“Spending time with the family” is a quotation I’ve seen in every executive “so long, and thanks for all the fish” (alias: goodbye) email.
If you work in a large technology company, you’ve read those type of emails: they precede a round of organisational shenanigans, back-stabbing, nail biting and re-reading of Machiavelli.
2 Risks and 7 Tips for Consultant Programmers: whilst this blog post talks about consultants who are architecting/programming systems – I think this can apply to all external contractors. It’s like Commercial Stockholm Syndrome.
A part of the Acrobat 8 launch today, Creative Suite Premium is getting a revamp.
And not just with Acrobat 8. Goodbye GoLive, hello Dreamweaver 8.
GoLive Systems, a small Hamburg Mac-only developer, was purchased by Adobe before the dotcom boom. Sadly, it might have been the boom’s first casualty as it languished behind Dreamweaver.
No surprises here.
I am not a Mac fan-boy. Been there, done that. And to be truthful, I think I am a little too old for zealotry. The innocent dogmatism of youth has been replaced with that pragmatism to the point of pessimism middle age.
My 15″ MacBook Pro runs MacOS X 10.4.7. The last time I rebooted was the installation of the MacOS X 10.4.7 update. That restart was so long ago, I honestly cannot remember rebooting.
Pop over to a Terminal window, uptime: up 22 days.
Up until May this year I had been a Windows person. Dell this, Windows that. A clean shutdown or restart at least once per week would keep the Dell going. After constantly sleeping/hibernating, things just didn’t feel stable anymore under Windows XP. Maybe it was all the weird VPN networking stuff that I had to run. Or memory not being freed up.
This MacBook Pro gets an equal amount of digital thrashing. It’s turned on and being used at least 14 hours per day. During the day, there are multiple shut-the-laptop lid hibernations, running multiple applications. Installing, launching Mac apps; de-installing (drag-install, drag to trash deinstall). Mad as hatter cats pulling out the magsafe power connector; Dashboard widgets are added, removed and refreshed. PowerPC (Rosetta) applications launching, force-quit Sheepshaver. Wireless network router reconfiguration. The screen in brilliant for spreadsheets – the performance on the Mac and Windows under virtualization are excellent.
During these 22 days I’ve booted Windows XP at least 15 times using Parallels. Most recently to run a TRS-80 emulator, and to take a look at a personal email in an archive .pst file. Even backing up the PC is easy. Drag copy the disk image onto our family file Debian server.
Under Parallels, everything I’ve installed has worked first time. Office 2003, Office 2007 Beta. Adobe Flex 2.0, Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Microsoft XML Notepad.
In a smartly organized corporate environment, and some smart configuration created by some smarter infrastructure cookies, a single standard Windows XP image could be created on a server. This could be pulled down when people come into work as their standard “office” suite. Separating the environments for executives could be a mechanism of saving costs.
Without the apple-coloured glasses, there are some deficiencies: the MacBook Pro has an integrated video camera in the lid but there are no device drivers for Parallels; and ACPI is yet to be supported under Parallels: so no Vista Beta/Vista SP1 yet. Not a big gamer thankfully as games performance/Direct3D sucks.
It’s still not a real Windows XP machine. There is no little laser-etched blue OEM badge (the Windows XP Professional installed is a box copy). So 22 days uptime or not, there is something that just doesn’t feel right: running Windows on a Mac is like listening to Country and Western in a Ferrari. You feel, well, dirty.
Still, this MacBook Pro has been the most stable Windows laptop I’ve had the pleasure of using. So, by definition – is the safest way to run Windows XP is under virtualization on MacOS X?
Paul Brickhill, original Australian author of The Dam Busters may be turning in his grave. The master of fakery is now in charge of re-kindling the memories of the bravest men who never had the chance to pass on their bravery to younger generations.
The director of the longest movies I am thankful I’ve never seen: Lord of the Rings; Peter Jackson, is now remaking the classic 1950s British movie of the book of the famous raid on the dams of the Ruhr valley in 1943.
If he destroys this like he has decimated the love of his childhood, King Kong (1933) , almost as much as the 1976 version: I am going to be livid. This movie is not about ILM/Weta technical gee-whizzery. It is about the men who flew in World War II, and those who lost their lives on both sides for reasons the current young un’s have forgotten.
The Dam Busters movie/book is a salute to quirky English scientist (Barnes Wallis) and to the bravery of airmen of the Empire; in a time that the current generation has quickly forgotten. Richard Todd, himself a veteran, played Wing Commander Guy Gibson (Victoria Cross), who died in a de Havilland Mosquito in Holland, September 1944.
During the Dam Busters raid in May of 1943 Guy was in command, and merely 25 years old. I trust that an appropriate age (that is, young) actor is chosen to provide realism to what otherwise could go the way of King Kong.
We need to remember; and I hope the movie does for the airmen of the Empire what Saving Private Ryan has done for the veterans of D-Day. To remember, not be entertained.
The world is a dangerous place, with a whole bunch of eejits. Sadly, the impact of no laptops on planes will have a serious impact on business travel. It shouldn’t, but it will.
Many senior executives use this “down time” to catch up on emails and sort out their presentations/spreadsheets/reports. For many, this time is the only time execs have to be offline. In the office, or at their destination the time is spent with staff, meetings and customers. Not hunched over a QWERTY keyboard.
I think the impact on technology may be different.
Imagine Business Class with a personal in-seat laptop, with web browser and live internet connection. As their the business traveller has their normal laptop securely locked up in baggage, hopefully on the same plane going to the same destination, this in-seat laptop is their only means of working.
Web access to email has been around for some time. Desktop applications on the web is emerging. Using such tools as forthcoming in Windows Live and Zoho may just find another niche. The challenge for these vendors and IT is to securely connect applications to sensitive data.
Now we just need some forward thinking carriers to implement both high-speed internet and the browser hardware.
Stuff to read:
CNet Ajax Spurs Web rebirth for desktop apps
Technorati Tags:
technology, laptop, plane
Joel on Software, one of the top ten blogs on the web follows the life and tribulations of CEO Joel Spolsky and his company, Fog Creek Software.
The movie/DVD, Project Aardvark, 12 Weeks with Geeks is an excellent view into a modern software company as you follow interns through the creation and release of Fog Creek Copilot.
In recent days, Joel has been over-simplifying management into what I classify as the push, pull and mingle methods:
Mingle: The Identity Management Method
What Joel hasn’t talked about is Leadership.
In truth, good managers are using a combination of all three of these all of the time. Managing and motivating employees is one of the most difficult skills to learn. Once mastered, you are leading.
In a very honest post, Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic, Erik Schwiebert from the MacBU goes into detail on the deep, technical reasons why VB is going to be left out of the next Mac version of Office.
The nuances of the painful decision, based on hard technical sweat, are shown in depth – and illustrate the quite common processes software companies have to go through when their platform mutates.
Maybe if the CLR goes MacOS, and the languages like C# make it to Mac, and there is a common Win Office/Mac Office object model – the world will be in a better place?
Just completed the Australian 2006 Census. For some strange reason, Firefox 1.5 (kept erroring “Connection was Reset”) was not working on MacOS X 10.4, but Safari worked like a treat.
It took 33% of the time to complete the form online. Thank you to the tubes of the internets!
Will the next Australian Census look like this?