Joe Auricchio

So my connections started getting finicky yesterday. Out of pure overlearned reflex, I popped open a terminal and started pinging google.com. The connection appeared normal, so I went back to what I was doing and left the window there.

I came across it again this evening just in time to see the sequence number cross 300. It took me a few seconds to realize what happened.

update
So I finally killed it.

--- google.com ping statistics ---
71507 packets transmitted, 69992 packets received, 2% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 94.539/111.947/1088.616/25.285 ms

TritonLink now has a Class Planner (beta). I’d link to it, but you need to be a UCSD student to see it (which is silly).

Messrs. Dye and Pajak have done a very good job. It feels a lot like TritonSchedule (which makes me feel really validated, because a pair of professional UI designers made the same decisions I did), with some nice improvements. They did a very good job on the lecture-discussion selection flow, and the department selection is just glorious. They fixed the grid width in pixels, which makes the positioning a lot easier. It’s all ajax, with almost no latency (on campus wireless); it’s very smooth and fluid. I don’t like that the lecture doesn’t immediately appear when you click it, but so far that’s my only complaint.

When I don’t have a CSE141 lab and an EAP application that need to be done urgently, I’m going to go under the hood and look at their JS code and ajax transfers.

On the whole, this is a Good Thing. My hat is off to ACT today.

Chris has a new MacBook for work. He likes Mac OS X, and he especially loves Adium. I agreed, and told him Adium is one of the very few apps that keeps me from switching to Linux. He asked what the others were. Here’s the final list I came up with:

1. Adium: multiprotocol chat client par excellence. The interface is beautiful and logical; it ties in with Apple’s Address Book; and these days it’s actually pretty stable.
   Alternatives: bitlbee. Every graphical client I tried on Linux just left me cold. Bitlbee is at least a novel way to solve the problem of user interface. I used it for a few weeks and didn’t hate it. I’d miss text formatting and the occasional image or file transfer. I’d really miss metacontacts.
2. Safari and Camino: browsers that aren’t ugly and slow. Sorry, Firefox. You were a pure joy to use back in the 0.7 days. Now, somehow, you’re bloated and slow and not very pretty… just like SeaMonkey you tried to replace.
   Alternatives: Firefox sucks, Konqueror does too much that isn’t viewing HTML (just the browser, ma’am), and that’s about it for Linux browsers.
3. Quicksilver: difficult to describe launcher-and-kitchen-sink. It just does stuff. Awesome stuff.
   Alternatives: none I know of.
4. Finder’s Column View. The rest of the app sucks rocks, but I still love Column View.
   Alternatives: Eh, there’s probably something for Linux by now.

These four thin but strong threads keep me on Mac OS X. I could switch to Linux tomorrow—I would have switched a year ago—if not for these few programs I love so much.