The reason I tell it is that once I started working at Apple (in 1999, a couple

[Read the whole thing]]]> So Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO yesterday, and people far and wide are sharing their stories of the man. Mine might be the smallest of any you’ll read, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway.

The reason I tell it is that once I started working at Apple (in 1999, a couple of years after Steve returns to the company), people started asking me if I’d met him. Something about the way they asked, or a look in their eye, made me realize what they really wanted was a “blood in the water” story about the CEO with the famous temper, or temperament, or something. I’d heard stories myself (one is that he’d sometimes ask people he encountered in the elevator what they worked on, and basically make them justify their job right there and then), but they were just stories to me. Oh, I had no doubt that he was emphatic in arguing about things, but I didn’t know any credible stories of him really laying into an employee he’d met at random.

Still, after just a few years it had become kind of ridiculous how many people asked me if I’d met Steve, who seemed to have an expectation of a good, juicy Steve story. I think at least a few of them asked if he’d yelled at me.

Indeed, I did pass Steve from time to time on the Apple campus. At least twice we simply made eye contact, smiled, and said “Hello” to each other, and continued on our ways. Once I saw him approaching with a look on his face that said “I’m on a mission and no one is going to get in my way.” I got out of his way and he walked on by.

But here’s the real story I have to tell:

In 2003 I started biking to work regularly. For a number of years I worked in Infinite Loop 1 – 2 floors below the CEO’s office. Despite being only on the second floor, I always took the elevator to bring my bike to and from my office: My office was big enough to hold my bike comfortably (so I didn’t have to lock it up outside), and it was awkward to carry it up and down the stairs; I was always afraid I’d damage the wall or the bike. I would wait for an empty elevator if someone else was waiting so I didn’t inconvenience them.

So one warm summer day (2004, maybe?) I’m leaving work, in full “biking dork” regalia (biking shorts, helmet, gloves, clip-on shoes), and I go to the elevator and hit the “down” button. The elevator arrives and (of course) there stands Steve. I think, “Great, he’s wondering why I can’t just walk my bike down one flight of stairs rather than stopping his elevator.” But since it would be truly stupid to let him go on without me (“I’m going to inconvenience you and do so for no reason whatsoever because I’m an idiot!”), I get in the elevator. The doors close.

Steve looks at the bike, looks at me, and says, “Beautiful day for a bike ride.”

I’m not very comfortable talking to famous or powerful people (you should see me stammer when I meet a science fiction author whose work I admire). Thinking quickly but not clearly (in other words, being something of an idiot), I say something like, “It’s nice. A little warm, though.” Steve is having none of this and responds along the lines that I’m picking nits. I allow that he may be right. By this time we’ve left the elevator and walked out the front doors of the building.

I remember thinking as we went outside that it was a little warm, but in the grand scheme of things, here we were in Silicon Valley where it’s almost always a beautiful day for a bike ride. So what did I really have to complain about?

I bet there are lots of employees with stories like this. The “blood in the water” stories seem more like legends (or, more likely, the stuff of high-level meetings among people whose job descriptions include going at it tooth-and-nail with the CEO, meeting a line worker like me would never hear about). Maybe he was different his first go-round at Apple, but if so, he’d grown a lot by the time he returned.

Oh, and no one I’ve told this story to has seemed disappointed by it. So maybe they didn’t really want the blood after all.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Those of my readers who know I work on Apple’s developer tools may have heard that we recently shipped Xcode 4. But this entry isn’t about that (since, well, this isn’t a work or an Apple blog). Rather, it’s about our ship celebration, which was dinner at Teatro Zinzanni in San Francisco on Thursday night.

Debbi and I decided to take the bus up with most everyone else, mainly because driving into the city during rush hour wasn’t attractive, but also because driving home after dinner wasn’t real appealing either. It only took a little over an hour for the bus to get there, so it wasn’t much of a compromise.

Teatro Zinzanni is – literally – dinner-and-a-show, the show being similar in some respects to Cirque du Soleil, but with a dash of vaudeville and audience participation thrown in. The show alternates a comedy bit – usually plucking an audience member for their involvement and a little embarrassment – with a musical and/or acrobatic performance, and one of the five courses of the dinner. While the style of the comedy bits were not really my thing (although seeing my cow-orkers’ involvement was greatly humorous, which made up for it), the other performances were very impressive. I was particularly amazed at the feats of strength and acrobatics performed by “Les Petits Frères”, which were frequently amazing.

(I’m amused that Zinzanni’s slogan is “Love, chaos and dinner”, since in order to perform these stunts in a dinner setting what they’re doing is anything but chaos.)

Almost worth the visit all by themselves are the available mixed drinks (PDF), of which I think I had one more than I really ought to have had. (Another excellent reason to have taken the bus.) I think the “Bella Donna” was my favorite.

We had fun socializing before dinner. Debbi met many of my cow-orkers, whom she mostly hadn’t met since I moved to a different team last summer, and we caught up with a few people we don’t see very often.

