Remotely Working [via Jim Mangan] I worked remotely for several months at my last job, and I can attest that it is difficult. We were fairly well wired: I have a fast cable modem connection; they already had a VPN for other people to work at home; I had web-based access to internal email; I got conferenced in for staff meetings. And everyone in the department was logged into Yahoo Messenger all day, so I could at least prove that I was awake whenever someone pinged me. But I always had the nagging sense that I had to prove that I was working — which, with the exception of the days immediately following 9/11, I actually was — and some days this was more difficult than others. Just the nature of the job — I might spend an entire day reviewing a complex functional spec without producing anything that anyone could see or make sense of (besides some seemingly incoherent notes I had made to myself). Or I might spend 8 hours debugging a SQL script or coping with a complex query. Or I might go in one direction, only to realize at the end of the day (or the end of the week) that it was a dead end, and start over in a much simpler direction. I ended up keeping backups of the intermediate steps, notes, chicken scratch, etc. on the company servers. Not only was it extremely useful once or twice to be able to dig up old notes, it served as an electronic trail to be able to prove I really was working all day. (I laughed when I read the author talking about daytime TV. It never occurred to me to turn on the TV in all the time I worked at home.)
Google Expands File Type Search. In addition to PDF documents, Google now searches
Microsoft Office, PostScript, Corel WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and
others. … Google also offers the user the ability to “View as HTML”, allowing
users to examine the contents of these file formats even if the
corresponding application is not installed. The “View as HTML” option
also allows users to avoid viruses which are sometimes carried in
certain file formats.
I have mixed feeling about this. One of the tenets of web usability is that information should be accessible to everyone. This used to mean that we could vehemently complain about stupid companies that “locked away” valuable information in Word documents. Now those companies have even less incentive to mend their ways. The upside, of course, is that the information really is accessible now. Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned.
Typeface designed in memory of Mordecai Richler [via Textism"] Wow, his own font. A man, a plan, a font… Sounds like there should be a palindrome in there somewhere, but grep ‘tnof’ /usr/dict/words comes up empty. Of course, nobody can hold a candle to Prince, the artist formerly known as The Artist, formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, formerly known as Prince, the artist who formerly required his own font just to spell his name.
gnuTellaVision [via Slashdot] Sounds interesting. I have no time to play with Gnutella or any of the other P2P networks these days, but it caught my eye because it was written in Python.
Borland releases Kylix 2 [via Slashdot] Kylix is Delphi for Linux. They have Open Edition, which is a free download and has runtime libraries licensed under the GPL (meaning you can only distribute compiled Kylix programs under the GPL). They also have Professional and Enterprise Editions, which are dual-licensed for either GPL or proprietary distribution, similar to Sleepycat’s DB library. I used Delphi professionally for three years (back in the Delphi 1/2/3 days) and it rocked. If Kylix is half the program Delphi was, it may take off like a rocket. Now that I have Linux on my laptop, I definitely want to check this out.
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