hard to fix: a few Google searches and RPM downloads later, it was all up and running. Not the most user-friendly, though (since many users would not know why it didn’t “just work” or what to do about it); again, this could be easily sidestepped by selling PCs with fully preconfigured Linux OSes, and bundling any costs associated with licensing into the PC cost.
- So far, it’s quite stable. There are automatic updates, and they work quite well, so far.
I’ve only been using it for a little over a week, so those are my only thoughts so far. If it sounds interesting, maybe give Suse 10 a try.
In my experience, frequency of posting directly affects traffic to your website.
Why do I say this? Simple; since I stopped posting multiple times per day, my traffic has dropped by more than 50%. I’m not sure if this relationship of post frequency to traffic holds for larger (traffic-wise) websites, but I imagine it does… or that part of the reason they are higher in traffic is precisely because there is new information on the site so often.
So, I’m going to try an experiment; I’m going to try to drastically increase my posting frequency. I’m pretty busy, so I’ll try it for maybe a week; multiple posts per day. I’m betting traffic will reflect it, but we’ll see.
I can’t resist putting up a link to this; a record of the correspondence between an official of the city of Tuttle, Oklahoma, and a a CentOS developer named Johnny Hughes.
It seems that Apache was incorrectly (or just incompletely) configured, so a default page was showing instead of the city’s website. Since the default page said CentOS all over it, the city official made the assumption that their site had been hacked.
For the real gist, read the whole exchange. Painfully hilarious. I hope Mr. Hughes gets a proper apology from the official with “22 years” of computer experience who accused him of hacking the server.
Incidentally, Johnny Hughes’ insistence on being courteous and polite, and even going the extra mile to solve the issue (or, to help find the solution) is a model of great customer service facing a hostile, irate customer; a customer who was not even a “real” customer, and whom Johnny could have felt justified in telling go fly a kite — but he didn’t. Kudos to Johnny!
It can be tempting to try to save a little money (yours or the company’s) and buy tools or devices that are just a little cheaper. Sometimes, that works out fine, but you need to be careful — read carefully what you’re getting. Sometimes you’re better off spending the extra money.
Case in point: I just bought a 4-port KVM. I wanted to keep the bill low (it’s for work), so I searched for, and found, the least expensive USB KVM I could find. I did note, at the time, that it said it was USB and PS/2 KVM. Well, that seems fine — nothing wrong with having PS/2 connectors in case you need them, right? I was going to save about $30 by getting this one, so I went ahead and ordered it.
Well, all in all, it’s a pretty good device. The keyboard and mouse you actually use, however, pretty much need to be PS/2. It includes a 3-port USB hub, so you could take up two of those spots for keyboard and mouse but… the Hotkey function (switching consoles with a keyboard sequence) only works on PS/2 keyboards.
It’s okay — it’ll do the job — but I would have been better off spending the money and getting a “real” USB KVM. Live and learn: buy the right tool — the best tool — the first time.
