Hackerdude

I want to wire my house with ethernet (Tivo and Xbox on wireless are OK but not great), but I want to learn how to do it myself. Here are some notes and links.

• How to make your own Ethernet patch cord - This one describes the wiring. And here's another wiring tutorial. And another.
• Installing a Home Network Part 2 -This one describes how to do the actual jack installation.
• Here's an example of a home network with a parts list.
• A FAQ with a nice set of DO's and DONT's.
• Wolfgang Rupprecht's experience wiring a california home (through the ceiling instead of under the house). Relevant to my ranch-style house. He also redid his phone wiring which I won't need to do. Going through the same faceplates as the TV cable sounds interesting though.

I'll update this with my experiences as I make some progress.

technorati tags: geek, ethernet, networking, cabling

This is a jewel of a comment.from Marc McNeil:

Why should you be able to go home and see your 13 year old son playing with a Sony PSP, with awesome graphics, great design and compelling experience, but when you get to work the brand new Enterprise Application looks like it was designed by amateurs, is difficult to use and is yet another cumbersome product that IT have rolled out with apparently little input from the people who are actually going to use it ("No-one asked my opinion...".)

dancing mango :: Is good corporate software design too much to ask?

technorati tags: quality, software, programming

If you ever wanted to try out Linux but didn't want to go through the hassle of installing and configuring it (and you're on broadband), this is a great way to do it for free:

Community-built virtual machines are built and hosted by individuals in the VMware community. The list of community-built virtual machines contains a growing set of virtual machines designed for a variety of purposes. See what your peers in the community are building.To download any of the pre-built virtual machines below, simply download the virtual machine and run it in the free VMware Player.

Community Virtual Machines

They have preinstalled Fedora, FreeBSD, SUSE w/KDE, Kubuntu and even ReactOS.

technorati tags: geek, computers

The problem is that our industry doesn't know how to draw the line between the person dabbling in programming and someone who does it for a serious living. The kid who builds the bird house above would never be hired to build an actual house. Not true in Software Development.The .com era was the perfect example of this. Anyone and everyone was a programmer once they knew HTML. This dillutes how our industry is viewed by the outside world. It keeps us in the 'geeks w/ keyboard' box.

Memoirs of a Bystander - I'm not anit-newbie

A couple of thoughts about Griffin's post (and his prior post):

I am absolutely in favor of providing the basic logic of programming to non-programmers. It can only help them understand why the requirements they produce need to be carefully written.

The "Geeks with keyboards" worldview is a problem of both sides - you won't find anybody under 30 who has never touched a computer keyboard (and very few people under 25 who never had to fix a configuration problem on a computer, even if it was just to run Doom), so that view simply no longer applies.

On the other hand, we "geeks" shouldn't think we'll never need our people skills because we'll always be coding and therefore everyone who can't write kernel drivers or run a windows device driver under the debugger must be a dumb jock. This is an endemic problem in our industry as well.

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One hour of increased brain activity via thinking a lot or experiencing new stimuli can make you smarter, more energetic, more creative, and more sociable.

How to Exercise an Open Mind - WikiHow

technorati tags: geek, thinking, puzzles