Carmack’s Cell phone adventures I am a big proponent of temporarily changing programming scope every once in a while to reset some assumptions and habits. After Quake 3, I spent some time writing driver code for the Utah-GLX project to give myself more empathy for the various hardware vendors and get back to some low-level register programming. This time, I decided I was going to work on a cell phone game.

What Dell Support Thinks of Dell “I too am working in Dell tech support,” the poster said, saying his job had been to route calls to the proper support group. “The great thing is that tomorrow is my last day here. Great because this by far has been one of the least gratifying and frustrating positions I have ever held. Yes, there are extensive and considerable problems with Dell tech support. Their outsourcing to India is not even the least of them. Every day is a continuous assault by absolutely clueless and irate customers and an ineffective phone-based support system that is enough to make anyone crack. I’m saying that it all sucks: Dell’s systems and their support and the morons who purchase them … So many times I’ve had to restrain myself from telling customers who are whining about what a piece their Dell is that, hey, guess you should’ve bought a Mac. Goodbye, Dell!”

Hitachi’s New Deskstar 7K500 Reaches 500 Gigs The drive uses longitudinal recording, which writes data tracks in concentric circles using particles magnetized horizontally on the surface of the disk. Hard-drive vendors may be able to squeeze as much as 250GB per platter out of longitudinal recording (current drives fit from 100GB to 133GB on each platter). Desktop drive capacity will top out at around 1 terabyte by late 2006, before running into technological problems in maintaining data stability.

Writing, Briefly A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.

Essential Fonts For Designers As a web designer, you know that Verdana can get real old real fast. But you also know that there are millions of free fonts on the internet and most of them are horribly bad. Here’s a secret: not all truetype fonts are bad. Some of them are quite classy. The truth is you dont have to be rich and able to afford postscript fonts in order to look professional.

Philip Greenspun said SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I’ve seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

I had an interesting conversation today at work. We were talking about the design of a product we’re working on, something I have laid out in the deep recesses of my mind. I was planting the seeds of approach with another developer, getting him to start thinking in the new product space, and digging for feedback on the approach.

I’m always amazed at how useful these discussions are. Many years ago, I used to think that the tangent-on-tangent hallway sessions were a waste of bandwidth, a way to avoid real work. I mean, how much can be accomplished from the pasty depths of witty geek-banter? Quite a lot really.

Not all shit-sessions are useful, of course, in the same way that not all developers are productive. Or like the way that some beers really do taste like skunk water, while others are the nectar of all that is good. With the right people, office banter is golden. And with the wrong people, the office banter is better than letting half-wits build bad software.

So the impromptu design discussion covers a bunch of stuff I’ve learned in the last few weeks, and the basics of an intended approach. Within a few minutes, the developer asks a few intelligent questions. Each question pointed out something I missed from my perspective under the chaos of ideas, technologies, and seemingly infinite possibilities. That short conversation solidified my thinking, what is now our thinking, which is the first step toward a great product.

It wasn’t the only useful conversation I had today either. I was talking to our founder (who I share an office with) and our wisest Elder about technology trends related to our products. The three of us came to a realization that we’re witnessing another shift in computing, and some of the implications it has on our business. Each of us on our own had noticed the trend, but failed to fully wrap our minds around it. In discussion we realized what it was, together.

I suppose we may have found a way to describe the phenomenon it on our own, but I don’t think it would have had the same impact. Successful leaps of thought, when shared between peers has a way of sticking out more than the stuff that we dream about by ourselves. Maybe it’s the fact that you can track the event in time as a story to tell future generations, and have another voice to back you up. Or it could be that the extended consciousness of a group realization results in clarity that just can’t be found in isolation.

I’m noticing the value of office discussions more now that I work from home a few days a week. The time I spend in my home office is very productive, as I can concentrate on a problem for hours at a time without interruption. When I get to the office later in the afternoons, I’ve already put several hours into design or code and have queued up several things that need more gray matter. I like the productivity that I get in issolation, but am grateful to be able to talk out designs and trends with other able minds.

Return of the Mac All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

Behind the Red Shed, with Jonathan ‘The Wolf’ Rentzsch I didn’t really know what I was getting into, so I just kept on digging away. Reading code, writing code, trying designs. Finally it settled down into two separate projects that, like chocolate and peanut butter, are great by themselves but are also great together.

Anon said … Definition of a fanatic: one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.