Tue, Aug 5, 2003

Check out this article in wired.  With a wife that is a doctror, it always amuses me the capacity for people to think that the "system" is hiding the real cure from them.  It seems to me that people always value the remedies that they have to go outside the "system" for.  It is like that episode of Sienfeld where his dad would only take a gift if it were stolen. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

(I tried to find the specific episode for that Sienfeld reference but it turns out that there are better episode guides for Xena and Good Eats than I can for Sienfeld.  The web works in mysterious ways.)

Sun, Aug 3, 2003

I love this.  When we are designing APIs, we think about this type of thing.  We want to make it easier for the "bad programmer" to write code that isn't so bad.  However, you can only do so much.

Mon, Jul 28, 2003

I finally signed up at Haloscan and now have comments up here.  I don't know if any of my 2 readers will care, but let's see what happens.

After the first outage at Haloscan, I'll probably give up and write my own comment system.  I want to keep it seperate from JoeBlogger though so that JoeBlogger is still a client render/FTP too.  The comment system will probably be similar to Haloscan in the way it is hosted on a page.

Mon, Jul 28, 2003

Earlier, I was wondering if the new G5 Macs would have an OS that could take advantage of their 64 bit nature, or if Apple was going to take a short cut and run the G5 in a compat mode.  Apparently, that is going to be the case, at least according to this Register article.

In a lot of ways, this is just more hype from Apple.  Many Intel processesors (I don't know the exact ones) actually have a 36 bit addressing bus.  Those extra 4 bits mean that the processor can actually address 16 times as much memory as a 32 bit addressing bus.  The difference is between 4GB and 64GB.  However, most Windows machines don't take advantage of that extra capacity.  The APIs are there though, if you want to use them.

So, is the 64 bit nature of the G5 hype?  As far as I can tell, right now the answer is yes.

(Well, I'm sure that someone will port 64 bit Linux to it, and that will be cool.  It might become the cheapest way to get a 64 bit linux machine, if AMD doesn't beat them to the punch)

Wed, Jul 23, 2003

Scoble linked to me.  Thanks dude!

However, I'm not a PM.  I'm a Dev Lead.  I don't know if everyone knows the break down of different jobs at Microsoft, but, in the technical areas, there are three main jobs: Program Management, Development, and Test.

The breakdown goes like this:  PMs talk to customers, develop requirements and write specs, Devs implement the code to those specs and Test validates that the Devs did their job. 

Of course, things never work out that cleanly.  For example, the Test team are some of the people first using the product so they may have more and better feedback than just if the program works.  And in a techinical area, like what I'm working on (graphics and APIs), a lot of the design work can be done by devs.

Microsoft is trying to develop higher level individual contributer developers to help lead the architecture of the product.  I'm heading down that track right now.  ChrisAn is another example of this.  Part of this is that just because you are good at writing code doesn't mean that you are good at managing people.  Beyond that, it is really hard to find PMs that can operate at the technical level necessary for some groups -- such as designing windows APIs.  As a result of this, higher level individual contributer devs and technical PMs do many of the same jobs.  This is why I've spent that last year or so writing specs!

Mon, Jul 21, 2003 Just to give Scoble some back up.  I'm planning on being at the PDC.  If you are there and want to talk about the new Graphics APIs, I'm one of the guys to find.  If I don't end up presenting a session or two you can be sure that I worked hard on the slide decks.

Mon, Jul 21, 2003

The house stuff is winding down.  We close on August 18th, and I think that we are mostly on cruise control until then.  We needed the owners to put a new roof on the house, so there was quite a bit of back and forth on that.  I think we have it worked out now!

In any case, this last weekend I went to my 10 year high school reunion.  It was a blast!  I should put some pictures up...

(The reasons that I don't post any pictures is that I want to make JoeBlogger have a picture gallery mode and I haven't gotten around to coding it up yet.  I should really get off my ass and do it.)

Fri, Jul 4, 2003

I'm back in Seattle for good!  Yay!

On top of that, Rachel and I took this week off to move and buy a house.  We've made an offer and they have accepted!  The inspection is on Sunday and we are figuring out mortgage and insurance stuff.  The house is in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle. 

The house is withing walking distance to the University hospital so, Rachel can walk to work most of the time.  The rest of the time there are free shuttles that run from the U hospital to the other hospitals around Seattle.  The house is also close enough to the freeway bus stop so I can stop sitting in my car and start sitting in a bus.  Microsoft has a really good bus commuter program where anyone can get a free bus pass.

So, in great historic tradition I may get busy with the house, the move and work and I may not be posting much.

Thu, Jun 26, 2003

Just wondering, but does anyone know if Mac OS X actually allows processes to run with a full 64 bit address space?  Or is everything just running in a 32 bit compat mode?  I couldn't see anything with a quick search on Apple's web page.

WinNT ran on the 64 bit alpha quite a while ago, but it only ran in a 32 bit mode.  Is Apple doing the same thing here?  Is the whole 64 bit thing, wrt Apple, all flash and no fire?

BTW, just because the new G5 machines can have 8GB of RAM doesn't mean that an individual process can access more than 4GB.  Hell, some Intel procs can access >4Gb, but they are still 32 bit processors.  For example, the 32 bit version of W2k3 server can support 32GB of RAM.  This extra RAM can be accessed via specialized APIs or you can have, for example, 10 processes each using 2GB.

Wed, Jun 25, 2003

I've released a new version of JoeBlogger based on feedback from Bubba and Harry.  I've also fixed a few problems that I've found.

Here is the msi, src, readme and license.

Changes:

• Fixed data loss issues when hitting "New Entry" button while current entry hasn't been uploaded.
• Fixed FTP issues with multi-line responses from FTP server.
• Added a "FilePutDelay" parameter to the site1.config file for dealing with FTP servers that get confused if you move too fast.  This is in milliseconds.  1000 seems to solve most problems.
• Moved some code around and had to put a custom binder in the upstreamer deserialization.

There aren't any big new features yet.  I just haven't had time.  However, when the new system goes up at gotdotnet.com, I'll probably start a workspace over there.  I haven't done it already because the current source control system that comes with the workspaces is really really bad.

Oh, and since pretty pictures make everything go down smoother, here is a screenshot:

Send feedback!  If you are using it let me know!