Buggin' My Life Away : Personal

Persecutions in Iran

Rick Schaut — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 01:20:00 GMT

Last week, I received news that the United Nations Special Repporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on freedom of religion or belief, Asma Jahangir, published a report expressing serious concerns about apparently new developments regarding the treatment of Baha'is in Iran. I've sat on this since then, debating with myself whether or not I should post something here on an issue that strikes so very close to home with me.

Today, someone forwarded a link to Ruth Gledhill's post yesterday on the subject, and I find the parallels she points out to the historical treatment of Jews to be rather compelling. I can't remain silent, so forgive me for sharing this very off-topic issue here.

Ruth Gledhill's post is excellent, with plenty of links for background information. I don't have much to add except for an anecdote that I think speaks much about the character of the Baha'is in Iran. In 1992, the Baha'is held a world-wide congress in New York. Baha'is from all over the world attended this gathering, except, of course, the Baha'is in Iran. Due to the policies of the Iranian Government, they were unable to attend. In lieu of their attendance, the Baha'is of Iran sent flowers. Not just a handful of flowers, but dozens upon dozens of roses in rather large arrangements.

I'm not asking people to do anything about this. I just want you all to know. Whatever your heart moves you to do about it, even if that's nothing, is fine with me.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Whenever God Shines His Light by Van Morrison

A Ghost from Mac World Past

Rick Schaut — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 10:05:00 GMT

As many people at Mac World pointed out to me, I've been rather silent lately. There's a reason for that. Of the stuff that's on my mind lately, there just isn't a whole heck of a lot I can discuss publicly. Even telling you some of what I did at Mac World this year strays too closely to the realm of forbidden discourse.

So, I'll just relate a story from Mac World past. Right after we shipped Office 98, Ben Waldman decided to take us out to dinner at Fleur de Lys during that year's Mac World. Neat idea, except that I didn't get the e-mail telling us that this place is jacket-and-tie only until I was sitting in my hotel room at the ANA (now the Argent). Great! Now, what do I do?

Well, the dinner was Tuesday night, and I was scheduled to do booth duty Tuesday afternoon. Nordy's is just around the corner, and I was pretty certain I'd be able to get any alterations done by that evening, so I ducked in. Being pressed for time, I didn't pay close attention to prices. I was rather more concerned with whether or not the clothes actually fit.

There was a rack of items on sale, so I figured I'd be OK so long as I chose items from the rack. Everything there was, indeed, on sale, including the rather nice Harris tweed jacked I'd picked out, which turned out to be sale priced at $500.00 off.

Of course, I hadn't noticed that this jacket was sale priced at $500.00 off until we'd finished all the measurements, chalked all the lines and I was standing at the cash register with credit card in hand. At that point, it was either scratch the whole idea of dinner at Fleur du Lys or buy the jacket. So, I bought the jacket. It's still the most expensive item of clothing in my wardrobe.

There's always some kind of dinner thing at Mac World. This year, we had dinner, with some MVP's and members of the customer council, at Frisson, where the food was just as good as the food we'd had at Fleur du Lys, and it didn't cost me a tie and a jacket.

Rick

Update: I neglected to mention running into Dave at the Nisus booth. There was customer there who was asking about Nisus. He said he'd bought Word, even though he didn't want to, because Word had the features he needed. The customer then turned, looked at me, and saw the Word icon on my shirt, at which point Dave burst out laughing. I patted Dave on the back, asked him if he was OK, and offered to get him some water. Check out Dave's blog. He has some good comments on stuff found on the Mac World floor.

The Life from the album "Songs In A Minor" by Alicia Keys

Sometimes I Feel...

Rick Schaut — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:54:00 GMT

I have a sick sense of humor. Ed Fries told me that. It's out in left field and loaded with various inside jokes. Half the fun is seeing how many people get the joke.

