7 ms·

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like u

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vastly different use cases, which is perfectly fine. I found it a quite interesting, if a little obscure, article to read.

adestefan 14y ago
His connection is terrible because he lives up in the Blue Ridge of Tennessee. There is no broadband there and I wouldn't be surprised if the phone lines are poor enough that you can't connect at more then 28.8k on a good day.
- steverb 14y ago
  To clarify, there is broadband up here in hills, but it is very unevenly distributed. I lived near the top of a mountain in the same area, and was finally able to get cable after pestering Comcast for a few years. The guy that bought the land at the very top of the hill was unable to get Comcast to run cable even with his offer to pay for the run himself. We cut down some trees for line of sight and re-purposed some satellite equipment and got him online via a second cable run to my house.
anonymouz 14y ago
For writing or coding, a decent keyboard seems much more important than a high resolution screen. For consuming stuff the converse is true. (Even though I also prefer a high res display, and he mentions that it took him some time to set up Xmonad in a way that allowed him to effectively work with such a low-res display).
- lanna 14y ago
  Except the Dell Mini 9 doesn't have anything nowhere close to a decent keyboard.
  - pattern 14y ago
    You begin your sentence with "Except" -- however you and the parent are saying the same thing :)
  - kerno 14y ago
    I owned a Dell Mini 9 hackintosh and recently sold it. I absolutely do not understand how Joey Hess uses it everyday for the sort of work that he does - the keys are roughly 90% of full-size, and I couldn't type more than a few words without hitting the wrong key. I feel admiration mixed with, "why?".
- kayoone 14y ago
  Well not everyone is coding in terminal windows and doing console-only stuff... for me doing interactive 3D development, a high res screen (or a couple of them) and a powerful machine is of equal if not higher importance than my keyboard.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    I generally develop in terminal windows, doing console-only stuff, and I still feel stifled if I don't have at least two displays. I know that all the cool kids are using split terminals and the like, but I like to keep log output visible, a browser in a separate space and a console debugger up without having to toggle between them. That anybody can get anything done with such constraints is amazing to me, but he's obviously quite good at it.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I use to feel this way as well, until, nearing the end of university (read: I was rather broke), I had the perfect storm of computer hardware disaster. I was forced to use for about a year just a single netbook with less than impressive resolution. Tmux and tiling window managers became my friends out of necessity. Cut to a few years later and now I have 3 high resolution screens in front of me, pretty much all the time. I still tend to use just my laptop screen with tmux though, with the rare exception (during deployments, mostly). I won't say that a single small screen is better, but I do think from personal experience that, after some time and initial effort, it really is not the handicap people think it would be. It certainly won't slow you down like a thumb keyboard will.
      - danneu 14y ago
        Haha. Same progression for me, too. Towards the end of uni, my Windows rig completely broke down. Being broke, I ended up with a Toshiba netbook that couldn't handle more than a few browser tabs at once. Installed Debian to squeeze out some performance over Windows XP (first foray into Linux). Best thing that ever happened to me. Soon I learned vim, tmux, and had my entire dev environment in a Guake terminal overlay that I could quickly toggle in and out of view. It was like having two full screens in one. My work just bought us monitors and everyone is dual/tri-screening it. I just dock my laptop and use the single monitor, still using the same guake/tmux/vim setup.
