One nice thing about AppleCare is that you can track the the whole process on the web. My PowerBook with the broken latch was shipped to Texas (why Texas?) on Thursday night, repaired late Friday evening, and shipped back to Chestnut Hill, MA on Saturday. As soon as DHL reported that it had been delivered, I headed over to the Apple store to pick it up. “Did we call you?” the “Genius” asked? “No, DHL IM’d me,” I replied, confusing him mightily.
From the paperwork, it seems that Apple replaced the latch, the bottom casing, and the speakers. And from running last I could see that the technician booted it up at around 11pm on Friday night, logged in to the test account that I’d created, and logged out 3 minutes later.
Author: geoff
The Cult of the Leader
Glenn Greenwald nails the state of conservatism in the United States today:
What it takes to make someone a “conservative” in Bozell’s eyes is the same as what is required in the eyes of all Bush followers — a willingness to support Bush’s actions because they are the actions of George Bush…. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.
Welcome to North Korea (or is it 1984?).
[Hat-tip to Sully.]
UPDATE: Glenn has posted an interesting followup which demonstrates beautifully how most of the vituperative criticism of his original piece simply reinforces his thesis.
Snow and zoom
As promised, here are a couple of pictures to show both the snowfall from yesterday and the zoom of my new camera. Both shots used “Scene: snow” mode; I have no idea why a useless “compulsory flash” kicked in on the second one.
17 inches
The National Weather Service is reporting snow totals of 17.5 inches for Boston Logan and 17.0 inches for Needham. The only number they have for Brookline is 13.5 inches, but that was at 3PM, several hours before the storm ended. Since we’re half-way between Boston and Needham, 17 inches is a safe guess.
Of course this is nothing compared with NYC and Hartford, CT, but it’s still a sizeable snowfall.
Catching up
So I zoom all over the world, blogging like crazy, and then I get home and go quiet. Why? No special reason; I’ve just found myself running around, dealing with lots of small matters since I returned.
- As I was packing up on Wednesday morning, I found that the latch on my 15 inch PowerBook wouldn’t catch. This used to be a perennial problem with PowerBooks and iBooks, but I thought Apple had solved it. I guess not…. On Thursday afternoon I took the machine to the Genius Bar at the Apple store near my home. The “genius” looked at it, and said, “Oh yes, routine fix, it’s under AppleCare, good, but it’s an offsite job, have you backed it up, and is there a
testaccount the technicians can use?” (Because, apparently, if they can’t log in as part of fixing things, they are liable to wipe the disk.) I raced home, backed up 32GB onto a handy FireWire drive, added a suitable account, and made it back to the store at 4:55 PM, just in time for the 5:00 PM pickup. Right now the system has been fixed and is on its way back from Texas(?!) to Massachusetts. Weather permitting (see below), I should get it on Monday. - I had a lot of fun photographing all sorts of stuff on my recent trip, but although quite a few shots came out quite well, I was also very frustrated. Take my attempts to photograph birds in Bangalore. The Nikon Coolpix 5600 that I was using is a perfectly good point-and-shoot camera, but with only 3x optical zoom I was never going to get really decent pictures of those herons and kites. So today, after studying the various online reviews of digital cameras, and stalking the aisles of Best Buy and Circuit City to check out how the various controls felt on different cameras, I bought myself a Kodak P850. Like my Nikon, it’s 5.1 megapixels; unlike the Nikon, it has a 12x optical zoom with image stabilization. If all goes well, you should expect to see the results in my Gallery in the near future.
- And in fact, the first pictures that I upload will probably be reminiscent of those I posted this time last year. We have another blizzard heading our way, and Sunday is likely to be meteorologically interesting…
Airport photography
As you may have noticed, I like to take photos of airliners, airports, and stuff like that. Fortunately I haven’t personally encountered the “cheap prose of patriotic convenience” that Patrick Smith writes about in Salon today – but it feels as if it’s only a matter of time. After Smith had twice been harrassed by clueless security staff for taking pictures at airports, he…
… presented the issue to Phil Orlandella, the media relations director for Boston’s Logan International Airport. As the departure point for both of the 767s that hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Logan’s security procedures came under intense scrutiny in the weeks that followed. Orlandella’s office sits off a corridor between Terminals B and C, and he’s been intimate with all all things Logan for more than a quarter century.
“Who controls security, TSA or the local police?” he says. “They both do, it’s that simple. And no, it’s not against any rules to take pictures, inside or outside, period. If anyone tells you otherwise, that’s a bunch of baloney.”
I think I’ll carry a copy of this piece with me when I travel… just in case some officious goon tries to tell me that I can’t take photographs because “we live in a different world now”.
