The View From North Central Idaho

Via Ry.

Gene Porter, the inventor of "The Man" hot sauce used at Dixie's BBQ, died Sunday.

The Seattle Times article tells a lot of the back story but it only vaguely hints at the Microsoft aspect with:

The restaurant crowd is often standing-room-only, and people have come from all over the world — CEOs from big companies on visits to the Eastside.

"The Eastside" refers to the east side of Lake Washington. The biggest company there is Microsoft. Dixie's BBQ is so popular with Microsoft people that it is served in some of the cafeterias. The Gun Club at Microsoft put up signs along the order line at the restaurant indicating how much longer you had to wait before you would be able to order and receive your food.

It was nearly a rite of passage for new employees eat at Dixie's. This morning I received an email from Kris, who I took to Dixie's shortly after he arrived here from Australia, telling me of Mr. Porter's death. I took my officemate Chandrika, from India, there. And I took son James there shortly after he went to work at MS.

Ry used to pick up fresh vegetables in Royal City (central Washington) on his way back from Idaho and give them to Mr. Porter.

And there is a story about Mr. Porter, a shotgun, and a ham that Ry or I could tell you sometime too.

He will be missed.

I just got back from work after 17 hours.

Crystal is finishing up a new test and things were dying in inconsistent and strange ways in the middle of the test. It looked like it might be my problem.

I certainly held a good share of the responsibility. There were a couple of big memory leaks which I was responsible for. I fixed those and the test now sometimes runs to completion. Hiep will be surprised in the morning to find several new bugs on his plate. He had more, but smaller, memory leaks than I did.

It's a good thing we are investing so much in automated tests. These bugs only showed up with a cross country trip. Crystal started us out in Redmond and we died somewhere in the Great Plains a few minutes later. We now sometimes make it to New York City.

I did get some laughter relief during the middle of the day. We were trying to recreate the problem and she asked me, "Do you ever use Depends?"

Ahh.... No.

From the context I knew she was talking about a software tool that probably checked for dependencies but I didn't know of the tool she was referring to and decided to tease her about the inadvertent insult she just made. I frowned at her and told her, "I'm not that old!"

We both started laughing and my officemate then wanted to know what she had missed. Being an India native Depend had to be explained to her. More laughter then ensued.

I'm sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple's industrial design, while the iPhone's UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Jesus Diaz
February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple
[And to make sure those coffin nails for Apple stay tight I've been at work for nearly 15 hours straight now.

I'm running tests after fixing bugs that would only show up as somewhat excessive battery drain if multiple failures in the entire system (including network connectivity and/or servers temporarily being missing some data) occurred.--Joe]

From my Windows Series Seven phone Windows Phone 7 Series.

Update: Yeah, yeah. I was in a meeting and didn't want to spend the time looking for the proper name. I got the words correct. Just not in the right order.

As a software developer deeply involved in providing location information to applications running on cell phones I have some advice if this concerns you:

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

...

Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

...

The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)

...

Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years.

Of course this is a two edged sword. If they can use your cell phone as evidence you were at a given location then you can use it to show you were not at some location. Leave your phone at work/home or in a friends car if you need to take supplies to your Jewish friends in the attic.

My advice is that no matter how careful you are with the applications you install or "disabling" the GPS or location services that isn't good enough. The cell phone company will still know where your phone is within a few hundred yards anytime it is turned on. And with some phones it's possible for you to think it is turned off when it actually is still functional at a level sufficient for your cell phone service provider to get location information.

As a friend of mine in the cell phone manufacturing business once told me, "I don't know exactly what's in the phone software. But I do know the phone only has one battery."

This and this is very good to see.

Not only from the standpoint of being proud to have contributed to the project but this sort of press might positively affect my bonus and salary.

Update: Second link fixed. See also this collection.

I don't get it. Are these people completely intoxicated by Communism or something? They are suggesting that Microsoft should give away the Windows Phone 7 Series O/S I've been working on for over a year.

They say we should do it to gain market share. Yeah, that makes sense. We would lose money on every item but we would make it up in volume I guess.

I'm open to alternate business models but I'm not seeing a good alternate at this point and they don't have any plausible suggestions either.

This is what I'm working on.

Deep down in the O/S you will find a location application programming interface. Below that you will find code that converts the existence of Wi-Fi and cell tower radio signals into a latitude and longitude. That (and a few other things) has been my job for the last several months.

This is just one small piece of a very large and impressive picture.

As Sean just said a minute ago in an IM, "Wow. You showed me some neat stuff Friday, but I was still impressed by today's reveal. With this piece of the puzzle, I get a tingling feeling up and down my leg. Like we really might be entering a new golden age for Microsoft."

Last night (this morning actually) I left work sometime after 3:00 AM. I woke up at 7:00 and couldn't get back to sleep so I was back at work by 9:30 AM. I got back back to my hardened underground bunker about 8:20 tonight and nursing a troublesome build from work on a remote desktop screen. But I am down to nine bugs now. Down from 23 this time last week. And I have two more that I think are fixed if I could just get the tests to run so I could verify that.

I'm running on empty and unable to do another chapter in Henigan Lethal Logic book like I had planned to the last several days. Maybe this weekend I'll be able to spend some time on it.

I have one more post I just have to make tonight then it will be lights out.

Kevin has the story.

I just want to add that my degrees are in Electrical Engineering but when I worked for the Aerospace Division at Boeing a lot of my time there was in the "Terminal Guidance Lab". Now at Microsoft I work on "location for cell phones". In my spare time I play with my chemistry set and make targets.

It's almost as if Kevin was talking about my career.

