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I recently purchased a shiny new Dell Precision 390 Workstation. I usually don’t buy name brand systems, but Dell’s price and their fancy quiet cooling system convinced me to acquire my first brand name computer since my Amiga 3000 was reborn as an Apple Powerbook 170.

I’m very happy with my Precision 390. It’s fast, quiet, cool and cheaper than any equivalent PC I could create from parts.

To beef up disk storage I decided to transplant one of my existing hard disks into it. Because mounting screws are sooo five minutes ago, the Precision’s hard disks are mounted in little plastic sleighs that slide into a cage on the bottom of the case where the air is fresh and cool. After sliding my additional drive into place and locating its power connector I discovered that the convenience of access came with a design compromise. To get the side of the case on again I had to use a rarely sighted SATA cable with a right-angle connector.

The next day I called Dell spare parts. I had forgotten to bring in my service tag number so they refused to deal with me for my own protection. I rummaged around the office and jotted down the service tag of a Dell Precision 380 workstation, which is practically the same case configuration. I called Dell for a quote on a cable with a right angle connector suitable for the Precision 380. The response was AU$24.05 delivered.

That’s not what I’d call a bad price, but it’s well into brand name exploitation range. I decided to defer my purchase decision and see if there were any local retailers with right angle SATA cable stocks. There weren’t.

Today I called Dell spare parts and this time I used the real service tag for my Precision 390. The woman I spoke to (I believe she was in Malaysia or Singapore) was very helpful and took note of my parts requirement offering to email me a quote when she had found the right part to save me time.

Five minutes later I received an email. She wasn’t sure if I needed the 400mm cable or the 700mm cable so she had sent a quote for both. Total price for both cables delivered was AU$4.40 — $1.10 for a 400mm cable, and $3.30 for 700mm. The material required to stretch a SATA cable over 400mm is obviously quite expensive.

I quickly wrote back that I would buy both and that she should call me for my credit card details. Five minutes later I had a call on my mobile phone that lasted more than four minutes. The call was extended because I joked that I wanted to increase my order to 1000 cables and my spare parts dealer took me seriously enough to talk me through the logistics of building an order for 1000 cables. It took a minute to explain that I was being ironic.

There is no way Dell is making any money out of this transaction. Are they buying my loyalty two SATA cables at a time?

Once upon a time I wrote a post about my use of Bloglines. I have to come clean. Google Reader’s latest upgrade has enticed me to change.

What’s changed?

Last time I tried to export my OPML into Google Reader from Bloglines it all ended in tears. My tears. This time the move was completely painless. The Bloglines email subscriptions and search feeds didn’t migrate, but I wouldn’t expect them to. Bloglines folder names turned up as Google Reader folder names. Google Reader folders are really tags, and you can tag one feed with many “folders.”

The Google Reader user interface has improved immensely since its introduction. Feeds load quickly and scroll smartly. FireFox 2.0 supports one-click feed subscription and there is a subscribe bookmark available. I have encountered a few user interface bugs but they have all been easily worked around. The most significant bug I found was in the “Manage Subscriptions” interface when selecting a drop down menu with a “Create New Folder…” menu item. Selecting this would bring up a text entry field off the bottom of the visible menu space giving the illusion that the UI had become unresponsive. In the past week or so this seems to have been fixed. I don’t know if it was part of the latest bugfix drive or if it’s because I’ve had a browser upgrade.

Google Reader is still missing a few of the features I like in Bloglines. For example, I haven’t found a way to see what’s changed in an updated post, but the list view and full screen mode options are worth the price of admission… err… more than the price of admission.

The original Google Reader (circa 2005) was a demonstration client application for a soon-to-be-released API. While the API hasn’t materialized yet, and Reader is still a Google Labs product (made abundantly clear with a bubbling conical flask of green goop that provides the “please wait…” animation) it feels solid and responsive. Is a formal API launch forthcoming, or are there grand plans for Reader?

On Firefox 2.0:

• Text field spell-checker: good
• Occasional hanging on page load: bad

That second point makes the new reload-sessions-after-a-crash feature much more useful than it should be.

I’ve tried IE7 a little. I was immediately weirded out by the lack of a menu bar to let me set a new start page. Once I’d found some window real-estate that let me get a right click menu up I turned on the menu bar. I was then unpleasantly surprised by where it decided to put the menu bar.

Agape from brain-melting menu bar 2.0 technology, I finally managed to change the IE7 start page.

Then my fear of change overcame me and I switched back to life on the edge with Firefox 2.0’s halting problem.

What a choice - application stability or user interface consistency. Can’t I have both?

John Hodgman (as occasionally seen on The Daily Show) has written an excellent book called The Areas Of My Expertise.

Because it is an almanac, if contains useful information, like this, and a list of 700 hobo names (apparently including “Nick Nolte” twice). Each hobo has been illustrated in a Flickr pool and the results are collated here.

Via Paul Kedrosky, a fascinating, eye-opening, and nicely annotated video of a panel discussion led by Guy Kawasaki. The panel is a group of 15 to 24 year olds who talk about why they need to send 400-4000 text messages per month, how frequently they use landlines, how they use MySpace and the importance of being in someone’s top 8 MySpace friends.

The link.

I’ve ordered some rare earth magnets. They’re being delivered by mail. Talking to a friend just now I had a vision of my package getting lost — stuck to the inside of a mail box somewhere.

I hope I don’t get my new credit card delivered on the same day.

Alan just posted about finding his Project Management Software Cardboard Schedule, he links to Jason Kottke, who is cataloging interesting things that can be found in Google Code Search. The Register points out that it is now possible to perform various levels of static code analysis on all code. El Reg reports that the folks who are most motivated to perform this public service are the shady underworld hackers and crackers.

My immediate thought, and I’m not alone, is that there are a huge number of spurious (and a smaller number of serious) metrics to be harvested here. For example - a quick and unscientific study of the prevalence of some of the gang-of-four (and one other) pattern names (search string : approximate hits):

• “factory pattern” : 600
• “singleton pattern” : 300
• “visitor pattern” : 200
• “proxy pattern” : 100
• “model view controller pattern” : 100
• “command pattern” : 50
• “composite pattern” : 50
• “iterator pattern” : 8

After seeing where iterator sits in this list, I’m beginning to see just how spurious my methods are. I guss there’s a thesis that the iterator concept is so entrenched that nobody thinks of them as patterns any more, especially when they’re built-in behaviour in contemporary languages.

Then there’s the opportunity to win coding style religious wars:

• “for(” : 384,000
• “for (” : 4,710,000

How about finding C++ crop circles?

• “: virtual protected” : 50

Those dusty parts of the Internet’s tubes where stars are born:

• “Hello world” : 50,600

Heroic failures:

• “still leaks memory” : 60,100
• “not my fault” : 100
• “could be bettter” : 100

Apart from being extraordinarily useful, Google Code Search is the best web-based entertainment since Google Image Labeler.

On September 1st, 2000 — just before the 2000 US Presidential elections — Ambrose Beers at the now defunct Suck.com wrote an article examining Dick Cheney (cached version here) and predicting with astounding accuracy the legacy of his Vice Presidency:
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