Coredump

Joel Spolsky wrote about his software company's amazing new office . I am drooling with envy right now: private offices, free lunches, showers (!). I wonder if we have other great places to work here in the Philippines. I know of at least two: Orange and Bronze * and G2VC with their TechBar in Ortigas. Reminds me of the places I've worked in. The closest I ever got to having a private office was when I was a network administrator . That is, if you can call a room with data cabinets and noisy servers "private" -- well, I did work there mostly alone. (Just an observation: more than anything else, a private office here in the Philippines is a symbol of stature more than a question of productivity -- less distraction = more productive hours, as opposed to lower risks of people catching you napping or worse, browsing pr0n {though, that's been known to happen even in cubicle settings}.) Having worked in government offices, I think it's safe to say that they are...

I got the Eraserheads 'The Reunion Concert' CD from an officemate for Christmas. I promptly burned it to my hard disk using Soundjuicer. The tracks got saved as FLAC, which unfortunately is not usable for iPods, and I had to convert it to MP3. Fedora, by default, does not include non-free plugins. To convert the ripped files to MP3: sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad flac lame cd ~/Music/Eraserheads for f in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$f" | lame -h - "${f%.flac}.mp3"); done I then edited the ID3 tags through Rhythmbox. Next stop, transfer the files to the iPod.

About the same time as I upgraded Coredump to Wordpress 2.7 , I also got the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 update . I haven't gotten around to trying out all the new features, but they look promising. Well, some may seem old news if you're already using Google Chrome, but they're good news nevertheless. First off, the Beta 2 update now has "Private Browsing" mode -- history is not recorded: searches, downloads, cookies, nada. Great for pron, er, secure banking. Tabs can also be torn away from windows and transferred to other Firefox windows effortlessly. The Smart Location Bar just got smarter with smart keywords, keyword matching and restriction, and other operators. You can now also play =.ogg= files natively without any plugins. (Get ready to be rickrolled! Heh.) TraceMonkey adds native compilation to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. (Lots of camel-case words there, whew!) Still not sure how it's usable for me, as a user, but it would be fun to test out for deve...