Through Brian Jepson to Jason Whittington, I came across a C# plugin for Eclipse.
Of course, Eclipse runs on Mac OS X, and that leads us to the obvious question: Can we use Eclipse as a C# IDE on top of Rotor? I'm not sure yet, but I certainly intend to find out.
Today's Mac OS X Hints mentions that keyboard navigation works in file dialogs in Mac OS X 10.2.3. That's a feature that worked wonderfully in Mac OS 9 and earlier, but hadn't been enabled in Mac OS X. I'd given up all hope of seeing it until 10.3, but it turns out that it works as of the latest update.
My only complaint with the new feature is that it's not as easy to dive into a folder as it was on Mac OS 9. In Navigation Services dialogs, you could could press Return to enter a folder. On Mac OS X, Return seems to do nothing in the same circumstances. Instead, you have to press the right arrow key. I can't reach the right arrow without moving my hand away from its standard typing position, which makes diving through folder hierarchies a lot slower than it was on 9.
I spent most of the day today reading Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy, which my parents gave me for Hanukah. It's the first baseball book I've read in a number of years, and it's probably one of the best I've ever read.
The book isn't really a biography of Koufax -- he clearly treasures the distinction between his private life and his life between the lines, and Leavy respects that decision well enough to barely touch on details like his early childhood or his family. What it is, though, is two intertwined stories: One covering Koufax's life with a heavy focus on the six years when he may have been the best pitcher the world will ever see, and a second about the night of September 9, 1965, when Koufax pitched a perfect game in what may have been the best exhibition of pitching on both sides that baseball has ever seen.
Leavy alternates chapters, one about Koufax's life and another about an inning from the perfect game, one by one, with exquisite timing. I've never read such a terrific description of a single game -- the feel of the crowd and the emotions of the players, the umpires, the broadcasters, and the fans as they realized they were seeing history being made. The transposition of that story with a beautiful description of Koufax as viewed by other players, his friends, and the rest of the world produces a book that's far more enjoyable than a typical biography.
Through Chuq Von Rospach ("The Halflings, cap'n, they will na take the strain..."), I just ended up at an astonishing collection of alternative versions of The Lord of the Rings. Wow. I have to stop reading because it's just too much at once -- too many good ones, and not enough time to read them in.
The page that Chuq pointed to directed me to a page where many of them got started. That one includes pretty good versions by Hemingway, Twain, Milton, Dr. Seuss ("Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!/I am to small to carry this thing!"), Freddie Mercury ("I see a little silhouetto of a man/Saruman! Saruman! What will you do with Frodo?"), Hans Christian Andersen ("Once there was a beautiful golden ring that had been made by a terrible lord...."), and others.
Some of the ones there are taken from older pages, though...apparently this art isn't all that new. There's the Alternative Lord of the Rings page, for example, with P.G. Wodehouse ("Sam, I've decided to go and overthrow the Dark Lord by tossing his jewellery into a volcano." "Very good, sir. Should I lay out your crazy adventure garb?"), A.A. Milne ("We're not going to *discover* anything, Pippin, we're going to *undiscover* uncle Bilbo's old ring." "CAN you undiscover things?" asked Sam. "Discovering doesn't seem to be a thing you can UN-, if you know what I mean."), etc.
And then there's the commentary on the page that Chuq points to, which stands on its own.
Like Chuq, I'm practically speechless. Wow. And I just topped it off by watching a new Lord of the Rings movie starring Humphrey Bogart. I'm stunned. OK, so it gets one plot point rather wrong, but hey, who's counting? It's still really impressive.
I'm very tempted to sign up as a judge for the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship. That mouthful of a name is San Jose's regional science fair for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I was fortunate enough to attend the ISEF twice while I was in high school, and I'd love to get involved in science fairs again. While I might mentor someone eventually, the easiest way to get involved right now is as a judge.
Of course, in San Jose I'm sure they have their fill of computer science judges already. We'll see if I can convince them to fit another one in. I'll have to wait until I have a phone number, though -- they understandably require one of those on the form, and I don't know what mine is yet.
I've finally figured out how to get NetNewsWire Pro pointed to my weblog -- it was guessing the wrong URL for Movable Type's XML-RPC script -- so I'm now trying to use it to post things.
Even if this works, I'm not sure I'll stick with it. To me, reading RSS feeds and posting to my weblog are two separate things, and I'm not sure I see the benefit of trying to shoehorn both of them into a single application. I can see how it'd work well for someone like Dave Winer, who posts very little that isn't a reference to someone else's weblog, but I'm far more likely to link to newspaper stories or random web pages than something I saw in an RSS feed.
In any case, it's software from Brent Simmons, so I'm sure it'll be good when it's done. It's clearly an early beta now, though, and that shows. But I'm happy to play with it and do my small part to help him make it better.
I think I've decided to get a Roomba after I move. I keep reading good reviews for it, and anything that can actually get me to vacuum more than I currently do has to be a good thing. The idea of turning on the vacuum before leaving for work in the morning and coming home to clean carpets is just too cool to pass up.
