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February 16, 2007
Technology- Moving to WordPress soon
I'm planning on moving this blog to WordPress soon. I've been using my own hand-rolled software for years and so far its worked out ok. On the plus side it keeps me in deep with various of the latest blog technologies, having to hand-roll them myself. As I wrote on a post over on the new Launch21 blog, the lack of good tools to post make it harder for me to update things frequently and it is just not worth it.
Launch21.com is running on WordPress now, but it will probably take a bit longer to move this site there since I'll want to preserve pretty much all of the old URLs for search engines. Hopefully not too long.
Matt from Judy's book finally started writing a blog and is off to a quick start with a flurry of interesting posts. I'm always a fan of interesting discussions about how to balance innovation, execution, etc. There was an interesting talk at the Northwest Entrepreneurs Forum by Shaun Wolfe, CEO of MessageGate. He called execution "system" and talked about a classic triangle balancing time, system, and innovation. One of his key messages was that its really key for a startup to understand when is the right time to invest in system (process, infrastructure, global scaling, reducing costs, more predictability), given the inevitable impact that has on innovation and rapid development.
On another random topic, Eric asked about what would be a good video card to drive his new Plasma TV nicely and I pointed him to this AnandTech article on HDMI/HDCP capable video cards. For a "TV" you want to find something that supports an HDMI connector at 1080P to get the best results, and ideally that supports the crappy HDCP copy protection stuff so you can play high-def video content.
February 08, 2007
Technology- Semantic Web and Microformats
Dave asks "Is the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) Dead on Arrival?" over on his blog. This reminds me a bit of some of the stuff I was trying to get at when I wrote about the history of RSS, although as usual my writing approach was the boring one and Dave did a great job coming out with an attention grabbing headline.
Some of the general concepts of the Semantic web are great, but the presentations I'd seen never included compelling user scenarios that made me really want to get it. In terms of the Vista marketing, there was no "wow" moment. Furthermore the technical approach was very dry, complicated and impractical.
Microformats and some of the other current trends on the web are a much more reasonable way to go about this kind of thing. Strip down complexity, make it work with the existing infrastucture and let people wire it together. The W3C vision around RDF and whatnot requried people to adjust how they expressed all their data, build new query engines, new outputs of their data from their apps. Ironically for a thing called the Semantic web, it required you to strip the semantics out of your data. From an architectural point of view there are good arguments for this seperation of data and semantics, but it rarely fit in well with any web-sites business strategy.
In other news the new Bloc Party album, A Weekend in the City is out and its available on eMusic immediately. This is a huge score for eMusic and it seems like they would be crazy to not sponsor (or otherwise have a presence at) the Bloc Party tour this spring. I see that they do have a big animated add for the album on their homepage, so it is clear that they get what a big deal this is for them. Of course Bloc Party's own web-site advertises downloading it from iTunes complete with evil DRM that Steve Jobs, despite his letter yesterday, hasn't removed. Given that Bloc Party obviously allows non-DRM protected distribution of thier stuff, this would be a good "put up or shut up" for Mr. Jobs.
February 06, 2007
Technology- DRM and Apple
Many blogs have referenced Steve Job's Thoughts on Music post today. While it is absolutely true that this is a propaganda statement in his battle with EU regulators, and that Steve's business is benefiting greatly from DRM right now, it doesn't matter. The fact that he came out and said this so clearly in public hopefully will help turn the tide away from DRM. Bill Gates in effect said something similar a few weeks ago when chatting with some bloggers but not in as public a way and certainly not as clearly.
For now I'm going to continue to support eMusic as much as possible as a great place to get DRM-free music. Some quick research shows that I can find over 30 of the bands playing at Coachella there so I'm well on my way downloading an album or two from each to decide what I want to go see. I've heard that other services are experimenting with DRM free music and if they do I'll be eager to support them too.
February 01, 2007
WPF- New Feb WPF/E Build available
A new build of WPF/E is now available from here (Windows, Mac). The old one accidentally expired so Microsoft rushed out the update. Tim Sneath has all of the details on his blog.
I'll be working to fix up the demos on here with the new build shortly.
FYI, this new build is apparently good until June 1st.
January 31, 2007
Technology- Adam Bosworth on early days of DHTML
Adam Bosworth gave a talk this week that was picked up in some of the press including this write-up at eWeek and again at Slashdot. He talks about the early days of DHTML and Ajax and some of the Slashdot comments have picked up on his talking about having invented Ajax and suggested this conflicts with my Story of XMLHTTP write up that has been carried in many online outlets lately.
I'll weigh in and say that both are true. To the extent that there is some confusion its because what we call AJAX today is a collection of many things- The basic dynamic HTML infrastructure. The XMLHTTP & async network communication piece. And the patterns of tying it all together.
Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn't have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time).
Having said that, they never built a real app with it and the act of using it for real turned up some missing pieces, leading to XMLHTTP as well as several other things that the Trident and XML teams themselves pioneered. I'd also like to acknowledge the Adaptive Path guys for coming up with a nice description of the approach and giving it a word that wraps it up nicely (Ajax). At Microsoft we totally blew the opportunity to evangelize and get out in front of this approach back in 1999. That itself is a longer story for sometime in the future. I realize that some in the technical community are "all about the engineering" but effective marketing and communication of your ideas is important and we missed out on that.
I do also think that Adam's discussion of why Ajax didn't take off in 1997 misses a key point. Sure, network connections were too slow at the time. The computers themselves and Javascript was too slow (recall that typical machines were 200mhz). The earliest versions of DHTML in IE4 had some.. er.. issues to work out (there was more than one reason that OWA required later versions of the browser). But most importantly I just don't think its realistic to expect the development community to make sweeping shifts to some new technology quickly. As I've mentioned before these things take 3-5 years, so its not much of a surprise that the stuff that was developed incrementally between 1996 and 1998 actually started to hit it big in 2000-2002 and really exploded in 2005-2006.
January 22, 2007
Music- Coachella 2007
The Coachella 2007 line up is out. My first reaction is a simple two words-
HAPPY MONDAYS!!!!
Of course reunions like that usually suck, and live they were supposed to be hit or miss anyway, so I'll have appropriate expectations. That doesn't diminish how exciting it is... And with the news coming on a Monday, what I can say, its a really happy Monday.
Oh, and the Jesus and Mary Chain too. Interpol. The Arcade Fire. Tapes n' Tapes. LCD Soundsystem. Soulwax. Kaiser Chiefs. And tons more. As usual the main attraction isn't the bands I recognize, its the cool new bands out there that I haven't heard yet.
Looking forward to it! And then off to Mix 07 early Monday morning.
I'll try to post a list of Emusic bands that will be playing shortly.
January 19, 2007
Management- Inspiring With the Big Challenge
Another big link today, this time from the folks at Ajaxian. I sit here wondering if saying thank you for a link makes me not cool. Kind of like the person who is over star-struck meeting a famous person or something. Personally I'm not terribly fond of the automated trackbacks (plus, spam has limited their usefulness) and it's the interconnectedness that makes the web work so I'm going to do it anyway. Thank you Dion!
The combination of the new interest in that write up and a conversation with a client yesterday of course reminds me of another good story. As we were developing Exchange 2000 / Outlook Web Access we would meet with Bob Muglia pretty much every week. At the time Bob was our senior VP and was running a pretty huge organization (I think including all of Office). The amazing thing was that despite the size of his organization he managed to still be very involved. Execs that combined the ability to get it when they saw something important and at the same time inspire people to drive hard made that a very exciting place to work.
Outlook Web Access was very much a "catch up" project. We started about halfway through Exchange 2000, and were working very quickly to build as much functionality as possible. Outlook has an incredibly deep feature set including tasks, this thing called the Journal, and of course tons of contacts and calendar features. At this point we had gotten the basic mail part working but not much else.
I don't know how he pulled it off, but when we showed Bob a demo of the mail stuff, he managed to do this really cool thing. He managed to show how enthusiastic he was about what we had pulled off so far. And at the same time somehow he challenged us something along the lines of "of course contacts are hard, you probably can't have contacts working quickly". The next week we demoed the contact list and again, he was enthusiastic, but of course the "card" view would be tricky. We managed to go for quite some time and every week Jim and Bob somehow managed to pull off a whole major section of the application into good enough shape for me to demo it.
I'm pretty sure that Bob and Gord Mangione (our GM) knew the difference between getting something to the point where you can demo it vs. shipping to enterprise customers. Getting this stuff polished and out the door was a huge effort and considerably less glamorous than those rapid development days, but I don't think we would have made it to there without the special kind of encouragement we had at the outset. There is a special balance you need to strike as a manager to create the right atmosphere so that people feel challenged but not overburdened.
Too often the relationship between a development team and their management is some adversarial one where the development team feels they need to push back on schedules and challenges. I think one of the sources of this problem rests in our assumptions that software like other engineering disciplines should be something you can accurately schedule. Developers that can come in on time are thought of as more professional. Plus, I get how difficult it can be to plan a marketing launch or other business issues that need lots of advance notice when your developers can't predict how long it will take to finish.
The sad fact is that as a developer I really dislike being pushed to make an accurate estimate of how long a project is going to take, and as a program manager I dislike having to push my development team for accurate estimates. It takes the right developers, but if your business and team can support it, you can get lots more done by not having a fixed schedule, tackling projects incrementally with nice bite sized steps, and just driving hard to get them done as quickly as possible. Sometimes you will hit roadblocks and something will take longer than expected, but this model doesn't leave you feeling guilty for missing some arbitrary schedule and encourages people to think of different ways around the problem.
In other news I'm thrilled to see that the new version of Prototype, 1.5 is now available. I've enjoyed using this library quite a bit to make Javascript much easier to deal with. I haven't seen any good summary of what has changed in the new version yet, stay tuned.
January 18, 2007
General- Blog Posts and Giving Proper Credit
Dare Obasanjo linked to my Story of XmlHttp this morning. It will be interesting to observe how much traffic a popular blog with great Google rankings like his creates. Given that good links are the currency of the web, I owe Dare a big thank you. And of course for any new visitors today, welcome.
The funny thing is that my first reaction was to be a bit stressed out. XmlHttp itself was a fairly small project as such things go, but even the smallest things at Microsoft need the contributions of so many people to pull them off. I'm confident that I forgot to mention many important people who helped and I hope they aren't too offended.
Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2000 was in many ways a much bigger accomplishment and of course the acknowledgement list for that project would have to be much much longer. XmlHTTP was just one small missing piece that helped pull off what is now called the Ajax architecture, but OWA is the place where the techniques to use it and to really build rich applications in the web browser really came together.
One interesting story- while we were developing Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2000, we were stressed that the rich version only worked for IE5 which had just barely shipped and was not widely deployed, especially in enterprise. We had an HTML 3.2 version that could run with any web-browser, but we not sure about the reaction we would get from our top customers to the IE5 requirement for the best experience. One thing that I thought was great about working in the Exchange team was that I had lots of opportunity to present to these big enterprise customers and meet with their CIOs and top Exchange administrators in person. These guys surprised us- I probably did a couple of dozen presentations to these guys and never once did I get any pushback on the IE5 thing. The more common reaction was that they saw so much value in having a server-driven app like Outlook Web Access that they said they were going to push up IE5 deployments to make sure all of their employees could access it. It does go to show that when you build a compelling platform and show the specific business justification, the deployment happens easily, and the IE and Trident teams deserve a ton of credit for having stuck with that vision for dynamic HTML applications for such a long time.
January 09, 2007
TV- CBS Making Progress
It is pretty amazing to me the sorry state of the TV networks taking advantage of the Internet as a distribution medium. The only real excuse is that most people don't have a computer hooked up to a TV yet so they can't really watch TV programming sent via their computer. Still, with a set of early adopters all over it, you would think someone would get in front of this trend.
So far the best solution I've found is Amazon Unbox. Unbox is cool enough that I'm planning on cancelling some of the premium channels on cable and just getting individual programs via Unbox. While I felt that $2 per program was too much for TV (its still too much for 30min programs, they need to price differentiate more), when I look at how many programs I can buy a month and still save over the Comcast subscription, it becomes easier to justify. Plus I get real DVD quality content, better than most broadcast HD and I get to replay anytime at that quality.
The other night we went to watch the latest CSI episode and discovered that the recorded version was trash. Somewhere between the Media Center and the HD broadcast antenna the results were jumpy and cut out. Since CSI is one of the programs available on Unbox I went there to get the program. This was a day after the broadcast but the new episode wasn't online yet. This I really don't get- hey, if I'm paying $2 to watch it, they should pretty much have it available online before the normal broadcast time if anything.
However a quick visit to the CBS web-site saved me. They have this new video player they call the InnerTube that has full episodes of most of the shows available a couple of hours after the west-coast air time. They force you to watch a couple of ads, but thankfully they are fairly brief (although they crank up the volume even worse than normal broadcast ads do).
The quality isn't as good as Amazon but its almost as good as broadcast/cable after you PVR it. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. Now if someone had a $20/month subscription service that would give me all the HD quality video of TV shows I want...
December 28, 2006
Vista- Windows Vista Tips
With the consumer release of Vista coming out in a few weeks I've been playing with RC2 and thought I'd document some of my experiences and tips for Vista users.
My first time is to suggest turning User Account Control off. This is a good intentioned feature that was intended to help improve the security of the system by normally running all programs in a restricted mode and requiring you to authorize administrative things. Unfortunately for me normal usage of my machine involves 10-100 of these so-called administrative things all day long, and with User Account Control turned on Windows Vista gives you constant pop-up dialogs asking if you want to do something. Over and over.
To turn it off go to your User Accounts control panel. Select "Turn User Account Control on or off" at the end of the list. A description of the feature appears with a checkbox. Uncheck the box and click OK.
Note- I'd only really recommend this if you feel confident in running your system and keeping it virus-free on your own. Microsoft loves bugging you with these security dialogs so much that they will give you a piece of toast every time you boot if you turn it off. Still, one toast per boot is way better than the constant nagging. And to be clear, plenty of user-research has shown that techniques like this don't work to improve real security since users just become habituated to clicking "ok" over and over and stop actually reading the dialogs or thinking about their context.
December 26, 2006
Technology- (Con)Fusion
I have been in hell with my main work laptop since Friday. On Friday I tried installing the Visual Studio SP1 upgrade. The first time I tried the upgrade I didn't realize that I'd need 2+ GB of free space so the installer failed. VS SP1 apparently still has a bug where if the install fails, the roll-back fails horribly, corrupting your .NET 2.0 install. Trying to run the VS SP1 setup or repair the .NET 2.0 gives you the cryptic error message "Error 25007.Error occurred while initializing fusion. Setup could not load fusion with LoadLibraryShim(). Error: The handle is invalid.".
Since then I've spent 3 days uninstalling and reinstalling things and trying to find advice on web-sites for how to fix the problem. Most of the advice didn't help but I finally found a suggestion in the end of this post that solved the problem. By deleting the c:\Windows\WinSxS\Policies directory, I could reinstall .NET 2.0 and proceed from there. What a nightmare.
I'm a little reluctant to point this out since there were some very good people on the team, but its pretty clear that some of the fundamental underlying problem is the technology called Fusion. This was an ambitious effort to fix some of the system fragility problems with the registry and dll-hell on Windows. The result can only be described as a fix that is 10x worse that the problem. The registry certainly has its problems, and most developers had figured out how to rename DLLs with strange version #s when they made incompatible changes. Things were fragile but a reasonably skilled Windows power-user or developer could fix them. With fusion the model is so much more complex and the databases are more opaque so pretty much the only people who can fix problems are the developers on the Fusion team. Its incredibly easy to get the wrong thing in the GAC (global assembly cache) or otherwise make some minor configuration mistake that is almost impossible to fix.
Who knows, maybe this is a product opportunity. It seems like pretty soon there might be a big market for fusion repair tools. Go for it...
December 25, 2006
Skiing- All I Want For Christmas is 1' Fresh Snow
And Christmas morning we woke up to find Whistler buried under 11 inches of fresh powder. Light stuff too. Ok, so it wasn't a full foot but close enough.
Our initial plan was to go to Snowbird again but a few weeks ago the snow reports there were not looking very good so we cancelled those reservations. The plan was to wait until this week and then see if what spots had great snow and look for deals. I was happy to see that Whistler was reporting over 100" snow-base and their Last Minute Hotel Deals page had a 5-star hotel listed for $169/night again, over half off the normal rates.
December 22, 2006
Technology- Judy's Book After Christmas Guide
Speaking of Judy's Book I thought it was worth mentioning some features I've worked on the past couple of weeks. Now that we have the deals site up and running solidly it has been very cool to succesfully build and ship some new features in less than a week.
A couple of weeks ago Chad and I built a Coupon Finder that uses a little bit of AJAX to work somewhat like the Google Suggest feature. You just start typing a phrase and as you type it issues queries and updates the display in real-time. The key was keeping the results really compact and the queries light-weight enough that the performance is really good. If it were slower at returning the results the usability would be poor. As it is the feature feels (to me) cool and responsive.
That same week we shipped a Holiday shipping guide. This was pretty crucial to turn around quickly while the data was still useful to people. Getting it out the door was an interesting exercise in rapid development. It was a mostly content-oriented mini-site, but the data entry was turning out to be very error-prone. We switched it to be driven by a table of data and were succesful at getting the initial version out on time, but there were issues to fix for a few days after the initial launch. From my perspective that was fine- with a web app if its not horribly broken, the cost of doing updates should be fairly low and there is little evidence of your mistakes later.
Yesterday we got online a After Christmas Sale Guide that was built on a similar structure to the holiday shipping guide. Based on the experience with the first guide I built a structure for creating generic "guide" sites. It seems like these things are very useful to people who visit the deals site, and they also provide a good source of incoming organic search users. In theory this generic version will let us deploy a new guide by editing an Excel file, three lines in a config file and no real code. If I had tried to build the generic version before we did the first guide I'm pretty certain I would have screwed it up- either made it too complicated or created a structure that didn't provide us with the right flexibility. Since we worked out the model in the first place, and then encapsulated it into code later, I had an easy model to follow. Of course I'm sure there will be many additions for future versions, but from my perspective it was a pretty good validation about rapid iterative models of software development.
December 21, 2006
Technology- Launch21
For the past few months I've been both working on some of my own sites like CalendarData as well as working with some other start-ups like Judy's Book. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to work with lots of different projects and the local environment is incredibly dynamic right now. It is pretty cool just being able to dip your fingers into some of the latest new stuff. With the advances in the ability to develop web-applications via that stuff that gets called "web 2.0" and the recent releases of WPF and WPF/E the environment also seems especially well suited for my skills.
A couple of weeks ago Peyman and I decided to combine forces and we created Launch21. Launch21 is a consulting group that specializes in rapid development of both traditional web 2.0 sites (ok, its funny calling them traditional) as well as WPF and WPF/E based projects. We are combining our tool-chests of libraries that we have been developing and are pretty convinced we can offer some unique time-to-market for people who want to get something out to the public quickly.Today we signed our first deal. Of course I can't say what it is, but we are off and rolling.
December 19, 2006
Technology- Virtualization
The power came back on late Sunday night- what a relief. All that I can say is that having the power off was miserable. I can't imagine how horrible it must be for people who still don't have power now that the work week has started. At least we didn't run out of laundry and were able to go to the gym for a hot shower.
It is pretty incredibly how poor the information availability was during the past week. Back at the 2003 PDC we did all kinds of demos of cool visualizations for situation-rooms and emergency response centers. But we never mentioned anything about helping provide information to people so they can find out what is going on. I'm sure there are kinds of social issues involved with providing more detailed information (why is that block prioritized ahead of mine?) but it still seems like we could do much better.
With my server running nicely in its rack in the datacenter, I thought I'd mention how great of a change it is to have modern virtualization technology. This is one of those things that took a bit to sink in. It was pretty clear right away why it was cool to have virtual memory and preemptive multi-tasking back a couple of decades ago. But when I can run all my apps at once nicely in one OS, why would I care about running more than one OS?
