Joel on Bill

Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, posted an interesting article on his first real experience with Bill Gates at Microsoft. It’s a very interesting read, that gives insights into both Bill himself, and how the rest of “techdom” view him (or at least those that know him).

I’d heard similar stories before, though it was interesting hearing Joe’s version. However, the thing that really struck me was that, this isn’t the way its done at Microsoft today and hasn’t been the way for quite some time. In the old days, Bill was central to the company, even after it became “big business”. This was how the now legendary “Internet shift” could happen. I think Bill liked having things this way, and he’s less interested in being just a “figurehead” for the company. This is probably central to his decision to wean himself from Microsoft and concentrate on his foundation, where he can have this kind of central role.

Good luck, Bill. It’s been a fun ride.

As a side note, I thought that it was interesting that last week’s Newsweek included a story on second careers for boomers, even before Bill’s announcement came out.

6/19/2006 10:24:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | development

Adobe vs Microsoft

Adobe is finally talking about its threatened suit vs. Microsoft regarding PDF writing support in Office 2007, and Microsoft’s new electronic document format, XPS. Of course, they’re talking anti-trust and Monopoly, having taken a page from Sun’s strategy in their lawsuits against Microsoft. Several thoughts come to mind:

1. The Justice Department should examine Adobe for anti-trust. After all, based upon Judge Penfield Jackson’s sliding scale approach to Monopolies (Microsoft has a Monopoly on OS’s running on computers able to run Microsoft software, the other computers, like Mac’s and Mainframes, and Unix machines don’t count), Adobe has a monopoly on PDF technology (it’s the ONLY electronic document format, and they own it).

2. Adobe should remember what happened to Sun: after winning their suit, and getting Microsoft to agree to remove Java from their OS’s, they had to go back and get Microsoft to agree to leave in their JVM to prevent Java usage from imploding since very few computer vendors seemed interested in shipping Windows with Sun’s (or anyone else’s) JVM pre-installed.

3. Microsoft also did a job on Sun by placing the C# language definition under the control of ECMA. What happens if they do the same thing for XPS? Just how does Adobe sue Microsoft for implementing an ECMA standard?

Adobe could find its core technology undermined in a big way if it tries to play hardball over this. Remember Ashton-Tate and Dbase: they sued Borland for copyright infringement and instead, wound up losing their own copyright over the database language.

6/19/2006 9:51:03 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | technology

Beginning of the end

News.com is reporting that Bill Gates is stepping down as Chief Software Architect. He’ll stay on for a couple of years, transitioning from time employee to part time employee and chairman. Ray Ozzie (the current CTO of Microsoft) will take over as Chief Software Architect.

This is the start of Bill’s retirement, and typical of entrenched execs who are moving to retirement: they have to wean themselves from their company (and vice versa).

6/15/2006 3:46:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

New Palm, part 2

Well, I’ve been using my Palm TX for a while now, and while I’m still annoyed about how hard it was to get going (are you listening, Palm? and why can’t I tell you about that directly?), my actual experience is terrific. I’ve got all the software I use regularly installed, and even was able to find a new video playing program (open source / freeware this time) that is better than what I had on my LifeDrive.

And, due to recommendations at work, I’m finally giving Rhapsody a try. It took me a while to get used to the interface, but so far I’m liking it. My boss had a good point: the music I listen to changes over time, so why not just “rent” it via a monthly charge? My MP3 player on my TX also works directly with Rhapsody, so loading musing into it is easy.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the purchase now. In fact, I cancelled the MP3 player that’s been on backorder for a week now.

I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. Excellent.

6/15/2006 11:11:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A movie that wasn't as bad as I expected

Yesterday, desperate for something new to watch on TV, I watched the remake of  The Stepford Wives. At first, I found the movie annoying in its one-sidedness. After a while, I began to see that the one sidedness was part of the story, and started ignoring it. Once I did that, the movie was almost entertaining (yes, I said “almost”).

Near the end of the picture, in the first “revelation scene”, I realized that the movie was fundamentally a “role reversal” picture. By switching the gender roles around, the story made a lot more sense, and was a lot more “sinister” in nature. It definitely wouldn’t have been made that way, but it was interesting to look at the picture from that angle.

