I've got something to say to all of the software toolmakers out there. Quit making me work at secondary activities!

Huh? What's a secondary activity? Well . . . where's my chalk?

To start with, a primary activity is the one you're, well, primarily engaged in. If you're blowing the snow out of your driveway, that'd be your primary activity. A secondary activity for that would be having to mix gas and fill the tank.

A secondary activity is one that either sits between you and the primary activity or serves as an interruption to it. This can change with context and who you are, but it doesn't change the fact that secondary tasks are irritating: usually highly tied to how important and urgent the associated primary task is.

I brought this up on Sunday at breakfast with regard to bookmarking on del.icio.us. For *me*, boomarking is ALWAYS a secondary activity. When I bookmark a site, I'm always "doing" something else: researching a problem, reading an article, looking for a new tool, etc. I have never and will likely never sit down at the computer and think, "I'm going to bookmark some sites for the next hour".

The normative way of using del.icio.us is to click the button, fill in the description, choose some of the suggested tags, add a few of your own tags and submit the link. That's a LOT of steps for something that's a secondary activity.

And, it's usually an interruptive secondary activity. I often decide I'm going to want to save an article when I'm half-way through reading it. If I save it when I have that thought, I get dumped back at the top of the page after bookmarking. However, if I don't bookmark it immediately, I'm highly likely to not follow through.

Now, before people start suggesting Firefox extensions, better bookmarklets, etc., I know about those (and am pretty happy with my current setup). However, that doesn't change the fact that the default way of using that service doesn't match the situation most users are in when they'd need it.

If your primary product is used mostly as a secondary activity for people, you had better be making it as smooth as possible or you're losing out on lots of users. The pattern you'll likely see in this case is people who sign up for your product or service, use it heavily for 2-3 days and then disappear.

That pattern happens as people realize that the effort is just too much for a secondary activity. They clearly see benefit (or there wouldn't be a burst of activity originally), but they don't see *enough* benefit to compensate for the effort.

That's also one of the reasons I'm not a fan of forums and prefer email lists as well as RSS over visiting a roster of sites regularly. See, despite wanting to keep up to date on these topics, the act of sitting down to deliberately go through a list of sites and "catch up" just never rises to the level of a primary task (it's not alone in that).

However, when those things are delivered as an effortless secondary task, I can keep up and don't get irritated. All of that new information is delivered right to my email client, where I *do* spend time doing primary activities. It's automatically updated, sorted and filtered. Those automated tasks reduce my effort below the threshold where I'd abandon other secondary tasks.

For years I've been using O'Reilly's Safari service. Most of the books from not just O'Reilly, but lots of other publishers are right there, online. I like it because books tend to address issues in more depth than most quick articles do on the Internet. Yet, being online, I get: full-text search, copy and paste from code samples, etc.

I tend to use Google, MSDN et al when I'm looking for an answer to a specific question. However, when I'm looking to improve my architectural approach or a cohesive look at a technology, I often turn to books. I do buy my fair share of books, but tend to like to get used copies (the whole half price thing works for me). Unfortunately, used book sellers don't always want to coordinate with my deadlines.

Enter Safari. Instead of hoping that the boxy white truck delivers your book before you need to deliver the code, you add it to your Safari bookshelf and get to work. For most of that time, I was on their "10 books at a time" plan. You get up to 10 books on your bookshelf to juggle between. Once you add a book, it stays on the shelf for 30 days.

Most of the time, that was fine. However, as I moved into shorter projects, that became more and more cramped. I was constantly trying to figure out which books to ditch, only to need them 2 weeks later.

Fortunately, I recently discovered that O'Reilly has an unlimited plan (called Safari Library), which is very cool if you do fulltime development. For $40 a month (intro rate), you get ALL of the books in their catalog. Instead of a "bookshelf", you just have "favorites". When combined with their bookmark system and a few PDF downloads of chapters, you've got a pretty comprehensive reference library.

Sure, it's not free, but it runs about what a new book would each month (if you had to go to the brick and mortar store and buy it), and it's instantaneous and flexible. I can now just grab the exact information I need instead of trying to shuffle and plan.

When your week at contains a list of technologies like this: SQLServer 2005 Reporting Services Architecture, ASP.NET SOAP services, MySQL performance tuning, PHP web stats analysis, blending recursive SQLServer datasets of accounting data in C# for embedding into Reporting services and conflicting VPN configurations on wireless connections - and your home project list includes a list like: Linux remote desktop, HTPC configuration, Powershell scripting, building a RESTful blogging engine and client, Mono/C#, setting up a Linux firewall/router, etc. . . . that kind of flexibility and wide range of information is really useful.

Because, sometimes the solution can't just be put into a 2 page article that you find on Digg.

While I was out last week, I had a lot of time, but much of it wasn't of much use. Pain killers reduced my ability to think clearly, which isn't a terribly good omen for the kinds of things I would have done if it was a "real" week off.

However, during that week, I did tackle a few things that I could fiddle with for a bit and leave to do their thing for 4-5 hours and then spend another 20 minutes or so with.

One of those was the Dell laptop that I replaced about a year ago. It's been pretty much just lying around doing nothing of any particular use, so I thought it might be time to see how it handled Ubuntu Linux.

I've pretty much made a flip-flop over the last couple of months to where Linux is my default OS unless I can come up with a reason why it shouldn't be. I'll probably always have Windows machines around and will likely keep using them as my main work machines, (and I'll probably buy a Vista machine soon for development purposes), but if the machine is mine alone to put to use, it's probably going to get Linux put on it going forward.

So, I figured, what the heck and over the course of the week, installed and configured it. I won't claim that it was entirely troublefree. I had to mess around to get 1280×800 resolution working, Getting Beryl to work wasn't exactly easy, etc. However, all of the hardware is working and things look good.

