After having pre ordered it from Amazon (sorry, no links… not making it easier for anyone to give ASUS business they don’t deserve) and paying a hefty $375 for it (in comparison to the competition), the unit shipped on February 7th of this year 2009 and I received it a few days later.

I was motivated to pre order, because as I had read somewhere in the “interwebs”, that the ASUS 1000HE was the first one to offer the (back then) new Atom N280 processor.  Sparing anyone the details of what the benefits of the N280 processor are over its brother the N270 processor (yes, to me processors are MALE because they do all the hard work and the heavy lifting, plus they can multitask!), but suffice it to say it was not because of the clock speed difference: 1.60ghz for the N270 in contrast to the whopping 1.66ghz of its big brother the N280.

3 months after, the unit’s integrated wireless card sadly died.  I called, got on their phone with their tech support, explained my case and after running a series of unnecessary tests to satisfy their need to prove the customer is not an idiot, it was determined (you don’t say?) that the wireless card was indeed kaput! As if I didn’t know already, but oh well… the RMA was issued and the unit went out the door and unto little machine hospital care. 

Little did I know, “little machine hospital” care turned out to be the worst HMO anyone would ever want to put their selves into their hands.

About a month later I received the unit back, and promptly turned it back on making my first order of business to test that the wireless card was indeed in working order.  Oh jolly, yeay! it was.

Don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you, and maybe its part of my stupid OCD habits, but I decided to check on the hardware specs by “right clicking” on my computer and selecting properties (you know these .  Oh, I remember, I wanted to confirm it had 1GB of memory and not 2GB, because my ultimate plan was (and quite honestly probably still is) to install Windows 7 on it.  I wanted to set out to buy extra RAM for it.

This is what I saw:

Surprise and darn! WTF??? 1.6Ghz Atom N270… not Atom N280… hmm… am I going crazy?  So I go and check Amazon’s receipts and sure enough, It says right there I bought a unit with an N280 processor. 

I then went and check the box in which the unit originally shipped, the same one I used to ship it back to repair the wireless card (yes, I keep that sort of stuff laying around.  I told you I have annoying OCD habits).

Sure enough, you can see the serial number AND that it is an EEEPC 1000HE, even the color is listed so thank God they didn’t send me back a pink one! can you imagine the post I’d write? 

There it is: INTEL ATOM280.

I quickly call them up, state the case and … surprise #2: with what sounded to me at the time, a very condescending forcibly polite little tone of voice, the tech proceeds to tell me that “it is all ok, because right here in my system it says that the serial number for your machine indicates the unit shipped from factory with a N270 processor”  I literally felt my head flush with the fluids of irrational anger and almost had to run and put it under the bathroom sink faucet to cool it off.   10 minutes later, after futile attempts to use logic to explain that “it must be an error”, I concluded with the statement “I don’t give a fuck what your system says, my unit was purchased as, was shipped from Amazon as, and I used it for 2 months as configured with an N280 processor” and followed it up with “what do I need to do to prove to you guys you are verging on committing retail fraud or at the very least deception by assumption of stupidity?”. 

Long story short (yeah right, but believe me when I say this is the abridged version) I had to write an essay about 5 times lengthier and angrier than this post is turning to be, and included every picture possible to prove to those idiots that I am not an idiot and that indeed my EeePC was originally equipped with an N280 and they shipped it back after repair with a lesser processor, the N270.

Blah, blah, blah, yada-yada-yada… about 2 weeks later I finally got a new RMA, and after my strong position that I wasn’t going to pay for shipping so that they can correct their blatant mistake, they included a pre-paid shipping label.  So I shipped it out and readied myself to let the waiting begin.

Yesterday after approximately 3 or 4 weeks, I received my EeePc 1000HE back from ASUS technical service (well technically speaking, I picked it up).  

Got it home, power it up and of course the first thing I do is go into the BIOS to check the processor… surprise, surprise, or should I be surprised?  You guessed it… same shit.  N270 Processor… this is even AFTER their order slip reads and says they actually replaced it AGAIN with the N280 (see the picture of the body of the repair slip included in the box back from the repair center):

Breath in Guillermo, Breath in… on the phone again, calmly explain the situation to the rep on the other side and guess what line they tried to feed me yet once again? “sir, the serial number for your machine shows that…” I said “STOP… STOP it right there and get me the highest ranking someone that I can talk to right now that is not going to insult my intelligence”.  She did, and I got Irish on the line, and she listened and did not try the “the serial number says” line again on me, although in all fairness i did warn her about it.