It was around midnight by the time we made it home, but it was well worth it. We have some friends who are big fans of Teatro Zinzanni, and I can see going back sometime.

I’d just rather not be one of the people picked to participate in one of the comedy bits!

[Read the whole thing]]]> Seems like a number of other projects are coming to an end around the Web as we transition to the new year, much as I decided to end my weekly comics review column. A few I’ve noticed:

• Dirk Deppey’s daily comics blog roundup came to an end as the author was let go by Fantagraphics.
• J.C. Bradbury is ending his Sabernomics baseball blog, to spend his time on other projects. Bradbury was an unusual voice in the sabermetric community, often presenting opinions at odds with common sabermetric approaches, such as his dislike of the idea of replacement-level players.
• The terrific webcomic Plan B came to an end last month, as its story reached its conclusion. I thought the ending was too ambiguous and kind of devoid of meaning – it needed a stronger denouement – but it was still a great ride, and I look forward to the creator’s next project.
• Not quite as sadly, Chad Nevitt’s Dreadstar December closes with a look at the next-to-last all-Jim-Starlin-created issue, and a summary of the series as a whole. Dreadstar was one of my favorite comic books when Starlin was producing it (it quickly lost that position when Peter David – whose style clashed badly with the feel of the book – took over as writer), and I don’t think it’s ever gotten its due. Nevitt did a great job looking at each issue and considering it as a serious work, warts and all. It’s certainly the high point of Starlin’s long career in comics.

No doubt there will be plenty of beginnings of Web projects that I’ll want to follow in the first month of 2011. The difference is that I may not find out about them until months afterwards.

I mainly plan to use this to play podcasts in my car, replacing my venerable

[Read the whole thing]]]> Is it silly to be excited to get a new toy like this? Especially since there have been weeks when I’ve spent more on comic books than I spent on this? (Okay, very few such weeks, but still.)

I mainly plan to use this to play podcasts in my car, replacing my venerable – but nearing the end – 80 Gb “classic” iPod.

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m not buying an iPad this weekend, though many of my friends and cow-orkers are. I tend to trail the edge of technology adoption anyway; I’m quirky for a programmer that way. For me it seems like the iPad is rife with potential, but there’s not a lot I’d truly use it for from the beginning.

Here are some things I don’t expect to use the iPad for:

1. Reading books and comic books. To me, most books and many comic books are things to be enjoyed over and over, to be collected and shared through lending and borrowing. I own many books and comics which I expect to enjoy for decades to come, and I have my doubts that the evolution of technology is such that I’ll be able to read an e-book I buy today again in 20 years without going through some sort of annoying upgrading process, due to format changes (never mind DRM issues, if any). Reading literature on a device seems better aimed towards disposable works. To be sure, there are some books which I regard as disposable (this one, for instance), but that’s not the case for most books.

   Of course, many readers may consider most books to be “disposable” in this case. (Debbi gets most of her reading material from the library, the long-time gold standard of disposable literature.) Even the classics are disposable to someone who doesn’t plan to ever read them again. But I’m a collector, so I’m just not the target audience for e-books and e-comics.

2. Programming. One can program for the iPad, but not on the iPad. More to the point, for me, most of my programming outside work these days involves writing complex Ruby scripts to process baseball statistics and my library of Magic cards. That uses programming as a tool to get some information out the other side, rather than to write an application which is itself the tool; it cuts out the middleman, so to speak. I could imagine rewriting all that stuff so that it runs on the iPad, but it’s not likely that I will. Especially the baseball stuff, which is pretty narrowly tailored to my own quirky needs.

   Programmers are an exception to Frasier Spears’ commentary on the iPad in this way; for us, programming often is a part of the “real work”. But the point is that programmers are not the core audience for the iPad, and I think one reason behind Cory Doctorow’s ire is that he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept this.

3. Writing and blogging. I don’t see myself writing fiction or essays or blog posts on an iPad: Why use the on-screen keyboard or buy an external keyboard when I can just use my Mac? Will it be as easy to do word processing or use WordPress on an iPad as on a laptop, and if not, will that be a significant barrier? I dunno.

   The question of whether the iPad is mainly aimed at content consumers, or whether it will also work well for content producers, is I think an open question. At the moment my impression is that it leans toward the former, but I can imagine the balance evening out over time. Consequently, I can see myself changing my mind about this one more easily than the above two.

