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Description: Redo from start....
Last Update: 05:59:38 03/05/2006
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First Fetched: 00:16:31 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 05:59:38 03/05/2006
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More reading of this week's New York Times Magazine got me to look up the history of the Dutch tulip bubble. For those of you who aren't quite as into history, the Dutch tulip bubble was the first generally recognized economic "bubble", occurring in the mid-1600s when crazed investors bid up the price of tulip bulbs, of all things, to a ridiculous amount before the market crashed. People often draw analogies between the tulip bubble and the dotcom bubble or today's real estate prices. Problem is, apparently there was no tulip bubble. A bit of reading in Wikipedia and Slate points out that what actually happened was that a slip in the tulip futures market -- yes, they had futures markets in the 17th century -- caused some well-connected investors to push through a law changing existing tulip futures contracts into tulip options contracts. This substantially reduced investors' risk, thereby pushing up prices dramatically as you'd expect in any normal market. The price increases ...
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As someone who's been thinking of buying a house for a while now and for whom a Bay Area mortgage would stretch the budget rather thin, I've been very interested in the mortgage-interest tax deduction. For anyone out there who isn't a homeowner or prospective homeowner, that's a part of the tax code that allows you to deduct interest on mortgages, which for the first few years of a mortgage is usually a significant portion of the payments. Today's New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about how the mortgage-interest deduction isn't all it's cracked up to be. Specifically, it overwhelmingly helps the rich, and it doesn't seem to boost homeownership at all. Given that, I'm suddenly a lot less enamored with it than I was an hour ago. In fact, I'm inclined to agree with the tax reform panel that unanimously decided that the mortgage-interest deduction should be scrapped as part of a plan to simplify the tax code and eliminate the AMT. Sadly, it looks like that plan was dead ...
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Apparently Tupperware is closer to being bulletproof than you would expect for something that well, doesn't get shot at. Not often, at least.
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I'll never be able remember the exact date from year to year, but it was three years ago on Martin Luther King Day that I started at Apple[1]. It's certainly been an interesting three years. I should bring in three pounds of apples, but they're free in the cafeteria. Or maybe I should bake something with three pounds of apples, but since I've never baked anything with as much as three individual apples, that might be dangerous. I could bring in three pounds of apple juice, but that seems silly. Plus there are the looks you get from the fine folks at Albertson's when you try to weigh the bottles of apple juice in the supermarket aisle. You'd think they'd never seen anyone trying to celebrate their work-anniversary holiday before.... [1] That was actually the third time I'd gone through employee orientation at Apple, since I went through it twice as an intern. I wonder what the record is, and whether if I go through it enough times I get the next one free.
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Our team's project shipped to customers today. As in June when it shipped to developers, you might have heard the news. These are terrific systems, and I'm really excited that everyone will finally have a chance to use them. On a semi-related note, Apple's stock closed at $80.86 today. Somehow that seems appropriate, in a way that, say, $80.85 wouldn't be.
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In the "you learn something new every day" category, I just learned that you can insert Unicode characters into printf-style format strings by using %C. I was trying to insert an emdash — Unicode character 0x2014 — into an NSString and couldn't find a good way to do it until I found some other code that did it with %C. It's documented, too — the man page for printf(3) says this for 'C' and 'c': C Treated as c with the l (ell) modifier. ... c ... If the l (ell) modifier is used, the wint_t argument shall be converted to a wchar_t, and the (potentially multi-byte) sequence representing the single wide character is written, including any shift sequences. If a shift sequence is used, the shift state is also restored to the original state after the character.
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As further evidence of how non-gadgety I am, I present my shopping list for this afternoon: One PS2 memory card. Now, you wouldn't think that's particularly interesting until you realize that I've owned a PS2 for over a year and this is my first PS2 memory card. In fact, I didn't realize till last night that PS2 games require different memory cards from PS1 games. It turns out that in all this time all I've done with my PS2 is play PS1 games and watch DVDs. You'd think I'd use a game console for, y'know, playing games made for the console, but apparently not.
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I'm not a gadget freak by any stretch of the imagination -- I use my cell phone about two or three times a week and I don't even know how to use its camera -- but PC World's 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years is a great read. Maybe that's because I love history, and this is full of historical tidbits that I didn't know. The first pager, the first answering machine, the first cordless phone -- they're all here. Neat stuff.
