Plaidophile

This is cool, a bunch of people at Mobileread have done a pretty thorough job of reverse-engineering the Topaz format, and even have rudimentary tools to convert Topaz into SVG, PDF, and XHTML. I'm a bit dismayed that they don't seem to realize how much work went into "just took the book and scanned it, ran an ocr and some corrections/images and put together a huge slow package and called it a salable ebook," but oh well.

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As I've mentioned in the past, I worked on Kindle. I think I've specifically said I worked on the Topaz format. If not, well, that's what I did on Kindle — I designed the Topaz file format and rendering/layout library, and did a lot of the work and problem-solving on the actual conversion process.

One of the (minor but important) parts of the Topaz format is, of course, the DRM, which has so far eluded being compromised, which is funny because it's actually a pretty trivial "secret-sauce" algorithm which was implemented under some pretty ridiculous constraints (I had limited time to implement it, wasn't allowed to pull in any external libraries, and had to keep it performing quickly without using much memory on an already-constrained device), and somehow it's eluded being cracked for a bit over two years.

Until now.

I had been having trouble with Outlook at work, where I'd been getting messages like "As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting" when someone else sent an update for a meeting I was on. Outlook had somehow gotten the notion that I was the meeting organizer, even going so far as to make it so I couldn't change my own reminder time without it trying to send out notifications to everyone about a "change in meeting time." Of course, the meeting itself on the calendar showed the actual originator as the organizer, but apparently Outlook's messaging and calendar components were out of sync with each other. It was probably caused because I originally accepted the meetings from Thunderbird+Lightning, and then later switched back to Outlook. It didn't help that both affected meetings had been updated since their original receipt.

There were plenty of results on a Google search for the key phrase, but none of them provided a solution (plenty of them blamed everything but Outlook, though). Fortunately, I found a workaround which seems to work for now, but it relies on still having the original meeting request messages available and an external IMAP client (so obviously you need to be able to talk to Exchange via IMAP).

Basically, I just deleted the meetings from my calendar, and then found the original request messages. They still showed me as being the organizer with the added wrinkle that the items were "no longer on the calendar," BUT if I used a different email client (i.e. Thunderbird over IMAP) and moved the items back into my inbox, then Outlook finally saw them as they originally were, and I was able to accept the meetings appropriately.

It's fortunate that both of these long-term recurring meetings happened to have been originated recently, though. If I didn't still have the original meeting request emails, I'd have been out of luck.

Hello Kindle source. I am downloading now to see if this actually includes the stuff I worked on (or at least the client end, although frankly it's the backend processing stuff that was actually interesting).

11:16 Oh, that's just the Linux runtime and all the F/OSS libraries it uses. They're just doing the due diligence in compliance is all. Nothing interesting to see here.

I've been summoned for jury duty sometime the first week of February. This is the first time I've ever been summoned for it in my 12 years of eligibility. Hooray!

I actually kind of look forward to it. I see it more as a civic duty and a responsibility, not something to get out of. The timing could of course be better, seeing as how we're on a tight schedule at work for the next couple of months, so I probably need to postpone it anyway (fortunately, the state of California makes that easy to do, and you're allowed to postpone it up to 6 months).

So, for the last several months, Windows XP has been trying its hardest (and succeeding) to piss me off. The thing which pushed me over the edge was some ridiculous driver stuff that would have required me to just reinstall Windows anyway, and since the state of affairs regarding Linux support at work has changed again, I decided that now that I'm between projects I should finally take my chance to switch back to Linux.

I ended up installing Kubuntu, and then very soon afterwards transformed it into Ubuntu (which is pretty easy, since they're really just different package suites for the same master distribution).

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?

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.