On the other hand, here are some things I do hope to use the iPad for, sooner or later:

1. As a drawing input device. I expect we’ll see apps which allow the iPad to be used as an input device like the Wacom Cintiq in pretty short order, connecting your iPad to a Mac and using it to control Photoshop or other drawing apps which are too resource-intensive to run on the iPad themselves. (Of course, in the long run, why need to even connect it to your Mac? But I doubt we’re there yet for many purposes.)
2. Playing innovative games. Computer games have been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years, in my opinion. First person shooters, real-time strategy games, simple arcade-style games, they’ve each made incremental advances over time, but nothing that’s blown me away. The last time I played computer games which felt truly new were MYST and Riven back in the 90s. Sure, they were at their core puzzle games, but they were also immersive experiences in exploring a world. I would love to see a thoughtful, immersive game experience enabled by the iPad.
3. Reading newspapers and magazines. Speaking of disposable literature, I still subscribe to the daily newspaper (the San Jose Mercury News) in print form, and I even save the funnies every day for Debbi to read. I’ll probably keep doing so, but I could see subscribing to other periodicals – especially niche ones, or ones I don’t plan to keep, such as science fiction magazines – and reading them on an iPad. (And yes, I’d certainly pay for them.)

I have no doubt I’ll buy an iPad eventually (perhaps as soon as this summer). This is just my personal and ruthlessly-practical way of looking at it.

The iPad is already a fascinating device from a social-engineering and technological-evolutionary standpoint (if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be all the controversy surrounding it), and the science fiction fan and casual futurist in me would love to write about those aspects. However, the Apple employee in me thinks I should probably stay out of it. (I don’t think anyone really listens to little ol’ me, but there’s no percentage in risking the Internet Hordes unexpectedly descending on my blog and reading more into it than I intend.)

And on that note, off I go to my fantasy baseball draft, which I manage using the aforementioned Ruby scripts on my MacBook Pro.

If you’ve never been to the Cartoon Art Museum, it’s definitely worth a trip. Admission is reasonable (currently $6 for adults), and you get a

[Read the whole thing]]]> Saturday we went up to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, mainly because I wanted to see their Monsters of Webcomics exhibition before it departs later this month.

If you’ve never been to the Cartoon Art Museum, it’s definitely worth a trip. Admission is reasonable (currently $6 for adults), and you get a lot for your money: The museum consists of 5 rooms, each with a different exhibit. If you’re afraid that it’s full of superhero comics art, nothing could be further from the truth: I features all sorts of sequential art, and usually there are only a few pages of superhero comics. For example, we saw a collection of concept art, color test art, and animation cels from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, many from the collection of one of the artists, Ron Dias. Another is an exhibition of an underground cartoonist from San Francisco, Spain Rodriguez. While underground comics aren’t my thing, there’s something for everyone (well, most people) here. The museum also has a bookstore in front with an eclectic selection.

The webcomics exhibit was pretty good, featuring ten webcomics, most of which I’d heard of, but only one of which (Girl Genius) I read. Though I probably should be reading Dicebox and Templar, Arizona (I’d never heard of the former, I’d come across the latter but not gotten into it). The other seven arguably have more in common with the underground comics I’m not fond of than with traditional cartoons or comic art, so I’m not sure any of them will be my thing (the art styles aren’t generally to my taste, and surrealistic stories and jokes aren’t for me). Still, it’s always good to see what’s out there.

The museum’s exhibits always feature copious notes, and this exhibit contained descriptions by the strip creators of how they got into webcomics, and how they produce their comics. The Dicebox exhibit contained a step-by-step illustration of how the creator produces a page, using both paper and digital techniques.

It’s been several years since I’d last visited the museum. I should wander by their web page more often and try to go once a year or so, because I always enjoy it. Plus, it’s an excuse to get up to the city, which us South Bay dwellers can be reluctant to do.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Things were a little different back in 1990, when I was new to the net:

1. You read their posts on USENET.
2. You send them e-mail about their posts.
3. You publicly respond to their posts.
4. You chat with them using talk, BITnet Relay, or perhaps IRC.
5. You talk with them on the phone or meet them in person.

Thank goodness today we have enough social networking technology to avoid that last step! Hooray for progress, eh?

[Read the whole thing]]]> I don’t often get new software for my Mac, as I find that the software that comes with Mac OS X, or that I’ve bought or downloaded previously does what I want. And with as many hobbies as I have – many of the non-computer hobbies – I’m not generally looking for software to do something new for me. Despite this, I’ve downloaded two new pieces of software in the past week:

1. ClickToFlash is a very cool Safari plug-in which masks out all the Flash being used on the web from your browsing experience, letting you choose to view a Flash instance on demand, by clicking on the Flash box. Since a lot of annoying animated ads are done in Flash, it also works as a partial ad blocker. It took me just minutes to be really happy I’d downloaded this.
2. Tweetie is a Twitter client. (There’s also an iPhone version, but I’m happy with Echofon there.) It seems slightly better than Twitteriffic, although I’m hard-pressed to say how; I tried Tweetie because I have friends who love it. I mostly wish that Twitter had a better Web interface so that I didn’t need a separate app for it at all; the service is so simple, you’d think they could make one. Still, since Twitter is of minimal value to me (Facebook is much more useful and fun), it’s not a big deal one way or the other.

What other Mac software out there ought I to be using?