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One of the cool things about ISAs with variable-length instructions is that when you start disassembling at a random address you can get very interesting results as the poor disassembler tries valiantly to figure out what's going on. Combine that with a rather large instruction set in which most instructions aren't used any more and you can learn all kinds of things. For example, who knew that the x86 instruction set has an instruction called BOUND? Not me, that's for sure -- until otool showed it to me tonight while trying to disassemble something in the kernel. I'll never use it, of course, but it's interesting nonetheless. Update: In case you're wondering why nearly nobody uses the BOUND instruction (aside from it being slower than the equivalent implementation using other instructions on all modern processors) there's this note from the page above: A second problem with the bound instruction is that it executes an int 5 if the specified register is out of range. IBM, in their ...
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I'm really not sure what to say in response to this. More specifically, to the reference to me in there. Update: I should clarify that I found Wolf's note funny (especially because I didn't know about it in advance) and figured that if he'd throw in a random amusing comment about me I probably should at least acknowledge it.... I do wonder if perhaps I'm the least wild developer in his late 20s in the Bay Area. Quite possibly. Or maybe the least social one. Not that I mind terribly...it's just the way I am. Just don't invite me to go out drinking with you, since you'll make me feel guilty about not wanting to come along. Not that I'm opposed to alcohol; I just don't really care for it and don't see the point in paying lots of money to drink stuff I don't like. For example, last night at the 360 Restaurant at the CN Tower, the wine guru at the table ordered an assortment of bottles. I asked folks to recommend one for me and they picked something or other that was supposed to be ...
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In what's been a pretty terrific year in baseball so far, a lot of team and individual races have come down to the last weekend of the season. One that I've been tracking is the National League Rookie of the Year race. Everyone says it's down to Willy Taveras of the Astros, Jeff Francoeur of the Braves, and the Phillies' Ryan Howard. Tonight, the Astros were in a game that they needed to win to keep the Phillies' chance of winning the wild card at slim to none. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, they had a runner on third base. Any hit ties the game. Taveras is up. Exactly where you'd like your Rookie of the Year candidate to be. And the Astros pinch-hit for him. With Orlando Palmeiro. Unless it's a particularly awful year for rookies, you don't pinch-hit for the Rookie of the Year in that situation...and you certainly don't pinch-hit for him with Orlando Palmeiro. It isn't a great year for rookies, but it isn't an awful one either. What the Astros did there shows ...
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Call me weird, but I like earthquakes. Not the buildings-fall-down-and-people-get-killed variety, but the little ones where nothing more interesting happens than having the ground shakes a bit. Every so often I'll feel that sort of shaking going on under me. If I lived somewhere else, I'd probably think it was the neighbors' washing machine being off-balance or something like that, but here in Northern California if the shaking feels just right it's probably an earthquake. And when that happens, there's nothing more fun than going to the USGS Hazards Program - Northern California page and seeing that yep, the little rumbling I just felt was a magnitude 3.1 quake not far from here. Neat.
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I normally don't pay too much attention to Stanford football, but we lost to UC Davis today. That's right, UC Davis. Davis isn't even a Division I school. Wow. How could that happen? I only checked the score because I'm about to sign up for my 5-year reunion in mid-October, and tickets to the football game that weekend cost $30. I didn't think that was worth it, so I figured I'd check how the team was doing. If we can't even beat non-Division I teams, I can't imagine the reunion weekend game's going to be all that good. I'll probably go anyway but man, Davis. Ouch.
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I love debugging things, but I think I'm spoiled most of the time because for nearly everything I work on I can grab the source code, build a debug version, and debug that. Tonight I had the pleasure of debugging something that I originally thought was a bug in the OS but which turned out to be in a third-party application and, because I didn't have the application's source code, I tracked it down to the instruction that went wrong instead of the line. (Actually, two instructions, since the code had two bugs.) Of course, I've reported this to the developer. I wonder what they'll think when they get a bug report saying "you have a bug in the instruction at offset 156 of this function, where you're reading a series of two shorts as an int, and another one at offset 188, where you're reading the short at offset 4 instead of the short at offset 6". I could give them diffs with the fixes, but I suspect diffs to their assembly code probably wouldn't be very useful.
