64 bits, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. kinda.

I find it hilarious to read some of the comments in news stories on technology companies, especially from folks who don’t write software for a living.

A lot of the evil that people accuse Microsoft of is really incompetence, short sightedness, tunnel vision or good intentions misinterpreted. People hate Microsoft, so they choose to see evil in it’s every decision. Most of the folks at Microsoft are smart, hard-working, honest people that want to make really cool software. Of course, I’ve met many MS folks who are testosterone-driven idiots without a creative bone in their body that just want to kill every other software company in existence. Too often, people mistake a move by the former folks as a scheme by the latter. This is horrible for the good folks at MS, but if that company wanted to fix its image, it wouldn’t have made a chair-throwing, hyper-aggressive salesman to be the CEO.

When John Nack posted about Adobe’s decision not to do 64-bit Photoshop for OS X in the next release, he knew he was going to get attacked for it. I thought he did an awesome job going through the reasons behind the decision without throwing blame around. I thought he gave real insight into what happened. He was open and up-front about everything and completely clear. Yet, you read the comments on the various sites and you can see that people read what they want to read and will interpret any decision within the context of what they want to believe. I’ve had more visibility into the decision-making hierarchies at Adobe than any other company I’ve ever worked for, and I can tell you that the people I work with always want to do the right thing for the people that use our software. No one is playing political games with Apple. Just because Steve Jobs says something is easy doesn’t actually make it easy. If it was always that easy, Final Cut Pro would be a 64-bit cocoa app already.

People who don’t write desktop software don’t understand why it might be harder than checking a checkbox to port from the PowerPC to Intel. People who don’t write desktop software don’t understand why it might be hard to write a new operating system from scratch or why having 100s of engineers doesn’t make it go faster. People also don’t understand that in an application where performance is paramount (like a media editing application), porting to a new operating system, hardware platform or compiler is a lot trickier than it seems because a lot of code is there doing tricky platform-specific stuff that has been hand tuned over years. People who don’t write software don’t understand what kind of effort it is to port millions of lines of code built in C++ against Carbon into Objective-C using Cocoa.

Maybe people shouldn’t care. It’s probably a bad idea to see how the sausage is made, right? This is probably true up to the point that people claim something is easy when they have no idea of the actual effort involved.

Apple isn’t evil. Apple is secretive. This is fun as a customer. This is evil as a developer. Microsoft will promise something for years, deliver betas and then pull the plug. Apple will be silent and then spring a huge change on its developers and then chastise them for not rewriting their apps from scratch again.

I don’t know if there is much of a point here except to say that before you accuse a company of screwing over their users for some political end, you might want to try and understand the real issues.

I think that I’m finally figuring out this social web stuff for myself

I’m a Generation X geek. This means that all this web 2.0 and social networking stuff doesn’t scare me (I was on BBSes before the internet y’all), but it also means that I’m not into giving away all my creative output for free or sharing personal details with strangers. It also means that I’m experienced enough to know that stuff I put out online can come back to haunt me (there are net news posts from 1988 that I can still find in searches that make me cringe). So, I give a thought to what I put out into the inter-ether.

With all that in mind, it is a bit tough to figure out what is appropriate to post on all the various social networks that I am continually dragged into and websites that I have (like this one).  After some serious thought, I think I’m figuring out a taxonomy that works for me: I post nearly no personal details in public forums. That may not make sense given that you are reading my opinions right now on my blog. However, my opinions are free to the world, the details of my personal life are my own business.  You want to write a blog about the intimate details of your personal life, that is great. I just like to choose who I talk about that stuff. Reading this blog, you can figure out a lot of what I care about and you can see who I am as a person, but you don’t really know me (unless you know me). That means that if I share those details of my life with you, it is a statement about our relationship.

Sites like Facebook are a bit different. There, I have an explicit trust circle that can only see details once we are connected. I really like this. I only add people as friends on Facebook if I really know them off-line. This means I can share more, although I still have to be careful because of the mixture of business and personal contacts in that environment.

The way I use twitter actually surprises me a bit. I put way more personal stuff into twitter than I do in other social networks. This is weird given how public my tweets are. However, with Twitter, the messages are so short that they are pretty meaningless without the context of a personal relationship. So a tweet may be meaningless to someone that doesn’t know me, but provides fascinating details to a friend.

These are just some of my thoughts that have been evolving around this. I’d be interested in hearing what other people’s takes on this are. Especially from my generation or older.

Canlis

Canlis is a Seattle institution and one of the most famous restaurants in the city. It is also a bit of an enigma, in the way that many fine Seattle restaurants are enigmas for someone who grew up far from the west coast. The enigma is the informality mixed with formality. Time and time again, I have put on nice clothes for an intimate dinner at an expensive restaurant only to be seated next to someone in shorts and a t-shirt, or to be confronted with a waiter who wants to be part of the dinner conversation. This would be perfectly reasonable in many restaurants, but not one that costs over $100 per person, in my opinion.

