Tweak Your Launchd With Lingon

In a previous post I showed how to write some custom firewall rules, and use a hack to get it to load automatically. With Leopard the hack to load it broke.

In steps a great new app for the system tweaker called Lingon (http://lingon.sourceforge.net). This handy little app lets you configure plist files and install them with just a few clicks.

Just select new, give it a name, give it a command to execute, select from a list of options how you want to to run and away you go. It even has an expert mode to dig deeper.

WordPress iPhone App

Just trying out the new iPhone WordPress application. I must say that it seems really slick.

The interface seems nice to work with, and if you’ve got the hang of the iPhone keyboard (ie. trusting the auto correction) it is a nice way to keep a blog going.

People and their Avatars

There is a very interesting link from Boing Boing about a piece by the New York Times on Robbie Cooper’s “Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators” photography exhibition that shows portraits of people with their avatars from various games. It is interesting to see the particular features that they choose to include in their avatars, the improvements they choose to make and the escapes they create. The show is going to be at the Portland Art center this month. I just wish I was in Portland.

The Broadband Gap

In general, I have found that network bandwidth requirements increase between 50-100% every year. With the prevalence of high speed broadband options to the home, user expectations have increased. Now that 6Mb cable modem service to the home is common, business class services shared among many users can at times seem inadequate.

Circuits To The People, Right On

Oh that last mile. There are many providers of connectivity solutions out there, but getting them to your door can be a major challenge. There are initiatives to provide WiFi access, and some vendors are building their own facilities, but it doesn’t address the problem.

The Local Exchange Carrier (LEC)

The LECs are what we got when the Bell Telephone monopoly was broken up into smaller monopolies. They own the last mile into homes and businesses in their region. Connectivity either comes from them or rides the “last mile” over their lines. For example say you want to bring in a Sprint Internet circuit in Chicago. You would have to obtain a local loop from AT&T to complete the connection. This, of course, comes with an access charge, but it also complicates troubleshooting. You enter into a situation where multiple vendors are pointing fingers at each other.

Ubuntu on VMWare Fusion Makes Me Oh So Happy

My initial impression of VMWare Fusion is just, wow. While Parallels was the first out there, VMWare is now bringing their deep virtualization expertise to OS X now. The latest public beta really delivers on the Linux side. While Parallels seems to have their focus on the Windows market, VMWare has been building for the Linux market as well.

OmniFocus: GTD Deliciousness

The Omni Group has posted a demonstration video of their upcoming GTD (Getting Things Done) product OmniFocus. For those who are not familiar with the GTD methodology, it is based on a productivity book by David Allen called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and popularized by Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders. The basic goal is to get everything out of your head and into some trusted task management system so that you can stop stressing about it.

There are a bunch of systems out there based on this methodology, but this one looks like the right balance of organization, and not too much overhead. Hopefully it lives up to the promise and hype.

Elephants on the network – LFNs (Long Fat Networks), Bandwidth Versus Latency

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to explain to someone who has just updated their connection to 10, 45, 100 Mb so they can quickly transfer there critical files to the other side of the planet only to find they aren’t getting any better throughput than they had before. This is a common misunderstanding about the relationship between bandwidth and throughput. The bottleneck is not the bandwidth, it’s the latency, and it is tough to argue with the speed of light.

TextMate Blogging Bundle workaround

I like to use the blogging bundle from the great text editor TextMate to do my posting here. The other day I encountered an error that gave me some problems, and I just want to point out a workaround. After posting to this blog, I received and error that went something like this…

Received exception:Wrong size. Was 1275, should be <unknown>

On Mistakes and Errors

There was an interesting quote I read today in Michael Shermer’s Skeptic column in Scientific American this month.

This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For a wise man once said, “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors… We’re not going to have any search for scapegoats… the final responsibilities of any failure are mine, and mine alone.