I am still waiting for yet another RMA, yet another pre paid shipping label and will send it out again.  This unit has spend more time in transit and in repair than it has on my lap and in my house.  I am not hopeful, but I have no recourse so I’ll try to make myself a believer.

Maybe I am not helping my case, but I felt compelled to and so I did… and wrote a note to the poor soul who is fortunate enough to be dealt the card of opening this box when it comes into ASUS’s technical black hole.

Here it is in all its glory.  Tell me what you think.

If you take the approach to clean up after yourself as you progress through whatever maybe your daily routine, and create this good habit for everything you do, you’ll end up avoiding what is almost unavoidably natural for most of us: procrastination.

Whether it is while you cook, write code/implement software solutions, do the laundry or go though things on your desk at the office, if you let things pile up… well, you’ll end up with a pile of <insert appropriate noun here>.

Why not keep your projects, solutions, classes, layers, frameworks, third party components et.al. in an organized manner right off the bat?  Regardless of the size and scope of the project, platform or technology…  Why wait until it becomes a tangled mess of bad historic legacy waiting… clamoring for someone to come in, criticize, refactor and “waste time” cleaning up your mess?

Why wait until your roommate, spouse, parent or sibling comes around and has to deal with piles of dirty dishes, filthy counters or messy bathroom?

I believe it is one of the easiest forms of procrastination to avoid with the highest payback in quantity, quality and immediacy of satisfaction.

Be it with the proverbial or actual dirty dishes, don’t be a slob, love yourself and those around you and Clean as you go… whatever that may end up being.

This literally just came into my inbox… (cut edited for obvious reasons)

And what exactly am I supposed to do with this?

If we keep having to include copy like this one, without making basic assumptions, I can't help but realize we are in deep trouble...

I am not one to get into any political discussions, I reserve my opinions and understand it when others passionately get into it and make it their main content.  This however is not the latter, but a very interesting and unbiased way to present content in a visual way.

Below is a wordie of both candidates acceptance speeches at their respective national conventions.  McCain’s on top, Obama’s  the bottom one.

work by Thomas Hawk

There is no other way to put this before I delve into the details: You (as a professional developer, product owner, product manager, software practitioner in any ability) owe it to yourself to read this book… that is, if you are anything like me and reading about all of these tidbits of software development history while getting a degree of insight into the process of an "organized" open source project, in any way call to you.

There is a little bit of everything here, presented in a narrative that is pleasant to read, and with the right amount of abstraction to keep you at the right interested at the right level without too much detail making the reading terse.  I almost [ALMOST] gave it to my wife to read, only until I was deeper into the book itself I reluctantly admitted it would have not have appeared as appealing to her as it was to me.

The [story] follows a team assembled and funded by Mitch Kapor, in its quest to create the open source product that would Chandler.  In the process, the OSAF is founded as the backbone supporting and governing the efforts.

Their trials and tribulations make up the narrative's main thread, but the vision, the lessons learned, the passion that one can feel jumping off the pages from those involved in the project and who wanted it so badly, was what made this a page turner for me.

Needless to say, the stories, the citations, the anecdotes surrounding all of those who end up intertwined in the process, as well as all of those that emerge from the story itself, and some of what otherwise would be considered useless footnotes in the history of software development, spoke to me, enticed my curiosity for wanting to know more about them and motivated more than a few searches and articles to be read parallel to and after finishing the story.

The book was published in January of 2007, and covers the project time (including vision and conception) spanning 2001 to late 2005, where the book sort of trails off and never quite has what one could call a "written form of closure". 

The author, Scott Rosenberg, sort of ends the book with a couple of chapters that are full of historical (albeit somewhat relevant) notes and an observer's retrospective analysis which are probably more subjective than actual factual conclusions.  I don't mean and certainly don't intend this to be criticism to the book itself or to the way he (and his editors) chose to conclude the book, but I would have liked a cap on the story more fitting to the initial heart beat of the book, one that would give the story it own identity, a beginning and an end.

