Category Archives: uncategorized

I can live with that.

Via Slashdot:

renai42 writes “A new survey has revealed that Americans overwhelmingly support strong censorship for blogs, even though a substantial amount have never actually been to one. Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves.”

Reference

Since when did publishing other people’s private information for all the world to see become fair game? And at what point did protecting other people’s privacy become censorship? That’s a really loaded word for what we’re talking about here, don’t you think?

I wouldn’t want some goofball posting my home address and phone number on the web. Heck, I keep my number unlisted so that other employees where I work don’t call me at home for tech support.

The news.com article goes on: A further 72 percent favored censorship of personal information about celebrities, and 68 percent, information about elected or appointed government officials such as judges or mayors.

Sorry, but I don’t the rules should be different for those in the spotlight. Celebrities, judges, and your next door neighbors all have the right to a certain amount of privacy.

How is this even news?

Sheesh

Thanks to Tom “Dizzle-Hizzle” Crawford, I’m back online and no longer a victim of Comcast’s DNS issues.

Don’t ask me how, though.

Tom and I were iChatting about the origins of our department’s gaming names.

Me: I was always Rhino, for obvious reasons.
Me: Joe was Bulldog, because he looks like a bulldog.
Me: Mike was HowlinMadd, A-Team reference. H. M. Williams, H. M. Murdoch.
Tom: ahhh–thats’ where the howlinmadd came from
Me: Remember that show?
Tom: yes, i remember the A-Team
Tom: i used to watch it all the time
Me: Dave didn’t get the reference for a long time. When we finally explained it, he get offended and said he didn’t watch the A-Team, because it was a kids’ show.
Me: We said that’s all right, we were just kids when it was on.
Tom: it was a kids show?
Tom: never
Me: That’s what Dave says.
Tom: i’ll still watch it when it’s on
Tom: i still like trying to predict when the army jeep will flip
Tom: because it happens every episode
Me: I used to love that 45 minutes into every episode, they would have the “work montage” where you’d see everyone’s hands busy at work on Hannibal’s plan.
Tom: I love it when a plan comes together

REAL World was, once again, a great time. It was fantastic to get to talk with the folks who make the development environment that enables me to do things like Tangelo, Frequency, and Kodiak. Geoff Perlmann, CEO of REAL Software is such a down to earth and approachable guy. He doesn’t just fly in, give his keynote, and leave; he’s there at the conference, rubbing elbows with his customers, meeting as many as possible, and earnestly striving to find out more about what they want and need from REALbasic.

Now, to be fair, he does live in Austin, and as he pointed out himself yesterday afternoon, flying in for the keynote and flying back out would have amazingly inconvenient, not to mention a huge waste of money. But I digress. I had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes, and I can see why his company is successful. He listens to his customers, he listens to his staff, and he acts on what he believes they need the most.

For several meals, I had the pleasure of dining with Mars Saxman. Mars writes the compiler for REALbasic. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and this is not a compliment I give lightly. He’s astonishingly intelligent, and he’s equally passionate about what he does at REAL Software. He’s also very proud of the work he’s done, and with good reason. Several times over the course of lunch on Thursday, someone would ask a compiler-related question of Mars. In response, he usually ended up whipping out his PowerBook and showing them why things the way they are, while explaining how things ought to be and how he hopes they’ll be in the future. It was enlightening, to say the least. At one point, I said to him, “You really get off on this stuff, don’t you?” He just smiled and said, “Oh, yeah.”

At Thursday evening’s dinner, he shared with me that he lives in a world where REALbasic “sucks,” as he put it. This is any developer’s dilemma: you work so hard on a program or product, and you rarely hear your users’ success stories; usually you only hear the complaints. Why isn’t this faster? Why is the download so big? Why doesn’t it do feature X? Why did you bother with feature Y? With a project of the size and scope that REALbasic encompasses, I would imagine these complaints are frequent and pointed. Now, to be honest, I’ve had issues with REALbasic, but nothing earth-shattering, and there were only one or two I was utterly unable to work around. But Mars, and REAL Software in general, hear more complaints than success stories. I took the opportunity to tell him how much REALbasic had changed my life. I talked about Tangelo and Frequency, and I told him all about Kodiak, and how it not affected made my job easier, but several hundred other people.

Also on Thursday, I was able to talk to David Grogono, REALbasic Product Manager, at dinner. Another extremely talented guy, and also passionate about his work. That’s what I love most about the REAL Software staff: they love what they do, and it comes through in everything they do. David showed us his new PowerBook with the velocity sensors that park the hard drive heads in case you drop it. That was cool enough, but then he showed us a program, written in REALbasic, of course, that used those sensors to control a Rubik’s-type cube on the screen. We were all floored. It was just too cool.

I didn’t get as much time to talk to Jon Johnson as I would have liked, but we got a couple minutes to touch base in person.

