23 декабря. Первый день отпуска. Уезжаю к друзьям в Лютон. Три дня мексиканское драмы в компании трёх Ань. Оказывается бросать девушек 25 декабря это модно, современно и удобно. Особенно по аське. Случайно пролил супер-клей на ковёр. Ногу отодрать удалось. Носок - нет.

26 декабря. Вылет в Дублин. Встретился с Воронычем и Томасом. К вечеру все трое слегли с гриппом.

27 декабря - 2 января. Сидели у компа.

31 декабря. Избегаем лекарств с парацетамолом. В 10 вечера пошёл снег. Вылезли на улицу. Бокалы с хеннеси взяли с собой. Сфоткались на фоне снега. Вернулись к компу.

3 января. Вылет в 7.10, температура 38. Перелёт в аэропорт East Midlands. 40 минут на автобусе в Ноттингем. 6 часов ждал поезд. Чтобы не закоченеть на старом холодном вокзале - ходил кругами вокруг здания. Два нарика пытались продать методон. Три раза. В Линкольн приехал к шести вечера. Выгнал из комнаты уже успевшую поселиться там девушку. Лёг спать в 8.

4 января. Откашлялся кровью. Ушёл на работу. Вернулся с работы. Поел. Пошёл спать.

5 января. См. 4 января.

6 января. Готовил торт. 600 грамм шоколада на 300 грамм муки. Вышло суховато.

7 января. Шеф толкал мотивационную беседу о том, как тяжело бывает на работе и о том, как многие не выдерживают нагрузку. Улыбался.



Приятно, что этот новый год удался лучше, чем предыдуший.

Продолжение будет.

• 12:46 New morning beverage: grapefruit juice and Red Bull! I can feel my flesh dissolving from the inside out. #

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If you ever needed proof that Microsoft was on Apple's jock...

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/06/tablet-pcs

For years, Microsoft has been trying to push this "tablet PC" idea with zero luck. Now that Apple's "tablet PC" is rumored to be called the "iSlate," Microsoft has suddenly switched to calling them "Slate PCs." At least they came up with an original name for the Zune and didn't call it the "ePod" or something, which is probably what they'd call it if they were releasing it today.

Related note: I always hear bad stories about the Genius Bar (speaking of stupid names...) but last night I took a frayed power adapter from my refurbished 2 year-old MacBook Pro to the Apple store. Got a new adapter for free with zero problems. In roughly four years I've never walked out of the Apple Store less than amazed at the service. Dude could not have been happier to give me a new one. Though of course it would have been better if the power adapter never broke in the first place.

I've been having a minor problem with my Acer netbook but I can't seem to find an Acer store in the Plaza. Maybe it's in the Court? I didn't look there.

• 12:23 Follow @jason to win one of ten Nexus One phones today #freenexusone #

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Here's where I really feel like an old fart. Got a support ticket from a client today. She's wondering how to run an application from the Windows command prompt.

She copied the application... let's call it "foo.exe" to her drive. She opened up a command prompt and is sitting in "C:\Documents and Settings\herusername" typing "foo" and wondering why foo.exe won't run. Note that foo.exe is in a totally different directory.

She has a bachelor's in computer science and has been IT person at this company for 5 or 6 years.

And doesn't know how to change directories or launch an .exe. WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING THESE PEOPLE IN THESE "COMPUTER SCIENCE PROGRAMS"???? Are they just glorified Excel classes or what?



(To her credit, this might not be Googleable. Sometimes things that are this simple aren't actually on Google because nobody really asks or answers those questions)

• 07:33 I'm determined to check email less in 2010. If it's really an emergency, somebody will call me. #

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In the past couple of weeks, I finally got to focus on some Rails development.

Surprisingly, I found it... hard?

No, really. Rails is supposed to make your lunch for you and tie your shoes for you and everything, and I was getting quite frustrated at the fact that it wasn't clicking with me.

The "secret sauce" of Rails is that if you follow the naming conventions, a lot of stuff is done automatically for you. You really have to do things The Rails Way. "Rails" is an extremely apt name for this framework because for the most part it really is like traveling on rails, in both the positive and negative senses of the word.

Which isn't a problem, actually, because The Rails Way is actually extremely well thought out and they make it quite easy for you to stay on that path and (here's where the railway analogy falls apart!) you have quite a bit of freedom within that path. Rails itself is based on the MVC (Model, View, Controller) pattern which is basically just a very clean separation of responsibility and is a proven concept that's been around for decades.

