Author: Ben

Want: Intel SSD

Post author By Ben
Post date March 24, 2009

80 gigs is plenty. Geoff got one and apparently it is rather awesome:

AngryParsley: Sequential
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 79.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 64.97 MB/sec [256K blocks] 
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 30.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 206.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: Random
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 65.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Write 66.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 9.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
AngryParsley: Uncached Read 177.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
AngryParsley: yeah, not bad for a laptop drive

Update: Apparently Joel Spolsky got one and loved it too. And there’s a good review of it on Anandtech. Also, the review reminded me of this piece on latency by an old colleague of mine.

Etc

st curvy

Post author By Ben
Post date March 6, 2009

st curvy, originally uploaded by paulhitz.

Great stitched shot of an abandoned church in detroit

Etc Video

Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise

Post author By Ben
Post date March 2, 2009

(Via swissmiss.)

Food

Roasted Beets in less time?

Post author By Ben
Post date February 23, 2009
2 Comments on Roasted Beets in less time?

One of my favorite side dish / salads is roasted beets drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with crumbled goat cheese. We pick up beets from the farmer’s market and roast them at home, making for an easy salad or snack when needed.

The only thing is, roasting beets takes forever, usually an hour plus in a 375F oven, a bit longer when we get the bigger striped beets that have been showing up lately. I stumbled across an article in the NY Times that suggests peeling and cubing the beets before roasting, which sounds like it might be the ticket.

It also claims to reduce the staining from the beets… Definitely have to give it a shot next time I need to roast some beets.

Computers

Google Sync + iPhone = Don’t Bother

Post author By Ben
Post date February 18, 2009

Update: A bunch of this stuff has been fixed by either Google or Apple with OS3 for the iPhone. I’m using Google Sync now and love it.

I had a warm fuzzy feeling when I saw Google announce that they’d licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft to offer push-based calendar and contact sync on the iPhone (and other devices). I tried to get it set up yesterday, and it was a monumental waste of time. Here’s what’s broken (for me):

Calendar Sync replaces any integration with iCal.
That means that if you have multiple accounts (like say $WORK and $HOME) on Google, you can only sync one.
Calendar Sync blows away alarms set on repeating appointments.
This was the biggest non-starter for me. If I can’t set an alarm on an appointment, there’s almost no reason to have the appointment.
Contact Sync loses all sorts of information
Google doesn’t support a true first name, middle, last name tuple, so it gets consolidated in odd ways. Google doesn’t support near the level of rich contact information that Address Book on the Mac does.
~~Contact Sync replaces any integration with AddressBook~~
And the “sync contacts with Google” option in AddressBook is horribly broken. It lost a good number of my contacts, I’m guessing because I had multiple entries with the same email address? No error, just refused to sync them.

So, back to SpanningSync for me. It works well and the developers are very responsive to help requests. You can even save $5 on it (and make me $5) if you use this link.