But with just 1U of space in the datacenter, the flexibility that virtualization gives me is just really amazing. The machine I got can easily expand to more than 10GB ram, 8 cores of CPUs, and 3TB of disks space. Those upgrades are all much easier than buying an extra hardware box. And eventually I'm sure I will buy an extra piece of hardware for redundancy. But in the meantime I can setup the services I'm building, deploy them on their own virtual machines, and they are all easy to manage. System updates used to be scary for a server when you don't have physical access, since if the machine didn't reboot right, you weren't there to reset it. Now if I need to reset a "machine" I just log into the host machine and go to its console.
Once I have a second server, I don't need to do any complicated reconfiguration. I can just move some of the VM configurations to the new box, and start them up. I didn't even have to shut-down my app servers to bring the physical hardware to the data center- they were all suspended, and once I booted up the host they were all able to just resume. I could be wrong but it looks like reboot times might be much easier to manage and much quicker with this setup too.
This stuff is going to be industry-changing for sure. Its already taking off quite a bit, but its clear that within a couple of years its going to be ubiquitous. On the other hand, Microsoft's current licensing schemes seem like they are going to be a serious problem. Just dealing with product activation already puts Windows Server at a huge disadvantage in this kind of world where its trivially easy to just clone a Linux machine image but Windows Server puts me through many more hoops to get it to work. Microsoft is going to have to figure out how to charge (and not gouge) for this stuff without being too much of a nightmare for the administrator. If they don't their already precarious position in the server space is going to collapse.
December 16, 2006
Home- Power is out
Thursday night we had a huge wind storm here in Seattle and the power has been out in our neighborhood for a day and a half now. Since my email server has been hosted out of my house, it is down at the moment and presumably my email is bouncing. I'm going to try to move it somewhere hosted as soon as possible- for now I haven't heard any solid predictions of how long it will take to get the power back. Oh, and its getting pretty chilly at home too. At least the stove works and we have a ton of candles.
I went and installed the Fast Carrot server at GridZones last night. With the power out it wasn't doing any good and this way maybe I can make a push to get the site ported over to it over the weekend.
Update: My email appears to be working now. I've moved it to a hosted service so that should be safer.
December 13, 2006
WPF- Upcoming conferences
Mike Taulty has posted a cool sample of playing 12 video streams at once and animating them using WPF/E. It looks like there is a bug on Windows where the videos aren't caching property so it looks like the video is being downloaded 12 seperate times. The Mac doesn't have the same issue but the video playback and especially the animation are not nearly as smooth (despite my Mac having a slightly faster CPU than the PC).
It looks like both MIX07 and the Microsoft PDC have been scheduled for 2007. I've added them both to my calendar of technology events on CalendarData.com. At the moment I'm more likely to go to Mix than the PDC, but we will see when it gets a bit closer. I'm already planning on being in Palm Springs for Coachella 2007 the night before so flying down to Vegas is just a short hop.
December 11, 2006
Technology- Building out hosting servers
I will shortly be moving the hosting for CalendarData.com and probably associated sites. So far I have been using 1and1 which has worked out fine for development purposes, at least on the linux side. Their ASP.net hosting is pretty horrible and once the traffic starts to build as it has for calendardata, their solutions are insufficient.
My current approach is to build out 1U servers using the Tyan Tank GT20 barebones. They seem to offer the most flexibility since you can put 2x Intel Woodcrest CPUs in which themselves can be each up to 4 cores, + it supports 4 hot-swap hard-drives. Running either VMWare or Xen for virtualization I can easily deploy multiple "servers" on one unit and as I need more capacity I can initially upgrade that first physical server with more RAM, CPU and disk, and later move them off to additional physical servers.
I'm currently shopping for a co-location service. In addition to the folks I mentioned back in March I'm also looking at gridzones- they have some attractive rates for 1U, although I'm trying to find someone who has experience with their service.
On the WPF/E front, I've revised my "detectwpfe.js" script. It now encodes the user setting as WPFE/YES/IE so that it will group better in the Google analytics display where the YES or NO is the most important state to analyze. You can download the update here.
December 06, 2006
WPF- WPF/E More Questions
The main set of questions that stand out with WPF/E at the moment is to figure out just what is missing (and what will be missing when the final version ships). One of the nice aspects is the install is smaller, and it runs on Macs, etc. But it doesn't appear to use the same high fidelity text engine and all that that the full WPF does. The real WPF isn't a strict superset of WPF/E, to run without the CLR and on other platforms I suspect that its actually a completely different implementation. It would be nice if, on machines where full WPF exists you automatically got the benefits of full WPF, and the WPF/E engine only ran when its not there.
But I guess this brings us to one of the slightly confusing parts of the wonderful Microsoft technology naming. WPF/E isn't really that similar to WPF. It's a different engine, a different runtime model, etc. Hopefully they share some of the same rendering code, but mostly from a programming point of view the only thing they share is the ability to specify things in XAML. Even there, you window up using the http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007 namespace for WPF/E and the http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml namespace for WPF (and some of the later namespace is used for WPF/E also).
What this means is that you can create a XAML file for WPF/E. Double click it in the explorer and it will open in IE, and WPF will try to render it, but fail. Presumably this is a minor inconsistency that Microsoft can fix (although its not clear if that can be fixed in the final 1.0 version of WPF/E or if it needs to wait for a new version of .NET or if its just something you can work around in authoring your XAML).
It is clear that it is still early days for this stuff. WPF/E doesn't even have a textbox yet. Presumably that is a key thing for them to add before they ship version 1. In the end I'm VERY glad that Microsoft choose to get this out into the community so we could start working with it at such an early stage- it looks like yet another sign of a more responsive Microsoft.
On another front, I'd point out that the support for media that is in the existing build is critical. So many of the scenarios where people want to embed richer content involve media, and this is one of the most common uses of flash around the web. The notion that this is a runtime where I can just play WMV and WMA on any browser any where and that its much easier to construct those players than with flash will be a critical strategic advantage for Microsoft.
Shawn Wildermuth had a good post covering some of the points of what WPF/E actually is.
On another front, I'm working on some tools to report to Google analytics how many of your users have WPF/E installed vs. not. It seems like it will be very interesting to track what percentage of my audience already has it when they come to my web-sites. I've created a small JavaScript function that detects the browser, platform and whether or not WPF/E is installed.
function GetWPFEStatus()
{
var Status = "WPFE-";
var Installed = false;
if((navigator.appVersion.indexOf('MSIE') != -1))
{
Status += "IE-";
try
{
var TheWPFE = new ActiveXObject("AgControl.AgControl.0.8");
if(TheWPFE)
Installed = true;
}
catch(e)
{
}
}
else
{
try
{
if((window.GeckoActiveXObject && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Windows') != -1))
Status += "FF-WIN-";
else if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Macintosh") != -1)
Status += "MAC-";
else if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Linux") != -1)
Status += "LINUX-";
else
Status += "UNK-";
for (var i=0; i < navigator.plugins.length; i++ )
{
if(navigator.plugins[i].name.indexOf('WPF/E') != -1 ||
navigator.plugins[i].name.indexOf('WPFe') != -1)
{
Installed=true;
break;
}
}
}
catch(e)
{
}
}
if(Installed)
{
Status += "YES";
}
else
{
Status += "NO";
}
return Status;
}
You can then wire this in to your Google Analytics reporting like this-
<script src="/detectwpfe.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> __utmSetVar(GetWPFEStatus()); _uacct = "-your-code-here-"; urchinTracker(); </script>
Yesterday's technique to animate the text rotation was a good exercise in talking to WPF/E with Javascript, but not really the most efficient way to do an animation in WPF/E. Today I've got an update that uses the built in animation objects. One interesting point is that while the built-in technique is more efficient, it isn't necessarily more clear in the code...
The code for the example-
<script type="text/javascript" src="aghost.js"></script>
<script type="text/xaml" id="xamlContent2"><?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!-- HelloWorld.xaml -->
<Canvas
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Name="CanvasID"
Loaded="javascript:onHelloWorldLoaded"
Width="300" Height="30" >
<Rectangle Width="300" Height="300">
<Rectangle.Fill>
<RadialGradientBrush
GradientOrigin="0.5,0.5" Center="0.5,0.5"
RadiusX="0.5" RadiusY="0.5">
<GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0" />
<GradientStop Color="Red" Offset="0.25" />
<GradientStop Color="Blue" Offset="0.75" />
<GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1" />
</RadialGradientBrush>
</Rectangle.Fill>
</Rectangle>
<TextBlock Canvas.Top="120" Canvas.Left="60" FontFamily="Verdana" FontSize="24">
<TextBlock.Triggers>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="TextBlock.Loaded">
<BeginStoryboard>
<Storyboard>
<DoubleAnimation
Storyboard.TargetName="RotateID"
Storyboard.TargetProperty="Angle"
From="0" To="360" Duration="0:0:30" AutoReverse="False" RepeatBehavior="Forever" />
</Storyboard>
<</BeginStoryboard>
</EventTrigger>
</TextBlock.Triggers>
<TextBlock.RenderTransform>
<RotateTransform CenterX="80" CenterY="30" x:Name="RotateID" />
</TextBlock.RenderTransform>
Hello, world</TextBlock>
</Canvas>
</script>
<div id="WpfeControlHost2">
<script type="text/javascript">
new agHost( "WpfeControlHost2", // DIV tag id.
"WpfeControl2", // WPF/E control id.
"300", // Width of rectangular region of WPF/E control in pixels.
"300",
null,
"xamlContent2");// Height of rectangular region of WPF/E control in pixels.
// All other property values are set to their default values.
</script>
</div>
December 05, 2006
WPF- WPF/E Hello World
From 2001-2005 I worked on the Avalon team (now called WPF) creating the next generation user-interface and graphics platform. One of the more disappointing things about leaving in 2005 is that the things I'd been working on where not ready for prime time yet, and it would be years before it would make sense to really dive in again for real-world projects. The other issue is just that the size of the platform (huge download) and big app model changes (Avalon/WPF is mostly code-first so existing web-sites would need to be really rethought to adopt it.
Yesterday Microsoft put the community preview of WPF/E (E is for Everywhere). They took the core graphics concepts of Avalon, the XAML language and packaged it in a 1MB download, with an object model designed to work inside web pages and be programmed from Javascript. Even better it works in Firefox and on the Mac. This is a huge breakthrough- a 1MB download really isn't that big of a deal and the broad platform support (hopefully Linux?) and consistent programming model makes it way easier to buy in to the technology.
Without further delay, here is my first "Hello World" thing in WPF/E. Just a little rotating text on a gradient, but doing this with existing browser platforms would have been a big pain.
Note- this probably won't work in most blog readers, if you want to check it out, visit my site. If WPF/E is not already installed it should take you to the download site. Downloads are available for Windows and the Mac.
Here is the XAML used in this sample:
<Canvas
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Name="CanvasID"
Loaded="javascript:onHelloWorldLoaded"
Width="300" Height="30" >
<Rectangle Width="300" Height="300">
<Rectangle.Fill>
<RadialGradientBrush
GradientOrigin="0.5,0.5" Center="0.5,0.5"
RadiusX="0.5" RadiusY="0.5">
<GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0" />
<GradientStop Color="Red" Offset="0.25" />
<GradientStop Color="Blue" Offset="0.75" />
<GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1" />
</RadialGradientBrush>
</Rectangle.Fill>
</Rectangle>
<TextBlock Canvas.Top="120" Canvas.Left="60" FontFamily="Verdana" FontSize="24">
<TextBlock.RenderTransform>
<RotateTransform CenterX="80" CenterY="30" x:Name="RotateID" />
</TextBlock.RenderTransform>
Hello, world</TextBlock>
</Canvas>
And here is the Javascript:
// aghost.js is a library from Microsoft for constructing a WPF/E object on all browsers
<script type="text/javascript" src="aghost.js"></script>
<DIV id="wpfeControl1Host" style="width:300; height:300; background:White">
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
var TheWPF= new agHost("wpfeControl1Host", // hostElementID (HTML element to put WPF/E
// ActiveX control inside of -- usually a <div>)
"wpfobj", // ID of the WPF/E ActiveX control we create
"300", // Width
"300", // Height
"#ffB42600", // Background color
null, // SourceElement (name of script tag containing xaml)
"helloworld.xaml", // Source file
"false", // IsWindowless
"24", // MaxFrameRate
null); // OnError handler (method name -- no quotes)
var CurAngle = 0;
function DoTick()
{
wpf = document.getElementById("wpfobj");
var rotate = wpf.findName("RotateID");
// Determine whether the object was found.
if (rotate != null) {
rotate.Angle = (++CurAngle);
}
window.setTimeout("DoTick()", 50);
}
function onHelloWorldLoaded(sender, eventArgs)
{
window.setTimeout("DoTick()", 50);
}
December 04, 2006
Cooking- Peking Turkey
For the past couple of years Hillel and I have wanted to do some interesting things for Thanksgiving beyond the usual turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry. We often talked about ideas like imagining thanksgiving as an Asian holiday.
Last year we tried to do thanksgiving as a small plates meal. Overall I'd call it a disaster. Some of the dishes worked out ok, some failed (truffle mini-souffles) and the many-courses of small plates format kept a bunch of us psycho busy in the kitchen the whole night.
This year Michael agreed to host Thanksgiving and in the end almost 50 people were invited. With that many people we needed some good coordination and we had an opportunity to do both traditional versions of many dishes as well as jazzing things up a little bit. We did three turkeys- one traditional roasted, one deep friend, and my experiment for this year was a Peking Turkey.
Basically the idea was to cook a turkey using the techniques normally applied to Peking duck. Part of the motivation was some less than stellar skin on previous turkeys. Since Peking duck is known for its great crispy skin I wondered if the approach would work on a turkey.
The basic notion is to dry out the turkey and then baste it with some flavored boiling water for 10 minutes. This seals the skin and helps keep the juices in when you cook it. Then you hang it for 8 hours with a fan on it and brush it with a honey-water mix every couple of hours. Then you roast it fairly conventionally. The skin browned fairly quickly, so make sure to cover it in foil and turn down the heat once it browns.
Overall I think it worked out very well and I'd be tempted to try it again. The usual duck recipes tell you to remove the leg bones and I should have followed that- when the turkey was hung the blood all accumulated in the drumsticks and couldnt really drain.
Hillel wrote up some of the meal here on tastingmenu with some pictures. One other observation- I think the class we took at the CIA was some pretty good prep for an event like this. Cooking for 50 can be pretty hectic and we had it mostly all prepped and ready to go with only reasonable amount of work on Thanksgiving afternoon itself.
December 03, 2006
General- Good news from the UK
Two pieces of good news Via Guy Kawasaki's latest post. First of all, Wagamama is apparently opening a branch in Boston. Sounds like its time to start campaigning for a Seattle presence. Tastingmenu has a write up on Wagamama that gives a good feel for what is so cool about this. The bottom line is they just seem to "get it" on many levels. Good food, nothing too complex, nice high-tech ordering, a great experience.
Guy also brings us news that a UK start-up called SpinVox is bringing email delivery of voice mail to cell-phones. I've pretty much always hated voice-mail. It has always felt like this huge disruptive context switch for me to go listen to some messages, make sure I have someplace to take notes, and all that. I'm much happier communicating in email, IM, or in-person meetings that by telephones and voice-mail, but of course I need to be able to adapt to how other people what to communicate also.
First of all its incredibly stupid that I can't get my Verizon cell-phone voicemail delivered to my email inbox as voice attachments. Email systems like Exchange have had this capability for at least 6 or 7 years and really it shouldn't be hard at all to just configure the voice-mail system to send me an email. But the SpinVox goes a step further and translates the voice message to text. From my perspective this is perfect since everyone can operate in the medium that they prefer and still get along just fine.
November 28, 2006
Technology- I Bought a Mac
Last week I got my new MacBook. It has been exactly 10 years since I last bought a Mac, just after I joined Microsoft in November 1996.
From 1984 through 1995 I was primarily a Mac developer. In the mid 90s the combination of the stagnation of the Mac platform (at that time) and the new stable Windows NT operating system brought me over to the Windows world. I was writing cross-platform software, but at the time I needed to reboot my Mac every time my application crashed, and Windows could just restart the process and keep going. As a developer you do that a lot so I started using the Windows machine more and more and eventually had little reason to keep using a Mac at all.
This year the situation has changed quite a bit. Im working on my own projects and would like to make sure that the web stuff works well with the Safari browser on the Mac. The Mac also has this application iCal which can sync calendars from a web-site and I want to make sure it works well with CalendarData.com.
But even more importantly, the switch to the Intel chips, something the Mac faithful had been speculating about for years, has made a huge difference in the practicality of using a Mac. My new MacBook is a GREAT Windows laptop. But best of all, with one key-press I can switch between the Mac OS, Windows Vista, and Linux and back to the Mac OS. Using the Parallels virtual machine software this laptop gives me the ultimate flexibility which is just a huge advantage.
After ten years away from the platform my Mac skills have gotten very rusty. As I usually do Ill be posting my discoveries on here as I play with new utilities and all that fun stuff. If you want to follow me, Judy's Book's deals site has a page of deals for the Apple store.
November 17, 2006
Technology- SOAP and S is for Simple
I've seen lots of links today to Pete Lacey's post "S is for Simple". This more or less makes fun of just how complex SOAP turned out to be with all its layers of XML schema, options, and other such mess. The general point is dead on and I've been a big fan of simpler REST-style mechanisms for wiring things up. The SOAP stuff works great when you stick with a single vendors tool-kit, especially just cranking it all out in Visual Studio, but wiring up dissimilar platforms is still a mess.
Pete's post points out that SOAP doesn't really use HTTP and mostly just tunnels through it. It doesn't put anything meaningful in the URL or use HTTP response codes in a meaningful way. He then points out that the SOAPAction HTTP header is mysterious and no one knows what it is for.
If I remember things correctly, SOAPAction is at least partly my fault. During the era when SOAP was being developed there were several different faction inside Microsoft involved with Internet protocol stuff. The faction that I was more associated with was more directly involved in the development of HTTP and HTTP extensions like WebDAV while another set of people had come from an RPC background and were developing SOAP. To be fair this was a classic case of a couple of groups of people by in large trying to work with each other, but not taking the time to really understand the other groups view-points, perspectives and expertise, and this was probably worse on the HTTP-fan side.
In any case, we were working with the SOAP guys to try to make SOAP more integrated with HTTP rather than just tunneling through it. HTTP has mechanisms of namespace, feature negotiation, authentication, error reporting and more, none of which SOAP used. On the other hand the SOAP guys were just trying to build their SOAP features and figuring out how to interact with all this HTTP stuff seemed like it was just going to delay them, plus it would make it harder to apply SOAP over other infrastructures (not that I've heard of anyone doing SOAP over SMTP or anything in real-life).
So we were left with trying to come up with practical arguments with why SOAP needed to follow more HTTP rules to be successful in the marketplace. For better or worse the only argument we really came up with was that HTTP protocols often have to go through HTTP proxy servers to get in and out of firewalls. By simply tunneling everything we pointed out that the administrators of those firewalls might lock down the traffic and not be able to differentiate between SOAP traffic, web-browser form submissions, etc. We didn't want the proxy to have to parse all the XML in the request to tell what was happening.
Initially we were asking for SOAP to be handled over a different method from POST. Our argument was that HTTP methods were the extensibility mechanism for HTTP protocol stuff and since POST had another function, it was not appropriate to reuse it for a very different type of thing. The counter-argument was that there were various HTTP stacks and proxies that didn't handle methods other than the built-in ones and by using a different method we would limit the reach of the protocol. The compromise was the SOAPAction header which a proxy could use to tell the difference between normal web-browser form submission and SOAP traffic, and differenetiate between different types of SOAP requests. In theory this would give the administrators some needed control of their firewalls.
Cue forward a few years, and it was probably a mistake. I haven't heard of anyone using it for anything useful and it just creates extra complexity and another thing to get wrong trying to interoperate between different implementations.
One last note- the Internet community has a long history of slapping the "Simple" term on things more as wishful thinking than reality.
November 10, 2006
Technology- Paged SQL Queries
The last two times I asked a question on here the result was so succesful I figure I may as well try it again.