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| 03:57:45 September 17, 2005, Saturday (PDT) |
Source: Out of Cheese |
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Since I'm a programmer, you'd think I'd like technology. And I do, to some extent...but I hate things that are powerful yet completely unusable. Unfortunately, I've hit two such things in the last couple hours that have gotten me annoyed enough to post a bit of a rant. I'm in Seattle for a couple days, staying at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. It's a nice hotel. I'm glad I'm not paying for it, though. It's fancy enough that my room has a flat-screen TV of some sort. Normally I'd just ignore the TV -- I watch so little TV that my poor TiVo probably feels unloved -- but tonight the Eagles were on Monday Night Football so I turned on the TV to try to watch the game. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with the hotel operator because I couldn't figure out how to get the TV to switch to real stations instead of trying to get me to pay for movies or games or other junk. You'd think there'd at least be a "get me out of here to real channels" option in the menu or something like that but ...
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Just a few days after the announcement that our galaxy is a different shape than previously thought, I'll be up in Seattle this weekend helping Galactic Consortium Press celebrate the 42nd printing of The Mooncurser's Handbook. I'll be playing with Erik, Nick, Marc, Deb, and Rick. I'm sure we won't win, but it should be a lot of fun.
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My townhouse has a small backyard. I ignored it for the first year I lived here, which meant that everything the previous residents had there -- a few random plants and a lot of grass -- either grew or died as it felt like. By early July of this year, I had my own little jungle out there. That's when I decided I'd like to be able to walk from one back door to the other and therefore things had to change. And if I was going to tear up some of it, why not tear up the whole thing, put in some of my own plants, and put a little bit of effort into not killing them? Actually having them grow well would be a bonus. A couple weeks ago, Adrienne was up here and picked out two king bougainvilleas for me. I'd cleared out enough space to plant one of them, so we put that one in and I figured I'd dig up the plant in the back corner to create the hole for the other one. One thing led to another and I didn't get around to attacking that other plant till this past Friday night. After a few hours ...
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I saw a thread on Usenet tonight which mentioned that the class-dump utility didn't work with universal binaries, so I took a few minutes and patched it up. It only displays data for the host architecture side of the binary, but that's still better than aborting. To get the changes, download the source code for the main project, then replace CDMachOFile.m with this version and build. Update: Steve Nygard did a much better job than I did and not only added universal binary support to class-dump, but also added a --arch flag so you can display any architecture you like. class-dump 3.1 is now available.
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BBEdit 8.2.3 was released today as a universal binary, so I can run it natively at work. Very cool.
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Buzz points out that not only did Andrew post something to his weblog for the first time in, well, a long time, but it's a fascinating post, too. If you've ever wondered what the secret messages hidden in the Web are, well, he's found them for you. One of the million or so links in that post leads to a page I wish I'd known about long ago: Andrew's list of April Fool's RFCs. Never again will I have to spend minutes searching for the right way to send Internet traffic via pigeons or what to do with my collection of an infinite number of monkeys.
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Peter has some interesting thoughts about objc_msgSend. His post is worth reading if you're curious about some complicated ways to improve performance, but there's one important thing missing: This shouldn't be necessary for nearly all developers. Premature optimization is almost always a bad idea. I'm a bit concerned that folks will read Peter's post and think, "objc_msgSend is slow! Hey, I use Objective-C! I can make my code a lot faster by tweaking my compiler!" Bad idea. The reason why objc_msgSend spends a third of its time in the dyld stub (at least for Peter's test) is that objc_msgSend is really fast. Lots of people have spent lots of time over the years making it as fast as it can possibly be. (Which isn't to say that it can't be faster...feel free to grab the code and see if you can improve it without breaking binary compatibility.) In other words, if your application has performance problems in certain areas, chances are it isn't due to objc_msgSend. Measure your ...
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A couple days ago I finally found the time to figure out how we'd get from Oxford to Edinburgh on June 26th. Merely booking the travel has been an interesting experience. To wit: Late Thursday, go to a variety of British train companies' web sites and search for direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh. Find only one train, from Virgin Trains, leaving Oxford at 8:34 a.m. and getting into Edinburgh at 2:29 p.m. Mail Adrienne, explaining that we'll have to leave Oxford somewhat early if we want to take that train and making sure it's OK. Early Friday, get Adrienne's confirmation that it's OK. Mid-day Saturday, head on over to Virgin's site to make the reservation. Note that the train no longer exists. Since it didn't appear to be close to being sold out on Thursday -- many classes of tickets were still available -- get very confused. Spend lots of time looking for the missing train and come up empty. Start investigating alternatives. Find that there are no direct trains from Oxford to ...
