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.
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.
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
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:
| Place | Name | USPSA | Class | Division | PF | Age | Points | Stg % |
| 1 | H., KW | L2847 | B | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 313.6755 | 100.00% |
| 2 | H., JOE | TY29386 | B | Limited | Major | 288.3225 | 91.92% | |
| 3 | P., TY | A56401 | B | Limited | Major | 278.8331 | 88.89% | |
| 4 | M., ADAM | A42720 | M | Limited | Major | 275.2926 | 87.76% | |
| 5 | B., MIKE | A39993 | A | Limited 10 | Major | 262.8004 | 83.78% | |
| 6 | I., KEVIN | L2544 | B | Limited | Major | 235.1292 | 74.96% | |
| 7 | W., DON | TY25213 | A | Limited | Major | Senior | 211.9319 | 67.56% |
| 8 | W., ROGER | U | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 196.7338 | 62.72% | |
| 9 | Revo, Roger | U | Revolver | Major | Senior | 187.4962 | 59.77% | |
| 10 | R., NICHOLAS | A57321 | D | Production | Minor | Junior | 169.0668 | 53.90% |
| 11 | Gr., John | A65903 | U | Limited | Major | 147.6443 | 47.07% | |
| 12 | D., Jerry | U | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 99.7761 | 31.81% | |
| 13 | M., Bill | U | Limited | Major | 87.8599 | 28.01% |
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 1/100th 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 1st 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…
