radiant.matrix

A developer who works for Microsoft has an interesting post about tips for working well at Microsoft. It’s not very hard to adjust these to apply to development work at any large company.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and trying for a little bit. Just about every instant-messenger (IM) technology supports setting a status message in addition to a state. That is, besides such states as “Away, Busy, Available”, one can enter additional information about that state; for example, “Away” can carry the message “I’m in training all day.”

Anyone who is interested in productivity has learned that IM can be both a powerful tool and a supreme source of distraction. Many have learned that setting “Away” or “Do not disturb” during work sessions to keep people from initiating contact can be extremely helpful. Unfortunately, many of us also have interrupt-driven work environments — if we’re marked away on IM, someone will call; if we let it go to voicemail, they’ll just stop by our desks.

There are times when I’d prefer to be available for people who need to contact me, but just don’t want to be bugged about lunch plans, a funny anecdote, or whatnot. I’ve figured out a way to use the status messages in our corporate IM product to effectively accomplish this. Here’s what I did:

Read more »

Why is it that, when food poisoning kills 5,000 people every year and 9/11 terrorists killed 2,973 people in one non-repeated incident, we are spending tens of billions of dollars per year (not even counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) on terrorism defense while the entire budget for the Food and Drug Administration in 2007 is only $1.9 billion? — Bruce Schneier, The Psychology of Security

Mr Schneier’s point is that we (humans) make really bad judgments about security trade-offs. This particular quote made me smile.

I don’t think it should be taken to mean that the FDA is underfunded, or that we shouldn’t spend any money on counter- and anti-terrorism measures. But I do think we as a country and as a member of the world community, need to be re-evaluating what’s important.

Read more »

Backup software for the Mac abounds; most of it backs up your data and settings for easy restoration. Unfortunately, if you find yourself needing to rebuild (like when you’ve toasted your disks), you’ll have to reinstall your OS, download all the updates, re-install all your software, then restore your data and settings.

There are commercial utilities like SuperDuper that make block-by-block backups of your disk — a backup so perfect that you can boot your system from the backup disk — but I’ve always fallen back on the good old UNIX command dd for that kind of thing.

Enter Carbon Copy Cloner. An entirely cost-free solution for block-by-block backups on MacOS, including OS X. The Cloner interface is simple and relatively easy to understand — if you’ve ever poked around in Apple’s Disk Utility, you’ll feel right at home. Simply select the source and target volumes, decide whether you need to erase the target first, and click the Clone button. When it’s done, you’ll have a perfect copy of the source volume on the target.

Don’t need a physical disk copy like that? Carbon Copy Cloner also supports Apple’s disk image format (DMG files) as a source or target.

The author accepts donations, if you’re like me and want to support people who develop and give away useful software.