Friday, July 29, 2005
Changes
I've accepted a job with Microsoft. We're moving to Seattle. I'd love to say more but it's too difficult to go into detail here. This was a tough decision. Believe me, we're still getting used to the idea. It's a huge change for my family. We've lived in Boston for a long time and have a lot of friends here. Overall we're pretty excited but we're also sad to be leaving.
Friday, July 22, 2005
War of the Worlds webcomic
Dark Horse Comics is publishing a webcomic adaptation of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. This version is faithful to Wells' novel. Dark Horse is publishing several pages each week. They're on week six. It's still early in the story but the pages looks really good.If you've never read the original novel, it can be found here. One thing I noticed after re-reading the first few chapters. In the novel, there's a character named Ogilvy, a "well-known astronomer". The novel's narrator is unnamed. In Orson Welles' radio production of the book, Ogilvy, an astronomer is the narrator. In Spielberg's film there's a character named Ogilvy, a somewhat daft survivalist, played by Tim Robbins.
War of the Worlds
I saw War of the Worlds last night. It has flaws, especially at the end, but the first half is very good. Uncomfortable to watch but very good.Based on H.G. Wells novel, the story is told as a first-person narrative. We only see or know what Ray, played by Tom Cruise, sees and discovers. After various strange events unfold early in the film, Ray is among a crowd that slowly begins to panic and run for cover. The way this is shot and how people react is very well done. A towering alien battle machine erupting from under the blacktop isn't something that you can easily wrap your brain around. You wouldn't just turn and run. You would stare, then start to move away, then look back, then run, then look back again. It's easy to be reminded of crowd scene footage from 9/11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Speilberg sticks closely with Wells' overall storyline but in the second half he adds a dose of "action hero" derring-do that felt out of place. Also, one aspect of the ending just felt wrong. A cheat.
This is Speilberg's third science fiction film in a row (after Minority Report and A.I.) where I was disappointed in some aspect of the ending. With Minority Report I would have preferred a darker ending, 10-15 minutes earlier than the "neat and tidy" ending it had. With A.I. there were several false endings; the last one or two felt tacked on.
Back to Squawkbox Comments
Squawkbox.tv is online again. I've switched back so that old comments are preserved. There wasn't anything wrong with Haloscan but I couldn't find a way to import comments in, just out. Eventually I'll host comments myself and migrate existing comments there. Not today.
Windows Vista
Microsoft has announced that the official name of Longhorn will be Windows Vista. Expect to hear that name a lot.
Global brand names are difficult: you don't want a name that gives the wrong impression in different languages, slang, etc. According to the article, Microsoft spent eight months researching potential names using "a process of focus groups and research to find out what name would convey idea of clarity". Did anyone check the meaning of the word in Latvian? According to a Latvian friend, Vista translates to chicken in Latvian.
Windows Chicken? It's funny but probably not a big deal. The canonical example of bad translation is the Chevrolet Nova which translates to Spanish as "it doesn't go". The claim is that this hurt sales of the car in Latin America. Apparently, that's an urban legend.
Global brand names are difficult: you don't want a name that gives the wrong impression in different languages, slang, etc. According to the article, Microsoft spent eight months researching potential names using "a process of focus groups and research to find out what name would convey idea of clarity". Did anyone check the meaning of the word in Latvian? According to a Latvian friend, Vista translates to chicken in Latvian.
Windows Chicken? It's funny but probably not a big deal. The canonical example of bad translation is the Chevrolet Nova which translates to Spanish as "it doesn't go". The claim is that this hurt sales of the car in Latin America. Apparently, that's an urban legend.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Tattooed Fruit
According to this New York Times article, laser technology is being used to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. It just burns the outer layer of the skin. I never really liked those little stickers they put on fruit but permanently disfiguring the skin with a laser seems like overkill. The skin is there for a reason. I wonder if the tattoo compromises the fruit's skin so that it could spoil more easily?
Goodbye OS/2
According to this CNET news article, OS/2 products will be discontinued by the end of the year. An IBM spokesman quoted in the article says "We're making official what has been going on for quite some time. We haven't released a new version of OS/2 in nine years."
