Dell DJ Ditty - I agree with Terry
Here is Terry’s post, with the eyesore and all.
Archive for September, 2005
Ye Ole NextSTEP connections
I was reading something on the internet today, about Unit Testing, and how it is ‘teh suck‘. The post was by the infamouse Wil Shipley, ex OMNI developer.
Inside the post he makes a strange connection, that I didn’t know about. “Why is this important?” It just goes to show how the NextSTEP community was small and connected? “Ok, still, why is this important?” Well, I used to REALLY be into NextSTEP with my buddy Steve and we used to think those guys at OMNI were ‘da bomb’.
Here is the connection:
Wil mentions that he started out writing unit tests at ‘Lighthouse Design’. Aha. I don’t remember that in his bio. It explains how he knew who wrote Diagram!, the best diagramming app in the world. It explains how Omni built its direct descendant so quickly, OmniGraffle. Oh, and uh, it is the number one selling app for Omni.
What else did Wil say? Well he talks about Jonathan Schwartz, the now president of the flailing Sun Microsystems. He says that Jon was the CEO of the afforementioned Lighthouse Design. Wow, I didn’t know that. I saw that this guy was President/CEO or whatever, but that never came through. Lighthouse was acquired by Sun in the 90’s when Sun was toying with using Openstep as their new desktop. (I tried installing Openstep on a Sun Sparc 5 back in 1997, unsuccessfully. I didn’t try to hard since the machine wasn’t so good in the video department. Read: Really F’n Slow). Anyways, what an interesting connection.
In fact… ye ole Bob Congdon remarks about this and I missed it. (Bob was part of the small team that wrote Lotus Improv, the first Spreadsheet for the Next. A slightly radical departure from the old Lotus 123/Excel styles of the day. He worked at IBM and is now in Redmond working for Microsoft). Here is his post and recollection of the failure to bring any of those great apps to light.
Behold! In the post, what does he mention? The long forgotten IFC! Read Bob’s blog for the link. Wow. Jayson Adams did that lib. It wasn’t long ago where I saw him driving around in his convertable in Menlo Park going to Cafe Borrone (sp?). I think Jayson did well on the IFC deal (good for him!). How is this interesting? My friend Steve used to work for one of Jayson’s companies up in the city called ‘Farcast’ which got renamed ‘Inquisit’. He doesn’t mention Farcast in his bio, but it looks as though he is back up in SF.
And the beat goes on…
Sidebar: If you ever want to see me getting misty eyed, mention the old days of computing. Old Macs or Old Next machines and coders exploring the new frontiers on such excellent hardware/software…. systems!
Sidebar 2: Bud Tribble is back at Apple. Bud was also at Next. Bud was also at Sun. Bud was also on the original, core Macintosh team.
Sidebar 3: These ex-Next’ers are in high places and powerful.
Sidebar 4: Does anyone have the old PBS documentary on the start of NeXT before they went public??
FPGA Computing from SGI
This news post in the EETimes says that SGI is getting into the mix. Strange move by the company, but good for the market.
Blogbot is now Open Source
I announced it on the main site last week.
I am now giving away the code and executables for free RSS readers. One reader is a COM add-in for Microsoft Outlook, and the other is a full C++ COM add-in for Internet Explorer. Right now, only the Outlook add-in’s code is up on sourceforge, but the IE add-in should be up soon.
The big reason for the license change is simply: time. I’ve been so much more involved with my day job, that I couldn’t give these projects any serious time. So I’m releaseing them to the community for free.
Here are a few notes on the outlook add-in:
Blogbot for Outlook was written in Python with a little C++ thrown in there. I really like the architecture I had developed for the app. It ended up pretty damn clean. Python worked great when it came to getting the prototype going. However, the lack of syntax checking for simple mistakes gets frustrating when the project gets larger. I blame the tools (or lack thereof) more than the language for this issue. The other problem was just the problem of shipping a single EXE for the app. This is just too difficult, and Python still has issues with DLLs colliding. The other issue was the immaturity of the documentation for the Win32 code and the design of the Python COM libs. I thought I had a problem with the Global Interpreter Lock, but that turned out not to be true. Overall, it was good, but I probably wouldn’t use Python as the environment… rather I would consider it an embedded language.
One of the big benefits of using Python was the modularity. I could easily test one single dialog easily without having to start Outlook and going through the motions. This is a big time saver for testing and caught many bugs early.
New Apple Subscription Program!
Guess what, I just got the new inside scoop on a new Apple product that hasn’t been announced yet. Hopefully I won’t get sued over this, but it is hard not to hear this stuff when you live so close to Cupertino.
Apple is going to sell a new thing: the apple loyalty subscription program. Here is how it works:
- Step 1. You give Apple a modest $1500 a year as a membership fee.
- Step 2. Apple gives you EVERY product they make that year, that is equal to or less than $1500.00 (subject to taxes and fine print)
- Step 3. These products are delivered to you on the day that they are announced! (Wow! Cool!)
- That’s it! So simple.
It’s kinda like Amazon’s 1-click, except, in true Apple genius, they have figured out how to do it with 0-clicks! (Prediction: a zero button mouse on the horizon?)
The details of the deal are even more interesting:
- They will have a payroll deduction system for convenience! Nice!
- There is no upper limit to the account. You can give them more money that year in order to handle that new laptop or G5/x86 desktops! Bingo!
- There is even talk of a ‘Silver Apple’ program. With this program, you get cash into your account for every member you sign up! Now you get paid by Apple for all the people you’ve convinced to ’switch’. Even more excuse to turn up the heat on your co-workers
- Any money left over in the account that doesn’t go into an Apple product, gets swept into an iTunes bulk purchase account! (Just like Wheel-of-Fortune)
Man, this is going to be huge. Remember, you heard it here first!
(this post was for my good buddy Bill Tani)
Yet Another Cool Free Web Email
I found a link to RoundCube as I was strolling around the web the other night. Very interesting. This one looks lighter on the infrastructure than zimbra. It is basically just PHP with a very clean style. Looks interesting and worth trying. I think the zimbra conversation stuff and search are much more enterprise, while this might make for a personal web email account.
Not Giving Credit Pisses Me Off
So I was looking around for news on IE7 today. I was curious when it was going to come out so the world could get rid of their CSS hacks. I found this blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/, which is designed to keep everyone up to date with IE 7.
As I read the blog, the first post is about their new Developer Toolbar. This toolbar is just coming out of Beta and guess what? It is a copy of the web developer toolbar done by this one guy for FireFox. Is there a mention of it? Nope. Why are they releasing it?
The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it.
Ok, the key line is the first one: “The developer community has asked for a long time”
To me, this translates to ‘We have heard you rant to us for a long time, and to show that we are gracious and nice, we are going to give you what you have asked for’. But why? Why now?
FireFox, that is why! They see people rave about the cool and useful plugins for FireFox, they want some of that energy back. Is there any mention of FireFox on the blog, not really.
Not mentioning the original innovator is something I really dislike. I understand why they do it, and people will probably keep doing that for quite some time. I still don’t like it.
Microsoft has billions and billions of dollars. They have tremendous resources. They give us a Developer Toolbar for IE, AFTER some guy hacks something together in Javascript for a FireFox extension. Why? Because web developers like it, and use FireFox. How long has Microsoft had to address this issue? 5 years? The guy on the IEBlog doesn’t mention FireFox at all for all the features they have copied cold. Hey, Microsoft and IE team, this is pathetic.
(Note: this is a slam against Microsoft, but even ‘Apple’ could have a similar story told about them.)
