BBEdit 9.0 -- First Impressions

After a little more than one working day using the newly released BBEdit 9.0, my impressions is positive.

First of all, I am glad to see that a trusted tool works largely as expected as it keeps pace. This is to me much more important than flashy new interfaces or features. The search interface is cleaner, which is nice, but over all I had no problem at all getting right back to work after the upgrade.

My favorite new feature is the variable auto-completion I noticed this evening while working on an approximately 400-line perl script with many, many variables. The auto-completion gave me great assurance without any split screens or searching that I had the spelling and capitalization of previously used variables correct.

Thanks, BareBones for the continued good work.

Some links about current DNS attack

Is your ISP using a correctly patched DNS server?

Or are you open to attack? Could the websites you see not really be what they appear to be?

Listen to a podcast with a very complete explanation of DNS and the attack.

Product Review: Tone 12 GB USB 2.0 Mini Hard Drive

Very cute, casing matches my MacBook Pro. Works reliably so far. Took formatting to Mac (Extended, case-insensitive, journaled) no problem. Slow as molasses, though. The speed really cuts into it's utility for my intended use in loading virtual machines.

Launch VMWare and open a suspended WinXP virtual machine:

* Over the network from G5 dual 1.8GHz PowerPC to MacBook Pro: 58 seconds
(54 seconds to suspend, saving state back to disk)

* Same virtual machine from Tone 12 GB attached to MacBook Pro directly: 1:02 minute. Saving state: 1:41 - 3:09 minutes.

* Same virtual machine loading directly from MacBook Pro HD: 17 seconds; suspend: 4.4 seconds

Green Business Leadership

We'd heard that some rental car companies are renting hybrids. Calling around today, my wife was frustrated to learn that the options are few and far between in the Triangle area. Seems that just like the car manufactures, most rental companies are followers, looking behind, instead of business leaders looking forward.

Which gets me thinking—how can NacreData LLC do a better job of being a green business leader? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Our transportation costs are largely non-existent — I work in a home office and everyone else currently doing NacreData work is also a home-based.

We're not a bulk hosting company, but I've read a few times (see http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/02/photo_originall.html for instance) that server farms are power hogs. We're beginning to move more of the sites we manage onto virtual-machine based servers, where several server environments can share the resources of one physical machine.