cascadian telegrams

bird songs of the cenozoic

one of the most addictive apps I’ve found for the iPhone is Chirp! (USA and Europe versions available) which helps you identify birds based on song or appearance.

 

Your location is used to list birds by name or common-ness.   Now when I hear an unusual bird call or song when I’m working, I’ll pop open Chirp and try to identify the bird.  

In my neighborhood, besides the ubiquitous robins and crows, flickers are very common, and there are also a few sparrow varieties.  Small hawks also frequent the area although I don’t see them as often (my parents saw one grab a field mouse the other day).

As the iPhone is really more pocket computer than an actual phone, this is an app that really shows the power of the platform.  It’s great to be able to pull out the phone from your pocket and identify birds by appearance or song while out walking in the woods or the mountains.   It is $2.99 in the App Store, and the lite version is free to try.

goog is my pilot

one of the really nice things about being a Microsoft employee is the really good level of IT infrastructure you come to expect and think of as normal; for example, if you have a “smart phone” (such as a Windows, Nokia, Blackberry or iPhone) you can get “push mail” from the corporate server and instant updates to your appointment calendar, contacts and more.  It is very handy when you’re trying to find a meeting place or if someone changes an appointment when you’re enroute, etc.  So when I left Microsoft I didn’t have any of those things any more (even though I still seem to have lots of appointments… “networking” is the term I believe :)).

Enter Google.  For no out-of-pocket cost you can set up email for your domain as well as shared contacts, calendars, documents and more, stored in the cloud and available anywhere.  If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, you also get “push mail” like the big companies have and “push calendar” via CALDAV (the calendar variant of WebDAV) for whichever calendars you choose (you can have many of them with different restrictions… I’ve got personal, family and one for our son’s little league team set up).  There’s a bit of initial configuration involved, but once it is set up, it works like a charm.  My email domain has been hosted on gmail for a few years now, but I’ve only now started using the calendar and other features.  Pretty slick.

Additionally, since I’m dividing my time between Windows and OS X, I can’t use OneNote for my “research notebooks” all the time as I was used to.  Google Docs is a decent facsimile and as a bonus lets me collaboratively edit with other people on the same document at the same time.  The editing affordances are rudimentary, but it is adequate for my needs.

The price for all this neat stuff is that Google is crawling your content stored on their servers and using it to improve AdSense etc.  It’s a little creepy when you’re discussing a mortgage or something in an email and an ad appears on the right-hand side from a mortgage bank.  Basically you are trusting Google (in the free case) to protect and not share your data without your consent.  For me, for now, I can live with that… but I can understand why some might not trust them. Presumably with the paid hosting plans you can opt out of crawling your data but I’m sticking with the free one.

Of course you can use IMAP or POP to access your mail and short-circuit the ads… that’s what I do, and I use a third-party app to synch my calendar and contacts.  But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they pull the plug on that capability for the free product some time in future.

goodbye to all that

after ~11 years,  10 managers, 5 teams (and 3-4 different shipped products, depending on how you count), 3 patents, 2 continents and the birth of one son, I’m leaving Microsoft and moving onto other things.  Here’s how I described to friends there:

Hello! And Goodbye…

My seven year-old son likes to say that he will work at the Lego Factory when he grows up.
Well, after nearly 11 years at Microsoft I’ve decided that I’m actually happier building things with Legos rather than designing Legos or deciding how many red vs white pieces are in each kit, whether Lego ships a Batman or Avatar kit, the philosophy of Legos and so forth, so I’m going back to building things.  My last day at Microsoft is Friday April 9th 2010.

If you’re getting this mail, you are a friend and/or a colleague who has made my time at Microsoft a happy and fulfilling time.  Thank you.

On balance, it really was a happy and fulfilling time.  The last six months were not happy;  my English side is not comfortable airing laundry like that in public, so I’ll leave it at that.  Suffice to say that my current position was the impetus for leaving but not the reason… I’ve been talking about going for years. It wasn’t exactly how I envisioned leaving or when, but… the perfect time never arrives.  So I left.

