Articles


2
Mar 10

Flash in the pad

Ever since the iPad was announced, the Internet has been abuzz about its lack of Adobe Flash. It goes something like this:

“Flash is DOOMED! It will go the way of the dodo!”

“No, you’re wrong, Flash is everything! The iPad is what’s doomed!”

Here’s what I think.

  1. Steve Jobs finds Flash distasteful and wants it to die.

  2. With FarmVille gone, America’s GDP will double.

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28
Sep 08

Work-at-Home Dad

I have been working from home full-time for nine years, and I’ve been very happy with the arrangement. But when I became a father almost two years ago, I found that working at home with a baby around brings some new challenges.

Sure, I can step away from my desk almost whenever I want and hang out with my son for a while. I can relieve my wife if she’s having a rough day or has errands to run. We can go to the park, or just play in the yard. I don’t have complete freedom from my desk, but I have a very flexible schedule.

On the other hand, some days it’s hard to get anything done. Going downstairs to play is easy and fun. Before you know it, two hours have gone by. Sometimes after a baby-induced bad night I’m too tired to think, and find myself staring blankly at my monitor.

But in general the main problem I have is keeping on top of things. Life has become much more hectic around here, and it’s harder to keep track of what needs to be done. This article is about the changes I’ve made in my work habits to cope with new demands on my time.

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22
Feb 06

RSS Demystified

I’m a big fan of RSS. There’s no way I could keep up with everything without it. But I’ve found that with the exception of a small handful of my technically-minded colleagues, everybody I know seems to fall into one of these three camps.

  1. They don’t know what it is, or if they do,
  2. They don’t know how to make use of it, or
  3. They don’t understand the point of it.

This article aims to lay out, very simply, what RSS is and why it is useful for the average person, not just for the tech-savvy crowd.

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9
Oct 05

op vs. sudo

Anyone in the system administration field today is probably familiar with sudo, a tool which allows an administrator to selectively dole out elevated privileges to users. Since sudo is fairly popular and has been written about extensively elsewhere, I’m not going to go into it in detail. Instead, I’d like to talk about a similar utility called op.

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