Alex Hopmann’s Blog

This video clip says it all.

Earlier today I was listening on the radio to them talk about how 30% of the Bear Stearns stock was held by employees and many of them mostly had the company stock in their retirement accounts- hadn’t they ever heard of Enron?

Of course this is actually very common in the financial industry- I’ve heard of some of the top firms (I won’t name names) that do all their 401k match in company stock. Folks in the financial industry really should know better. I usually like to avoid government regulation, but it does seem like the sort of thing someone should investigate / question.

I’ve been involved in various standards efforts since 1993 and seen many sides of the coin. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some things that worked out very well and have been widely adopted, and I’ve also got a few standards efforts that I put a lot of time into that didn’t work out so well.

When interacting with folks in the Standards community, developers who use those standards, and end-users that use these products. Typically they all really don’t “get” the world that the other folks live in. I’ve often had to explain to people that the standards process is kind of like making sausage- most people really don’t want to see in detail what goes into it…

Joel has written a really good explanation of the most fundamental conflicts involved in this whole space, the stress between the idealists and pragmatists with regards to interoperability and compatibility. Its a long read but worth every bit of it and I’m probably going to point lots of folks towards it so they can at least understand some of the difficult decisions involved in building new versions of something like a web browser.

One of my home machines has terrible network performance. Its an older Shuttle SB51G but it appears to mostly be in good shape running Vista with all the latest driver updates. It tends to run about 100k bytes/sec on a 100mbps Ethernet connection to a local server that normally gives much much better results. The bandwidth usage (as show in taskman) jumps all over but never gets more than 2%.

It is plugged into my gigabit ethernet switch which has been handling traffic just fine including 100mbps connections. I tried switching the cables used to connect it. I’m pretty sure this machine used to have decent network performance. Doing a NETSTAT -E shows only 8 ethernet “errors” which doesn’t seem abnormally high. NETSTAT -S shows ~1000 TCP retransmits and ~1800 UDP errors, but its been running for a long time and again those aren’t especially high.

Any suggestions?

I tend to have a lot of computers around. I tend to prefer working with lots of big monitors and different computers to deal with different tasks all over. On my desk I have 3 monitors (two 20″ and one 30″), an old computer that is typically open on email, my main development workstation that is doing all sorts of stuff and a few other computers doing misc things (servers, machines I’m setting up for other tasks, test machines, etc).

Clutter is not a new thing in my life, but I’m trying to simplify my desk a little bit. I’ve moved the computers out from under the desk by buying a few USB extension cables and some nice 15′ DVI cables so the computers can all be out of the way but still be hooked up. I also needed some extension cables for my speakers (a 5.1 system which are currently attached through 3 pMix “personal audio mixer” devices that lets me attach them to 3 computers at a time).

Having multiple keyboards around has become a pain so I’m trying out Synergy which is a free tool that lets me use one keyboard/mouse across multiple computers. This is not the same thing as a KVM switch since it doesn’t switch the video- all the machines are hooked up to their own displays, just the mouse moves between them. I just installed it so no reports on its reliability yet. I did hit a glitch where it kept reporting that my “server” machine was rejecting the connections of the client one- changing to a different port solved this problem. I think I might have been accidentally running two instances of the synergy process, with one of them incorrectly configured. I also haven’t tried hooking my Mac into the setup yet, but I’m looking forward to it.