How Appealing points to a fascinating story in the Weekly Standard about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth in the hours after Booth's assassination of President Lincoln. For years, all I've heard of the tale has been about the Mudd family's attempts to clear the doctor's name. This story is about the Mudd family and their efforts, but it ends with a detailed explanation of the facts, which apparently have largely been ignored over the years. If you've ever read an article about the Mudd family's work to clear Dr. Mudd's name, this story is well worth a read.
It was supposed to rain all weekend in California, but it was absolutely beautiful instead. That was a very pleasant surprise.
Less pleasant was the surprise I had when I picked up my car at the airport and saw that it was covered in frost. I think I've been spoiled by our garage at home, but I don't own an ice scraper. Fortunately the folks at the parking lot where I left my car were nice enough to clear off my windshield, and a combination of the defroster, air conditioning, and a fan turned all the way up allowed me to see well enough to drive. Until I hit the fog, that is.
Just to make things more interesting, I turned on the radio and landed in the middle of a series of reggae Christmas songs, including such pieces as Eek-A-Mouse's The Night Before Christmas and something the DJ called "a Rasta Jingle Bells". I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like that before.
One of the more interesting bits of apartment-hunting was watching how the person showing us around at each place treated my roommate and me. I'll be rooming with Ruby, a good friend of mine from Stanford. Yes, that's "Ruby", which is a female name, and yes, that's "good friend", not "girlfriend".
Of course, you don't introduce yourself to someone who's trying to sell you an apartment by saying, "Hi, I'm Eric, this is Ruby, and we're Just Friends." But you'd think that when you mention that you're looking for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom place that perhaps they'd realize that they might not want to assume that you're sleeping together.
Invariably, though, whoever was giving us a tour would say, "Here's the master bedroom, and here's the guest bedroom." Even for apartments in which the two bedrooms were the same size. Grr.
Of course, none of that was as bad as the one apartment salesman (what do you call those people?) who didn't even look at Ruby the entire time. He never even introduced himself to her. When two people are looking for a place to live, you'd hope that both of them have some influence on the decision. Ignoring one of them really doesn't go over very well. That certainly dropped his apartment complex a few notches in our rankings. Of course, the fact that the place's floor plan didn't provide any place for a TV in the living room didn't help, either.
This weekend's apartment-hunting trip was an interesting contrast to the similar trip I took to Redmond a year and a half ago. Bay Area apartment rates have dropped since that time, but they're still rather high. And this time we had the challenge of trying to create a reasonable commute to two different employers, while last time things were easier with all three of us working at Microsoft.
After a day of searching, we settled on Archstone Willow Glen, which while not perfect, seemed to be our best option. They have a reasonably good location -- a ten-minute commute for my roommate and probably twenty minutes or so for me -- and a nice set of features along with affordable rates. The biggest drawback is that we'll be farther from Stanford than I'd like, but the closer we get to Palo Alto the more expensive (and smaller) each apartment becomes. So we'll stick with this for a while and see how it is. If it turns out that we can do better elsewhere, we can move again.
Congratulations to Rob Griffiths, founder of macosxhints.com, on his new book! Pogue Press and O'Reilly are publishing Mac OS X Hints next month. If it's anywhere near as good as the web site -- and from Rob's description, it sounds like it's better -- it'll be a great book.
I'm heading down to California for the weekend on a quest to find an apartment in a whirlwind two-day tour. Naturally, it appears I'm bringing Seattle's rain with me. Oh, well. I'll just have to imagine how each place looks in nicer weather.
I might be out of email contact all weekend, too, since I'll be staying with my future roommate and I don't know if her family has Internet access at home.
How Appealing points to an amusing story at law.com about taxation and the First Amendment. Apparently Citrix Systems just filed suit against the Florida Department of Revenue, claiming that the company shouldn't have to pay taxes on transmission of information, including software sales. The company believes that the First Amendment's right to free speech renders those taxes unconstitutional.
The claim is so laughable that I'm impressed they found a lawyer to file it. The First Amendment protects speech, true, but courts have consistently held that commercial speech doesn't receive anywhere near the same degree of protection against government regulation as non-commercial speech. Ignoring the fact that software is sold, not spoken, Citrix' business sales are clearly commercial speech and therefore can be regulated. The regulation in this case, a tax, is content-neutral because it applies to all companies, regardless of their field. Citrix would not only propose to overturn the long history of First Amendment law, but it would also cause the regulation to no longer be content-neutral because it wouldn't apply to businesses whose products could be construed as providing speech. So the company's argument isn't only wrong, it contradicts itself by proposing an unconstitutional solution. Very impressive.
A couple of interesting tidbits from today's traffic on the DarwinPorts mailing list:
Chris Hanson describes the One True Quoting Style. He's completely right. One of the many reasons why I use Eudora at home is because it lets me write email exactly as Chris describes it.
Naturally, it's completely impossible to get Outlook to do quoting this way, so nobody at work snips the text they're replying to and inline replies are extremely rare. I suppose I'll end up using Mail at Apple -- I wonder if it can be coerced into behaving correctly. As far as I can tell it can come close, but it inserts an extra line at the top of a reply and puts the starting position of the cursor at the beginning of that line. I'd much rather the cursor start at the bottom, below the quoted text, or that all of the quoted text be selected (as it is in Eudora). The extra line is annoying.