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Today I was all set to ask Andrew if he could take me to the airport on Sunday and pick me up on July 5th when I realized I didn't remember the exact flight times. I switched over to Mail, searched through my Southwest ticket confirmations, and didn't find the ticket. I searched some more; no ticket. I tried different search terms and found all Southwest tickets I've reserved in at least the past seven years, but nothing for Sunday. Confused, I called Southwest to see if perhaps they'd mailed the confirmation to the wrong email address. Nope; they didn't have it at all. I was rather busy when I was making the reservation a couple of months ago, so despite checking the flight times twice with Adrienne, I apparently never actually filled out the ticket purchase form at all. Fortunately, Southwest still had tickets available from San Jose to Burbank on Sunday night and coming back early on July 5th. I'm glad I checked now rather than, say, waiting till Sunday afternoon....
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Today, for the first time ever, I opened the blinds in my office. That worked nicely for a few hours until the sun starting coming in directly through the window late in the afternoon and, despite the air conditioning, the room temperature rose rather quickly. Also, the direct sunlight was reflecting off of various things, blinding people who walked by in the hall. Neither of these effects is particularly desirable, so I closed the blinds again. We'll have to see if I open them for a few hours every day, or if I just give up on them until the first day back after whatever the next thing I work on ships. I'm a programmer, after all...if I'm exposed to sunlight for more than a few hours per year perhaps I'll just shrivel up and turn into a pile of dust.
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I've seen a couple folks write up things about the difference I've made in helping along the transition. That's rather nice of them...but it's far more attention than I deserve (and a lot more than I'd like). I'm just an engineer. I don't manage people, I'm not a tech lead, and I don't provide project direction. Many people worked on this in a variety of capacities. I'd prefer not to be singled out, especially in the context of "Eric's team" or things like that which imply something that isn't true. In other words, if you're happy with Apple's products, thank all of Apple, not just one engineer. And please don't look to this site as a resource similar to what Dave Hyatt does with Surfin' Safari; this is my personal weblog and I'd rather take it down altogether than have anyone consider what I say here as being semi-official or have this be a place to look for Apple announcements.
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What a week...everything went incredibly well. I gave part of a session, met a ton of developers, and helped quite a few folks get things up and running on the Intel-based systems. Lots of fun all around. I also ended up very short on sleep and far behind on email. This weekend I'll try to catch up on both of those. Then I get to head back to work for a week and then take a real break by heading off to England with Adrienne for a week and a half.
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Our team's project shipped today. You might have heard the news.
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My fifth reunion at Stanford is this fall. For every reunion, Stanford puts together a "class book" consisting of one page for every person in the class who wants to send one in. The page includes things like current contact information, a picture, favorite Stanford memories, and a large section for what you've been up to since graduation. I read through Adrienne's copy from her reunion last fall and it was really interesting to see what everyone had been up to. The deadline for getting the page submitted is Wednesday and I've been somewhat busy lately, so I find myself spending my Sunday afternoon trying to put it together. The alumni association is nice enough to provide a PDF file with form fields for the standard info, I figured I could just fill out the fields, print to PDF with Mac OS X's built-in Print to PDF support, open the result in Graphic Converter or something like that to put pictures in, and then mail off the result or just take it to the alumni folks on campus. ...
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You often hear of folks claiming that Godwin's Law applies to something other than online discussions and not really being able to back it up, but I think Ed Felten has a pretty good point as he tries to expand it to copyright policy.
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I turned 27 today, and I see that I've got a little trend going of posting on my birthday with the same title each time -- I did this last year and the year before. This year I more or less gave up on Entenmann's St. Patrick's Day cupcakes and instead bought cute mini St. Patrick's Day cupcakes from Albertson's for my team. I think they went over well, since I brought a fair number of them and only two were left at the end of the day. I didn't plan to do much for my birthday this time around, but I was very pleasantly caught by surprise last night when two people got in touch to ask if I wanted to get together today. As a result, I had lunch with Jon and Chris (and we would've invited other folks, but it really was rather last-minute) and dinner with Katie and Marc at Max's. So it turned out to be a fun birthday after all. Very cool.
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