MacBU Bloggers

Yesterday we had our Office 2004 Service Pack 2 ship party, and I got to talking with Rich Schaut about his blog and we started to list all the MacBU bloggers. We kept listing names, but they no longer work in MacBU, so the qualification became: currently working at MacBU and has a blog. The funny thing is we only came up with three people: Rich Schaut (Dev) Andy Ruff (Entourage blog) and something here... (PM) David Weiss (that's me) (Test) It's all about transparency, and I expect that this list will grow, but who am I missing?

I Love My Jobs!

Last Friday we had the 26th Microsoft Company meeting and celebrated Microsoft's 30th anniversary. As a member of the Macintosh Business Unit I got to attend. Microsoft rented the SafeCo baseball stadium for the 7 hour meeting and it was cold. It was fun. I'm overall pretty sure my underwater stock options will come up gasping for air, eventually. So that's good. Part of the tradition is that everyone brings, hats, shirts, noise makers etc. to distinguish which tribe or team you're a part of. The MacBU was no different in this aspect, and we got the rebellious slogan, "go ahead, mac my day." all lower case at no extra cost. In the test team, we came up with some other slogans, that didn't make it on the shirt, but that I thought I'd share for your enjoyment: I love my Jobs I have a good iWork-iLife balance... On the other side of the fence, the grass is always greener. So are the Apples. I work with iPods My Software runs on a Mac. Does yours? My Office is prettier. Guaranteed not to run on Vista Turn up the AAC! An Office for the rest of us Uniting the world: Macintosh, Unix, Intel, Microsoft Always nice to work with a bunch of Mac heads. :)

We choose to go to the moon!

From President John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

There is some passion in this address! To me it's saying "We do things not because there is a return on the investment, but we do things that are hard simply to prove that we can and enjoy the growth that comes of it." I felt this same drive and same ambition listening to Burt Rutan speak of SpaceShipOne at Oshkosh 2005 and quite frankly, it's contagious and inspiring. If NASA's new space program produces more creative drive, more ambitious "Why not?" questions, especially in the youth of today, it will be worth every penny it costs.

Pressing and Eager Young Churchill

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and found this gem, the first paragraph of which is simply the background by Neal A. Maxwell for the quote:

I think, for instance, of the towering and courageous Winston Churchill, admired in so many ways, including by me, but who had serious difficulty containing his ego which sometimes tarnished his otherwise remarkable contributions. One winces, even at this late date, as he reads Balfour's rebuke, in 1905, of a pressing and eager young Churchill in Parliament. Just after Winston had been excessive, Balfour rose in dignity and said: As for the junior member of Oldham . . . I think I may give him some advice which may be useful to him in the course of what I hope may be a long and distinguished career. It is not, on the whole, desirable to come down to this House with invective which is both prepared and violent. The House will tolerate, and very rightly tolerate, almost anything within the rule of order which evidently springs from genuine indignation aroused by the collision of debate. But to come down with these prepared phrases is not usually successful, and at all events, I do not think it was very successful on the present occasion. If there is preparation, there should be more finish, and if there is so much violence, there should certainly be more veracity of feeling. [Ted Morgan, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 175.]

People just don't talk like this anymore.

Oshkosh Videos of Burt Rutan

If you are wondering where my Oshkosh videos of Burt Rutan and friends are, well, they're on my hard drive, beautifully encoded in MPEG 4 and waiting to be given to the world. The problem has been a technical one. If you care for the details, I can't "seed the torrent" from behind my AirPort Extreme connection to the Internet. Anyhow, I'm looking into some other solutions, so don't worry, I'll get them posted as soon as I can.

Chainless Bike

I've mountain biked quite a bit here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and bent my fair share of axles and derailleurs, so this seems like a perfect solution. You get better ground clearance (13 inches), because there front gear is gone, but I wonder how you grind over a log with this thing. For $750 it's not exactly cheap, but it's not out of this world either. No grease is nice, and breaking a chain becomes a thing of the past, but if the internal gear box does break, I'm guessing you're out of luck. With a chain a few simple, light tools and extra links and your back on the trail. Still, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a ride and see what kind of gear range the "Shimano Inter-8 Premium - planetary gears" really have. My guess is they've not quite got the range worked out just yet. Another worry is this bold text from the owners manual: If you shift while pedaling, reduce your pressure on the pedals. Excessive tension on gears makes shifting difficult and speeds the wear of the components. When they come out with the "racing transmission" edition, where I can switch gears with full force on the drive train, I'll absolutely have to give this a ride.