The final twist was also interesting and one I didn’t expect at all. I won’t describe it so not to spoil the picture for anyone masochistic enough to choose to watch it.

All in all, the final resolution showed some nice balance, though not enough to make the picture into anything but a bad remake. I did think it was interesting that a movie making a statement about the subjugation of women (if that was what they were trying to do, its hard to say) only had one actor with star billing: Nichole Kidman. Even Matthew Broderick was relegated to billing “under the title”.

As a side note, what’s with these remakes that either ridicule (Stepford Wives, Starsky and Hutch) or ignore (all the MI’s) the originals? It’s a safe bet that the folks making these movies weren’t fans of the originals, and they’re basically just cashing in on the name recognition, or are they trying to “say” something more significant? If they are, they’re doing a lousy job of it.

6/12/2006 5:03:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Palm Postscript
I tried to send my previous post directly to Palm, and found that there was no way to do that. Hopefully, they’ll find my post directly. Not a high hope though.
6/12/2006 11:27:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

New Palm, new adventure

I’ve been having “slowdown” issues with my Palm LifeDrive. It’s a great PDA/MP3 player, but has a huge flaw: Palm decided to treat the HD storage like internal (Flash) RAM instead of as external storage. This means that applications are stored in it and must be swapped to RAM to run. This causes a noticeable delay at both startup and when switching applications, and can be really annoying when all you want to do is check your appointments for the day.

I considered just resurrecting my T3, since I was happy with it (other than having decent MP3 capability). However, I realized that I’d miss having WiFi capability (the T3 only has Bluetooth). I remembered that Palm now had the TX model out, and sure enough, it has both Bluetooth and WiFi built in. It also has 100 MB of (available) Flash RAM, so it sounded like a serviceable MP3 player too (like the LifeDrive, it comes with MP3 player software). Since the price was right, I went for it and picked one up.

It turns out that the TX has a few flaws in its OS … Everything went well until I tried to synch up with my LifeDrive’s backup: the synch locked up in the middle, and the TX started resetting repeatedly. The only way I could stop it was to reset it back to factory defaults.

Now, a little history. I’ve been using a Palm OS device since the Palm IIIx days in the mid ‘90s (gadzooks! just about 10 years!). I’ve gone through several “device transfers”, and they’ve all gone without a hitch. Even when there were hardware / OS changes, the system was smart enough to handle it without any major work on my part. So, this reset problem was extremely unwelcome.

I did some Googling on the problem, and found a couple of articles on how to handle it. Apparently, mine was not an isolated case. Plan A and plan B both failed (soft reset, hard reset). Plan C finally got the device working (reset to factory defaults, remove all backup records from the HotSynch database before synching up for the first time). Then, I had to load the missing applicatons piecemeal from my old backup. After a few hours of work, I (finally) have a working TX with my old data intact.

Then, I ran into my next hurdle: While the Life Drive will work as a virtual disk drive through its hotsynch cable, the TX doesn’t. I was surprised by this, since its a standard feature of Palm’s only real competitor, Microsoft. Luckily, I found a third party app (kudos to the Palm development community; they’re the main reason I’ve stuck with Palm over the years) that provides virtual drive support to the external SD card. This actually provides me with potentially MORE storage than I could have had with the Palm’s Flash RAM, since I can get up to at least a 1 GB SD card into that slot. This is MORE space than I was using on my Life Drive.

Anyway, today I’m finally up and running on the TX. So far, now that my startup pain is over, its living up to its promise: its nice and snappy, and has all the nice features that I used with the Life Drive. As an added bonus, the Grafitti 2 interface seems to work better with the TX than it did with the Life Drive. Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the current Palm devices. Both the TX and the Life Drive before it showed a much lower level of quality than the previous units. Frankly, I’d be switching to a Windows Mobile device, except I have experience with it as well, and the quality there is even lower: Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand the handheld market anywhere near as well as Palm does. So, I’m sticking with Palm for the duration, hoping and praying that they get their technological act together. Needless to say, that I’ll be sharing this story with anyone interested in hearing it…

