The devastation from weather related disasters in the past few years has been overwhelming. Japan was ready, as ready as you can be for a disaster of this scale, Haiti was not, nor was Christchurch.

If you’ve thought about giving to Red Cross before, now is a good time. Text REDCROSS to 90999. Information

It’s not really a science, it’s more of an art. If you are careful, and attentive, you can see when someone starts working this particular art form. In a technical discussion, bit by bit, you start getting lost in the conversation, wondering how we got on to this topic, when it doesn’t have anything to do with what needs to be accomplished. Then you realize that the same guy has been talking for the past few minutes, and he’s been working his art, casting his spell, and the whole room has fallen under it. He’s convinced everyone in the room that he knows so much more, that his knowledge on the topic is so vastly superior to anyone present that no one is on the same level. Which is exactly where he wants your mind to be, because the next step after that is agreeing with whatever he wants to do.

There are several problems with the scenario described above. First, that the culture of the organization would allow a meeting to continue when the topic has been lost, and confusion has taken over. Second, there’s a good chance that the guy throwing out acronyms and buzz-words doesn’t understand the topic, or how the acronyms he’s spewing relate to the topic. He probably has a vague concept, he looked it up on Google, maybe even read about someone else doing it on TechCrunch, but he’s missing the deep understanding of the subject to speak with real authority on the matter. Einstein said:

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

If things are getting deep and confusing, and the guy doing all the talking is talking too fast, and you start to see the same looks around the room, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to say “wait, stop, I don’t understand how we got on this topic, let’s get back to how we can fix X”. It is at this point you see what the guy is really made of. If he’s good, he’ll respond by saying something along the lines of “ok, no problem, let me walk through it a bit slower so everyone is one the same page”. If not, he’ll try to push back, either with intimidation or more technical jargon, or he’ll change the subject, which might be best for everyone.

The most important problem that should be addressed directly is that the guy doing the talking is behaving just like a schoolyard bully. Like any bully, the one and only way to deal with him is to call him out. Make your stand, demand an answer. Of course, making a stand means that you are going to have to prepare first. You can’t stand up to him if you don’t have a solid grasp on the situation. But, if you do, if you know your tech inside and out, by all means call him out the first time he starts throwing around terms that you know don’t belong. After a few times, he will start to acknowledge your presence a little differently. He’ll start to think a little harder, and choose his words a little more carefully. An end result that will benefit everyone involved.

Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Apotheker said.

via: Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth - Businessweek

Well, this will be interesting. Porting WebOS, which is Linux based, to run on x86 hardware should not be too difficult. What will be difficult is managing the user interface. How are they going to integrate the touch based UI of WebOS with the standard PC?

Apple is solving some of these problems with new gestures and interaction changes with OS X 10.7, but they are not porting iOS to the Mac.

Also, dual-booting is a pain. I used to dual-boot Windows and Linux, before I started using my Mac at work, and the problem I’d run into was that I never knew where my data was. Did I save that file in the Linux partition? Did I accept that meeting invite on the Windows side?

I’m going to assume that HP plans on including WebOS as an option for fast, almost instantaneous boot to use a limited subset of the computers capabilities, and not as a full-blown Linux install. In that case, no one will ever know its there, and will continue to boot straight into Windows.

If HP is really serious about this, I’d suggest that they not install Windows on their machines at all, and ship them with an enhanced, more desktop ready, version of WebOS as the one and only operating system.

We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn’t involve repackaging them as a product.

via: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)

Exactly. I’ve said before that I prefer an honest transaction with a company, where I am clearly the customer, and am not volunteering to be part of the product being sold.

This post by the owner of Pinboard is full of interesting information. For example, the service is hosted on three (now four) large, dedicated HP servers, which, according to Netcraft, are running Ubuntu and Apache. His database servers are MySQL, with a simple Master-Slave replication setup. I especially like this part:

It has become accepted practice in web app development to design in layers of application caching from the outset. This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one’s app like a high-level character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty “application stack”.

I had just come out of Rails consulting when I started Pinboard and really wanted to avoid this kind of overengineering, capitalizing instead on the fact that it was 2010 and a sufficiently simple website could run ridiculously fast with no caching if you just threw hardware at it. …

If you offer MySQL this kind of room, your data is just going to climb in there and laugh at you no matter what kind of traffic it gets.

