geek – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

Hyperconnected

A stunning piece of advertorial from InfoWorld via Nortel’s sponsored IDC survey. a considerable number of what it calls “hyperconnected” users … those using at least seven devices and nine applications … accounted for 16 percent of the population in the study Behind the hyperconnected were the “increasingly connected,” who use four devices and as … Continue reading “Hyperconnected”

A stunning piece of advertorial from InfoWorld via Nortel’s sponsored IDC survey.

a considerable number of what it calls “hyperconnected” users … those using at least seven devices and nine applications … accounted for 16 percent of the population in the study

Behind the hyperconnected were the “increasingly connected,” who use four devices and as many as six applications and account for 36 percent of the population.

i don’t find this hard to believe considering that at home I have a heap of IP-enabled equipment: three routers, a desktop computer (iMac), three laptops (17″ Pro, Air and Asus eeePC) , a slingbox, a game console (Wii) one Internet tablet (Nokia N800), two iPhones and two other internet-capable phones (Nokia and Sony-Ericsson).

The article continues like an infomercial but points out that your local friendly neighbourhood It department may have to change the way they work to allow for more heterogenous workspaces and include platforms like mobile telephones, FaceBook or even game consoles (those that have web browsers built in). How frustrating is it that I can’t just connect to Facebook or LinkedIn to ask a question or to help me in resourcing a new place in my team. I end up having to go home and do my investigations there. IT departments are still driven by paranoia and fear, not for the loss of data, but for the loss of their job.

Unified communications, which is promoted by companies such as Microsoft and Nortel, will make an impact, according to IDC and Nortel. Networks will need to accommodate identity, presence, location, telephony and data.

And we see two companies uniquely qualified to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by making these solutions expensive, proprietary and failure-prone.

I wouldn’t describe myself as hyper-connected even though I’m sitting at a desktop computer with a laptop in my bag, an internet tablet on my right and an iPhone on my left. We need to establish a platform for the hyperconnected, get ubiquitous network access (is this going to be Wifi, WiMax or 3/4G?) and improve the battery life of these devices. And we should get right to resolving these issues as soon as we’ve defeated poverty.

Command Line History meme

From the biscuit, the command-line meme: On my Mac: MacBook-Pro:~ mjohnstn$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] ” ” i}’ | sort -rn | head -10 69 cd 55 ssh 42 ls 38 ping 37 say 31 top 23 ifconfig 23 curl 19 sftp 15 whois I must say, Steve is a … Continue reading “Command Line History meme”

From the biscuit, the command-line meme:

On my Mac:
MacBook-Pro:~ mjohnstn$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}' | sort -rn | head -10 69 cd 55 ssh 42 ls 38 ping 37 say 31 top 23 ifconfig 23 curl 19 sftp 15 whois

I must say, Steve is a ‘ls’ freak.

Subnotes

I’ve got two ‘subnotes’ in the house here. An Asus eee PC and a MacBook Air. Yes, it’s true that the MacBook cost five times the cost of the eee PC but the differences are startling. Attribute MacBook Air eee PC Screen res/size 13″ @ 1280×800 7 inch @ 800×480 Screen border

I’ve got two ‘subnotes’ in the house here. An Asus eee PC and a MacBook Air. Yes, it’s true that the MacBook cost five times the cost of the eee PC but the differences are startling.

Attribute	MacBook Air	eee PC
Screen res/size	13″ @ 1280×800	7 inch @ 800×480
Screen border	<1 inch	1 inch+
Weight	3 lbs	2 lbs
Thickest point	0.76 inches	1.4 inches
Processor	1.6 GHz dual-core	630 MHz Celeron-M
RAM	2 GB	512 MB
Storage	80 GB (70 GB free)	4 GB (1.3 GB free)
Battery	4 hours	2 hours
Keyboard	Full size, backlit	Cramped hunt-n-peck
Software	Mac OS X plus iLife	Linux

The real question becomes one of why the MacBook air is now being touted as the “one to beat” as if the PC industry was poising itself for defeat just like they did with the iPod. It’s true that Apple tends to attract focus in terms of free publicity but the more apt comparison would be with the Lenovo X300 which is, feature for feature, relatively comparable to the Air, but a lot more expensive and a lot uglier.

I do mention the looks of the machine and, let’s face it, that’s not going to matter to someone who’s used to Linux or Windows. But I appreciate a machine that’s well put together, that doesn’t flex and creak when you lift it and which is easy to carry. Again – like Mac OS X, it’s more than just an aesthetic. The Air is very thin which means that if you’re carrying it with books/papers then it just fits in. The eee PC needs a bit more attention because it’s an awkward shape (half A4, 1.4 inches thick at the widest point) and in a bag, the awkward shape is liable to deform or damage other things in the bag. I’d certainly think twice about carrying the two together in a bag.

