Out of Cheese

Lest anyone think I’m a technophile, I didn’t own a DVD player until today. We watched DVDs at home with my PowerBook, connected via S-Video to my TV. That was good enough for once-a-month-or-so watching, but Ruby signed up for Netflix last week and the PowerBook solution just wouldn’t scale to that.

Since I have a small TV, no external speakers, and no intention of building up a complicated home theater environment, Brian and Ronnie suggested that I buy the cheapest DVD player I could find. With a minimal amount of effort, that turned out to be the Amphion Media Works S99, which Circuit City was selling for $40. So far, so good — it appears to play DVDs, and that’s pretty much all I care about.

Some of us (and Robert, who doesn’t seem to have a web page right now) recently bought a server and colocated it at Hurricane Electric through the California Community Colocation Project. Yay for inexpensive colocation….

This weblog will be moving there soon. (Don’t worry; I’ll post notices and redirect links, etc.) Step one, though, is to get a domain name. I have a name in mind, but I’m not sure which registrar to pick. What’s the best one these days?

Greg Parker, who is a friend from both Stanford and Apple, just released an SSH client for Palm OS 5. Very cool. When I replace my Palm IIIx with something modern one of these years, I’ll be sure to try it out.

When I was talking to Nick tonight, he mentioned that he and Marc, my two roommates when I worked for Microsoft, are now looking for houses near Redmond. The news didn’t come as a huge surprise, since Microsoft pays well and real estate in suburban Seattle is rather inexpensive, but it still prompted me to sit back and reflect for a moment.

All three of us graduated from Stanford at the same time. We started at Microsoft within a month of each other. It’s worked out well for them, but the move up there didn’t work out quite as well for me. When I came back to Apple a bit over a year ago, I knew I’d be making some sacrifices in exchange for being back in a state where I wanted to live and at a company where I wanted to work. One of those sacrifices was to give up any chance of buying a house any time soon.

Of course, I was well aware of that from the moment I first thought about moving back down here. It’s nothing new. But hearing that my ex-roommates are buying houses really brought the point home. Life is full of tradeoffs like this, and in this case I don’t regret my decision one bit. I’m a lot happier down here, close to lots of friends and working with great people on what I hope will be a great product. I wouldn’t trade that and my monthly rent payments for a house and a job in Redmond. I’m sure I’ll be ever so slightly jealous, though, when I visit Marc and Nick after they’ve moved and get to see the places they’ll own….

Nobody told me that Hoop started a weblog! I had to find out from his Orkut profile. There should be a requirement that any of my friends who starts a weblog lets me know.

Anyway, welcome to the world of weblogging, Hoop! I’m now up to three Microsoft employee weblogs in my NetNewsWire subscription list.

The Phillies are opening their new stadium on April 12th, and I’d love to go to the game, even though I’ll have to take a few days off from work and fly across the country to do so. I’ve been planning this for months, hoping that I’d find some way to get tickets. They’ve finally announced how ticket sales will work, and there’s an interesting catch. It’s an online drawing, but they only allow one entry per email address and credit card. In the four days the form has been up, 41,000 people have signed up for the 2,500 pairs of tickets. That puts my chances of getting tickets at near zero (well, 6%, which is close enough).

Out of desperation, then, I’d like to ask a favor of anyone reading this. Head on over to the form, sign up by Thursday night, and if you get tickets, I’ll gladly pay for them (plus your cost of sending them to me, and maybe something extra unless there are way too many).

I know it’s a lot to ask, to try to convince folks to type in a credit card number to buy something they neither want nor need, but if you can take pity on this desperate Phillies fan in his time of need (er, time of want), I’ll be very appreciative. Thanks!

Update: It seems that nobody who read this won. Oh, well. Thanks for trying….

I figured I’d just watch the Super Bowl for the ads, since I didn’t really care about either team. Naturally, the ads weren’t very good but the game was terrific. That’s fine with me; I’ll take a great game over ads any day.

Of course, the game’s mostly being ignored now thanks to the whole Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake episode. I didn’t watch the half-time show. I was trying to get some work done, so I turned down the volume just low enough so I could hear when it was over and ignored the screen. I don’t have any particularly worthwhile comment to make on the most notable part of the show. Instead, I have a question regarding the half-time show as a whole.

CBS declined to air the winning ad from Bush in 30 Seconds allegedly due to the network’s “standards and practices“. Now that we know what they were willing to air for a half-time show, does that mean that the ad set too high of a standard?

Just curious.

Safari 1.2 was released today. So was Java 1.4.2 for Mac OS X. Safari naturally gets most of the attention; a mere Java dot-dot release rarely merits more than a paragraph at MacNN.

While the updated Safari is great, what’s even better is something that required work in both Safari and Java. For the first time ever, the Mac now has terrific support for Java-to-Javascript communication. This is the most common form of what’s typically called “LiveConnect” — communication between Javascript and a plugin.

I’ve been waiting more than five years for this. I first posted to mrj-dev asking for LiveConnect on the Mac in November 1998. (I still have the message.) I was working for Homestead at the time and trying hard to port their Java applet to the Mac. Back in those days, “write once run everywhere” was still a viable theory, so I thought the port would be easy. And on the Java side, it was…until I ran into Homestead’s LiveConnect code. I tried some of the most creative hacks imaginable, like an invisible HTML frame into which the applet would insert dynamically generated code that included the right Javascript bits to talk to other static Javascript code on the same page, but two-way communication between Java and Javascript just wasn’t possible.

After Homestead, I interned for Apple’s Java team and pushed to implement LiveConnect there. No dice — it needed far more support on the browser side than on the Java side, and Microsoft didn’t seem to want to do the work required for IE to support it. The next year, I interviewed with the Mac IE team. They were planning to give me an offer, but I asked if we could determine what I’d be working on first. (This was back when interns could pull silly stunts like that.) I suggested LiveConnect. They suggested working on other parts of the browser. I countered with LiveConnect. They countered with WebTV. I gave up and went back to Apple, but I never stopped trying to convince people that the Mac needed LiveConnect.

It’s been a long time, and unfortunately it’s probably too late to be of much importance. Java applets aren’t nearly as prevalent on the Internet as everyone in 1998 thought they’d be. Even my former colleagues at Homestead decided to write a Windows application rather than deal with the problems of Java in the browser. But some sites persevered, and for those, today is a great day for their Mac users. It’s been more than five years, but now, finally, LiveConnect works.