Over-engineering is something we deal with at my workplace, and something I’ve been guilty of myself. Which is part of the reason I’ve been looking at moving away from virtualization, clouds, and other buzzwords and returning to the simplest, most reliable setup possible. A concept that Pinboard has nailed.

There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium service and priced it as such. We are unapologetic about it.

via: [Our Lean Startup

WordPress Hosting Blog

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I’m always wary of free services. I like knowing who I’m dealing with and what our business relationship is, preferably with me being the customer, and them providing me with goods or services in exchange for money. Very simple. Services based on advertising revenue will eventually start preferring the advertiser over the user of the service.

For example, take the recent Twitter app update. Twitter is a great service, fun to use and interesting in how it allows you to connect to people. But, it’s free, and since its free we have never been Twitter’s customers. As such, the recent update introduces a new “quickbar” which annoyingly obscures the tweets we want to read with a trending topic we couldn’t care less about. This happened because Twitter needs to please the people who are giving them money. I would much prefer the ability to pay for the service. Paying for Twitter would reduce spam and refocus the company on what really matters; people.

37 Signals comments on a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years. Data centers and IT departments are not the core competency of most businesses, they are a requirement of operating the business. Or, at least, they have been for the past thirty years or so. Businesses are now seeing the benefits of moving what they are not good at, controlling IT, to what they are good at, which is whatever makes them money.

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

via: The end of the IT department - (37signals)

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has a comment that matches what my thoughts have been when I try to explain the consolidation I see in the sysadmin field:

Certain of the comments on Hansson’s post remind me of this quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I’ve even heard that virtualization technologies and cloud services will provide more opportunity for sysadmins. That makes little sense to me. People are assuming that the work in the future will be just like the work of the past. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of work, especially work that revolves around technology. It grows, it changes, it merges into new things. Consider the iPhone.

Disruptive technology changes things, and the iPhone was, and continues to be, disruptive. It is powerful, both in means of hardware capacity, and the operating system and software that it runs. How long will it be before the iPhone, or one of it’s many competitors, completely supplants laptops as the computing device of choice for people? I imagine a future where you dock your phone to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your one and only computer. I don’t think its too far away. When that happens, how much need will there be for a traditional IT department?

Software is becoming simpler and easier to use. Hardware is becoming more reliable, and longer lasting. And, most importantly, harder to break. This comment from the 37 Signals post stood out to me as a common misconception in the IT industry:

I’ve “done” IT for multinationals and startups, and the thing that is most obvious, is that if you leave the kids alone with their toys, you end up with a network which hardly ever works, more viruses than you can count, the mail server acting as a spam relay, the company being raided by FAST , the fans overheating in the PCs, the aircon never having been considered in the server cupboard, the backup plan being a mystery… need I go on?

No, you need not go on. Because every single argument stated is a symptom of the Microsoftian workplace. A computer on every desk, and every computer running Windows. Since Windows is easy to break, people break it. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Over the years people have been trained to “click here, and here, and once a week here, but no where else or you’ll break it”. People don’t need to become smarter about computers, computers need to be easier for normal people to use. When they are, when the computer is as simple (or, is) an iPhone, the need for things like anti-virus and defragmenting schedules, and wallpaper policies go out the window.

Desktop support departments are a symptom of misguided use of technology in the workplace. What is the purpose of that Dell on your desk? To assist you in performing whatever task your job really is. Perhaps if you break your tools, you are not really fit to be doing the job in the first place. If you don’t understand your tools, how can you be really good at what you do? Would you hire a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use a jigsaw?

Change is coming. I can feel it, see it on the horizon. Between web services, increased business specialization, and incredibly small and powerful computers, there is a shift in the culture of work brewing.

Alex Payne from Bank Simple sees it

Finally on the technology front, we’re deploying into Amazon’s cloud. Our information security architecture allowed for this even before Amazon announced PCI compliance; their support for these more stringent security standards is a happy bonus for us. Using AWS today is a no-brainer, particularly for an operation of our modest scale and performance requirements.

They are a bank, and they are gong to be using Amazon’s AWS. Independently responsible employees, outsourced data center, and no IT department. How long will your business hold on to the ’90s mentality of what IT needs to be.

I love these videos from Field Notes.

Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

If you take a moment to look around the room you are in now, what do you see? Are you surrounded by things that matter, and were built by people who care? Or, more likely, are you surrounded by mass produced, assembly line, imported goods that you honestly don’t believe will last all that long? I’ve been thinking about quality again, and how it applies to me, to what I do, and how I spend my time.