6/12/2006 10:54:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

WinFX is dead, long live .NET Framework 3.0
It looks like Microsoft finally found a “product naming person” with a clue. They’ve decided NOT to call the (next) version of the .NET Framework “WinFX” after all, opting for the much more sensible “.NET Framework 3.0”. Okay, so it still a terrible name (try Googling “.NET” and see what you get!), but at least it has some continuity with what’s come before. We’ve been living with the “.NET” name since before 2002.
6/9/2006 5:08:21 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Pixar's next
I just saw the trailer for Pixar’s next movie, Ratatuille, and it looks good great! I’m lukewarm about Cars, it looks too much like an old Chevron commercial to me. But, Ratatuille looks like its back to greatness for Pixar!
6/9/2006 9:23:36 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I'm on the fence about the Akaka Bill

Dan Akaka, junior senator from Hawaii, submitted a bill to essentially award the Native Hawaiian federal status similar to that given to Native Americans, including Eskimos.

The bill was narrowly defeated via a Cloture vote today (Cloture votes prevent filibustering).

I’m on the fence about this bill. Originally, I was against it. It sounded like rewriting history. What happened in Hawaii was nothing like what happened to the Native Americans; that was more like one nation (the various Native American tribes) being overrun by another nation (the good ole US of A). Most people are probably unaware, that the Constitution specifically talks about Native American issues and specifically treats them as “foreign nations”. Native Americans weren’t considered “citizens” of the United States until the 20th century.

The case of Hawaii was more like that of Texas: Citizens of the country (Mexico in the case of Texas, the Kingdom of Hawaii in the case of Hawaii) broke away or overthrew the existing government and set up their own “Republic” in place of it. In both the Hawaiian an Texan cases, there was some degree of unofficial U.S. involvement in the governmental change.

In the case of Hawaii, certain lands were passed over to the Federal Government for their administration (these were lands originally held by the rulers of Hawaii, that the subsequent Republic of Hawaii also held in trust). The US government has been managing these lands since then, but not as reservations; Native Hawaiians have always had the same citizenship rights as all other residents / citizens of Hawaii.

According to Senator Akaka’s web page, his bill would just add more formality to the relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian people, placing the management of the lands in the Department of the Interior (where Native American lands are administered) and establishing some sort of working relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian. It specifically disallows any question of land seizure or even creation of Casinos on Native Hawaiian land. These were amendments added because of concerns expressed by various other Senators.

This sounded pretty benign to me: the Feds already had some sort of acknowledged special relationship with Native Hawaiian, this just added more structure to that relationship.

But, Senator Akaka talked about issues like the Native Hawaiian “deciding” whether to have a monarchy or not. So, this sounds more like the creation of a special, ethnic shadow government for Native Hawaiian. The State of Hawaii tried this before, creating the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

So, I’m on the fence here. Frankly, I think the Hawaiian politicians are just pandering to the liberal constituency of their state, rewriting history by accepting that the United States government overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. This seems to be slowly becoming the “conventional wisdom” in the state, and its just wrong.

Native Hawaiian activists like to talk about how :“their land” was “stolen” from them, but to this date, the largest private land owner in the state is a Native Hawaiian trust, the Bishop Estate. And there are many other wealthy Native Hawaiian families as well. Also, before those “thieving” white people had their way, it was impossible for common people to own land in Hawaii; Hawaii used a feudal system where land was controlled solely by their nobility, not by the common folk.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I feel better.

6/8/2006 5:17:31 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

"White on White" racism in America: a perspective

One thing that gets very little press today in the talk of immigration reform is the history of “White on White” racism in the United States. I was doing a little “audit” in my head, and was shocked by the results: There are three European ethnic groups that come to my mind when I think of “White on White” prejudice: the Polish, the Italians, and the Irish. Guess what these three groups have in common? They’re (by and large) Catholic. Now, there’s something I hadn’t anticipated.

Guess who’s also (by and large) Catholic? Yes, Hispanics. What gives?

6/7/2006 2:20:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

The other (yawn) AI shoe has dropped

RealityTVWorld just announced that Katherine McPhee has signed with Clive Davis and 19 Recordings. For those not “in the know” and who still may care, 19 Recordings is owned by Simun Fuller, the creator of American Idol.  Now, of course, this is not big news; 19 Recordings has signed all of the other runner-ups in AI. But, they took their time with Katherine, probably because people have been expecting it and they didn’t want to overshadow Taylor Hicks.

This should be good for Katherine, she’s probably going to be a good recording artist since her voice is so weak. Hopefully, they can give her the necessary training to improve her live performances as well.