I must say the the prospect of being unemployed scares the life out of me in some ways.  I’ve been unemployed precisely two weeks since 1987 (after we returned from our honeymoon in 1991, so… ages ago) which is effectively “never”.  It is very weird. 

I’ll stay in software and hopefully return to my original role as a developer (which I did for 13 years or so prior to becoming a ‘program manager’ at Microsoft).  I thought that point was plain enough with the “lego” and “building” metaphor in the goodbye email, but I still got some replies like

""what’s this stuff about Lego?”

“what do you mean building… like, carpentry?”

“does this mean you have more time for hockey now?”

“are we still on for lunch?”

Mmm hmm.  Glad to see that Microsoft continues to hire only the best and the brightest!

And of course the most popular response was:  “what are you doing next?”

Honestly I don’t know yet.  I’m going to write a few apps to blow the dust off of my coding skills, talk to as many smart people doing interesting things as I possibly can, and think about it for a little bit (if you know of interesting ideas, dear reader, my c.v. is here for context).  It’s a big world outside of the echo chamber, and I have a lot to learn…

Here’s my new office, which also happens to be ‘home’:

 

Allons-Y!

Michael

ps yes, Susan is staying put :)…

rich vs reach

this?

or this?

 

I ask because we’re about to repeat the whole “everything runs in the browser” war that we had 10-15 years ago, which makes me tired just thinking about it, and irritated because it will spawn another generation of documents masquerading as applications and un-maintainable code.

It is obvious to me that the rich experience is the better one.  Whether you get it via Adobe Air, Silverlight or whatever, the experience in a rich client is superior to the experience in a browser:  More tactile, more tailored and better use of the underlying OS and hardware than the “least common denominator” approach of browser-based apps.  Yes, the Ajaxian apps are better than the L.C.D. vanilla web apps, but even the best of them (Basecamp, Mint, Gmail) pale in comparision to truly rich desktop apps – the ones you live in as a tech worker or a digital artist or engineer, your editor or designer tools; the best ones are like the cockpit of a high-end car or an airplane, with every affordance designed to minimize gestures or cognitive load.  The iPhone apps are also testament to this:  the best ones are tactile and use the built-in sensors such as the accelerometer to great effect.

Meanwhile, the HTML5 hype machine is gaining strength, with promises of video playback and “drag & drop support”, which just makes me laugh.  We already have those things.  So now your browser can do that?  That’s nice… basically it’s a stupid pet trick, and 10 years too late.

To be clear:  Moving the browser forward is great.  It’s the best low-friction way to deliver software ever invented.  But we confuse the convenience of navigating to a site with the actual app.  Everyone wants the convenience of a single click (or navigation) to access or update an application.  But almost nobody wants to spend their day toiling in front of, say, Facebook. 

On the other hand, with the really great apps (say AutoCAD, Cubase or Photoshop, really good IDEs/Editors such as VS or Emacs) you can spend hours in front of them with a real sense of productivity and craft, where the tool (like any good tool) feels like an extension of your body and mind, and where you don’t feel like you’re constantly fighting the limitations of the damn thing in order to get your work done.  I’ve yet to see a web app that gives you that sense of capability and power.

HTML documents are great and have a place in this world.  But they are not programs, and they encourage bad programming habits and provide a diminished experience for users.  Let’s not conflate our connectivity fascination with the quality of the end results.

sourcemap

(hat tip to my friend Richard for this one)

I’ve thought about this idea for ages, and someone is finally implementing it:  Show me precisely the source (and by extension, a way to gauge environmental impact) for all the materials in things I purchase so that I can make good decisions.

sourcemap is brilliant.  From the site:

SourceMap is an open source project about where things come from.

Simply put: We believe that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of.
Sourcemap is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind a number of everyday products (more info).

Here’s a snippet from their site of what’s behind a “typical laptop computer”

robots

like most geeks I find robots adorable and interesting, but this thing creeps me out... can you imagine this gamboling through the woods toward you?  Ewww...

 

 

The cure is some robot that does something cute and also shows what lazy bastards we really are

 

 

yeah I know... get a life.  You spend your time as you like, and I'll do the same ;).