It started with our washing machine. After seven years, our washing machine looks like it’s on its last legs. Seven years sounds like a long time to have an appliance, but its really not. When our grandparents bought appliances they were built to last for thirty years, now they are built to last five. We called up a repair man who stopped by the house to take a look. He was an older guy, and didn’t bring the right tools for the job, so he just looked at the machine and told us his view of the model we own. He said that he had just told a customer that day that his washing machine, same model as ours, was not worth the cost to fix it, and that it would be cheaper and more economical to buy a new one. As older people do, he lamented the quality of todays machines, so I asked him what was being built today that was as good as the machines of the past.

He looked me in the eye and said “There are none.”

The repairman’s view of the world has become so pessimistic that he truly believes that there is nothing built for the common man worth buying. This is sad, but I believe he’s wrong. I believe it in part because I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro, in my opinion the best computer ever built. The perfect blend of power and portability, but more than that, an example of manufacturing excellence. Apple is a company that cares about details, and they are not alone. I believe we may be at the beginning of a renaissance of sorts, a return to traditionally crafted goods created by artisans and engineers.

These people have inspired me to do better, to be more, to remember the attention to detail that the Navy demanded of me. Take a minute to read these stories, watch their videos, and see where they are coming from.

Saddleback Leather, Coudal Partners, DODOcase, Blackbox Case, and finally, Staber Industries.

Staber may very well replace our Maytag washing machine. Its all they do.

We don’t have to live in a world where all of our things are replaceable, where everything around us falls apart after a couple of years of use. We don’t have to live in a world where everything has a computer chip and can’t be fixed if it breaks. We don’t have to live surrounded by junk. But that’s what the past thirty years of steadily declining quality of goods has taught us, it’s become a core belief that affects everything we do. We go to work, and sigh, and think, “here it is, another Monday…”, and do what we have to do until we can go home. Punch the clock, earn a paycheck, who cares if our work is any good? That’s wrong, and it doesn’t have to be like that.

Living in a world of quality goods and services starts with each one of us caring more about what we do with our lives, what we spend our money on, and most importantly, where and how we spend our time. No matter what you do, if it is writing software or changing oil, I want to encourage you to do your absolute best. Because no matter what you are doing, you make an impact on the world around you, you matter because you are here, and when you start to believe that what you do makes a difference, you start to care a little more, and when you care about your work, you make the world around you a little better every day.

So, today, as you go to work, or prepare for the next day, or think about what might come next…

be great.

Readability is a subscription based service that allows you to read the text off of websites in a beautiful, clean, consistent interface. Since I started reading the web through Readability a while ago, I’ve appreciated it’s consistency, meaning that one site looks the same as the next, as the next, and the next. Reading articles on the web becomes more about the writing, and less about design. Jumping from site to site can be jarring, distracting, but when using Readability, the entire web can feel like a single book, one with many chapters.

However, I’ve been able to achieve this consistency with Safari Reader (yes, I know it’s built off of Readability), and Instapaper text view (yes, also inspired by Readability). So, the discussion is not about the value of the Readability service, since you can get the same thing for free, but who should pay for the content rendered through Readability. Advertisers… or you?

Do you feel generous?

I feel that I get value from the sites that I visit, the sites that I’ve marked as “Can’t Miss” in NetNewsWire, and knowing how publishing works on the web, I often visit my favorite sites and click on an ad. That click gives the site money, which ensures (hopefully) that the site will continue to be published and continue to provide me with some kind of value. That value might be entertainment, news, opinion, or instruction, but it is worth something to me. Readability is a way to pay for that value, while reading the site in an interface that makes sense.

Paying for the experience is where Readability differs from Instapaper. In my mind, I think about reading with Readability now, and reading with Instapaper later, but the overlap between the two is too obvious to ignore. Evidently the developers of Readability agree. They have been working with Marco Arment to develop a special build of Instapaper that will credit the sites you read through the Readability service.

Readability has a few surprisingly big names behind it. Not only is Marco onboard, but also Frank Black, Jeffery Zeldman, and more. With a team as talented this, I think its important to think through any criticism of the service carefully. I’m sure they have.

Unfortunately, the current quality of the Readability service is a little less than I would expect. There have been several times in the past couple days I’ve hit the Readability keyboard shortcut and was shown this error.

Going back to the site and trying again fixes the problem. I’m assuming that they are making improvements to the Readability back-end continuously, and that this error is a symptom of those improvements. Annoying, but I’m chalking it up to growing pains.

