What's it all about, Alfie?

Having a tough morning this morning... feeling a little behind the 8-ball. Nothing impossible, hey, even Cowgirls get the blues. But when I'm feeling a little blue I like to put on some of my favorite music on my iPod and force myself to go through the motions of a regular day knowing that everything is temporary and in a little bit things will change... problems will arise needed to be fixed, and the day will be off to a running start.

One of the things I do every morning is to scan all the systems making sure that everything is looking normal - within limits. Just giving everything a once over. Like every morning this included my laptop - I put notes here and there to remind me of things and the way I'm sure to find them is to check each morning. So I'm flipping around and I stop on this little simulator I started writing back in 2003. Nothing fancy, but it's written in Obj-C for the Mac and it's using the BLAS package - kind of fun. Anyway, I was just scanning the code - reading it to see where I was. And it started to make me feel good.

Like Beans-n-Weenies and Cornbread.

Comfort Code. I'm sure that just about any language can appear artistic or beautiful to someone. It's what we each read into the code - like a painting. It's just that Obj-C has always been one of the more beautiful languages to me. Maybe I was just lucky and learned it from a couple of the sharpest guys I ever knew. That certainly helps. But it's also that I wrote this code not on a deadline or from someone else's specs - but what I wanted, so all the comments are nice, all the code is done really well. It's just a really nice piece of work.

I ended up running the example I had worked up for the simulation and it's almost to the point that I could make it dynamically recalculate the results on any input change - it's fast. Sure, that's the box and the BLAS routines and the OS, but it's really neat to see something that used to run as a batch job run about as fast as the blink of an eye. Another smile.

We all like comfort food... it makes us feel like home really isn't that far away. Comfort Code is a lot like that. Makes me realize that things are all that bad, and maybe I need to get back to that.

Well... it's hit my minimum size for a new iPod - 32GB. Apple today announced the new 32GB iPod Touch. It's very very tempting as I've wanted to have something that can play my movies and pod casts on the train when I get a little tired of reading my book at the time.

At $499, it's steep, I'll grant you, but it's still exactly what I wished they had released the first time. And with WiFi and the new apps, it'll be a lot more useful than the original 'Touch'.

Yes, very temping indeed. I may have to go to the Apple store this weekend and pick one up. It's just exactly what I wanted to get.

Just got out of a meeting with my manager. Seems a vendor I've been dealing with here at the Shop is unhappy about the fact that I have posted my experiences dealing with them and their products. Given that they are a multi-million dollar company and I'm a developer, the decision to take all references to them, their people, and their software down was easy. I just did it.

But it's gotten me to thinking... why threaten legal action to someone who's unhappy with your product? It's not like there are real trade secrets that I revealed, at least none that I recognized as such. Sure, there were discussions about architecture and the pros and cons of the design, but I have a feeling that had I said nothing but glowing things about the company and product I might not have been asked to remove them. But maybe so. Maybe they just don't want people talking about them.

Either way... I took it down. But I can't help but wonder who was watching and why. Maybe they have a legal team just scanning the net 24x7 looking for things like this. It's certainly possible. It's just amazing to me to think that my comments generated this level of excitement.

Today I had a good morning... lots of things to check on, fix up, make sure they don't happen again... you know - work. But then I've gotten so far ahead of the rest of the people I'm working with that I was in for a long afternoon of thumb-twiddling. Not exactly what I wanted to do, but there really wasn't much I could do about it. All the projects I'm on are in a state waiting for someone else to do something and there's nothing that's sitting out there waiting to be done.

Things are on order, or the people need to decide what they want, or the people creating this API aren't quite done with it, or the database group haven't made the databases for us... it's all just stuff, but it's all just stuff that I have no control over.

So I work hard at trying to stay busy. Not the easiest thing to do. Hopefully Monday will get some things moving. If not, it might be time to break out Snoopy vs. the Red Baron on my PSP.

Again, I try to stay out of the mergers and acquisitions business realm, but sometimes I have to say something. Microsoft's offer of $44bil for Yahoo is one such time. There was a time that Microsoft was the best thing for the computer industry. Prior to Windows and it's abstraction of the peripherals like displays and printers, every application needed to have people on staff to work out the graphical interface and write drivers for each printer they wanted to support. WordStar was a classic example. Gobs of driver disks and you have to make sure that what you needed to be supported was, in fact, supported by the code.

Major hassles. Then came Windows with it's printer driver model and graphics support. Application support teams no longer had to support each and every printer and display. Way easier for someone to make an app now. This was really the 'gift' of Windows and Microsoft. And it was good.

Similarly, in the beginning, there were a few web crawlers, like lycos - ones that you could use, but you almost always had to have several, and there were even applications on some platforms that would hit several search engines to try and get you something useful with a single query. Then came Yahoo. Again, it was an early pioneer, and it made a big difference in the search engine landscape. It also was one of the first to have 'busy' home pages - portals, many called them, with news, groups, etc. all on the front page.

But with absolute power comes corruption. Unfortunately, Microsoft, like IBM had to battle a horrible reputation that it had taken years to build. Yahoo sat on it's lead and didn't work to keep itself on top of the heap. Now Microsoft finds itself in the position of playing 'catch-up' to Google in the search engine space. Yahoo has long since fallen to Google as well. It's not surprising that Microsoft (with tons of cash) tries to close the gap on Google with the acquisition of Yahoo, but you can't really catch up to #1 by buying #2. The best you can do is to close the gap a bit.

In the end, what needs to happen at Microsoft is they need to go back to the days when they were innovative and not just making money. Like IBM, they need to repair their image with the developers who ultimately make them look good. Take the time to embrace the non-commercial developer. Make amends, and over the long haul, they'll get back into the coveted spot they once held. But it's going to take more than buying Yahoo to do it.

This morning I saw that MarsEdit had gone to v2.1 with a bunch of improvements in the release notes. Honestly, the performance is nice, but there has been one little annoying thing that I've mentioned to the author and he's yet to address - probably because he thinks it's not necessary. That is the minimal size of the posting window.

Window sizes, I've come to learn, are a very personal thing. I've had some people look at my 80x24 terminal screens and think I was insane. But it's what I learned on, and the idea of having a big, wide, terminal is just something I may never use. I'll always deal with 80 column editor windows, and "taller" terminals are OK, and I use them often enough, but for a lot of the work I do, smaller is better.

So when I started using MarsEdit, I liked the fact that it could be personalized to the weblog I had (WordPress), and that just about everything about it was configurable. Very nice. But then I tried to make the posting window narrower - like an editor window, and it stopped short of what I wanted. Now, I'm guessing that I can go into the nib file and change this minimum size, but I sent the author an email and his response was that he needed to make sure there was room for the 'sidebar' in the window. Well... I don't use the sidebar, and do I've got more space than most.

He said he'd look at it, but I'm guessing that it's not going to amount to anything. Maybe I'll ask him again today.

Anyway, the update is nice, and the tool is, in general, a wonderful way to post to just about all the weblogs out there.

UPDATE: basically, he said 'Take IB and change the nib'. Not what I hoped, especially with updates, but it's always been a possibility.