A minor wtf? moment
A note to self, and for future reference - Javascript ‘month’ functions start at ‘0′ for January, though to ‘11′ for December. Which is why 2007,9,27 seems to be 64 days away…!
Filed under Technical stuff | Comment (0)A taxonomy of Facebook scepticism
A couple of interesting Facebook-related items cropped up in my feeds this morning:
JP Rangaswami has come up with a taxonomy of Facebook sceptics:
Hrrumph Steak: This is the type of person who goes red in the face when you ask him whether he’s actually used Facebook at all, and remains embarrassedly silent. Dead meat in more ways than one.
Billy Slow-Mates: This guy is actually nothing more than a shy late adopter, waiting to see what his friends do. In the meantime he hopes he keeps his street cred by claiming complete ignorance. Usually a true fanatic once converted.
IM I Said: This is the guy who’s taken this long to discover instant messaging and texting, and doesn’t feel he needs another mode of communication. Often seen buying LaserDiscs and, occasionally, Betamax tapes.
Time Lord: This person just considers Facebook to be a waste of time and that’s that. Probably because it interferes with his Word Search and Sudoku.
The Jobcentred: The sort of guy who thinks you’re slacking on the job if you talked about the cricket or the weather while waiting for the lift to arrive.
Then the ubiqitious Robert Scoble:
Anyway, back to the idea of a Facebook Hotel.
Think about how a business would change if it knew every one of its customers had a Facebook account.
I was thinking of a hotel/casino where when I walked in the iPod in the room was playing the music that I had set as my favorite on my Facebook profile. The digital screens in my room had all my photos and some random photos from my friends. My favorite movies and TV shows were on the video device. The bar knew my favorite drink and how I liked it made.
That got me thinking about how I’d change my business after I knew everything about my customers.
It’s a neat idea, but you just know that the execution would be let down - like the hotels that programme their TVs to display a “Welcome, MR J SMIThh” message, incorrectly spelt and meaning that the TV has been left on belching carbon all day long. A nice idea, but better in the minds of marketers than can actually be delivered.
Filed under Blogs, Working smarter | Comment (1)Blocking out your surroundings
The advantage of working in an open-plan office is that it’s easy to interact with your colleagues; the downside to working in an open-plan office is that it’s easy to be distracted by your colleagues interacting. Short of locking yourself away in an empty closet or meeting room, the next best anti-distraction technique is to plug your ears with sound to block out the distractions, and with an iPod or iTunes running it’s really easy to do.
But sometimes music is just as much of a distraction - a pounding beat or obtrusive vocals can be almost as bad as chattering colleagues if you’re trying to maintain a train of thought. So plain old noise can be better in these situations - but then the question is what kind of noise?
I’ve tried using noise generation software to mask out background sounds - pink or white noise is very effective at blocking out extraneous noise. But it’s not particularly pleasant - there’s a good reason why blasting victims with white noise is a favourite CIA interrogation technique.
An alternative I’ve come across is ChatterBlocker - it’s a small app that has a number of built-in soundtracks of things like running water, birdsong, random chillout-y music and indistinct voices. The clever part is that you can mix these sounds together at various volumes to create a custom soundscape that works for you - so currently I’ve got a babbling brook and birdsong with a smattering of airy chords blocking out the sound of colleagues talking and the street beyond. It helps that I’m using a pair of Sennheiser CX300 in-ear headphones, which help to cut down the outside noise with rubbery bungs.
It’s very effective, and I’m surprised by how quickly you manage to forget the fact that you’re wearing ear buds and that the noise is artificially generated. It’s not quite working by the banks of a stream in a forest glade, but it’s certainly an improvement on a busy office in the centre of London.
Filed under Mac, Technical stuff, Working smarter | Comment (1)Changes
Via Ben Hammersley, Joe Gregorio on change:
There are two rules for any change in technology.
The first is that there will be a dedicated core, those that are heavily invested, either monetarily or professionally, in the status quo, and they will resist any change.
Oh yeah, the second rule?
Change doesn’t care about your investment.
The context of the quote was Java and XML, but it applies equally to anything in the technology field. The scenario that immediately came to mind was an ex-organisation of mine, frantically jamming their thumbs in the social networking dyke…
Filed under Working smarter | Comment (0)Facebook opening up (slightly)
One of the reasons I’ve never really become that excited over Facebook is the fact that it’s pretty much a walled garden - the first rule of Facebook is never to talk (externally) about Facebook.
That seems to be changing slightly - there’s now RSS feeds available for your friends’ status updates, which plays nicely with a standard RSS reader.
Small steps, but ones which need to be taken…
Filed under RSS, Technical stuff, Working smarter | Comment (0)Setting default routes with a VPN and OS X
Setting up a VPN connection in OS X is incredibly simple - just use the Internet Connect wizard, and away you go. But if you use the wizard to set up a VPN connection, it assumes that you want all traffic to go down the VPN tunnel. That’s fine in some circumstances, but it can be a pain if the upstream connection to the Internet at the VPN end is slow - and in any case, it’s most likely to be adding additional hops to your destination if that destination isn’t at the VPN end. A much better scenario would be for normal traffic to go via the default Internet route, and only VPN-specific traffic to go via the VPN.
It’s quite easy to fix, but it does involve a certain amount of command line wrangling. The process goes like this:
Filed under Mac, Technical stuff | Comment (1)
- Fire up a terminal session and go to the /etc/ppp directory with cd /etc/ppp Then create a subdirectory in here called peers if it doesn’t already exist. You’ll probably need to invoke sudo to do this so that you get root privileges - so the command will be sudo mkdir peers
- Create a file in here with the same name as your VPN connection - so for example, my VPN connection is called ‘Headshift’, so I create a file called Headshift by using sudo touch Headshift (this is case-sensitive, so make sure that the case of your VPN connection name and the file agree)
- Open up this file and edit it to include the line ‘nodefaultroute‘ - sudo nano Headshift, entering the line then saving the file will do the trick here.
- Restart the VPN connection, and check that the default routes have changed. You can do this by using the netstat -rn command in a terminal window. This will throw back a whole chunk of data, but the part we’re interested in is right at the start. The top line is the default route which shows the gateway which all traffic will go through - this should show the IP address for your default network connection. In my case, it’s the Airport interface which is listed as en1, with a default gateway of 192.168.1.1, but this will change depending on the setup.
- Further down the list will be the entry for the network at the other end of the VPN connection, and this will show it’s gateway as ppp0, which is the VPN link. So for example, if the network at the other end is 172.168.1.0, then you’ll see an entry for 172.168.0 in the list with a gateway of ppp0
- You can also check this by doing a traceroute to a host on the VPN-connected network, which should show that the packets are passing across the VPN link; then tracerouting to an Internet host, which will go via the default LAN connection.