tonyedgecombe 14y ago
It appears he is living off-grid so his biggest constraint is going to be power consumption. A smaller screen means longer battery life.
npsimons 14y ago
I hate to pull this card on you, but what have you done? We're talking about a Debian developer who has also developed (and continues to develop) basically an open-source replacement for Dropbox (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...), by himself on an incredible budget. He actually Gets Shit Done, and does it relatively efficiently. I would not be surprised at all if a factor towards being productive is the fact that his daily Internet connection doesn't support browsing Facebook. And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters.
- pwang 14y ago
  > And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters. I don't necessarily agree with the parent post's sentiments, but I also disagree with this very broad blanket statement of yours. I am reasonably happy most of the time on my Macbook Air screen, but I definitely prefer to be coding on a larger screen when I can. I knew Joey back in college and he is a sharp guy with a LOT of working memory. My memory has gotten worse over time, and I tend to work with heterogenous codebases, so I can't fit everything in my head and need the screen real estate. I know many excellent, productive devs who love having large screens to code on.
  - joeyh 14y ago
    You sure you knew the same guy? My working memory is crap, and, presumably, getting worse. ;) I find that functional programming really cuts down on the amount of mental state I need to maintain. So while I'll have some API docs and another module or two open for reference, I don't need to worry about what that variable gets set to two pages above. Maybe avoiding that kind of unnecessary detail makes one's unconscious better able to work on the program too. Still learning about this: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_not_coding_late/ http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_not_coding_late/
    - cdibona 14y ago
agumonkey 14y ago
Haskellers don't need a lot of screen space ;) He might suffer the first installation of ghc/platform though.
- pyre 14y ago
  He's a hardcore Debian guy. I'm sure that if he needs a custom build he probably farms out the compilation to one of his remote servers, and just downloads the resultant .deb file.
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    Not sure I understand, ghc/platform is hundreds of MB iirc, remotely built or not. Or maybe you meant a tailored ghc distro without all the statically compiled libs and such ?
    - pyre 14y ago
      I assumed that you were referring to compilation time on his netbook, but I guess you were referring to download time over dial-up?
      - agumonkey 14y ago
        Exactly, now we're both in sync.
        pyre 14y ago
        I assume that he probably doesn't have to compile GHC all that often. He can probably just drive to the nearest place with free Wifi and download whatever he needs over a faster connection.
moconnor 14y ago
Programming is sadly still pretty much text-based. How many characters do you display on your monitor? Could you display as many with a smaller font on a smaller display? I don't think screen resolution is the bottleneck in information transfer here.
- brianobush 14y ago
  I think it is great that it is text-based. Can you imagine searching for code without text?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Or diffs. Diffing in visual languages is a nightmare.

