Tag: Microsoft

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Scobelology

Back when Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet, this dude named James Parry figured out an interesting promotional trick. He built a homegrown Usenet search utility and tirelessly trolled it for the mentions of his own nickname, “Kibo“. When he found some, he would join the conversation. This feat of persistence gained him thousands of fans and even a homegrown religion, Kibology. I don’t think anyone has figured out a finer way to waste time, especially considering that commercial application of search technology in the past tended to mint millionaires and billionaires.

I have a special folder in my Bloglines accounts that holds a set of very popular, but surprisingly unreadable blogs. Remembering Kibo today, I think I understood why Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble has so many readers. He’s the Kibo of bloggers! Look (and this is just one page):
Joey is 10x the guy I am
Rick Segal debates my impact
Alfredo asks what Wired’s top 40 list says to me
And this is just the first page! The quick pitter-patter of Scoble’s posts is filled with references to other people’s posts about him! Can Scoblelology be far behind? So far no hits.

Still, this does not explain why people read Joi Ito’s blog. It could be more properly described as “Where in the World is Joi Ito”. It’s all “Off to Japan“, “Off to SF“, “Off to Japan“, “Off to Australia“. I get it, he’s a world traveler.

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Fun With Google Maps Part I : The Magical Lake in the Land of the Blibbet

What’s that between buildings that look like shuriken from above? Of course it is Lake Bill. It’s not marked on the map kindly made available by Jeff Barr, but there it is in an awesome 360 degree panorama and here are some pictures of ducks and koi that live there. There’s another picture in the blog post by Adam Barr (I’ve read his book) about 10 favorite spots on MS campus. I am told that it is a prime beer drinking spot – no wonder seeing how many Barrs there are at Microsoft budum-pum.

The origin of the naming of the lake is shrouded in mystery. I also heard that long before Bad Boy Ballmer was charging up developers by jumping on stage he was doing that by swimming across Lake Bill.

By the way, does anyone have a video of Gates’ famous table jumping skills? Does he do that any more? Oh, and if somebody pointed me to those funny Microsoft Tech Ed videos, that would be very cool.

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Creative Time Wasting 404

Dear readers, let me vent some useless thoughts about HTML and share the fruit of my procrastination with you today.

It occurs to me that HTML code has finally become a third rate citizen of the World Wide Web. Back in the day, there were horrible WYSIWYG editors that mangled poor HTML, raped it by adding their own non-HTML tags and in general produced bloated and unreadable mess. They still exist today. But now most sites are script generated, so rarely do you see clean, beautiful and handcrafted HTML code when you view the source.

One of the worst offenders is Microsoft, of course. It gave FrontPage, an unholy product of a dying company called Vermeer Technologies (I’ve read in this book that the price of FrontPage was huge and number of copies sold – miniscule) an eternal life as a part of the Office Suite. Other Office programs always produced horrendous HTML. And now, they don’t even want developers to touch HTML directly. They added extra layers – Server Controls (again, plans for VTI extension and FrontPage come to mind) and Web Forms to isolate them from the language that can be learned in 20 minutes and mastered in a few years.

I can’t say that positive things did not happen. For one, fewer people write in old skool all-caps HTML tags. All lowercase tags are so much more readable.

Also now it’s probably safer to put little Easter eggs and funny notes in HTML comments. Are there more of those around? I don’t know. But the oldies but goodies are still out there.

Famous hacker JWZ’s enigmatic page contains this haughty comment:
<!– mail me if you find the secret –>
<!– (no, you can’t have a hint) –>

Smarter people than me tried, but failed to find meaning in in the 404 lines of what seems to be a hex dump. Former Livejournal user mcgroarty, for instance, wasted a good chunk of his time on this. Where is his blog now, by the way? Does anyone know?

What I noticed though is that the page is not static as mcgroarty probably assumed. It changes with time. More than that, it seems like it is not the same data – it probably cycles through different files. You can clearly see that if you look at http://www.jwz.org through the wayback machine. Meanwhile you can see the old design featuring the Jamie’s cool terminal graphics likeness. You can see the old design get resized, then get replaced with the 404 line nightmare. Then “mail me if you find the secret” gets added. Enough people send emails and JWZ, always eager to save some time, adds “(no, you can’t have a hint)”.

Are these 404 a cruel joke – meaning not found?