Canlis has a reputation as one of the more stuffy restaurants in Seattle, proclaiming on their website:

Canlis is a fine dining restaurant. Most men feel comfortable in a suit or sport coat. They are not required, but they are encouraged. Certainly, casual attire (jeans, tennis shoes, short sleeve shirts) is not appropriate. The golden rule: there is no such thing as overdressed!

I was heartened by this, and looked forward to our meal there. Of course, because this is Seattle, the restaurant does not enforce this policy and so, in my suit, we were seated next to a party of people in jeans and casual shirts. Luckily, the balance of people’s attire in the room was more on the formal side, so I did not feel too out of place although I was dressed more formally than anyone else in the restaurant under 60. I did feel somewhat overdressed.

The atmosphere does lend an air to the stuffyness: It does feel like a formal restaurant. The staff is numerous and well dressed, the decor is tasteful. When you pull up, a valet rushes to your door. You are greeted as you enter and your coat is whisked off your back and put away.

This formal atmosphere was fairly destroyed, however, by the wait staff who were overly friendly, made mistakes with our order and made some fairly large blunders for a restaurant proclaiming itself as a fine dining establishment. Twice a course was served when one of our party was not at the table. This might seem like a minor complaint, but it is the kind of thing you don’t expect in a restaurant like this. There were a lot of small things that really destroyed the atmosphere: food was served to the wrong person; one server kept bumping a person at our table while serving another table; one of the items we ordered was forgotten by the server and then delivered after the course was complete. You could pardon these kind of mistakes in a lesser restaurant. We certainly haven’t experienced this very often in this price range. Other “formal” touches were there: napkins were replaced whenever someone left the table; silverware was exchanged at the end of each course.

One other thing was just odd. There were a lot of families with small children there. I have nothing against this, but I’m not used to seeing it in this kind of establishment. Especially in these kinds of numbers. There was even a crying infant there. I love children, but it really does take away from a high-end meal to see a child pretending to play the drums with his silverware at the next table, or to hear a child screaming.

All of these minor quibbles (and they are minor taken individually) could be excused if the food was exquisite. The food was quite good. Of my whole tasting menu, I had only one complaint: my scallops were not cleaned adequately; there was some very unpleasant grit as I ate them. However, they were cooked perfectly, so that is a minor complaint. The whole menu was quite good and was certainly equal to other restaurants in its price range.

Overall, I have a hard time recommending this restaurant. I think it would be a great place to bring an out of town relative if you want an interesting view and your guest is enough of a foodie that you want to skip Cutters, Salty’s or Pallisades. Beyond that, I don’t see a real reason to go there again. The food is good, but there is better in the city at the same price or less. The atmosphere is nice, but not an attraction in itself.

Going out for really high-end food should really be a treat. It should be an experience that you want to savor, to remember fondly. It should make an event extra special. Life is too short and money is too precious to feel like you’ve dressed up for nothing and thrown away huge amounts of money on a meal that was not worth it.

I didn’t hate Canlis, but I didn’t love it either; and for food at this price, it means I really can’t recommend it.

Canlis in Seattle

Yet another incompetent Bush appointee shows his true colors too late

Official’s Journey Ends in a Swirl of Accusations – New York Times

In 2004, less than two months after his confirmation as housing secretary, Mr. Jackson told a House panel that he believed poverty “is a state of mind, not a condition,” provoking strong criticism. Two years later, he said in a speech that he had canceled a contract for a company after its president told him that he did not like Mr. Bush. Mr. Jackson later said he had made the story up.

This month, Mr. Jackson took a pounding from senators who demanded explanations for accusations that he had steered hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends for work at the Virgin Islands housing authority and reconstruction in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

coffee is good for you!!

BBC News – Daily caffeine ‘protects brain’

Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.

A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.

UK experts said it was the “best evidence yet” of coffee’s benefits.

enough with the silos and security-holes already

Hey social networking sites, can we just cede the video sharing to youtube, the audio sharing to myspace, the photo sharing to flickr and the rest to whatever. At least, can you all stop forbidding embedding of each others’ content? It is such a pain in the ass to have to upload each video or mp3 to 18 different websites. Most everyone I know is already on all of them anyway. My network varies in size from site to site, but it’s pretty much the same people. Can you guys think of something new for a change instead of trying to be the next facebook or myspace and failing catastrophically? (especially since you can’t think of a new twist on the idea)

On a related topic, consolidating the stuff from all these different sites is a good idea, so friendfeed and plaxo and facebook apps, well done. Now if you can do it without having me give you my login details to all those other sites. Sure random web 2.0 startup, I’ll give you all my login details (won’t that work well when we have OpenID), and I’ll trust that you’ll never do anything bad with them no matter who buys you. I can’t believe that people give this kind of info out…

Fiddling while Rome burns…

As usual Maureen Dowd sums it up quite nicely.

Soft Shoe in Hard Times – New York Times

“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

Dude, you’re already in the ditch.

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy. Yet the more terrified Americans get, the more bizarrely carefree he seems. The former oilman reacted with cocky ignorance a couple of weeks ago when a reporter informed him that gas was barreling toward $4 a gallon.