One of the most common scenarios for querying a database is a paged result, either in a rich-client listbox scenario, or in a web-page where it shows you page x of Y. MySql has this cool syntax where you can do something like:
SELECT * from xxx LIMIT 500,10
Which means give me lines 500-509 of the resultset I'm asking for. So if I'm displaying a page with 10 entries on each page and want to show page #51, I just do the above.
As far as I can tell Microsoft SQL Server has no equivalent syntax. You can do something similar to this with a cursor, but as far as I can tell its complicated to do (at least I haven't seen any easy boilerplate that I can use everywhere). Plus there are all these different kinds of cursors and its hard to understand the performance trade-offs of each.
Now to be fair, I don't know the real performance of the MySql implementation. Presumably when you say LIMIT 500,10 the database is calculating the first 510 lines of the result set and only returning 10. But the easy way with SQL server involves returning all 510 lines and then throwing away the first 500, which can't be better. Plus in theory given the knowledge you want that 51st page, MySql could be doing some cool optimizations to improve performance.
So- anyone with advice on the best way to do this with Microsoft SQL Server? Write please... Thanks!
November 06, 2006
Politics- HBO Special Hacking the Vote is online
The HBO special "Hacking the Vote" is online now on Google video. There are few things more important to our democracy than the basic fairness of the elections- that every vote gets counted and that every citizen is given a fair opportunity to cast the ballot that they want to cast.
Related to this I wanted to raise another issue. Increasingly people are switching to mail-in ballots and in Seattle this year the ballot is so thick that it requires two stamps. Granted, people have the opportunity to go vote in person without paying anything, but given how much we save with the mail-in-ballots, shouldn't the state be paying for the postage? That would also reduce the opportunities for votes to be lost due to mailing errors (although I do understand that the postal service is going to deliver ballots even if they don't have enough postage).
November 03, 2006
Technology- The Web is Awesome!
I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how cool the web is. Yesterday I posted about the strange behavior I've seen on my laptop. This morning Eli wrote to point out that the symptoms appeared to be a disk-drive where DMA wasn't working. He included a link to a Microsoft article which shows how to tell if DMA is working correctly. Sure enough my interface was configured to try to use DMA but for some reason it was in PIO (non-DMA) mode. Having determined the cause of the problem it wasn't too hard to find some more detailed instructions on how to fix it. I made deleted a few registry keys to force the computer to redetect DMA mode, rebooted, and its now working perfectly playing glitchless audio and video and overall performing much much much better.
Eli also included a link to his blog Shouting Distance which is mostly focued on debugging. It seems like a great resource for some of these sticky issues I've discussed in the past few posts.
All in all I wish I'd posted about this much sooner- I've been suffering with this for months and now the problem is not only solved but its documented (somewhat) to hopefully help the next person who encounters a similar problem. How cool is that?
November 02, 2006
Technology- Laptop Driver Problems
In my last post I complained about debugging JavaScript in IE. I was totally wrong. Eric pointed me to a couple of sites and since then I found the "advanced options" to turn on debugger support. I feel pretty clueless to have been missing those for so long. There is also an IE "DevToolBar" that is a great help for inspecting the DOM, etc.
In the meantime I thought I'd complain about my laptop. I've got a Dell Inspiron E1505. I've mentioned it a few times before and I'm happy to report that the blue-screens are much less frequent. I do still get some sometimes- the main two causes seem to be wireless (which I now leave disabled whenever possible which pretty much sucks) and when I connect to the laptop with remote access which seems to bluescreen the video driver sometimes (and I've updated to the latest).
The other persistant problem is there appears to be something wrong with the drivers for the hard-disk. Whenever my hard-disk is active the system becomes very unresponsive. I really can't play music or video, at least locally without it glitching enough to make it miserable. When I watch with the Task Manager I see the kernel times (the red line you can turn on) appear very high anytime its busy using the disk (most of the CPU is busy in kernel, not user tasks). This seems wrong but I'm a bit at a loss about what to do about it. I've tried all the latest drivers off the Dell site, but if anyone has any suggestions, please email me.
September 29, 2006
Technology- CalendarData.com supports Live Clipboard
One of the features I've been messing with for a few weeks now is support for the Microsoft introduced Live Clipboard. Live Clipboard brings copy and paste to the web, enabling you to copy and paste inside and between applications that support it. I've been messing with this for awhile but I'll admit that being quoted mentioning it in an article in Wired Magazine was extra motivation to actually get it online today.
To the best of my knowledge, CalendarData.com is the first production site to support Live Clipboard. Doing some searches I haven't found any other sites implementing it other than Ray Ozzie's example pages. I noticed a grip over on mini observing that little progress has been made since it was introduced back in April. This kind of whining is percisely why traditionally companies like Microsoft hold these things back until they are all ready to go. The thought process goes "until our entire product line is ready to support this and we have 100 developers lined up with us with press releases, let's keep it under our hats". That approach IS appropriate for some things, but I'm a big fan of "get it out in the community and see where it goes from there" instead.
Today's implementation is just a start- I've got lots of ideas about how to extend this further including adding some new clipboard widgets to collect clippings, and some new formats to represent RSS feeds, calendars, and links to other objects (for example a link to a photo). Another big issue we need to tackle is some UI evolution- to be honest, the little clipping icons scattered all over the page look somewhat cluttered once you have a user interface with multiple elements. It might make sense to hide them somewhat until you move the mouse over their associated object, etc.
Another observation from implementing this stuff- coding and debugging JavaScript in web pages pretty much sucks. Its much easier in Firefox than IE since the Firefox JavaScript console, DOM Inspector and Web Developer toolbar are a great help. I assume there are similar things for IE but I'm not aware of them, so shoot me an email if you have suggestions. Still, as I'm starting to use some JavaScript libraries for Live Clipboard and the Prototype AJAX library, I often find myself chasing small syntax errors for unnaturally long time-spans.
September 18, 2006
Politics- Rolling Stone Article on 2004 Election
I mostly try to avoid addressing political issues here and usually find conspiracy theories uninteresting outside of episodes of 24. However this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone raises some important questions on what happened during the 2004 election. The biggest scandal here is how little attention any of the incidents outlined in this article have gotten from the media so far. Given the direction that the media has taken lately Im curious how much this will be picked up by the key news outlets- The NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. Furthermore as far as I can tell, its two years later, another set of elections are coming up and so far nothing at all has changed to prevent any of this stuff from happening again..
September 07, 2006
Technology- New Judy's Book Features
The stuff that I've been working on at Judy's Book is finally live in production and open to the public. Go check out Judy's Book Deals and the Judy's Book Dealbar.
Judy's Book Deals responds to one of the key things that have been missing from Judy's Book so far. Judy's book so far is a great place to share tips about a great place to eat or service professionals, but many people have been asking for a place to share the latest great deals. There are several other existing deal sites but usually they are just steering you towards whatever will make the site owner the most money, not necessarily the best deal. With our site we take the approach that the community of users rank which deals are actually best for you.
The dealbar is the thing I've been working on myself most recently and it is a bit more experimental. As you surf around the Internet, it knows about the best deals as ranked on the Judy's Book Deals site and will let you know about deals relevant to the site you are currently on. The cool thing is you might be on some site about to buy something and it can let you know about a special configuration that has a better discount or a coupon code. I know there have been several times I've gone to buy something and had to cross-check several web-sites to make sure I'm getting the best price available. Of course this relies on great deals existing on the main site...
In any case its been a fun and interesting experience working on this new direction for the past few months. Its pretty clear that its all going to need some tweaking as we go along so we still have our work cut out for us.
September 04, 2006
Technology- Free Wifi at Highway Rest Areas in WA State
Two big thumbs up to the Washington State Department of Transportation for providing free wi-fi at highway rest stops. Driving back from Canada today I'll admit that I didn't use the service, but it makes tons of sense.
I bet the truckers (or for that matter anyone who works on the road) really love it. Plus anything to help encourage people to take a break on long trips is probably a great thing. I almost needed this on my way to Canada. I needed to send a file to some people I was working with and I'd forgotten the cable I need to use my phone as an Internet connection for my laptop. I managed to use blue-tooth to send the file to the phone and email it from there, but that was pretty complicated to pull off, so its nice to know that I have other options now.
September 02, 2006
Sports- Dahon Folding Bike
When I got my airplane I went shopping for a folding bike that could easily fit in the airplane for trips. I did not have a normal bike at the time and I was hoping I could get something that was the best of both worlds- a real mountain bike that could fold in half, easily fit in the car's trunk or an airplane and then go up a real trail. The Dahon Zero-G seemed to fit the bill so I got one. I've had it now for a year and a half but today is the first time I took it out for anything beyond the roads and paved paths of Seattle.
I should be clear that when it comes to real mountain biking I'm a big wimp. I enjoy the easy trails but I'm not so excited about feeling like I'm sliding down something out of control or near a precipice. Today we were up at Whistler and they have an inexpensive rate for the bunny hill. I took the bike up for a few runs and overall I can say it did a great job on those runs. One thing I did learn is that its really important to tighten everything before doing real off-road riding. On my last run a bolt fell out of my rear brake and it failed which was a bit exciting to put it mildly.
Overall it's a pretty great bike and it wasn't its fault that I didn't check the screws in the brakes. Probably not good enough for the super-hard-core-black-run type person, but good enough for a wimp like me who enjoys a nice run on the mountain.
The visit to Whistler put me in the mood to post a calendar of Whistler / Blackcomb events for the coming year.
August 31, 2006
Technology- Toolbars and Browser Security
As part of a project that I'm working on I've been building some toolbars recently. The experiece of building toolbars for IE and Firefox is pretty radically different. This tutorial over on Born Geek was very helpful and I got some good results in just a couple of days. Overall debugging was moderately easy since I could install the Firefox developer tools and use the JavaScript console. I did hit one intermittent crash that was almost a ship-stopper, and did I mention that the documentation for this stuff is terrible? I dont mean to complain- I know its all free, but if Open Source stuff wants to compete with the alternatives, they need to provide some great reference materials for developers. When trying to use XUL the behavior of the 6 different kinds of buttons and various layout things seemed pretty random, and it was pretty much trial and error getting it to work right.
We werent even going to do an IE toolbar initially because I figured it would be a couple extra weeks of work to get all the COM and C++ stuff right. I went searching for some sample-code and came across ToolbarStudio on http://besttoolbars.net/. To be honest my first reaction was that this was pretty damn weird. A full IDE for creating toolbars? With the ability to do all kinds of stuff with no coding (which was almost a negative for me)? For $75? Is there really that big a community of people out there making toolbars, and who really installs that many toolbars anyway?
It turns out that ToolbarStudio is pretty cool if a bit clunky. The definition of the toolbar is all XML, HTML and JavaScript. The environment makes you edit everything packaged in a CAB file which is a bit strange for normal development process / builds / source control. We have also hit a few bugs but so far they have been very responsive at answering questions although the response time is always overnight since their developers are in Russia. The biggest problems are that debugging my JavaScript in this environment can be a nightmare. There isnt the same notion of a console to output debug messages (that I know of), exceptions tend to get silently dropped (things just dont work right), and the process of installing, testing and uninstalling the toolbar can be tedious (also true for the Firefox environment).
One other note- so far Ive been unsuccessful at building a signed Firefox toolbar. Given how (one might say) arrogant the Firefox folks tend to be about their security being better than IE, this is pretty surprising to me. Most Firefox extensions that Ive seen arent signed and Firefox barely gives you better UI for being signed. To sign an extension you use some Netscape 4 era tools and need to do some bizarre packaging involving putting magic files into a ZIP in just the right order. To cap it off, if you dont get it right the package wont install, but the error messages wont really tell you what is wrong. Its a nightmare. Ive heard some rumors that this is getting better, but if the Firefox are really serious about security (as opposed to serious about pretending to have security) they will make signed extensions both a real advantage for developers, as well as easy for everyone to do.
Of course its possible that Im just missing the key instructions- Google doesnt always find everything easily. If so Ill be happy to get pointers to the magic solution and post my apologies up here.
August 30, 2006
Technology- Developer Info on CalendarData.com
Last night I updated CalendarData.com with a page of developer information. My approach with the site is to take a totally "open" approach- support importing and exporting all the data through standard formats. These formats include iCAL (ICS), RSS + xCal, and comma separated values often used to publish calendars for Outlook. The documentation is only partial at the moment but I'm going to try to update it frequently.
In addition you can use an IFRAME to embed a calendar in your own web-site. Im also exploring other approaches to embedding custom calendars including reference to JavaScript files, AJAX, and other similar approaches.
This weekend, the Bumbershoot festival is happening in Seattle- I've posted a schedule of the main Bumbershoot music events online here.
August 23, 2006
Games- World of Warcraft
I don't have a lot of time for games, but I do have to admit that I've been sucked into World of Warcraft a bit. Compared to some previous massive-multiplayer games its pretty friendly towards people who only play a few hours a week. Since I started my friend Chris has lapped me- I was halfway along advancing a character and he created a new one from scratch and got it to 60 weeks before me.
The game has a current level limit- 60. My goal the past couple of months has been to get to 60 before the new expansion came out, and sure enough last night I finally hit that goal! The expansion looks pretty cool although selling an extra $40 box seems very old-school for a game that delivers new bits to me every month over the internet. I assume they do this for shelf space or something during the holiday season, but it still seems a wacky thing to do with their existing userbase (who are so far generating some of the biggest annuity revenue of any game ever).
August 22, 2006
Technology- More laptop issues
After my last write-up on laptop issues I was still experiencing blue-screens, although fewer. A bit more experimentation suggested it was probably the audio driver and I finally noticed that Dell had an updated driver. The new audio driver appears to have fixed the blue screens for now.
Of course then today I do a bone-headed move and spill coffee on my keyboard. I run to get paper towels, pull the power and disassemble the thing as much as possible. 30 minutes later I have the laptop back together but the keys on the left side of the keyboard aren't working. This is pretty frustrating since I did clean up the liquid pretty quickly and I actually took the keys off and cleaned out any liquid and the contacts themselves appear to be under rubber so I don't get how they got as broken as they are.
Lucky for me I forked over an extra $110 for the complete-care coverage from Dell. This covers you pretty much no matter what, even if you drop your laptop or spill liquids on it. For Dell this is probably a great upsell, and for me for a laptop its a great peace-of-mind purchase. So I connected to the Dell tech-support chat and apparently a replacement keyboard is on its way.
I'm a bit skeptical that it is all going to work out so nicely so stay tuned. All in all the online chat thing was way nicer for me than a phone call and I didn't get any run-around.
August 11, 2006
Technology- Fixed my laptop
A couple of weeks ago my fairly new (3 months old) Dell laptop started blue-screening. I suppose the first sad thing is that it took my awhile to bother trying to fix it. I tried disabling drivers, making sure my memory cards were secure. Yesterday I started running the Microsoft memory test tool and the Dell diagnostics and everything was coming up great. Part of the issue is that the kernel driver that it was reporting the crashes in turns out to not be the real source of the problem.
After a few searches I tracked down the issue to a driver called tfsnifs.sys. It turns out that the Sonic DVD software that Dell includes with the laptop somehow turned on its "DLA" feature which does some drive-letter mapping for I think writable CD and DVDs. I'm not sure how this got turned on but I probably accidentally launched it trying to burn an ISO or something.
In any case the software appears to be a piece of crap. I really wish Dell did a better job making sure the stuff they shipped on their PCs was higher quality. The sad truth is that they are more interested in selling you the upgrade to whatever package is installed. Still, this explains the huge tech support problems they have been experiencing. Between poorly-written anti-virus, firewall, and three media center packages and all trying to fight for the system resources its amazing that it runs as well as it does.
In any case, my experience is stay away from the Sonic stuff- it appears to suck, and I did check and there is no upgrade available at the moment. My laptop is happy now that I've disabled it. I still need to figure out why media-playback isn't really working right anymore. Any medium disk access tends to make it stutter which is just not supposed to happen.
August 10, 2006
Sports- Soccer Snobs
Last night Kat, Fen and I went to see an exhibition match between DC United and Real Madrid at Qwest Field. It was packed- the reports are that 60,000 people showed up at a soccer game which is pretty amazing for the United States.
Overall the game was good and Fen even seemed to enjoy it. I do have two critiques. The first is that they were really poor at providing information on the players. Here we had two out-of-town teams playing. There was no program for sale (that I saw). Even a photocopied piece of paper listing the players names and #s would have been great. Or some more regular use of the score-board displays to give us information (rather than just showing ads all game long). Our seats were way up high which was great for watching the plays develop but to be honest I had no idea who was down there on the field.
The other thing I noticed were the soccer snobs. There were some people sitting near us derisively talking about other attendees who didnt know everything there was to know about each player or the sport in general. Ive seen this same "more obscure than you" thing in many of my interest areas (although thankfully I havent seen it play out much among my friends at all). You meet the wine people who make fun of you if you admit to liking California Cabernets or wines from Bordeaux- if you cant appreciate (and know all the details about) some obscure region in Spain you are clearly not a true wine aficionado. Alternative Music gets the same thing- to quote an Art Brut song My Little Brother- "He no longer listens to A-sides. He made me a tape of bootlegs and B-sides."
Sure I love a good soccer match, a nice obscure wine and a cool B-side, but dont give me attitude for liking Song 2 or a bottle of Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon. I hope I've never come off as that snob myself and apologize if it ever seemed that way.
On the topic of Soccer, here is a schedule for the Seattle Sounders- we may try to catch a game or two in the remainder of the season. US Music Festival schedule.
August 08, 2006
Technology- NetGear WNR854T 802.11 draftN router with Gigabit Ethernet
I'm giving up on my Belkin pre-N router. I have to reset the stupid thing 2-3 times per day. I suspect there is a bug in some firewall or parental control feature where too much HTTP traffic (uploads from a backup service) cause it to lock up and not route HTTP anymore. The strange thing is that it keeps routing other protocols just fine.
In any case, I've ordered the NetGear WNR854T from NewEgg for $139 with free shipping. I'm fearing that I'm going to regret this purchase- its the one with the Marvell chipset instead of the Broadcom stuff, but on the other hand its wired ports have gigabit ethernet. All of the rest of my wired stuff is gigabit so I just couldn't bring myself to buy more slower equipment especially since I do lots of high-bandwidth video, etc within the house. For many people faster than 100mbit doesn't matter at all since they just use the network to talk to the Internet, but i've got several TB of storage and like to be able to access it at close to local-disk speeds.
August 04, 2006
Technology- ComputerWorld on Building AJAX Web Pages
The last week my blog writing has gotten stuck by the combined forces of having too many things to write about and being pretty busy. The task of writing up my visit to Yellowstone (for a couple of hours), flight to Chicago, great dinner, weekend at the Pitchfork music festival and all that has been too daunting to tackle.
In the meantime ComputerWorld has an article "So how do you code an AJAX Web page?". This article may be just fine but it turned clueless pretty quickly by saying "Beyond the XMLHTTP Request object, which has been around for several years as a solution looking for a problem".
This is just completely opposite the real history of XMLHTTP Request. Part of the what made this whole thing so cool was that it was an object fined tuned to solve a really specific problem- creating really dynamic data centric web pages. In other words, what we call Web 2.0 or AJAX nowadays although we were not slick enough to coin any cool terms for it. Sure, there are plenty of things that could have been done better with it, but its one of the few examples of any web technology developed post-1996 that was actually developed by an application team just filling in a missing hole in the platform.
The calendar feed of the day is the US Music Festival schedule.
July 26, 2006
Technology- 802.11n wireless progress
More 802.11n draft technology is coming on the market and the router market continues to be super confusing. The big announcement this week is that Dell will shortly have an internal adapter for their laptops that uses the Broadcom chipset. This suggests to me that if I'm going to get a new router (and I'm getting really unhappy with my Belkin Pre-N) I probably want one of the the Broadcom ones.
The other interesting new development is that Netgear finally introduced a router that has the high-end networking (N) and gigabit Ethernet ports. Since I use gigabit Ethernet at home its somewhat painful for me to be hooking in a 100mbit router since I hang a few devices off the router's wired ports. The tricky part is that Netgear has two versions of their 802-11N routers- one use the Broadcom chipset and one uses the Marvell chipset. The bad news is the gigabit version is only available with the Marvell chipset and eWeek has reported that it has more compatibility issues talking to other devices than the other chipsets.