I suspected that the 404 lines show chunks of the old green image that I mentioned, or are generated from web collage. When I looked at the famous animated compass gif (the one that replaced the Netscape diddler when you typed in about:jwz or went to JWZ’s old homepage in Netscape 1.1 and some other early Netscape version I think) I found another hidden message from JWZ:

“You have a lot of free time on your hands, don’t you?
Tell jwz@jwz.org that you found the secret message!

http://www.jwz.org/
about:jwz

“Some people will tell you that slow is good — and it may be, on
some days — but I’m here toò tell you that fast is better. Being
shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out
of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
”

Oh, Jamie, I have very little free time. But whatever free time I have I usually end up wasting on stupid things.

This does not seem to be the solution to the 404 line homepage puzzle, but the heck with it.

Russian-speaking readers can entertain themselves with reading comments over at tema.ru. There are a couple of hints of hidden links, a few sprinkles of profanity, showing off about Photoshop mastery. Outstanding advice to journalists that was there in the earlier version is gone. I also remember seeing a completely blacked out page about his photo equipment there (you needed to do control-a trick to see it) in a very old version of the site. http://www.design.ru has its share of rowdy commentage.

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The Codename of a Rose

One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating are software product codenames. You might remember my old post about Talisker – I owe the discovery of my favorite scotch to a Microsoft codename. I was planning to put together a list of all the codenames myself, but as it is typical of me, never got around to it.

Recently I was reading “I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” and came up upon some Microsoft codenames that I did not know about before, such as Merlin for Microsoft Encarta. The book is full of interesting MS trivia, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced it.

I decided it was time to put together that list of codenames, but it seems like since I wrote that post a list like that was put together by somebody else. He heh. Netmeeting’s codename is “Oprah”.

Sadly enough I never worked on a project that had a codename. I did come up with some myself, but many of those were unprintable.

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FUD You

A common IT worker in computer related conversation spews more acronyms than a Soviet Commissar, but chances are he or she won’t be able to decipher half of them. Managers often don’t even know the meaning of the concepts that the acronyms represent.

Some acronyms are meaningless by design and recursive to boot. GNU? GNU’s Not Unix!

Others seem like acronyms, but aren’t. I always thought that TWAIN stood for “Technology Without An Interesting Name”, but it turns out it originates from “The Ballad of East and West” – “and never the twain shall meet”. Sometimes when I try to reinstall my scanner for the hundred’s time it seems to be very appropriate.

Some apparently stood for something at some point in time, but then lost their meaning. People understood COM to stand for “Common Object Model”, then “Component Object Model” and now it stands for that old difficult technology that only Don Box used to completely understand. You need to use .NET instead, which is an acronym looking non-acronym which stands for whatever Microsoft wants it to stand for. Now Expect Trouble. Never Edit Text. Next Exciting Technology. What is the dot for? Come on, every developer knows that dots make your code more powerful.

An acronym that is often used in conversations about Microsoft is “FUD”. It always made me think of Elmer Fudd (because people using it often sounded like him), but it’s actually a term coined by a computing pioneer, Dr. Gene Amdahl.

It stands for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” – tactics that IBM salesmen used against Dr. Amdahl’s company. Amdahl made mainframes that were fully compatible with IBM’s, but cheaper and faster. It’s easy to use FUD on managers that were in charge of purchasing those multimillion dollar big irons. “Nobody was ever fired for going with IBM”, right?

The sheer existence of Amdahl was a huge boon to mainframe purchasing customers. The rumor was that if you placed an Amdahl mug on your table, IBM salespeople were gonna give you million dollar discounts.

Let me present an artifact from my collection: the famous “Million Dollar Mug”:

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Again With Time

Setting Wright’s book aside, I went on to read Jack Finney’s “Time And Again” which was up  next. I’ve read it in Russian translation many years ago, but understood very little of what makes it so very special a book. My mom seemed to appreciate it better back then, because it remains the only science fiction book that she ever liked. This time, in English and after a quarter of my lifetime spent in New York, the book truly resonated.

“Time And Again” is a time travel story, with a novel and decidedly low tech approach.  The idea is that the past really exists, but we do not slip back into it because our minds are tethered to the present by a web of knowledge that is increasingly time specific: computer is a machine, not a person; Microsoft is a giant corporation,not a tiny little startup; Altavista is forgotten, Google is the best search engine; webpages are out, blogs are in; I just opened Semagic to write this post, I just typed this sentence.  We are constantly reminded of when we are: our computers hum, there are airplanes flying overhead, if we look out of the window there are cars parked outside.  We call them cars, not automobiles most of the time.