One of the ways I've done this is through the "Currently Playing in iTunes" feature of NetNewsWire. At times it's been subtle, like "listening" to Pat Metheny's Wherever You Go on an April 1 post about Mac BU moving down to San Jose, or "listening" to Supertramp's Asylum in a post about our move from .Text to Community Server.

Sometimes, it's not so subtle. The Who's Won't get Fooled Again on any post dated April 1 is obvious, or Jimi Hendrix' If 6 was 9 on a post about byte swapping.

So, when John Welch wrote about Mac BU at the crossroads, the correct choice of Currently-Playing-in-iTunes theme seemed obvious, even down to paraphrasing some of the lyrics.

Well, I'm sad to say that Cream's Crossroads was the wrong song for my previous post. After the exchange I've had with John and others in the comments, the correct theme song would have been, well, what I'm "listening" to now.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers Band

PS. Smile, John. It's a joke.

Feeling Antinomial

Rick Schaut — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:44:00 GMT

Today's theme seems to be names. Dave Winer and Kosso are wondering about Robert Scoble's middle initial. Sorry, Robert, but I've already staked a claim to having all the relevant initials.

On almost related note of vanity, having a last name that happens to be a common verb in some other language makes for a Feedster search that will occasionally turn up a movie review that you can't read. Google searches tend to suffer from a similar problem of turning up multiple web sites that have the German equivalent of "Click here to view guest book." I knew I should have taken German in high school.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Rick Kick Shaw by Cecil Taylor Trio

Gettin' Published

Rick Schaut — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:57:00 GMT

Well, APress is advertising it, and Amazon is taking orders for it, so I suppose I can now publicly revel in the fact that Joel Spolsky selected my essay on Mac Word 6 for his collection of essays, The Best Software Writing I, Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky. Props go to Derek Miller at Pen Machine for nominating the essay in the first place.

Back in October, I'd noticed that Derek had nominated the essay for Joel's book. At the time, I felt honored, but didn't really think it would be selected. I was rather surprised when, a couple of months ago, Joel contacted me for permission to publish it.

I don't think of myself as a writer. Though people have told me that I should write more often, most of them have been members of my family or close friends. I'd mostly chalked that sort of thing up to unmitigated bias and moved on. Yet, almost simultaneously with Joel's request to publish my essay on Mac Word 6, I got a completely unrelated offer from a small publisher about writing a book.

Unfortunately, regardless of how my self-image might change because of this, it's still very hard to figure out when I'd actually have time to do some serious writing. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to be head-down getting Mac Word up to speed on the new XML-based file formats we just announced. After that, there's a lot of work to be done investigating universal binaries.

Who knows? Maybe I'll sit down and do some writing after Mac Office 12 ships. Still, I get the feeling that there's going to be some other issue with Mac Word that I won't want to let drop. After all, I've asked myself a variation of this same question following the completion of the previous 6 major releases of Mac Word, and I'm still doing this.

By the way, Joel, I do have a nice home, but it's in Woodinville not on Mercer Island; my mother is probably much more fond of the condo in Bothell than she would have been of a loft in Seattle; I rather doubt that anyone would mistake my Acura sedan for a Bently convertible; and we just sold the big boat.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Savor/Toussaint L'Overture by Santana

Wes Montgomery

Rick Schaut — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:47:00 GMT

When I first started this blog, I said I'd talk about music from time to time. I've been searching for the right opportunity to do so, but, until now, none have presented themselves.

This morning, however, NPR's Morning Edition had a piece on Wes Montgomery. The big news is that Verve have reissued a remastered version of Smokin' at the Half Note with a few extra tracks thrown in for good measure. Pat Metheny calls this "the absolute greatest jazz guitar album ever made."

While I'm not sure I agree with Pat's assessment, believing that at least one or two of Pat's own albums might well belong in that spot, I do agree that this album belongs in the library of anyone who either loves jazz or appreciates the skills of a very talented guitarist.