All this is made much worse by my experience with the quality of router firmware. It tends to just be terrible, and the bleeding edge models are even worse- I've seen horror stories of routers that show up and have such buggy firmware they barely work at all. It really feels like some event will have to happen to shake up the home router market since in its current form it really isn't serving customers very well. It sure is nice that the prices are so low, but I'd pay an extra $100 easily for a router that actually works 100%.
Tip- you can tell what chipset the NetGear routers have by the last letter of the model name. The NetGear WNR834B is a Broadcom router, the WNR834M and WNR854T are Marvell.
July 25, 2006
Technology- Real Time Log Reporting
I admit that I like to watch my server logs in real-time. I know its a sickness, and Im not really trying to do anything to get over it. When I built a web-server back in 1996 when there was still a market for web-servers, our killer feature in Boulevard was that it had a bunch of cool graphs so you could sit at the console like a vulture and watch the blips come in as users accessed your site.
Now that Im running several web-sites again I of course wanted to have something similar again. Partly it is related to my philosophy of build, get in front of real users, and iterate. Having a really tight connection to whats happening, what activity is popular, what gets lift is important. But I think it also goes beyond the practical into the psychology of building software live on the internet. I tweak the UI and watch for the difference my changes may make. For example I made some changes last week and there was a pretty noticeable difference in how many people found their way past the find feeds UI to an actual calendar
I've built a little WinForms app that downloads updates from the server logs every 5 minutes, scans through the data and does various custom analysis including popular pages (broken down to specific parts of the site), bot analysis, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Its really easy to update and add new stuff, especially since its pretty brute-force on the actual data analysis side.
Calendar Feed for the day- Computer Industry Conferences including the upcoming Apple WWDC in two weeks. I'm sure I'm missing many interesting conferences- again this calendar is in wiki mode so any registered user can add new events to it.
July 23, 2006
Hiking- Biking the Iron Horse trail
Kat has been trying to get me to go tackle the Iron Horse trail for some time now. Sunday we decided to go for it. First we went to the bike store to get some good bike-lamps and I also got some gloves and some padded bike pants. We headed up the pass and left my car at the end of the trail and took Kat's up to the beginning.
The Iron Horse trail used to be a railroad track through the pass and has been converted into a hiking and biking trail. Because it used to be for trains the grade is pretty even the whole way through- its the easiest way to go through the mountains without lots of up and down. The direction we went is overall slightly downhill- enough to keep a nice pace while still being a nice workout. The trail starts off with an almost 3 mile tunnel. The weather in the area has been close to 100F, but the tunnel was probably around 50 degrees, cooled by the melting snow run-off. One thing that surprised me a bit about the tunnel is that it was completely straight- you could see this little speck of light at the other end over two miles away.
Mostly the path was very nice for biking- dirt and some gravel. There were a couple of bridge overpasses that were much thicker loose gravel and those were fairly treacherous. There are also several side-hikes available along the way that are worth checking out sometime in the future.
July 21, 2006
Hiking- Rachel Lake
Today Eric and I did the hike to Rachel Lake. The Rachel Lake trail is about 60 miles up I-90. The hike isn't that long but the last mile is pretty steep. It starts off with a little up bit and then a nice long fairly flat part. The last part is a good work-out and you are rewarded at the end with one of the most beautiful lakes in the Cascade Mountains. There were a few people at the lake even on a weekday, but next time I'm tempted to bring a float for the lake like some of the other hikers did.
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July 20, 2006
Technology- Building CalendarData
In building CalendarData.com the way I have, I'm doing a few wacky things. In some ways its an experiment about how the progress of technology changes the way that someone can develop and launch a business. First of all, I'm not following the old model of "develop an app for a year (or 6 years) in secret until its all perfect and then launch it to an amazed public." With the new site, everything is pretty much out in the open. I've been building it for a couple months without announcing it, but the site has actually been up and in public for a bit. I've also been rolling out changes to the site a few times a week, sometimes more- so far today the site has already had two updates, first to enable wiki-like functionality where you can mark a calendar as "open" so anyone can add and edit events, and the second update to make some UI improvements, get rid of unnecessary clutter, etc.
As I do this, to be honest the site so far looks really bad. Its still too cluttered, the usability is poor, it needs lots of design help, and more. However there were several factors that prodded me towards putting it up even in such an unbaked form. First of all, lots of the functionality is already there, and I find it useful and hope some others might too. Second, it can take a long time for the search engines to find you and index you and its probably a good idea to get that process going as quickly as possible. A spider isn't going to care about the UI, so there is no reason to hold up getting that going. Finally I'm already learning a lot from the visitors that arrive at the site. I could have spent a few more months designing the perfect UI, and would have been totally wrong about how real users would be interested in the site. Now, I need to be careful to not assume that the trickle of current visitors are representative of the (I hope) future mass audience, but tuning a UI in the presence of real data is a dramatically different thing from doing it in the abstract.
So that's how it goes for now- I've turned on the wiki features, so in addition to importing a feed from some existing service you can create brand-new calendars, and/or go add events to existing ones. In the next couple of days I'll add the ability to put descriptions and links into events, be notified when changes happen to calendars you have edited, and display stats on how much you have contributed to the community. The next goal is to get a set of people who have actually come to the site and contributed in some way. Stay tuned as we all see how that works out...
Calendar Feed for the day- The Seattle Art Events Calendar. Please feel free to add your own Seattle-area arts related events to this calendar.
July 16, 2006
Technology- New web site, CalendarData.com
Today I put online another update of one of the sites I've been developing, CalendarData.com. CalendarData is an experiment with several modern web-phenomena. It is an aggregation engine for feeds of Calendar data. It is a wiki for creating easy-to-find guides for events related to various special interests. It also features a combination of client-side engines and web-based UI. The whole thing is still very rough but now that I've added the ability to add new calendars and events right in the site I thought I'd mention it here.
I've been thinking a bit also about my approach to building these new sites. There are plenty of areas to pursue, but for now I've decided to focus on areas that scratch an itch for myself or my friends. This doesn't mean that I won't try to make them as general as possible for a broad audience, but I figure if I'm building something that I would use myself, the chance is bigger that it will be useful for at least someone.
There are several other things also in development but those will need to wait until later...
July 12, 2006
Music- Art Brut
Art Brut appears to be coming back to the US this October- I just got tickets for the Seattle show. Hopefully I'm going to see them in Chicago in two weeks also. I've been inspired to update the tag-line of this blog to "Modern art makes me want to rock out" which is a pretty good way to sum up both what is so great about the band as well as my more general attitude towards art.
July 11, 2006
Hiking- Washinton State, Mason Lake
Mason Lake is a relatively easy to reach hike just off Interstate 90 45 miles east of Seattle. Despite being fairly close you are pretty much in the middle of the cascades and enter the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area during the hike.
Eric and I drove up there- we had an older hiking guide that warned that the trail was in terrible condition but it seemed fun anyway. It turns out the trail has been totally re-done since the guide was published and is in great shape. The hike was pretty steep but a good workout and the only glitch was that my heels started getting blisters- I think the climbing shoes had weakened them a bit over the weekend.
At the end of the trail (for us- the trail actually continues on much further) was beautiful Lake Mason and we stopped for a quick lunch. Round-trip the hike took us a bit more than three hours but with the elevation gain I was pretty tired & sore afterwards.
July 08, 2006
Hiking- Glacier National Park, Highline Trail
Yesterday Kat and I flew out to Glacier National Park with Michael and Anh in Michael's Saratoga. It was pretty amazing how much gear we packed in his airplane. The flight was beautiful; we landed and had a nice BBQ dinner.
Today we got up very early (at least by my standards) and headed up to Logan Pass which is on the continental divide. From there we hiked about 3-4 miles on the Highline Trail to "haystack" little peak that Michael had scoped out for climbing. This was my first time really climbing with ropes and all outside. I've done it many times in the gym but outside is a very different thing. It looked like the climb was going to be pretty easy though which is just how I like it.
The first pitch was a breeze and was good confidence building. After that though the third pitch had a really tricky first bit. I was pretty wiped out when I got to the top. After everyone got to the top of that we were trying to figure out how far it was to the top- we could see what looked like an easy bit, but it wasn't clear if that was the top or whether there were going to be some other tricky spots. Part of the appeal of this climb was that the other side was a very gentle grassy slope. So we decided to see if we could traverse out to find an easier way up to the top.
I suspect this wasn't a great idea. We roped for the traverses but they were still pretty difficult and slow and things weren't getting any better. Eventually we could see what looked like the grassy slope close ahead, but there were also two ravines in the way and those can be really difficult to cross.
So we decided to down-climb. I found the belay-down much scarier that in the gym at first. At the gym you just get to the top of the wall and you already have your butt hanging over nothing. I finally managed to get going and we all got down but it took a while. We were all pretty tired and eager to get back to the car and our camp-site.
For dinner we were really roughing it- since we were car-camping we had huge steaks, asparagus, baked potatoes, butter, a couple nice bottles of wine and to top of off chocolate fondue. Its tough but someone has to do it.
July 06, 2006
Technology- Google Checkout
Last week Google introduced their new Checkout service for online payments. I was pretty excited to investigate since an easy way to accept payments without having to fork over 50% to someone else would be a real bonus for those of us trying to build new web-services, etc. The site was easy to sign-up for and taking advantage of the $10-off on any $20 purchase from various vendors was a pretty good deal to get me to try it out. The API stuff looks pretty good too.
The one catch is that their terms of service currently only support transactions that involve "tangible" goods. So selling a digital service is not allowed for now. They seem to imply they are looking at supporting these digital services eventually and I find it ironic that they don't support the very kind of transaction that they have built their business on so far. I don't for a second think that its because they don't want people competing with them- Google has never seemed like the organization that would take a short-signed position like that rather than eagerly get everyone selling web-services across the web to be tied into the Google infrastructure. Stay tuned...
July 04, 2006
Sports- Germany vs. Italy
I fear that I'm going to make some enemies with this post. But if you can't just lay it out in a blog, what's the point? Today I set the Media Center PC to record the Germany vs. Italy game. I also set to record the next two programs since the games often go over the "allotted" 120 minutes in the ESPN schedule, but ESPN does keep showing the whole thing. Note- this is not a slam on ESPN at all- while I suppose you could complain about some of the commentary, overall the World Cup coverage in the US has improved 10000% in the past few years and watching not-interrupted by commercials games all the way through is great. When I went to watch it I discovered that the Media Center had screwed up and only recorded 12 minutes of the main game. So I skipped forward to the next "show" and sure enough the game was 0-0 in overtime! Thank you Media Center for saving me from 90 minutes of crappy soccer.
At which point I need to remind folks that this was a game with Germany playing. Look, if you want to convince a typical American that their stereotypes about soccer are wrong, show them any game with the Brazilian team. Even losing (rare) they do it with big smiles, stylish moves, and keep playing hard on the attack the whole time. If you want to convince that same American that their stereotypes are 100% right, show them a game with the Germans. Let's just say I wasn't shocked to see a 0-0 tie although a 1-0 victory with 75 minutes of defensive boring play would have been more typical.
Anyway, the overtime was very cool, the Italians scored a beautiful goal with 1 minute left and then followed it up with another beautiful goal catching most of the German team on the attack. That 1 minute would have been worth sitting through the preceding 119 minutes (although thankfully my Media Center had saved me from 80 of those minutes). Now the final game next Sunday becomes something I'm really looking forward to, especially if the French win tomorrow.
July 01, 2006
Technology- Network Magic 3.1
I'd like to congradulate the Pure Networks (disclaimer- I'm a shareholder) folks for shipping Network Magic 3.1. The new release appears to focus on just fixing a bunch of things and increasing reliability. This is a great direction- with software like this its all about saving time so its critical that it works 100% every time.
If anyone is interested they are having a $15/off sale for the 4th of July weekend. Click here to check it out.
June 29, 2006
Music- Art Brut Top Of the Pops!
All that the Art Brut folks have ever wanted is to appear on Top of the Pops. They tend to mention this in just about every song. With the sad news that Top of the Pops is going away shortly a petition drive has launched to get them an appearance before its too late.
Won't you help? For the children...
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June 28, 2006
Misc- Two posts on LancairTalk.com
I just wanted to call out two posts I made this past week over on LancairTalk.com, my airplane blog. The first is about our rafting trip this past weekend where we put the raft into the airplane and went down to Hood River to raft the White Salmon. The second is about getting to "fly" a 767 in the Boeing full-motion simulator.
June 22, 2006
Technology- History of RSS
Yesterday I was browsing some stuff and came across a couple of sites that describe the history of RSS. I'm sure these are accurate as far as they go, yet they are still missing quite a bit of the details. Tim Bray wrote a good version of the CDF -> RDF side of things, and this book by Heinz Wittenbrink mentions the CDF angle a bit.
The RSS Specifications web-site says that RSS evolved from RDF which was invented by Ramanathan Guha. However its important to point out a couple of additional specifications that came before RSS. Before he went to Netscape Guha was at Apple where he invented MCF, the Meta Content Format . MCF was based on a name:value format similar to MIME, and Internet email (see the MIMEDIR specification) but was only implemented in a strange experimental 3D browser called HotSauce that Apple shipped for a brief period of time.
Beginning in 1994 I started developing some formats and protocols to use Internet standards for a rich client online application. One of these formats was called "WindowScript" and it was presented at an IETF meeting I think in late 1995. It used the name:value style to specify the user interface of an application, effectively the same concept as XUL (although much less sophisticated at the time). The notion was that you could specify complex User Interface like a whole email application using WindowScript and it would data-bind to HTML and other content to interact with the user.
When I joined Microsoft in November 1996, one of the early projects I got involved with was helping create a format for specifying data about web-sites. The initial vehicle was supposed to be the feature "channels" in IE 4, but as is often typical at Microsoft we had fairly grandios ideas about broader applications. At some point in early 1997 Thomas Reardon dragged me down the hallway to meet with Jean Paoli who had just joined Microsoft and was talking about this new thing called "XML". It seemed like XML was going to be big some day, so we quickly changed all the colons to angle brackets in the spec and published "Web Collections in XML" to the W3C on March 7th, 1997. To the best of my knowledge this is the earliest existing document addressing XML- at the time I believe the decision had not yet been made by the XML working group to make tags and attributes case sensitive and there are several other historical oddities in that spec.
Dated 3 days later on March 10th, 1997 was Castedo Ellerman's Channel Description Format (CDF) specification. I don't remember why we diverged and published two similar but slightly different specs on the same week- I was working with Castedo at the time. I suspect the issue was that IE was under huge pressure to ship quickly and they felt like they needed their own thing that they could just lock down and be done with right away.
In the summer of 1997 Guha, now at Nescape responded to our Web Collections and CDF proposals by adapting MCF to be expressed in XML. The W3C saw these many different proposals and created a working group to sort out the differences. The W3C was very interested in pursuing this as part of their semantic web initiative. Inside Microsoft we had shifted our thinking a bit at this point and thought that these meta-data proposals were unnecessary since the XML was the way to represent the meta-data. Of course XML still needed schemas to do useful applications but we didn't see much value in RDF, being a language in between the base XML language and the actual application-specific schemas. Tim Bray's post back in 2003 acknowledges "it hasn't exactly turned the world inside out" and RDF hasn't made much adoption progress since then. I'd argue that the ratio of "data expressed in RDF in 2006" vs. "data expressed in any XML-based format in 2006" (a number pretty much indistinguishable from 0) suggests we were right. If RDF were really solving such a crucial problem I'd bet that it would be pretty widely used 8 years later. Tim argues that RDF's problem is that the format is too obtuse, but again, if it were really solving a problem, a simplified format such as he proposes would have happened by now. Instead formats like RSS and ATOM suplimented with all sorts of extra XML tags continue to take the Internet by storm.
Neither MCF, RDF, or Web Collections anticipated the notion of blogs and a feed of posts. They were all more focused around site-map type applications and more traditional notions of web site publishing. Dave Winer created RSS based on some of these earlier formats for this application and the killer makes all the difference (in a good way!) I do remember in the spring of 1997 talking with Dave Winer and evangelizing CDF to him. If I recall, his reaction was that he didn't really get the "channel" thing (which is not a surprise since it was mostly just a Netscape vs. Microsoft hype thing around the latest buzzword- "push") and that the CDF format seemed too complicated. I recall building a CDF "Channel" for scripting news, but the whole channel notion fizzled so much over the summer of 1997 that the CDF approach was quickly forgotten.
For comparison sake, here are some examples of what the various formats look like. These examples make it pretty clear to me the similarity between CDF and RSS.
MIMEDIR (circa Nov 1996)
source: ldap://cn=Meister%20Berger,o=Universitaet%20Goerlitz,c=DE name: cn=Meister Berger, o=Universitaet Goerlitz, c=DE cn: Meister Berger cn: Berger Meister sn: Berger age;value=int: 33 o;charset=iso-8859-1;encoding=quoted-printable: Universit=E6t G=F6rlitz title: Mayor title;language=de;value=text: Burgermeister description;encoding=quoted-printable: The Mayor of the great city of= Goerlitz in the great country of Germany. email: mb@goerlitz.de home.phone;fax,voice,msg: +49 3581 123456 home.addr;encoding=quoted-printable: Hufenshlagel 1234=0A= 02828 Goerlitz=0A= Deutschland certificate;encoding=base64: dGhpcyBjb3VsZCBiZSAKbXkgY2VydGlma...
Meta Content Format (MCF)
begin-headers: MCFVersion: 0.95 name: "Animals" end-headers: unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Dogs.mcf" name: "Dogs" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Cats.mcf" name: "Cats" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Pets.mcf" name: "Pets" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/FamousDogs.html" name: "Famous Dogs Page" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Dogs.mcf" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/BestPets.html" name: "Best Pets" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Dogs.mcf" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/WildDogs.html" name: "WildDogs" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Dogs.mcf" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/CatLovers.html" name: "Cat Lovers Page" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Cats.mcf" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/CatHatershtml" name: "Cat Haters Page" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Cats.mcf" unit: "http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/GeneralPetStuff.mcf" name: "General Pet Stuff" parent: #"http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/Pets.mcf"
XML Web Collections
<XML>
<WEBMAP profile="http://www.w3.org/WebMap.webc" VALUE="Widget Inc. Web">
<Author value="Sally Widget"/>
<Print value=FALSE/>
<Offline value=TRUE/>
<Page about="http://www.widget.com">
<Author value="Sam Jones"/>
<LastMod value=="Sat, 01 Feb 1997 10:21:18 GMT"/>
<Title value="the Widget Inc web site"/>
<MaxDLSize value=50000/>
<Schedule value=DAILY/>
</Page>
<Page about="http://www.widget.com/products.htm">
<Author value="Sam Jones"/>
<LastMod value=="Sat, 01 Feb 1997 10:21:18 GMT"/>
<Title value="Widget products page"/>
<MaxDLSize value=50000/>
<Schedule value=DAILY/>
</Page>
<Page about="http://www.widget.com/products/wholesale.htm"/>
<Author value="Sam Jones"/>
<LastMod value=="Sat, 01 Feb 1997 10:21:18 GMT"/>
<Title value="Wholesale Products Info"/>
<MaxDLSize value=50000/>
<Schedule value=DAILY/>
</Page>
</WEBMAP>
</XML>
CDF
<Channel HREF="http://www.foosports.com/foosports.cdf" IsClonable=YES >
<IntroUrl
VALUE="http://www.foosports.com/channel-setup.html" />
<LastMod VALUE="1994.11.05T08:15-0500" />
<Title VALUE="FooSports" />
<Abstract VALUE="The latest in sports and atheletics from
FooSports" />
<Author VALUE="FooSports" />
<Schedule>
<EndDate VALUE="1994.11.05T08:15-0500" />
<IntervalTime DAY=1 />
<EarliestTime HOUR=12 />
<LatestTime HOUR=18 />
</Schedule>
<Logo HREF="http://www.foosports.com/images/logo.gif"
Type="REGULAR" />
<Item HREF="http://www.foosports.com/articles/a1.html">
<LastMod VALUE="1994.11.05T08:15-0500" />
<Title VALUE="How to get the most out of your mountain bike" />
<Abstract VALUE="20 tips on how to work your mountain-bike
to the bone and come out on top." />
<Author VALUE="FooSports" />
</Item>
<Channel IsClonable=NO >
<LastMod VALUE="1994.11.05T08:15-0500" />
<Title VALUE="FooSports News" />
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June 21, 2006
Home- Last Day of School
Today is the last day of school, both for the Seattle's public school system as well as for the baby birds that hatched a couple of weeks ago on a statue in front of our front door. Some local robins built a nest on top of the status by local artist Steve Jensen. I hope he approves, but I think its a great testament to how cool the statue is that the birds thought it was a perfect spot.