Hubble: Galaxies Across Space & Time

It's this kind of stuff that makes me love astronomy. 9 billion years of cosmic history that in 2 minutes 51 seconds.

These galaxies were photographed by Hubble as part of the Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) project. The original source image contains over 600 million pixels. Hubble scientists and imaging specialists worked for months to extract individual galaxy images, placing them in a 3D model according to their approximate true distances as determined by ground-based photometric redshift data.

More info here and here.

A Modified Computer Case

This is really just amazing. It's called the ORAC3 It took 7 months work to make this metallic-water-cooled-transparent-case computer a reality. I'm very impressed. I love good looking computers, that's one reason I like using a Mac, but this really lifts "computer mods" as they're called, to a whole new level.

BitTorrent

Before I share some of the media I gathered at Oshkosh, I think I better explain a little about how to download the stuff. If you are a computer geek that understands what I mean when I type /. then you can skip this post, otherwise read on: Let's start at the beginning: In the world of computers data takes up space. In the physical world books or pictures or CDs or video tapes all consume a certain amount of physical storage space. If you've ever known someone with a large collection of books or CDs you know what I mean. Space always costs. You have to build shelves, expend energy moving all of it as you change location and even organizing it enough so that you can get to what you want easily costs time and energy. In the world of computers space costs in much the same way. But there is a big difference and that is how much MORE space is required for pictures, audio and video. Space in the real world is measured in dimensions like height, width and depth and density. Space in the computer world is measured in bytes. A byte is simply a bunch of numbers that together mean something to a computer. Well, the text that you are reading right now might consume something like 5,000 bytes. That may look like a big number, but let me add to the comparison so you can get your bearings. When I take a picture with my digital camera, that single picture might consume on average 500,000 bytes! That picture "costs" 100 times more space than all the text you've been reading! But wait, it gets worse, audio data like a song you might Download from iTunes would consume around 5,000,000 bytes! That's a lot of bytes. When you make video on a computer you add lots of pictures (each second of video contains around 25 to 30 picture frames to provide the illusion of movement) and then add the audio and you end up with a very large file. I've got a video that is 1 hour and 5 minutes and how much space does it consume on my computer? About 14,000,000,000 bytes! Now that's a lot of bytes. Storage of all this data wasn't the only problem, moving it around quickly becomes rather important. Once the Internet began people started to share data with other people online. At first it was just text, but it didn't take long before Grandma Sue wanted to see video and pictures of her grandchildren and things started to get tricky. Moving around 14 billion bytes or even a picture of 500,000 bytes doesn't happen very quickly. It takes time. The first thing people tried to do was reduce the total number of bytes that are needed to represent the data. Some really smart people got together and figured out how to compress the data into a package that consumes less space but was still recognizably the same. A few compression formats you might be aware of are JPEG for digital pictures and MP3 or AAC for audio data. Compression has helped a bunch in solving the extreme space demands of pictures, audio and video. Compression also helps with data transfer costs since you don't have to transfer as much data from point to point. I have an online storage account with Apple that is part of my .Mac subscription. I pay $150 a year and I get 1024 megabytes (MB) of online storage and 10 billion byte (10 gigabytes or GB) transfer limit per month. If more than 10 GB of data is transfered from my online storage, then it's taken offline until the next month. There are other services that I could use to store and share my data, but I like .Mac because it's easy and comes with other useful features like data synchronization. If I take that 14 billion byte movie and compress it with iMovie I can get it down to about 80 million bytes or 80 megabytes (MB), which goes to show what amazing work these compression folks have done. At 80 MB and with my 10 GB transfer limit after about 120 people have downloaded the video, my online storage would be taken offline for the month and I'd be sad because I want more than 120 people to see the video. The Solution 1. Compress video and audio as much as possible 2. Distribute the transfer cost between everyone that wants the data I use iMovie to compress the video and BitTorrent to distribute the transfer costs. BitTorrent is an application that downloads big files. The difference is that once the file is downloaded, the BitTorrent application also shares out the file for others to safely download from your computer. This way everyone avoids downloading the large file from a single location, but everyone enjoys downloading small parts of a large file from everyone else that has already downloaded the file. Like compression, it gets complex fast and involves some cool math, but just trust me, it works really well. BitTorrent is not the only application that does this kind of thing, but it's the one I like best. So when I put a link to video on my web log here, more then likely, I'll link to a BitTorrent file that you can download from. What you'll need to do, is download the BitTorrent application to your computer and use it to down load the video. Once you've downloaded the video, consider leaving BitTorrent running so that others can download bits from your copy as well.