My experience with OS/2 was limited. When I worked on InterNotes Web Publisher, I ported some features from NT to OS/2. The APIs are quite similar in style and many details. No surprise since OS/2 was a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft. It's funny to recall that the look and feel of the Unix Common Desktop Environment was intentionally made similar to OS/2 PM. The expectation was that OS/2 PM would become the predominant GUI on PCs. For a whole bunch of reasons, that didn't happen.
The history of OS/2 is pretty interesting. It was a joint effort, developed in multiple locations, by two very different companies. After the IBM / Microsoft split, there was also an effort to build OS/2 for PowerPC. Windows NT also supported multiple processors in the early days including the PowerPC and Digital Alpha chip.
My experience with OS/2 was limited. When I worked on InterNotes Web Publisher, I ported some features from NT to OS/2. The APIs are quite similar in style and many details. No surprise since OS/2 was a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft. It's funny to recall that the look and feel of the Unix Common Desktop Environment was intentionally made similar to OS/2 PM. The expectation was that OS/2 PM would become the predominant GUI on PCs. For a whole bunch of reasons, that didn't happen.
The history of OS/2 is pretty interesting. It was a joint effort, developed in multiple locations, by two very different companies. After the IBM / Microsoft split, there was also an effort to build OS/2 for PowerPC. Windows NT also supported multiple processors in the early days including the PowerPC and Digital Alpha chip.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Mondegreens and Malapropisms
A mondegreen is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase, such that it acquires a new meaning. The word is itself a mondegreen of "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray and laid him on the green", from the anonymous 17th century ballad 'The Bonnie Earl O' Murray', the last five words being misheard as "Lady Mondegreen". Popular music is a major source of mondegreens. For example, the lyric "There's a bad moon on the rise" from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Bad Moon Rising was often misheard as "There's a bathroom on the right".
By contrast, a malapropism is an incorrect usage of a word, usually with unintentional comic effect. Although George Bush is often accused of being the king of the malaprop, many of his mistakes aren't, strictly speaking, malapropisms.
By contrast, a malapropism is an incorrect usage of a word, usually with unintentional comic effect. Although George Bush is often accused of being the king of the malaprop, many of his mistakes aren't, strictly speaking, malapropisms.
Comments and Trackbacks
Squawkbox has gone dark for the past few days with no indication that it's ever coming back. So in the meantime I've switched to HaloScan. It was easy to setup and supports Trackbacks as well.
New Java Platform Naming Scheme
Graham Hamilton's blog post Goodbye "J2SE", Hello "Java SE" explains Sun's new Java platform naming schemes. They've dropped the "2" and used Java rather than "J". So J2EE now becomes Java EE. I supposed that it's improvement; the "2" in the old names became pointless after a while. But the new names sound clunky when you say them. JavaEnterprise, JavaDesktop and JavaMicro would make more sense to me but all of those terms have already been used elsewhere. Oh well.
As long as they're making changes, Sun ought to consider renaming their annual Java conference as well. JavaOne? What's the One supposed to mean?
As long as they're making changes, Sun ought to consider renaming their annual Java conference as well. JavaOne? What's the One supposed to mean?
Name that Candybar
See if you can name that candybar from its cross-section. Strictly speaking, some of them aren't really bars. I think I got about half of them right. There were a few that I'd never heard of.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Flipbook!
Flipbook! is a Flash application that allows you to draw simple animations, save them to a gallery and share them with others via e-mail. My son will love it. Here's a simple Flipbook! animation that I made
File.deleteOnExit is evil
I was dealing with a JVM crash on Linux recently. During a load test, the JVM ran out of native heap and died. That is, it ran out of heap memory used by native code, not the Java heap.
After looking at an mtrace log, I found the culprit: a large number of calls to File.deleteOnExit which was used in conjunction with File.createTempFile to create a temporary file and then mark it for deletion. No, I didn't write this code!
How does File.deleteOnExit work? It adds the file's pathname to a list of pathnames to delete when the JVM exits. But when will that happen? It could be weeks from now. In the meantime, pathnames accumulate in memory. This approach is evil. It should never be used in a server application. There are alternatives such as a file deletion queue and reaper thread that removes old temporary files. Or better yet, more careful analysis of a temporary file's lifecycle so that you delete it when it's no longer needed.
