September 2009 Archives

Right now I'm on a Southwest flight from PDX back to SJC after a great trip to see Bryan and Katie's wedding. Bryan, of course, is better known as Dr. Bryan J. Rice, high muckety-muck of X-ray lithography for SEMATECH, and, not incidentally, one of my oldest friends. I've known him since my senior year in high school, when we had the good fortune to have the same physics class/ We spent countless hours together working on cars, studying at college (he got his bachelor's in computer science and a masters' in physics in the same amount of time it took me to get a bachelor's alone!), and generally palling around.

David and I left San Jose Friday evening and flew into PDX, where we picked up our rental and headed for the Hotel B. The bride's sister had recommended it; its primary virtues were its low rate ($40/night on Priceline, although they're exaggerating if they think it's a three-star property) and its proximity to Bryan's house, where the wedding was to be held. Overall it was nothing special: the rooms were adequately clean and reasonably well-maintained, except for the incredibly squeaky floors. On the other hand it's right across the street from the Hillsboro airport, which just happens to have a large contingent of helicopters that fly pretty much all day. For most people that would be an unwelcome nuisance but for us it was a bonus.

First thing Saturday morning we headed over to Pine State Biscuits. Summary: A++++ would eat again. In fact, if I lived in Seattle, i"d drive to Portland just to eat there. In fact I"m considering planning a trip up from Morgan HIll to eat there. Turns out they were recently on the Food Network, and i can see why. Large portions, delicious biscuits, and the best stewed apples-- tender without being mushy, and not sickly-sweet-- I've ever had. (Plus the waitress pictured here kept calling David "darling" and batting her eyes at him.) After being thus filled, we headed over to Powell's, another reason why i feel like a future visit to Portland is in order. What a fantastic place! David and I each got a few books. I would happily have bought more, save that I lack time to read them all (I did get the 2009 edition of "The Best American Science Writing", the 2007 version of which I thoroughly enjoyed). I figure I can squeeze that in.

Then, the wedding. Bryan really put on the dog for this event; his backyard was groomed and manicured within an inch of its life, and it was absolutely perfect for the ceremony. The weather, which had been yucky-but-typical in the morning, improved markedly, with clear skies, a light breeze, and plenty of sunshine. I took video of the entire ceremony, but haven't had a chance to edit it yet. In the meantime, here are some pictures to tide you over. We had a lovely dinner and got to meet a few of Bryan's co-workers from Intel, as well as seeing some familiar faces from his family. I'm really glad we were able to attend, even though I'm sorry Arlene had to miss it. (but I get to see her and the boys this week! yay!!)

Today was quiet; we found the Brookwood Ward in Hillsboro and went to Sacrament meeting, hit Pine State again (figuring, correctly, that eating there would cover us for both breakfast and lunch), and went back to the hotel to get David's forgotten retainer. At that point, we decided it would be more fun to take the Portland MAX light rail to the airport, so I returned our car at the airport (remember, it's right across the street!) and we trained it back to PDX. Tonight for dinner it's pasta-in-a-bag, followed by the last part of "Torchwood: Children of Earth," then up and at 'em tomorrow.

Today is Labor Day, which means it's the start of the third full week that David and I have been living in California, and my fifth overall. I miss Arlene, Matt, and Tom so much! I can't wait to see them again on the 25th, right before we close the sale of our house in Ohio.

A few assorted thoughts on being a newly-minted Californian.

1. I am adapting to traffic and commute times. Note that I didn't say I liked them, just that it seems like I'm getting used to them again, much as when I lived in Atlanta. David has seminary each school day at 0650, so once I drop him off I can usually be at my office between 0745 and 0800. That usually makes me the first one in, which is fine with me. On days when he has football practice, he's done about 1830, which leaves me plenty of time to leave the office and still get him on time. Of course, once Arlene, Matt, and Tom are here I'll be able to take the train more often.
2. Speaking of which: I took the train last week to get back to Morgan Hill after dropping off my rental car. It worked fine. It's about 40 miles each way from Morgan Hill to my office. The Saab gets about 28 mpg in mixed city/highway driving, so figure (5 * 40 * 2) / 28 ~= 14 gallons of gas per week, or about $44 at today's gas price. Train tickets cost $7.75 each way, or $52.75 for an 8-ride pass, or $205 for a monthly pass. Thus I'm paying a slight premium to be able to sit and work, or read, or whatever instead of just sitting in traffic. Not a bad trade, it seems.
3. It seems like these guys are everywhere. I see at least three or four cruisers each day going to and from work. Kinda makes the Ohio Highway Patrol look like slackers.
4. The weather seems to have two states: pleasant and hot.