The four chicks had been growing quite a bit and yesterday they didn't even fit in the nest anymore. This morning as we headed out the door for Fen's last day of school they were standing up and one of them flew, clumsily but without incident to a nearby tree. Graduation! Another pilot is born.
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June 19, 2006
Technology- Wikis and Wireless
I'm looking into a wiki to use for my home and new ventures. At Pure Networks we used Confluence which was very nice. I've signed up for the at-home-personal-use version of it which lets you have two users for personal use, but installing it can be a giant pain. At Judy's Book we are using JotSpot which is hosted so I'm going to give that a try especially since they have a free trial.
One brief note about yesterday's post- I wrote the whole thing and uploaded it on the drive back from the hike using my Motorola Q phone and the PDANet software to connect my laptop to the Internet using the phone. Very cool and the connection was surprisingly good during most of the drive. It's very cool that you can have decent Internet connections just about anywhere now, but dealing with all the different networks- wifi, wi-max, EVDO, other cell technologies is just a mess. It is hard for me to believe that within 5 years we won't have just one thing (even if there are actually different sub-protocols) that gives you network connectivity anywhere. Of course I could be wrong- there are some pretty different technical issues between long distance radio frequency vs. short distance, latency issues, and the worst barrier to actually serving the customer here is the various business models of the wireless providers who want to find as many ways to charge you $40/month for 3 of 4 almost identical services as long as they can.
June 18, 2006
Hiking- Skookum Flats Trail
Today we hiked the first 2 miles of the Skookum Flats Trail (#1194). This trail is located in the NW foothills of Mt Ranier and while its in a hilly area along a stream bank this trail itself is relatively flat which makes it pretty easy. Despite the guide which listed this as visitor use we only saw maybe 6 other sets of people during our hike. The scenery is nice with a river along side the trail and a waterfall at the 2 mile point. There are also some quite interesting fallen logs and some huge trees- its nice to see an area that appears to still be old growth.
We saw several mountain bikers pass us and it seems like a pretty good trail for mountain bikes. I'm not especially hard-core so I'd probably get off and walk over a couple streams and past one wash-out but beyond that it looked pretty easy.
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June 16, 2006
Technology- The BillG Review
With Bill announcing his impending retirement it seems like all the blogs with any link to Microsoft are taking the opportunity to reminisce. Having been lucky enough to witness/occasionally participate in many BillG reviews, I suppose I'd be negligent to miss the opportunity. At their best, a BillG review was an exciting opportunity to see some long-term, big picture strategy and watch projects and technologies get put through the ringer.
Joel Spolsky's post does a great job summing up how cool a good BillG review could be. By the time I started Bill was already getting a bit further from the technology- Microsoft had grown to the point where he rarely had time to dive into writing notes on the margin's of specs. Sometimes these could be pretty frustrating, but I realized over time that one of Bill's great gifts was the ability to look at things over a 5+ year timeframe. The catch is that the words didn't always come out that way so it was easy to get upset when Bill was critiquing some part of your strategy or product. By adding a "within 5-7 years" at the end of statements things often became less confusing and distracting.
My favorite quote, and I'm never going to forget this one was "I can't believe that anyone with any f**king IQ is thinking about this problem". The statement was directed at my bosses, but if I recall correctly the person working on the problem was me...
On a side note, Barbecues.com is having a 10% sale this weekend. I'm going to look into stocking up on some of the bisquettes for my Bradley Smoker and this seems like a reasonable place to pick one up if you don't have one already. Compared to a pit smoker it may be cheating but it makes it WAY easier to make nice BBQ.
June 12, 2006
Technology- Books on Usability
Jacob Nielsen has a new book out on modern web usability issues. He published a previous one back in 1999 but things have evolved quite a bit since then. Some of the issues needed to be updated and others are still just as bad as they always have been.
To get a taste of the book you can check out an excerpt over on Wired's webmonkey.
June 07, 2006
Technology- Motorola Q Phone, the Honeymoon Review
Two weeks ago I wrote about the new Motorola Q phone and concluded that it looked like it hit just the perfect combination of features for my needs.
On Monday my "new every two" discount through Verizon came available and the phones hit the stores, pretty much on the same day. I called Verizon and they confirmed that I was eligible for the discount. I asked the woman if she could check whether any of the local stores had them in stock. She said she couldn't check by computer but offered to call all the stores for me and call me back with the results. I've often used this forum to complain about bad service (like American Airlines) but Verizon won big points this week for one of the best customer service experiences I've witnessed in some time.
As for the phone I first need to include the disclaimer that I've had the phone for less than 24 hours. My typical experience with new high-tech gadgets is that the first week is great and its only a few weeks later that the downsides of the device start to be very painful. Having said that so far I'm very impressed with this phone and the first 24 hours are way better than the first 24 hours with my old Samsung i630. (Anyone want a free Samsung i630? Just email.)
The good stuff- My favorite positive surprise is actually the power charger. It uses the mini-USB connection to charge the phone. So if you plug it into your laptop, it charges (or at least holds the battery level), and there is only one connector for docking, power charging, and its a totally standard connector. I've got dozens of different shaped power adapters from old phones and other devices and switching to a standard shaped connector (and a multi-function one too!) for the power charger is a major consumer friendly innovation. Thank you Motorola!
The phone looks and feels good and the call quality is much better than what I was dealing with before. Its a bit of a pain to hold the phone when talking on it so I'm investigating ear-bud/headset options. The big issue for me is whether to go bluetooth for the headset or not. Wireless seems nice but the extra weight and pain of dealing with batteries in the headset seem less nice.
Using PDANet is great. I'll need to try it out a bit more but being able to have roaming Internet on my laptop anywhere without needing a wifi connection is great. The only issue so far is that I got a bluescreen once while using it, apparently in the USB drivers. Probably Dell's fault, but still annoying.
The scroll-wheel is very good but not perfect. I like it a lot better than the touch-screen for reading Internet sites and getting through email. Trying to deal with scroll bars by tapping them on my friends Treo's (both the PalmOS and Windows versions) really sucks and the wheel is much better. Still the ergonomics of the wheel could be better- it feels a bit cheap and I can't help but think Apple or Sony would have figured out the physical design somehow so that it would be much easier to scroll quickly and precisely.
Between the EVDO high-speed network, the scrolll-wheel and the reasonable screen, using this phone for Internet browsing is a huge improvement. I checked out Google Local and Bloglines and both were very well suited to this form factor. It doesn't seem unreasonable to use this device to keep up on blog-reading when away from a desk.
Finally the price is just awesome. With a contract and corporate discounts the phone can be purchased for as little as $150 which is less than half what the competition costs (the Treo 700 will cost you $300-$400 depending).
The so-so- Overall the phone is faster than my old phone, but not as responsive as a non-smartphone. It takes forever to startup from a power-off.
The bad- I'm really concerned about scratching the screen. I've had flip-style phones before and when they are closed it protects the screen. I really need to find some sort of screen-guard but there is nothing off the shelf yet. Also the key-guard doesn't appear to have the option to auto-activate on idle (I suspect this feature exists but I can't find it yet). Its also very sad that the feature of using blue-tooth to let your laptop connect to the Internet is disabled, presumably because the carriers want to sell some extra expensive service on top of their already expensive internet service for the phone.
Overall so far I think the phone is great. It has just about all the features you would expect and with the price point its at Motorola is well positioned to make a big sweep of the smartphone-with-mini-keyboard market for the near future.
June 06, 2006
Cooking- Grilling/BBQ
With the weather turning nice I've started regular BBQ parties again. I was hoping to do my slow-smoked dry-rub ribs yesterday but we were travelling over the weekend and I didn't have the necessary stuff in time (the ribs).
So instead I grilled some lamb with my special marinade. Note that its really important to understand the difference between BBQ and grilling. Barbeque is slow cooking with smoke and indirect heat while grilling is cooking relatively quickly over direct heat. For the marinade my "secret" ingredient is roasted dried fenugreek leaves from Vij's Rangoli (the market next to Vij's) in Vancouver. I mix them with salt, fresh chopped rosemary from the garden and a few other herbs (winter savory, some crushed pepper and some thyme) and some olive oil. Marinade for 4 or 5 hours, heat up the grill. Throw the lamb on the grill on one side, sear it, then turn it over and reduce the heat. Note that the grill will flare up quite a bit from the olive oil but that's usually ok since you want to sear the outside anyway. You just don't need to blast the heat super-high.
I think they turned out pretty great. Hillel mentioned that they were salty and I did overdo the salt a bit, but the interesting thing is that he mentioned that he had thought the salt was just from the lamb. Proper seasoning (using salt) is really important to cooking and its one of those things I often get wrong, but it was pretty cool when it works out such that it integrates well with the dish.
Today I plan on shopping fpr materials for my spice rub for some proper ribs for next week. I also want to try a pork shoulder sometime soon but I need to make sure I have the heat on the smoker fixed for that.
June 01, 2006
Outdoors- The New Raft
A new hobby for me is whitewater rafting. Kat was a commercial rafting guide so we have a bunch of friends who hit the local rivers during the right time of the year. Last year was a bit of a bust because the snow levels were so low- rafting in the north-west mostly relies on the melting snow to bring up the water levels. This year is the opposite- we had huge snow all winter and the rivers are just huge right now.
For her birthday I got Kat a new raft- anTer Aire Super Puma. These are a bit smaller than a normal commercial raft but more importantly they are more streamlined at the ends- this means they are both more maneuverable but also easier to tip and take a bit more work to keep pointed in the right direction.
We spent a whole evening putting the raft together- you need to lace the floor in which is a super-pain. Even more so when we realized we did it backwards and had to redo the whole thing. This weekend we headed up to the Wenatchee river and did our inaugural float. For our first trip we had 5 of us in our boat and there were three other boats. Ironically two of the other rafts had carnage but we never tipped or lost anyone except for when we intentionally practiced tipping the raft. Here is our victory shot afterwards-
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On Sunday we hit the river again but many people didn't make it back out from the campground so there were just 3 of us in the boat- its quite a bit more work with just 3 of you but I thought it was extra fun with the extra pressure about working hard since no one else is going to be able to carry your load.
May 31, 2006
Music- Coachella Videos
AT&T appears to have put videos of several of the Coachella acts online including my favorite Bloc Party. If you go check it out you can probably see my hands going crazy somewhere in the front. They have Ladytron also but the Bloc Party set was the best show I've seen in a long time.
Here are a couple of pictures I took at the show-
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May 30, 2006
Music- Sasquatch Festival
Friday we got going pretty late and since we needed to get to Leavenworth and be ready for rafting in the morning we skipped the Friday night line-up. Saturday we were running really late after rafting (more on rafting later) and were pretty sure we had missed the Shins. On the way over we passed through some pretty intense thunderstorm cells and apparently they had hit the show also causing an hour delay- I suppose it isn't really fun to watch a concert in a hail-storm.
The Shins were really great. After that we were really looking forward to seeing the Flaming Lips. I'm not sure what I think about their music but I've heard great things about their show. We waited a half hour while they set up the stage and they they announced that they were switching the order of the Flaming Lips and Ben Harper because of the delays. Since Ben Harper was scheduled to be on for two hours and we had an hour drive and an early-morning appointment at the river we bailed and went back to our hotel.
Sunday we got there quite a bit earlier and were in time to see the Decemberists. They were great and I plan to check out their stuff more (especially since you can get their albums on eMusic). They were followed by Matisyahu- I thought he was good although Kat didn't really like it. We retreated for a couple margaritas in the cliff house with beautiful sunset views during Queens of the Stone Age and came out afterwards to see Death Cab for Cutie.
To be honest I was a bit down on Death Cab going in. We had seen them at the Paramount and it was really disappointing. Pretty much nothing but bed-wetter songs and very pop-music-for-15-year-old-girls sort of thing. Luck for me at Sasquatch they turned it all around and played an amazing rocking set.
They were followed by Beck "presented in puppet-vision". Beck had a little puppet stage set up in back and the big screens showed the (live) footage of the puppets acting out all the musicians on stage. He also had a guy who did just crazy Napoleon Dynamite style dancing and played a ton of my favorites.
In the end Sunday pulled it all out for Sasquatch but in retrospect I should have only gotten tickets for Sunday. Still Sunday was a great show and I'm really glad I didn't miss it.
May 26, 2006
Music- Sasquatch Festival
This weekend Kat and I are off to the Sasquatch Festival which has expanded into a three day event held at the Gorge in eastern Washington. The Gorge is a great venue but its a bit of a pain to get to for a single day. Since the event is all weekend we are actually going to be staying over in Leavenworth, rafting in the mornings (huge water on the rivers still!) and hitting the shows from relatively nearby in the afternoon/evenings.
The lineup this year is a bit less interesting than I've seen in the past. As usual a great way to check out many of these artists is by downloading their stuff from EMusic. They still have their "50 free songs" promo if you sign-up a new account and after that its as low as 22 cents a song. Plus none of it is DRM protected so you can easily listen from any of your computers, create a music library server, transfer it to an iPod or other device, etc.
The only catch is that they don't have all the major-label stuff. Still, from this year's line-up they have Nine Inch Nails, Bauhaus, HIM, TV on the Radio, Matisyahu, The Decemberists, Gomez, The Flaming Lips, and probably more of the other non-mainstage acts.
Overall for the Sasquatch show I'm mostly looking forward to the Sunday line-up but just keeping my fingers crossed that the whole thing isn't ruined by bad weather.
May 22, 2006
Technology- Motorola Q Phone
I've been suffering for almost two years now with this Samsung i630 smartphone. The thing is huge, ugly and doesn't work very well. It is slow, it responds slowly to calls, hangs, and other fun misbehavior.
So the basic result is that I've been shopping for a new phone for months now. I love the little querty-keyboard thing on the Treo's and had been leaning towards one of them, but have been holding off because they are still huge and fairly expensive.
So it is not a big surprise that I was really excited to read Michael Gartenberg's write-up of the new Motorola Q. Windows SmartPhone, querty keyboard, super-slim nice looking form-factor, fast internet connections. Best of all its going to be priced at $199, basically half the price of the Treo. He points out that this phone isn't for everyone but it sounds just about perfect for me.
I just hope that the pdanet folks make sure that it works with this phone.
May 21, 2006
Travel- Vancouver
Kat and I took a trip to Vancouver this weekend. We had been planning on flying down to Napa but the Napa forecast was for thunderstorms which put a damper on the whole thing (since they are aren't especially good for flying OR for nice wine-tasting parties).
Last year we had a similar change of plans and just went to Portland for the weekend instead. This year we headed the other direction and headed up to Vancouver.
One note- I'd love to be pasting some of these reviews on Judy's Book but they don't appear to cover anything in Canada. I'll have to chat with folks back in the office about that this week, although I do understand that there is probably a pretty high entry cost into any new geography for them.
Friday night after a long drive we went straight to Vij's. We were a little stressed that we wouldn't make it in time before they closed but everything worked out. We checked in and had a nice glass of wine and some snacks as usual while waiting. I just don't understand why more restaurants can't do half as good of a job of taking care of their guests that are waiting for a table. The meal was wonderful as usual- we had short ribs with cinnamon, an Indian crepe with navy beans, venison medallions, and their signature lamb popsicles with fenugreek cream sauce. I also managed to pick up an extra canister of their roasted fenugreek leaves which they normally sell in the shop next door. At this time of night the next-door place was closed but the proprietor got me a can anyway. This has been my secret ingredient recently in a lamb marinade I make for the grill so I was pretty eager to get some more.
Saturday morning we went to the Granville island public market for lunch and a little shopping. Maybe some Vancouver residents think the opposite but this feels much cooler to me than the Seattle public market. Lot's of interesting food stalls, not quite as much straight tourist junk and several shops offering stuff that is really hard to get in the US including some leaves used for Thai curries, etc. We had a good donut but the secret was to get an absolutely fresh one- the other ones we tried were just ok. We also had a bagel from Siegels- these were only ok again but we found out later that their main branch is in town. We also sampled a soup from "The Stock Exchange" and some pies from "A La Mode". The soup was pretty good but I found the pies disappointing- especially the raspberry/rhubarb which just didn't taste right for some reason.
After lunch we headed to the movie theatre to see the Da Vinci Code. I thought it was pretty good- when I read the book I felt it was written to be a better movie than novel in the first place and the movie didn't disappoint (although neither did it join the pantheon of the greatest movies).
For dinner Saturday we went to Lumiere where we sat at the "tasting bar" which is actually a set of tables outside the main dining room (although they do have a few seats at the actual bar that are open for walk-up guests). I thought Lumiere was great- we started with a hamachi salad which included some crab and greens. We then had some squash ravioli with truffle butter sauce. I've often found squash ravioli to be a fairly boring dish put on the menu so there is something for the vegetarians, but these were great- intense and flavorful. The third starter we had was the duck broth with dumplings. This was a stand-out for the whole evening- worth the trip just for this one dish. The duck broth was just so flavorful. For our main courses we had veal cheeks, foie gras two ways and some potato puree and two-color asparagus. These were all very good, although it was another example of dishes that were bigger than they needed too be and that were also outclassed by the appetizers. The appetizers were just more interesting and memorable. We finished with a tapioca pudding and a chocolate fondant and a glass of Gehning Brothers 2003 Riesling ice-wine which was really excellent. Some of the ice-wines are over sweet without the right balance but this one had a great acid and tropical fruit flavors.
Its also worth noting that the wait-staff was great. Good wait-staff can't make up for bad food but at an already good place makes it extra special. They were attentive, helped us deal with our small table and made some great recommendations for the next day. This is where we heard about the main branch for Siegel's bagels and Caffe Artigiano. The next morning we started off checking out Artigiano where they made a great "Spanish Latte" which included a little sweetened condensed milk, some great coffee and clearly skilled barista's. After that we headed to the main Siegel's branch which was I thought better than the bagels in the market. And finally as we headed out of town we stopped for our real lunch at Sun Sui Wah which is probably the most well known dim sum place in the Vancouver area.
We stayed at the hotel Listel. The Listel is somewhat less expensive than my favorite place The Opus, and its in a pretty good location and I thought the service was very good. Their "thing" is that they feature lots of art including art from a local gallery in most of the rooms on the floor we were staying on. This made it better than your typical generic business hotel, but it still wasn't as stylish or cool as I expected. There was one big problem with it though- the shower was not very nice to start with and the water temperature sucked. It was just way too cold. To be fair, we didn't complain about this until on our way out so we didn't give them enough chance to fix the problem.
The trip back across the border was a pain as usual. I really need to check out the Nexus pass thing since that line just zooms by the rest of us. There was this annoying guy ahead of us in line who kept shutting his car off every time he stopped and then had to restart it again to move forward. Cars from the other lane kept scooting in front of him and every time (dozens!) he started his car we could smell the stick behind him. I have to assume he thought he was somehow saving fuel or reducing polution without realizing that starting a conventional engine (as opposed to a hybrid) causes a ton more pollution than just leaving it running for a couple of minutes.
One other quick note- many of my friends and I have done lots of food photography over the years (check out tastingmenu.com for some of the best). Getting good photos in the low light conditions of a restaurant is always a big problem. But if you use the flash the result is often washed out and even worse. Lately I just figured out a track of using the flash but putting a napkin over it- the resulting lower level of diffuse light works just great and while you need to be a little careful to not annoy other diners too much it isn't as bad as the full flash.
