Jul
27
2009
Another great essay from Paul Graham of Y Combinator about the differences between “managers” and “makers” and how they schedule their day. I’ve personally found that most non-makers are completely oblivious to how much having even short meetings during the day can disrupt our work process. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe Joel Spolsky) but I recall a discussion about how if it takes 15 or 30 minutes for a developer to “get in the zone”, a couple 15 second distractions can ruin a whole day of productivity.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
[full essay here]
On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays?? Dave Winer needs to make that happen.
no comments | posted in software, tech
Jun
10
2009
IIS7 has this great new feature called Shared Configuration. Except that it has a tendency to do horrible things which usually result in all the websites and application pools being removed from your server and your production website starting to serve 503 Service Unavailable errors.
For an innexplicable reason, Microsoft decided to kill the Export function from IIS7 in favor of this new feature. But for those of us who don’t trust technology, we like to do things manually and to get a repeatable result that doesn’t update automatically when we least expect it. Yes, I am the sort of person who wonders why the default Windows Update on servers is to Install and Reboot Automatically at 2am…
In any case, in a simple 3 step process you too can export and import your Internet Information Server 7 websites and app pools. Continue reading
4 comments | tags: .net, howto, iis7, infrastructure, IT, servers, software | posted in tech
Feb
22
2007
Starting to ramp up for licensing photocore and I decided it was time for (another) company to handle all that business stuff. And thus critical axiom was born… And yes, my primary reason for saying something here is to get some links going on to get the site indexed :-)
1 comment | tags: criticalaxiom | posted in asides, photocore, tech
Feb
5
2007
The Logitech Revolution MX mouse is worth every single one of the rather large number of pennies it costs. I’ve had it for a week now and I liked it initally, but today I upgraded to SetPoint 3.3 (the config software) and now i’m totally hooked. The mouse has two scroll wheels and three buttons. The normal scroll wheel up top scrolls vertically, leans left and right and clicks. Then it has a thumb wheel that scrolls horizontally and clicks. It also has the usual Forward-Backward browser buttons.
The way I set it up, the top wheel scrolls documents like any normal mouse and the left-right clicks are set to do Prev-Next in my iTunes playlist. The thumb wheel is set to do volume up-down and click to mute. Then it still has the browser back button, a middle click for tabbed browsing and an interesting Search button where you can highlight text and press it, then it opens a google search on that phrase. Cool. Very cool.
no comments | tags: mouse, review | posted in tech