The funny thing is that I'd forgotten how well Linux revives old hardware. I replaced this laptop (I'm on it now actually) because it was painfully slow to use. However, now, with Linux installed, and even with the Beryl eye candy turned on, it's *faster* than the Windows laptop that replaced it.

When you combine the speed bump with the long battery life, the better screen and smaller form factor, I'm actually headed back to this thing as my primary laptop. And, if I throw $100 worth of RAM into it (bringing it to 1.25GB), it will certainly last another year before it even begins to feel slow.

This seat-of-the-pants improvement is something I've "always" known, but apparently wasn't applying to the situation right in front of me. I was running Linux on lots of old hardware, but didn't think to see if it could breathe life into a laptop I actually liked.

I definitely regret not doing this sooner.

I'm still oscillating between several text editors, unable to find *all* of the features I like in any one place. That's not new territory for me. After all, my ideal OS is a stone soup combination of Linux, Windows and Mac. They all offer things worth having that the others don't have. However, given that I *do* use all 3 platforms, and do much of my work (and play) in a text editor, finding a new contender that's cross-platform is a good thing. I don't care how great Textmate is, if I'm sitting at a Linux machine, it doesn't do me any good.

ActiveState (if you've done any Perl on Windows, you've bumped into these guys) have had an IDE product for a while, priced in that $300 range. A couple of weeks ago, I got a product announcement that they'd released a free programmer's text editor, with the typical goodies: syntax highlighting, autocomplete, custom keybindings, all the "normal" stuff.

Komodo Edit has support (including auto-complete for most) for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django out f the box. The auto-complete works much better out of the box for PHP here than in many of the other options. Theoretically, there can be lots of other support added as well. That's because Komodo Edit is written in XUL (like Firefox and Thunderbird) and it can be extended just like those other platforms: with Javascript and XML. There aren't many extensions yet, but that's the case with any new platform, so I'll be watching for developments in that area.

Overall, I think they struck a nice balance of features in the free editor vs. the $295 full IDE. You can see a comparison of the feature differences, but it basically boils down to things like a full debugger, regular expression toolkit, and a code browser. They're the kind of features that most individual developers can do without. And, if you *do* need them, you are probably in a position to justify the price tag.

Definitely worth a look, especially if you don't want to fiddle with settings to get lots of good functionality. Besides, it's free. So, if you don't like it, delete it and move on.

A few years ago, I bought a set of Sony wireless headphones. I bought them mostly to clear up the wire clutter on my desk and they worked OK for that purpose. For the most part, they just sat there collecting dust.

This past summer/fall, however, they got dusted off and put into service in an attempt to bring peace to the household. That was about the time Shelly started back at school to get her MBA. She has a vested interest in a silent house for studying purposes, often for most of the duration of the weekend hours. *I*, on the other hand, have a 52" TV and surround stereo system that I specifically spent time setting up for this house that I would like to use during some of those same hours to watch movies.

The fact that she's studying actually amplifies my desire to watch movies as it provides time to watch those movies that I know in advance she won't like. Therein lies the problem. The movies in that category tend not to be quiet and the sound became the source of contention.

As I wanted to figure out a compromise that worked for both of us (and was bound by my previous statements of support), I could do one of the following:

• Shut the whole thing off and do something else on the weekends. In January. In Minnesota.
• Turn the volume down to a "reasonable" level.
• Watch with headphones.

The first was rejected because I *want* to watch movies and TV on the weekends. The second was thrown out because I discovered that reasonable as a state was only satisified by volumes that required closed-captioning. I usually watch with the laptop running, and reading a movie and working on the laptop aren't terribly compatible activities.

So, I pulled out the wireless headphones and we've had a reasonable compromise ever since.

Now, the headphones had a slight hiss/whine that could only be eliminated if you held your head . . . just . . . so. That is, until a few weeks ago, when the whine disappeared, along with all of the other sound as the headphones went down in a blaze of ozone-tinged glory and were rendered little more than inert plastic and metal by some electrical short.

I've since replaced them, this time getting a set based on the past experience of the Sony's (and several pairs before those) and the new set is MUCH better and ended up actually cheaper than the Sony's.

I ended up getting a pair of Sennheiser RS120's. They work great, without the whine, throughout the basement (haven't bothered going upstairs with them yet). The charging is idiot-proof, which couldn't be said of the Sony's (which required getting 2 little contact points aligned perfectly): you just hang the headphones on the metal stand and they charge.

The sound is thinner than my BeyerDynamics that I use at work. However, some of that is that they are open (people sitting near you can hear the sound), which wouldn't make these good for work. That doesn't matter that much to me though.

That's because, I've seen (and read) over the years that wireless headphones tend to either skimp on the wireless bits or on the headphone part. That's because doing both well results in a product that's expensive enough that we won't buy it. But, when they skimp on the wireless bit, you get whining, static, the neighbor's baby monitor and some teenager's cordless phone. When they skimp on the headphone part, you get slightly less bass response and muddy middles. I'll take a sub-optimal EQ curve over a crying baby injected into a dramatic moment any day.

As an added bonus, this system lets you add an extra pair of headphones to the system. When our foreign student arrives this fall, I expect that he'll probably be joining me for at least a few of the Saturday and Sunday movie viewings that need to have their sound suppressed. Now I don't have to work out the technology for multiple sets of headphones.

So often, technology gets applied "just because" it's cool or you want it. This time, there's a bit of that, but I'm able to keep my entertainment and Shelly gets her pristine silence for studying. And, that's an actual improvement in people's lives: a much better use of $100 than most.