There are rumors going around about the stuff I am working. Some of them are almost true:

"Orion" is a cloud-based assisted GPS system that is supposed to dramatically increase initial location-lock performance. This will guarantee rapid GPS performance across all future Seven devices, regardless of carrier support (currently, aGPS is dependent on individual carrier implementation).

The radio-interface layer (RIL) is being updated to support multiple-tower signal detection and trilateration (think Google's My Location service in Google Maps) and IP resolving. In addition, information garnered from WiFi connections will also be used for faster location detection (also similar to Google Maps).  All of this information is then passed on up via API to third-party software for ease of access and limited instruction sets.

Planned performance for an initial lock (cold start) is targeted at less than 1 second and would find you within 300 meters. A hot or warm start is targeted at less than 0.25 seconds and would track you at less than 10 meters.

What actually happens with this location-information in terms of end-user services is currently not known — that is we do not know how the OS will utilize it for the the end-user experience. See the video from Channel 9 for some hints.

The people on our team laughed and rolled our eyes at parts of this.

The truth will be released soon.

As you might have noticed I haven't done much blogging recently. I am spending a lot of time at work and working while at home.

Earlier this week we learned something we had designed and implemented months ago works for simple cases but in real use it is easily broken. It had to do with some user interface stuff that we didn't really want to do (our team is working fairly deep down in the O/S). We just didn't have any UI experience and the UI coding model is something very new and had virtually no documentation and was in a great state of flux at the time we designed our little widget. Now it needs to be redone--essentially from the ground up.

It only showed up when some of the other teams started calling into our UI and problems showed up if you didn't do things precisely the way it was intended to work. These other teams are partially blocked by this bug on my plate and it is my number 1 priority to get this fixed ASAP. No pressure there...

My boss says he starts getting into heart attack territory when we have an average of 10 bugs per developer. We currently have an average of something like eight and I have 16 on my plate. No pressure there...

So I was digging into the samples (which don't work) on how do this thing when the PM stopped by to give my officemate and I some "encouragement". In his heavy East German accent he said, "Yah! You should know that in just <deleted> weeks Steve Ballmer is going to demo this to the world..." Now that is some pressure.

I think I need a caffeine IV drip.

Just one more time. Then I'll go home.

Haitao Jiang
January 8, 2010
This was said many, many times in the last three or four hours as he tried to get his code working. Hiep, Pawan, and I hovered over his shoulder and others lurked on-line to await the results. He finally agreed to go home at 23:33 PM.
[I've been working since 5:00 AM after going to bed last night at 23:30 and I really don't feel like finding a better QOTD for you. I went to bed after Barb had gone to sleep and I was up and working before she woke up.

My stuff is done for now and the testers writing the automated test code have to be convinced the test code is broken and not my stuff. We start at it again tomorrow morning.--Joe]

I put in about 15 hours at work yesterday and I have been up since about 5:00 AM this morning working too.

We have a major deadline tonight and I expect I'll be very busy until late tonight and then crashing after that.

My blog and email may get some attention tomorrow or the next day.

Even though I haven't gotten out of bed yet (aren't laptops great!) and have already made a couple of blog posts I have a very busy day ahead of me. In addition to the usual things like attending to hygiene, food, and clothing I need to make up a couple hundred rounds of .40 S&W and head out to the range for a USPSA action pistol match. After that I have to return to Redmond to help The Borg conquer the galaxy.

I turned off Captcha on the comments to help some people that were having problems with it. If you see a bunch of spam comments start showing up don't worry about it. I'll take care of them by tomorrow morning.

Update: The pistol match went fairly well. I messed up a reload on one stage or else I might have actually won. I came in second instead:

We started sitting in the chair and had to stay within the box. There is a Pepper Popper on the left in the shadow of a no shoot which activates a swinging target coming out from behind the stack of barrels on the right (simulates a hijacker come out of the bathroom).

I got 50 points (out of 55 possible--an 11 round stage) in 8.31 seconds for a hit factor of 6.0168. Pretty good, I figure, for almost all head shots except for the mover. Especially with all the hostages to avoid.

That white stuff on the ground? That is snow. SOME wimps stop shooting outdoors in the winter--but not at our range in North Central Idaho.

Via the WA CCW email list I found out a firearms related company in Greensboro North Carolina is looking for a new PM:

As a strategic leader within the organization, the Director of Product Management is required to manage and insure the profitability and competitive positioning of firearms products within the assigned category in the commercial sporting goods market, and to act as a steward to insure the long-term effectiveness of firearms products by performing the following duties personally or through subordinate supervisors. This position is responsible for understanding the target market and keeping the product line competitive on both price and features with key responsibility for the profitability of the product line. The ability to develop and produce strategic planning documents is required. Must be able to understand financial reporting and prepare and explain financial analysis to measure project performance. Must be able to prepare and deliver presentation materials to senior level management. Must have a solid understanding and grasp of technical concepts as they relate to product design and manufacturing. Requires 30%-40% domestic travel and some international travel may be required.

I wonder who it is. Para-USA is in Pineville NC but they are 100 miles away and doesn't have the position listed on their website.

Say Uncle wrote about our exobrains this morning then I went to work today and worked on the operating system for one. I fired off a build of the software and I happily noted that the CPU usage on the eight 3 GHz processors went to 98%. It pretty much stayed there for most of the two to three hours it took to do a build. The CPUs get some rest when it's writing a bunch of stuff to disk but still it's an impressive amount of CPU cycles being burned.

Then I wondered just how impressive is it? What does it really mean?

That computer can add 20 numbers together in the time it takes for light to travel one foot.

Eight 3 GHz processors are doing something on the order of 20 billion operations per second. And those "operations" aren't exactly trivial. Each operation is something like an addition, subtraction, multiplication, reading or writing a number. And those aren't just numbers like 0 through 10. The CPU can handle any number in the range from -2147483648 to +2147483647 just as easily as it can from -10 to +10. And while it is doing that it can keep up a running commentary telling me what it is doing at a rate that is far to fast for me to keep up.