I don’t like the eee PC. It’s a perfect example of you get what you pay for. The plastic is cheap and ugly, there’s a strange amount of flex in the unit, sleep functions are almost entirely absent and how anyone can work on that keyboard with that screen. And it’s so sluggish. Yes, it boots up marginally quicker than the MacBook Air but then the MacBook Air has better battery life and very seldom needs rebooted (as Sleep works!) whereas the eee PC needs rebooted often. And the wireless? Is it just Linux? Can’t it ‘just work’. Can’t it automatically reconnect to my two different WiFi networks? Why does it need reconnected manually every time?

To be honest, I’d be more likely to wonder where the utility of the eee PC comes in when compared to the iPod touch, the Nokia N810 and other such devices. It’s the bare minimum of a computer – the UI, capabilities and portability of the N810 and iPod touch leave it far behind.

nerdz

PeeJ noted this link to The Nerd Handbook: Really it’s a couple of pages describing how to meaninfully interact with a nerd who is painted for the most part as being a borderline Autistic with directional (and somewhat immutable) focus. …control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. … Continue reading “nerdz”

PeeJ noted this link to The Nerd Handbook:

Really it’s a couple of pages describing how to meaninfully interact with a nerd who is painted for the most part as being a borderline Autistic with directional (and somewhat immutable) focus.

…control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. Think job changes. These types of system-redefining events force your nerd to recognize that the world is not always or entirely a knowable place, and until he reconstructs this illusion, heâ€™s going to be frustrated and heâ€™s going to act erratically.

The stresses of “the real world”, where people are erratic and inconsistent, lie, cheat, grandstand, self-promote and generally act in socially acceptable ways is just not where my comfort zone is. I like to be with people I know and trust. While PeeJ may consider me to be present the air of being obnoxious (and he’s probably right), there’s a much more complex interplay here as despite the fact I don’t communicate well (his word was ‘atrociously’) I’m not doing too badly. I think.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerdâ€™s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. Itâ€™s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where heâ€™s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

Yup. Which is why I can have the SlingPlayer open, while surfing the web with Godlike open at page 285 and email and IM conversations going. It may not be efficient but it gives me happy. It’s hard for other people to understand this and it often seems untidy because, by extension, we really ‘need’ 30″ high resolution screens attached to our laptops to keep everything visible and a large desk with our papers, books and pet projects. Our attention may wander to any one of these things (and I believe it’s part of the good procrastination thing that I’ve talked about before).

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerdâ€™s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates.

I had a rather negative experience of this recently where it was assumed that when I met her friends I’d automatically embarrass her because I’m not interested in football or cars. I am, however, interested in computers, technology, gadgets, business and suchlike and a lot of other guys are too. This was highlighted a couple of weeks later when we went out for dinner with one of my friends and his wife. We geeks successfully stayed away from our geek topics while the conversation steered itself around shoes, hair, weddings, holidays and other essential stuff and the only references to our nerdish tendencies was when the womenfolk brought them up. These geek things were, after all, the reason we were in a nice restaurant, eating nice food and having good conversation.

If youâ€™ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does.

I would agree absolutely that I interact daily with more people during my downtime at home than I do during my work day and also any other time. My buddy lists are huge and used every day. I twitter. I blog. I receive and respond to emails. I run more than one forum. Social skills? Yeah I got them. It’s again back to the small talk.

Looking back earlier this week to a wedding I attended, I don’t think it was immediately apparent that I was a geek though I was and so were my friends there. Geeks aren’t bad at all – they have incredible attention to detail and, unlike a lot of other sorts of people, they do have passion for things. Passion is something sadly missing in most people’s lives (or if they have it, it’s for the beer or the football which I consider to be unconstructive).

I’m not going to sweat it. The people I love, love me for who I am now. Though I admit that I dress (and smell) a lot better since her indoors came on the scene. I even like aftershave now…

Hot/Cold

Okay. I want some of these. The Hot-Cold Mug In fact, there’s a heap of things there which would be just fabulous. 🙂 I’m a kitchen geek as well. Sue me. Yes, this is a link to remind me. Related posts: Mac OS X roxxorz, Linux is teh suk? Make the fork not hurt Cold. … Continue reading “Hot/Cold”

Okay. I want some of these.

The Hot-Cold Mug

In fact, there’s a heap of things there which would be just fabulous. 🙂

I’m a kitchen geek as well. Sue me.

Yes, this is a link to remind me.