May 20, 2006
Technology- RSS Feeds for Calendar Data
I'm interested in exploring creating RSS feeds with calendar data. In essence taking RSS (or Atom) + iCal (or preferabbly an XML expression of iCal data) and creating feeds with it. Imagine an easy standards-based way to subscribe to a feed of US holidays or the local school schedule or a sports team's schedule.
I suspect that someone has already done something in this space so I'm doing a bit of research. My first attempt to look for info via Google surprised me a bit by how sparse the results were. In any case I'm going to try to catalog other references and I'd like to encourage people to contact me at alex@hopmann.org if you are interested in this topic and want to collaborate.
- There is a mention on the Google GData page of the scenario.
- PHP Magazine has a demo that fetches data from the Google calendar. They used code from an RSS reader but RSS itself isn't part of this scenario at all.
- Trumba appears to have done this. Their format looks perfect and for now I'm going to use it as a starting point. Unfortunately they closed my old demo account and I don't see any calendar examples in their docs where I can look at a real feed. I should add that I just re-signed up for a free account and they have an interesting usability issue. They require you to fill out all kinds of questions about your industry and size of organization. You can't skip these questions which is going to tempt a lot of people to just respond with something random which will likely make the market research they wanted to get out of it very suspect.
I've taken the liberty of publishing a Trumba calendar here- http://www.trumba.com/calendars/alexs_calendar1.rss?xcal=1 . It doesn't by default include the xcal data, you need to add that parameter to make it work.
The xCal specification also appears to be an important part of making this all work. I found a link to a fairly recent xCal specification written by Doug Royer who I worked with some back a long time ago when I was involved with some of the iCal working group activities. There are some more links on this site over here.May 18, 2006
Jobs- Contracting for Judy's Book
This week I started some part-time contacting for Judy's Book. Judy's is a local startup funded by Ignition among others and Rich Tong put me in touch with them. Their site is a cool place to share tips about great local shops, restauarants, ask questions to the local community and all that kind of thing. It's got all the usual modern cool things like friend lists and a trust system that helps the community rate who provides helpful advice and keep out the trolls.
So far I couldn't be more happy with the experience. Ok, its only been two days (+ a little extra) but it has really been one of those experiences where it feels like I'm understanding much better what I'm really good at (and enjoy the most) at work. Plus its always great to meet a bunch of smart enthusiastic people working on an interesting project.
At Judy's I'm working with a small team of people to come up with some totally brand new stuff. Of course I can't say anything about what it is yet, but the whole combination is really cool. Part of what I'm enjoying is that with this small team I can be really fast at pulling together prototypes, concept pages, etc. We can do a combination of conceptual discussions (who are the customers?, how do we compare to the competition?) with concrete "wouldn't it be cool if it worked like this", "let's try it this way" development.
I feel like its important for me to acknowledge at this point that I recognize that the "deliver the product over successive years" part of the job in the software industry is really important. I'm even slightly defensive on this topic since I get concerned that people think I'm not good at finishing a longer project. In reality I've shipped dozens of versions of the Resnova products, stuck through a 3 year Exchange 2000 product cycle and spent more than 3 years working on Avalon.
What I've realized is that I can do those projects. I spent years thinking that was what I had to do to be on track for a successful career. More recently I've been thinking that since my skill-set seems especially well suited for that first 6-12 months of a project, I should focus on how to deliver the most value with that. Right now I'm actually doing that with three projects simultaneously and while that is probably a bit much, it still helps every day feel different and gives me plenty of outlets for creativity.
Working on projects like these can have some unique challenges. For example, you want to build things so that as much as possible of what you build can be carried forward, especially the architecture. The last thing anyone wants is to inherit a piece of junk that is held together (barely!) with bailing wire and needs to get scrapped in a big, expensive, from-the-ground-up rewrite. At the same time, realistically anything you create in the early phases is going to get rewritten over the next 6-24 months. Hopefully several times. So build things with an elegant architecture, but with rapid development techniques and plan on everything getting rewritten one chunk at a time as the needs change.
The other set of issues and revolve around your team. I've often noticed lots of uncertainty in dealing with other people. Is it a prototype? Is it production code? How much does it represent a statement about the future product direction? The simple answer is that in a startup, everything is an experiment, but that level of ambiguity can be a really difficult thing. I've met many people who thought startups would be great for them but they wound up miserable with the level of change and uncertainty. I'm probably confusing some people who have worked with me since I've been in a role where I've been trying to lock down a plan and reduce churn before. To deliver polished products to customers you do need to lock down at some point. Part of the fun thing about this current role is that those type's of issues aren't something that I need to deal with.
May 13, 2006
Technology- High-Def DVDs
David Pogue wrote a good article in the NY Times today on why the world doesn't really need high-definition DVDs. He goes into why this is a cynical attempt by the consumer electronics and movie industries to get you into another round of buying all new equipment and re-buying all those movies that you already bought once on VHS and again on DVD.
The one thing that the article doesn't go into is how these guys are missing the thing that I think consumers actually DO care about. I agree with his review that the new movies do look somewhat better than existing DVD on a great large screen (I got a chance to check this stuff out at the CES 2006 conference). However I would trade that in a minute for a truly convenient movie watching experience. I personally hate dealing with the masses of physical DVDs (or music CDs for that matter) and rip everything onto a server. In doing so I'm giving up some quality, but the overall experience is way better and the number of difference devices that I need to get it all to work is greatly reduced.
So where is the industry then when it comes to providing the really convenient integrated experience without lots of physical media? One could presume that the issue is that this is a disruptive technology (see the book "The Innovator's Dilemma"). The existing industry is used to making money by coming up with a new generation of hardware and using that to resell both the player and all the content again. To them they don't see any upside in providing consumers what they really want.
The problem with creating the disruption is that the 5 main studio's control all the content and as far as I can tell they don't want this model to change at all either. So you can't just bypass the consumer electronics industry right now and provide the true "buy a movie, have it on your local server, watch from any media device in your house anytime" experience with the existing movie studios. However another lesson from The Innovator's Dilemma is that the disruption usually starts outside of the existing structure. The best example I'd point to right now is youtube.com which is increasingly providing some really interesting content that you can just watch on any computer in the house. This last week for example I was able to watch two really good pilots for TV shows that never got picked up and another interesting short movie. All of my TVs are attached to computers so that connection already works for me, but it doesn't for most people, and youtube also needs to be hooked up so its easier to add "content" from youtube into my own library. It would also be nice to be able to get somewhat higher quality content- DVD quality can be done for about 600MB/hour and I often don't mind setting something to download and watching it later.
A lot of attention has been paid to the XBox 360 with a HD-DVD player and the PS3 with Blue-ray. For me these are both very important devices but their ability to play high quality video off a server of via the Media Center Extender support is much more important to me.
Of course I'm usually wrong about what consumers really like. I hate ring-tones and can't believe that the industry makes billions (really) selling stupid little song loops for $3-4 each (especially given that the songs themselves sell for $1). Maybe consumers will flock to the stores buying Hidef equipment and content, but I'm hoping the disruption grows somewhere and that the studios realize pretty quickly they need to jump on board.
May 09, 2006
Wine- Touring Yamhill Valley, OR
I'm spending the beginning of this week touring around Oregon's Willamette valley, specifically Yamhill country near McMinnville and Newberg. This area specializes in Pinot Noir which is a grape that I've continued to have a hard time "getting". I've had some very good Burgundy wines but whenever I find one that I like they always wind up costing more than $300/bottle. In any case I thought it would be a great idea to check out the region in a bit more depth to see if I can appreciate the wines a bit more plus I have heard that the area is beautiful and not over-developed and over-crowded like Napa.
We flew in to the McMinnville airport and our first stop was across the street at the Evergreen Aviation Museum, home of the "Spruce Goose", Howard Hughes's famous airplane. The thing is just incredibly huge- basically bigger than a 747 or 777, yet almost entirely made out of wood. The museum also has a great collection of other airplanes including a Beech Constellation (first production composite aircraft, a Burt Rutan design), a Titan II rocket, and plenty of other stuff to put it into the world-class catagory along with the Boeing Air Museum in Seattle and the Air & Space Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.
From there it was pretty easy to hit a few wineries. There are tons of them all around and they are pretty close together, but we did discover one issue with visiting the area. Most of the area's wineries and restaurants are closed on Mondays and many on Tuesdays. For future trips I'd recommend going Wednesday to Friday for easier availability of visits.
We stopped by Archery Summit where we tasted several wines. This was a pretty good way to get started since I was familiar with them from their past association with Pine Ridge in Napa (although that association appears to be no more- the woman in the tasting room seemed slightly offended when I mentioned Pine Ridge.) The setting was very nice, and the wines were pretty good, although their most expensive one didn't really impress me that much and the price tag for the one I like best was pretty high. One interesting angle was the hard-sell on their wine club. Basically they made a big point that their wine club is almost full and at that point they aren't going to bother selling any wine at retail since the club will buy up the whole allocation.
From there we cruised around, found lots of places that were not open on Monday and ended up at the Ponzi wine bar in downtown Dundee. This was a nice place to sit down, have a snack and taste some wines from Ponzi and some of their friends. We checked in to the hotel, rested a bit and had some nice Spanish food at Las Ramblas on the main street of McMinnville.
On Tuesday we got up and made some calls for some appointments at some other wineries. We started out at Sineann which was a great experience. The place is tiny, sharing space with Medici and Russell Hodgkins, the assistant winemaker started off pouring us tastes of 11 of their released wines, including three Gewrztraminers, a bunch of Pinot Noirs and a Merlot and a Cabernet Sauvignon. Of the Pinot Noirs, I actually enjoyed their basic "Oregon" best- it had a rich full nose with vanilla, tobacco, and a little touch of root-beer. The mouth-feel was medium, but with really great balanced fruit. They make a bunch of single vineyard Pinot Noirs, but to me, none were better than the blended one.
After tasting the release wines Russell took us to barrel taste. We probably had another dozen or more tastes and these were a fascinating chance to compare the different vineyards and even different blocks within the same vineyards. Often it was amazing how distinct it could be even within the same vineyard. Barrel tasting is difficult since I still have a very hard time translating to what the finished wine will be, but opportunities like this are the sort of thing that you need to experience to build that skill so I really appreciated it.
As we barrel tasted Russel mentioned that they make some Zinfandels. We had been joking earlier about the concept of Oregon Zin, but I really enjoyed the two they were making so I picked up a few bottles of the earlier vintage in addition to some of that Oregon Pinot.
After Sineann we headed to the nearby Domaine Serene which appears to be one of the more established estates. The buildings were gorgeous with way more space than they needed for their production level, and some really cool architectural elements like a triangle/spiral staircase that went up for 5 or 6 stories. Their wines were nice, but again for me they were overpriced compared to how much I loved them. My favorite was their 2003 Winery Hill Pinot Noir which was apparently only planted in 1999. This was the first vintage, but while it had a lighter nose (the bottle had just been opened) it had more finish and complexity that some of the others.
For dinner we went to Joel Palmer, which is a place that we discovered specializes in wild mushrooms. I'm not a big mushroom person (I usually avoid them) but the food here was very good and I managed to both find some things that were not mushroom-heavy and enjoy the mushrooms in the amuse bouche and the tastes of my friend's food. We had a GREAT bottle of wine with dinner- The 2003 Patricia Green Bonshaw Pinot Noir. This was just great, bold and yet with plenty of complexity and elegance. It went great with the mushroom stuff, but also with the spiciness of the crab bisque I had and showed a super-long finish. Patricia Green is a definite stop next time I'm in the OR wine country.
My overall conclusion is that there are plenty of great Pinot Noirs coming out of Oregon that I can really appreciate. You have to do some work to find the great ones that are a good value, but that is true for almost any grape/region, and the ratio in this area of worthwhile stuff seems much higher than in Burgundy. I'm looking forward to checking it out again and seeing if I can turn around my general prejudice against Pinot Noir.
May 06, 2006
Technology- iSCSI
Coming soon- those Coachella pictures and a write-up on my new laptop, the Dell Inspiron E1505.
In the meantime I've been busy this last few days writing a bunch of code, Back in 1996-1999 I wrote a bunch of code in Java but have not written much since then since for most purposes C# has been more convenient (and more recently PHP). However this week I wanted to build an iSCSI server (or "target" to use the iSCSI terminology) that was very portable and Java seemed to be the right fit. I'm happy to report that it didn't take more than a few hours to get back into the swing of it. Even better, Java development has progressed quite a bit compared to when I last remembered it. The Eclipse IDE is really quite nice and makes it pretty fast to get going, although it still has quite a few rough spots compared to the Microsoft Visual Studio environment.
iSCSI is an interesting beast. No comments right now on why I was doing this, but it is a TCP based protocol that lets you connect to a disk drive over any IP connection. Microsoft has an iSCSI "initiator" for Windows (again, iSCSI terminology for client) that lets you mount an iSCSI volume and have it show up as if it were just a locally attached drive. It's a bit complicated to use, but the nice thing is that the iSCSI protocol has relatively simple semantics and once its working you have a fully functional remote drive. Basically there is a bunch of connection setup and configuration stuff, and then its just "read block" and "write block" that that's it.
So far my implementation is a bit rough but I'm surprised by how quickly it got to the point where it works with most applications and has fairly good performance. I was easily able to max out the bandwidth of my wireless network with minimal CPU usage on the host and got most applications working including Explorer, Visual Studio, etc (but not SQL Server).
May 02, 2006
Music- Coachella 2006
As usual I let the pressure of catching up on the posts about the Spain trip get in my way from posting about other stuff. Without further delay I'm going to instead write about this year's Coachella festival.
The Coachella festival is one of the big things I look forward to each yet. For me this rates way above other normal holidays like Christmas and all that junk. We rented a nice house in Palm Springs with a pool and invited a bunch of friends and my brother, sister-in-law and nephew out to join us for a long weekend. Thursday evening we flew down. It should have been a great flight but I initially flew up to 23,000 feet and Kat got altitude sickness which was no fun (and a special bummer since it was her birthday). After that we descended to 19,000 and the flight was great except for the last little stretch where we hit some storms down in southern California. In any case being able to fly non-stop all the way to Palm Springs sure is great, I just wish the airplane was pressurized.
Friday was awesome- just hanging out by the pool, sipping margaritas, and a bit of tennis. In fact the only thing we did wrong with our planning is not saying through Monday to do the same thing again to recover from the shows.
Overall this year's festival was great, but not quite as good as last year. They have usually done an amazing job of logistics given the 80,000 people that attend, and once again the traffic was actually really handled well, and while the lines to get in were a bit long overall it wasn't so bad. The one thing they really screwed up was the Madonna show. Part of what makes the 80,000 people thing work is that a quarter or more of them just get parked in front of the main stage and they stay there to get their great spots for the main headliners. This year on Sunday they had Madonna play the dance tent instead of the main stage (and more on her act later) and this created a massive traffic jam as 40,000 people left the main stage to go to the dance tent and then back after she was done.
The music highlights for me this year were (in descending order)- Bloc Party, Daft Punk, Art Brut, Franz Ferdinand, Ladytron, Lady Sovereign. Carl Cox and stellastarr* also seemed really cool but I barely caught them so I'll reserve judgment for later.
Saturday we got in just in time to catch Lady Sovereign. She was pretty good- basically a somewhat less interesting version of MIA. After she was done we headed over to the dance tent to catch Joey Beltram. He was very good during his actual tracks but his transitions were pretty unsmooth frequently breaking the groove. We wandered around a bit and saw a little bit of Wolfmother who seemed to think they were Led Zepplin, which didn't really do anything for me. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were decent, but TV On the Radio were very disappointing.
Finally we got to see Ladytron- they started off a bit slow (low energy) but it built up during the show and the last few songs were awesome. When they finished we headed over to the main stage where Franz Ferdinand had just started. We watched them from way back, but there was actually room to dance and I was bouncing all over the place with some guy that I think was from Scotland. They put on a great set which was amazing for the main stage at a huge festival and I can't wait to see them in a club again sometime soon.
At this point we headed over to the dance tent to get a spot for Daft Punk. Audio Bullys were on and they were pretty disappointing so we saw Depeche Mode do 3 songs that were also very lame. Nick and I scoped out a pretty good spot mid-way back but in the tent for Daft Punk. The thing that sucked was that for 15 minutes before the show and 20 minutes into the show we felt like we were in the middle of a highway with people pushing by us. What was most funny to me was when people would get offended that I wouldn't step out of the way as they pushed me out of the way- my take is, sure, push to the front if you want, but don't expect me to be friendly about it and keep going if you are going to do it.
The sound started with the alien tones from Close Encounters, the curtains opened and Daft Punk were in this pyramid dressed in alien space-suits (I'll post some pictures tomorrow). They had 3 layers of cool lights on the side and the pyramid itself had cool displays. The beats were awesome and it was just an amazing show. You can check out some at http://www.daftpunk.com/ although unfortunately the video is in the Real format
Sunday we got to a bit of a slower start and missed Mates of State, but got there just as Ted Leo / Pharmacists were starting. Ted Leo was pretty good although nothing super amazing. After Ted Leo we saw Matisyahu from the beer garden by the main stage- again, he was decent but especially for the festival thing wasn't that great. We went right over to get a good spot for Bloc Party.
To say I've been anticipating seeing Bloc Party would be an understatement. Last year when I saw them I had no idea who they were and even at Sasquatch I knew a few of their songs a little bit. Since then I've listened to Silent Alarm hundreds of times and I consider it the best album from last year. About the second song of the set I bounced into the middle of the crowd where a bunch of people were bouncing all over. The set was just incredible. The crowd was totally into it in a way you rarely see at festivals, the band was really on for almost the whole set, and I had such a great time I almost passed out. I've seen some music press mention Adorable when writing about Bloc Party and the comparison is apt- they both have a great combination of high energy and slower songs, huge passion and just a great stage presence.
After the Bloc Party set I mostly wanted to collapse for a few hours but instead caught a few minutes of Paul Oakenfold and a beer. The dance tent was pretty crowded for Oakenfold (and also people lining up for Madonna) but his music didn't really do anything for me.
Bad logistics aside, the Madonna set was a disappointment. She went on 20 minutes late, the sound was really crappy from back where we started out. Also she played guitar on two of the songs which was a bit weird. I should be clear- its totally cool that she wants to reinvent herself a bit, but it was extra strange that she played the dance tent given the set she played. Finally she only played 5 or 6 songs and none of them hits (other than the single from the latest album). Now, you don't need to just play the hits, but a festival is not the time to drag out all the stuff from the new album- its just not the classic format for playing a festival and its too bad that she didn't tune her set for the venue. Finally, walking away from the area I could tell that a bunch of Madonna fans who came out to see her were really pissed off about the length of her set. They probably shouldn't have expected a normal concert-length set, but she went WAY shorter than the 50 minutes listed in the schedule.
After Madonna Kat and I were stuck in the massive crowd movement and didn't make it to catch the end of Mogwai. We went to the outdoor stage instead of the main-stage which luckly wasn't too crowded and Kat promptly fell asleep. The Go! Team was ok although nothing substantial- Nick said he hated them. Finally we headed over to see Art Brut. Dungeon was finishing their set and they were just awful. I had downloaded 3 of their songs and they didn't seem so bad but they were just terrible. They also wouldn't stop and kept going for long after their set was supposed to be done. This meant that Art Brut was late to setup and they were having some problem with the bass amps so they started very late.
Finally Art Brut went on. They hopped on stage and struck a bunch of rock and roll poses and after a little intro kicked into "formed a band". The singer, Eddie Argos , continued to insist that every member of the audience was required to go home and join a band. I love that kind of attitude. They strutted all over the stage, had great intros for their songs and Eddie at one point jumped into the audience and even tossed his microphone back just strolling through the audience encouraging everyone to shout the lyrics.
