Today's meditation question:

We're good at rewarding "extraordinary effort." How do you reward, or even detect, the even more desirable behaviour of "made sure extraordinary effort was not necessary"?

Google TV's Youtube app has a screen saver. It kicks in every 10 minutes or so. You probably won't notice this (since most Youtube videos are under 10 minutes) unless you buy a Youtube movie, which I did. Ha. Dismay.

On the other hand, if on the same Google TV you browse to youtube.com/movies, and start watching a movie, the screen saver doesn't kick in. Sadly though, in this mode the "full screen" key on the massively overdesigned keyboard doesn't function, so you have the movie in a little box in the middle of your giant TV screen. +1, guys, +1. (After some experimentation I learned that you can pagedown - yes, the Google TV keyboard has a mouse but no scrollwheel - and then mouseover the video and press the otherwise-invisible Youtube fullscreen button, just like on a real web browser.)

The good news: Google TV will be totally useful as a conversation starter at parties, if what you like doing at parties is ranting about what happens to your project when it has absolutely no product management focus. Hmm, that sounds terrible. Remind me not to throw any parties.

And then there were six.

...somehow that sounds less foreboding if I tell you the previous number was five.

Just saw a talk by David S. Miller, Linux kernel hacker extraordinaire, about optimizations that shave fractions of milliseconds from network latency.

And now, back to work, where I consider myself lucky if my API even returns a nosql database concurrency exception in less than a second.

dear software companies:

if your launch is gated by a partner contract

please get it signed before writing all the code

thanks

Yeah, it's the same old stuff as always, but I think we get extra points this time for the support rep who goes by a pseudonym in order to protect his/her privacy... while cracking down on pseudonyms.

Youch.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/10/2553406/logitech-ceo-google-tv-cost-us-dearly-no-revue-replacement-coming

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/40000/6000/500/146540/146540.strip.gif

A few people have mentioned that they're disappointed with the lack of all-caps yelling segments in my emails lately. I'm sorry, there just hasn't been anything good to all caps about.

New Year's resolution: more all-caps emails.

...

HI THERE HOW ARE YOU? I AM FINE. I HOPE YOUR PROJECT IS GOING WELL. WE ARE ENSCONCED IN REGULATORY ISSUES THAT WILL DELAY OUR PUBLIC RELEASE INTO THE NEW YEAR BUT IT WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTED AND ACCORDING TO PLAN. PLEASE CONTINUE DOING WHATEVER IT IS YOU WERE DOING. THAT IS ALL.

You know your open source project has "arrived" when people other than you start doing presentations about it at major technical conferences.

28c3: bup: Git for backups