[Read the whole thing]]]> Often when we ship a new version of Mac OS X, there will be a celebration event for the organization. We were trying to remember the other day whether we’ve had one for every release (I’m pretty sure we didn’t have one for Puma), but I’ve thought in any case that none of them equalled the party for shipping Cheetah (OS X 10.0), which was held in Hangar One at Moffett Field.

But I think we just surpassed that one, with the party for Snow Leopard, which was held on Friday evening at the newly-rebuilt California Academy of Sciences. The museum shut down for a private party for just us, and even though there were hundreds people there, I’m told by people who have been to the new building (this was my first visit) that it wasn’t anywhere near as crowded as when it’s open to the public, so it was totally worth it. I don’t even want to think how much it cost to rent the place for a Friday evening.

I visited the old Academy a couple of times before it was demolished (like the De Young Museum nearby, Cal Academy’s old buildings were damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and had to be rebuilt from scratch), and I recall it being interesting but quaint, in an old stone-and-concrete structure which felt too small for the Academy’s ambitions. The new building is huge, three stories tall with a garden that covers the whole roof, and a spacious floor plan based around the Morrison Planetarium in one wing, and the tropical rainforest in the other. It’s quite a structure.

I love rainforests and we made a point of visiting before it closed at 8 pm (the party started at 6:30). You start at the bottom and walk upwards, with the air getting more and more humid as you progress. There are butterflies and birds in the habitat, and you’re asked to check yourself for butterflies before you leave. We also made a point to get Planetarium tickets, where we saw a show titled “Fragile Planet” about the possibility of life on other worlds. The script was a little dodgy at times (although it might play better to someone who hasn’t been reading science fiction all his life), but the visuals were fantastic, especially the opening sequence of lifting off from Earth. Well worth the visit.

The “living roof” was disappointing only in that you can’t see as much in the dark; I suspect it’s better seen in the daytime. Certainly it looked stunning in the Planetarium show. But the interior didn’t disappoint, with African dioramas, the giant pendulum, fossils and skeleton reproductions, displays and interactive presentations, and the Steinhart Aquarium, which is not as impressive as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but is still fun. The party lasted until 11, which was enough time to see everything, some things more than once.

Debbi came with me as my guest, and were socialized with many of my cow-orkers and their guests. Over the last 10 years I’ve gotten to know quite a few people at Apple, though it’s always a little surprising how many people I don’t recognize, even from just walking around campus. It’s a big company.

Debbi and I left a little early – although things were starting to wind down – and went to Ghirardelli Square to wrap up the evening with ice cream.

I didn’t take pictures of the party itself, but we did take some good pictures of the academy, for your viewing pleasure. I certainly recommend going if you’re in the area – assuming you want to brave the crowds.

The hanging blue whale skeleton
(click for larger image)

Large blue butterfly in the rainforest

This lizard is smaller than my hand

Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton
(click for larger image)

Sea dragons
(photo by Debbi)

A lively sea turtle

A rare albino alligator
(click for larger image)

Me and a model of a large tortoise
(photo by Debbi, of course)

[Read the whole thing]]]> Sunday marked (as the calendar turns) ten years of working at Apple for me. I guess yesterday – Monday – was slightly more relevant, since if course I didn’t start work on a Sunday (although I did go in the previous Friday to get some info from my manager, since I spent my first week in a training class). Yesterday was 522 weeks from that starting date.

But who’s counting?

I’ve spent most of that time working on the Xcode developer tools. Not only is 10 years a long time to work at a single company in Silicon Valley, but nearly-8-years is a long time to be in more-or-less the same role at that company. Of course, every year it seems like I’m working on something new and different, using new technology, so there’s a lot of variety within my job. There’s so much going on here that even if I switched teams every couple of years there’s still more neat stuff to work with and work on than anyone could fit into a lifetime. (Contrast with my previous company, where after 4 years I felt like I’d basically done everything there was to do, on a technical level.)

(Of course, I “celebrated” my anniversary by spending the whole day investigating a heisenbug, but that’s the way it goes sometimes!)

Although the job has its frustrations, there’s no substitute for working with smart people on a project that matters, even if it’s not the most visible or glamorous project around. And I know my work is appreciated, which helps a lot too.

It’s been an exciting decade for Apple, too; the company was just starting its upswing when I joined the company, about a year after the first iMac was introduced. It’s been fun to have been there through all of that.

When I told one of my closest friends at my old company that I was going to interview with Apple, she said, “Oh, you are so out of here.” Ten years later, I’m glad I got the offer, and I’m glad to have taken the job. And I’m glad to have stuck around this long. I hope to stick around a good while longer.

At least Facebook actually let me join. When I tried to join MySpace a couple of years ago they, well, technically they let me join,

[Read the whole thing]]]> So I joined Facebook yesterday. Giving in to subtle social pressure, I guess. But I don’t yet (or, if you prefer, still don’t) see what the big attraction is.

At least Facebook actually let me join. When I tried to join MySpace a couple of years ago they, well, technically they let me join, too, but something went wrong with the account set-up and I was never able to edit my account: Any changes I made were immediately lost. I couldn’t even delete the account and start over! And MySpace has (or had, at the time) nonexistent user support: I wrote them twice asking for help, and all they did was send me back entries from their FAQ that I’d already read. Useless.

