Chaos Server

The modern working environment has an expectation that you’re available even when you’re not working and that belief leads to bad behaviors for managers and employees. I love when employees take vacation because it gives them time to recharge and gives me the opportunity ask them to put together a coverage plan on how to deal with the things they do while they enjoy vacation. Here is the real kicker, employees frequently offer to be available, do tasks, respond to emails and I’ll tell them in a nicer version of this sentence: “if you are responding to email or corporate instant messenger while you’re on vacation I see that as underperformance.” I would be ecstatic if I could disable someone’s access to corporate resources while they are gone to avoid any and all cheating that may appear. The steps of completing the task should not be in the coverage plan For a long vacation (1+ weeks) I’ll tell someone to start their coverage plan a month before they actually leave and use it as someth...

I know Apple cares about my experience as a customer beyond just the UX of an app or the physical design of a device or even the packaging. It's this care about me, my privacy, me experience that keeps me as such a loyal fanboy. I have been posting a lot on LinkedIn these days and LinkedIn extended an offer for a free trial of LinkedIn Premium. The offer said, “After your one month trial, we will automatically charge you….” I figured I wouldn’t do it. It seemed obvious it was going to require my credit card and then the only way I could cancel would be to call them. That is the standard, user-hostile approach to subscription retention. Even in my teenage years, as someone who DESPISED calling on the phone, I was able to work up the courage from time-to-time to do the free AOL trial and then end the month with the 20 minute phone call to cancel. For the LinkedIn offer I curiously tapped and saw that it was an App Store subscription. “Oh, done!” I thought. For an App Store subscrip...

I incorrectly assumed AirPlay from my iPad Pro wouldn't work the way I wanted it to. Plugging an external display into and iPad Pro doesn't work the way I want: only the left-most split screen app is able to route the external display. I assumed that AirPlay would have a similar problem, but AirPlay to an AppleTV works EXACTLY like I would expect it to. No seriously, it's awesome. After loading my movies and TV shows into the iOS TV app using an app called WALTR, I can AirPlay from that app to an AppleTV and then just switch away from the app and not worry about it. So while that show is playing, I can still run two apps split screen as well as the flyover app. Awesome. I also tried successfully with the YouTube app to make sure there wasn't any proprietary Apple stuff happening, and YouTube worked just as well. I can also use the Control Center widget to control the external app. I tried a similar thing with the iPhone, and I'm very happy to report it also works...

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. - Jeff Hammerbacher When interviewing candidates, I'm surprised how few (especially engineers) do not ask questions back to me to help shape their answers. When I ask most people to perform a task in an interview, they expect I've done a good job thinking through what I want to ask them, and jump into performing on the task. If you're doing an interview, one of the starting points for any problem solving excersize is to gather information and confirm that you've gathered it correctly. This is the true problem solving approach and tends to impress interviewers, even if they don't have any more clarification to give. When I interview engineers one question I typically ask is a simple data modeling question: "I want to create a database table (or class hierarchy or whatever) that maps who reports to whom in the company. How would you model that?" It's straight forward, but t...

Well that was nice! I was having this problem where I couldn't get the latest update to OSX Mojave installed on my laptop because I didn't have the space. I've spent a lot of time eyeing iPhoto Library.migratedphotolibrary which seemed like it was taking up 52GBs of space, but in theory that is just duplicate spaced used by the new Photo Library with both files hard linking the same data on disk. I finally took the steps to copy the migratedphotolibrary off the internal hard drive to the Drobo and the delete the the bundle and... yep, I got 52GBs of free space back. So it looks to me like some time during the migration from laptop to laptop some copy operation changed those hard links into duplicate files. At least I've got plenty of space now, right? Update: It was pointing out to me the most likely culprit was the conversion to APFS.