Archive for December, 2008

Presentation Skills of Benjamin Zander

December 27th, 2008

The presentation skills of Benjamin Zander are absolutely amazing. He says so little, yet so much. He uses paper easels rather than PowerPoint and live demonstrations rather than canned demos. He works the audience and circulates amongst them. What an excellent example to aspire to.

JMeter & Plugins

December 26th, 2008

I noticed a post on JMeter EJB plugin. It is a short but well written example. My ears are a bit more attuned to Apache JMeter these days after I wrote the first OSS Groovy plugin for JMeter last month. One of my clients is now using it for scalability testing of a JEE application. I highly suggest you take a look and consider contributing ideas or code to the project. I’d be glad to have other contributors.

MacBook Pro (late 2008) “Hot Laptop In Bag” Troubles

December 10th, 2008

As an owner of two “MacBook Pro (late 2008)” units (gotta love the Apple official model title), I’ve experienced an overheating issue quite frequently. It’s becoming known as “hot laptop in bag, syndrome, v2″. Here’s a quick tour of the problem with a bunch of the news articles published in just the last few days.

There’s a quick description of the problem by Gizmodo then, the actual thread on the Apple site, followed by a suggestion to use SmartSleep to turn on Hibernate mode only, or reset your SMC, or reset your PRAM, or actually get a firmware fix. Take your pick.

And if you don’t find that enough, go ahead and check out the electron microscope pictures and spectrograph of the bump composition that says NVidia is not being transparent about the failing video chip problem.

Does this just make you want to run out and buy one of these new units?

Lest you think I’m switching back to PCs, these Macs are still way better than my last Dell D600 that required 4 complete overhauls for failed components in a 90 day period.