Matt's Blog

One of the benefits of building a new house is that you get to address all those things that annoy you in houses built over the last 50 years. One pet hate of mine is having to use power boards. And with good reason too: talk to any electrician, and they will tell you that power boards are a huge problem (although presumably not for them, since they are also the source of a lot of work). Although I hate them simply because they are a pain in the ass, and should absolutely unnecessary in any house built in the last ten years. And yet, surprisingly, not only did I have to explicitly request a reasonable amount of power outlets when designing a new house, but I also got a lot of strange looks when I told the builder that I wanted 8 power outlets in the main bedroom. The standard was 4 outlets: 2 on each side of the bed. But now think about how easily those two power outlets would be used. A clock radio and a bedside lamp is all that it would take to max out the two outlets avail...

I recently had a conversation with a manager within a white collar company who mentioned that "work/life balance is something that we strive for". It was interesting to see exactly what this term of "work/life balance" (WLB) actually meant to the company. It meant things like a BBQ on Fridays, casual dress, team building exercises that allowed even non-creative people to pitch their ideas, and a general emphasis on hiring people who would fit in with the existing employees. All of which is great, and none of which has anything to do with work life balance. These employee benefits are all about creating a great corporate culture, but do nothing to help balance the demands of life and work. In my opinion, WLB has become the new "great communication skills" of corporate lingo. How many job advertisements have you seen requiring applicants to have "great communication skills"? I'd hazard a guess that the majority of job descriptions list...

Download  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1526979/vmblock.tar and copy into  /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/. This tar file has been updated with the instructions form  http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/04/01/vmware-workstation-8-0-2player-4-0-2-and-7-1-x3-1-x-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-4-0/ . You may also want to fix the vmnet.tar file as well with the instructions here .

I have owned a tablet for quite some time now. And it does everything that a tablet should be able to do: play games that can be picked up and put down in 5 to 10 minutes, check email, watch videos, browse the web, and consume news and social feeds. I even tried to do some useful work on a tablet once or twice, and never attempted it again. Every attempt to use an (Android) tablet app for simple word processing was a painful demonstration that not even the people developing the apps were using them seriously. Text would get lost behind an on screen keyboard that would pop up and disappear at the most inconvenient of times. Key strokes would fail to be registered as the tablet froze while processing some background operation. There was no such thing as a spell checker. Trying to insert or edit text in previous paragraphs required a divine level of patience trying to place the cursor at the correct position. It occurred to me that the reimagination o...

Realising that I wanted to dig up a search query that I had done that morning, I opened up my history and began searching. The list of sites I had visited in just one day was quite astounding. Most of the sites were either Google searches or the sites found from those searches. As an information worker this is actually a fairly common browsing pattern. I spend a lot of time researching and problem solving, and taking little snippets of information from various sources. Lately I have found myself wishing that I had a better way to track those sites and pages that I have found useful. The Google plus one extension in Chrome does provide a rudimentary way to identify sites that have been useful, but those results are then buried. Subsequent searches don't put sites that I have plused one at the top of  any new search (although "Search Your World" was apparently supposed to do that), and I have found no convenient way to search through the list of sites that I have previous...

Download  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1526979/vmnet.tar into /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ This updated vmnet.tar file comes from the patch that was posted for VMWare 8.02 at  http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/01/26/vmware-workstation-8-0-2-player-4-0-2-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-2-and-3-3/ .

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was a prolific blogger. I even considering trying to make a living from it. I made some serious strides in that direction, having created a reasonable reader base on Brighthub and publishing a book. I really quite enjoyed tinkering with open source multimedia libraries and sharing my experiences. The best thing about blogging on these technologies is that you got to enjoy the "ah-hah" moment of getting something to work without having to deal with the last 95% of work which usually involves tweaking, refining, marketing, supporting and publishing a product. Unfortunately, neither venture really worked out on a financial level. Brighthub ended up taking all contributions made to the main web site and stopped paying any revenue to the writers, and my book is now making only a handful of sales. So while I consider both experiences to have been valuable, I can't consider either of them to have been financially rewarding. Which is ...