This is a pretty interesting presentation. The content matter while slightly silly is actually pretty informative and eye opening. I bet we all waste more paper than we realize. What really stands out is Joe Smith has amazing presentation skills. This should be shown on the first day of any public speaking class. This is pretty much the best example of solid public speaking skills. Audience engagement, entertaining, great use of language, demonstration, repetition and humor. All in perfect balance.

Apple managed to achieve a decent “chicket style” keyboard, the spacing is pretty good. The low action makes it very responsive. So I’m not totally opposed to the style. I’m typing on one now.

Looking at the photo, I can’t imagine this new keyboard Lenovo is using will be any good. The function keys look quite narrow and the arrows look like they have the prev/next against them. Those buttons are essentially useless and just ruin the feel of that part of the keyboard. My T43 has them, but at least that was a classic keyboard which was very tactile. I’d imagine the new keyboard also changes the usability of the Trackpoint. I’m just going to assume the spacing and action is solid.

I guess this is the downside to making laptops thinner and lighter.

By default you’ll see a line like this in a series of otherwise commented out configs:

   ForwardX11 yes

Change that “yes” to a “no” and save the file. No more quitting X11 every time you ssh into another box.

In the event you need to use X11 forwarding from time to time, you can enable it when connecting by doing:

ssh hostname.tld -o ForwardX11=yes

It’s nice to get rid of those little annoyances every once in a while.

It was a stunning failure in vision, and more or less the same thing happened at Flickr. All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

It’s worth a read. It’s a textbook example of how not to build/manage a product. Yahoo isn’t in it’s current situation by accident or chance. The upside is there’s a bunch of good lessons for everyone inside and outside of Yahoo here.

Love or hate what Facebook is doing, they are essentially the antithesis. Every decision Facebook makes is seemingly about growing the community and features that increase engagement. There are of course many other ways to fail.

The Internet is a network/community of cooperation. If you forget about the network/community factor, you’ve lost.

About two weeks ago I got to see Shuttle Enterprise Arrive in NYC. NASA Television has now posted some video of the Shuttle being unmated from the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Unlike most of the times we’ve seen this process it was done by crane.

$ ant
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tools/ant/launch/Launcher
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher. Program will exit.

Odd, generally yum packages work out of the box. The problem ends up being that ant can’t find ant-launcher.jar The solution is to add the following to your .bashrc

export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java

Once you do that it should find the necessary jar and work just fine.

Hopefully that saves someone else the hassle of figuring this out.

Back to regular blogging tomorrow.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the branch library’s storage closet was powerful enough to serve an entire college campus.
…
The high-end router serves four public computer terminals at the small library in Putnam County.

It goes on to define them as Cisco 3945′s. These are reasonably large (in terms of Cisco’s lineup) high capacity routers. Given 4 computer terminals in a library, a cheap Linksys box (also Cisco) would have likely done the job just as well, for under $100.

I don’t think that router provides CIPA compliant filtering either, so I’m guessing they are doing it via software on the computers connected, or they have a gateway appliance of some sort.

It gets even more amusing:

Gianato said the T1 cards have other uses — video conferencing, wireless Internet and “voice over Internet protocol.”

A T1 (DS1) line is 1.544 Mbit/s. Granted unlike most broadband services this is a direct private line and thus you get the full 1.544 Mbit/s, but still this is 2012. You’re unlikely to be using such low capacity for those services in any meaningful way. You’d likely get better performance with a residential cable modem these days.

Those T1 cards are also quite expensive.

This is why you need competent IT folks, even in government.

Neat little treat for people commuting. The same group did something very similar once before that went viral on the web. Must be tough playing in such a crowded train.