Technology Posts

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I wasn’t feeling overly ambitious, so I hung out close to home mostly and rented a few movies. I’m not sure if there really are no movies, or if Apple TV is exceptionally crappy right now, but I hardly found anything to watch at all. Back in September I wrote a post about switching to Server Beach. For the most part, it’s been pretty rock solid. We have a dual core server there with cPanel on it, and it’s been relatively pain-free. One of the reasons we opted for a dedicated server was to make our lives a lot easier. Prior to setting it up, Dale and I realized we had about four or five hosting accounts combined, many of which had old sites on them. Unfortunately, keeping everything running smoothly in that scenario is a challenge, especially when you’re also trying to develop (and […]

I get enough of these types of emails that I basically don’t even really read them any more. Hi Duane, For the release of a future worldwide success story, I’m urgently looking for a Linux debugging expert with very strong knowledges of C/C++! They’re implementing the ANDROID (Java) mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel, then looking for someone who knows Android architecture and API’s. To resume: -Strong C/C++ knowledges -Experience with Linux Kernel development, and various Linux distributions -Testing, and Linux/Unix development skills You love Brussels, are excited by working in an international environment with offshore team, and available ASAP, this is your job. Here are a couple of things that bother me when I get these: I’m not really a Linux expert, something they’d know if they scanned my resume on this site. I also don’t have any ANDROID experience The grammar and spelling are screwy in […]

Gillian Shaw had a great article today in the Vancouver Sun about what it means to unplug nowadays. I think as the penetration of computers, especially mobile internet, continues to spread, it’s going to be more and more relevant. Without a doubt, I think people spend way too much time online these days. In fact, if anyone is guilty of that, it’s me. I was recently trying to think of memories from before the Twitter and Facebook eras, trying to remember what I used to spend most of my time doing. I remember having a lot of nice dinners with my ex, and also going for long walks from time to time. And while I try to power down the gadgets in the evening, I know without a doubt that disconnecting even further will ultimately make me a bit happier. I’ve had many jobs where the expectation is that everyone […]

I was just cooking myself lunch, and an old memory came back to me. It was probably around 2001, and I was working in Ottawa. A company in Silicon Valley called me up and asked if I wanted to come down and interview for a fiber optics job. I was only mildly interested in the job, but I hadn’t been to California in a long time, and I thought I’d hear what they had to say. I didn’t really feel like traveling alone, so I asked if they’d be interested in pitching my friend Rob also, which they agreed to. So anyways, one Thursday afternoon I was sitting in Rob’s apartment in Ottawa, drinking a bunch of beer prior to our flight to San Jose. We got there late at night, and eventually found our way to the Fairmont San Jose hotel. We had early morning interviews, which lasted probably […]

I was just sitting here, watching a bit of Lost on the DVD player and also doing a bit of research. Like most evenings, I usually wind down my evening by reading about the state of the world, or sometimes about the latest technology. I came across this interesting article about how the US Navy is toying with the idea of turning seawater into Jet Fuel. The reason they are considering this is because the United State’s oil production is on the downward slide. In fact, the United States reached peak oil production sometime in the 1970s I believe. Of the 30 or so countries that produce significant quantities of oil, approximately 20 of them have reached peak oil, and are now declining. What that means is that sometime soon (probably within 10 or 20 years), the world’s global oil product will peak, and begin declining. If our current energy […]

Just for yucks, I integrated Google Latitude into the sidebar in my blog section. Google latitude, for those that don’t know, allows people with GPS-enabled devices to share their locations with their friends (I think it can do it based on geo-IP as well, but that’s not super exciting IMO). I’m not entirely sure showing a map with all my friends on it is particularly useful to be honest, but I thought I’d toss my location up on there for something to do. Far better, in my opinion, would be integration with services such as IM, such that I can see my friend’s list sorted by distance to me. That way if I wanted to go to the bar (and drink water, as per my last post), I could find a list of people close by and blast out a quick group message. Some people are worried about privacy — […]

About a year ago, I was down in the United States attending WordCamp San Francisco. While there, my friend Jason lent me a little USB dongle that let me basically surf the web from anywhere. It was a CDMA device that basically piggybacked data onto the wireless towers such that you could use the internet wherever you could get cell access. I was so impressed by it (remember, this was before the iPhone came to Canada) that I’ve been constantly on the lookout for something like that that I can also use down in the USA, since the Roger’s roaming data rates are fairly absurd. When I looked last year, there were several hardware options I could have gone with, but all of them required either a one or a two year contract at a base monthly price of $60 USD, which was way more than I wanted to commit […]

I’m up at Cultus Lake now, doing some weird cross between camping and working. I honestly wasn’t too sure if I’d get 3G up here, and had planned to head back into town during the days. But given how I have four bars on my phone, and that 3G is working great, I might just work from up here. To that end, I went back home a while ago and picked up my 15W solar panel and my 75Ah deep cycle battery. Right now my laptop appears to be drawing about 25W, which is fairly awesome considering I’m charging it and also working on it at the same time. At 120V, that means it’s currently drawing roughly 0.2 amps (200 milliamps). I’m currently using an inverter attached to the deep cycle battery, and since power must be roughly conserved across it, that means the battery must be putting out roughly […]

So, I gotta ask, and I’m probably going to get raked over the coals for doing so. I’m curious as to why there are so many technology events that focus exclusively on women? Some of them actually look pretty good, and I’m actually a bit disappointed that I can’t attend. In fact, some of the people I really look up to in the community are female, which makes it all the more disappointing that I’m excluded by nature from some conferences. And that’s really my question I guess — why can’t I attend some of these events? Obviously there are a lot of women in technology these days. I’d be the first to point out that there are still more men (at least, the statistics tell me), but walking around Northern Voice or WordCamp San Francisco, I really couldn’t say whether there were more men or women there, which to […]

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now, and the one universal constant in that time period has been the flakiness of the Twitter service. Even today, at least a year after some of these problems started cropping up, you still get the occasional “Fail Whale” when the servers can’t keep up. Some of the other random problems I’ve witnessed lately are: disappearing avatars the inability to upload a new avatar missing background images on profiles flaky service (i.e. the Fail Whale) messages that appear 30 – 60 minutes after they were tweeted Obviously running a service that can handle millions of people is no small effort. I’ve never tried to do it, and I imagine I’d have the same problems (or far worse problems) if I were put into that same situation. What is a bit scary though is that they’ve been working on these issues for over […]