Imagine you have every man, woman and child on this planet (about six billion) working on the same task they couldn't even do the raw arithmetic let along the communication and coordination at a rate that is even 1/100^th of what the little box under my desk can do. I have the brain power (for some tasks) exceeding the capacity of several earth-like planets complete sentient population at my disposal.

The exobrain of today is only about one 1/3 of a planets worth--but that isn't a bad start on a budding cyborg.

Did I also tell you we are working on project SkyNet?

Update: Some of the comments about this post here are absolutely awesome. To completely appreciate some of them require having read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Also closely related.

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.

Ben Franklin
[Or both.

Boomershoot, this blog, the software I have written (some used by 100s of millions), the hardware I have designed (10s of thousands of units shipped), and my children are my attempts.--Joe]

A guy at work, Chet, frequently stops by my office to take a break and talk about, among other things, the state of our economy. Are we going to have hyper inflation? Deflation? Should savings be put into stocks, bonds, precious metals?

I bought a few ounces of gold and silver in the late 1990s and that turns out to have been a fairly good investment. But as Chet points out, "You can't eat it."

If being able to eat it were the sole criteria for sound investing then a few tons of lentils, peas, and wheat from the farm be a good idea but my bunker can only store so many sacks before it starts getting in the way. And I'm pretty sure some of the sacks of food I sold to people worried about Y2K in 1999 (about 20,000 pounds total) are still in their closets unopened except perhaps by rodents and insects. The food stores fairly well but unless you were very careful how you stored after ten years it has noticeably degraded.

Dave Hardy points out there is an alternative to gold that is useful (I don't recommend eating it however) and which has retained it's value every bit as well as gold has for the last 136 years. When I bought my first gun the guy I bought it from pointed out that guns in good repair don't loose significant value over the years. Even that SKS you bought for $65 back in the early 1990s kept pace with inflation. Ammo too has been a good investment.

So perhaps that is Chet's answer. Instead of precious metals like gold and silver invest in steel, copper, brass and lead with a little bit of nitrocellulose thrown in.

Two weeks ago I delivered a bunch of concrete blocks, mortar, and grass seed to the Boomershoot site. I didn't stay long enough to do anything with it because I wanted to shoot in a steel match that same day. I made the quick trip out there because I was afraid it would snow up or rain so much that it wouldn't be accessible until spring and I wanted the materials out there so I could walk (or snowshoe) in if I needed to and do any last minute prep work.

Today I drove back out and planted the last of the grass. It wouldn't have been disaster if I hadn't gotten the grass planted but it will be better that I did get it done. I would have liked to have done some work finishing off the semi-permanent toilet but I ended up spending time talking to my parents and brothers and then driving the 345 miles back to the Seattle area.

I'll probably go back out there in a couple weeks. Due to a huge office move at work I will have the entire Thanksgiving week off (extra, free, vacation!) so assuming the ground isn't knee deep in mud or waist deep in snow I will spend some of that time working on the site. But I have 2010 essential stuff done for this fall.

I took two people to the range with me tonight.

Gang is one of my co-workers. He is from the People's Republic of China. He had some military training when he was still living there but he only fired eight rounds total from an SKS. He went shooting with some friends in the U.S. once quite a while back. He doesn't qualify as a "new shooter" but he is still a beginner. He told me he would like to try it again sometime and I, of course, was pleased to take him to the local range. He said his father-in-law was visiting from China and would like to go along too if that was okay with me. FIL had never fired a gun before. He had field-stripped one in training but had never fired it.

Gang bought me dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. I went through the safety rules with Gang translating for his FIL. I told him which guns I had brought and Gang asked if they all fit in the car. I said there was plenty of room but I was carrying one with me there in the restaurant. They didn't seem surprised or concerned.

When we got to the range I then had them do some dry firing with the .22 revolver. I worked with them on the grip, stance, sight alignment, and trigger control. First using the gun in single action, then double action.

Here is FIL cocking the gun in preparation to fire his first actual shot:

Here is the result of his first eight rounds from about 10 feet away:

I was impressed! I know people who have put many hundreds of rounds down range and can't shoot that well. Gang's efforts were similar but offset to the right and up of the bullseye about the same amount as FILs were down and to the left.

I then rented a Ruger Mark III/45 since my Ruger Mark II is still with daughter Kim in Idaho. Here FIL is punching holes in the target with the semi-auto:

I fired a few rounds with my STI to make sure it didn't go full-auto on me after getting it's new NP3 finish before letting them try it.

They both fired it a few times then I loaded up the Gun Blog 45 for them. The loads were 230 grain bullets but downloaded to a Power Factor of only 175 (typical is about 200). Here the FIL is just getting the gun out of recoil with the slide still not closed:

They said the .45 hurt their hands a little bit but they had big smiles on their faces after shooting a few rounds each:

Next came the Evil Black Rifle:

Success! The target below has holes from both FIL and Gang from about 20 feet away. Each of them had one go low and the rest in a tight group in the middle of the A-Zone. FIL put his three on the lower left of the A-Zone with Gang having the upper three.

As I watched them shoot I keep thinking of Tiananmen Square and wondered how things might have been different had the civilians been armed and able to defend themselves. Gang, his wife, (and perhaps FIL), and daughter will be attending a private Boomershoot party next spring. After learning how to use guns of course they need to learn how to make explosives.

I've now taken new shooters to the range from Taiwan, India, Canada, and the People's Republic of China. I'm exposing the world to freedom, first hand, one person at at time...