More info on the problems with File.deleteOnExit can be found in Sun's Bug Database: Bug ID: 4513817 File.deleteOnExit consumes memory.
After looking at an mtrace log, I found the culprit: a large number of calls to File.deleteOnExit which was used in conjunction with File.createTempFile to create a temporary file and then mark it for deletion. No, I didn't write this code!
How does File.deleteOnExit work? It adds the file's pathname to a list of pathnames to delete when the JVM exits. But when will that happen? It could be weeks from now. In the meantime, pathnames accumulate in memory. This approach is evil. It should never be used in a server application. There are alternatives such as a file deletion queue and reaper thread that removes old temporary files. Or better yet, more careful analysis of a temporary file's lifecycle so that you delete it when it's no longer needed.
More info on the problems with File.deleteOnExit can be found in Sun's Bug Database: Bug ID: 4513817 File.deleteOnExit consumes memory.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
SMS Search
Yahoo has added an SMS Search feature for cellphones. It's pretty similar to Google SMS. I can't say yet which is a better service but it's good to see competition (and innovation) in this area.
Neal Stephenson and E-mail
Email, instant messaging, text messaging, etc. are all useful for keeping in touch with other people. But they're also a source of interruption. As a former co-worker once told me: "I hate being interrupted but I love being able to interrupt other people to ask a question or share an idea". I appreciate the sentiment; developing software requires long periods of concentration but we also need time to connect with one another. It can be difficult to find the right balance.
Writing software is rarely as solitary an endeavor as writing novels. Nevertheless, novelist Neal Stephenson's essay on this issue entitled Why I am a Bad Correspondent is interesting reading.
Writing software is rarely as solitary an endeavor as writing novels. Nevertheless, novelist Neal Stephenson's essay on this issue entitled Why I am a Bad Correspondent is interesting reading.
Quiet time
Sorry that I haven't posted anything in a while. I've been somewhat busy. I'll try to get back to some unfinished posts as soon as I can.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Gimme Dat Ding
The novelty song Gimme Dat Ding has rattled around in my brain since I was a child. It's a real earworm. The song was written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood for a children's television show that never aired.
Google Earth
My son and I have been playing around with Google Earth for the past few days. He's having a ball — and learning geography at the same time. The installation was simple on a relatively new computer; somewhat more finicky on our older Win2K desktop system. If you haven't tried it yet; it's worth a look.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Trailer Crasher
I'm not sure that I'll ever watch the movie Wedding Crashers but the film's web site has a cool gimmick. You can insert yourself into the trailer and Crash The Trailer.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Starry Night Photomosaic
This image is a photomosaic of Van Gogh's Starry Night. The image is composed of over 210,000 photographs. The total image size is 1.5 Gigapixels. Click to zoom in and see the tiny photos. The mosaic was made using AndreaMosaic. The page uses Zoomify to allow you to zoom down.
Lotus / IBM Anniversary
I realized today that an anniversary had passed last month without notice. Ten years and one month ago (June 6, 1995) IBM made a cash tender offer to purchase Lotus Development Corp. at a price of $60 per common share — the day before Lotus stock was trading at $32 per share. A week later the offer was upped to $64 per share. The total value of the transaction was about $3.5 billion.
I worked at Lotus at the time and remember that we were pretty stunned by the news. IBM had done its homework; there was no way for Lotus to resist the offer. The deal was accepted and Lotus became a division of IBM. Overall, it was probably the best outcome for Lotus. The growth of Notes/Domino sales in the years after the acquisition was phenomenal.
I worked at Lotus at the time and remember that we were pretty stunned by the news. IBM had done its homework; there was no way for Lotus to resist the offer. The deal was accepted and Lotus became a division of IBM. Overall, it was probably the best outcome for Lotus. The growth of Notes/Domino sales in the years after the acquisition was phenomenal.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Lost Frog
Sometime around September of 2003 fliers appeared in the Seattle area, proclaiming the loss of what appeared to be a small boy's frog named "Hopkins". About a year later a web site www.lostfrog.org began with the flier and continued with humorous visual riffs on the flier. Mike Whybark figured out the identity of the boy who drew the original flyer. It's not the ending that Mike expected but his post is an interesting read.
Working Model of F-14
Wow. This working F-14 model is very slick. Once airborne it looks amazingly real.
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