Eric F. Savage

A post on the Freakonomics blog got me thinking. What inventions have genuinely improved, or even affected, my life. I drew up a list, and decided to constrain it to the 21st century, so things like the cellphone, the VCR, the CD, the ATM, instant messaging, and online banking aren’t on the list. Here they are, and where possible I put the approximate year I adopted them.

Major Improvement to Daily Life

• Tivo (2000) - Definitely #1 on the list. I don’t consider myself a couch potato, but this completely unshackled me from the network’s arbitrary scheduling. It also make more shows enjoyable, or even watchable, by cutting out commercials.
• RSS/Google Reader (2002, 2005) - RSS enabled me to keep track of a much broader set of sources, and Google Reader took RSS to the next level by making my subscriptions and unread articles available anywhere (including my phone).
• Smartphone (2006) - I’m far more organized now that I have my full contact list and calendar on me at all times, as well as being backed up, plus last-resort internet access is a nice bonus.
• TV shows on DVD (2003) - There’s now a new category of TV show, the ones I don’t even bother to Tivo and just wait for the DVD.

Minor Quality-of-Life Improvement

• Netflix (2002) - Like they say, no more late fees.
• Wifi (2004) - Adopted later than most geeks, has proven useful in many ways.
• Wikipedia (2003?) - Coming from someone who used to read the encyclopedia for fun, Wikipedia is like crack.
• Text Messaging (2006) - Late to the game here. Enables a new layer of communcation and makes me both more responsive and more proactive.
• GPS (2007) - I waited a while for the price dip, and now consider GPS a mandatory item for my car.
• mp3 player/iPod (2002/2004) - No more discman and CD cases is a good thing.
• Digital Camera/DSLR (2001, 2004, 2007) - I’m too lazy to deal with film. I got my first digital in 2001, my first nice one in 2004, and my first digital SLR in 2007, each a vast improvement over the previous.
• Firefox (2004) - Firefox has gone from lightweight security-minded browser to bloated, customizable security-minded browser, both of which I’ve found value in.
• Eclipse (2002) - Java wins in my book because of Eclipse. Having a program that thinks for you enables you to think about the real problems.
• Launchcast (now Yahoo! Music) (2002) - One of the earliest and still one of the best customized music services. If you’re not sold on Pandora and Last.fm it might be because they are are inferior versions of Launch.

(supposedly) Major Advances, Adopted by Me, Negligible Impact

• Social Networks (2004) - I use LinkedIn as a sort of resume-light, and myspace to keep up with my sisters, and facebook as the site du jour, but they are all just curious diversions.
• OS X (2005) - Scores high on sexiness. Scores low on stability & usability
• XP/Vista (2003) - Windows 2000 made computers better and more useful. XP and Vista seem to just make them slower.

Major Advances, Unadopted by Me

• VoIP/Skype - I don’t use landlines.
• Fastlane/Speedpass - I still find the ease with which someone can track me disturbing, plus the lines these days are usually shorter at the cash lines.

There’s probably some that I missed, or just weren’t important enough to remember. My main question is, what’s next to get on the list, and where on the list will it end up?

I recently picked up, and am liking, the new “wafer thin” aluminum keyboard from Apple. Its very small, I like the key action and it’s very solid considering it’s size and thickness. But, I use it on Windows, and there’s no driver available other than the standard keyboard one, so the extra keys like media controls aren’t enabled. I came across a freeware macro program called AutoHotKey that works very nicely, and wrote up a few little scripts for it. You can download AutoHotKey and run the scripts yourself, or you can download the compiled version here [enable_mac_aluminum.zip, 193KB] and just pop it into your Startup folder.

Commands:
Shift-F3: Print Screen
Shift-F4: Task Manager
Shift-F7: Previous Track (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F8: Pause/Play (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F9: Next Track (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F10: Mute/Unmute
Shift-F11: Volume Down
Shift-F12: Volume Up
Windows-s: Open http://www.efsavage.com

Here’s the entire script:

#s::Run www.efsavage.com
+F3::Send {PrintScreen}
+F4::Send, {SHIFTDOWN}{CTRLDOWN}{ESC}{SHIFTUP}{CTRLUP}
+F7::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, z ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 112, 76
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F8::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, c ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 30, 77
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F9::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, b ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 148, 79
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F10::Send {Volume_Mute}
+F11::Send {Volume_Down 3}
+F12::Send {Volume_Up}

PuTTY is the most popular free SSH client for Windows. It’s very stable and very lightweight, due to the developers keeping bloat out of the source. One piece of bloat that I would like to see is the ability to pick icons, which I find very valuable when working on multiple servers, a common task for most developers. Luckily it’s pretty easy to roll your own PuTTY, so I figured I would offer a little how-to here.