As we were leaving the range Gang asked if I was going to the gun show this weekend. I told him that I was returning to Idaho but he and his entire family (even the baby) would be welcome and he said he might go to look around. He doesn't have a house right now but when he does he might buy a gun for self-defense then.

So, do you still give chemistry lessons on the white-board in your office?

Suresh Parameshwar
October 15, 2009
[See also another time when I quoted Suresh.

Suresh was my mentor at Microsoft when I first started working there full time. Almost two years ago he left Redmond to go back to India (still working for MS). He was back in Redmond this week on business and stopped by to visit friends. A bunch of us had dinner at our old boss's house last night and stay up talking until almost midnight.

Before he went back to India on more than one occasion Suresh and I had discussions about explosives and I explained the chemistry to him on the white-board.

The above question was one of the first things he said to me when I saw him last night.--Joe]

It's possible there are few lines of some of my prototype code that made it through to release. I'm not certain. Windows Mobile 7 will have significant input from me.

Here are the details:

AT&T today announced two new smartphones based on Microsoft Inc.'s new Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, HTC's Tilt 2 and Pure (see images, below.)

AT&T didn't announce full details for all six new phones, but said the HTC Pure is now available at AT&T stores for $150 after rebates, and the HTC Tilt 2 will cost $300 after rebates. Both require a smartphone data plan commitment and a $40 or higher voice plan in order to receive the rebates.

6.5 is a big step in the right direction and 7.0 will be awesome.

Windows mobile 6.5 will be out soon. Windows Mobile 7.0 will come out later.

I'm working on 7.0 and it looks very nice. I too was worried about 6.5 until I saw it for the first time last week (competely different team so it's not quite so weird that I didn't see it sooner). 6.5 is a big step forward and I am much less worried about it now.

The release of 7.0 will make me much happier with our position in the mobile phone market.

That is all... Back to work...

Microsoft matches charity donations dollar for dollar for full-time (a "blue-badge" in the local vocabulary) employees. The Second Amendment Foundation has been receiving my automatic payroll deductions since I started full time with MS.

Kevin reports my donations, matched by Microsoft, have been put to good use:

I'll post about this again, but last night SayUncle asked a question about donating toward the legal fight for our rights, mentioning that he'd received emails from people saying they'd tried to donate during the Parker/Heller litigation and had been refused. Alan said that there had been a deliberate decision to take that case all the way without outside aid of any kind, which is why offers of assistance had been politely but firmly declined. However, all the current litigation, such as the Chicago incorporation suit and many others, are being paid for by the Second Amendment Foundation and CalGuns. If you want to help now, that's where your money needs to go. I've been receiving solicitations from SAF for a while, but I did not know that they were the financiers of these efforts. They'll be receiving donations from me in the future, and I hope from you as well.

The payroll deductions are open for change starting October 1^st and I'll be increasing the amount they get.

I didn't do as much blogging this weekend and yesterday as I normally would have. I had extra things to do at work the last few days. Plus I went out to the Boomershoot range and played in the dirt (pictures to follow) all day on Saturday.

At work yesterday afternoon I gave a short presentation and demo (actually I had Gang do the demo since his demo was completed and mine wasn't) despite mangling a few sentences got laughs and applause at all the right spots and I should be able to give blogging a little more time tonight.

I really want to say something about "Prags" v. "threepers". It appears I accidently lit a match near a powder keg with this post (see here and here). Maybe late tonight I'll have something...

The boss is going on vacation for a couple weeks to celebrate his 25th Wedding Annivesary (which isn't until December but contrary to suggestions they are not celebrating early in case they don't actually make it that far). Instead of this little mouse being able to play while the cat is away he asked that I be the cat while he is gone. And as he brought me up to speed on the things that needed my attention while he was gone he told me the demo I'm working on that he absolutely must have by the 18th (two weeks from now) is actually due next Tuesday (one working day)*.

I worked until almost 20:00 last night then went to the range and put a couple hundred rounds down range. Blogging will probably be light until after Tuesday as I will be spending most of my time working or at one of three different ranges.

*To be fair, it was as much a surprise to him as it was me.

On Friday my officemate told me Kris had just stopped by and left something for me. I found a damaged Pocket PC with a note on it asking that I do an Idaho Stress Test on it. I contacted Kris via IM for more details. The screen had been damaged and was completely non-functional. There was company sensitive data on the device which needed to be destroyed and Kris wanted me to do this for him.

On Saturday daughter Kimberly and I went to the Boomershoot site and, among other things, destroyed the data for Kris. I also had a hard disk that was in similar need of "data reduction" and we deleted the data on both items at the same time.

Tomorrow I'll deliver the pieces Kim and I found to Kris but for the rest of you here are a few pictures assembled into a video:

Why is it that every printer ever made has User Frustrator Tabs (UFTs) built into the paper tray?  Their only function is to prevent the user from sliding a new stack of paper into the paper tray.  They're there to catch the corners of the paper as you're trying to get it into the machine, thus causing one or more sheets to bunch or shift inside the tray.  Often it's the bottom sheet that gets hung up, and of course it's impossible to slide the bottom sheet forward under the stack, even without UTFs, unless you remove the whole stack and try again.  UFTs work especially well when you have an important customer on the phone and you're in a hurry to print something.  Of course the printer never knows that you've just installed a new, crumpled stack of paper in it, so while you're on the phone you have to find the right button to push, telling the printer it is now time to jam and wad a new sheet in its mechanism.

I can just see Butters, in his aluminum foil Professor Chaos uniform, evil grin on his face, as he builds the CAD file for the new HP paper tray; "He he he heeee.  Now the world will know the pain and frustration...."

Hey guys; ever though of having, you know, flat, smooth surfaces inside the paper tray?

