cpenner461

It took a while to get through, but I was able finally able to order one through the HP Small & Medium Business Store (http://www.hp.com/sbso/). Had to pay for shipping though.

I've been working remotely as a dev for the past 6 months or so - love it! My take on his questions:

“Doesn’t it get lonely?” Not really. I'm on IRC all day so have plenty of technical interaction throughout the day, and there's always the outside world (lunch, friends, etc).

“How do you get work done?” I almost think I get more work done working remotely than I do in an office because I won't spend 30m here and there talking about my weekend or whatever, I just work. Casual web surfing (HN etc) is about the same (i.e. occasionally when I need a break). I spend a few days every other month or so actually at the office, which has proven to be very productive, but in a different way. There's a dynamic that (I've found) you can only get in person, face to face, that doesn't involve cranking out lines of code, but just being able to talk through various issues/strategies/directions/etc. It's refreshing to have that time every over month or so.

“Doesn’t it affect your quality of life?” Absolutely! But in a very very good way. Granted I was commuting 1hr+ each way, so I immediately gained 10+ hours a week and save $3-400/mo on gas. The flexibility is amazing. Working at an office I had to leave early (6am) to try to beat the traffic. This morning I took my son to Panera to pick up bagels for the family before starting work (for example).

The whole experience thus far really makes me wonder why more companies don't embrace it more.

  defaults read

EDIT: Hmm, that shows all of the defaults that are currently in the system, but I guess doesn't show you what extra settings you could set. E.g. that setting in the grandparent doesn't show up in my defaults.

Very useful - thanks for the link!

Serious question: can/do patent trolls go after open source projects? I'm not thinking of businesses who sell/support open source software (e.g. Red Hat), but would it be a viable "defense" for an indie dev to simply release their project as open source? I've got an idea for a "weekend project" or two that I could conceivably make a few bucks with, or I could release them as open source so that I can at least benefit from the idea without worrying (as much?) about being sued for violating a patent. On the one hand if I'm not making any money from it one would think that the trolls would go elsewhere, but then again...

Just looking for a general idea here, I'm not looking for official legal advice here... :-)

I hope this works for them, I've been getting into Arduino and other electronics lately and would be nice to have a local place to pick stuff at the last minute. I went into our local shack a few months ago to pick up a piezo transducer to use as a pickup in a cigar box guitar I was making with the kids. It was dead when we got there, so all of the salesmen descended on me asking if I needed help. So I said I needed a piezo transducer, and they all looked at me like I had 3 heads. "Do you mean a transistor?" :) I asked them to just show me where the transistors were and I'd take a look around. Sure enough down in one of the bottom drawers of components was a label "Piezo Transducer" - bingo! As I checked out a few minutes later the manager was in awe that he had such a thing in his store. Surprisingly the same store actually had a decent (though small) selection of other supplies (hookup wire, breadboards, blank circuit boards, etc).

My son (5) has his own workbench next to mine, and regularly likes to go "build stuff" with me. He's built several "houses" (random blocks of wood glued/screwed/nailed together) on his own, and loves helping cut/drill/nail whatever project we happen to be working on. If I'm working on electronics stuff he likes to take the voltmeter and check the resistance of various objects to see if it beeps.

I realized all the hands-on/building/tools/etc was really paying off when he changed the batteries in a baby bouncer completely by himself. (For those unfamiliar with anything baby related, this means he had to work a screwdriver and remove several screws to take the cover off just to get to the batteries - I know adults who can't really work a screwdriver.) He even had the appropriate remark of frustration when at the end of it all he realized he'd put the cover back in the wrong way and had to take the whole thing off and re-do it...

Does anyone have enough experience to comment on how Pixelmator compares to Acorn? I use Acorn for the occasional times when I need an image editor and have no issues with it, just curious how the two compare. A quick google search only turned up comparisons from several years ago, and I know Acorn has had a lot of changes/improvements since then, and I'm sure the same is true for Pixelmator.

This is really neat. I just finished building an acoustic guitar, I'd love to see it's acoustic profile as compared to some others... Hmm, another project idea to investigate (although I'll prob have to settle for the old fashioned method).

Agreed. I find that reading books on my kindle somehow helps satisfy the desire to be doing something geeky/technical (even if the book is anything but). Able to kill 2 birds with one stone... :)

My wife has the original palm pre from sprint, and I love the software and system in general. The hardware has been what has kept me away from it (it's the lack of a software keyboard for me personally). Compared to my android experience, the pre seems much more polished.

This is from the author of SQLite, which I would say is pretty bloat free, so I would think that he has applied the same development style to Fossil.

I've stayed away from fossil as an SCM because it doesn't have the traction that others do (I personally prefer mercurial), but I have used it a few times where I needed a wiki and bug tracker, setup is about as simple as you can get.

+1 for DynDNS - very geek friendly and gimmick-free.

I've got Home/Down working correctly in my Terminal.app, you've got to go into Preferences->Settings->Keyboard, then scroll down to find the "home" key, click "Edit", and set the action as "send string to shell", and enter "\001" as the string. Repeat for "end", using "\005" as the string.

Caveat - this is how my work laptop is setup, my personal one is set to "\033[H" and "\033[F" for home/end respectively, but it works as well and I don't remember how I set it up. I'm remembering having some issues with the prefs wanting to escape the backslashes so "\003[H" ended up as "\\003[H" or something like that...

For PageUp/PageDown I find that applying the shift key with them does the trick (at least in applications like vim/less). However you can probably apply a similar trick for them in the prefs.

The Control key (jumping word boundaries) works sometimes for me, sometimes not, haven't tracked that one down yet.

edit: by "correctly" for home/end I mean jumping to the beginning/end of a line.

Another vote for DynDNS. I'm a little surprised to not see them mentioned more - especially here, they're pretty "geek friendly".

If you're into python, you can check out http://www.python.org/community/jobs/, there are the occasional remote/telecommuting jobs posted there.

A company I've run across before that only works with remote devs is Art and Logic: http://www.artlogic.com/ (absolutely no affiliation, I just know they're a remote company).

This list mentions the original (T-Mobile) Nexus S as being oem rootable - I wonder if the recently announced Sprint version will be as open?

From a comment in the article, you can view the review in iTunes (link launches iTunes): http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewUsersU...

I think the techcrunch article (linked on one of the comments) mentioned that if they can't get a gps/wifi signal they look at lighting (camera) and sound (mic) to determine if people are in the same location. Neat use of the technology but - yes, a bit creepy.

The few times I've scanned one it has seemed like too big of a hassle for a pretty minor ROI.

I'm pretty sure this _is_ actually a point of law. Being released via Wikileaks (or similar) does not change the classification of the information released.

From a quick glance this sounds similar to the debugging provided by paste/pylons? I've only played briefly with pylons so I may be way off though...