At one point Eddie announces that they have been given permission to go past midnight at a cost of $2000 per minute. Apparently the local noise ordinance charges that much if the shows go late. I suspect that Tool was on track to go 15 minutes late so Art Brut wasn't actually costing them anything but they played up the two... thousand... dollars... per minute.. and announced that they would use their extra valuable time to play a b-side, and then threw out the set list and did an appropriate choice of "Moving to LA" for the venue. Of course at this point its past 12:10 and they haven't done their last two songs "bad weekend" and "good weekend" so they launch into those, but are still taking their time while the guy at the side of the stage (roadie? manager?) is getting a bit tense. At the end of Good Weekend Eddie goes off stage but the band keeps playing. Its well past 12:20 right now and the stage guy is just getting frantic. He is motioning to the drummer to stop. But the crowd is going nuts and the band just keeps pumping people up. The stage guy runs out and grabs the drummer by the leg to try to stop him but continues to get ignored- he looks pyscho pissed and stressed out. Like he expects that at this point the band is being charged that $2000/minute. He motions to the sound board guys to shut them off but the drummer keeps going for at least another 30 seconds before finally leaving the stage.
All in all an awesome show. I just hope they didn't just get bankrupted by some fines or something. I am happy to see they got some good coverage in the LA Times review of the show and I really hope they make it back to the US. They feel like one of those things that are pretty uniquely British with tons of just incredibly obscure UK music references, but hopefully there are enough of us around here who get it when you title a song "These Animal Menswe@r" to keep them afloat.
Coming soon- tons of festival pictures and maybe even a little video.
April 07, 2006
Travel- Touring the Alhambra
Friday was the big day to tour the Alhambra. The Alhambra is the old
village/palace/fort complex constructed on the hill above Grenada and various
parts of it date back 1200 years and span many different cultures from the
Romans, Arab/Moorish, Catholic kings to a modern day monastery. I've done a lot
of travel around the world and this is both one of the coolest things to tour as
well as one of the longest single sites (if you want to check out the whole
thing).
In the days prior to our departure the weather forecast for Southern Spain didn't look good but luckily the weather forecasters were wrong and it was absolutely beautiful. We hiked all over and I took an amazing amount of pictures- over 1000 in this one day. The Alhambra has so many examples of cool architecture so I took lots of close ups of various carvings or various designs, plus there are a ton of great spots for panoramic photographs. It will probably take me weeks of playing around at home to pull together some higher quality panoramic stitches.
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After touring all day we found a dinner place on a local square a bit away from the central tourist masses and returned for a second time to get some gelato at the Cafe Bib-Rambla.
Another twist on the timing of our trip is that it was Holy Week (or Semana Santa). Many of the towns in Spain have traditions where they take their statues of the Virgin Mary out of their churches and parade them around while often dressed in clothes that resemble the Klu Klux Klan to American eyes (although the Spanish traditions are much older and I gather the Spanish are annoyed that the infamous American organization stole their symbol). These statues are on these giant platforms and are often carried by 20-40 men marching along an inch at a time.
We were tired after dinner and tried to pick up a taxi to take us up the hill. The driver refused to take us and at first I was pissed, thinking he just didn't want to take the fairly short ride which would probably require him to take a fairly long return with no fare (the streets out of the Alhambra are not straight-forward to put it mildly). The driver managed to communicate to Stacy that the way was blocked and sure enough we looked over and saw a police car blocking the road up to our hotel. We set off on foot but were unsuccessful asking the cop where and when the procession might be. We kept looking around and just as we were getting close to the top we started seeing some lights and noises. My reaction was "hurry up, let's go before we miss it" but Stacy accurately pointed out that the thing's don't move very fast at all and there was no rush.
The procession at the Alhambra was a pretty small one I gather and they weren't even wearing the special clothing. Still it was pretty cool and it wasn't over until past 1am and they had delivered the statue back into the church right next to our hotel.
April 06, 2006
Travel- Arrival in Grenada
After a long day of travel we arrived in Grenada, got our bags and our rental car. Picking up the car was really easy and while I was a bit concerned that the "service needed" message came on right away, it was driving fine and the only staff-person at the Avis counter was gone by the time we were ready to leave the parking lot.
We followed the highway signs for the Alhambra. Our hotel is actually on the grounds of the site so we needed to drive up a road that is normally restricted. Stacy proved her value right away by negotiating with the guard who restricts access up to this road since we didn't have whatever documentation he expected to prove we had reservations.
The Hotel America was great. Initially I wanted to stay at the main hotel on the Alhambra site- the Parador. However the Parador costs about twice as much so we had switched to the Hotel America which wasn't anything fancy, but it had a nice relaxed cafe and wasn't as stuffy feeling as the Parador.
After relaxing a bit we joined Lauren, Ken, Olivia, Belle, Norm and Dan (big crowd!) for a very nice dinner at a Moroccan place in the Arab quarter (I wish I remembered the name of the place).
April 05, 2006
Technology- Blogs and Travel
Over the next couple of days I'm going to post several entries with old dates on them. I've been traveling in Spain for the last week and a half and am catching up on my travel reports. I've actually had pretty good Internet access during the trip, but felt uncomfortable about posting on the public internet that I was away while I'm actually out of the house. It would be really cool if there were some good solutions for this kind of situation that would let me share this stuff more effectively with my friends and family but not the whole world, but so far this doesn't appear to exist. In any case, if you see new posts appearing from 10 days ago, its not a bug.
Today (the 5th) we left for Spain. We booked some business class tickets for Kat and me using my airline miles but unfortunately getting to the south of Spain ended up involving three flights with connections in Chicago and Madrid. They changed our flights just a couple of weeks ago and we wound up with greater than 4 hour layovers in both Chicago and Madrid. After the miserable experience in Dallas I don't mind a decent layover but 4 hours is a lot and expanded the overall trip to 24 hours of travel. Flying business class was a big bonus for the layovers since we got to stay in the special lounges. The other effect of the reschedule was that they said they couldn't book us seats ahead of time. We brought Stacy to help with Fen and Olivia (two 7-8 year olds) but the bookings were different so when we checked in they couldn't get Stacy seats with the kids.
Luckily we managed to negotiate seats together on each step but I noticed that the Spanish airports aren't set up at all to make seat changes at the gate. The folks at the gate don't have a way to do anything other than take the tickets and put people on the airplane.
March 29, 2006
Technology- Hosting
Today I moved www.alexhopmann.com over to the hosting provider. As I started putting some more images online and getting a bit more traffic it was both having more of an impact on my home connection as well as just being way too slow for people trying to access it (since its limited by my upload speed).
Also- had some great meetings yesterday. One thing that I miss about being in a company with a team is the daily interaction with lots of smart people, but as I'm starting to dig in on new opportunities I'm finding some good ways to fill that in. Two big to-do tasks for today are getting my tax paperwork together and putting together a resume suitable for consulting opportunities.
March 28, 2006
Skiing- Spring Skiing
I went up to Stevens yesterday with Eric and some other friends. Conditions were great, especially in the afternoon when temperatures got up to 50 degrees and the sun came out. Seventh Heaven was great and I took some of the steeper routes down under the Southern Cross chair that I haven't skied for years due to a combination of my being out of shape and poor conditions. What a great day and I've now already almost half paid for next year's weekday pass.
I did a lot of research on hosting and co-location. Matt recommended 1 and 1 since they let you have shell access and run cron jobs on their shared servers. Eric suggested rbwtech and Peyman suggests Server Beach for co-location / dedicated servers. I'm just not quite there yet since I don't have the actual usage load to justify paying $100/month rather than $10/month right now.
Given their money-back policy I've signed up for 1 and 1 for now and this site will likely be moving there in the next couple of days. I will be doing some performance testing on the site and will report results back here.
March 26, 2006
Technology- Apache and Hosting
Today was a pretty good day. I got my Apache logging working using cronolog to create a new log every day. It took a bit since it was distributed source-only and I couldn't get it to compile at first. It has a "configure" command that you run that tests the environment and creates appropriate makefiles. First step was realizing that I didn't have gcc, but that was easy since the configure command gave me a good error message to that effect.
But once GCC was installed it was still giving an error message that it wasn't actually working. I tried running the compiler and it gave up an error message that the linker was actually failing to load glibc.o. A little research suggested this was the standard c library and a bit more research suggested that it needed to be installed on its own. The package name wasn't obvious- I think it was libc6-dev. At this point everything compiled and it was only a few more steps to get the files installed in the right place and update the apache configuration files to use the log rotation tool.
Of course there were no direct examples of the right syntax to use to configure Apache to use the cronolog. And when I started Apache and it just didn't have any error messages, it took a bit to figure out how to tell what was wrong. I figured out how to shut down Apache in the "service settings" and run it from the command line where I could read all the error messages and debug my configuration files. A little while later and its running fine and I just finished up fixing some differences in the stuff I built between IE6 and Firefox. The key one is that IE6 exposes any extra attributes you sprinkle in your HTML directly in the object model and in Firefox you need to call .getAttribute() and .setAttribute() to read and write them.
This linux stuff does feel like its just held together with duct-tape and bailing wire sometimes. I'm sure its mostly that I'm not familiar with it, but finding things can be tough when they can be in /usr/bin, /var/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, or who knows what other directories. On the one hand the way that individual pieces are really building blocks for each other can be really powerful, but if you have some obscure configuration problem in one place on your system its really easy for the whole thing to stop working correctly. I'm sure Windows has many similar situations.
The other thing I noticed today was that I really need to get this moved onto a hosting provider if I'm going to put more sophisticated stuff up here. Running it off my home connection has worked fine so far but earlier today while I was listening to the radio the media player suddenly stuttered. A little research revealed it was someone looking at photo libraries on this site. Next step is researching the different options- The main thing I'm looking for at the moment is someone with good PHP and MySQL support, the ability to host multiple domain names/sites without paying individually, and reasonable monthly transfer limits. Any recommendations?
March 25, 2006
Technology- MySQL
My efforts today were an interesting illustration of some of the differences between Windows and Linux. Like I mentioned before this Ubuntu Linux has come miles from what I remember in terms of the ease of setup. A couple of days ago I installed MySQL 5.0 on my Windows server which was pretty much 100% automatic. Install and it ran a nice little wizard to help with initial setup and it was all running.
This morning I went into the Synaptic Package Manager on the linux machine to install it. All went pretty easily and I got it installed in just a few minutes which was mostly download time.
The first snag happens when I go to try to set up some accounts for my apps to authenticate to the server. The Linux box isn't accepting the commands that worked on the Windows one. After a bit of messing around I notice that the Linux machine has MySQL 4 installed which is pretty radically different than version 5. I head back to the package manager and am surprised to see no option to install version 5.
Next I head to the MySQL site which has 13 (13!) different options of linux-based downloads depending on the specific Linux distribution. I guess "Linux x86 generic RPM" and download those just to discover that I don't have the RPM utility. I head to the package manager to install the RPM utility only to see that it warns me that it will break the Debian based package installs (which is what Ubutntu is based on).
At this point I'm pretty frustrated but a quick search on Google helped me find Roland Bouman's site. Roland appears to have hit the exact same issues as me and his page describing what to do was an amazing help as I worked through the rest of the problems. I hit a few more snags including installs that didn't work. I didn't notice at first since the failure wasn't really clearly communicated, but I couldn't find the installed files. Next I hit a few issues with trying to figure out the capitalization that they used for various files and since Linux/Unix is case-sensitive this all matters a ton.
In the end I finally got it working although I'll need to dig in a bunch more tomorrow to make sure that its setup right, logging correctly and putting files in a reasonable place.
March 24, 2006
Technology- Servers
Getting a lot of exposure to just how much configuration is needed with a linux machine. To be fair a lot of this isn't about linux, it would apply to setting up a dev and server environment anywhere. It does feel like this stuff is more clear on Windows but maybe that is just because I'm more familiar with it. The cool thing is the learning curve feels very fast.
So far I have-
Created an ubuntu install CD. Fairly painless once I discovered deepburn for burning the ISO.
Installed ubuntu. Totally painless. Last time I installed linux (years ago!) it took forever and was hell. This was great, answer a few questions and after awhile it boots into a fully functioning GUI.
Installed packages. Installing them is itself painless but figuring out what you need is a bit of a mystery. Ive gotten used to using "WinSCP" to copy stuff to linux servers and its just lucky I knew to look for a "SSH" package to install.
I had to install- Apache, PHP, PHP modules for all sorts of junk, SSH.
Now that I have apache installed and am connected with WinSCP, I have no idea where to find the apache vroot and config files. After lots of searching I found them in /usr/share/apache2/ . It looks like the default config is to put directories in /var/www/
Speaking of all this configuration stuff, Im looking for recommendations on good books for-
Apache configuration
MySql
Java Struts (or in general Java web-server development)
Tom Cat
NANT and whatever build environments would work for Java
March 23, 2006
Technology- Servers
I've been busy the last few days- writing a bunch of code and setting up some machines. I should say that I don't have a specific focus of some great buisness idea that I want to tackle yet, but I've got a few technology things I'm playing with. I'll be putting up some new image libraries on this site in a couple of days that will show off some of the code I've written.
In the meantime I've also been setting up some servers. This site is running on a Windows 2003 Server box that I've had for years- Its an old Dell PowerEdge SC500 with three (fairly small) disk drives and just a 1.1ghz Celeron. I've just recently added PHP and a full set of other tools to the box.
I also just reformatted another machine I had sitting around with an install of Ubuntu linux. The old machine was running Media Center, but with no tuner- I was using it for remote viewing of programs since the old extenders suck. Now that I have an XBox 360, it works as a great extender and I can reuse the machine. I'm busy loading all the assorted packages on it and it will be interesting to experiment with both boxes to understand better the trade-offs of both environments.
In other technology news that nice XBox 360 already broke- the DVD won't read any discs, which is fine for use as an extender but not so fine for playing games. It looks like its going to be weeks before I'm able to get it all repaired which is really annoying.
Kat beat me to posting about the Stevens Pass season ticket deal. I've been up twice in the past week and hoping for another 3 visits in the next week (weather permitting). With all the late-season skiing I'm getting in the next-year pass will already pay for itself before next year. I'd also like to apologize in advance to all local skiers- our next season is doomed, whenever I buy a pass the snow is always terrible. Sorry!
March 17, 2006
Cooking- Corned Beef
Kat is busy taking her test this weekend and requested Corned Beef for dinner as a St. Patricks day thing, plus the high- protein thing is supposed to be good for test taking. I think it turned out pretty good- Whole Food's had a bunch they had pre-marinated so I bought a two pound cut and they filled up the bag with a bunch of the brine. I took it home and put it in the Staub pot with a bit of extra water, some beer, potatoes, carrots, boiler onions, and a few cloves of garlic. Brought the whole thing to a boil and then turned it down low with the top on for about 4 hours.
I think the main mistake I made was to not skim the surface earlier. There was a bunch of gray congealed stuff that wasnt very appetizing and while I removed it later it had already gotten all over the veggies. Id also say that the result wasnt an explosion of flavor- it was a perfectly good corned beef, but it was still boiled meat Irish-style. Im wondering what is the magical difference between this and the great New York pastrami?
March 16, 2006
Technology- Hard Drives
I just went through hell today trying to get my hard-drive switched over to the new one. The Seagate software didnt work automatically- when I followed their directions after the copy was done I switched the new drive to be the master and the computer would come up and say "Error Loading OS". Luckily the net came to the rescue and about an hour of Googling gave the following result.
I used a WinXP disc, booted into the recovery console and tried the following-
FIXMBR C: FIXBOOT C: COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTLDR C:\ COPY CDDrive:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\ BOOTCFG /rebuild
The two copy commands didnt work for me- they gave me "access denied" and I rebooted and it still failed. After trying about a dozen other things I returned and somehow discovered that my CD drive was mounted as H: . So modifying the above to-
FIXMBR C: FIXBOOT C: COPY H:\I386\NTLDR C:\ COPY H:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\ BOOTCFG /rebuild
And it worked! Im checking out the new setup now and so far so good. Google Desktop is reporting that something is wrong and its time to sign into email for the first time in 20 hours.
A few glitches- my old 2nd drive moved from "F" to "E" and so a bunch of stuff is failing. Switching it back seems to have fixed it and almost everything looks good. Microsoft Office was still busted but luckily it has a good repair program and once I ran that everything was actually right.
March 15, 2006
Technology- Hard Drives
My first hard drive was a 40MB one for only $800. Yes, thats MB, and yes, Im sure there are people who dont consider it to be a classic hard-drive unless it was a 5MB 8 inch model.
I distinctly remember when La Cie introduced a 70MB drive for $550 at MacWorld and broke the $10/MB barrier. Years later we broke the $10/GB barrier, and a couple of years ago broke the $1/GB barrier.
Just yesterday I bought a 300GB drive for $69 (after rebates), or in other words, costing less than $.25 per GB. Its pretty amazing how the drives just keep getting bigger for less money, even faster than CPUs and GPUs get better performance. Still its also a good reminder that nothing has gotten at all better at managing all this cruft of information in the home (or workplace for that matter). This drive from Seagate is supposed to have some software that helps me copy over the OS and files from my old drive and set it up to boot but so far no luck- Ill report updates tomorrow.
March 13, 2006
Jobs- Time off day 1
I would not call today a success at the whole relaxation plan. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.
The big project today was working on my office at home. My office has had stacks of crap all over for a long time now such that you can barely walk in it. I mentioned yesterday I was looking at some Ikea shelves but I discovered this new "The Container Store" in Bellevue and they had some shelves that are not at all stylish, but do the trick nicely. Getting them into my office involved some major excavation, culling of dust-bunnies and moving lots of stuff into the other room and then back. I bought two starter packages and one extra solid shelf but probably need to go back soon for an extra two shelves to finish it off. Of course its going to take me the rest of the week to get all the music gear plugged back in and running.
I've added some new pages to this web site- one for "food", one for "travel" and another for "art". These are supposed to be lists that I'll just maintain over time of things I like or want to do.
March 12, 2006
Jobs- Time off
As I look forward to some downtime for the next few weeks I asked Tim if he had any advice since he took a few months off in between Microsoft and Pure. His advice was pretty good although I have a feeling I'm going to have a hard time following it. He suggested not planning anything- take a few weeks where you just wake up and say to yourself "hmm, maybe I'll go grab a cup of coffee".
I unfortunately already have a list of many things to do. There is something like 30 items already on the list. Plus I'm already thinking about how it could be really interesting to do some consulting for a bit.
Several of the bigger things on my list are getting my office back into shape. I'm probably going to initially do this the "low budget" way- while I've got some cool designs that need some custom iron-work, initially I'm going to get some cheap shelves from Ikea and go from there.
The second set of things is improvements to this blog- I plan on redoing the styles and graphics (which were really just a "quick I need something anything in here quick") and adding some extra pages for lists of places I want to travel, places to eat, etc.
March 09, 2006
Jobs- Leaving Pure Networks
For the last two months at work I've been writing a ton of code investigating (and building) out some potential new directions. I suppose having not done this for a few years I was a bit concerned that my coding skills were rusty. They were, but I'm happy to say that it comes back to me pretty quickly and even diving in to a bunch of new technologies like PHP had a pretty quick learning curve.
Im still a big fan of the Network Magic product and all the folks at Pure but I've decided to move on. When I went from Microsoft to Pure I didnt take any time off and this time Im going to give myself a few weeks to recharge, organize the mess (otherwise known as my office) at home and start working on some new ideas. I'm even hoping to do some major upgrades to this site as a way to experiment with some of those ideas, so stay tuned and shoot me email with any comments.
I also just realized that I did something really rude in my last post- I mentioned Aaron but I didnt link to his blog. So I've fixed it in this post and edited the previous one to fix my oversight.
March 07, 2006
Technology- Live Clipboard
I think I saw this earlier this morning but it didn't really sink in until Aaron stopped by and mentioned it. Today Ray Ozzie posted about the "live clipboard" concept, otherwise known as the clipboard for the web.
Wow. Now that I've had a chance to think about it, this is probably a really big deal. And I love how in this transcript of Ray's talk (over on O'Reilly) Ray is quoted as saying that perfect success is people thinking that this isn't really a big deal, that it is just a simple scalable paradigm. HTTP started out that way- just GET, HEAD and POST. Xmlhttp started out the same way, just a simple little control with like 6 methods and three of them were pretty much the same.
Looking forward to the cool things that I can do with this...
