Poor Man's home office setup

Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood, two of my favorite programmers have long talked about the perfect home office and components. However, their access to resources far exceeds mine and I suspect most people in India. For instance - IKEA is not an option here (yet).

I still believe in working from home is efficient and have put in some thought and money (more thought and less money - I'm cheap)O on getting the components of this right -

Room / Space

I need a room separate from the place where I have strewn dirty clothing to focus on work. Just the act of moving from space to another dedicated for work helps in narrowing down focus and limit distractions. If you don't have the option of a separate room, consider carving out a space that is delineated with some simple elements like maybe a different flooring, or focused lighting or painting the walls around the area in a different color. It's a psychological trick that make a huge difference.

Desk

Here's one that most people get wrong and tend to buy something labeled as a computer desk. Computer desk is simply a marketing gimmick. The worst thing you can do is have a pull out keyboard rest - that simply does not work.

Here are the ones I see sold in India purporting to be computer desks

 


ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE WRONG 

Instead look for a 4-seater dining table like one of these - They will give you better surface area as well as plenty of legroom.

 



Also - most working desks are designed for writing rather than computer work and thus get the height all wrong. You will not find an office chair that will adjust to the height of a writing desk, and even if it does it will result in dangling feet.

Footstool

Despite sounding like a luxury item from the Ottoman empire, the footstool is extremely handy (footy?) to give you options for your legs. Having a foot stool will give you the flexibility to slump back or forward. Back pain prevention is 90% adjusting positions regularly. Which makes it important to have multiple options while sitting.

Chair

I haven't found a perfect chair yet, so i prefer a simple dining table chair with a straight back. I find most cheap office chairs to be more uncomfortable than a simple high back dining chair. So - this is a to do. I just don't find any reasonably priced chairs around bangalore for retail.

Laptop / Desktop

This one is debatable. Most laptops do not offer the performance of a desktop at half the price. However, I still don't like having a massive desktop sitting under the desk collecting dust and getting tangled in my feet. Luckily I was able to appropriate my brothers Lenovo T400 which is simply a stunning machine. Upgraded it to 8 GB RAM and it performs on par with most work desktops. But It's pricey.

Wireless Headset with mic 

If you tend to do a lot of meetings from home like I do, this is essential. I've come to the point that I find VoIP far more reliable than my cellular connection. I've gone for the Plantronics 995 and i'm quite happy with the purchase. The only issue I have with this is that  i cannot use this when its on charge, which seems like lazy engineering. But I was surprised when some of my audiophile friends used this for extreme EDM and stated that its audio quality was astounding. 

It does not use bluetooth and has its own USB dongle, which i don't object because the range and fidelity is far superior to any bluetooth headset i've tried. Which means that I can discuss architecture with people in the US while playing fetch with my dog in the yard (I love living in the future of the past)

Wireless Speaker with Mic

This one is kind of optional from a pure home office perspective, but just in the last week it has become irreplaceable part of my setup. I've been doing night long calls last week and having headsets on for eight hour calls simply is not an option. So I went and got the BIG jambox which comes with a built t in 360 degree mic. Usually i've found that being on a speaker phone is the quickest way to annoy people on a call followed by heavy breathing. But the Jambox has excellent mic fidelity and so far no one has been able to make out the difference. This also comes in handy while making Video calls and you don't want to look like a DJ in a club with massive headsets.

Keyboards / Mouse 

A controversial personal preference, but I prefer a wired keyboard and mouse over wireless versions. Given my aversion towards anything wired, I suppose this trait is because even a single stutter of the mouse because of wirelessness is just not acceptable to me. Maybe its gotten better, but I hate lifting up the mouse and checking if the red light is on. Even more so for the keyboard. Wireless keyboards have a different problem in that most of them tend to target portability over usability.

USB Hub

This little Rs 100 device has a huge impact in my work day. No more do I have to bend over into ill-lit corners and jiggle the USB cables of my keyboard and mouse into the laptop. I simply have all my USB devices plugged into the hub and connect a single wire into the laptop. Kinda like a ghetto docking station for the laptop.

Extension cord

i've learnt the hard way to invest in a great extension cord - not an average one, not a good one, but a great one. The best available currently in bangalore is by Belkin. Don't think about how much it's costing - it will make a huge difference in the quality of any geek's life to have an assortment of cables plugged in snugly into this beast. And don't make the mistake of getting a single row version - you always need the space for that one pesky outsized adapter that takes multiple rows of parking room like that overcompensating Toyota Fortuner guy at the mall

Monitor and Projector

2 display screens are a must. it's not even a debate anymore. What remains to be decided is what kind of monitor. I've hunted down a Square TFT Dell monitor because it was the one I had at work and had gotten used to it. TFT is easier on the eye than LCD, and I always thought of wide screen monitors were for the casual movie watching crowd. I'm not so  sure about that anymore. A couple of sessions on a wide screen monitor has made me rethink my choice.