The second problem I’ve found is when using HyperDock to split the screen of my 15” MacBook Pro between Safari and a text editor, Readability pushes the text off the right side of the Safari window. The last six or so characters are off the screen. Stranger yet, when resizing the window smaller, the horizontal scroll bar does not appear to allow you to scroll to view all of the text, the text is just gone. The Instapaper text bookmarklet does the right thing and formats the text correctly for the current size of the window, and provides the normal scrollbar when needed. I’m not sure why Readability doesn’t, but its just a bit disappointing.

I’m hoping that both of these problems are fixed soon.

Ian Hines is a fan, and had this to say:

It’s a wonderful concept. It’s all the things we’ve come to know and love about Instapaper, with the added ability of finally allowing us to easily support our favorite writers.

In contrast, Colin Wheeler is skeptical:

…for me it feels wrong cause it puts the burden on consumers instead publishers who need to clean up their websites in the first place

What Colin is saying is when a site is well designed, there’s no need for Readability. The sites many people are most likely to read in Readability are the sites that do not understand the value of clean design in the first place, sites that are covered with ads and distractions. He makes an excellent point, and one that I think is going to be shared by a lot of people.

Herein lies the rub. No one likes ads, but no one wants to pay for online content. So how can sites that make their money off of page views continue to exist if they do actually clean up their interface? That’s the answer that Readability is designed for. An alternative revenue stream. It is an interesting test.

Also interesting to note is that Readability is not a startup, it’s an experiment by an established company. Arc90 builds and designs internal applications for other businesses. Richard Ziade, the original creator of Readability, has this to say about why Readability exists:

We also believe that quality content is worth paying for. The rat race for page views and impressions has not only led to an oftentimes painful experience on the web, but also to a diminishing of quality content on the web. Today’s reality isn’t anyone’s fault but ours. We won’t hesitate to spend $4.00 for our daily cup of coffee … but we’ll balk at even a modest attempt at supporting the volumes of content we consume on the web. Readability represents an opportunity to show all the great publications, writers and bloggers out there that we care about quality and we’re willing to pay for it.

Readability may turn out to be more important to the future of the web than we can currently see. I’m rooting for it. I’m rooting for less ads, higher quality, and more thought.

Like many who are interested enough in the tech industry to attempt to stay up to date on current happenings, I’ve been struggling with an ever increasing number of interesting sites and feeds. In the past I would categorize the feeds into folders with names like “Blogs”, “News”, “Design”, and “Friends”, but eventually I’d wind up with a folder with a name like “MetaBlogs” or some such ridiculousness. While the multiple folders did help to organize the feeds, they did not help with what I needed; keeping up with what was important.

So, a few weeks ago I gave up on organizing the feeds by type of feed, and instead dropped down to three folders of what the feeds meant to me. My New organization is Can’t Miss, Skippable, and Staging. Three folders, no exceptions.

Can’t Miss

I read everything that comes into this folder, without exception. As such, I’m extremely conservative with the feeds that I allow in this folder. For each site I decide that I do not want to miss a single post, I’m making an agreement with myself, and deciding that my time is well spent reading what they have to say. I have several sources in this folder, but most of them are low-volume personal blogs. There are no high-volume sites in this folder.

Skippable

I like your site, I’ve found what you have to say interesting at some point, or I’ve found some value in your site, but I don’t need to read everything you write. Skippable is where you belong. These are the sites that post twelve times a day, the news sites, hacks, and inspiration. I like you, but it’s not love just yet. Skippable is giving myself permission to select everything, mark it read, and not feel the least bit bad about it.

Staging

This folder is also about giving myself permission, but this time it’s the permission to subscribe to anything I choose. Every interesting blog, news site, or any other feed source first winds up here. Like the Skippable folder, I still don’t mind marking everything as read and skipping whats in here, but from time to time I’ll puruse this folder and see if anything has caught my eye enough in the past few weeks to warrant moving the feed into one of the other folders. Sometimes I read one good post on a site and that’s it, everything else is something I can do without. Eventually that feed will be deleted. If I’ve enjoyed several posts, I might move you up to Skippable. And if I’ve found myself searching for your feed, then it might be time to move it up to Can’t Miss.

I think RSS is still very much alive and kicking, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve got a sustainable system for keeping up with the news I care about. Finally, it’s a great idea to break out of your RSS reader and visit the sites you care about.