I just got back from seeing The Two Towers. Wow. It was terrific. If anything, it was too short. I really can't wait for the third part to be released, since then it'll be possible to buy all three DVDs and sit down to spend a day watching Peter Jackson's wonderful rendition of the entire trilogy.
The Web is abuzz with discussion of AOL's instant messaging patent. I haven't read the patent's claims myself, but the News.com story on it says it covers "anything resembling a network that lets multiple IM users see when other people are present and then communicate with them."
That quote is a rather good description of MIT's Zephyr system, which had been around for years before I used it as a freshman at Stanford in 1996. I wonder if the patent application mentions Zephyr as prior art. If it doesn't, the patent is probably largely invalid. If it does, the claims probably cover far less than the press coverage implies.
A year and a half ago I decided to take a bit of a risk and try something new. I passed up the opportunity to work for Apple's Java team, where I'd been an intern for two years, and instead moved to Seattle to work on the Rotor project at Microsoft. On the Rotor team, I worked with a small group of incredibly talented people who managed to ship a product that many people thought could never come out of Microsoft. In the process, I learned a lot about software engineering, a lot about Unix, and a lot about working at Microsoft.
At the same time, though, I missed California. The weather was definitely a factor -- after five years at Stanford, I came to appreciate 70-degree days in November -- but more importantly, most of my friends were still there. I also missed the feeling of Apple's small teams and small company (in comparison to Microsoft, at least). There's also a certain appeal to working to improve the products that you use every day, and that's much easier for me to do at Apple than at Microsoft.
When the opportunity recently arose to return to Apple, I decided to take it. I'll probably be at Microsoft for another three weeks, and then I'll move to California and start working at Apple by the end of January. It's a somewhat strange transition to make -- relatively few people have worked for both Apple and Microsoft, and I'm sure far fewer have moved between the companies twice -- but it's one I'm very excited about, and I'm confident it's the right choice.
Orson Scott Card points to a really interesting Harvard study -- the Dialect Survey. Much like the Pop vs. Soda page but on a greater scale, the Dialect Survey is attempting to plot American English dialects by geographic region. Take a few minutes and fill out the survey to see just how weird -- or how normal -- you are.
It seems I'm a lot like other Philadelphians, though I definitely stood out on one question. On "What is your general term for a big road that you drive relatively fast on," I checked the "a freeway is free; a highway isn't" box. That's true for me -- I grew up on the East Coast, where highways have tolls, and have since moved to the West Coast, where freeways don't have tolls. I now tend to switch terms based on which side of the country I'm on and on whether the road is tolled. The results for that question say I'm like a whopping 0.46% of the respondents. Oh, well. I stand by my answer, weird as it is.
The New York Times included an article this weekend that's a miniature biography of Trent Lott, with a focus on his segregationist background.
It's incredibly strange to read this story and realize that not only is most of it about events from the past forty years, but many of the people involved are still in politics and public life. Perhaps it's the bias of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and outside of the Deep South, but the details of this story would seem inconceivable to me if they weren't true. In politics, while you might not always agree with your opponent, you can often understand their viewpoint. The views expressed in this article, though, are ones I simply can't comprehend. They're completely absurd.
After a day of downtime, this page is back up and running. I suspect you'll notice that a few things have changed in the interim.
The most noticeable change is that the site is now running on Movable Type instead of Radio. I'd been thinking about moving to Movable Type for a while, but certain events prompted me to put most of my weekend aside to make the change now. I stuck with Radio through its performance problems and its frequent crashes, but I draw the line at data loss. Especially when it happens twice in six months with no signs of a fix.
Since things were done in a bit of a rush, I haven't had much of a chance to make everything look pretty. I'll be doing some tinkering over the next week, I'm sure. I'm just happy for now that I managed to get everything migrated without too much damage, especially since the Movable Type manual, while excellent, doesn't discuss migrating from Radio. The best solution I found was Krzysztof Kowalczyk's radio2mt Python script, which did the job quite well after a few tweaks (and after I gave myself a crash course on Python). I'll either post my changes or send them to him in the next few days.
So far I'm a huge fan of Movable Type. It's everything Radio isn't -- completely configurable, incredibly fast, and very easy to learn. The manual puts Radio's confusing and muddled documentation to shame. Connecting to the Movable Type page running on a server a thousand miles away from me is faster than opening up a local page from Radio. And while Radio was largely a black box hidden behind a wall of incomprehensible documentation, Movable Type is very straightforward. I've already changed some of its templates, since they didn't display correctly out of the box in my copy of OmniWeb (which I have set to masquerade as Netscape 6.2 so I can use Wells Fargo's online banking).
What's not to like about Movable Type? Titles, for one. I don't like 'em. Sorry. I'm going to try to figure out how to keep them from displaying on my entries (though I'll probably leave them on for the RSS feed to make Alexei happy). I also think that Radio's default templates are prettier, so I'll be making this page look more Radio-like. Finally, I wish archive pages were numbered by date instead of by entry number, just because I'd prefer human-readable names for every page. That's about it, though. It's a vast improvement.