What do I expect to get out of Facebook? Honestly, I have no idea. I mainly use the so-called “social media” for two purposes:

1. To keep in touch with friends.
2. To follow writers I find interesting or who are writing about subjects I enjoy.

For the most part, I get all of this through the blogs I follow (and I follow dozens of them), including LiveJournal, which has pretty much shown itself to be the best one-stop-shopping site for keeping up with friends and acquaintances.

I can count the number of times I’ve gone to sites like Digg on my fingers. I have a Twitter account which I use sporadically, but Twitter just doesn’t provide much depth or a decent signal-to-noise ratio. (Debbi sometimes teases me about Twittering when we’re out-and-about, but really I’m not very active there. Not compared to many people.)

So anyway, Facebook: I imagine I might encounter a few old acquaintances there, but honestly I’m already in touch with most of my old friends through e-mail and the Web. The mere existence of the Internet turned out to be the 90% solution for that. But maybe I’ll be surprised.

So Facebook might just end up being another account I created that ends up laying fallow. But hey, at least it’s free.

I think I was first exposed to computers by a neighbor of mine when I was about 8 or 9 (so, 1977 or 78) who had somehow piqued my interest with some stories of his programming mainframes. He loaned me a book he had on programming in FORTRAN, which I thumbed

[Read the whole thing]]]> (Ganked from Nadyne.)

I think I was first exposed to computers by a neighbor of mine when I was about 8 or 9 (so, 1977 or 78) who had somehow piqued my interest with some stories of his programming mainframes. He loaned me a book he had on programming in FORTRAN, which I thumbed through but didn’t really understand. I’m not sure it was a very good book, to be honest, although at that point I had no idea what distinguished a good book on programming from a bad book. (It’s not clear to me that most people who write programming books know this either.)

Also around this time I got into video games courtesy of the Atari 2600, which was the most popular (at least in my neck of the woods) game console of its day. There was even a “programming in BASIC” cartridge for the system which I bought with images of programming my own games, but it was a waste of time since its capabilities were, uh, extremely limited. But also around this time a friend of mine, Ben, got a TRS-80 Model I, which actually did have a full BASIC programming language. I borrowed his books on BASIC programming and wrote out – in long-hand on lined paper! – lengthy programs which represented little games. I’d go over to his house and type them in and see if they worked, debug them, etc. It was all totally ad-hoc, but those days I spent lots of time writing and drawing random stuff on paper, so it was right up my alley.

My parents bought me my very own TRS-80 Model III, which must have been when I was 11 or 12 given that it was released in 1980. So I was able to create all my own little games, and I’d also create little animation programs with the rather primitive graphics system. It had a tape drive and 4K of RAM, and I wrote a text adventure game which filled up the whole of memory, and I had to cut corners to get it to fit in. Later it got upgraded to 48K of RAM with a floppy drive. This was the day of computer magazines which printed whole programs in source code, and I subscribed to one: Softside. I especially enjoyed the text adventure games, in which they encoded all of the text strings using a simple algorithm so you wouldn’t have the game spoiled for you while you typed it in. On the other hand, you ended up with some interesting typos in the strings when you ran the program.

(I sometimes wonder if typing in all this stuff from paper helped make me such a fast typist, especially since I’m a two-fingered typist.)

In late 1981 my friend Rob – who at this point qualifies as my oldest friend with whom I’m still in contact – moved in across the street. They had an Apple II+, and we spent many hours on that thing playing Ultima II and watching MTV. This was a big step forward since it had better graphics and color, which my TRS-80 didn’t have. A couple of years later my Mom bought an Apple IIe, which pretty much put my TRS-80 into mothballs.

My next step in actual programming came through playing play by mail games, which inspired me to construct my own turn-based computer games, which my friends would play. I wrote an elaborate system in BASIC to track everyone’s moves and the state of the game, and emit board state to the screen from each player’s perspective (one of the things I thought was neat about these games was that you could only see a limited amount of the board, quite different from real-time board games). Unfortunately I had no idea how to write printer code, so I had to copy all the boards onto paper to hand them out. Did I mention that I had a lot of free time back in the day? (Did I mention that my grades weren’t so great early in high school?)

By senior year of high school I was seriously interested in computer programming, and I signed up for two programming courses at once, a full-time class in Pascal, and a part-time class in BASIC (the instructor insisted I take the latter class in order to take the former). These were my first exposure to structured programming principles. I also worked part-time in the computer lab and had to restructure a program they were using in the office. This was my first experience working with someone else’s code, and it was more than I could handle at the time – it was very slow going. I just shake my head when I reminisce about it, since these days I wade into thousands of lines of code I’ve never seen before on a semi-regular basis.