What makes Smokin' so special is that it's a live recording. It captures the spontaneity and invention inherent in jazz improvisation. It's one thing to work out a solo in the studio where you have time to think about an idea and several recording takes to express it to your satisfaction. It's quite another to do the kinds of things Wes does in the impromptu setting of a live performance.

This is no self-indulgent foray into flights of technical fancy ala Al DiMeola and his cohorts on a stage in San Francisco. Not that I don't enjoy listening to Al and Paco and John trading riffs that leave me shaking my head in wonderment, Wes' playing has a soulful quality that's absent in more popular live albums. When I listen to Wes, I'm less wowed by the technical display, though there is little doubt that Wes had a technical ability that rivals any guitar player, than I am simply moved by what Wes says. Wes' musicality is on another level altogether.

So, my advice is that you run, don't walk, to your nearest music reseller, and get your hands on this release of Smokin' at the Half Note. You won't be disappointed.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: West Coast Blues by Wes Montgomery

Caponomics

Rick Schaut — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:02:00 GMT

Way off topic, but Bruce Stram is a cousin of mine, and Football Outsiders has published a guest column that Bruce penned. It's a fascinating review of the Economics of the NFL salary cap.

I would venture to guess that few of my Apple-using readers happen to be football fans, but I couldn't resist giving the props to cousin Bruce. On the other hand, if you're at all interested in Economics in general, Bruce's article is a very good piece.

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: No Ordinary Love by Sade

Update: In the "Jokes only an Economist would love" department, I'd sent an e-mail to Bruce noting how a statement he'd made looks remarkably similar to Say's Law. Bruce facetiously replied that it's really Stram's Law; Say stole it from him, at which point, I asked if that means that I am the Walras (koo koo ka choo)?

Snowballs in Summer

Rick Schaut — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 02:05:00 GMT

Snowballs in Summer

They always start with something small. You take a three-day weekend to spend some time with your family in Victoria. You stay a couple nights at the Empress. Spend a couple mornings enjoying the waterfront. Spend an evening visiting friends who live further north on Vancouver Island (where you see, of all things, a Chinese restaurant advertising a smorgasbord).

You wake up Sunday morning in Victoria. Your day’s itinerary includes a ferry ride from Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen and a double-hop flight from Seattle to San Francisco via Portland. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll have barely enough time at home to get a quick shower and repack for the upcoming week. And the flight crew for your connecting flight in Portland will have to knock off because they’ve hit their time limit. You won’t check into the hotel in San Francisco until the wee hours of Monday morning.

You spend a busy week attending a variety of sessions at Apple’s World-Wide Developers’ Conference. The shwag is nice, but the backpack isn’t quite cool enough to get you to dump your present, Swiss Army backpack. During the keynote, you think about Arlo Rose, the fact that nobody booed when your business unit was mentioned, and whether or not there’s a reasonable way to support spotlight’s file-based design within a single large database. And what about large Word documents? Do they leverage Word’s summary info abilities? Probably not.

All week long, the only time you have to actually write anything is spent writing trip reports for people who aren’t able to attend. I’d share some of them with you, but the reports discuss technology that’s covered by NDA. Sorry, you’ll have to wait.

By the time you get back home, it’s the 4^th of July weekend, and cousins are visiting from Germany. You spend the next ten days sailing, camping, visiting the Experience Music Project and watching flying fish down at the Pike Place Market. It’s a good thing that their English is better than your German—particularly given that most of the German you know is profane.

The Monday after the cousins leave is nearly three weeks since your family trip to Victoria, and it’s been precisely that long since you’ve done any real work. In the mean time, testers have been finding a number of AppleScript issues you’ll want to fix before the next project goes on the clock. Catch-up time. As you work on the AppleScript issues, you discover even more issues. You’ll need to refactor sizable chunks of code if you’re ever going to get a handle on all the problems that need attention.

