Duckfeet in the snow

I wish I had thought to bring a camera on my morning walk with the pup. Walking through Gasworks Park I noticed some odd prints in the snow. It took me a bit to realize I was looking at duck footprints.

Seattle Half-Marathon 2008

Seeing Doug's post about running the Seattle half-marathon reminded me that I should mention that I also ran the half-marathon this year. Not nearly as good a time as my Vancouver half-marathon. I didn't train as hard, got sick 2 weeks before the race, and don't think I ate enough the day before. I managed ~1:50, despite having to walk a bit, for fear of passing out. Next year, I'll train for those damn hills better, and try and find a better pace person... Running the first 1/2 of the race at a 7:30 pace was not a good idea. Felt great at the time, but not sustainable.

Running 13 miles is an excellent excuse for some pints of Porter and a proper hamburger, and thus so did I indulge myself.

New toy

Friday I picked up a new MacBook. (I almost bought a Samsung NC10 instead, but wanted a machine powerful enough to run Eclipse/etc.)

So far I have mostly been installing all my favorite Mac apps (Quicksilver, AquaEmacs, Fluid) plus a few developer tools (NetBeans, Eclipse, XCode) plus the usual (OpenOffice, Firefox). Given that my last Mac is an old PPC 12" MacBook Pro, this is a significant step forward. Everything is so snappy, and the bigger screen is a great. I've also moved over from my old Password Safe password archive to KeePassX and a DropBox account to share the password amongst my machines.

I've adjusted to the new trackpad surprisingly quickly. I love the new multi-finger scroll. One of the main uses of this machine will be browsing the web, and one of my biggest complaints about using my girlfriend's MacBook, is the lack of page-down key. The two-finger scroll is a great compromise.

I'm looking forward to getting some time to play with XCode an Objective-C. I started toying around with that on my old machine, but got distracted. Now that my household is mostly Mac (2 MacBooks + 1 Mini + 1 Work PC Laptop + 1 PC Desktop I never use), Mac tools are much more useful.

Been a long time

I've been quite busy with work but unfortunately, the nature of what I do means that I can't really blog about it.  Or at least, I have yet to figure out how to appropriately blog about it.

That said... it is the most interesting job I have had since when we were first working on XML support in Internet Explorer 5. (Back then I was helping define the XML DOM, XPath, and tons of other amazing things that people take for granted now.)  Working on S3 has taught me more about the reality of building and running distributed systems, than I can even imagine fitting in one book.  Working on hard problems with a great team, makes this one of my favorite jobs of all time.  (p.s. we are hiring...)

Vancouver Half-Marathon

Natascha and I spent the morning running around Vancouver, BC. 13 Miles of scenic vistas. Lovely day for a run. I'd forgotten how much I like Vancouver. The city is beautiful, and manages to have a bit more international feel than Seattle. The Half-Marathon was a very pleasant tour through a few parts of the city center. I'm not entirely sure what my time was, because we started late, but we think I managed just over an 8 minute mile. Better than I expected.

And I'm supposed to buy their content in the future?

Yet again, Microsoft drops it's DRM on the floor. I avoid DRM whenever possible, but have used iTunes a few times for books on tape, and my significant other uses it occasionally for music and TV shows. One of the reasons iTunes is so popular is that it is as close to a constant in the industry as any other. Meanwhile Microsoft can't seem to figure out what it's story should be. This is why Microsoft needs Yahoo. Microsoft has no idea how to build a content business.

XML = 10 years?

I saw the flurry of posts this weekend about how it has been 10 years since the initial XML recommendation was published. I particularly liked Tim’s XML People. It is amazing for me to imagine that it really has been 10 years. I still remember sitting in my office at TechnoTeacher (long gone) seeing the announcement about the formation of a W3C group to standardize on a subset of SGML fo the web. Way back when Usenet was still useful and I was a SGML newbie reading comp.text.sgml to try and understand some of the crazy stuff I was working on. There is no way anyone in that era could have imagined how XML would evolve and emerge as the ever-present beast that we all know and love. or love to hate.

