Hello, 2009
Happy New Year!
It’s been a hectic holiday season here in the Pacific Northwest. We were snowed in over here for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 days or so. I wanted to spend most of my time with family, but I’m sneaking away for a few hours today to prepare for the new year.
I’m writing this post from my office in my new chair that I picked up from Plush over at the Redmond Town Center:
No that’s not me :) It’s a fantastic chair. I wanted an alternative place to work that wasn’t just my desk (which is a great setup, but a bit of variety is a good thing). I got the fur cover which makes it feel like I’m sitting on a giant teddy bear.
I’m writing this post on my Lenovo X200s, which finally arrived after deciding to take a tour of Canada for a week:
This is a fantastic laptop. The keyboard is hands-down the best keyboard that I’ve used. It’s significantly better than the T61p that I have, and I’m finding that I prefer the feel of its keyboard over my 17” MBP as well. I’m loving the fact that I now have the extra keys that I’ve been missing on the Mac. Form Follows Function.
My top criteria around laptops are:
1) Screen quality – this thing has a 1440 x 900 LED backlit display which is fantastic. A good compromise considering the laptop weighs in at around 3.2 lbs with the 9-cell battery that I have installed.
2) Battery life – this thing has crazy battery life. I have the screen set at max brightness right now, and my battery meter shows 7 hours remaining at 88% charge.
3) Emissions – heat and sound. This thing is quiet and is not hot at all. This was the thing that annoyed me the most with the MBP – it was hot *and* loud. Playing a movie on it without headphones on was an exercise in frustration.
4) Performance. This thing is plenty fast with the 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo. It rates 4.9 on the Vista CPU perf, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. It has 6MB L2 Cache, but I also paired the laptop up with the most excellent Intel X25-M SSD.
The Intel SSD was the thing that turned this into a very special laptop. There are no annoying pauses at all while working. My system is instantly responsive after logging on – which certainly isn’t the case with my quad core desktop because of all of that contention for the HDD head. It boots really quickly, shuts down fast.
Now that I’m all geared up for the new year, I’m looking forward to the goals that I’ve set for myself:
1) Ship IronRuby.
2) I want to make it just as easy for an external developer to work on IronRuby as someone who sits down the hall from me.
3) Work on the fit and finish that will make IronRuby a great experience for .NET developers. Integration with ASP.NET MVC, fixing our interop bugs, fixing our startup and working set issues, and getting some quality docs out there.
4) Refactoring me. I’m going to fix a bunch of things that I’m not happy with. I’m turning into a fatso again and that’s not cool. Part of this is admitting that I have a problem, and then figuring out that I don’t have to do it alone. I’m not going to do crazy things like my brother is doing (40” vertical in 2009!) but I should be able to hit 150 lbs this year.
I hope you all have a great year!
Happy new year to you and IronRuby :)
Posted by: fanweixiao | January 02, 2009 at 04:13 AM
The only thing I don't like about this laptop is that the Function key is in the lower left where the control key usually is. I sort of prefer it being somewhere between the Windows key and the spacebar.
Posted by: Justin Chase | January 02, 2009 at 02:10 PM
John,
I noticed your list didn't include making IronRuby a greate Visual Studio citizen, meaning full integration with the IDE. Maybe I'm way behind the times here, but that's super important. If you've already done it, thanks, and sorry for the spam.
Posted by: Rob Fahrni | January 02, 2009 at 04:21 PM
@Justin: The first thing I do with any computer is remap the Caps Lock key to a Ctrl key. I rather like the Fn key at the lower left since I never use the left Ctrl key in any event.
@Rob: We would love to do this. But IronRuby + VS is a major undertaking that we're not staffed for right now. Today we have our hands full getting IronRuby done - once we finish that, we'll see what resources we might be able to turn loose on VS support.
Posted by: John Lam | January 02, 2009 at 09:02 PM
Good luck with all your goals, personal and professional. I'm excited to see IronRuby ship!
Posted by: ben | January 03, 2009 at 01:37 PM
How old is your brother? I want a 40" verticle leap too!
Posted by: Alex | January 10, 2009 at 07:57 PM
@Alex: he'll be 33 this year.
Posted by: John Lam | January 11, 2009 at 06:24 PM
Very nice post! Thank you!
Posted by: kalarev | January 27, 2009 at 07:31 AM