Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

It’s not often that I just can’t parse an article in the Wall Street Journal. However, I was baffled by an article in yesterday’s edition about a company named Culturecom. The article, by Evan Ramstad, claims that Culturecom has “found a way to put Asian characters in a position to command binary code… because instructions inside chips are written in English, Asian-language input and output must contain layers of translation”. I’m not sure what Mr. Ramstad is getting at; from looking at Culturecom’s page, it looks like Culturecom has an x86-compatible CPU that includes a Chinese-language character generator. Given Culturecom’s previous announcements, this seems likely. While an impressive feat, this isn’t the same as making the CPU start executing instructions in Pinyin or ideograms. I’d love to know if I’ve missed a detail, though; the article doesn’t help, since it doesn’t make any mention of whether Culturecom has also ported compilers, editors, debuggers, and so on to use the new CPU. I’ve asked Mr. Ramstad to comment; maybe he can shed some light on what’s really up with this.

The Exchange team now has a group blog: You Had Me at EHLO. Recommended reading.

I am totally infatuated with my new XM PCR— a little XM radio receiver that plugs into the USB port on your computer. I’ve liked the idea of satellite radio since I first heard about it, but I spend very little time in the car, so there’s not much point in buying a car unit. This, however, puts the music where I can listen to it: in my office.
There’s a Mac control program called MacXM that lets you change channels, see a song list, and even set filters so you get alerts when selected songs are playing, no matter what channel you’re on. (Plus, I now have the source code!) This might be a neat vehicle for me to brush up on my dormant programming skills, except that MacXM already does everything I want to do.
Audio quality is excellent, even though the antenna is looking out of my basement window. Since my Mac doesn’t have a line-in port, I had to order a Griffin iMic; until it gets here, I can listen to the computer or the radio, but not both. I can also use AudioHijack to record an XM stream as an MP3 file; combine that with filters, and you’ve got an easy way to record songs or programs, even with a timer. That will probably come in handy.
The radio was only $49; at that price, I’m delighted! My only complaint is that XM doesn’t seem to carry NPR, although Sirius has it on their service. On the other hand, Sirius doesn’t sell a computer-controlled radio, so there you go.

Very cool news: Microsoft is releasing the source code for Allegiance, their multi-player space combat game. The game is a few years old, but it’s still cool, and it’s exciting to imagine how the game might be extended.

I’ve been so busy with evaluating my second-least-favorite software product that I haven’t had time to post here much. A few notes:

• Betty and Julie snuck into town to surprise Mom on her birthday. Boy, was she surprised! It was great to see them both, too.
• Steve McConnell has an update to his seminal book on software craftsmanship, Code Complete. If I was still a developer, I’d be badgering my teammates to read the new version, since it’s online now. Amazon doesn’t list the updated edition yet.
• The Exchange Cookbook project is slowly gathering steam. I set up a web site for it, but there’s no real content there yet. I hope to get O’Reilly’s permission to post draft chapters and scripts there as we go along.
• Thomas wants me to tell his best jokes to all my friends. So, here goes. Q: When do astronauts eat?
  A: At launchtime

Thanks to an indirect tip from Scoble, I found this cool page of presentation tips. Even though they’re awfully tech-y, they’re valuable for even non-technical presenters. Case in point: I once had to extemporize about 15 minutes of my presentation when the big video projector died. I was able to because I’d thoroughly prepared; the alternative would have been for the audience to throw spitballs and chatter among themselves while we all waited for the AV guy to get it fixed. John, take particular note since you’ll be showing code at TechEd.

On the one hand, Shel Israel writes an interesting account of his VIP tour of the Computer Museum in Santa Clara. On the other, Scott Knaster points to a very cool new site, Folklore.org, for people to post their first-hand stories of involvement with development of new technologies. The first story posted, natch, is about Andy Hertzfeld’s involvement with the design of the original Apple Macintosh. Great reading. Now, if we can just figure out some way to get lots more stories preserved there, David and I will have something fun to read together. I’d particularly like to see Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky (Palm Pilot), Dave Cutler and some folks from his team (Windows NT 3.1), and anyone from the TiVo team post their stories.