#876,394.2;

Why is it that the printer and camera manufacturers actually hire (and presumably pay) extra people to write software, and then actually include it in their product packaging, just to take over my computer, turning it into an All-HP Fun House, or the Wonderful, Lollipop World of Cannon, instead of the computer I actually liked and paid for?  It's like putting dog turds in your product packaging.  You hire people to search for dog turds, you hire people to wrap those dog turds, and then you pay to ship those dog turds with each camera or each printer, so that I'll stick one in my optical drive and ruin everything, permeating my whole computer.  Gee, thanks.  All I wanted to do was print stuff, OK?  How hard is that to understand?  All I want to do is take pictures and put them on my computer.  Why does that require special dog turd software?  You know what I do?  I pull the card from the camera and use a damned card reader, 'cause that way I know I'm not sticking yet another dog turd in my optical drive.

(go ahead-- ask me how I feel about it)

I'll bet some Microsoft geeks had fun with this.

You should hear about some of the parties we have had. Read Renegades of the Empire for some hints.

[Via an email from Rob.]

A guy on our team speaks with a very noticeable German accent. I never thought much of it. Another guy is from South Vietnam, another from China, the new person on our team (just today) and my officemate are both from India. If there is anything unusual about the foreigners around the office is that they work harder than the U.S. born people. This guy is no exception. I see emails sent by him from late at night and all weekend.

But he stopped by to talk about stuff last Thursday and we ended up talking about where he grew up. He was born in East Germany. I hadn't realized that. For some reason I always thought of West Germany whenever I might have considered his origins. He hates the communists. "Communism makes people lazy. Yah!"

I said it always amazes me that experiment has been run so many times and resulted in 10s of millions dead and still people keep wanting to try it again. I told him of someone I know who told me they didn't think people should own their own houses. The government should own them and allocated them on the basis of need. This person told me, "You and Barb don't need such a big house. Some other family with a larger family needs it more than you do."

His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. "You tell them I lived that. You tell them to go visit this town. Yah!", and he showed me a town on a map of Germany. "Not one bomb was dropped on that town during the entire war", he said. "There was no fighting in that town. But if you go there that town looks like it was all bombed out. When people don't own their property they don't care. The roofs, they are all falling down. Yah! You tell him to go there and look for himself."

After he got married they applied to the housing allocation board for a place to live. There was "nothing available". But other people who applied after him got really nice places. But they were the children of the people on the board, and the people who had connections to people on the board. After two years the housing board told him that his parents had permission to make some changes to their place (I understood this to be partitions, plumbing, etc.) and then he and his wife could live there.

He told me he graduated, "The best in my class." But he couldn't get into college because his family weren't "good communists". He got a job in a picture tube factory (television sets I presume) and he did so well the company used its pull to get him a position in school. He got a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering. Then he got a PhD in Computer Science.

After the Germany's were reunited his father obtained his secret police file. Every letter to or from West Germany, where some of their family lived, was read and a summary was put in his file. He found out who had spied on him and who said things about him that put his loyalty to the communist party in doubt and stopped his career.

"Joe", he said, "People complain about how unequal things are with the rich executives in a capitalist society. But it's just the same under communism--it's the politically connected that have the money and the people that aren't connected don't have anything. I know. I lived it. Communism, it's very bad."

I need to ask what he thinks of the plans for health care and the take over of the banking industry, etc. in this country. That should be interesting.

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft but not in Search.

I know MS has been spending a lot of money attempting to catch up to Google as a search tool. A year or so ago I attended a few internal meetings and saw data that showed objective tests placing search results above Yahoo! and nearly as good as Google. I expect the results are at least on par with Google by now, but still MS wasn't getting the traffic anywhere close to that of Google.

It appears MS has decided that search quality wasn't a deciding factor. Yes, the branding of "Live Search" sucked. "Bing", to this non-marketing expert, appears to be much better. And I hope that will help. But what they are doing is much, much more than just rebranding it. Check out this video. It's a decision engine, not just a search engine.

Coming soon: Bing.

I've used that reason to close a bug before. But the meaning of the word "reproduce" was different in my context.

Full disclosure and disclaimer time. I work for Microsoft. The following opinion is my personal opinion and does not represent, to the best of my knowledge, the opinion of anyone in MS management.

The EU is about to fine Intel:

Microsoft and Intel are taking it on the chin in Europe these days. On Wednesday, the EU is expected to bring down a heavy fine on Intel for its myriad anticompetitive activities at the expense of AMD. The Wall Street Journal reports it will be one of the biggest fines in the EU’s history.

The anticompetetition commissioner can fine Intel as much as 10 percent of its annual revenue. That would be a $3.8 billion fine based on 2008 revenue, more than triple the $1.16 billion charged to Microsoft for noncompliance in the EU’s long-running antitrust action against Redmond.

One has to wonder what percentage of the EU income is based on fines and what percentage is based on taxes. But most of all I wonder how long the EU would last without Intel and Microsoft products. I'm sure Intel and Microsoft could do without the EU a lot better than the EU could do without Microsoft and Intel.

I just wish Microsoft and Intel had the gumption and the means to demonstrate that to those commies.

We received an email from Steve Ballmer yesterday morning saying the other shoe was dropping. I'm fine and everyone I checked with is fine but I still need to check in with a few more.

This is an open letter to all the talk show hosts, pundits, party hacks, cheaters, scumbags, sick twisted freaks (you know who you are) and pro-freedom bloggers.  We could spend the rest of our lives cataloging the outrageous behavior of nasty, America-hating, ignorant, self-loathing, cultist, freedom-hating, anti-human, leftist politicians including Progressive Republicans.  We know they're bad, OK?  If there are three or four people who still don't get it, that's all right.