The other thing to mention here is that Rob’s mother bought one of the very first Macintosh computers, which must have been right in 1984. It had MacPaint and MacWrite, plus of course an ImageWriter. The screen size, graphics, and color were a bit of a letdown compared to the Apple II, but the interface and software made up for that. I still have a paper print-out of a drawing I did in MacPaint on that very machine. I don’t really remember Rob and I using that machine for much more than novelty fiddling around – the Apple II was still the game system – but in senior year – by which time Rob had gone off to college – my new friend Matt also had a Mac, and we spent many, many hours after school at his house playing Dungeon of Doom on it.

In 1987 I headed off to college at Tulane, and although I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, I did want to keep up with programming. Tulane was a little draconian about its computer science courses: I wasn’t able to test out of classes with material I’d already taken, so I spent my freshman year being re-taught stuff I’d learned the year before. Sophomore year, though, we moved on to C more advanced information about how computers work. By the end of the year I’d decided to declare my major in CS, since the competing majors (English and art) were things I thought I could work on on my own without formal collegiate training. (Naturally, I’ve done fairly little creative writing or drawing ever since. Oh well!)

So that’s when I committed to a career in software When I finished college I felt somewhat deficient in my programming skills – in particular, use of pointers in C still baffled me from time to time – so I went off to graduate school at Wisconsin. Although I didn’t get a Ph.D. there, I did have the opportunity to work with an outstanding programmer on a research project and I learned a tremendous amount from studying his code and talking with him about how he designed software.

I was never a Macintosh programmer in the classic days. Whenever I tried to learn Mac programming I was either daunted by the high price of the developer tools (“Hmm, developer tools or four months of comic books…?”) or I would read about what was involved (the APIs and the lack of protected memory) and it just didn’t seem worth it, especially once I had experienced doing programming on UNIX systems. So my first experience with graphics programming was with X Windows. On the bright side, once Apple moved to a UNIX OS with the advent of Mac OS X, that made it an ideal system for my programming background.

When I look back on it, I often feel like I backed into being a programmer. I wasn’t a hacker or prolific programmer like many of my peers at the time, and sometimes I’d wonder if I wasn’t a fraud because programming didn’t consume my hobby time like it did so many other peoples’. But I’ve always tended to spread my time and attention across a variety of hobbies and interests – as even a casual reading of my journal should prove. Despite this I’ve ended up as a solid software engineer (well, I think so, anyway) in my career. Programming isn’t the be-all and end-all of my life, but I still enjoy building things and seeing them work, and all things considered I don’t regret the choices I made to end up where I am.

[Read the whole thing]]]> I decided to search for my name on the new search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”). The results were disappointing: The top hit was to my old web page, and the rest of the first page were either blogs I had commented on, or who had me in their blogroll. But this blog? Doesn’t show up.

Fail.

I’ve joked that Twitter is “like blogging only without

[Read the whole thing]]]> A few weeks ago I gave in to peer pressure and joined Twitter. You can find me there under mrawdon. Okay, I wasn’t really being pressured, but I’d several of my cow-orkers were hanging out there making pithy remarks, so I decided to sign up.

I’ve joked that Twitter is “like blogging only without the pesky content”. I’ve also seen it called “microblogging”, which I take to mean, “There is content, but there isn’t very much of it.” Which seems about right: I see little tidbits of real content here and there, but most of Twitter consists of tiny, generic snippets of thought which are either devoid of depth, or devoid of meaning due to a lack of context.

It’s the lack of context that really makes Twitter a suboptimal experience compared to blogging: If I didn’t know the people I’m following personally, there’d be essentially nothing there for me. So it’s no surprise that the few times I’ve tried to go out and find new Twitterers to follow, I’ve come up empty because it’s all just random nattering without any context to give it meaning, or any depth to give it value in the absence of that context. (By contrast, I’ve found many fine journals and blogs over the years simply by poking around in one place or another on the Web, even if I didn’t know the author beforehand.)

If I were to use a single word to sum up Twitter, I think it would be “disposable”. It’s hard enough to build anything of lasting value in a blog format, and it looks to be nearly impossible on Twitter. I don’t expect to become educated or informed through Twitter, and I strongly doubt there’s anything of interest in “the archives”. Will I ever go back to look at my old tweets to recall what was, like I do with my journal? Probably not. I wonder whether anyone else does so with their tweets?

Clearly a lot of people are having fun on Twitter, though. A tool like Twitteriffic turns Twitter into something like a push-notification system, which means less effort on your part to keep up with what your friends are doing. (This isn’t very different from following a blog via an RSS feed, though.) But it seems like most of the fun is in following the snarky remarks and exchanges and the occasional raw outbursts that pepper the site.

So there’s some value in that; people have fun and get a few laughs. But there’s a lot of fun and plenty of laughs elsewhere in the world, and a lot of it is more rewarding when it’s not restricted to 140 characters.

It all went pretty well, with one exception: Mid-afternoon yesterday, shortly before the presentation, I

[Read the whole thing]]]> I put in my time at WWDC this week. In addition to staffing the Xcode lab, I also was demo boy for a presentation – the first time I’ve been on stage at a conference other than Q&A sessions.

