Archive for May, 2007
Pimp Your Zune
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Yeah I know, Zune. A complete flop. Well, unless of course you consider 10% of a market in 6 months a flop. (We knew this was going to happen.) If you’re interested in making your Zune stand out amongst the other million or so out there here in the states, Colorware will sell you a new one in any of 26 customized color schemes, or you can ship your existing Zune back to them to have it pimped for about $75.00. Since I’m pretty confident I’ll be picking up a rev 2 Zune in the fall (or two), I’m going to send my rev 1 in for a make-over. I’m thinking of going with a John Deere theme. Call me crazy, but I think it’s going to look pretty sweet. 
I should also point out that iPod lovers out there can do the same with their hardware, except of course you won’t be standing out much since, well, everybody including your grandmother has an iPod.
Update – .. and yes, I’m fully aware of the irony in that last statement.
Unix Build Tools on Windows
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Not much has changed since the last time I worked with cygwin – these tools still totally suck. They are buggy – prone to crashes, freezes, unexplained build failures, out of memory errors, and they leave zombie processes floating around more often than they close down successfully. Not what I’d consider a very productive environment for developing software on Windows.
Hurricane Season Begins Again
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Let’s hope the folks up in Colorado are as good this year as they were in the last at predicting the number of named storms.
The chance of a major hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast between the Florida Panhandle and Brownsville, Texas, is 49 percent; the long-term average is 30 percent. There is also an above-average chance of a major hurricane making landfall in the Caribbean, according to the forecast.
Body Language
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Interesting body language, although it seems they are getting along. Unfortunately Engadget’s blow by blow isn’t very good – nothing compared to their usual detailed blow by blow coverage. It might not be their fault though, sounds like it was pretty free form. Hopefully some video will be up soon, I’m really interested to see the whole thing.
The best part of the technical discussion I’ve read so far is the rich client stuff, one area these two characters can definitely agree on – Gates: “You’re always going to have rich local functionality. It’s about using that together with rich functionality in the cloud.” (No guarantee that’s an original quote.)
Best quote from the fun, banter back and forth side of things: “What’s the greatest misunderstanding about your relationship with each other?”
Steve: “We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade.” (yucks)
Bill: “Neither of us have anything to complain about. People come and go in this industry, it’s nice when someone sticks around.”
Gates likes strong competitors.
Engadget commentary: “People, we’re telling you, these guys really respect each other. There’s no doubt about it. There’s a certain, sombre reverence, and profound respect. It just comes through.”
Hmm, maybe both camps could learn something from that, but odds are we’ll probably keep our legs crossed in opposite directions too.
Update – Here’s some better blow by blow without the commentary, but it’s not complete.
Update – Video
Surface
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Viewing this video, first thing I thought of was ‘Bladerunner’. Deckard should have interacted with one of these at that bar. I can also see Will Smith buying drinks through this as well rather than interacting with some cheesy robot behind a bar. The amazing thing is you’ll be seeing interactive systems like this in use by the end of the year.
Monad
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
I like that .NET objects I’m familiar with are available to me on the command line, as objects:
> “hello, world!”.ToUpper()
HELLO, WORLD!
PowerShell’s codename, Monad, comes from Gottfried Leibniz’s monadology,[4] a philosophy in which the universe is a composite of fundamental elements called monads that are integrated in a “pre-established harmony”. Similarly, PowerShell is a composite of the complex tasks of a series of components. The components are special programs called cmdlets (pronounced command lets), which are .NET classes designed to use the features of the environment. The key difference between the usual UNIX approach and the PowerShell one is that rather than creating a “pipeline” based on textual input and output, PowerShell passes data between the various cmdlets as objects (structured data).
If accessed individually from the command line, a cmdlet’s output will automatically be converted into text, but if its output is to be used by another cmdlet, it will be converted into whatever form of object is most appropriate for that cmdlet’s input. This has the advantage of eliminating the need for the many text-processing utilities which are common in UNIX pipelines, such as grep and awk, as well as allowing things to be combined interactively, or in a scripting environment, which would otherwise require a more complex programming language. For instance, a listing of processes will consist not of text describing them, but objects representing them, so that methods can be called on those objects without explicit reference to any outside structure or library.
Five Years, One Month, Four Days
Friday, May 18th, 2007
Five years, one month, four days – the total time I’ve spent working for VeriSign. The number one reason I’ve managed to shatter all my past employment length records (best record before – one and a half years) was the guy I worked for while there – Gary Krall. If you ever have the opportunity to work for Gary, I highly recommend you take it. He’s a stand up guy who won’t let you down.
Overall, VeriSign is not a bad company to work for – they let me work from home, paid industry rates, had great benefits and for five years through the tireless efforts of my boss, sent me interesting things to work on. So overall, no complaints.
I think though, it’s time to move on, so today was my last day there.
Over five years at a big company you accumulate a lot of baggage – you become the maintainer of a lot of old projects, you go through multiple management shakeups, you see a lot of interesting initiatives die (along with a lot of good code), and you see company management make a lot of crazy decisions. That’s the job. But after a while, you just get tired of it. That’s where I’m at.
So now I am off, on my own, doing consulting again for a while. My first gig will be with Mozilla, doing all things Windows to their Firefox codebase. It should be interesting to see where things lead from there.
Fridge Magnet
Friday, May 18th, 2007
“a small handheld portable device wirelessly connected to a PC running Windows Vista that functions as a normal enhanced device for Windows SideShow. The scribbler enables the user to create handwritten notes on the device’s 3.5” QVGA LCD display using a stylus, and these notes may then be retained on the device or sent to the Windows Vista-based PC for further processing.”
Toss those post-it notes… Ricavision nails it again with this killer SideShow handheld. If that screen is 3.5 inches, then the height looks to be less than an inch. (Does it stream music from Winodws Media Player?) More proof Microsoft is far ahead in the home technology space compared to their competitors.
Dell Ultra-Thin LCD
Friday, May 18th, 2007
My new Dell 30″ display is smokin’, but I’d happily trade it in on something like this. Due out this fall, I’d expect this display to be kinda pricey but given my experience with the 30″ (best display tech on the market / cheapest 30″ on the market) who knows.
Note to Dell – you need to do something about the glare, maybe some sort of treatment on the glass.
Progress?
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
Key senators in both parties and the White House announced agreement Thursday on an immigration overhaul that would grant quick legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and fortify the border.
The plan would create a temporary worker program to bring new arrivals to the U.S and a separate program to cover agricultural workers. Skills and education-level would for the first time be weighted over family connections in deciding whether future immigrants should get permanent legal status. New high-tech employment verification measures also would be instituted to ensure that workers are here legally.
The compromise came after weeks of painstaking closed-door negotiations that brought the most liberal Democrats and the most conservative Republicans together with President Bush’s Cabinet officers to produce a highly complex measure that carries heavy political consequences.
The only signifigant thing this new government has accomplished since they all went back to work in January. Of course, it’s not law yet, we’ll have to see. The bad news if it passes? The whole mess will be managed by the Department of Homeland Security.