I'd rather try to figure out how we're going to get some principled Americans nominated so we're not always forced to choose between bad and worse-- between more socialism slower, and more socialism faster.  This last national election was a real puker.  The Republican Party is, at the moment, just as lost, dumbfounded, selfish and clueless as ever.  They're a herd of does, staring blankly into the headlights of an on-coming truck, and the worst part of it is; they don't even suspect that they're clueless.  They in the Republican leadership think they have some really clever answers, which amount to more of what got us into this mess.  I recently heard it described as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That fits very well.  The Republicans have some really super great, super ultra smart ideas for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  No really, listen...  (all the while we have this simple, proven model for success, and it's being ignored.)

We need to change that.  You need to change it.  I need to change it.  There isn't anyone else.  I suppose, since it's up to us, it will have to be on the local level for most of us, being as we're not billionaires.  That's OK.  We can still do what we can do.  A lot of people are jazzed up right now.  They just need somewhere to start.  Well, pick a place, a local issue or a local politician that needs a hand (or a very public spanking) and get to it!

That there are clueless people is not the issue.  There will always be the clueless.  They'll sit on the sidelines, worrying about who likes them and who doesn't, trying to figure out where the "center" is so they can position themselves in it and claim superiority for having done so, while someone else does the lifting.  Are you a sitter or a lifter?

I have a bad feeling that things could come to blows before this government is brought under control, and I really don't want that to happen.  Do you?  This country is far too important in the grand scheme of things.

And with that; I don't have much more to say on here, other than to repeat myself or talk about the weather and what I did last weekend, unless it's to tell you what I'm doing on the local level to influence politics.  Now I think I have some calls to make.

(Note that I placed this in nearly every one of Joe's categories. It's relevant to everything we do and every opportunity we want for our kids in the future)

You know how to get a solution? First you create a problem.

Aravind Seshadri
April 15, 2009
[One of my favorite things about working at Microsoft is that I am surrounded by smart people--very smart people. Also knowing that some of the software I write will be used by, literally, a BILLION people is really, really cool. That and being part of the Borg means we get to rule the galaxy.

So, yesterday Aravind, Hiep, and I were discussing our plans for domination of the galaxy when Aravind told us the above. I burst out into laughter as my mind went flying into all the different directions implied by those two sentences. Here is a sample:

• Before you can solve a problem you have to define (create) it. Once it is accurately defined you can much more easily solve it.
• Most businesses sell "solutions". The grocery store sells you a solution to your hunger problem, the electric company sells you a solution to your energy problem, etc. Before you can sell anything new you have to create a problem. Before there were telephones did the people know they had a communication problem? Before there were cars did the people know there was a transportation problem? Before there were diamond engagement rings did people know there was token of commitment problem? We create problems in people's minds so they will buy our solutions. This applies to (perhaps especially in) politics, and personal relationships, as well as the business world.
• If you have a problem in "Area A" you may be able to solve it by creating a problem in "Area B". For example, a scumbag is causing you discomfort by threating you with a knife and you want a solution to your discomfort. You create a fluid retention problem for him by inserting multiple jacketed hollow points into his thoracic cavity. You now have your solution.
• And my favorite, "There is no problem the proper application of high explosives can't solve."

-Joe]

Breaking shit sounds easy, but it's not. It's actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn't break.

hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It's an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, "Where do you think the greatest weakness are?" And "How would you go about breaking this?" Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.

On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven't found any bugs. If they haven't found any bugs then they aren't doing their job, right?

Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It's about a year old and I'm pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven't gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.

I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She's a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn't show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I'll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.--Joe]

Last month at Tam's place people were commenting things we had which were old. It was sort of "back when I was a young'n..." story telling time.

I visited my parents last Saturday and picked up my contribution to the discussion:

I brought it in to work today and asked my office mate if she knew what it was.

Her eyes got big and she said, "Oh my! Is this a punched card? I have never seen one of these before!"

I told her that it was more than that. "This", I told her, "Is proof I was writing software before you were born."

I took Engr 131 fall semester 1973 at the University of Idaho. Punched cards is a tough way to program a computer. There is no back space or delete and retype. There is no "white out". If you make a mistake on a card you get to type a new one (there were rare exceptions but that is beyond the scope of this discussion).

We would leave our card deck on a table in the hall and come back three DAYS later to read the print-out result of the submission to the IBM 360. Usually it was something like ten pages of paper that boiled down to something like "Syntax error on card five, column 17." Or "Program error. Core dump follows."

The next year using a line editor on a teletype that looked like an IBM Selectric typewriter with a box of paper in back was such a thrill. You could get the compile and run results in a minute or two instead of days. And "editing" was just AWESOME compared to punching cards.

In the early 80's I started programming on a CRT. It was still a line editor but listing lines 120-140 only took a couple of silent seconds instead of 30 seconds of clattering with the teletype. I started hearing rumors of something called a "visual editor" about the time son James was born in '84. I couldn't imagine what the fuss was about. "Visual editor?" What is that about? How much better than Edline could an editor be? I didn't bother to check it out for several months.

Even then I would tell people about programming the microprocessor system I had build on a plug-board. I had typed in hand assembled hex codes into a PROM programmer. Then I plugging the PROM into a socket and powered up the system trying to debug it from the deciphering the way the LEDs blinked. Now that was a tough way to program.

I woke up early this morning after having a dream.

Today is the day I may get a chance to ask Senator Leahy a question or two. In my dream I asked my question, didn't like his response, and my follow-up question was a bit hostile. As I was leaving the confernce center a couple of men in suits tried to stop me. They were unsuccessful. Things for me went downhill from there.

I must avoid being hostile. I think I can say nearly the same words with a smile and a friendly voice and everyone will have a much happier day.

Update: I have written down the exact words I want to use.

