Asymptomatic

I've been casting about online for some kind of portable training device, something that can keep track of my time on the road while I train for a particular race later this year. There are quite a few options for watches, each with options of their own.

One of the more fascinating watch brands out there is Suunto. There are a couple of other makes that have similar capabilities, but Suunto looks to have expanded on an interesting idea of connecting wirelessly to peripherals like a chest-worn heart-rate monitor, a bike cadence monitor, and even a GPS. The watch acts as a central processor for the peripherals, receiving, recording, and presenting a subset of the information, and then relaying it (via USB tether) to a computer for more intense processing and output.

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We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it's something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.

All of my computers at home are named after "characters" in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin's Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.

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Every so often, you want to see how some code will look on your server before you actually deploy it there. Without setting up an identical server at identical cost elsewhere, you might consider testing locally on your desktop computer.

This setup describes what I've found to be useful, which is a system that allows you to host multiple sites on your local system, all resolving to different domain names, and configurable by adding a simple single line to a file and creating the directory to host the site. You don't even need to restart Apache to configure a whole new virtual host with this method.

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Where is it?

One of our clients for work has been on the hunt for an issue tracker to keep track of issues for our web development project and for their internal systems. We looked through a few options and eventually settled on FogBugz. I do not like FogBugz because it's another one of those programs subscribing to that crazy Creating Passionate Users philosophy that says it's great to have people that hate your product. Particularly because I am one of them.

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Over the years I've had many occasions to work with different graphic designers in producing various types of output related to the computer. Of course, I've helped produce web pages, but also printed documentation and marketing materials all related to software releases.

Some designers have been better to work with than others, as you would expect in any field. There are many common threads that I've noticed between these designers of, shall we say, "things they could do that would make things go much more smoothly than doing what they're used to" in regard to getting software projects done.

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