I don't YET have a projector, but I think it will complement my wireless speakers well in enabling me to get a little more distance from the monitor for long presentation. Lately, I've been getting paranoid about my constant focal distance of about two feet for long durations of the day.

Other Stuff 

I'm a big fan of this little Havells's fan. Small, light, yet powerful, this one has a unique air distribution system which works by the shell rotating on its axis instead of the entire assembly swingin gpback and forth.







Since i'm a fiddle person by nature I usually have an assortment of hand exercisers, a yoyo, and maybe  a kendama lying around. The fiddling helps me think.


Be sure to check out Jeff's and Scott's home office setups that make mine look like a 3rd world ghetto.

And here are some links on getting it just right for your home office -

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/07/investing-in-a-quality-programming-chair.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/01/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-me-and-my-office.html
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/NewJobNewHouseNewBabyAndDesigningATotallyNewHomeOffice.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WorkingRemotelyFromHomeTelepresenceAndVideoConferencingOneYearLater.aspx

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Authentication in ASP.Net MVC

At the outset there appear to be a couple of options for doing Authentication in an ASP.Net MVC application - Global Filters and HttpModules. To understand this a little bit more in detail, we need to take a look at the Architecture of ASP.Net MVC as illustrated in the diagram below

As you can see, MVC is built upon the ASP.Net framework along with other frameworks like Web Forms and Services etc.

Global Filters - are implemented at the MVC layer
HttpModules - are implemented at the ASP.Net pipeline layer.

ASP.Net Framework has inbuilt functionality to provide authentication, which is by the use of HttpModules. Every request into the system will go through Httpmodules  whereas only MVC specific request will go through the global action filters. MVC has the concept of global filters that expose an onAuthorize event. This (authorization) at the application level does make sense to control which user can access which resource or not. But Authentication should not be left to the individual applications IMO.

Mnay people prefer MVC filters be used for authentication, but I don't agree that this is a good paradigm in an enterprise scenario where you may not want developers controlling authentication polcy and application. I advocate using the ASP.Net HttpModules feature for authentication for the following reasons

• It allows configuring security at "site" or asset level completely agnostic to the higher level frameworks like MVC / Web forms etc.
• It can be configured by Release Engineering. Global filters on the other hand are defined and instantiated in code programmatically. This moves the control of security from developers to release engineering which is a safer mechanism. We partition developer and release engineering practices (even though the developers might be writing the the code for the actual httpmodule)
• Common set of HttpModules can be reused across ASP.Net application, WCF services and MVC applications

There are some advantages of using global filters -

• They allow for finer grained control if we wanted to expose actions for authenticated as well as unauthenticated user (which is not the case in any scenarios)
• They speak the language of MVC

Reading and references

http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2009/09/09/38390/
ASP.NET MVC Authentication - Customizing Authentication and Authorization The Right Way - Jon Galloway

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Arrgh, Matey - Or the saga of the white hat pirate

Before i begin, let me qualify two things

1. I have no satisfactory solution to the problem.
2. I am not advocating piracy.

What I'm getting at is this - Pirating is just simpler and more efficient than purchasing books online every step of the way

To set the stage, my inventory of devices looks like this -

Dell 6400 / Windows 7

Kindle 4th Generation

Nexus 7 / Android

Lenovo T400 / Window7

Macbook Pro / Snow Leopard

Micoromax Ninja / Android

Xbox 360

iPad 1

Step 1: Discovery 

For a pirated digital copy, I simply need to type in the name of the book + "torrent". That's it. I don't have to deal with any specific stores search like for Amazon or Flipkart. What's more, I get presented in one screen EVERYTHING for my search including format options, books, movies, and yes, even porn dedicated to the subject (see rule 34 of the internet). I have a choice of formats depending upon my download appetite and gadget compatibility. For instance, if I also had a PS3 (urgh), I might want the Blue-ray version as well.

Step 2 : Download 

It's no secret that the much-maligned BitTorrent protocol is the most efficient way to download anything. The media companies, however, have managed to equate it with piracy - but that's the same as saying internal combustion technology cause war. Anyways, the BitTorrent protocol is so awesome because it harnesses the distributed power of the internet by using peer-to-peer connections to download files. it's resilient, fast and distributed - Holy grail, Batman! 

