Stumbled across these seriously nice looking offices the other day. I have office envy. Although perhaps the nice offices are to make up for the fact that they make marketing software, blurgh.

Eventhough I’ve never had one, it’s pretty obvious to me that private offices are the best option in terms of productivity for concentration-workers [1]. I also want a pony.

Browsing on officesnapshots.com, it seems most tech companies still don’t go for private offices. Or perhaps it’s just that the “cool”, “hip” companies are all too edgy to have private offices … man.

A special dishonorable mention for the flickr offices, cube farm without proper cubes even! Photo by mylesdgrant.

The new Mozzilla offices come a close second, saved by the fact that presumably they’re planning to fit them out a little better. RedHat aren’t really trying either, in Brazil at least.

I don’t mind the look of the Last.fm office, although it reminds me of the “lab” at Uni, which was not the most productive place in the world – although fun.

I can forgive some of the smaller companies for having grungy startup style offices where everyone’s sharing a beanbag, but for the bigger companies I just don’t get it. You’re paying all these programmers to build your products, so you pack them all in a room together where they can’t concentrate? I guess the upfront costs are too much for the accountants.

Even the companies that do make an effort, seem to focus more on gimmicky stuff, cafeterias, break-out rooms etc. The core office spaces, where you’re going to have to spend some time – face it – aren’t that special. One aspect of that is probably that “cool” stuff is better for marketing yourself to potential employees, just don’t mention that at some point they will have to do actual work.

Part of Google’s Zurich office, photo from Picasa (which has no visible copyright info?)

So I guess for a while at least, a lot of programmers and the like will continue to get their best work done in the wee hours of the morning or night, when all is quiet and the logic flows.

Or perhaps we should just all work from home, then we can all have our own personal perfect office, and  we could stop worrying about petrol too.

[1]: I just made that up. But I mean anyone whos work involves concentrating on one task for tens of minutes at a time, like for example programming 🙂

Is it just me, or is Ubuntu Hardy sucking so far?

So far I’ve got:

• Pidgin: randomly segfaults, glibc double free etc.
• Rhythmbox: randomly segfaults, no stack trace?
• F-Spot: randomly dies, it always did, but it’s more common now.
• Epiphany: dies sometimes loading flash – that’s probably flash player’s fault though.
• Metacity: vertical maximisation is broken, very annoying.
• Kernel: fails to resume more often than previously, sometimes locks up completely when undocking.

The killer is when you try to file a bug report you’re supposed to attach the info from /var/crash, but I have nothing in /var/crash!

Can I have my money back? 😉

In case you haven’t already been, get along to Hume to check out the new climbing gym. It’s run by the same folks who run the Mitchell gym, and it’s brand spanking new, no shiny worn-out holds!

There’s a bunch more routes, and they seem to be more interesting than the Mitchell ones. Although perhaps that’s just because I’ve been to Mitchell a million times. Still, there’s a bigger bouldering cave, a whacky roof section, a bouldering mezzannine, and stacks of overhanging routes.

We went along on Friday and really enjoyed the variety. I took a few shots, but they don’t really do it justice, it’s at least twice as big as it looks in any of the photos. And as you can see it’s pretty empty, so get along while there’s plenty of room!

View the photos »

Oops. I just realised I’ve been pushing the wrong photos onto the web in some instances, eg. when I edit a photo it’s been publishing the original version, not the editted one, crud!

Anyway, so if you’ve ever looked at any of my photos, now you have to look at them all again, because now they’re better.

A couple of weekends ago we spent a sunny Sunday morning out at the Cotter catchment planting trees. It was organised by the mountaineering club, and run by Greening Australia – it was sponsored, at least in part I think, by Snowgum, so we got 10% off vouchers for our efforts.

The Greening Australia guys picked out a slightly trickier than usual site for us, seeing as they figured we had all climbed Everest and all. So we were planting the side of hill, an area of old pine plantation that had been burnt out by the fires.

They kitted us out with picks and shovels, buckets of trees, a bit of water crystals and fertiliser – and little white wind guards for every second tree. We had to dig the holes, although there’d been some sort of earth ripper thing through a few months back which had dug small furrows where we dug – so it was pretty easy going.

All in all we planted somewhere around 700 trees in about three hours or so, that was with 25 odd people. Not a bad effort. And to top it all of they cooked us sausages, just about the best sausages I’ve ever eaten I reckon.

There’s plenty more trees to be planted, so hopefully we’ll find time to get out there again, if you get the chance I highly reccomend it.

View the photos »

Spent last Saturday night hanging out with The Panics at the ANU refec. They were awesome, their live sound is superb. They played a bunch of songs off the new album, as well as a few old favourites. Still with 50 odd songs just on their three albums and a few EPs, they could play all night and I would still be listening.

Both supports were really quite good – although neither did a good job of clearly stating their names – which makes it hard to plug them! It seems they were called Oh Mercy and Little Red.

We’ll see you there next time they’re in town!

(photo is copyright kairin, some rights reserved)

I won’t try and recreate any of his jokes, promise, you had to be there. There was the Canberra Theatre last weekish, and it was an excellent show. The man is damn funny, even if he would be locked up in some countries.

I particularly liked it when he called a bunch of giggling girls just near us “a pack of sluts” – not knowing they were sitting there with their mothers – at which point the crowd broke into laughter which then immediately turned into hushed mutters of disapproval. So fickle.

(photo is copyright ollyfarrell, some rights reserved)

If you’re wondering what all this subprime business is about, don’t miss the subprime primer. Probably not safe for work .. if you work at a bank or a finance company anyway.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out this amazing graphic of U.S inflation.

You can see what all the little sections are by hovering your mouse, or you can zoom right in.

It has lots of interesting little comparisons, although they’re all about the “average” person so I guess they might be lies, dam lies and statistics.

For example the average spending on new and used vehicles is 4.6% + 1.8% = 6.4%, whereas spending on car running costs, maintenance etc. is ~9%. For some reason I would have thought new cars would be a greater share of spending, but I guess running costs add up, and a lot of people drive old cars.

It just struck me that the download pages for Linux & Solaris might reveal a certain something about the projects they promote. Or maybe not, just a thought .. really I’m not trying to start a flame war.

From kernel.org:

“The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is:  2.6.25.1“

And www.opensolaris.com/get:

Code without compromise
Our fully functional desktop environment promises extreme data integrity, so you can code on the edge and never compromise your work.

…

Download, burn, boot, and launch.
From dorm room to boardroom. OpenSolaris has everything you need to take your brilliant idea, build a prototype, test it, deploy it, and run it on production servers—out of a loft, or across your enterprise.  …  OpenSolaris is industrial strength and built to scale from the get go. … OpenSolaris is the OS of choice for those who prefer to live on the cutting edge of innovation. Naturally fast, free and easy to download …