Matt Brubeck: Planet Matt

Vice Admiral to ARM Architecture in four clicks!

I've done working from home; I've done coworking; I've done the Mozilla Summit and soon I'll have my first work week. But this week I'm trying something different.

We're visiting my wife's parents in Port Townsend, WA for several days. Instead of taking vacation time, I'm working from their house this week. Since I already work remotely, my team will barely notice the difference. Meanwhile it will be a nice long visit for Sarah and her family, and I get to spend time with them in the mornings/evenings/mealtimes/weekend.

This has got me thinking about other new possibilities for nomadic working. It also seems relevant to this article on vacations and happiness research which says, "The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counterintuitive — to break it up, to interrupt it with real life."

"A very preliminary work in progress" programming language from Mozilla's Graydon Hoare (with help from Brendan Eich, Andreas Gal, Dave Herman, and more).

Looks like a very attractive multi-paradigm design. Lots of safety features (memory safe, no null pointers, objects are immutable by default, actors/tasks have no shared mutable state), structural typing, tagged disjoint unions, type inference, impressive static analysis features, native compilation (direct x86 codegen in Ocaml, and prototype LLVM backend), low-overhead C function calls and easy integration with gdb, valgrind, etc.

"Respondents were least happy about the vacation while they were taking it. Beforehand, they looked forward to it with eager anticipation, and within a few days of returning, they remembered it fondly. But while on it, they found themselves bogged down by the disappointments and logistical headaches of actually going somewhere and doing something."

"The most effective way to inoculate a vacationer against the deadening power of adaptation, however, may be the most counterintuitive — to break it up, to interrupt it with real life."

"In Rework, we talk about how you need to be willing to let your customers outgrow you. There are more people who are not using your product than people who are; You need to make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies."

Amusing and detailed reviews of movies the author hates.

"If you build an application that's predictable, configurable, and unambiguous your users won't ask for an exit button. The first time they see an unknown background Service that's been running for an hour, or the GPS icon unexpectedly starts flashing, or the device gets hot while in their pocket they're going to get narky."

Mobile-optimized XKCD site, including alt-text readable by mobile browsers.

Android-specific meta-viewport property. "If it is not specified, it uses the default, 160dpi as of today. Then the 1.0 scale factor specified in the viewport tag means 100% on G1 and 150% on Sholes. If you set 'target-densityDpi' to 'device-dpi', then the 1.0 scale factor means 100% on both G1 and Sholes."

"The iPad is always 'hot' — touch anywhere on the screen, brush off a speck of dust, or change its orientation slightly, and something changes... One reason the Kindle seems like a more 'peaceful' ebook reader... is that it has almost no hot zones."

"It is JavaScript/CSS 3 based and allows for fixed elements like headers and toolbars on web pages when viewed on the iPhone or on Android. It works on the iPad, too."

I've just returned from a busy week-long trip visiting family on the East coast. Now I'm ready to start my second week of work for Mozilla.

I stayed home for all my first week, to minimize potential hassles or distractions. It sure is nice and productive working alone in a quiet office for long periods, and going downstairs for meals and snacks with my family. But tomorrow for a change of scene I will be at StartPad at 1st & Columbia downtown (near Pioneer Square). If you're in the area and want to share lunch or coffee, email/IM/call/text me.

In the future I'll post to Twitter (which auto-updates Buzz and Facebook) on the days I'm downtown. You can follow me on any of those sites (or subscribe to Planet Matt) if you want to know when I'll be around.

"This site contains a collection of practice dynamic programming problems and their solutions."

Playing with a "game" we designed in Scratch.