Summer Fun at Oshkosh

It's summer time where I live and we've been taking advantage of the situation. Lots of hikes, camping and visiting family. It's been great. One of the coolest things I've done is attend EAA's AirVenture Oshkosh 2005 It was amazing. The bulk of the next few posts will be cool things I saw and discovered at Oshkosh.

iRobot Customer Support

I've had the Roomba robotic vacuum for over 6 months now, and it's time to get some new filters. I called customer support and talked to a very nice man who helped me place my order and even get some free replacement brushes since mine had worn out too soon. Well, a few days later I got a package in the mail with not only the 3 filters I ordered, but a super duper iRobot cleaning tool. What can I say? I'm impressed. As any Roomba owner will know, after a few cleanings, long hair and carpet fuzz gets all wrapped around the main brush as well as in the two bearings. This tool with it's small comb, pick and embedded knife make for a perfect companion for cleaning every so often. I really get the feeling the iRobot people are thinking about me, their customer and this is a good thing. P.S. If anyone can tell me what the two little holes are for, I'd like to know.

The Trust Cycle

My Dad is constantly telling me that to build a high performing team, you've got to drive trust deep. One of the central reasons I enjoy working on the Infrastructure team in the Macintosh Business Unit is our mutual respect and trust. I just found a new blog on agile methods and what do you know, but that's exactly what he defends: Trust is the Essence of Agile

Agile software development brought the idea of trust to the forefront. When there is trust, there is less waste, less extra work, less verification, less auditing, less paperwork, less meetings, less finger pointing, less blame-storming. Building trust between the engineering group and the customers is the first goal for any agile manager. Equally building trust with and amongst the engineering team is also essential. So many aspects of agile methods are about building trust - frequent delivery, focus on working code rather than documentation, face-to-face communication, pair programming, peer reviewing, stand-up meetings, shared responsibility and joint accountability, direct customer collaboration including on-site customers and customer involvement in modeling sessions, estimating, tracking and reporting based on customer valued functionality, information radiators, big visible charts, burndown, cumulative flow and ultimately complete transparency into entire engineering process. Agile for the first time, enables us to run software development like other parts of a business. It clears away the fog. It lifts the veil of secrecy. It blows away the opaque clouds and reveals the naked truth of what is really going on.

Good stuff. He's working here at Microsoft now, trying to change things around. It will be interesting to see the effect.

It's easy, just a recompile right?

After some time to digest the news about Macs with Intel Inside, I've observed something that makes me worry. Not worry about the transition, but about some developer's view on software testing. First from Will Shipley the long time NeXT developer at Omni Group and now cofounder of Delicious Monster. Speaking of his work at Omni when NeXT moved from the Motorola 68K CPU to the Intel processor, he says:

My then-company ported all of our apps to run on Nextstep for Intel Processors in a couple days. I think OmniWeb took the longest; if I recall the others pretty much recompiled and ran.

Then he talks about his experience working on the Mac Intel prototypes at WWDC as follows:

It turns out all Apple has ready now are prototype machines, which are in plentiful supply here at WWDC. So, we went into their lab, opened up our source code for Delicious Library, clicked on the "compile for 10.4 only" option, and compiled our program for Intel processors. And it ran. It looked great to us. So, to sum up: no source code changes. We clicked, it compiled, it ran. The program we built will now run on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

(emphasis mine) Then there's James Duncan Davidson that regularly writes tech articles for apple who wrote:

And, when you see an app recompile on the new machine and run just fine—or even when you see one and see issues, but know that it's just a matter of cleaning up some bits and bobs—well, it's not a scary proposition anymore. What's left to do is straight forward coding. There's nothing that requires massive, or even minor, changes to the design an application. It's just making sure that the code doesn't make any assumptions it shouldn't.