To travel back you need to find a places that exists both in the present and in the past unchanged, potential portals. If have certain talents, go to such a place, dress in the style of the past, eat what people used to eat then, become saturated with the lingering atmosphere of the past. And then, trough self hypnosis, make yourself temporarily forget about modern things – and back you go, into the past.

In the book, a government secret project taps a talented, but loosely and dissatisfied illustrator Si Morley who successfully uses an empty apartment in the Dakota Building near Central Park to travel back to the Eighties. The Eighteen Eighties.

Just like Jack Finney is better known for “Invasion of The Body Snatchers“, the Dakota is better known as the building where John Lennon lived and inf front of which he was killed. It’s a monster of a building with 14 ft ceilings, very thick walls  and giant apartments. From the top floors all you can see is Central Park, a place that is kept true to Frederick Law Olmsted’s master plan as much as possible. In short – a time portal.

What I especially love about the book is the fact that it is very well illustrated with photographs and drawings which are presented by the protagonist in line with the narration. Why in this age of computer augmented publishing  so few other books show photographs next to the text that describes them is beyond me.

Here’s Si Morley’s photo of the Dakota side to side with my version:

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/dev/sign

Ok, I am going to wallow in my geekiness. I went ahead and bought a Pro-Lite led marquee Model PL-M2014RV6 (aka Tru-ColorII ) on eBay for 150 hard earned American dollars.

I mounted it in my cube, connected it to the serial port of my computer and proceeded to hack together a perl script that talks to it. Easy enough. Then I innovated (in a Microsoft meaning of the word) – wrote a script that parses our weblogs and outputs what people search for on the marquee with fancy dissolve effects. Add a couple of lava lamps and it’ll be just like Googleplex.

I read up on Pro-Lite programming on this website, but ended up not using any of the code from there. Also some of the information there is outdated – the ROM on my sign is version 6.5

P.S. For those of you who are wondering, “tru” colors are: red, orange, yellow, lime (!) and green. They come in dim, normal and bright varieties, also rainbow, red/green, red on green and other combinations. All other colors are not “tru”.

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The Water From The Machine

Here’s another memory of my childhood illustrated by a photograph by the author of Window Shopping in the (Evil?) Empire:
Soviet soda machine

This is a Polish version of the Soviet soda vending machine, an amazing piece of technology.

During Perestroika we got a glimpse of foreign television during the Japanese TV week.  If I remember correctly they showed an hour or two of selected Japanese TV shows on one of the three state-run stations. As a curiosity they showed a snippet in which Japanese reporters try to use one of these machines.  Equipped with some change, giggling they approached the machine. They put one of the coins into the slot and were surprised by the jet of water from the dispensing nozzle.  In Japan one of them explained, the glass drops down from the machine and fills with ice. Then they noticed the communal glass (a paneled one from the previous post) and for a few minutes tried to figure out how to wash it. Then they notices the indentation to the right of the machine. They stuck the glass in there and after a few tries washed it with in the mechanism that shoots little jest of water from underneath.  Another coin – soda went into the glass correctly prompting shouts of triumph. I don’t remember if they were brave enough to drink it.

Soviet soda machine

The prices were 1 kopek for plain seltzer and 3 kopeks for seltzer with a shot of syrup. Those with a sweet tooth liked to collect a few shots of syrup which was dispensed prior to the water (technically making it a post-mix machine) and then filling the glass completely. Unscrupulous machine maintainers liked to underdose the syrup helping them to steal some money.

Another one of bright memories was when my father, a civil engineer, took me to his construction site which had one of these soda machines that did not require a kopek to operate – you could drink as much as you wanted. There was no syrup water, but the refrigiration unit was hacked to make it much colder than the machines out in the street.  Even visiting Microsoft which has commercial style refrigirators filled with free soda, juices and water did not impress me that much.  Oh, and I also got to go up into the cabin of a huge crane (not at Microsoft of course).

Believe it or not, but the company that made these soda machines is still in business. They look like this now:

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Corporate Memorabilia

It looks like I failed to attract any Microsoft readers, but I have at least two readers from the Big Blue. Let the pandering to the audience commence!

As those of you who actually read my journal might know that I used to work for a dot com agency called iXL where I had many unforgettable experiences.

(I finally found a metrocard that casa” posted in his journal a while ago).

Anyway, iXL had a logo that looked like this:

In the beginning it was a hip company – dress code was not enforced and neither was anyone required to come in at 9 AM. I don’t remember what it was, insistance on business casual or the mandatory 9AM meeting that made sysadmin named Lee to make enough of these buttons for everyone to wear in the 9AM meeting.