Archive for April, 2006
April 11, 2006 at 1:04 pm · Filed under General
I ran accross this guys web page the other day.
I didn’t read most of it, but as my eyes were scanning, I ran across this entertaining blurb:
I once took a trip to California. They taught me an important lesson: If everyone were generous, no one would have to work. I was confused for a while by all of the Mexicans laboring away. Clearly they didn’t understand. I guess the Californians gave up trying to educate them in the ways of Kantian economics, because they kicked them all out. You have to be open minded to last in California. There, open-minded means “not limitted by rationality.” Whenever I was accused of being closed minded, I always said “articholks are more expensive in the off season and I wouldn’t want to stand under a wet rag.” They always understood.
Ah the internet. It’s that cool breeze that hits you as you sit under the shade of the palm, by the beach.
April 11, 2006 at 12:26 pm · Filed under General
My buddy Jim has posted 5 or so articles on his blog, Current Word about Boot Camp and the possibilities of Apple running Windows XP.
As a user and programmer of both systems, I find this all to be a non-event. Most Mac users don’t want to run Windows XP … and. vice versa. I don’t think this event is worth noting or getting riled up about. There will not be this mass migration to Windows XP by Apple users. There may be a migration to Apple hardware by some PC users, but I doubt it. Apple hardware costs a lot more than PC hardware since the OS and Applications are bundled.
I am sure of this though:
- More Windows users could become Mac users
- OS X will not easily run on commodity PC hardware
The bottom line… yeah this was released but… hmm. moving along…
April 9, 2006 at 10:34 am · Filed under General
POVRAY
Steve sent me an IM the other day. He’s been playing around with POVRAY and he was wondering about the work I did in that so long ago. He’s having the same kind of fun that I had back then. I remember the time, I must have spent a month of my life just playing around with various models and waiting for renders. Yeah, I probably spent most of my time waiting for renders.
The new stuff on Steve’s blog is really nice. I like his mockup of an mp3 player.
Here is an old render I did for fun for a company I started. This was done in 1995 on my NextStep Intel box (running an AMD 486 clone). The scene wasn’t complicated, but a good render took at least 3-5 minutes. I did this scene and all the letters out of primitive shapes (i.e. I made each letter from spheres and columns). My modeler was just VI.
I always loved Ray tracers (and graphics in general). I don’t think that was unique to me. Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, computer magazines loved to put up a cover that was some kind of 3d render. In fact, Amiga World had a whole issue dedicated to an animated guy who was ray traced. The guy was made out of mirror balls and was juggling 3 other spheres. (You can see the image here, but remember, those images were full screen :-)). Another big moment was when Apple released the Macintosh II. This was the first color Mac (that I can recall), which also had slots. It was big and was supposed to be a powerful computer. In their brochures, they showed the Mac II with a ray traced scene of mirror balls on a floor composed of a repeating texture of color Apple logos (just look at the image above). It was quite a good render at 640 x 480. Everybody I knew remarked about the picture. (Later it was found out the the render was done on a Unix box by one of the Apple engineers).
Now that I think about it, the Aqua interface by Apple really makes this love of shiny colors apparent as well. Moving on…
Life
All of this leads me to another thought, though. Back then, I could spend a month playing around with various technologies. I lived hand to mouth with my paychecks, etc., but I was able to really experience some of the interesting frontier technologies happening on the internet. Today is a different story. With work and family, there is not a lot of justification for working on stuff that has absolutely no immediate value to my fellow humans. I don’t even play games anymore (which isn’t so bad since I SUCK at Counter Strike).
I miss some of the fun I used to have with computers. My goal is to change that situation.
April 6, 2006 at 3:36 pm · Filed under General
If you are a WarGames fan, then you understand the reference 
Over at the Plaxo blog, Cam, one of our founders, posted a technical blog entry on how we pulled off the little icons in the ‘Contacts’ view in Outlook. He even gave a little shout-out to me, which is much appreciated.
Although the icons view has been a stable system, I did spend a lot of time on that code. The first time was when we originally created it. The second time was when I had to put AOL presence icons all over the Outlook client. This work was both fun and challenging because you had to go very deep into the various systems in order to pull this off. It is also one of the projects that helped me form an idea about plugin work in general…
Whenever you do intense plugin work, you will find that it is a lot like doing device driver work for an OS. You must be VERY detail oriented. When you are just doing userland work, the OS is there to catch your mistakes. When you are inside of a complex application, at the C level… the application will crash or become broken when you mess up. If you are lucky, it will crash on your frame.
I could go on about the various mistakes that occur, but I think you get the idea. I mention this because a lot of people think this is easy work. It is not, and the people we hire have to be very good. Todd, Cam, and the others are very smart coders. Otherwise, we could not pull this off.
The only thing I can think of that is harder would probably be building a MAPI store provider…. which reminds me another quote by someone here at Plaxo. “Remind me to take MAPI off of my resume”
April 5, 2006 at 11:34 am · Filed under General
I agree with this guys blog post.
April 5, 2006 at 9:03 am · Filed under General
Besides the lack of good keyboard nav and a second mouse button, the MacBook could use one more thing: a dock connector.
Now, when I mention a dock connector, I don’t want your typical dock connector that is proprietary. I want one connector, that delivers power, video, keyboard, mouse, usb, etc. I also want it to be all optical (except for the power).
If I had this, I could easily and simply use the laptop just for its CPU and storage rather than it’s own limited display and input devices.
It would be great if there was a standard here.
April 4, 2006 at 9:47 am · Filed under General
Apple doesn’t get the paned, full screen view idea.
For example: if you compare XCode to Visual Studio 6…. XCode loses. Also note that Visual Studio 6.0 was released in 1998.
April 3, 2006 at 12:58 pm · Filed under General
I’ve been using Mac OS X consistently since around November of 2005. Overall, the experience has been good. I’ll list some of the good and the bad.
The pros:
- Everything is in your user directory, there is no registry
- The look and feel are excellent
- Laptop integration is excellent
- Everything generally works well
- Networking / wifi works without issue
- Firewire support is excellent, it is how I do backups
- Peer to Peer wifi works great
- Unix!
The cons:
- The lack of good keyboard shortcuts limits productivity
- The lack of a second mouse button on the system is disappointing (even NeXT had two mouse buttons)
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