We’ve worked so hard at enabling our computers to multitask effectively–and increasingly faster–that we have far surpassed the human ability to multitask. Don’t get me wrong; being able to continue browsing the web or working on a document while I’m downloading a large file or processing some video is obviously invaluable. It’s hard to imagine a time when we actually had to sit and wait helplessly while our computer chugged away at some data.

Unfortunately, some of us humans might try so hard to leverage our computer’s multitasking abilities that the ultimate bottleneck becomes the limit of our own mental concentration. You’re working on a document, but you also have your email client open and perhaps a few tabs on your web browser. Before you know it, you’ve wasted a significant period of time replying to email or going off on a tangent through the web, when the most important task at hand was just to finish typing up that document.

Enter WriteRoom. It may seem archaic by today’s standards to boot up your computer into a word processor program and to only be able to use your computer for that purpose until you finish and boot into another program, but it sure didn’t test human self-control and concentration like the systems we have today. WriteRoom duplicates that simple, distraction-free experience, and while you’re at it, gives you a bit of nostalgic joy in the process. Sure, you could get a similar affect by opening TextEdit (on the Mac) or Notepad (on Windows), but where’s the joy in that experience?

Did you grow up on an Apple ][ using AppleWorks with a green-on-black monochrome monitor? WriteRoom’s default scheme duplicates just that environment. Did you have the DOS PC’s common white-on-blue? Or can you just not stand anything but black-on-white? Fine, the color scheme is customizable. So is the font, so you don’t have to stick with a monospaced font, although it sure adds to the nostalgia.
And the best part is that you don’t have to give up the multitasking bit to use WriteRoom. You can run iTunes and download that huge file in the background, but experience a visually simple and uncluttered experience while working on your text document.

WriteRoom is for the Mac only, and the original version is free. A clone called Dark Room was written to respectfully “capture the essence of WriteRoom” for Windows machines, and is also free.

I was testing an OS upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 on a ColdFusion webserver earlier this week, and I experienced only one hiccup, although it was a momentary show stopper.

The ODBC services would not start, and although the “ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server” service was started, browsing ColdFusion pages received an odd error page:

500 NULL

There was a Macromedia TechNote about this matter, although it was unresolved as of the TechNote’s last update.

Whereas a Google search will uncover many other times this error may pop up, my circumstances applied after the OS upgrade and on every single page view in its entirety.

The TechNote gives a good hint when it says the error can be caused by an empty or missing license.properties file. My answer was similar: The user that the ColdFusion service was running as didn’t have permission, after the upgrade, to read from the CFusionMX7 directory.

I gave the user read rights and everything began working wonderfully.

If you haven’t seen it yet, David Pogue’s video discussing whether Windows Vista copies Mac OS X is pretty entertaining material…for Mac enthusiasts, anyway.

Even though I think it is pretty blatant, for those of you who do not realize: David is using a common linguistic tool known as sarcasm.

I love funny lists about stuff in the programming realm, like the Levels of JavaScript Knowledge list I stumbled across with Jenny’s help.

Well, here’s a great one about a pet peeve of mine: What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies). Movies almost always portray email clients, the web, app source code, and other computer elements very differently from the way they really look. I know it’s an effort to make these things look more interesting, but seriously, some of the stuff they’ve come up with is pretty wild.

This article points out some of the stupid cinematic effects Hollywood sometimes applies to code. Warning: The author’s language is needlessly inappropriate at times. But if you can get past that, it’s a great laugh.