The project itself is still alive, the product is available but beyond knowing that I would suggest that if you intend to read the book that you don't spoil the whole experience of reading the book by "catching up" on where the project is at currently.  I can share with you that the many players in the story and the project are interesting and up until the end they "all" came and went.  An interesting note worth mentioning is that a good number of the people involved in this project are the same "core" that brought us Firefox.

You can read it as a story, you can read it as a use case, you can read it as a diary of a software development project, you can read it as a text book that is 100% pragmatic, but nonetheless I recommend you read it.

You can find other reviews here, here, and here.  More opinions will for sure confuse the heck out of you, so go right ahead and read them all!

The book's main site is kept by the author at Dreaming in Code, available on Amazon or you can just let me know you want to borrow it!

Anyone not like free?  Those of you who raised your hands… GET THE HECK OUT OF MY BLOG.. :)  In all seriousness, this is your chance to enter a drawing for some cool swag! generously hosted by Max Pool at his blog {Codesqueeze}.

He was able to get vendors to pony up some nice (and pricey) software that would make an excellent addition to any developer’s toolbox.

Me myself I am hoping, going for Bamboo 2.0 CI Server.  No I will not resell it on eBay, I have actual plans for it.  Coincidentally I am in the middle of (call it, what you will) a project to setup a CI solution using CruiseControl.net & SVN at home.  The SlickEdit tools would be a nice to have, and believe me, there is nothing like a good editor to make you productive above and beyond the powers of Notepad.

On Deck: Guillermo, get you ass in gear and evaluate "the Bamboo"!

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all... right?  Well that being one extreme, I'll take a more balanced approach and not write all of what I was so tempted to while I suffered sitting through this "event" (so loosely defined!).

Painful, bordering on disrespectful to the attendees time, sometimes crossing the line.  The presenter, while a nice gentleman, should have been, shall we say, better prepared; once again I am using the extreme definition there because I am convinced this person never even looked at the material before in his life.  He read from the printout of a "Lab Material", and read and read and read... read the slides, read the CODE!!!, the signature of the tool generated event handler's for controls... yes

"and here we see object sender (comma) KeyEventArgs e"

...and I am not making this up!

The totally best part of the day was the end of the presentation, not only because the pain finally went away but also because I won a copy of Office Professional 2007. 

I have to believe in miracles and in the kind and compassionate hand of God here, to know how (literally) I was so close to losing it he devised a way to bring my blood pressure down by rewarding me with the cool "swag".

This past Saturday evening, Tammy and I inadvertently (literally) got sucked into watching the 2004 "Build A Better Burger" food contest that the Sutter Home winery hosts every year, shown on the Food Network HD, I couldn't help my mouth watering at the parade of the very creative burger recipes. 

The outcome couldn't have been any more obvious: I set out to reproduce the winning recipe of 2004, the very next day.

Armed with the printed recipe, found on the site along other year's winning recipes, I shopped for the "delta" ingredients, and diligently assembled the heart attach on a toasted bun.

Pictured is the fruit of that labor.

My verdict:  I think the oregano and perhaps the seasoned salt may have combined to be too overpowering of a flavor. I should have thought better about the <amount of> Italian spices that the recipe called for, but that only became apparent once I had already "poured" all the ingredients together.  Next time I make this, I'll hold back on the those 2 ingredients and let the others find a better balance.

The blue cheese spread was phenomenal, and I will for sure repeat it on any sandwich calling for blue cheese.

The recipe is presented for 6 burgers, but I made 4 a little big bigger, and had enough for a second round the following day (yes, that is today and that was dinner!).

Just today I read Sergio Pereira's post about the TIOBE index, which "gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages"

Its more like a shock really, to see how one's perception can often be so off base.  The gaps between #1 (Java), #2 (C) and C# at #8 is much broader than I would have ever guessed.  Although C# use (my current language of choice) is historically shown to be on the rise, the gap is still nonetheless surprising to observe and digest.

I am not that interested in analyzing this data, but I thought it would be worth to share the shock I felt when I saw the graph.