adestefan 14y ago

His connection is terrible because he lives up in the Blue Ridge of Tennessee. There is no broadband there and I wouldn't be surprised if the phone lines are poor enough that you can't connect at more then 28.8k on a good day.

steverb 14y ago
To clarify, there is broadband up here in hills, but it is very unevenly distributed. I lived near the top of a mountain in the same area, and was finally able to get cable after pestering Comcast for a few years. The guy that bought the land at the very top of the hill was unable to get Comcast to run cable even with his offer to pay for the run himself. We cut down some trees for line of sight and re-purposed some satellite equipment and got him online via a second cable run to my house.

anonymouz 14y ago

For writing or coding, a decent keyboard seems much more important than a high resolution screen. For consuming stuff the converse is true. (Even though I also prefer a high res display, and he mentions that it took him some time to set up Xmonad in a way that allowed him to effectively work with such a low-res display).

lanna 14y ago
Except the Dell Mini 9 doesn't have anything nowhere close to a decent keyboard.
- pattern 14y ago
  You begin your sentence with "Except" -- however you and the parent are saying the same thing :)
- kerno 14y ago
  I owned a Dell Mini 9 hackintosh and recently sold it. I absolutely do not understand how Joey Hess uses it everyday for the sort of work that he does - the keys are roughly 90% of full-size, and I couldn't type more than a few words without hitting the wrong key. I feel admiration mixed with, "why?".
kayoone 14y ago
Well not everyone is coding in terminal windows and doing console-only stuff... for me doing interactive 3D development, a high res screen (or a couple of them) and a powerful machine is of equal if not higher importance than my keyboard.
- bmelton 14y ago
  I generally develop in terminal windows, doing console-only stuff, and I still feel stifled if I don't have at least two displays. I know that all the cool kids are using split terminals and the like, but I like to keep log output visible, a browser in a separate space and a console debugger up without having to toggle between them. That anybody can get anything done with such constraints is amazing to me, but he's obviously quite good at it.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I use to feel this way as well, until, nearing the end of university (read: I was rather broke), I had the perfect storm of computer hardware disaster. I was forced to use for about a year just a single netbook with less than impressive resolution. Tmux and tiling window managers became my friends out of necessity. Cut to a few years later and now I have 3 high resolution screens in front of me, pretty much all the time. I still tend to use just my laptop screen with tmux though, with the rare exception (during deployments, mostly). I won't say that a single small screen is better, but I do think from personal experience that, after some time and initial effort, it really is not the handicap people think it would be. It certainly won't slow you down like a thumb keyboard will.
    - danneu 14y ago
      Haha. Same progression for me, too. Towards the end of uni, my Windows rig completely broke down. Being broke, I ended up with a Toshiba netbook that couldn't handle more than a few browser tabs at once. Installed Debian to squeeze out some performance over Windows XP (first foray into Linux). Best thing that ever happened to me. Soon I learned vim, tmux, and had my entire dev environment in a Guake terminal overlay that I could quickly toggle in and out of view. It was like having two full screens in one. My work just bought us monitors and everyone is dual/tri-screening it. I just dock my laptop and use the single monitor, still using the same guake/tmux/vim setup.

tonyedgecombe 14y ago

It appears he is living off-grid so his biggest constraint is going to be power consumption. A smaller screen means longer battery life.

npsimons 14y ago

I hate to pull this card on you, but what have you done? We're talking about a Debian developer who has also developed (and continues to develop) basically an open-source replacement for Dropbox (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...), by himself on an incredible budget. He actually Gets Shit Done, and does it relatively efficiently. I would not be surprised at all if a factor towards being productive is the fact that his daily Internet connection doesn't support browsing Facebook. And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters.

pwang 14y ago
> And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters. I don't necessarily agree with the parent post's sentiments, but I also disagree with this very broad blanket statement of yours. I am reasonably happy most of the time on my Macbook Air screen, but I definitely prefer to be coding on a larger screen when I can. I knew Joey back in college and he is a sharp guy with a LOT of working memory. My memory has gotten worse over time, and I tend to work with heterogenous codebases, so I can't fit everything in my head and need the screen real estate. I know many excellent, productive devs who love having large screens to code on.
- joeyh 14y ago
  You sure you knew the same guy? My working memory is crap, and, presumably, getting worse. ;) I find that functional programming really cuts down on the amount of mental state I need to maintain. So while I'll have some API docs and another module or two open for reference, I don't need to worry about what that variable gets set to two pages above. Maybe avoiding that kind of unnecessary detail makes one's unconscious better able to work on the program too. Still learning about this: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_not_coding_late/ http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_not_coding_late/
  - cdibona 14y ago

agumonkey 14y ago

Haskellers don't need a lot of screen space ;) He might suffer the first installation of ghc/platform though.

pyre 14y ago
He's a hardcore Debian guy. I'm sure that if he needs a custom build he probably farms out the compilation to one of his remote servers, and just downloads the resultant .deb file.
- agumonkey 14y ago
  Not sure I understand, ghc/platform is hundreds of MB iirc, remotely built or not. Or maybe you meant a tailored ghc distro without all the statically compiled libs and such ?
  - pyre 14y ago
    I assumed that you were referring to compilation time on his netbook, but I guess you were referring to download time over dial-up?
    - agumonkey 14y ago
      Exactly, now we're both in sync.
      - pyre 14y ago
        I assume that he probably doesn't have to compile GHC all that often. He can probably just drive to the nearest place with free Wifi and download whatever he needs over a faster connection.

moconnor 14y ago

Programming is sadly still pretty much text-based. How many characters do you display on your monitor? Could you display as many with a smaller font on a smaller display? I don't think screen resolution is the bottleneck in information transfer here.

brianobush 14y ago
I think it is great that it is text-based. Can you imagine searching for code without text?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Or diffs. Diffing in visual languages is a nightmare.