Another conversation that occurred over dinner was two mathematicians discussing quarternian mathematics with a 14-year-old whiz kid named Asher (and yes, meeting a 14-year-old whiz kid is extremely humbling). Several of us on the opposite side of the table were less proficient in the mathematical arts. When the pad and pen came out for scribbling calculations, Brady chimed in to let them in on a little-known mathematical secret: an upside-down 3 looks like an E.

There was talk of REAL Software’s new Software Maintenance sales model, which makes sense, and which will probably benefit me. They’ve committed to more frequent upgrades, and that’s a good thing. The big news for me is that Swordfish, their technology for compiling web applications, will now be part of REALbasic 2005 instead of a standalone product. There’s simply a new project type called “Web Application” in addition to the existing project types. That will save me some money. The keynote featured a short demo of Swordfish as well as a slightly longer demo of REALbasic 2005. They spoke of really cool new features in RB 2005 like Container Controls, assisted refactoring, and an HTMLViewer Control. Good stuff.

One thing that was kind of gratifying for me was that people knew about Tangelo and Frequency. Several people approached me to ask how Tangelo was doing. Someone even said, “Oh, that has podcasting support now, right?” Sweet.

Speaking of Tangelo, I thanked Will Leshner of SQLabs once again for doing the SQLite plugin for REALbasic. Tangelo is powered by SQLite under the hood, and it’s a great little database: fast, cheap, reliable, and fairly standards-compliant.

I attended Stephen Tallent’s sessions on XML, which were very informative. I learned about about XPath, which is basically SQL for XML. Very cool stuff, and I think I might be able to use some of what I learned in those sessions in Kodiak-related endeavors. Plus, Stephen is an absolute riot. I also attended sessions on building the best cross-platform apps, using networking to communicate with other apps, creating custom controls, and more.

The only suggestion for improvement I had was to increase the length of the conference. My idea is to add a day of longer, more in-depth sessions, on the day of the keynote, that people would pay extra for. As the conference is now, the keynote starts it off on Wednesday evening, followed by two days of one hour sessions. This works well, but there are some topics that simply can’t be covered in an hour.

All in all, I had a great time, and I learned a ton. Again.

Well, there’s nothing quite like being on the 15th floor of a hotel in a strange city when they’re calling for possible tornados in the vicinity. The wind’s starting to howl like crazy. The lightning looks like kinda cool from up here, but the novelty is really starting to wear off now. A weather alert just went across the TV screen saying that it would be wise to get to a basement. Fat chance of that.

You know, when I was here last year, a building down the block caught on fire. Maybe Austin doesn’t like me being here.

Well, I think somebody had the wrong idea about what’s really going on here this week.

Somebody’s going to be mighty disappointed. See, MTV’s Real World isn’t here. It’s REAL Software’s REAL World 2005 conference. A fun time, to be sure, but not quite the thrill ride that some may have imagined.

From cheap 5673, drug 1443258,00.html” target=”_blank”>The Guardian:

Easter is one of those occasions on which human beings entertain a number of contradictory ideas. Christians celebrate a pagan fertility cult, while non-believers make their biannual journey to church. People whose lives are dominated by godless consumption give something up for Lent. A society governed by science engages in the ritual sacrifice and homeopathic magic – eggs and chicks and rabbits – required to induce the earth to bear fruit.

Ten Reasons You’re a Software Developer By Donna L. Davis

Via developer.*:

Article teaser: I still remember the welcoming speech a computer science professor (who looked a lot like Coleridge’s ancient mariner) gave his class of eager freshmen almost 20 years ago. It culminated in the ominous warning: “Find a another profession where you won’t constantly beat your head against the wall.”

Reference

Jen wasn’t feeling well, so Grace and I went to the grocery store unsupervised. And it wasn’t one of those quick and dirty trips, either; it was a full-blown week’s worth of groceries type of things. Jen was apprehensive, but like I said, she wasn’t feeling well, so armed with a list of items and two coupons, Grace and I headed to the store.

One of the items on the list was hair dye. Now, in order not to give away any secrets, I won’t say which of the three of us required this item. But it was Preference by L’Oréal, Medium Auburn.

I had no idea they had so many different shades of hair dye. I figured they had your basic selection: black, brown, blonde, red. Maybe light and dark within each color. But, no, there’s like 100 different shades. So I started scanning the shelf for medium auburn and had some trouble. Grace was helping.

Finally, I turned to Grace and said, “You know what? Let’s get bright red and surprise Mommy.” (I guess the secret’s out.) There was a woman stocking shelves nearby who overheard me. Without even looking my direction, she said, “I hope you have a comfortable couch.”

I laughed and replied that it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve done. As I was talking, Grace tapped me on the arm and handed me the box with Medium Auburn. “How did you find that?” I asked her. I mean, Grace is just a beginning reader. We work on books like Hop on Pop, but they don’t have words like medium or auburn.

“I recognized the lady on the front of the box,” she said.

That’s my girl.