But I did have some problems, er, getting on the rails. It's a great way of doing things, better than I've been doing things for about a decade -- but it didn't really leap out and grab me by the face. And Textmate is wonderful, but frankly I'm shit at remembering names and syntax and really do enjoy things like Intellisense code completion in Visual Studio.

I think I'm over the initial hump, though. It's really starting to click.

Because of the nature of Ruby, Rails is able to extend it in a very seamless way, and the result feels a lot like a language that was created from the ground up to do modern web development. I think .NET is a fantastic runtime library, but ASP.NET feels positively bolted-on by comparison.

(A developer I know really hates Rails and its extension of Ruby, and in most cases I'd consider the separation between .NET and ASP.NET to be a virtue. But so far, I think Rails does it extremely well.)

The PM has a Twitter:

http://twitter.com/hatoyamayukio

• 09:46 Idea: Start the new year by cleaning out your mail inbox. Archive everything... you can search for it later if you need it. #
• 09:48 Cuz you're using Gmail or some other email solution w/ awesome search, right? Not organizing things manually like a 1950s secretary, are ya? #

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I think most people reading my journal aren't too interested in the nuts and bolts of technology. Anyway, there are a few of you, and besides -- this is my journal so I mostly post what's interesting to me.

Why SSDs Matter. One thing I've been interested in is solid state disk technology. In a nutshell, hard drives simply haven't kept pace with the performance increases in memory and processors over the years. Hard drives' transfer rates have improved, but latency hasn't improved at all, and it's latency that really matters for typical workstation and computer use. Solid state drives have latencies several orders of magnitude faster than those of traditional drives.

SSDs With Realtime Compression. Anyway, the third generation of SSDs is almost here. AnandTech has a preview of drives based on the new SandForce SSD controller, such as OCZ's Vertex 2.

In a nutshell, these drives are faster than the previous generation, but describing their performance is trickier than ever. Some of SandForce's performance derive's from their controller's ability to compress/decompress data transparently "on the fly" so less data needs to be physically written to or read from the disk.

This is great - a big win in some scenarios, and no loss in others. The wrinkle is that disk performance, already dependent on so many factors, will now vary in terms of the type of data being stored. Compressed media files like music, images, and movies will not benefit at all from realtime compression. Uncompressed applications and text data will benefit greatly, but there's already a trend towards compressing this stuff at an application or operating system level which, again, would mean that this data wouldn't benefit from SandForce's storage-level compression.

The Ideal Future. Ideally, at some point, the SATA and/or SAS specs will be expanded in a way that will allow the operating system and applications to communicate with the storage device so that, for instance, one level does not waste time compressing data that has already been compressed at another level.

Are SSDs Better Than Traditional Disks? Stupid question. It's like asking if a car is better than a bike. It depends, and ideally you'll have both. Today's ideal personal computer would have both solid-state and traditional disks so that you can have the benefits of both.

The holidays, which I was dreading, turned out to be a lot of fun. New Year's Eve was great -- after a few recent dud NYEs, it was fantastic to spend it with great people from OB at MAGfest.

And honestly, I have the best friends in the world. Friends I really don't even deserve, because nobody deserves friends this good.

It's kind of nice to have the holidays out of the way, though! Finally I can focus on what needs to be done.

I'm not a fan of specific New Year's resolutions like "lose ten pounds" because nobody ever keeps them, but here's my goal (not a resolution) for the new year:

When I know what needs to be done, I will do it, even if somebody else wants me to do something else.

Doesn't mean I'll stop listening to others. There are plenty of times when others know better than me. But when I know that 2+2=4, I've got to stop listening to people that say it's 3 or 5. Because ultimately I'm the one who's being graded.

I feel awful. My joints are aching, especially my fingers and wrists; my sore throat is epic; I keep vacillating between freezing and stuffy; and I can't bend over without feeling lightheaded. First day of school is tomorrow. And I flew this morning but what else could I do, only starting to get a sore throat at 11 PM last night when my flight left at 5:30 AM? I feel like I have failed epidemiology by being the sick person on the plane but hell, I would have had to have stayed another few days in Oregon if I followed the do-not-fly-sick rule, and school is a total dick about people taking days off, even for good reasons.

Anyway. Feel horrible. Do not want. There is a complete and utter lack of anyone to take care of me. BOO. :(

I don't fully remember last years' but I think I did em all. They were like... Go outside, get a tv, sleep, don't poke people on facebook, be an ass. Yeah, I did em all pretty quick.

This years? Totally going all out:
 1. Touch my toes

... that is all.