Take some time to check out Aesop Rock, he’s pretty awesome. The new CD, None Shall Pass, dropped on Wednesday and it might very well rock your world. Even cranky pitchfork seems to like it.
You can find a free mp3 of the title track here, it’s hot. I think Magnetk will be taking a company trip to the Middle East to see the show in a few weeks.
Although it isn’t the newest news, it is new to me.
I recently found YSlow, a nice plugin to Firebug [easily the best Firefox plugin ever]. Made by Yahoo, it plugs in some nice features to help you gauge and optimize performance based on an arbitrary set of rules for high performance sites.
I’ve been using it lately to optimize load times on our site and it has helped quite a bit, if for nothing else than being a convenient way to actually measure load times. In particular, it pointed out some laziness on our part in regards to rule #6 and rule number #1. It helped quite a bit.
Nice screencast here.
I found this the other day - a command line version of Google Calculator. Very cool!
$ gcalc gcalc version 0.1 by Greg Miller Usage: gcalc [-d] example: gcalc "5+2*2" example: gcalc 5! example: gcalc "sqrt(-4)" example: gcalc "160 pounds * 4000 feet in calories" example: gcalc avogadros number example: gcalc 0b110111010 + 0x33 in decimal example: gcalc 22 lira in yen example: gcalc 2 to the power of 5
Whether iTunes or VMWare Fusion v1.0 is the culprit, I’m not sure. I’ve been getting high CPU usage while my guest OS is idle in VMWare Fusion 1.0 final. The solution, noted elsewhere, is to disable ituneshelper.exe using autoruns or msconfig.exe. vmware-vmx CPU usage with an idle guest OS went from 38% to 8%
SftpDrive has been under quite heavy development over the past couple months, as you might’ve noticed. We’re releasing version 1.6.5 today. It includes:
Also, it’s worth noting that the Mac client is still under heavy development and will be the subject of more news on this blog in the coming month or two.
One of our goals starting Magnetk, apart from making great software, was to create something from nothing. To work hard, be creative, and just “live off the land”. We’re an entirely bootstrapped company, with no outside investor.In the [many] months preceding the release of SftpDrive 1.0, we would pick up the occasional odd programming job to help pay the bills, and feed Dave’s insatiable appetite. One distinct luxury of being an American software developer living in Boston was that the occasional odd job paid rather well. In a different place, or a different industry, this certainly wouldn’t be possible.We consider ourselves lucky to be doing what we are doing — there are relatively few types of companies out there that require almost no up-front capital investment. In the developing world, where resources for entrepreneurs are even more limited, that task becomes even more difficult. Kiva is an amazing company started by a fellow Stanford graduate that provides a great way for us to help give back.
“Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.”
Magnetk has participated in a loan through Kiva to help expand a small family business in Cambodia which sells duck eggs. We encourage you to take a look around Kiva’s and consider participating in a loan if you have the means. Micro-loans are one of the most effective means of encouraging economic growth and independence in the developing world.
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