Out of Cheese

A few days ago I posted a note about the Unix-Haters Handbook. In a comment on that entry, Brian mentioned that a PDF copy is available online at Daniel Weise’s home page. On Friday, the link to the online version was sent around via email at Apple. Last night, Slashdot picked up the story. I wonder if Brian’s comment started all of that.

In any case, I still hadn’t found the time to download a copy. I wandered over to Daniel’s page just now and found that, unsurprisingly, he’s taken the file offline due to the flood of traffic from Slashdot. Argh. Oh, well…I’m sure I can ask Brian or Alexei to send me a copy. (Note: Please don’t send me an unsolicited copy. I don’t like unexpected large attachments.)

I’ve been sick all weekend, so I was asleep during today’s Phillies game. And what do you know — Kevin Millwood threw a no-hitter to beat the Giants. Wow. Of all the games to miss, it had to be a no-hitter.

I was pointed to the Unix-Haters Handbook today for the first time since Louis mentioned it in January. I’ve read over the preface and it seems like quite a good book. The catch, of course, is that it’s long since out of print. Louis says that Stuart Cheshire has some extra copies, so perhaps I can borrow one of those if I ever wander by Stuart’s hallway and introduce myself. Or perhaps O’Reilly will buy the rights from the publisher someday and republish it. That would be very, very cool.

Apparently Rick Santorum claims that his comments equating homosexual sex with polygamy an incest were taken out of context. Well, I’ve just linked to the context and I don’t understand what an appropriate context would be. I think his beliefs come across clearly in that interview and they’re simply absurd. There’s no logic behind the assumption that the Supreme Court’s legalization of private sex between two consenting adults irrespective of gender would legalize polygamy or incest.

Then there’s Santorum’s other quote from that interview: “I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts.” That’s nonsensical. Either gays and lesbians are allowed to act the way they are or they aren’t allowed to exist at all…and since the latter is ridiculous, the former has to be accepted. Senator Santorum may not like it, but splitting hairs like that just doesn’t make any sense. He can choose to be offended by homosexual relationships, but if he’s offended by people behaving in a way that doesn’t affect him and allows them to express their love for each other, that’s sad.

I’m a bit late to the party, but congratulations! to my adviser from Stanford, Julie Zelenski, whose first child was born three weeks ago. Absolutely adorable baby pictures of little Rein are already online.

Today’s Macintouch mentions that Joe Zobkiw’s Mac OS X Advanced Development Techniques is about to be released. Zobkiw is the author of the definitive book on CFM programming, A Fragment of Your Imagination. If his new book proves to be anywhere near as useful as his first, he has a hit on his hands.

I’ve recently been working on getting three Stanford friends hired at Apple, one for an internship and two for full-time positions. Of course, all I can do is recommend that teams interview them; I don’t actually control the hiring process. Tonight I found out that the intern candidate will be getting an offer. Yay! One out of three is a good start, but three for three would be even better….

While catching up on just a little bit of my massive pile of email from the past few weeks today, I headed over to sscli.net and signed up for the sharedsourcecli project. That’s a site that opened a few weeks back for projects involving Rotor, hosted by CollabNet. It provides a way for folks working on Rotor to get their changes into a source distribution that the entire community can use, rather than sending them in to Microsoft and not knowing what will come of them.

For Rotor’s 1.0 release last year, I did a lot of unofficial work to make the code more portable, so it’d be easier for people to move it to additional operating systems that we didn’t support. Some people have ported various Rotor releases to additional platforms, but in the process of doing so they typically break the officially supported ports of FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. What time I find to spend working on the code at sscli.net will be spent moving Rotor to additional platforms in a way that makes the code more portable, not less.

I just remembered that I’ve been meaning for a while to post a tip for Stanford alumni who use Safari: If you’ve visited InCircle with versions of Safari prior to beta 2, you probably noticed that Safari went into an infinite loop of redirects when trying to load the site. That’s been fixed in beta 2, but you have to delete all of your stanfordalumni.org cookies from prior releases of Safari to get it to work.

I had a lot of fun finding Stanford alums at Apple by watching who filed bugs about this.

Robert Scoble is off to Microsoft. I hope he enjoys the job, though I suppose my employer’s goal is to help towards the item he says will get him fired — switching people to a non-Microsoft platform.

More interesting, though, is his comment that he’ll hopefully keep doing his weblog and that he’s trying to figure out how being at Microsoft (and having signed Microsoft’s NDA) will change what he blogs about. He notes that he can talk about anything that’s public and to some extent that’s true, but somehow I bet Microsoft would as happy about him saying “Here’s yet another security hole in Windows” as Apple would about me saying that the 12″ PowerBook isn’t worth buying (it is, by the way…it’s a very nice machine).

There’s also the issue of what happens when what he’s working on isn’t public, and that’s the biggest part of why I’ve had so little to say here lately. I’m often happy to comment on random technology issues, but my areas of interest there naturally coincide with the things I’m working on, and therefore I can’t say anything about them. Of course, with Microsoft’s penchant for announcing everything it’s working on a year or two before it ships, I suppose his attempt to remain silent won’t be quite as challenging as mine…I can’t say anything until the product is shipping. Oh, well. Such is the price for working on very cool stuff.