Fly on the Wall: “We are breeding a whole new generation.” 22 Sep 2006
15 comments Latest by Clayton Hynfield
Some of the activity this week at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:
On-Deck Borat
We’re quite excited for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”. That led to a discussion on the similarities between Sacha Baron Cohen and Andy Kaufman. Check out Kaufman’s “Foreign Man”…
Kaufman’s Wikipedia page talks about some of his other confrontational bits:
One of these performances included getting on a ride that people stand in and get spun around. After everyone was strapped in Kaufman would start saying how he did not want to be on the ride in a panicked tone and eventually cry.
On a few occasions, audiences would show up to one of Kaufman’s performances requesting to see Latka. Kaufman would announce that he was going to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to them. The audience would laugh at this, not realizing that Kaufman was serious and would read extensive passages of the book to them.
Lewis and Clark
Four days of being sick and traveling got to Marcel: “I have no idea how Lewis and Clark did it.” Which led to a few L&C recommendations: Jamis said to check out Clay Jenkinson’s portrayal of Meriwether Lewis. Jason called Ken Burns’ Lewis and Clark “absolutely incredible and moving.” Marcel loves Clark’s entry upon spotting the coast: “Ocean in view, oh the joy.”
Jamis’ blog
Jamis’ blog is a good resource for the Capistrano curious.
Moo confirmation
Moo.com’s ordering process is nifty and the confirmation note the site sends is nice and friendly.
I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on it’s way to you.
Remember, I’m just a bit of software. So, if you have any questions regarding your order please contact customer services (who are real people) at…
Jamis: “I like that. They don’t try and pretend it was sent by a real person, like lots of automated ticket responses do.” Sam: “Nice transparency.”
iTerm
iTerm gives you tab power. Is it worth it though?
Frist dome
This is some photo of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (from Getty Images).
Dwell in Chicago
A recent issue of Dwell had a profile on Chicago. A couple of our fave places made the piece: Bari Foods, a great deli near 37signals HQ where we often get sandwiches, and Club Lago, old school Italian joint that’s a great place to pretend like you’re in the cast of Goodfellas. Both worth a stopover if you’re ever in the area.
The children are our future
When Web 8.0 hits, Jamis’ son will be ready!
15 comments so far (Jump to latest)
Steve 22 Sep 06
As someone who spends a lot of time covering events at the US Capitol, that “fit the politicians head into the dome” shot is pretty common, since the leaders of each party almost always hold their news conferences in that exact spot in the Ohio Clock Corridor.
Luke Redpath 22 Sep 06
term.app + screen for me here; its just seems faster and less clunky than iTerm, screen is efficient once you are used to the key bindings and you can use Visor, which is just awesome.
Chris Carter 22 Sep 06
Wait, let me get this straight - you don’t like a camera that allows people to make themselves look slimmer, but you DO like a guy who has stereotyped an entire country as a bunch of people who enjoy incest, beastiality, and are terminally poor to boot?
Huh, color me confused.
ML 22 Sep 06
Chris, Borat is a joke.
dc 22 Sep 06
this is going to come out great because I don’t remember the quote exactly, but I remember another one from Clark or Lewis about finding the bears quite annoying after not thinking they would be at first.
something like, “the bears are quite tiresome”.
it seems they have a bent toward understatement.
pwb 22 Sep 06
Counting subscribers is Feedburner’s killer feature??? Does not your blogging software do that?
Chris Carter 22 Sep 06
I’m aware Borat is a joke, I own the Ali G collection :)
Peter Cooper 22 Sep 06
I’m surprised at the discussion surrounding iTerm. Perhaps it’s an Intel vs PPC thing, but iTerm is pretty fast and looks great here. I’m still running 0.8.1 and hadn’t even realized I should upgrade, so I might look at that now.. :) But yeah, it’d be great if Apple would just add tabs to the regular Terminal, since that’s the only reason I use iTerm. I don’t know why Apple don’t just open source that level of stuff.
ToddG 22 Sep 06
I’m still using GLTerm, have been for years, since the first time I used Terminal and said “you’ve gotta be joking”. And it hasn’t been updated in years but still works! Amazing. It’s written in C++ and OpenGL and was for years faster than Terminal.app and iTerm. Haven’t compared latest versions of those but I’d be surprised if they were faster…
Joe Ruby 22 Sep 06
I’m in the Terminal+screen camp. I wish Terminal had tabs. Can’t remember anymore what the deal-breakers were for me with iTerm — sluggishness, lack of scrollback, …
One annoyance with Terminal+screen is ctrl-a doesn’t go to the beginning of the line — anybody know of a workaround?
Peter 22 Sep 06
Hey, I want a little Jamis to fawn over me too! Where can I pick those up, preferrably in HD with a DVR! Boy if Apple is looking for a hit product there it is, a small army of HiDef, DVR enabled kids that want to sit in back rooms and work for you.
bashon 22 Sep 06
Hmm, yes. While Borat might be very amusing, I wonder if that kind of humour ought to be left at home. Although the goats might not be too happy about that.
Rob Cameron 25 Sep 06
Am I the only person who think Andy Kaufman wasn’t really very funny?
Clayton Hynfield 27 Sep 06
Ryan, Jamis, David, & Sam (& Mark when he starts): Much of the time I use plain & simple Terminal to manage a few dozen Unix & Linux boxes. Whenever I suspect I’m going to be working on a particular task longer than an hour or so (like the 2500-file restore I’m doing right now), I start a screen session, appropriately named using the -S option, so that I can detatch from & reattach to the session (say, at the end of the day before I pack up my PowerBook).
A really handy screen feature lets you attach to the same session multiple times, so for long-running things like performance tests, I can have four Terminal windows up, each looking at a different screen window. To do this, the screen binary needs to be setuid root, you need to put “multiuser on” in your ~/.screenrc, and then you invoke screen like this: screen -r username/session.
The coolest part, though, is switching over to iTerm, firing up several tabs, multiuser-resuming all those screen windows already open in Terminal, turning on Send Input to all Tabs, and kicking off the same command at the same time in four different windows, and then switching back to Terminal to watch the fireworks on all four windows simultaneusly.
The only way this could be cooler is by taking iTerm and its horrible performance, configuration UI, and font rendering out of the mix and adding “send input to all windows” functionality to screen itself. I took a look at the screen source to see if I could hack it in there, but I never made it past figuring out what C file I’d need to modify to add it (main() in the 3000-line screen.c, I’m afraid).
If anybody would be interested in working on that one with me, I’d happily take it up again.
Joe: regarding using ctrl-A to get to BOL, I have five words for you: set minus oh vee aye.