Off to Los Angeles
In about an hour I’ll board my flight to LA, which will be my first on Virgin America airlines. I’m heading down a day or two early to visit my younger sister and enjoy a bit of warm sun before the conference kicks off on Monday. From what I hear, there should be some pretty exciting stuff happening on Monday beginning with Ray Ozzie’s keynote address.
Of course, what’s most exciting to me is that on Tuesday we’ll begin talking about all of the work my team and I have been doing for nearly two years now (has it really been that long?!?). My friend and colleague David Washington, platform PM for the Find & Organize team, will be presenting our session on Tuesday afternoon. It’s the one titled “Windows 7: New APIs to Find, Visualize, and Organize.” Apparently it was a bit of a challenge to come up with an interesting title that didn’t spoil the fun of our announcements. At any rate, if you’re at all interested in Windows Explorer or Search – you won’t want to miss it 🙂
I’ll be there to help answer questions after the session, to assist with our hands-on labs, to hear everything you have to say about the work we’ve done and what we can do to make sure Windows 7 is a compelling offering for you and your customers / users.
Oh yeah, and one more thing for those of you following along at home. On Thursday, David and I were interviewed by Dan Fernandez for my very first Channel 9 video. I expect it’s the first of many, and I think you’ll enjoy it when it’s made available in just a few days.
About a week ago we posted an entry to the Windows 7 Engineering Team Blog about Windows Desktop Search, describing the motivation behind indexing files and what investments we’re making in that area of the system. It’s a good read so check it out if you haven’t already.
This afternoon we made a follow-up post addressing some of the suggestions, comments, and concerns that showed up in the comments to the original entry.
If you have more feedback, please keep it coming. I and others will try to respond in the comments over there, or in future follow-ups.
I was just reading this article from the Wall Street Journal and was struck by how it butchered an issue very important to everybody who uses the internet. Mind you, this isn’t a WSJ “blog” post, this is the full-on deal apparently penned by Monica Langley and Jessica E. Vascellaro.
Here’s where it started to go wrong:
Congress is considering measures that could have an adverse impact on Google’s business, including laws that could limit companies’ ability to deliver personally targeted online advertisements and rules that would allow telecommunications companies to charge different prices for different levels of Internet service.
At first I thought to myself, “what the heck does that mean? ISPs already charge different prices for different service levels.” Oh well, whatever, this article is about Schmidt supporting Obama so one goofy line is forgiveable right? But oh no, it gets much worse. Speaking as if she/they were an authority on the matter:
Mr. Obama’s stances on some issues important to Google remain unclear. Both the candidate and the company, however, have said they support limiting Internet service providers from charging different rates for different levels of service, saying it would be discriminatory and stifle innovation.
I’m not aware that Obama or anyone else have supported such limitations. Such limitations make no sense at all. What Obama and companies like Google, Microsoft, and others all DO support is what has become known as “net neutrality.” Net neutrality isn’t about price levels for internet service. It’s about limiting or banning internet service that discriminates against specific endpoints. The closest thing I can think of to what the WSJ said is that one effect of this could be an ISP charging a higher price level for somebody else’s service.
It would be like AT&T charging me extra, or intentionally giving me more dropped calls, if I use my iPhone service to call Dominos pizza instead of Pizza Hut, because Pizza Hut made a deal where they pay AT&T to sabotage phone calls to their competitors.
Price levels? Come on WSJ, I use to respect you guys.
Indexer Status gadget updated
I updated my Windows Search indexer gadget with a couple of fixes. If you run the gadget, you may want to update in order to fix issues with the play and fast-forward (“index now”) buttons not properly reflecting the state of the indexer back-off feature after clicking one of them.
Also, if you like the gadget, please go to the Gadget Gallery page and give it a good rating 🙂
Countdown to PDC
PDC is only 26 days away! While I don’t have a session of my own as I’d originally hoped, I will indeed be there. The session representing my team’s platform work is already up on the PDC agenda. You can find it by narrowing down to the sessions titled “Windows 7.”
Windows 7: New APIs to Find, Visualize, and Organize
The presenter is my good friend David Washington, who is my team’s platform and SDK PM. The talk will cover a variety of really cool topics, including my feature area which we’ll be talking more about soon.
If you’re going to be at PDC this year please leave a comment and share a bit about yourself and what you’re looking forward to seeing there.
What is a “leftist?” Am I one?
I support Barak Obama for president. Does that make me a “leftist?” It seems that these days this is the only qualification necessary to earn that label. It’s a label that gets tossed around as a derogatory and all-encompassing term but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Is anyone who supports John McCain a “rightist?” Do all of those people believe exactly the same things?
Here’s an idea. I’ll give you a few bullet points about me, and you can decide whether or not this label applies.
- I believe in minimizing the size of government.
- I think politics should be dealt with as locally as possible.
