Tao of Mac

Nov 16th 2005 · 2 min read

Steady

Had a very productive work day (mostly due to the fact that an internal event whisked away a whole team and it was way quieter than average). The quiet was instrumental in helping me regain my focus after the usual dose of interruptions, and beats hanging out in our test facilities (which are nice, but with rather unstable Wi-Fi connectivity due to their also being radio testing facilities...).

It's an interesting thing, actually - our test floor is usually crowded, but it's a far more civilized working environment because: a) most people don't know each other and tend to interact less; b) they have tight time budgets to be there, so they're more focused and tend to tolerate less interruption themselves.

Which leads me to the conclusion that whoever came up with the asinine theory that open-space offices make people more productive must have been ignored (or, more likely, snubbed) by his/her colleagues every day.

And they probably deserved it, too.

Some news and other tidbits:

  • Martin has come up with an interesting way to read content in . I, for one, want to have a go at it.
  • 's Virtual Server R2 is shipping with official support, which is an interesting indicator of how competition with VMware and Xen is going to make the OS virtualization market a very lively place over the next year or so. groupies are probably having a field day, but in the end it's just another OS.
  • In the meantime, someone leaked a Royale (without cheese). Still looks like a Chicco toy, though.
  • A bunch of and stuff is being added to the relevant pages. Every time I pick one up I'm amazed that they could get nearly everything wrong except the port and the UI...
  • Like Simon, I still don't quite grok Base. It's like tagged Wiki of sorts, but without the Wikiness that seems to put off a lot of people.
  • The Xbox360 has been reliably spotted in the wild, hunted down, and gutted. Given that none of my traditional consoles is getting any use (although the still gets fired up once in a while) and the appalling title selection (other than Halo and Oddworld, I never found much of interest to me), I think I'll pass.
  • To read later, a piece on (Incidentally, I've ordered the 17-85 lens for my , and will be posting about that when I get it and have the chance to try it out...)
  • Nokia buys Intellisync - more arrows in their corporate e-mail quiver, and an interesting way to gain ground on RIM (which uses Intellisync technology for its desktop links).
  • An excellent example... of Free Software advocates' propensity to type before thinking. Several more (which blithely ignore the fact that gcc on its own is useless without the rest of the toolchain) are even now percolating through the comments...