March 06, 2006
Skiing- Spring Skiing
Rich's post about spring skiing reminds me that its soon time. I love spring skiing- its not at all the same thing as good winter skiing but if you have a good snowpack there is nothing better than swishing down the mushy hill in 60-70 degree (ok, I'll take 50s too) weather with a light jacket on and few crowds. I think it was my first winter in Seattle where Crystal was even open a couple of days in June. A couple of years before that Tahoe got so much snow that I was up at Kirkwood the last day of the season and it was the last week of June (I think- I can't promise that my memory is actually holding up here).
So far this ski year got off to a good start and I've already got about 10 days in (probably double what I've done for the past few years). But we didn't get out at all in February because of some trips we planned and Kat's studying for her exam. We ARE planning on hitting the slopes right after her exam (two weeks!) and I'm hoping to catch some great days in April (at least for the part of April when I'm not in Spain). So while its not one of those super-epic years, we should be pretty good this spring as long as some of the areas are willing to stay open.
Also- A quick cartoon from the Aero News Network that just possibly might explain what I experienced at American Airlines. I certainly feel like I experienced "a poop vortex"...
February 27, 2006
Travel- American Airlines is dead to me
This is the story of our return flight from Washington DC last weekend. For the post title I borrowed a phrase from the Colbert Report that sums up nicely how angry I am with the experience. This was the worst travel I have ever experienced and that is a catagory with lots of competition.
We started off with a nice morning / early afternoon in Baltimore and headed out driving to Washington National with what we thought was plenty of time. We got a bit messed up in the directions and made it to the airport with no time to spare- luckily Kat was able to do a web check-in on her phone and we ran through the terminal, picked up the paper tickets at the desk and ran to our gate just as they were calling final boarding.
Unfortunately we are delayed on the ground about 5 minutes because ATC has some radar outage. In theory this shouldnt be a big deal, but I check the tickets and apparently they only gave us 35 minutes to make our connections at Dallas (to be clear these were booked directly with American Airlines). DFW is a huge airport and American has gates spread out over 4 terminals there now. We arrive in Dallas, but then get held up another 10 minutes because another airplane is still at our arrival gate. A bunch of the passengers start to get tense since we all have tight connections and its especially frustrating looking out the window at all the adjacent gates that are empty. Why dont they just park us at the next one? Eventually they move the airplane in, and again Im surprised that they flight attendants arent making any special effort to help people with tight connections- no announcement about waiting to get off if you dont have a close one or anything.
Our connecting flight is across the airport- we landed in C and needed to get to D. There is this skylink train thing but it loops around the outside and would have been 20 minutes easily. There is a ramp across the road between the terminals so I decide to run for it and Kat and Fen will follow as quickly as they can. On my way out I ask a guy at the counter to call over to the other gate and tell them they have 3 passengers on the way. I dash down the terminal, up the escalator, across the ramp, down the escalator, and arrive at the destination gate, looking at my watch- 2 minutes before the scheduled time. Right as I get there the gate attendant announces to me that the flight as left and closes the door in my face and heads down the ramp.
Ill have to admit that at this point I got quite irate and was yelling. I had just been running for 10 minutes straight and it tends to ramp up the adrenalin + the frustration levels. My anger was increased by the gate attendants non-communicativeness. I pictured them shutting the door on an airplane with 3 empty seats just because they wouldnt hold up the airplane for an extra 2 minutes (to be clear- the door of the airplane wasnt closed yet, the guy was going off to go do that).
At this point the remaining woman at the desk (or the guy who closed the door in my face) could have probably defused the situation by saying quite simply "we put some last minute people on the airplane so your seats are full and its not like we can go on the airplane and drag them off. There is another flight to Seattle tonight and we will make sure you get on it." I know dealing with upset travelers is probably the worst part about those jobs, but its still part of the job and doing it right with honest clear communication is important. Instead they took the approach of "maybe if I ignore you then you will go away" which when one is in a complex travel situation just makes you more upset.
Eventually the supervisor came out from the gate and he did seem to understand the basics of the above. He explained that American Airlines was basically having so many delayed flights that they were just assuming that tons of people would miss every connection. They were aggressively giving away seats for people who hadnt shown up 10 minutes before the fight since they always had a huge crowd of people to push to the next one.
The next problem though was that he chose to exact a bit of revenge on me for being upset at the gate. He got Kat and Fen on the next flight but only put me on "standby, which gives you an excellent chance to get on". Calmer now we went to the next gate and waited. I figured that since I had gold status with American Airlines that was supposed to put me at the front of the standby list, so no problem.
Two hours later the next flight boarded, they called some standby passengers and Im still waiting. Its 10 minutes before the fight and the gate attendants are looking over the folks that are going to get screwed on this connection- look, there are 3 coming from Costa Rica, no way they are going to make it on time. They are giving away their seats, and at the last minute (10 minutes before the time on all the screens and all the tickets) one person does make it. They tell me Im out of luck and they will get me on the morning flight.
At this point Im pretty much in shell-shock. Three minutes later a woman runs up and goes through the same thing I did at the previous gate. She starts out screaming "I cant believe this, it says Ive still got time, Im going to be fucking fired if Im not in Seattle for work tomorrow morning". She manages to stop screaming but her voice is still not normal. The three people from the Costa Rica flight show up and are pretty annoyed but are still on vacation-mellow. They are all really confused about how this happened to them and the woman behind the counter isnt giving an honest explanation so I tell them what the guy at the other gate told me. Now she is pissed at me and accuses me of trying to start a riot (and to be clear at this point Im very calm and just matter of fact explaining what I just witnessed happen to them). Again its the "maybe if the passengers just don't know the system they will go along like sheep" attitude. Luckly we now have things like blogs to get the word out.
So she sticks me with a middle seat on the morning flight and wont help me with a hotel room and says I need to talk to the supervisor. He takes about 15 minutes to finish up helping someone with some unrelated flight and then looks at my info. At this point he comes out and says that they intentionally screwed me on getting on this evenings flight because I had been upset at the other gate, hooks me up with a voucher for the Clarion inn, and sends me off.
The shuttle to the hotel takes about an hour to pick me up. Its actually really cold in Dallas- about 40 degrees. When the shuttle does come Im the first to get on but at the next terminal there is such a big line for the Clarion shuttle (all of whom had been waiting over an hour) that they all cant get on and we have to turn away others. I speak with the shuttle drive who says that its just been crazy for the past two weeks- something changed two weeks ago and American is bumping way more people all the time.
The morning flight was pretty normal and uneventful other than again overcrowded shuttles- I wound up sharing a taxi with some others rather than waiting another 20 minutes. They had no problem switching my center seat to an aisle.
To sum it up, there were a whole host of things that are totally wrong here. First of all, American Airlines has pushed their hub thing beyond its limits- trying to schedule 35 minute connections (which a flight attended for another airline described as an illegal connection), and by policy showing inflexibility in helping people make those connections is just a really bad way to run things. But I suspect the problem is deeper since this approach gives them plenty of people who are bumped by accident- which lets the airline overbook and avoid having to ask for volunteers that can cost them $200-$400/seat to get. Intentionally causing your passengers to mess up their itineraries in order to deal with your overbooking situation is just an evil way to treat people.
Then, given that situation, the way your staff deals with people is just not ok. Ive heard a few things about the unhealthy airlines lately and I wonder how much of what I saw was a symptom of the dysfunctional labor/management thing going on at American. The non-communicative attitude and the staffs need to show customers whos boss by screwing my getting on the next flight is not going to get the airline healthy again. At this point I cant imagine any destination that I need to get to so badly that I would make another connection at DFW and in general Im all set to avoid American whenever possible (although sadly that is not 100% possible).
Finally, the situation with the official departure times is just wacky and I don't think this is unique to American Airlines. Why print 7:28pm on a ticket and show it on the displays when this time is completely useless to your passengers. If I have to show up at 7:18pm before the doors close, why not put that as the departure time? If 7:28pm had some use to me that would be one thing, but as far as I can tell its just one more gimmick that lets them schdule crazy-tight connections, "accidentally" bump more people and avoid having to pay for over-booking.
February 11, 2006
Food- Dim Sum in San Francisco
For a few years now Hillel and I have had a bit of a debate about which of two San Francisco dim sum restaurants is better. The two contenders are Yank Sing and Ton Kiang. I've always argued that Yank Sing had more interesting variety in dishes, but as of today I'll switch and admit that Hillel was right. I visited Ton Kiang and I've got to say that the variety and just great freshness of their dim sum put them in the top spot.
I warmed up with a couple of pot stickers, but then they brought around something that is apparently a new dish they just introduced- green tea salad. They bring it on a plate with different ingredients (cabbage, garlic, peanuts, I think ginger and some green tea paste) separate and then mix it together for you at the table. It didn't blow me away but it was very nice and it was a new taste which was great.
Then I had a couple of deep fried pork buns. These were great when fresh- later on I brough some back for Kat and they were a bit greasy but right at the table they didn't come off that way. The snow pea shoots were very good, and the shrimp and snowpea, and scalop dumplings were just about perfect- delicate but they didn't fall apart when you tried to pick them up. Finally a few normal pork buns, which were super fresh again.
Also checked out a couple of other places the last two days- Straits cafe opened a branch in some new mall down in San Jose and I found it very disappointing. And Kat and I went to Aqua which was just great- it was nice to have interesting modern cuisine with the sea-food angle on it which resulted in something a bit different from the "usual".
February 10, 2006
Technology- Phones
I've had this Samsung SCH-630 phone for the last two years now and the thing is almost dead. A week ago something was loose and it could never get a wireless connection. Earlier today something was loose and I couldn't hear in the ear-piece (although I did figure out a work around of using the speaker-phone mode but that sucked).
I've looked around a bit and right now the choices seem to be-
a) Treo 650.
b) Treo 700.
c) Samsung i730.
d) Wait for the next great thing and tough it out while my phone dies a slow death.
(d) is the inertia plan, but its getting harder every day. The problem is that I've seen some really bad comments on the Internet about the Samsung, and neither Treo is clearly better than the other.
The 650 is cheaper, has a better screen and I've heard nice things about the palm software although using friend's phones I also find it somewhat confusing at times.
The 700 is supposed to be somewhat faster and its probably easier for me to build cool stuff for. But it costs $200 more and it feels like such a 60% solution. I'm really disappointed they didn't include wireless and I'm just pissed at Verizon for disabling the feature that would let you use it as an internet connection for your laptop.
February 09, 2006
Technology- RSS
I know I've been promising this for a long time now, but this blog now has an RSS feed. You can grab it here and I'll update the templates to include the standard RSS icon & link shortly.
February 01, 2006
Music- Coachella coming soon
With the Coachella line-up out, I'll probably be posting lots of links to bands I'm looking forward to or checking out over the next few days. Overall the line-up doesn't create an immediate "wow" reaction, but I've got to say that I've always found its the stuff I didn't recognize right away that has been best. So I use the band-list as a shopping list for lots of new music. I've scoped out all the bands that have music on EMusic and I'll probably place a couple of Amazon orders too (although mostly I like supporting the artists that are on EMusic).
TO start off though here are two bands that aren't going to Coachella (this year- British Sea Power I discovered there last year) but I find myself surprised that I didn't buy their albums.
January 28, 2006
Music- G. Love and Special Sauce
Kat and I went to the G. Love show last night. I bought the "Back in the day" and "in the kings court" albums at the show but wanted to check out a few of the more normal albums. Cool stuff- I noticed all the Amazon listings compared him to Beck which at first didn't make sense but the more I think about it its probably right. On the other hand I've never seen Beck in a small club- maybe he would be this cool in a small setting.
January 27, 2006
Network Magic Photocast- a cool new way to share photos
We just launched a cool new app call Photocast. It lets you subscribe to a feed of photos from somones Net2Go site and view them on your computers. You can check out my photocast just by clicking here.
The best part is that if you are running Net2Go you can give your friends and family access with simple URLs that look like this-
http://photocaster.networkmagic.com/?host=http://alex.net2go.com
January 26, 2006
Books- New books to read
Time for me to get off my butt and grab these two new books- one from Robert Scoble of blogging fame and the other from Guy Kawasaki who pretty much invented the role "evangelist" back in the old-days at Apple.
I've been writing tons of code at work, but I should take a bit of time to upgrade the infrastructure for this site so I can blog a bit easier. Maybe I'd be less lazy and update the site more often then. At least I now have a way to create articles as distinct documents- the next step is RSS which should be really easy now.
January 03, 2006
Presentations- Jobs vs Bill presentation style
This posting has a great analysis of the different presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I often used the Steve Jobs presentation style as an example of very effective speaking, although I'd have to admit that I have been terrible at following his example.
I did several pretty succesful public speaking bits at Microsoft and I thought some great demos as part of a few keynotes, but my last one at the PDC '03 was a terrible disaster. I got busy with other stuff and just didn't prepare a fraction as much as I should have- it was a real disappointment.
It's really interesting to see Mr. Reynolds talk about how the Steve Jobs type presentation can work for technical content. I've seen it work super-well in his consumer speeches, but I'd have to say that last time I saw him speak at a WWDC it was somewhat less effective with the hard-core developer audience. I would be fun to try it out- I especially like the advice about avoiding the bullets and make each slide tell a story.
December 26, 2005
Skiing- Shopping for new skis
Once again for the holidays we took off for Snowbird for some skiing. I've been getting a ton of crap for my beautiful 10-year old "classic" straight skis with a full 203cm length to handle carving the toughest ice. Ok, I suppose they are getting a bit old, so I decided to demo for a couple of days to try to find some new ones.
I suppose my first concern was that I wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between the various sets of skis. Who really knows what kind of difference a bit stiffer or a slightly different curvature makes? To my surprise the different skis were dramatically different and some of the skis that were supposed to be best for my skiing style were my least favorite. Some sets of skis just made me distinctly unhappy when I tried to push them. They would try to decide the direction to go themselves or they had big vibration problems. Some others were nice, but unexceptional. Two sets- the Atomic Metron B5 and Rossignol Zenith Z9's both created a distinct "happy grin" effect. The Rossignol's were $300 cheaper so I bought a pair of those last night and skied on them all day today. Maybe it was just the nice dump of fresh snow we got today but they were great today across different conditions and I'm really loving how much better it is to have shorter skis with some nice wide scoops in the thick powder.
Official Demo Results-
Unhappy-
Atomic Metron M:EX,
Volkl Supersport
Nice-
Dynastar 8000,
Nordica Top Fuel
Big Grin-
Atomic Metron B5,
Rossignol Zenith Z9s
Other-
Goode. These are all composite construction just like my airplane and are super-light
and have a ton of stiffness and spring. I've
had a pair of their poles for a long time and they are great and totally
indestructible. The skis seemed like they might be great for some special
purposes but they weren't good enough general-purpose skis for me (although I
have to admit I was on a pair that was too short for me). They have a great
bounce that was fun in the moguls, but not enough weight to deal with crud and
when I was trying to ski fast on a steep run with a fairly bare surface they
almost vibrated me to death.
December 26, 2005
Skiing- Shopping for new skis
Once again for the holidays we took off for Snowbird for some skiing. I've been getting a ton of crap for my beautiful 10-year old "classic" straight skis with a full 203cm length to handle carving the toughest ice. Ok, I suppose they are getting a bit old, so I decided to demo for a couple of days to try to find some new ones.
I suppose my first concern was that I wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between the various sets of skis. Who really knows what kind of difference a bit stiffer or a slightly different curvature makes? To my surprise the different skis were dramatically different and some of the skis that were supposed to be best for my skiing style were my least favorite. Some sets of skis just made me distinctly unhappy when I tried to push them. They would try to decide the direction to go themselves or they had big vibration problems. Some others were nice, but unexceptional. Two sets- the Atomic Metron B5 and Rossignol Zenith Z9's both created a distinct "happy grin" effect. The Rossignol's were $300 cheaper so I bought a pair of those last night and skied on them all day today. Maybe it was just the nice dump of fresh snow we got today but they were great today across different conditions and I'm really loving how much better it is to have shorter skis with some nice wide scoops in the thick powder.
Official Demo Results-
Unhappy-
Atomic Metron M:EX,
Volkl Supersport
Nice-
Dynastar 8000,
Nordica Top Fuel
Big Grin-
Atomic Metron B5,
Rossignol Zenith Z9s
Other-
Goode. These are all composite construction just like my airplane and are super-light
and have a ton of stiffness and spring. I've
had a pair of their poles for a long time and they are great and totally
indestructible. The skis seemed like they might be great for some special
purposes but they weren't good enough general-purpose skis for me (although I
have to admit I was on a pair that was too short for me). They have a great
bounce that was fun in the moguls, but not enough weight to deal with crud and
when I was trying to ski fast on a steep run with a fairly bare surface they
almost vibrated me to death.
November 21, 2005
Microsoft- Mini-Microsoft
A brief mention of me in Mini-Microsoft today. Its always nice to get recognition for cool projects you worked on. I still really enjoy reading mini, although as many people have observed his comments section has really gone to hell. My other observation is that while I agree with a ton of the stuff that he writes, in many ways I think his central premise- that the key thing to fix Microsoft is to just reduce its size a bunch, is just incredibly unrealistic. There are two key issues here- 1) Just who does the scaling back anyway? The problem is that once you have an organization with entrenched power structures, fiefdoms, etc. as you scale back those tend to get maintained or even enhanced. Unless the senior management types are super-human, the fiefdoms protect themselves and the cuts probably in exactly the wrong places. 2) Microsoft has lots of legacy. Sometimes you can try to ignore it, but the reality is that just about every computer user in the world today relies on Microsoft's products and they can't just quit maintaining them. And this means that every time they fix something they need to fix it across ~33 languages across 6+ different OS revs, etc. They can't afford to just abandon their existing customers and architectures and the reality is that much of their bulk is because of situations like that. If people blindly took mini's advice you would likely have another situation like the run up to the great "security push" and temporary abandonment of IE where people (myself included) got too focused on the new great innovative stuff and ignored supporting the existing stuff.
On another topic I really really need to upgrade this site- I'm going to make it my top project to crank out some RSS feeds, etc. I'm still going to stubbornly stick to using my own custom tools to build the site. Also if people have been connecting to this page on alex.hopmann.org, I've also registered www.alexhopmann.com since the more normal URL structure seems to be easier for people.
November 11, 2005
Pure Networks- Network Magic Is In Stores
We went down to Fry's Electronics the other day and were thrilled to see
that Network Magic boxes were there on the software aisle. They were
beautiful so we couldn't help ourselves and picked up a few copies. You can
click here to get one yourself from Amazon. Feel free to buy 5 or 6.
Also- Tom's Networking just posted a review of Network Magic. Sweet. I was a bit nervous about this one- I read Tom's daily and they can be pretty hard-core. "Network Magic has more going for it" is a pretty great thing for them to say and I'm hoping we can be all over improving some of the issues they point out.
November 10, 2005
Microsoft- Ray Ozzie memo
When Microsoft acquired Groove and made Ray Ozzie CTO #3 (talk about having lots of "chiefs") I'll have to admit that I was a skeptic. I've seen lots of smart people come into Microsoft and have a really hard time figuring out how to fit in and be effective. To be honest, with some of the recent trends (more on that later) I was expecting it to be even harder to do anything that would make sense.
They recently published a memo that he sent to the whole company (initially two weeks ago). This is being positioned as the latest "Internet Tidal Wave" memo and I've got to say that my reaction is actually "wow". First of all I'm really touched that he talks about OWA and XMLHTTP (twice!) as being some of the key pioneering projects leading to the Internet services wave. I didn't necessarily expect those things to catch on quickly or be recognized for what they are initially, but its interesting that it wasn't really until the guy comes in from outside that they finally get some internal recognition. I seem to recall the Hotmail guys even analyzing how gmail was doing its stuff when OWA was right there under their noses for 7+ years!
But beyond that, I've got to say that it really feels like the rest of the memo is pretty much dead-on in a way I haven't seen for awhile. I'm sure there are some details you could pick on, but it looks like a great wake-up call, it looks like something that people should be able to get their teeth into, and it feels like some good validation for a which of the thinking we have been doing at Pure lately.
Back to the "recent trend" thing. I was just reading Rich Tong and John Zagula's book The Marketing Playbook
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The fine print- Not much fine print for this website.