- I dislike the notion of “redistribution of wealth” and pretty much despise welfare and the culture that tends to develop around it.
- I think balancing the budget is important and that our debt and its continued growth are out of control.
- My political ideal is that people are free to make bad choices and that they should be held responsible for the consequences.
Those are a few aspects of my political philosophy that I consider to be “conservative” in nature.
But then there are these:
- I do not believe in God or heaven.
- I think science should be taught in science class. In school I learned about the Greek and Roman gods like Zeus and Venus. If you want to teach about creation myth in that context that is fine with me.
- I do not think the entire world should be like America. I’m in Italy as I write this up and it seems perfectly great just the way it is.
Confused yet? That’s just the beginning.
I do not “support abortion.” I can imagine no circumstances in which one would be a part of my life, and if someone asked me whether they should have one there are very few circumstances where I would even pause to consider an answer other than “no.”
But I support abortion rights, or at least oppose any ban on them at the federal level. I do not believe that anyone can conclusively determine “when life begins” and that giving an unborn fetus rights is a slippery slope that ends with banning contraceptives. I consider this to be a “small government” position, and would prefer that such determinations be handled at the state level if necessary.
I support gay marriage. Not just in that I support the right of gay people to be married, but much more — I think that a gay couple who are in love and planning to spend their lives together should get married. I don’t think the law should say anything about it either way, but my core beliefs place a great deal of value on a societal commitment being he absolute goal of a romantic relationship.
Basically, I value monogamy and embrace our societies’ decision to formalize it. Furthermore, I believe that gay relationships are as real, natural, and valuable as heterosexual ones. Combine those two values and the result is that I support gay marriage.
Given the above, I never know how to answer if someone asks me for my political affiliation. Right now I support the democrats, believing that they represent leadership more in tune with my values, including the conservative ones.
Political posts
You may have noticed a “surge” if you will of politically-oriented posts on this blog. I do apologize to those who feel I am polluting their newsreader’s technology folder, but ask that you understand this blog as being about my life and things that seem interesting to me. I have done my best to categorize my posts, and each category does have its own feed available. For example, if you want just my technology related posts, you may prefer to subscribe to this feed.
On the other hand, these posts are entirely seasonal, and will most likely end completely after barely more than another month. If you can bare with them, you may actually find value in my perspective, even if you don’t share it or agree with my political ideology. I strive to make sure each of my posts has some unique value and is not just a link or “Go Obama!” cheerleading. In fact, I greatly value the opinions and perspectives of others, so if you do disagree with what I write, my preference would be for you to respond! Tell me how you see the world, and perhaps we can learn from each other’s perspectives =)
Back from Italy
I realize I didn’t actually inform you, my readers, that I was going to be away for the last couple weeks. Whoops =)
I spent the 11th through the 23rd in Europe, mostly in Italy, for my good friend Paolo’s wedding. He’s from the beautiful city of Trieste, and decided with his bride Roxy to hold the wedding there in the same church where his parents were married some 49 years ago.
It was a fantastic trip, my first to Europe. There was one rather nasty incident pretty much as soon as I arrived involving the theft of my passport and brand new laptop. The Milan police were immediately informed and given a license plate number to track down, but so far they’ve been pretty useless and dismissive.
I wasn’t about to let that ruin my first European experience, though, and it did not. Over just a few days I was in Milan, Monza, Bolzana, Munich, Venice, and Trieste. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook you were likely treated to a largely real-time photo blogging of my trip thanks to the iPhone’s camera and Facebook app.
Now I’m home and working to get back into the swing of things.
Campaigning from the gutter
McCain’s people must be getting really desperate. The American people are smarter than this. You can’t lie about what somebody said in the age of the internet where transcripts and video recordings are readily available. And please… you don’t get points for the irony in attacking Obama for “smearing” Governor Palin using completely and undeniably out-of-context quotations. For reference, this is the quote that McCain’s ad says attack Governor Palin in a sexist manner.
“John McCain says he’s about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out George Bush — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics — we’re really going to shake things up in Washington,'” he said.
“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”
How you go from that to a “sexist” attack on Governor Palin is pretty mind-blowing, even for the McCain smear-mongers.
If you’re launching a start-up at Demo or TC50, you need to do better than any of these.
If your home page links to a PDF “info sheet” you fail.
Now, some of these suck for the sole reason that the start-up itself seems to be a pointless idea. Some combine terrible company and product names with seemingly useless or redundant offerings. Maybe they do have something compelling to offer, but they aren’t selling me on it.
Others, though, might be interesting but don’t even try. Some of them look like they installed Community Server or something like it and forgot that you’re actually supposed to customize more than just the name. One doesn’t even let you in.
Robert also linked to Quantivo, an example of a good website. Maybe we’ll see more on Monday when the TC50 start-ups are revealed. So far, though, I don’t expect to ever hear of most of the Demo companies again after this week.