Author Safely Ensconced in Cave

A part of having a good workspace, for me, is having a very clean desktop. I run everything as lightly as I can get it because the goal — the thing that brings about  good work, is to establish a place where everything drifts away but the project that you’re on. For me that means putting away IRC, instant messaging, Twitter and email for most of the day and just allowing for one or two really basic windows that I can use. Otherwise, an 8-hour workday can easily produce less than fifteen minutes of actual progress while still feeling exhausting.

Not everybody runs Linux on the desktop, of course, but those of us who do often enjoy a good tight terminal setup. For me, aterm fits the bill quite nicely. Running on a dark, single-color background with the following options produces very nice results:

/usr/bin/aterm -bg black -fg white +tr +trsb -fade 60 -bl +sb -font font1

What do other people do to enhance their productivity on the desktop? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Enter lightweight databases like SQLite. As the home page says, it’s a self-contained, zero-configuration, transactional database engine. It’s great for rapid development, but many find that it’s a perfectly suitable solution for production as well, saving the user the overhead of a more complex solution like MySQL.

While playing around a bit with SQLite this weekend, I discovered a handy tool that makes SQLite a breeze to work with. It’s by Mrinal Kant and it’s a nice little Firefox plugin that allows you to manage SQLite DBs much the same way one might use phpMyAdmin for MySQL databases.

So go forth developers, and create and manage thy lightweight tables for great justice.

Tonight is the first-ever Ignite SLC event at the Leonardo. There will be some great talks, a paper airplane Olympics and a whole lot of fun. I hope you’ll join us.

Immediately after release of the patch in question and prior to exploit code being released into the wild, along with most other major providers, XMission has patched its servers for this serious issue on both its primary nameservers as well as its dedicated resolvers.

While there, I had the chance to hear from Adrian Cockroft, who is currently leading a performance tuning and research group over at Netflix.

Though his presentation was excellent, one of the most interesting thoughts he had was about the future of the hard drive, which he amusingly called spinning platters of rust.

Though projecting prices for storage is never a particularly exact science, some people have tried and show some interesting projections:

Given that we’ve already seem some major storage vendors moving toward solid-state arrays one has to wonder what effect this will have on operating system architecture. Cockroft pointed out that once we see effectively flat memory architectures in machines with much smaller differences in seek times between media, we may see a major effort underway to re-architect the way that operating systems see the idea of hierarchical memory.

Perhaps even more compelling from a performance standpoint is what this re-architecture might do to the idea of the database as a storage engine. For the truly curious, both Microsoft Research and Oracle Research are actively considering the question.