Of course protocols are just that - an agreement of how to do stuff. The "stuff" needs to be done. And here comes in the client - µTorrent - a very tiny BitTorrent client, the undisputed champion weighing in at just 1 MB. Yep - read that again - 1 MB. Many web pages these days amount to more than that simply to give us the update on the Kardashians (<-- My idea of SEO: dropping celebrity names) 

And no - its not the download of a downloader; Another bit of chicanery that incenses me when i download a 2 MB installer which proceeds to download hundreds of additional megs for the target application, usually a ploy to install yet another toolbar on my browser[Deep breath ... 1 .... 2 .... 10]. I'm fine now.

The small download footprint is deceptive, because this is an incredible little full-featured application. Does what it says and does it very well. Running on my machine this is taking about 20 MB of ram, almost exactly as much as every individual tab on chrome.

Step 3: Formats 

As i mentioned earlier, i now have a choice of formats and resolutions. In case of books I can have the pdf version for "Read Later" and "Instapaper". and the .mobi version for my kindle.In any case I can use a plethora of converters to format the pdf to whatever format I choose. If i buy a digital copy I'm locked to a fraction of the devices that i own. 

Conclusion

So there we go - money didn't even figure in the equation. I would happily part with the cost of a coffee to acquire the brain juice of an intelligent person (umm.. book), but the current state of the eco-system does not incentivise me to do that. 

The villians of the piece are the distribution agencies, and not necessarily the content producers. The distribution companies have the most to lose here. Authors have already started self-publishing via amazon to free up their content. I won't go on much about this because there is enough being discussed on this topic by people more knowledgeable than I. My focus was on the technology and usability flows of pirated content versus DRM protected content acquisition. 

One short term, slightly hippy-ish solution, would be for the content producers to set up channels for people like me to make "donations" to assuage the piracy guilt but still use the best of breed technology to acquire content.

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Its getting "cloud"y out here

Firstly, apologies for the pun, but it IS getting overcast in Bangalore the last few days. I've noticed that I've quite naturally migrated away from most desktop apps towards a "cloud" based solution. Or as we used to say a year ago - online solutions.

But, hype and buzzwords aside, I really only took notice the last couple of weeks since my work laptop fried and I've been messing around with multiple laptops. What popped out was that I really didn't need to install much to keep going at work because I had been progressively preferring online solutions to desktop ones.

Outlook Desktop -> Outlook Web Access.

The Microsoft OWA 2012 release has done a tremendous job of ensuring desktop parity in feature and UX which has made the transition so simple that i didn't even notice that i had stopped using the desktop client. The web client retains many of the keyboard short cuts, alert sounds and visuals that are really key to bringing the full experience to the net. The best part is that unlike the previous versions, this web client works well across most of the browsers.

Visio -> Lucid Chart, Gliffy

I feel a little sad for Visio. As an architect, I should have loved this product. This was supposed to my home where i merrily drew boxes and layers and clouds building enterprise dreams of interconnected systems. But Visio let me down with their latest 2013 release. I don't know what segment the team targets, but the software is unnecessarily bloated with all sorts of themes and art works, but makes a complete hash of the most simple thing that I need - connecting shapes easily and in an intuitive manner.

The best part is that at my workplace, Lucid Chart is integrated with the collaboration platform - JIVE, making it even simpler to move away from Visio

Notepad -> Writability

Ok - so this one may be a bit of stretch because it really is javascript code that enables you to write in the browser. But if you're signed into chrome bookmarks get ported over to the instance and its almost like an application in the cloud.

Windows Live Writer -> Blogger.com editor.

I've waited a long time for this. Windows live writer was a great alternative to Rich text areas for creating blog content. But i recently logged into blogger and found the new editor powerful enough to discard live writer. In fact, this single change is allowing me to blog a lot more. I don't know if other engines have powerful editors, but I'm happy to stick with my Google profile and hence blogger.

Word -> Jive

Now this may not really be an option for everyone, but at my workplace we've deployed Jive for business collaboration and I am amazed at the transformation it has brought about to the company DNA. What once used to be silo'ed divisions with serpentine communication channels is now a thriving community of collaborators. I can't say enough about this. Every large organization needs this.

Strictly speaking, there isn't a direct mapping from Word to Jive, but because of the platform I rarely create documents. Instead the platform allows me to create blog posts.

Skype -> Google + 

I still use skype on a daily basis because of my perception that the call quality is better. For personal calls, where I'm willing to live with a little more disturbance, I tend to use the Google + hangouts. Strangely enough, google+ has more features than skype - most notably the ability to screen share

Of course there are some applications I use on a regular basis that simply don't have equivalent replacements yet -

• IDEs - Visual Studio
• Excel 
• Media Players (but for music only i use a combination of sound cloud, pandora etc.. )

I have a bunch of other applications but they are mostly BECAUSE i am on a desktop and would be irrelevant in a fully cloudy world - zip software, networking stuff, media players, editors.

The future of desktop applications does indeed look bleak.

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