(emphasis mine) Compare that with the more measured response from Rich Schaut, a long time Developer of Mac Word at Microsoft, he explains:

For a more concrete example, Apple have produced documentation for developers who use PowerPlant. PowerPlant uses various resources to describe the UI objects that are created--windows, menus, dialog boxes, etc. Reading these resources correctly in the context of a universal binary will be crucial. They've included some sample code to flip bytes in PowerPlant resources. It's more than 780 lines of code--780 lines of tedious, byte flipping code. [...] No. The PowerPlant resource example isn't extreme. It's just a common, specific example for which Apple have been kind enough to provide a solution. Anyone shipping serious applications that have not already had to solve this problem for cross-platform scenarios has quite a bit of tedious work to do. While I've welcomed this change for my own circumstances, I don't envy the position in which a number of my compatriots down in San Jose find themselves.

Maybe it's my perspective as a full-time software tester (more about that in another post) and I might be missing the light here, but Universal Binaries just doubled the amount of testing I need to do to verify, as Will put it, that the "code doesn't make any assumptions it shouldn't." This is simply a non-trivial task. Sure, I've been around a while and maybe I'm jaded, but when someone says to me, "Hey, I clicked the check box, it compiled and booted, looks good!" I get all sorts of bad feelings about what hideous bugs are lurking inside. Software testing is perhaps one of the most difficult disciplines in the software industry and good testing costs. It costs time and money. Thanks to a new CPU, a new complier for Intel and a new run time translator for PowerPC applications on an Intel box, Apple has single handedly increased the cost to test a Mac software product by at least twice if not three times. That, my friends, is not a good thing. Let me hasten to add that, elegant romantics aside, I think this is a good move, but for a software developer and especially as a software tester, it's going to cost. I should mention that I think all of these developers I mention do test and work very hard to produce high quality software. But high quality software is SO much more than a compiled and launching application, and I think that aspect is being missed in the discussion.

Mac OS x86 Leopard

I can't really let this day go by without saying something about the stunning change announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference today. I just watched the keynote presented by Steve Jobs and I don't really know what to think. The big news is as follows: 1. Apple will be transitioning to the Intel processor over then next 2 years 2. When Longhorn ships, Apple will ship Mac OS X Leopard 3. Apple has been building Mac OS X secretly on Intel since Mac OS X version 10.0! 4. They will have a binary translator named Rosetta for older PowerPC apps 5. iTunes is going to catalog podcasts on their music store with chapters and album art 6. Steve Jobs wore a black shirt, black pants, and black shoes rather than his customary jeans and mock turtle neck I don't know how this is going to effect everyone, but if it means a faster Mac and a better laptop experience, I'm all for it. I really thought it would never happen. I'm amazed.

Diminished Readership

While doing Saturday chores I listened to a talk given in November 9th 2004 by Dallin H. Oaks entitled “Where Will It Lead?”. The part that got me thinking was this bit: "Second is the matter of diminished readership of newspapers and books. The circulation and readership of daily newspapers in the United States is declining significantly, even while our population is increasing. Specifically, the per capita circulation of newspapers in the U.S. in the last 30 years has declined from 300 to 190 per 1,000 population. To cite another measure, in the four years ended in 2002 the percent of those ages 25 to 34 who have read a newspaper during the past week (either in hand or on the Internet) fell by almost 10 percentage points—from more than 86 percent in 1988 to less than 77 percent by 2002 (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1989 [109th ed.], table no. 901; and Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003 [123rd ed.], table no. 1127). The proportion of adults who read books has also declined significantly in recent years (see National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, Research Division Report #46, June 2004, Washington, D.C. [www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf]; and Christina McCarroll, “New on the Endangered Species List: The Bookworm,” Christian Science Monitor, 12 July 2004, 1–3). "Why are these trends of concern? More and more people are not reading the news of the world around them or about the important issues of the day. They apparently rely on what others tell them or on the sound bites of television news, where even the most significant subjects rarely get more than 60 seconds. Where will this lead? It is leading us to a less concerned, less thoughtful, and less informed citizenry, and that results in less responsive and less responsible government." I wonder, do blogs help or hinder informed citizenry? Blogs certainly level the playing field and diversify the voices out there, but do they promote a thoughtful, informed citizenry? How does the multiplicity of blogs help finding the truth? At least with large establishments, there's a finacial benefit to publishing accurate reports, but in a world filled with blogs, where is the accountability? Trusting in the masses isn't very reassureing to me.

Throw Away Your Mop!