A few days ago at Georgetown University you suggested creating a "Truth Commission" to investigate constitutional excesses of the previous administration. Do you still think that is a good idea and do you think such a commission should also investigate the excesses of congress and the current administration in regards to violations of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in the Bill of Rights who have exceeded the powers enumerated in the constitution?

Follow up questions may involve Just One Question and/or reference to 18 USC 242.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) will be visiting my work next week to speak and it's possible I might get a chance to ask him some questions. If I do get such a chance what questions/comments would be appropriate?

Background data on Leahy to help evaluate this opportunity:

• Leahy is the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and is a senior member of the Agriculture and Appropriations Committees. He ranks seventh in seniority in the Senate.
• Patrick Leahy was elected to the United States Senate in 1974 and remains the only Democrat elected to this office from Vermont. At 34, he was the youngest U.S. Senator ever to be elected from the Green Mountain State. Leahy was born in Montpelier and grew up across from the Statehouse. A graduate of Saint Michael's College in Colchester (1961), he received his Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center (1964). He served for eight years as State's Attorney in Chittenden County. He gained a national reputation for his law enforcement activities and was selected (1974) as one of three outstanding prosecutors in the United States
• As a leading member of the Appropriations Committee, Leahy is the Chairman of the Committee’s Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and also sits on its Defense, Interior, Commerce-Justice-Science, Transportation-Treasury-Judiciary-Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security subcommittees.
• Active on human rights issues, Leahy also has been the leading U.S. officeholder in the international campaign against the production, export and use of anti-personnel landmines. In 1992 Leahy wrote the first law by any government to ban the export of these weapons. He led efforts in Congress to aid mine victims by creating a special fund in the foreign aid budget, and the Leahy War Victims Fund now provides up to $14 million of relief to these victims each year. He was instrumental in establishing programs to support humanitarian demining and played a key role in pushing for an international treaty banning anti-personnel mines. He also wrote and enacted civilian war victims relief programs that are underway in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yeah, it's old news. But I'm liking it on my computer at work so I'm about to install it at home. Get it here.

At a meeting this morning we were discussing a possible name for a new product. It was suggested that since we already have SkyDrive and SkyMarket (with rumors of SkyLine and SkyBox), maybe we should name the project SkyNet. The consensus was there were probably names less threatening to the warm and fuzzies.

Microsoft announced layoffs this morning. I haven't been into work yet but my email account still works and from reading email from upper management my division is one of the areas that will continue to receive "strong support".

Notice anything wrong with this message?

I recently purchased a mini-14 scout mount and the rear U - shaped mounting bracket which secures the mount to the barrel seems to have the threads on one side either cut crooked or damaged.  Is it possible to get another bracket and screws?

Thank you,

Neil

 

Neil (last name)

(e-mail address at Earthlink dot com)

 

I walked across the street to the cafeteria in building 117 and noticed there was a fire alarm going off in building 118 and lots of people were standing around. Microsoft security was parked outside and I thought it might be a fire drill. It was a little odd because usually they do those in the morning.

When I came back with food in hand there were three firetrucks and a "Battalion Chief" SUV parked outside. Then I saw the water shooting out from the front door. A sprinkler?

Something unusually is definitely going on but there isn't any smoke and I didn't see hoses going inside the building so it probably isn't too serious.

Notice the water shooting out from above the door?

If you have a cell phone and it is turned on your cell phone company knows where it is within a few hundred yards. If the government wants this data from the provider it generally (emergency exemptions apparently exist) has to get a court order.

However, the FBI has the technology to trigger phones into giving up their serial numbers and their phone numbers. This does not require a court order! Currently they use a van to drive around town and try to find their target. But that doesn't have to be the way they always do it. All they have to do is put this technology on major travel routes and in travel hubs and they can do a pretty good job of tracking a large proportion of the population. If they put up their own devices on most of cell towers around the country they can track every active cell phone in the country.

I write software for mobile phones for Microsoft and it is rare that a day goes by where we don't talk about and implement privacy protections for the customer and now I find out the Federal Government is actively working to defeat us.

He says he is sorry about bringing down Microsoft.com today. He didn't even have to use any Boomershoot technology.

As people say, his brain is a very powerful CPU but it's running a buggy operating system.

Last evening as I was leaving work I saw this. Sorry for the low picture quality. It was taken with my cell phone.

Today, all day, was the company meeting. In a lot of ways, especially when Steve Ballmer is on stage (or running through the crowd), it's like a prep rally from high school. The following are my Twitter comments while watching the meeting. If you view them on the web they don't have the proper time stamp because the cell phone connectivity (and my Internet connection on my Pocket PC) at Safeco Field was very intermittent (overloaded with all the geeks with mobile devices). Most of the Twitter updates had to be sent several times before they finally made it out.

At the company meeting. Live Mesh is awesome. Office 14 is gettting lots of applause too.

Watching cool demos of Live Search.

XBox has good stuff coming.

Just saw world premier of more MS ads. Will show up on TV tonight. Much better than the first one.

Windows 7 demo is cool!

Raiin Wison led us in making a new world record of simultaneous paper airplanes in the air--22K.

One of the best ways to predict the future is to invent the future.--Craig Mundie

The robotics demo was impresssive. Receptionist assistant will go to beta in a few months.

Fireworks for Steve Baller's entrance.

60B in sales. 22B in gross income. No other company (if they aren't an oil company) can say that.

Apple: GAME ON!

Google has never been challenged. I want see what happens when they are.--Steve B.

Because my officemate, I, (and a few others) won an award for working some long hours last year and delivering on time we spent the money by taking a few others and going kayaking on Lake Union this afternoon. I updated my Twitter account several times and was wardriving with my cell phone while kayaking. Here are the twitter updates:

• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899833135
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899858649
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899876994
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899900654
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899931397

My boss took some pictures and updated his Facebook account with them while still on the water. Ry (who wasn't even there) tagged some of the pictures with names before we made it back to work and dropped people off.

