I have used a two monitor setup for several years (I’m about to try three just for the hell of it.) I discovered Ultramon the other day, downloaded it, and my life will never be the same. If you use two more more monitors on your PC setup, this is a must have app.
Following are some of the features that I’m already using:
There are plenty of other features, some of which I’m sure I’ll discover over time. Installation is trivial and was flawless for me. I’ve been using it for three days and can’t imagine not having it.
I started my summer school program today. Yeah – I know it’s Saturday – but so what. I turned off my email (eek) and settled into an hour of Brian Harvey’s Computer Science Logo Style.
I’d already read the first two chapters (Exploration and Procedures) so after downloading Berkeley Logo 5.4 I fiddled around with some of the examples that I was struggling to parse without playing around with them, such as:
print word word last “awful first butfirst “computer first [go to the store, please.]
Chapter 3 was descriptively titled “Variables.” I took a little detour as I figured out how to change my editor to notepad2.exe (seteditor “n.exe after I renamed notepad2 to n and put it in the ucblogo director – DOS path hell, ugh – boy what an emotional victory to get that working.)
Well – my hour is up. Boy – that went fast. Time to go running. Bye.
As I wander around in summer school, I’ve been working my way through Brian Harvey’s Computer Science Logo Style 2/e, Vol. 1: Symbolic Computing. So far I’m finding Harvey to be a fantastic writer and his approach to introducing computer science concepts to be very accessible (to me). In addition to being a good writer, Harvey has written a Logo interpreter that goes along with the book series.
For those of you that are sneering and thinking “Logo – that’s for kids”, Harvey has a fun four line program showing the power of Logo that he uses to challenge one to reproduce in four lines of Java.
I’m still too early in the book to have any thoughtful commentary about my “programming rebirth” other to say that it’s fun to stretch my brain on this stuff again after a long hiatus.
I’ve just agreed to be a judge for the finals of the Microsoft produced Imagine Cup Programming Competition. This is a college programming competition that now has over 15,000 students enter. I’m heading over to Yokohama, Japan at the end of July with Scott Maxell of Insight Venture Partners and Chris Pacitti of Austin Ventures who are my co-judges for the finals. We’re apparently going to do an American Idol like thing – nerd style. Scott insisted on being Simon and I offered up – much to the chagrin of Amy – that I’d be Paula. I think it’s awesome that Microsoft produces a worldwide college programming competition – it was easy to agree to judge when asked.
A few days ago I posted about turning on the Pipelining feature in Firefox. In many cases, I’ve seen a dramatic performance improvement. However, now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I’ve run into some sites that it simply breaks, including the Wall Street Journal site.
One of my comments suggested that I try the Tweak Network Settings Firefox Extension. It’s great – it exposes the same options but also gives you and easy off button (“Default”) and on button (“Power”) through a menu option in the Tools menu within Firefox. Interestingly, when I used the “Power” settings (which are slightly different then the ones I had listed in the previous post), the Wall Street Journal site automagically works again.
I’ve been using Firefox for a while and love it. I’m waiting patiently for my beta of IE 7.0 to see how they’ve done, but for now I’m addicted to Firefox. My partner Greg Galanos (another software nerd – he used to run Metrowerks) sent me the tweaks to turn on pipelining in Firefox. The performance improvement is awesome. If you are a Firefox user on a high speed line (don’t try this on dialup), try the following:
Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in “about:config”
Look for the following lines:
Change them to (by click/double-click the line):
This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply to the request before making another request
Then you need to create one new option:
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic.
Ken Norton has an incredible post up about his visit to Enron in 1999 while he was CTO at NBCi. Thanks for Mark Pincus for the link. I’ve filed this under “Internet Axis of Evil” because – even though “bogus stuff that doesn’t work” isn’t in Fred’s list, it belongs.
Fred Wilson wrote a long post on his investment in del.icio.us six weeks ago. I’ve been playing with del.icio.us and some of the other tagging services and finally got around to putting a del.icio.us link on my blog posts. So – while you can’t yet tag del.icio.us from within NewsGator Online (hint, hint), you can click through to my blog and tag directly if you so desire. Of course, if you are an avid del.icio.us user, blogger, or podcast junkie, there are already plenty of ways to use del.icio.us with Feedburner.
In 1994 when I was first playing around with the Web, catalog publishing was a common example of something that would eventually shift to the Web over time. Last week, Thomas Register announced that they were discontinuing their print publication in favor of the Internet in a move that reflected “an over 10–year transition to the Internet as the primary information source of the industrial market.”
I love this shit. Do you remember Industry.Net which morphed into Nets, Inc. – run by Jim Manzi (ex-CEO of Lotus) straight down the tubes in the Spring of 1997 over three years before the Internet bubble peaked? Perot Systems ended up picking up the whole thing for about $9 million in one of the most “gossipy” failures of 1997.
Nets was going to do what Thomas Register did, but on the Web instead of print. A decade later, Thomas Register will be 100% web-based. If you are looking for an Orifice Plate Flow Meter, a DC to DC Transformer, or a Cryogenic Solenoid Valve, you no longer need to buy an expensive book every year. And – it only took them 10 years to get there.