This last Christmas season my wife surprised me buy getting me a robotic vacuum. It was one of those great moments when you get a present, that you really wanted, but didn't really know you wanted it. The geek side of me totally took over and I spent hours watching it and trying to figure out how it works. The model she got me is the Roomba Discovery and we continue to use it to this day. We probably use it more than they expected, because the flexible side flapper that cleans edges broke. I went to the web site to order the part, and was greeted with this: Sure enough, they are going to make a robot that mops your floor too! I have to admit, this is a great use of technology and if it works well, I'll probably drop the cash for it. When I got through to the customer support people they quickly ordered new parts for free, because they thought they shouldn't have worn down so quickly. Very cool. I'm impressed.

Dublin to Copenhagen

I just finished a business trip in Ireland. I enjoyed the work, loved getting to know the people there and of course enjoyed exploring the town of Dublin and the country side after work. The town seems to be growing like crazy. A short drive to the country side seems to put you back in time. It's a beautiful, breath taking green. It rained most of the time we were there. Still, I could easily get used to living there. On the way home I caught a flight from Dublin to Copenhagen and then from Copenhagen home to the US of A. The first leg of the flight was a short 2 hours and I ended up sitting next to a wonderful Irish couple in their thirties or so. No children, out for a long weekend in Denmark. I don't know how it started, but it seems like almost immediately the lady was asking me about what it's like to be a Mormon and how the church works. During the course of the conversation I found out that she is both a lawyer as well as a psychologist and very well read. She is Catholic and participates a weekly study session with 2 nuns, herself and a few other friends of other faiths as far as I could tell. A she is very interested in religion and asked many very good questions. We didn't agree on everything, one rarely does when talking about religion, but on most things we did and the conversation was amicable and had a fun pace to it. Her husband certainly was nice, but didn't participate declaring with a smile, "When it comes to religion, I've been there, done that." So we continued talking just us the two of us. One of the most interesting things for me was our discussion of a pre-mortal existence. The idea the we lived before were born seemed a brand new idea to her. When we discussed the idea that before we were born, we lived with our Heavenly Parents and that "Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." it seemed perhaps the newest idea that had crossed her path in a very long time. We got pretty quickly to the question of the purpose of life and while she didn't share with me what she thought it was, I did with her. She did share some very interesting insights into how she thought people change and grow and was able to explain it in very sociological terms. Basically, for us to change, we need to have a input that allows us to see a contrast, and the input must come from something or someone external. This way we can make a choice. Without the input, we continue as we are and change cannot occur. I thought this was very insightful, and it reminded me of a bit of scripture: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. Wherefore, it must needs have been created for a thing of naught; wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of its creation. Wherefore, this thing must needs destroy the wisdom of God and his eternal purposes, and also the power, and the mercy, and the justice of God. ... Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other." We then discussed more about why we would need to come to this earth and experience life in this way. I explained how I believe that we must learn from our own experience right from wrong. And by learning to choose the right, we experience more happyness and joy. The purpose of life then is to increase our joy and happiness by becoming like our Father in Heaven. We do this as we learn to think as He thinks, do as He does, love as He loves. We both agreed that this process would take us far into the next existence and then the flight came to an end and we said our good byes. I often speak with those I meet. Everywhere in fact. I really enjoy learning about others and how they see life and what interests them. I came away from this conversation feeling like maybe I take for granted far too much of the religious truths I hold dear. It's not always too acceptable these days to speak of religion in public, at least at work, but I can't help but think that the simple truths, about God, the purpose of life, and the role of Christ in our redemption and eventual return home, simply sooth the soul and invite a reflective hue on life that ingenders change. And change, that's something we can all use.

Customer Signature

In July 2003 I was issued an American Express credit card. It just expired. I've used it for almost two years and I never signed the back! I have never, not even once, been asked to sign it! I guess I'm not alone! I wonder what the signature on the back of the card is supposed to mean anyway. If it is just to verify against the receipt I sign then it seems it is a sorely under-used security precaution. Once again, security is so very dependent on human process. If the process fails, so does the security.

A good example of the human factor in security is this article. An estimated 500,000 people (perhaps as high as 1,000,000) had their account information stolen in "what may the biggest security breach to hit the banking industry." Who did this crime? "Account information on the customers was illegally sold by bank employees to a man identified as Orazio Lembo, whom police said was doing business by illegally posing as a collection agency." Brilliant.

The Thing Legends Are Made Of

Check out this fan made Nike commercial.

Possibly the best golf shot of all time. Seriously, even if you don't play, you should watch this. It's 60 seconds long.

Hello World!

Nothing like a beginning! This is my very first web log and it will be mine in every way. Here you will find thoughts, ideas and commentary on things I think are interesting or important. I hope you enjoy your stay.