Author: admin

Productivity with a “time map”. The idea of a “time map” is an interesting one. Simply put, a Time Map is a budget of your day, week, or month that carves out distinct times for each of the key departments of your life. Instead of feeling that you have to act on every request the… Continue reading Productivity with a “time map”

A case for better collaboration software.  The Central Desktop Blog tells us all the reasons why e-mail is bad and explains why you might want to seek out a better solution for your collaboration. The single worst trait of email is that it's silo'ed. What I mean by silo'ed is that email traps information into… Continue reading A case for better collaboration software

Smokin' Mirrors. Resilvering — also known as resyncing, rebuilding, or reconstructing — is the process of repairing a damaged device using the contents of healthy devices. This is what every volume manager or RAID array must do when one of its disks dies, gets replaced, or suffers a transient outage. For a mirror, resilvering can… Continue reading Smokin' Mirrors

Database War Stories #5: craigslist. By tim Eric Scheide of craigslist offered me a stream of consciousness summary of the craigslist database setup. At a conference last year, Craig showed a slide (which helped inspire my postings about asymmetric competition [1, 2, 3]) that listed the number of employees at the top ten web sites.… Continue reading Database War Stories #5: craigslist

Database War Stories #6: O'Reilly Research. By tim In building our Research data mart, which includes data on book sales trends, job postings, blog postings, and other data sources, Roger Magoulas has had to deal with a lot of very messy textual data, transforming it into something with enough structure to put it into a… Continue reading Database War Stories #6: O'Reilly Research

Interview with millionaire Marc Allen. Self-improvement blogger Steve Pavlina does a great interview with entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Marc Allen. Allen describes himself as lazy, running his publishing company on less than 30 hours a week. He sleeps until 11AM, takes Mondays off, spends Sundays with his family, completely disconnected from the internet and work. He… Continue reading Interview with millionaire Marc Allen

Microsoft Vista's Endless Security Warnings. Paul Thurrott has posted an excellent essay on the problems with Windows Vista. Most interesting to me is how they implement UAP (User Account Protection): Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don't get full access to certain features… Continue reading Microsoft Vista's Endless Security Warnings

Google's Mini Slims Down, Speeds Up. The search engine company claims that the newest version of its small business appliance is half the size and weight of its predecessor. The new Mini also boasts a 25x speed increase and offers a real-time crawl feature. [Datamation Product News]

Are We Short of Engineers?. This morning's Wall Street Journal carried a short opinion piece by Robert J. Stevens, CEO of Lockheed Martin, complaining how the US is short of engineers and therefore falling behind the rest of the world in technological innovation. His list of remedies is all the usual: Spend more on education,… Continue reading Are We Short of Engineers?

Appetite. Dan's recent post about software got me thinking. Maybe you're like me, where you love trying out cool new apps. “Wow, this is great! It'll save me time and I'll be far more productive”. But after a day or so the excitement wears off and you're back to pencil and paper, or storing things… Continue reading Appetite