The last leg of the journey
This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM here in the Embassy Suites hotel on Arcadia. (“Arcadia”! Sounds blissful, no?) I think this means I’m ready to head home. So I’m just finishing my packing; in a few minutes I’ll head down to get breakfast, and then I’ll check out and drive down to LAX for the final leg of my journey. Tonight, if all goes well, I’ll actually sleep in my own bed.
I was going to add a few notes about what I’d learned from this 23K mile odyssey, but perhaps I should wait until it’s complete!
"Geek-to-geek" at SeeBeyond
Last September I wrote about the “geek-to-geek” event that I organized at StorageTek: an opportunity for several dozen senior engineers from Sun and StorageTek to meet each other, network, discuss issues of mutual interest, and so forth. That event seemed to work well, so yesterday we held a second one, at the Monrovia, CA facilities of SeeBeyond. SeeBeyond was the premier vendor of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software that Sun acquired last year.
The basic integration of the organizations and product lines is going well: we’ve announced the Java Integration Suite which brings together the key integration and composite application capabilities from both companies. However we wanted to broaden the horizontal connections: to bring in people from various parts of Sun to learn from each other. And in particular Greg Papadopoulos joined us for the first half of the day to lead a discussion of the “software as service” ideas that he presented at last week’s Sun Analysts Summit.
We followed the same format that had worked in Louisville: a series of 5-minute self-introduction presentations, open discussion to capture issues of interest, a working lunch, and then afternoon breakout sessions. (And for Sun employees: all of the materials will be posted on my internal blog by the end of the week.)
Herewith a few pictures; full size images are in my gallery:
Jerry Waldorf making a point. (Yes, the classroom layout is sub-optimal; this approach works better if you can arrange people in a circle or horseshoe. But it wasn’t a big problem. And yes, I did PhotoShop one image a bit to remove whiteboard contents.)
Greg attacks a virgin expanse of whiteboard, while Mark Hapner looks on.
The result: I actually prefer this to the version in Greg’s slides. Maybe we need a “scribbled whiteboard” template in StarOffice….
Thanks to all who helped make this happen, especially the intrepid “day-trippers” from northern California, and Judy for pizza and logistics.
"Because we're Google, and we say so, that's why."
From The Register
We gather the official position of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich is not to the liking of the powers that be at Google, as they have decided to shift it 100 metres or so east.
UPDATE: According to several letters to The Register, the culprit is the U.S.Navy. Of course, this means war….
Men in white
And now, the explanation of that picture.
When Sun acquired StorageTek, it added a number of technologies, competencies, and lines of business to its portfolio, and many of these were completely new to Sun. A simple example: Sun is now a developer and vendor of mainframe peripherals and software. We have developers in Louisville, Woking, and Canberra, working on a code base of hundreds of thousands of lines of IBM Assembler and C. (Don’t knock it: this is a really good business to be in.)
In order to give Sun’s leading technologists a more detailed view of the full range of technologies that StorageTek brings to the table, we organized a meeting of TAC in Louisville last Friday. (TAC is a body chaired by Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s Chief Technology Officer, and includes the CTOs from the various lines of business – software, servers, service, etc. – as well as the Sun Fellows. “High powered” doesn’t even begin to describe it!) In addition to presentations and discussions on various hardware and software programs, we took the TAC members to see another capability that StorageTek brings to Sun: microelectronic manufacturing.
StorageTek (now Sun) has always been one of the cutting-edge developers of tape storage systems, and at the densities and speeds we’re talking about you can no longer rely on commodity components. There are no standards (for servo patterns, encoding schemes, and so forth); you have to do it yourself. Even the tape media is specially formulated for each system. As a result, we design and manufacture thin-film read/write heads in our own facility. It’s not quite the same as semiconductor manufacturing – we’re dealing with exotic cocktails of metals designed to tune the magnetic properties of various components – but there are many similarities. In particular, the plant is divided into three zones, including “clean room” and “nearly clean”. (My colleagues can correct my terminology!)
Because of our tight schedule, we decided not to tour the clean room itself, although it would have been delightful to see some of my colleagues in full “bunny suits”. Instead we toured the “nearly clean” area, which only requires hair nets, beard nets, booties, smocks, and safety glasses. We split up into three groups for the tour. Here’s my group, just about ready to go:
And here’s another group, including Greg Papadopoulos. (Picture by Jim Hughes):
You can see all the pictures here in my gallery. Although I only took pictures while we were suited up, it’s worth mentioning that some of the most fascinating material came later, when we saw just how you go about debugging the design of such a component. (Hint: it’s relatively easy to contain electric current – insulators work pretty well – but it’s remarkably difficult to make a magnetic field do what you want it to.)
Many thanks to Richard Dee and the staff of the thin film facility for their time and knowledge.