It all went pretty well, with one exception: Mid-afternoon yesterday, shortly before the presentation, I started getting a headache. In the somewhat overheated presentation room, the headache got worse. I was okay when I was actually driving the demo, but waiting between demos I was feeling really cruddy. Afterwards I went to the lab for my shift, but at that point the headache had gotten really awful and my stomach felt upset. I finally left early and caught the train back home, where Debbi picked me up at the station. At home I went straight to bed and slept for 12 hours nearly-straight.

I’m not sure if I was dehydrated (we’re having another heat wave here), or had a touch or food poisoning, or just had a migraine. But I felt much better this morning, if a little wobbly. Possibly from skipping dinner.

There are a lot of people for whom WWDC is a big social event, and they spend the whole week up there, even renting a hotel room in the city. I’m not one of those people, so I’m back in the office today. In a way I envy those folks, since I’m sure it’s a lot of fun for them, seeing old friends etc. I rarely have that experience, even at SF conventions, and I know a lot more people in fandom than I do in the Mac developer community. Ah well. Diff’rent strokes and all that.

[Read the whole thing]]]> A few months ago I took the plunge and upgraded our desktop computer at home to Leopard. After all, I’d been running it both at work and on both of our laptops, and it seemed fine. Okay, I’d had to update some freeware and shareware, but that’s to be expected. I should probably update them more than once every 3 years anyway.

Well, it went smoothly, except for one problem: I can’t get my scanner to work under Leopard. Which is a bummer, since I use the scanner to scan book and comic covers for this journal, album art for my iTunes library, and also to scan items I put up for sale on eBay.

I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 80, which was reasonably inexpensive and (more importantly) small and flat, but with a decent-sized platen for scanning. It’s worked well for several years, on both Panther and Tiger. But on Leopard it doesn’t work at all.

My first problem is that I use the version of Adobe Photoshop Elements that came with the scanner, which means that it’s now quite old, and won’t even launch on Leopard. If this were the worst problem, it would be surmountable; I could try to figure out Image Capture, which comes with Mac OS X, or I could try to use GraphicConverter or buy a copy of VueScan. Or heck, I could just buy the newest version of Photoshop Elements.

The larger problem is that the LiDE 80 doesn’t seem to be supported on Leopard, and in fact Canon seems to do a poor job of updating their drivers – the most recent drivers for this scanner were posted on 10/4/2007, which was shortly before Leopard was released. So I infer that they haven’t really been updated to work with Leopard. And n matter what I try, I haven’t been able to get them to work, even using the TWAIN driver, as other applications don’t seem to recognize Canon’s TWAIN driver. (The drivers also appear to be available only for PowerPC machines, which is fine for my desktop machine, since it is such a machine, but I’d like to buy an Intel-based Mac sometime soon, and that will pretty much hose it.) Someone recommended I check out SANE to see if they have a driver for it, but they don’t; apparently the scanner uses a “backend” which SANE doesn’t yet support. Alas.

It appears that other people have had the same problem, but I haven’t found a concrete solution. This thread has a lot of discussion about the issue, and some people seem to have gotten it to work, but others have not. I’m one of the “have not” people. On the other hand, one person was able to get it to work with VueScan, which I haven’t tried. (Although since VueScan seems to have a free trial, perhaps I should.)

So anyway, my solution to all this was to realize yesterday: Hey, I bought a second internal hard drive for the desktop machine a while back! So I partitioned that drive and installed Tiger on one partition, brought it up to date, and then installed the Canon software along with Photoshop Elements. Sure enough, the scanner works great in that environment. So at least that gives me a solution for the short term.

The longer term will involve buying a new computer, and then probably a new scanner. It seems that Epson has been releasing new drivers for Leopard, so I might give them a try, perhaps the V200 Photo. I’m certainly more inclined to buy a scanner from someone who appears to be actively supporting the platform.

If anyone has any advice or suggestions on what to get, I’d appreciate it.

Of course, I’ve needed to buy a new stereo receiver for months, and haven’t gotten around to that, so who knows when I’ll get to doing all this? (Then again, I installed Tiger on a new partition on a whim last night, so it could happen at any time…)

(via Daring Fireball, even if Gruber is a sourpuss when it comes to Boston sports.)

First of all, realize that I think the most practical piece of computer hardware to come along in the last ten years are Palm PDAs, and the only thing they have over the Apple Newton is that they’re faster, and they fit easily into my pocket.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Impressions after a few days with my iPhone:

First of all, realize that I think the most practical piece of computer hardware to come along in the last ten years are Palm PDAs, and the only thing they have over the Apple Newton is that they’re faster, and they fit easily into my pocket. I use them to store my calendar, my address list, and (most importantly) my extensive want list of comics, books, CDs, and other items I collect. And I can back up the data onto my computer (which is critical in all three cases).