By now, the work snowball has become huge. The other snowballs—the sprinkler system that needs repair, refinishing the deck (because it’s due), scheduling the repair work on the crumbling concrete of the steps from the driveway to the front court-yard, and the camping gear that still needs to be re-stowed (so you can, once again, park your car in your garage)—loom as large as ever. You wonder if you’ll ever write another blog post again, and people are beginning to wonder if you’ve abandoned it.

In the mean time, the Mariners have gone south, and Theo Epstein has traded Nomar Garciaparra to the White Sox. Something’s wrong in the Universe, because there really isn’t anywhere in the Majors where a person with a name like Nomar Garciaparra should be playing other than Boston.

Nothing to do but have faith. It’s summer. The snowballs will melt. Eventually.

Rick

Where's Rick?

Rick Schaut — Sat, 01 May 2004 01:57:00 GMT

Where's Rick?

Wow, leave blogging aside for a while, and the world just passes you by. The past few weeks have been so busy, that I haven’t even been able to read the blogs I follow. I fired up NetNewsWire this evening, and there were over 700 posts awating my perusal. Clearly, I’m not going to get through them all.

So, why have I not been blogging lately? Well, we sent Mac Office 2004 off to manufacturing, at which point we all took a few days to just decompress. At the end of a product cycle, you tend to not even want to look at a computer, let alone sit down in front of one in order to type out a few random thoughts. Unfortunately, my boat was out of the water getting a new coat of paint on the bottom, so I didn’t get to do much sailing either. Yes, my timing was impeccable.

Also, the end of April is a very busy time for members of the Bahá'í Faith. We have three holy days, an annual meeting, our regular monthly meeting (monthly in terms of the Bahá'í calendar, not the Gregorian calendar—don’t ask), and a national convention all packed into the span just short of two weeks. In any event, my evenings have been pretty clogged, and, in fact, I have another meeting to go to tonight.

After the decompression time was over, it was back to work where I’ve had three major items on my plate. The first is engineering excellence planning which is where we take a look at some of our development methodologies and think about ways we can improve the process. As part of this, I’ve been working on writing some new unit testing code for Word which my Win Word counterparts are interested in stealing when I’m done (and I’m almost there).

The second is some product planning for Office 12. I’ve blogged about this in broad strokes before. Basically, we take some prototypical users, and we design some product use scenarios around those users’ needs. I’m a member of a cross-discipline team that’s drilling down into one of those scenarios. There is a different team drilling down into each scenario, understandiing what users are doing, looking into how our products presently help them solve the problems they’re facing and identifying what might be referred to as users’ “pain points” as they try to solve these higher-level problems. From this work, we’ll design the features that will go into the next version of Mac Office.

The third big item on my plate was the Customer Council meeting. The Customer Council consists of a number of customers who have purchased premium support. One of the things you can have with premium support is the ability to sit down with the product teams and discuss what your issues are. We had representatives from firms like the Rand Corporation, Turner Broadcasting, Gannett News, and several others. I think there were about 25-30 representatives present.

Normally, presentations at the Customer Council meetings are handled by program managers, but, following the release of Office 2004 to manufacturing, we had some personnel changes in the program management group affecting Word. So, I got to be the one making the presentation for Word, which is something I really enjoy doing and don’t often get to do because I’m a developer. The other cool thing about it was, after I’d finished my presentation and discussed some of the future directions we plan on taking with the next version of Office, none of the members of the Customer Council had any further questions. Members of the Customer Council don’t pull their punches, so when they don’t have any further questions or comments after you’ve finished the presentation, you’ve pretty much nailed it.

The other very cool thing about this year’s Customer Council is that we spent a good chunk of time sitting down with representatives from Apple, and the level of communication in the room was appreciably better than anything I’ve seen in the past almost 14 years. The results were so positive, that we think we want to do this kind of thing, sit down with customers, representatives from Apple and representatives Microsoft all at the same time to hammer out some issues. I don’t think it will be all that long before users reap some benefits from this kind of cross-communication. It’s very much a sea-change, and, I think, a very welcome development for the industry.

