Personally, these devices are important as they do provide a fun way to communicate the state of a project or problem. While something more conventional- say a status posted to a web page- may be easier, it’s far easier to understand a situation with simple visual/aural cues. To not waste time repeating people who can explain this better, please go here.

At Amazon, we have a ticketing system that’s used to file bugs/issues affecting the sites we manage. There are different levels of tickets that can come in, some of which, unfortunately, page us in the middle of the night. There are times that some of these issues become large scale events, initiating a control center like atmosphere. In the spirit of feedback devices, we felt these situations deserved a visual alarm system, so we bought a red strobe light.

With the help of X10, we’ve tied this to our ticketing system, and it turns on automatically during high severity events. In order to do this, I set up a simple daemon on my development box that listened to a port for commands. Being accessible anywhere on the network, anyone in the office can turn devices on and off by writing to that port. For more information on how to set up the X10 equipment and for a how to on automated build integration with lava lamps, see Pragmatic Automation. I’ll also post the code for my server/client setup soonish…

While I had my camera at work, I figured I’d include a small look at my desk after our recent total physical team room reorganization:

1. You don’t want to pay for internet
2. The linksys gods live around you
3. Unfortunately, signals aren’t strong or are intermittent
4. Never sure which network is up and working properly
5. Don’t mind bricking a router

You can set up a dynamic repeater. Essentially, have your router scan networks to see what’s up and running and has the best signal, and rebroadcast it as your own private network.

How? DD-WRT

I did brick a really cheap crappy router trying this, but it was more for kicks. Make sure you have enough flash memory. Also, it might be worthwhile to check this.

I’ve always known this, but a little over a year ago, I really needed a new laptop, and against my better judgement, bought an HP DV2416. It had everything I needed, and didn’t look ugly. I figured, if anything, it had to last at least a 1.5/2 years before crapping out on me.

Installing Ubuntu on this machine sucked majorly, mainly due to the unsupported and badly built (later recalled) motherboard, unsupported nVidia graphics card, and motherboard killing Broadcom wireless card (all unknown at the outset). But things worked, and I had to admit, I was incredibly productive.

Four months in, my harddrive died. This was mainly my fault. I tried opening my laptop, but the entire laptop came with it, and subsequently hit the table hard from two inches up. Placing the HD in a position of first contact was a horrible design idea, in my opinion, but I couldn’t complain too much. I was able to salvage my work and awaited my new harddrive, which unfortunately took a few weeks to come.

Again, I reinstalled and resumed my productivity with Ubuntu. As the summer approached, my laptop’s fans started to get louder, and the laptop warmer. I figured I just needed to clean out the fan, an unfortunate circumstance, but doable. Over the next two months, my laptop would start to shutdown or freeze at odd times. It didn’t make much sense. It seemed to always happen whenever my wireless card was on and I used the internet heavily. After a while, the laptop would refuse to start up, only showing blinking LED lights while the fan ran. This time I had to send the laptop in for repairs. Oh yeah, somehow the harddrive had crapped out again.

I didn’t receive my laptop back for a month and a half. Ridiculous. When I got it back, I realized Ubuntu might be causing some issues as it just couldn’t play nice with the motherboard or wireless, so I had to settle on running XP. I haven’t been as productive since, but I set up a decent enough environment that was easily replicable if anything happened again.

Unfortunately, the heat sync in my laptop recently refused to start. It not starting means even the most menial tasks can raise my cpu temperature high enough that my computer will shutdown automatically and be unbearable to touch.

Anyways, somehow I was able to get customer support to fix my laptop again, although I have no idea when I’ll get it back, or if they’ll even fix the problem. This essentially has put a hold on a project I was hoping to deploy and has sharply reduced my productivity.

In all, of the 16 months I’ve owned this laptop, I’ve been unable to use it for about two and a half months, which will continue to grow…

In conclusion: stay away from HP.