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By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.

A great post from Zach Holman on operating hours at GitHub. For me, I know that even though I’m in the office at 8:30 or 9 in the morning, on most days I don’t actually start being truly productive until after lunch.

Since moving back to Boulder, I’ve been using Viget’s VPN more and more often to grab stuff off of our shared fileserver. I take a fairly minimalist approach to my menu-bar (going so far as to remove the clock from it) so I wasn’t thrilled about having the VPN icon up there but having to open up network preferences to connect and disconnect from the VPN wasn’t terribly fun either.

Enter AppleScript. After a bit of digging, I found that you can script the connecting and disconnecting of a given VPN. Grab the name of the VPN service you’d like to easily toggle and open up AppleScript editor and paste in this script:

tell application "System Events"
    tell current location of network preferences
        set VPNservice to service "VPN SERVICE" -- name of the VPN service
        set isConnected to connected of current configuration of VPNservice
        if isConnected then
            disconnect VPNservice
        else
            connect VPNservice
        end if
    end tell
end tell

You’ll want to change “VPN SERVICE” to the name of your VPN connection from network preferences (retaining the quotes). Running this will switch the states of your VPN from connect to not. That in and of itself isn’t terribly interesting but if you have a app that can handle system-wide hotkeys (like Quicksilver, Alfred, or Keyboard Maestro) you can bind this script to run at the press of a button (for me, it’s just Cmd + F12).

AnandTech just posted a review of Apple’s new Thunderbolt display. All in all it sounds like a great deal for Apple laptop owners. But then there’s this:

That’s right, the only way to get video to the Thunderbolt Display is by using a Thunderbolt enabled Mac (or theoretically a Thunderbolt enabled PC). For Mac users that means only 2011 MacBook Pro, Air, iMac or Mac mini models will work with the Thunderbolt Display.

Which means that if I were to buy a Mac Pro from the apple store right now, I’d have to go somewhere else to buy a display. That’s the most un-Apple-like thing I’ve seen Apple do in a long time.

A wonderful post over at Threat Level on why Netflix integration into Facebook is blocked by federal law. Though mostly about consumer privacy laws, one remark stood out as especially poignant:

…that would make Facebook users even bigger advertising pawns than they already are…

Advertising pawns, indeed.

Using a bundle you’re not quite familiar with in TextMate? Don’t remember exactly what snippet use to generate the model stub in Django (just like me five minutes ago)? Fortunately, TextMate as always has you covered. Pressing CTRL + CMD + T will bring up the “Select Bundle Item” window, allowing you to easily search the current bundles list of snippets and commands.