Anyway, so while I’ve been doing all this, Chris Pratley has been on paternity leave (congratulations on the baby, Chris). He’s been blogging, and blogging, and blogging and blogging about some of the history of Word. The posts provide a nice compliment to my post on Mac Word 6.0. Unfortunately, in the process, Chris discussed some of the things I had in mind.

One of the issues I wanted to talk about is why there is no “reveal codes” feature in Word. People ask me about this relatively often, and, when they do, I know I’m talking to former Word Perfect users. As Chris points out, Word Perfect used markup codes to do things like turn on bold, then, later, turn it off, similar to the way HTML works, while Word uses what might be described as a parallel array of runs of text matched to buckets of formatting properties (well, actually, they’re coded as differences from the underlying style, but that’s a detail for another post). One of the things Chris doesn’t point out, however, is how Word’s design is better suited for WYSIWYG word processors.

Suppose I give you an arbitrary location in the document (because, say, that happens to be the first character of the first line being displayed in the current document window), and ask you whether or not the character at that location is bold. Under the markup design, you have to start from the beginning of the document, and scan forward to the arbitrary location I’ve given you. Under Word’s design, you merely search for the corresponding run of text that contains that document location, and go look at the property bucket to see if bold is there. In Computer Science terminology, Word Perfect’s design requires an O(n) search, while Word’s design requires an O(log(n)) search.

Now, this didn’t mean all that much back in the days when the word processor presented the document on a character-based display. In fact, it actually put Word at a bit of a handicap, because Word was doing extra work to maintain the parallel buckets for all the formatting informtion. Word Perfect could just dump whatever characters you typed into the file without having to worry about ensuring that any formatting that’s applied to the newly-typed text gets stored as well as the new text. When people start using Windows, however, Word’s design had the advantage while Word Perfect’s design was at a disadvantage. This is yet another data point showing why we need to design the UI first, and then implement the features. It’s also something to keep in mind when people think about the history of word processors.

Rick

RSS

Rick Schaut — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 21:40:00 GMT

In a comment to my bio, Scott points out that I was destined to blog.

Scott and I met at Scoble’s Geek Movie Night. This is one of the cooler things about blogging. You get to meet new, and very interesting, people like Scott and Scoble.

Rick

Where I'd Rather Be

Rick Schaut — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 02:28:00 GMT

Sometimes, information at your fingertips is a bad thing. For example, from my desktop at work, I can view the current weather conditions on Seattle’s Elliott Bay. When you have the means to go play on the water, yet have lots of work to do, you don’t really want to know that the conditions are just about right for playing. This is particularly true when the first day of spring has just passed you by, and the time since you last played has been far too long.

Just thought you’d like to know the sacrifices we make in order to bring you Mac Office.

</facetious>

Rick

On Vacation

Rick Schaut — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:18:00 GMT

I'm a few states south, and a couple of time zones east, of Seattle (just off Galveston Bay, actually) visiting family. Since it seems I've acquired an admirer from Sweden--or at least the ISP he's using, Telia Network Services, is in Sweden, I've disabled comments while I'm away. My apologies for any inconvenience.

In the mean time, here's an amusing local news item.

Rick

We Don't Need No Steenkin'...

Rick Schaut — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 04:35:00 GMT

As I type this, I'm listening to some "Ten Years After" being played on an ELP model LT-1LRC laser turntable routed through a CounterPoint pre-amp/amp combo system into some Carver Planar speakers. Kinda makes you want to say "piffle" to the whole ACC vs. WMA thing, and I'm really having a hard time getting Alfonso Bedoya's famous line out of my head.

Of course, when I look at the price tag for all this stuff, a different meaning for Bedoya's line comes to mind...

Rick

A Brief Bio

Rick Schaut — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 00:28:00 GMT

Since I’m a n00b in the bloggosphere, I suppose a brief introduction is appropriate. So.....(read more)