By contrast, I have fairly little use for a mobile phone: I’ve had a low-end phone for a while, but I mainly use it to coordinate with Debbi, and in case of emergencies. I don’t use it for work, and I sometimes forget to take it with me, and rarely miss it. So it’s handy, but far from essential. I use my land line far more than I use my cell phone.

So I suspect I’m an unusual customer for an iPhone. On the other hand, since I was gifted with one I was certainly interested enough to activate it (and even paid an early-cancellation fee on my existing phone to do so!).

The hardware is nice: The form factor is fine for a handheld computer, a little taller and narrower than my PDA, and a lot thinner. As a phone it feels funky, a solid rectangular object, but I’m used to a clamshell enclosure that curves around my cheek and where the mike is closer to my mouth. I’ll probably get used to that difference.

The glass screen is surprisingly durable, I’d expected I’d scratch it within the first few days of use, but it’s still pristine. I tend to carry my stuff in my pockets rather than in a belt holster, so I bought a MarWare Sidewinder for it. It comes with a belt clip and a wrap for the earphones, as well as a clear film for the screen, which seems to work well. (Note to self and others: When applying plastic film to iPhone, do so in a cat-hair-free zone.)

Voice quality seems fine, although I think my old Verizon service was somewhat clearer. My impression is that voice quality will vary widely depending on where you are and, well, your personal preference. People seem very opinionated when it comes to wireless services.

Making calls is really slick and easy: Just find someone in your address book and hit their number. Or dial a number. And it brings up a palette of several options while a call is in progress, so you don’t have to remember what button to hit to put a call on speakerphone.

The user interface is responsive enough that I almost never feel like I’m waiting for the phone to do anything, although sometimes I do wait for it to get data from the network.

The “mechanical” aspects of the UI work well for me: My fingers aren’t small (though they’re not huge), and I find the general buttons and the pop-up keyboard to both be pretty easy to use. I’m getting better with the keyboard: Mainly I had to train myself to hold the phone level, rather than at a slight tilt to the side, and that made keypunching much more accurate. That’s a much easier hill to climb than, say, learning Graffiti. I rarely have to hit anything twice because I “missed” the first time, but I do sometimes. Not enough to annoy me. On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing myself doing extensive typing (e.g., journal entries of any length) from the phone.

Scrolling is simple, and the zoom gesture is really cool.

Network connectivity: WiFi connectivity is easy to set up (although if you have a 14-character password for your home network, like I do, then typing it in while you’re still getting used to the keyboard is a bit tricky; it took me three tries), and the phone is good at locating a network when it’s in a new location. EDGE connections feel (to me) to be about half as fast as WiFi, which is fast enough to look up maps, but a bit slow for surfing the web.

Google Maps is the killer app on the iPhone. It’s got the street maps, satellite view, traffic info (depending on your location), easy scrolling and zooming, directions, and bookmarks. It’s the first feature of the phone I used which made me glad to have the phone: When we went minigolfing on Saturday and found our destination was closed, I looked up the location of a nearby minigolf course which I’d seen, and found directions for it. It’s easy to envision finding other destinations in the same way (one of the iPhone ads already does so).

The Safari web browser is pretty handy, although I suspect it has some subtleties I have yet to figure out. I had some early problems with it crashing on me several times, but it’s stopped. I did reboot the phone when it happened, so maybe that cleared up whatever the glitch was.

Mail is a nice convenience, although it’s not something I really need. Since it doesn’t have mailbox filters, you’ll need server-side filters in order to make good use of it. Unfortunately, my Dreamhost e-mail (i.e., the address for this site) requires a security certificate to access, and I can’t find a way to set up such a thing on the iPhone. That’s a bummer.

The biggest weakness of the iPhone, for me, is that you can’t synchronize the Notes to your computer. As I said above, I keep extensive notes on my PDA, mainly for my collecting hobbies (but for other things too), so this is the biggest obstacle to my simply replacing my PDA with the iPhone. Because I simply can’t afford to lose this data. I could perhaps create a Web page with the info and access that with the phone, but then I couldn’t really add to it while I’m out shopping. Hopefully this will be one of the first issues to be addressed.

(To be fair, I haven’t dived very deep to see if there are ways to work around these issues. Maybe there are. I’m not real interested in “hacking” my phone, however.)

Syncing addresses and music is exactly as trivial as you’d expect it would be. Mail accounts, calendars and Safari bookmarks all gets synced, too.

I haven’t used the camera, photo albums, voice mail or text messaging much yet. I haven’t used the calendar at all (until I can replace my PDA with the phone I may keep using it for my calendar). I also haven’t really used it as an iPod yet, although Cover Flow is a pretty nifty way to scan through all your music on the thing.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the phone: It’s useful as a phone, it’s very useful as a map program, and its has a lot of other features come in handy from time-to-time. While I really wish it could sync Notes, it’s still very polished for a first-generation piece of hardware.

Oh, and the first software update for the phone is available.

(via Stephen Leigh)