6/7/2006 9:57:14 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Horror of the Character Actors

John Campea of The Movie Blog just reviewed The Breakup, and said some interesting things. I won’t go into his review; just follow the link if you’re interested. I will say this much: its not the usual review of this picture.

However, some of what he said got me thinking: He likes Vince Vaughn in the movie, but says that we might be getting tired of him. Vince basically just “plays” Vince. This sounds very familiar. It reminds me of Jim Carrey. The same thing: in comedies, Jim just plays Jim. No muss, no fuss.

In the old days, guys like these two would have a comfortable career as character actors. Whenever a producer would say “Get me a Vince Vaughn type”, his casting director would just call Vince’s agent and see if he was available. Vince would show up, be Vince on screen, and everybody would be happy. If you watch old movies, like I do, you know that there are a ton of folks in them who fall into this category. You probably have no idea of their names, but you always recognize them when they walk on screen. I recently saw Charles Coburn in Carey Grant’s Monkey Business; he’s one of these guys.

Unfortunately, we live in different times. Guys like Vince and Jim who have no range or depth to their performances are getting star billing, that’s just wearing out whatever distinctiveness they have. Don’t get me wrong; I like Vince Vaughn, and I used to like Jim Carrey (before he became over-used and over-hyped). I just think this new system does both the actors and the audience a disservice.

6/5/2006 4:22:02 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Dell's using AJAX
Here’s an interesting thing: Dell is now using AJAX technology (I presume) on their web site, so system config changes now dynamically change the system price, you no longer have to press a “recalculate” button and do the post back. Also,  a price window floats down the page as you scroll (this is more a Javascript gimmick than AJAX).
6/5/2006 2:53:26 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

My opinions on Batman bad guys

The Movie Blog just said that Spider-Man 3 will have 4 villains, and John was quick to express his displeasure. In solidarity with his opinion (considering that I still haven’t seen Spider-Man 2), here’s my comments on the Batman movie franchise, that (in my opinion) started this whole multi-villain thing.

1. Batman: one villain (that counted): the Joker (Jack Nicholson). He stole the show, which was bad (remember the title of this movie?), but not a bad picture, overall.

2. Batman Returns: two villains (that counted, forget about Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck). Bad move. People (Tim Burton, that is) were sidetracked with Jack’s over the top performance in the previous movie, and thought that it would take 2 villains to fill his shoes: bad idea stacked on bad idea. Catwoman was enough of a character. The dual story of Bruce Wayne’s relationship with Selena Kyle and Batman’s relationship with Catwoman would’ve been terrific, but they blew it by adding the cartoonish Penguin character.

3. Batman Forever: two villains (again!). After the Joker, Two-Face is one of the best villains in the Batman genre. And, they totally ignored him so that they could latch onto Jim Carrey’s rising star, playing The Riddler. The Riddler was a small-time villain in the comic, made big by Frank Gorshen’s great TV performance. To add insult to injury, Tommy Lee Jones was playing Two-Face! Now, come on, one of the best actors of modern times, and you ignore him! This focus on what was basically a TV-villain would be a harbinger for the next Batman travesty…

4. Batman and Robin: two villains (and three! heroes). The “ensemble cast” would have been bad enough, but the sheer campiness played pseudo-seriously was downright disgusting. Building on the wholly inappropriate Riddler debacle, this movie tried to cash in on Alicia Silverstone’s rising popularity by casting her as Batgirl in this farce. There should’ve been just one villain (either Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy would have worked), and the movie should have concentrated on the relationship between Batman and Robin (again, remember the title????). This movie almost killed the franchise. Joel Schumaker should never be allowed to make a movie again!

5. Batman Begins: two villains (but, one at a time!). Finally, Batman done right! Even better than the original movie: this one centered around the title character instead of allowing the villains to steal the show. The two villains were there to support the main character, instead of chewing up the screen with their own drama; excellent. And, that plot twist about Ras Al Ghul at the end was brilliant!

So, now, 4 villains in Spider-Man 3. I can hear the cash register now: cha-ching! In a bigger sense, I think its a sign that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst can’t carry the picture. Especially since they’ve decided to add Gwen Stacey to the mix. This shrieks of Batman and Robin all over again…

6/5/2006 10:48:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general