Monthly Archives: August 2006

Working at home, with children

I hope Ryan sees this, but 6 tips for working at home with children lists 2 good work habits that anyone working at home should follow:

  1. Maintain a good work schedule, and stick to it.
  2. Take a long lunch and enjoy your opportunity to work from home.

I haven’t been able to do either. I usually get up early (sunrise at 6.30 is quite spectacular from my office!), straight to my desk to post a photo, check email, irc, web stats, and then shower, breakfast, back to desk, bring the dog for a walk, work, break, work, quick lunch, work. Suddenly it’s 6pm and I’m wondering where all the time has gone.

That’s a normal day, but sometimes I need to get out and do some chore. Then I can be catching up the hours until late into the night.
Automattic is a 24-hour company. Podz and I are in Europe and the rest of the guys in the US, I wonder sometimes what it would be like to work on hours more closely tied to the other side of the Atlantic? The 8 hours difference between here and San Francisco is unrealistic, but maybe 4 or 6 hours. Then I laugh and think that Jacinta would kill me because we’d never see each other!

Working from home? It’s the best thing I’ve ever done! (via)

Gzip Compression or No?

mod_gzip, zlib.output_compression or whatever way you compress your web pages is a great way of reducing your network traffic costs but comes at the cost of increased CPU usage. Despite what you might think, it can be more expensive to send data over the network, especially to slow clients than compress it first of all and send a smaller burst.

Unfortunately this little server may not be up to the task of gzipping content at an acceptable rate to make it worthwhile. I’ll leave it run for another few hours and check the stats tomorrow.

More snakes than you can shake a stick at

Has anyone actually gone to see that Snakes on the plane film? The first I heard of it was woz-is-name reviewing it on Ian Dempsey’s show on Today FM a few days ago, although I remember Damien Mulley saying something about snakes a few times. I just thought he had a new hobby! Internet Hype? I must be on some alternate ‘net!

Anyway, it’s supposed to be crap, so I’m not going!

What’s my name?

Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.

How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.

For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).

Automattic at the Bridge

More Linux eye candy: CGWD Themes

If you’ve seen my desktop machine at home you’ll realise I’m a big fan of the Xgl and compiz stuff and now thanks to a Linux Journal article I’ve discovered the CGWD Themer.

Installing it in Ubuntu is as easy as adding a new site to your apt-get repository list and firing up apt-get in the usual way and grabbing the binaries from their repository. Then either launch it from the command line using the command “gcompizthemer” or go to System->Preferences where a new menu item called “CGWD Themer” can be found. The themer does nice things to the borders of and bars of your windows. I love the glow of the min/max/close buttons that spills over the side of the window!
Oh, and just because I bought a Mac laptop doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux. I fell in love with my Gnome+Xgl desktop once again when I came home from San Francisco!

Later – two articles features on digg and delicious which might be of interest:

  1. An Overview of modern fancy Unix desktops – good summary of the competing technologies that make the 3d and special visual effects possible
  2. The Linux Desktop Myth – a long essay on one man’s experience with switching to Linux and GPLed software.
  3. Suse Compiz page – has lots more info and lists all the options and configurable bits! (via)

Rice Crispy Cakes or Buns?

Let’s ask Google:

  1. Rice Crispy Cake – 75 results
  2. Rice Crispy Bun – 17 results

That’s what the Internet says and I agree. ‘nuf said!

For completeness, it should be noted that

  1. It’s Kelloggs Rice Krispies but that name is trademarked as Andy just reminded me so people are more likely to spell it with a C in their cookery books and sites lest the lawyers descend on them!
  2. Kelloggs avoid the bun and cake controversy completely by calling them Rice Krispies Treats. Cowards!

Conversation on leads to some confusion. I wonder if I should quote some of it. The Rice Krispies cakes and buns Irish people refer to are simply made of Rice Krispies and melted chocolate. No yucky marshallow, or whatever else. Chocolate all the way. Yum!

Happy Birthday WordPress.com!

One year on and still going strong! Lorelle was the first to notice but shortly afterwards Matt posted a nice message saying that yes we had forgotten to celebrate the birthday but it was great that one of our own bloggers had remembered. Nice list of trivia too!

Reading through that list, it’s true that Matt and I hadn’t met when I started working for him. In fact it was several months later in December before we met.