Plaidophile

So it's kind of funny when someone asks me if an app I worked on is out and I'm like "No, I think it's just in beta" and he's like "well a friend of mine in Asia said he downloaded it and it's pretty cool and he can do [blah] and [blah]" and I'm like "I think your friend is just quoting the information that's been publicly released about it" and then I look online and find out that oh, huh, it has been released, and then I download it and mess with it and then realize that while I worked on (a small) part of it, this is the first time I've actually seen the app as a whole.

I guess the next version is where the really cool stuff is going to come in, although it's nice to see that the (very small) part of it I worked on is running nice and fast.

So, today was my one-year anniversary at the new job. Yay! I forgot my security badge.

The funny thing is that the exact same thing happened on my first anniversary at Amazon too. Weird.

I only even thought to check whether this was my anniversary when I realized that the only time I'd ever forgotten my badge at Amazon was on my anniversary and thought, hey, didn't I start this job sometime around August 27?

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Oh yeah, today for the first time ever while waiting for The Church of Beethoven's weekly show to start, I finally saw something in the wild:

So, all the patents for the neat inventiony stuff I did on Kindle seem to be available on WIPO's site now. Should I make that one entry I wrote about it a while ago public? I'm still concerned that Amazon might want to bring down The Mighty Fist of Justice on me for that.

I guess I could just link to the patent filings but they seem like such a sterile way of describing it, and even my eyes glaze over reading them.

Quick poll: when you see this documentation in a cross-platform image-handling API:

width: Specifies the width of the image. All implementations support images that are at least 64 pixels wide.

what do you think that means in terms of valid parameters to be passed into the width parameter?

Lately I've noticed that a lot of people are confused about what a hash table is and how one goes about implementing it. (This often comes up when I'm interviewing candidates and I ask them how they'd implement an associative array without the use of std::map.)

A hash table is not using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to order it in an associative array/sorted list/etc.

A hash table is using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to index into a linear, non-sparse array.

Note to self: check outgoing email account before firing off a quick email to the entire group at work.

So I'd been doing pretty good about not having a lot of caffeine lately. Then they went and got an espresso machine at work.

Okay, so it's been pretty well-established that I dislike Windows. But there are some positive points as well:

1. My builds are much faster. This of course isn't really anything to do with Windows directly, but now that I don't have to rsync my source tree from the host OS to the client OS, that cuts a few minutes out of my build cycle (not to mention all the time that's wasted by things getting rebuilt when rsync updates the timestamp even on unchanged files), and of course the tools themselves run a lot faster as well since the hard disk is no longer emulated.
2. My morning startup and evening shutdown are much quicker. This has little to do with Windows and more to do with the fact that the MacBook doesn't have a proper docking station, whereas my Windows laptop (a Sony Vaio) does. The docking station does have some quirks to it (in that you have to be careful that it's safe to undock or else the system completely freezes), but it's nice just being able to drop my laptop on the dock in the morning and that's the entirety of the setup, rather than having to plug in a whole bunch of cables in a particular order (to prevent network services and the monitor and so on from being detected weirdly), and just pressing a button and removing it in the evening. This morning was the first time I had a purely dock-based startup, and after step 1 I couldn't figure out what to do next because I kept thinking there had to be steps 2-5.

Irony: during Passover dinner, being called on the phone about needing to come into work on Sunday. By a coworker who is Egyptian.

I already had a Thursday the 27th. I'm not sure I want to face another one. Guh.

So, at work, one of our target platforms used to have a supporting toolchain on both Linux and Windows, but the next version will be Windows-only. Previously, at work I was running Linux on my work-provided laptop (which I kept locked up in a drawer) and a MacBook connected to it (via NFS) for all the actual user interface stuff (since that combination also works well with perforce, which is pretty finicky about how file permissions get managed).

So, because there's no more Linux support, we have to move to Windows for our primary dev environment, and since Windows and OSX don't really get along that well in terms of managing file permissions and so on, I decided it'd be easier to just reinstall Windows on the laptop and use that as my only environment.

I was never that big a fan of Windows, but starting today I absolutely loathe it. Anyone who thinks that Windows and Macintosh are "more or less the same" can bite me.

Going there on business, March 16-21 23-28. Obviously I will be more or less inaccessible during that time.

So, my reimbursement from my CES travel was downwardly adjusted to the tune of $88, with a note, "Please be advised that your lodging expense has been adjusted to reflect the appropriate limit as stated in the corporate policy." Well, gee, thanks for "bringing my expenditures into compliance with the policy" (did you go back in time and change my credit card bill, too?) when I had actually requested a much less expensive hotel room at Bally's and for whatever reason I was upgraded to Caesar's Palace with no explanation.

I am really glad I only went for two days (well, one and a half, really) of the actual convention, because holy damn was I ready to kill people today.

(Note to self: Seriously, you're agoraphobic. Stop doing these things.)

On the plus side, the curbside checkin and subsequent security line were really short. (I don't know why everyone was lined up inside when curbside checkin had like 3 people in line.)

I made the mistake of taking my laptop to the show floor with me, which has made my backpack very heavy. On the plus side, it's made it so I can post this post.

So I'm going to CES in Las Vegas this year (to see what our competition is up to, not to be a booth babe or wahtever). As in, I'm sitting in the airport waiting for my delayed flight. The boarding area is getting crowded and pretty much everyone who is talking is talking about CES. I'm also a bit agoraphobic (especially in large crowds). This should be "fun."