Amit Schreiber's Blog | הבלוג של עמית שרייבר
Yesterday I called a friend of mine who is visiting from the US and is staying at her parents’ place. My mind struggled for 2 seconds before I remembered how to say “may I speak with…” It’s been years since I’ve uttered this request.
And today my father called to tell me about an interesting article he saw and thought I would like to read. I immediately said “email me the link” and he replied “I’m reading it on the hard copy.” Again… took me a few seconds to realize what he was referring to.
… but then why do I get Venus women’s razor ads on YouTube?
Maybe it’s a “knowing the future” kind of thing.
EDIT: OK, this is not funny. Now I got an Always pads ad. What the hell, Google?
I gave Unity a good chance, but it was simply torture. Maybe it’s the over 3 years old hardware I’m running Ubuntu on, or maybe it’s the servers I’m running on my machine for the project I’m working on, but the hard drive kept thrashing to a point where it was unbearable. Sometimes just clicking a top menu or switching to a different window would take over a minute while the hard drive was grinding as if it was being benchmarked.
So I decided to go back to Gnome classic. The computer is way more responsive now and works considerably faster. My guess is that either Unity’s memory requirements are so high that I ran out (of 2 GB) and the memory had to be constantly swapped or it’s my relatively old 3D accelerated nVidia video card or Unity is doing too much disk access. Whatever it is, Unity does not work well on my machine.
I’m not so happy about reverting back to Gnome because I don’t like to be the kind of person who doesn’t accept change. But for the sake of productivity – I have to forget about Unity for now.
If you installed Ubuntu 11.04 and after a while the launcher stops auto hiding as it should, it may be because you did some dragging and dropping in an application. For example, if you use Konsole (like I do) and you drag one of Konsole’s tabs to reorganize their order, the launcher will suddenly pop up and will not hide itself automatically.
The easiest workaround I found is: right click the tab in Konsole and choose “Detach tab”, then drag the tab in the newly detached window back to where you intended to put the tab in the original window. When you’re done – the launcher will hide itself.
Excluding (some really annoying) bugs, is anyone else having difficulties with the new Unity interface? Or am I just too old for these kind of conceptual changes?
EDIT: This is a known and confirmed bug in Unity. I dutifully added my two cents.
If you get question marks after exporting Outlook contacts to a file (like a CSV file), you should try setting the non-Unicode language to your own, as described here, and then export again. If this doesn’t work, I recommend undoing this by going back to the original setting.
What’s going to happen when text-to-speech-to-text is perfected? Phones can already read text messages well enough and soon you’ll be able to input text messages to your phone just by talking to it.
Then, instead of texting, you’ll be:
Essentially, you’ll be having a push-to-talk (PTT) conversation with the robotic voice of your phone. All to avoid a simple call.
Just a thought.
I’ve been unemployed for a week now and it’s mostly been about adjusting to a new, different, routine. Here’s a list of some of the adjustments I had to make:
This is just off the top of my head. Getting up in the morning and “going to work” in my own desk at home also feels a bit unnatural. But it’s all about adjusting, and I think that after just one week I’m doing OK.
Here are some pictures from my farewell party from IBM, formerly Diligent. I had a great time with colleagues who became my friends over the past few years.
I’m 34 and it’s time for the yearly look back.
It was a year of starting and ending relationships. I’ve had some great moments of happiness along with big disappointments. Right now I’m happy and hoping to stay that way.
It was a year of travelling. I visited Paris and Berlin (same trip), Athens, Slovenia and Croatia (same trip), Switzerland and the US. I traveled more than I did during my trip around the world in 2009.
It was another year of Prodigy concerts. I went to a total of 3 concerts (two in Paris, one in Athens) with friends, which is even better than going alone – it’s an experience I love to share. My count of Prodigy concerts now stands on 12. Considering they’ve been around for 20 years, I think I still have some catching up to do :)
And finally, it was a year of tough career decisions. After working nearly 5 years in the same place I decided to quit and go on my own way, starting in a week’s time. It’s not easy giving up the comfort and security of being a hire in favor of an independent road, but I think it’s time to give it a try.
All in all, it was a year to remember. I can only hope for a similarly exciting 35th year.
This is what I get for reporting news on this blog – having to report change: Facebook will temporarily disable the new contact information sharing it just announced. PC Magazine reports:
Facebook announced Tuesday that it will temporarily disable a feature that allowed the social-networking site to share user phone numbers and addresses with app developers.
Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations for Facebook, said in a blog post that the site is “making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.”
I still recommend you remove all “real life” contact information on Facebook. Put a current email address and nothing more. Your privacy is too precious.