Last week, I tried to clean up some of the Toshiba-supplied junque on my M200. For example, at boot the system loads a half-dozen or so programs that have no discernible value for me (like the Panasonic DVD-RAM driver). I started uninstalling things and quickly found that I’d broken the ability to switch between the external and internal display ports. I was able to fix that (about an hour before I went on stage on Tuesday), but I also noticed that the “rotate” button wasn’t working: when I flipped the screen, it would automatically rotate, but pressing the button that’s supposed to rotate the screen in 90-degree increments didn’t work. The button itself worked physically (e.g. I could make other things happen with it), but it wouldn’t do what I wanted. I fiddled, and reinstalled drivers, and finally yelled for help on an internal Microsoft email list for tablet users. (Of course, I can’t actually join the list because it’s only for employees, not contractors… bah.) Anyway, the response I got included a forwarded note from a Toshiba support engineer, and it unveiled the mystery:

When in tablet mode and the unit is rotated, the system will NOT automatically reorient the display. This requires that the Tablet Rotation Button be utilized (see graphic). By first orienting the display as desired, then pressing and holding the Display Rotation Button for 1-2 seconds, the display will change to match the new orientation.

So, the trick is to turn the computer to the orientation you want, and then press the button. Works every time. I was pressing the button and then turning the unit. I was expecting to be able to mash the button repeatedly to change to the desired orientation. This is poorly documented at best, especially since it’s contrary (but superior) to the way the rotate button works on other devices, like the Acer C1xx series.

In no particular order, a few SPOT features I’d like to see:

• Make weather for my custom cities appear in the “glance” channel.
• When I set up a travel date, make my home city weather appear in the “my cities” page on the weather channel. After all, MSN knows where my normal home city is.
• Add the ability to send IMs to the watch from the Mac MSN Messenger client. Several folks I know at MS have made this same suggestion to both the SPOT and Mac Messenger teams, but it’s apparently rather a lot of work, so I don’t know if this is going to happen.
• Provide better management of downloaded watch faces (lots of people have asked for this)
• Allow me to get alerts for flight delays on the watch. I’d pay extra for this.
• Offer a premium newswire service, with e.g. business news from Dow Jones. I’d pay extra for this, provided that the latency was still acceptable.

If you’ve got specific features you’d like to see added or change, list them in the comments, and I’ll forward it on to the SPOT team.

Toshiba’s been touting the fact that the M200 has a dual-axis accelerometer that lets the computer sense what physical orientation you have it in. I couldn’t figure out how to enable the sensor, but it turns out that you need to download a tool from Toshiba to enable it.

A weird experience last night: while I was at Elder-Beerman, my watch went totally dead. It spontaneously revived about 15 minutes later. A couple of folks on SPOTstop have reported the same problem, but no consensus on a cause yet. It only seems to affect the Fossil Abacus watch, which I bought in large part because of its $129 price– the next-closest watch is $50 more, but maybe they spent that $50 on better ESD shielding. At this rate, the watch won’t survive long enough for Thomas to inherit it when I die.
And, as long as I’m pointing out the inexplicable: for some reason, I don’t get weather for any city other than Toledo, even though I have New Orleans and Seattle listed as cities for which I want weather. The weather updates for Toledo arrive like they should (and boy, is it good to know that it’s 10° outside with a stiff wind), so this may just be a temporary glitch. Omar Shahine of Microsoft has a good review of MSN Direct’s performance in the Bay Area; it’s worth a read too.

Robbie Allen, who wrote the Active Directory Cookbook and is the editor for the Exchange Cookbook, also has a blog.

Mike Wendland blogs about whining from Ambient Devices: they want Microsoft to open the DirectBand network (which MSN Direct and SPOT use) to anyone who wants to transmit over it. Ambient makes some (actually rather cool) devices that receive data over a variety of existing networks (including pager and GPRS). However, they don’t like it that, after spending tons of money on building DirectBand, Microsoft isn’t eager to let them use it. Fancy that. Alan Reiter calls DirectBand a walled garden, and perhaps it is, but there’s no alternative technology that meets the price, size, and power consumption constraints that MS faced– given those limits, it was FM subcarrier or nothing, and I don’t think it’s fair to criticize them for not opening the network they built to J. Random Competitor.

From the “they’ll have to catch me first” department, Mike Strock points out this article on Gizmodo. Since SPOT watches have an FM radio receiver, they’re verboten for inflight use.

Here’s a move I didn’t expect: Microsoft has released version 3.5 of its Services for UNIX (SFU) package, for free. SFU won an award at LinuxWorld 2003, and it’s obviously in contention to win at this year’s show. SFU 3.5 includes an NFS server (cluster-aware and capable of running on Windows Server 2003), a gateway, and a client, plus a NIS/NIS+ synchronization server. My favorite feature, though, is the Interix subsystem, which includes ksh, csh, pthreads support, and the full GNU SDK. You get all of the standard UNIX commands, for Windows, for free. Get it now.