Hilarious rant about how difficult it is to assign a keyboard command to Find Next in Mac Word. Of course our own buzzword doesn’t offer programmable keyboard shortcuts at all, and it isn’t as Mac-like as it should be sometimes, so I shouldn’t throw stones. But this is so funny I can’t help it…
Trip Report: Germany
•21May08 • 2 CommentsGot back from Germany on the 29th of April. Didn’t get a lot of time to ease back into work: went into 15 hour day mode immediately and stayed there until this week. It’ll be worth it. Meanwhile, I thought people who enjoy cars and technology might enjoy this trip report.
I spent my first few days in Munich being a tourist: doing a beer-making tour, visiting standard tourist sites, and so forth. I also got to tour the BMW factory in Europe, which was amazing. I was especially impressed by the paint shop, where there was a continuously moving waterfall under the line and the glass walls between us and the robots had no paint on them.
Picking up my car the next day at the BMW Welt was an experience: a bit over the top but also very cool. The architecture is amazing inside and out:
Had a good time driving my new car around Europe. First to Füssen, then Strasbourg.
Overall I did about 1200 km, most of it on the Autobahn at 100 mph+. Maximum speed I hit: 240 km/h (150 mph). But BMWs are kinda famous for exaggerating speeds, so don’t take that as gospel. Trust me when I say it felt pretty darn fast. Funnily enough, 100mph doesn’t feel fast at all on the Autobahn – in fact it felt a lot like going 65 mph here in California. Can’t say enough good things about the German road infrastructure – they do a marvelous job of keeping it in shape.
The highlight of the trip was the day I spent in Nürburg, Germany, home of the Nordschleife, one of the world’s longest and most difficult road courses. Stayed at a place called the RingHaus, which is a lot of fun – many visitors from England, and one group who had driven in from St. Petersburg.
I started the day by doing a lap around the ring in my own car. I was quite nervous about doing this as I’d never driven the course before and worried what would happen if I had an uninsured accident. But my one slow lap (13 minutes, anything less than 11 minutes is respectable) was without incident. Shortly thereafter a proud owner of a new Porsche was not so lucky: like me, he patoodled around the track at low speed, only to get rammed from behind by a motorcycle going to fast around a blind corner. The motorcyclist was seriously injured, unfortunately.
I then did a lap as a passenger in a race-prepped Alfa 75 sedan that had been rented by the English folks I met at the RingHaus – the interior had been stripped and a full roll cage, racing seats, and racing belts were installed. This car wasn’t as powerful as mine but it was far, far lighter. It went around that track pretty quickly. Unfortunately, my ride was a fairly short one – 6 km or so into the lap we spun out and hit the curb, bending the car’s front suspension and steering rack. Fortunately we didn’t get run over by anyone and we didn’t hit the wall, so we just put limped the car the rest of the way around the track. That spin was a little more excitement than I’d planned on – when we got off the track my shirt was soaked through with sweat and my heart was pounding.
As it happens, though, my day wasn’t over yet. A half hour later I got a call from the folks at the BMW Ring Taxi service – they had an open slot available in one of their two BMW M5s. These are extremely capable cars driven by professionals who know the Ring like the back of their hands. We went really, really fast – much faster than the Alfa 75 even though we had four people in the car AND the air conditioning was on. In fact we hit 240 km/h at one point (it feels even faster when you do it on a curvy racecourse!). I was sitting in the right rear passenger seat, and got thrown around quite a bit as we carved through the turns – no fancy racing buckets here. I turned quit green, and a half hour later I threw up. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
From there I drove the car to Frankfurt, spent a day there, then dropped the car off and came home, just in time for my 9th wedding anniversary on the 1st of May. A great trip.
Quick recommendation: TED Talks on Video
•21May08 • Comments OffNot exactly new news, but the TED folks have a nice video podcast of their historical talks. I’ve been watching them now and then as time permits and they are amazing and inspiring. You can also subscribe via iTunes, as I’ve done. One of my dreams is to eventually do something so amazing that I get invited to talk at TED…
Silverlight: lead pony or stalking horse?
•20May08 • 4 CommentsThis article about Novell’s Moonlight project made me giggle (via Hack The Planet – hi Wes!). I was wondering just the other day about how Miguel de Icaza, a very smart and talented guy, ended up in a career spent developing one Microsoft-clone project after another. Evolution, Gnome, Mono, Moonlight. Just think what he could have done if he had tried to do something new.
Steve Yegge on dynamic language optimization
•14May08 • Comments OffI’ve been underwater trying to get a release out the door ever since I got back from Germany two weeks ago, and so haven’t had much time to do anything interesting. But last night I read a fantastic transcript of a talk by Steve Yegge of Google called Dynamic Languages Strike Back. If you care about compilers and/or dynamic languages you should read it and check out some of the linked articles, including one from Adobe. Mind-blowing stuff.
History Meme
•17Apr08 • 2 CommentsTim Bray and Mark Pilgrim have done it, so I thought I’d throw my command line history into the mix. Interestingly, I’ve been doing a lot of ruby on rails work over the last few weeks and it has skewed my command line use away from java based stuff like ant and maven:
~ % history | awk '{a[$3]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}' | sort -rn | head
259 ls
135 cd
82 p4
61 svn
61 ruby
59 cap
34 rm
31 mate
30 rake
22 script/console
(and, in case anyone was wondering why I use the third column instead of the second, it is because my default shell is still tcsh.)
SHARE Futures
•19Mar08 • 1 CommentThere’s an interesting post over on Ryan Stewart’s blog about SHARE, my favorite web service (sometimes) and my personal migraine (sometimes). Ryan wants to know why SHARE doesn’t get more love from bloggers, something I can’t really speak to. We do get quite a bit of usage, though. Anyhow, there was lots of great feedback in there which we’ve been discussing on our internal mailing list, but there was one comment from Marc Hughes I wanted to address more publicly:
I’m planning Adobe Share support for AgileAgenda (my scheduling app), but the thing that’s been keeping me from doing it is the beta status.
When it goes official, what will be the fee structure? Free? Free for a limited account, pay for more? Pay-only? How committed it Adobe to the technology? If nobody uses it will it be gone in a year?
Also, being able to embed the content in a web page is great, if you’re sharing one of the few supported formats. But what about custom file formats? I want to supply a custom swf that’s used as the embedded viewer.
First, its really cool that you’d like to support SHARE in AgileAgenda. This kind of integration is exactly the reason why we spent so much time building web services APIs.
Second, on the future: although I can’t make any guarantees that mean anything, the future of SHARE is pretty bright. There is some other software coming from Adobe that make use of the same web service APIs that you can get from SHARE today, so we are pretty darn confident that those APIs will still be around for some number of years to come (since we had to sign support commitments in blood).
Third, on custom file format viewers: this is something we’d definitely like to do, although there are some serious security issues around embedding third party SWF objects inside of our Flex UI which we’re still trying to figure out. So no dates for this functionality just yet. Anyone have any tips? Send them my way.
Fourth, and finally, SHARE itself is getting a little stale, in internet time anyhow: its been almost five months since our last major update. That’s way too long, and we’re going to try to make sure we have something cool to show every couple of months from now on. The good news is that some of the key features we talked about at MAX last October are literally just around the corner, driven in large part by the feedback we’ve received on SHARE to date. And I’m even more excited about the new UI functionality coming in the release after that, which I get to play with a little more every day.
Anyhow, I hope this helps people who are working with SHARE feel better about its future. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about next week.