1. Download and install Cygwin. I’m not sure which packages you need, as I typically just install everything.
2. Download putty source code from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
3. Open cygwin shell
4. cygwin: mkdir putty
5. cygwin: cd putty
6. cygwin: unzip [wherever download is]/putty-src.zip
7. cygwin: mv WINDOWS/PUTTY.ICO WINDOWS/PUTTY_ORIG.ICO
8. Now put your icon (.ico) file in WINDOWS and name it PUTTY.ICO
9. cygwin: cd WINDOWS
10. cygwin: make -f MAKEFILE.CYG putty.exe
11. You should now havea nice fresh putty.exe file in the WINDOWS directory, copy this wherever you wish.
12. Copy the next icon to PUTTY.ICO and re-run make. Repeat until you have one executable per server.

So, after finally calling it quits in my battle against my MacBook Pro, I retreated to Microsoft. You basically can’t buy a Dell without Vista now, so I figured I’d give it a shot. There’s been a fair amount of hype by Microsoft in favor of it, and a tremendous amount of anti-hype against it by basically everyone else. After my first day, I’ll say that neither side has much to stand on.

The system is what I’d consider an average developer box these days. Grand total with tax was less than $1150.

• Dell E521
• Athlon Dual-core 5000+
• 2GB RAM
• 250GB hard drive (no raid)
• ATI X1300 video card
• 20″ Dell 4:3 LCD
• Windows Vista Home Premium

I hooked it up to my pre-existing 24″ LCD as primary monitor. I had bought a Radeon 9250 so that I could run the second monitor on DVI, but ATI doesn’t have Vista drivers for that, so I hooked it up to the VGA port until I return that card for a newer one.

Here’s what I installed:

• JDK6 - No problems
• Eclipse 3.3M4 - No problems
• Jetty 5 and 6 - No problems
• JettyLauncher (eclipse plugin) - Only works with JDK 5, not sure if this is a Vista thing, so…
• Subclipse (eclipse/subversion plugin) - No problems
• JDK5 - No problems
• MySQL 4 - No problems
• Firefox 2 - No problems
• Yahoo IM - Crashed once, but it does that on XP too often too.
• AIM 6 - Crashed once after I first started it, ran fine through several conversations later on.
• Windows Mail (pre-installed, I configured for POP and SMTP over SSL) - no problems.

So the big complaint by the hordes has been performance. For a mid-range machine, with full Aero enabled on two monitors at 1920×1200 and 1600×1200, I see no lag at all. Aero is actually decent. It’s only major flourish is the new “flip-3d” where the windows stack up like something you would see on a Mac, but its really kind of useless, and I prefer alt-tab. The live previews when you over over the task bar are actually kind of nice, though not very useful. The transparency is fancy, but not overdone, the fade/shrink when you minimize is quick and nicely done. I haven’t disabled any of it yet after 7 hours of use, which is about 6.9 hours longer than the ridiculous XP theme lasted.

Programs launch and run faster, though it does seem like installers go slower and hang for a while. It also comes with a ton of nice fonts, I’m curious if we’ll start seeing those show up in CSS files. I set most of my stuff up for familiar 8pt Lucida Console, I’ll have to go through and see if they’ve added any other nice monospace fonts.

Microsoft seems to have adopted the unix idea of security when it comes to “sudo”. Whenever you do anything that affects the OS, it prompts you to allow it to proceed. If you want to do something like edit your hosts file, you’ll need to run your editor as an administrator, which is as easy as a right click. It’s all a bit annoying, but probably just because I was tweaking it alot. We’ll see how it plays out after a period of normal usage. The worst part is that when the box comes up, the whole screen flickers and takes on a lightbox type effect. Seems to be overkill and poorly implemented.

Other than that, I hate to break it to the Microsoft PR squad and the throngs of haters, but it’s really just good old Windows. The paths are a bit different, things are called slightly different names, but from my perspective, it’s all trivial stuff. Unless I come across something tragic or wonderful, I see no reason for people to upgrade, or to resist upgrading.