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Friday, Oct 12. 2007 – Category: Musings

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since I left Sun. I’ve spent 2 weeks at Songbird now, and am starting to feel like less of the retarded-idiot-who-knows-nothing now. It’s been a challenge switching between two completely different jobs at two completely different companies. But damn if the commute to SF isn’t a helluva lot nicer (and a lot more fun…. riding a skateboard is orders of magnitude better than sitting idling spitting out noxious fumes on 880). Seriously, I don’t drive my car on weekdays anymore…. and that is just lovely.

I’ve been using a MacBook the past couple of weeks and I’m starting to adjust, but I still miss my Solaris environment. This is the first time I’ve used a Mac since busting out on Oregon Trail (”Your party has died of starvation”) in the third grade, so it’s been a while.

WE’S HATES THESE @)#(@)(#*%)@# KEYBINDINGS, YES WE’S DO

Seriously… hate ‘em. Just hate ‘em. The lack of virtual desktops and ZFS is a bummer too. Apparently the next release of MacOS fixes those though (though what’s up with ZFS read-only??), so I await that patiently.

Job wise, it’s been different. We’re pushing for a new developer release soon with a whole new accompanying developer portal. We’re really trying to push for developer adoption with the extensions and web page APIs we’ve been working on. I’ve been goofing off learning the webpage APIs (that brings up an interesting discussion I had with my boss: is it “webpage” or “web page”? wikipedia claims both are valid). It’s pretty awesome stuff - the interaction between the media library and the web is really starting to come together. More importantly, it’s not just an iTunes clone - the level of interaction available is a lot more two-way and dynamic than what you can do with iTunes.

Plus: it’s f-ing open. yeah, suck on that - closed proprietary DRM’d up-the-wazoo iTunes.

So that’s what’s new in the world of work.

Wendy and I are in Hawaii this week for her annual OMFS meeting, so I’ve been working in the hotel room trying not to stare out the window at the ocean and surfers. Fun, neh.

We’re going parasailing this afternoon and snorkeling tomorrow - so I’m looking forward to that. More importantly, we’re going to Nobu for dinner tonight: mmmmmm… as Campbell’s would say, that’s “mmm mmm good”

twitter schmitter

Thursday, Sep 20. 2007 – Category: Musings

so i confess. i totally don’t get the whole “micro-blogging” thing on twitter. i guess it’s convenient for blogging random little snippets here and there from your phone - but seriously, i swear, half the people i know doing so are doing it from their iPhones (yeah you Sara), or their otherwise keyboard-enabled smart phone and could just as easily blog it on their main blog.

is it for status updates of what people are doing?

am i going to twitter “taking a piss. why do people miss?”?

or “cleaning up my dog’s puke cause they ate dog poop and grass”?

i totally don’t get it.

/me ain’t hip. (and not just cause i emote with IRC actions either)

so here’s my micro blog: “woke up today totally into the idea of green t-shirts. need to get more somehow”

“We only part to meet again”

Monday, Sep 17. 2007 – Category: Musings, OpenSolaris, Sun

I’m leaving Sun.

It’s been a gut-wrenching decision, but I got an offer to join a startup in SF that was just too interesting and exciting to pass up.

What’s more important is what I’m not leaving. I’m certainly not leaving the OpenSolaris community (while my participation may dial down somewhat, I still fully intend on being active in the lists, and serving in the OGB.) I’m not leaving the many many friends I’ve made in the past 4+ years working at Sun.

I believe very strongly in OpenSolaris; I believe that it will succeed, and that it will be a disruptive influence in both the proprietary/closed software world, as well as the open source world. I’m sad that I won’t have the opportunity to work on it as my day job anymore, but I will still eagerly participate and watch the progress from the outside as a non-Sun participant and contributor now.

It’s sad, and a little scary to leave a place that I’ve not only become comfortable at - but one that I love. I’ve loved working at Sun, I’ve had a blast, learned an immense amount of stuff, worked with some of the smartest people I know, and gotten to work on one of the coolest open source projects around.

I guess I feel that sometimes you have to spread your wings, leave the nest for a bit, and find a new nest.

a party in 783 frames (78.3 seconds)

Sunday, Sep 9. 2007 – Category: Musings

we had a party to celebrate Yukon’s 40th birthday last night. i’d been playing around with my new webcam (Quickcam Orbit MP, which aside from pan/tilt functionality - seems to work great under Solaris). i forgot i’d left it on and it was taking a shot every 30 seconds.

this morning i grabbed a copy of swftools, which also built just fine under Solaris and whipped up this following basic flash movie with the 783 frames the webcam took last night.

(i used jpeg2swf and set a rate of 10fps, and yes - it’ll loop around…)

the party started at 4pm, so most people were out on the back porch while we were grilling and drinking. as the night came in and things cooled down we headed in doors.

Bose™ is in the business of being a trademark nazi

Tuesday, Sep 4. 2007 – Category: Musings

So I listed a Bose™ SoundDock™ on eBay with a photo of the SoundDock that I took. I then listed the following description:

Brand new, still shrink-wrapped and in box Bose SoundDock, dock system/speaker for the Apple iPod. Fits any generation iPod with the included 3 dock inserts. This one is the white one.

And I was informed that my listing was cancelled because Bose requested it be pulled for a trademark violation.

??? I can’t see how I violated trademarks given that I gave it my own description and used my own photo - but well, that sucks. I’m following up with Bose to see if it was just flagged overzealously by some trademark nazi (human or robot) on their end, or if I really can’t sell Bose equipment on eBay.

shaking it up in the east bay

Wednesday, Aug 15. 2007 – Category: Musings

hrm. it’s been a shaky past month in the east bay with the various earthquakes we’ve had.

last night we had a 3.2 whose epicenter was 1.7 miles from our house

on Sunday we had a 2.7 whose epicenter was 12.8 miles from our house

and about a month ago we had a 4.2 whose epicenter was a mere 1.5 miles from our house.

i’m starting to wonder if we’re going to have a big one soon.

wii

Saturday, Aug 4. 2007 – Category: Musings

holy crap.

the wii is crack.

a rant on social network dilution

Monday, Jul 16. 2007 – Category: Musings

I stumbled across TopLinked.com, a site listing the top linked people on LinkedIn this morning.

Am I the only person who finds this sort of dilution of social networking annoying? It’s the reason I stopped using Orkut, Friendster, and all the other gazillions of social networking sites. LinkedIn is the one site I continue to actually use because of the value of professional networking; but this value is derived from what I thought was from an actual network.

People with thousands of connections and notes like “(accept all invitations)” are pointless. What value are they adding to the network? Clearly they can’t actually professionally (or even personally) vouch for everyone. If I meet someone who is connected to one of my friends (who actually maintains a proper known network on LinkedIn) then I know there is some value in that connection. I know I can talk to my friend who can vouch for that person (or maybe they won’t vouch for them - either way the information is useful to have). What can I derive from seeing someone who is a 2nd degree connection through someone else who has 20,000 connections? Absolutely nothing. They can’t tell me anything since they don’t know anything. Their node in the social network quickly becomes “fluff”…. it’s the equivalent of the highly connected MacArthur Maze of highway junctions: it’s inevitable that you will have to pass through it at some point, but you’ll hate it and curse aloud the time you spend there.