Work? Work is awesome. I am still enthralled with what I'm doing in three respects. First, we have an extremely talented and smart team. Second, I continue to be impressed with the tutoring engine and what I'm leaning from it. Third, I am having great fun setting up our experimental Exchange 2010 environment. Compared to what we have now, Exchange 2010 is light-years ahead. It's like moving from this to this.

Our typical daily routine is to get up around 0545, shower, and grab breakfast at the hotel. I drop David off at seminary, drive to work, work, and then pick him up again after football. We've really done a good job of eating in: turkey burgers, salmon, pasta-in-a-bag, and so on are all typical fare. Arlene sent us a crock pot but I broke it about 2 minutes after it got here, so that hasn't been much help. We definitely miss her cooking!

Weekends have been quite a bit more relaxed. Saturday David and I went to the 144th annual Scottish Highland Gathering and Games. It was everything we hoped for: there were pipers, the Marine Band San Diego, Scottish Heavy Athletics, and sheep-dog trials. Sadly I didn't get to have a Scottish egg, as the line was about 45 minutes long. Apart from that, though, it was delightful, and it's nice to know they'll be in the same place at the same weekend next year in case we get a hankering to go back. Sunday we did essentially nothing except attending church, devouring a Costco take-and-bake five-meat pizza we bought Saturday, and driving around to look at houses we found on RealtyTrac. For our evening entertainment, we watched the first part of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" (brilliant so far!) and an episode from the first season of House. We've also been reading a lot; the library system here is quite well-stocked and has many of the amenities we came to expect from Way Library.

Today David has some friends from church over to swim in the hotel pool while I write. Interestingly, even though today's a holiday, he still has football practice at the usual time, so once I drop him off I'm going to look at a couple of rental houses. Right now we're leaning towards renting for a year, letting our equity from the Ohio house marinate in a nice CD while we wait to find exactly the perfect house. Tomorrow it's back to the weekday routine!

Ahh, the joys of the internets. Today's treat for your delectation: this piece by Daniel Eran Dilger in AppleInsider about Snow Leopard's Exchange support. Sadly, it's riddled with factual inaccuracies.

In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape's web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That's what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.

I think this misstates what actually happened. Microsoft wasn't trying to push IIS by tying IE to it. Instead, they were trying to prevent Netscape, and more broadly browser-based apps, from throwing Windows off the desktop 15 years later, Microsoft is still fighting that same battle, although against different opponents. For a web server to be useful, it must communicate with many different clients. For a browser to be useful, it must communicate with many different servers. That's the whole rationale behind the use of HTTP and HTML, for crying out loud.

Now we move on from matters of interpretation to matters of actual fact.

Apple's support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies. Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients. Apple did not license Microsoft's Windows-only "Exchange Active Sync" software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.

Unfortunately, this is just plain wrong in several ways.

• Apple doesn't use WebDAV for Snow Leopard. Instead, they use Exchange Web Services, a SOAP-based interface that delivers almost all of the functionality in the now-ancient MAPI stack. Microsoft shipped WebDAV support in Exchange 2000 in the apparent hope that they'd be able to do away with MAPI as the primary Outlook/Exchange protocol. Turns out that WebDAV-- an open standard that Microsoft adapted in the name of interoperability-- turned out to be a spectacularly bad choice from a performance and functionality standpoint. Unfortunately, Entourage used DAV. This limited Entourage's functionality (but more on that later.>
• Exchange ActiveSync isn't a "Windows-only" protocol. It's a well-described sync standard that can be licensed by device makers who want to talk to Exchange (Palm, Apple, SonyEricsson, and Nokia all have), or that can be licensed by server makers who want EAS devices to talk to their servers (IBM Lotus is the best example here.)
• Snow Leopard doesn't use Exchange ActiveSync.

On to another matter of interpretation:

This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard's support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don't use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.

Snow Leopard's support for Exchange only works with, well, Exchange. It certainly doesn't work with Gmail or Yahoo. It's questionable how well it even works with Snow Leopard Server. I'm reserving judgement until we get our 10.6 server set up at work so I can test it first hand.

Now, to jump back to something at the beginning of the article. Dilger says:

Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again, after a decade of giving enterprise Mac users a third rate alternative in Entourage, but Microsoft's efforts to win back Mac clients may come too late to prevent the significant erosion of one of the primary reasons companies have to pay for Office on the Mac.

It's ironic that Dilger labels Entourage as "third rate" given how many Entourage features are missing from Snow Leopard's clients. However, Snow Leopard's client implementation is nowhere near the functionality of what's currently in Entourage, and I don't think that's likely to change when Microsoft ships their Mac version of Outlook.

This had me puzzled for a bit: I set up a TV and Xbox in our hotel room and tried to get on Xbox Live through the wireless connection on my MacBook Pro. The Xbox stubbornly refused to pull an IP address from the Mac. After a little Bing-fu I found this article, which explains how to fix it. It works like a champ!