XML arrived at an interesting time. The 'Internet' was exploding. Networked computers went from an office/academic luxury to an automatic assumption. What that meant was that many people needed to extend existing, incompatible systems to share data. XML appeared at a time when a flexible, international foundation for data exchange format was desperately needed. XML was not designed for this; it was designed for text markup! For all its flaws, XML came closer than anything else that existed. Big business jumped on XML like it was the philosopher's stone.

XML has been credited and blamed for many things. It has been used an abused. When the customer need appears and drives things that fast, it means many technologies/methodologies/etc get carried along for the ride. I'm not saying XML was not worthy, only that XML got dragged farther than many would have liked, and was stretched sometimes past what most deemed appropriate. XML was also one of the tools that enabled the explosion of commerce on the internet. XML changed the game. Before XML, people defined rigid schemas and binary encoded their data. Versioning was very painful. Writing parsers for data formats was infamously problematic and error-prone. XML arrived as processing speeds became fast enough to support text formats where binary formats used to be the rule. XML also solved a number of internationalization issues, by mandating Unicode and defining standard rules for determining which encoding was used. XML introduced the world to the concept of a 'self-describing' format. People who complain about XML today often fail to realize how much that they take for granted did not exist back then. No solution is perfect.

If XML really is as horrid as people say, then why didn't another format replace it? Because there was no other format that solved as many problems. It doesn't hurt to have some heavy hitters in your dugout, too. XML didn't become so omnipresent because of politics. It is here because it was a better 'good enough' than anything else out there. 10 years later and we are only just starting to see other formats, such as JSON, usurp the role, and only in cases where XML was not necessary a good fit to begin with. That is a spectacular success in my book.

A number of people have taking the 10 year anniversary to ponder 'what next?' To me it is obvious. XML is part of the plumbing of the modern web. It is not perfect. XML vs JSON debates amuse me. Each has its own place, and there are large areas where either works. XML should not be a religion. XML is a tool. I don't hit a nail using a drill, nor do I carve holes in wood using my hammer. We live in the world technology plenty. Just as a journeyman carpenter learns about his tools, developers should learn and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tools at their disposal.

XML is here to stay. Use it wisely and prosper.

Remote Desktop for Apple Macs

Last Christmas, I got my parents an iMac to replace their aged and infested PC. So far, this has worked quite well, but I keep running into the same problem: I need to walk them through some task, and doing it over the phone does not seem to work.

So what I'm looking for is remote control software that would let me see (and interact) with my parents machine over the internet. Ideally, I should be able to run the client from either a PC or Mac, so that I can walk them through something from home or at work. It looks like I have 3 choices:

1. Timbuktu - Expensive. It looks like you need a full license, just to run the client, which means I need 2 or 3 licenses, at ~$99 a pop.
2. Fog Creek's CoPilot - pay per use (5$), and I can't easily use it to log in and requires that my parents initiate.
3. Home-grown VNC solution - requires setting up a VNC server exposed though a ssh tunnel, as well as some sort of dynamic-dns so that I can find the machine.

Right now I thinking to use CoPilot to address the current problem, since that is cheap and easy. I've never used it though. Any caveats I should know about? Any alternate suggestions my Googling missed?

Back from Africa

Just returned from 3 weeks in Kenya and Tanzania. Did you know that Tanzania is more properly pronounced something like tan-tay-nia? We spent some awesome time in a bungalow on the beach my Mombasa. We went to an amazing wedding in Nairobi (a friend of a friend was the groom). We spent 3 days on Safari in Maasai Mara. I'll upload pictures soon. Then we were off to Kilimanjaro. 6 days of sweating and I made it to the top! After that we were all exhausted and slummed it around the hotel mostly.

Overall it was an amazing trip. It was full of adventure and the unexpected. Hiking up Kili was the most demanding task I've ever attempted. I'm still amazed I made it to the top. The Safari was amazing. I loved seeing the animals, but it felt really odd driving a car around and chasing after these poor animals. Better than a zoo though.

And now after almost 24 hours of travel, we are home. My cat is curled up at my feet. And I have to work tomorrow with 11 hours of jet lag.