Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

“Papers please” no longer needed

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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.

It was Ry’s fault

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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.

Pure Microsoft

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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.

Kayaking for geeks

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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:



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.

Bicycle ride to Paradise

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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.

I have an admirer among my co-workers

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Kris tells a little about working with me.

Quote of the day–Kris

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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]

Dinner with a soft green glow

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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.

Personality test

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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.

Quote of the day–Scott McNealy

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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]

A Breath of Fresh Air

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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.

Random stuff from work

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

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.

Easiest interview question

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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.”