Co-worker Kris recently arrived here from Australia. Saturday he rode his bicycle from the Mount Rainer park entrance to the Paradise visitor center and then back down the mountain. The elevation of Paradise is 5400 feet and the temperature was 95 F. He estimates he burned 4288 calories and consumed 5.8 liters (1.5 gallons) of fluids. He also got hit by a car on the way up.

And he says eating Vegemite demonstrates Aussies are tough.

Kris tells a little about working with me.

Nothing says "Awesome!" like a woman that knows how to make explosives.

Kris (a co-worker of mine at Microsoft)
August 11, 2008
After seeing this blog post about Kim.
[This is a co-worker of mine. We've been sharing tips on how to make things that go boom.--Joe]

Barb and I have a very social weekend ahead of us.

First off is lunch with son James.

Tonight Barb and I are having dinner with Phil (from SoftGreenGlow.com) and his wife. Despite the references to the canned salmon mouse I'm sure we will have a pleasant evening.

Tomorrow is the company picnic with probably 5 or 10 thousand other people.

This wasn't some cheesy Internet quiz of some sort. This was something that my company paid big dollars for and followed up with a nearly full day of "training" to explain the results to us. Everyone in our organization had to participate. Mandatory training they said. Okay, whatever.

I was surprised. They really nailed a bunch of things for me. View the results for yourself here.

During the training they gave us these four little soft plastic blocks that looked very much like Lego's. They were a training tool and as the training started people were sort of playing with them as the instructor talked. Then someone had the blocks fly apart and scatter across one of the tables. "A block explosion!", the instructor announced. Her assistant went to the white board and recorded the explosion. Someone asked, "What does it mean?" The instructor said they didn't know for certain but they keep track of them to see if we can figure something out. There were no more block explosions all day.

The one person to have a block explosion was also the only person in the room with a ATF license to manufacture high explosives. You should have heard the people in my group laugh when instructor called it a block explosion. No one else in the room understood the significance like they did.

Microsoft is run by a very bright, very energetic, very healthy person who has very few outside interests -- and he has a killer instinct.  I admire the guy -- I think they ought to bronze him and break up his company.

Scott McNealy
[Bill has left the building. His last day at Microsoft was June 27.--Joe]

I can always tell when I get a call from someone in the U.S. military.  They've planned the call, so they get right to the point without humming and hawing or getting off onto irrelevant tangents.  They're always lucid, and communicate easily.  They know and use the standard phonetic alphabet (really important with a bad cellular connection):

Alpha
bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliette
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu

(Memorize these.  There are only 26 of them and they can save you from communication errors over and over)

Plus they're always patient and respectful.  No exceptions.

Now, shall we talk about your average college student?  No thanks-- I'm in a good mood and don't want to spoil it.

Last December I made two posts about how busy I was at work:

• Running on empty
• Running on empty makes the news

About 10 days ago while I was in Louisville our Corporate VP held a meeting for all the people under him. I missed out on the big meeting but I've watched part of the video of it since then. One of the topics at the meeting was awards for various people. My officemate, Sapna, mentioned in one the previous posts, our PM, our test/system integration guy and I got one of the awards. Here is a screen capture from that video:

I told Barb about this and she thought it was pretty cool... until I told her what we had done. We designed/wrote/tested some of the website code that puts ads on mobile phones (like what you see here depending on what country you are in) for our mobile websites.

Barb's response was basically "ads are evil". But ads are the reason so much of the Internet is "free" just like most television programs and radio. For example Hotmail requires dozens of servers with massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Ads pay for those resources. There haven't been many ads on a lot of mobile phones for various reasons but that is changing and my little team (above) helped change that.

I find the diversity of our team interesting. Sapna is from India and on Monday participated in a folk-life event at the Seattle Center attended by some large number of people. She and about a dozen others put on several dances from India. I showed up and took a bunch of pictures. At 5' 3" and 110 pounds she doesn't look like a software geek: 

Taqi is from Pakistan (don't India and Pakistan lob expolsives and high speed pieces of metal at each other on a regular basis? Odd--they get alone so well here.) and when he visits "home" I sometimes ask him about what "training camps" he spent time in. He takes it quite well and tells me stories from his time, years ago, in the military--which he makes of point of telling me was the secular military. He is about to finish his master's degree from the U of W in physics.

Zane is of Asian descent and a Canadian citizen who loves to play basketball. Snowboarding is also up there on his list of things to do.

All of them are great people and I'm proud to work with them. However, I'm sometimes intimidated here at Microsoft. If you open your mouth about something you should know what you are talking about because I suspect the average I.Q. in our section of the building is probably about 150. Damn, these guys are smart.

Yesterday I arrived at 8:45 and left at 17:40.  Nearly nine hours interviewing for a new job.  I'm not sure how many people I talked to.  In my mind they merged into a blur of coding tests on the white-board.  "Write your own version of malloc() and free()."  "Implement a function that converts a ASCII string into a floating point number."  "Reverse the order of the words in a string.  Do it in place--without allocating more memory."  "Find the first unique character in a string."  "Write the test cases for your code."  "What is the big O of your solution?  Can you do it better?"  Those are just the ones I remember.  My right arm went weak from writing on the white-board for so many hours.  I remember the easiest question though.  "What gets you up in the morning?"  "My wife", I answered.

Update: I've been getting calls and email asking how it went.  It went well.  Only the smallest of glitches.  The 8.5 hours of interviews with eight different people today in a different group was generally easier except for one technical question that I severely crashed and burned on. 

And the toughest question yesterday?  "Show me a cure for spam email.  You have 45 minutes."