OOXML Rejected by ISO

As I'm sure you've heard by now, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has failed to pass Microsoft's Office Open XML "standard" through "fast track" approval. I'm glad to hear this because there are a lot of scary criticisms out there of the OOXML specification.

It's a six thousand page specification. Yes, you read that right: six thousand pages. Through "fast track". Uh-huh.

Anyway, lots of people are celebrating this triumph, but just remember that this is a battle won, not the war. I've decided to dust off my wet blanket and toss it out there because:

1. A lot of very smart people work at Microsoft


2. They learn from their mistakes


3. Just like the Terminator, they'll be back.

They might not be back with OOXML, but they won't just give up and go home.

The Surreal Life

Yesterday was a pretty surreal day. Everything was fairly normal until late in the afternoon when John told me that Don King was coming over to the Chicago Google office with his son, Carl King, and a few other folks for a visit. While I was expecting a fantasticalicious whacktasticatudinous time, with possibly a few fights breaking out at the weigh in, what actually happened was much more mundane. Don and Carl and the guys were very low key, super friendly, and overall quite interested in all the cool stuff that we do at Google. I just about passed out laughing when Don pointed out that the picture on his Wikipedia page wasn't of him, but of a wax replica of him at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Priceless.

Don even stood patiently while we got some photos in front of the big Google logo:




Now that's what I call an outrighteously sparklicious Americaneriffic jacket.

[Thanks to Rachelle for hanging out with us and taking the photo above]

Moglen Takes Aim at the other Foot

If it wasn't enough that Stallman shot the Free Software Movement in the Foot last month, Eben Moglen (former general counsel of the Free Software Foundation) put a bullet in the other foot of the Free Software Movement at OSCON last month. Tim O'Reilly had invited Eben to talk about free software licensing in the Web 2.0 era and Eben gave Tim a tongue lashing. For an encore, he took the opportunity to alienate thousands of open source developers when he told Tim:

If you hadn't taken this whole long 10 year wasted detour, talking about Open Source instead of concentrating on concepts of freedom we could have had the conversation you and I are about to have now... 10 years ago when you started this whole long deviation which is now coming to an end.

So what we want to have now is a philosophic discussion. spread this Open Source nonsense over to the edge, and say now we're talking about what freedom means...

(Emphasis mine)

Riiiiiiiight... Insulting me and ridiculing what I believe in is a sure-fire way to bring me over to your side of the argument. As with Stallman, it boggles the mind how someone so obviously brilliant could be so completely egocentric. Those two deserve each other.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude n. German. Pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune.

I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't jumping with joy at SCO's stock derailing at the announcement that they don't even own the copyrights to Unix. Their stock dropped 71% today:



And now I'm off to break open the champagne.

Progress Takes Many Forms

In 2000, when I first started hacking on Subversion, it took almost 10 minutes to build Subversion (way pre-0.17) on my weak old Pentium II whitebox PC.

Just now I built Subversion 1.4.4 on my Macbook Core 2 Duo in 2 minutes flat.

That rocks.

OSCON 2007 Presentations

I had a blast at OSCON this year. Portland was, as always, a fantastic city, and I really enjoyed catching up with what I call my "second family" of conference friends that I see several times a year.

Ben and I gave three presentations this year, and they were all well-received. As promised, here are the slides for each presentation (in PDF format):

• Our ever popular How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People. It was well-received, but after a dozen or so times giving this talk, I think we're about ready to retire it. You can also view the video if you missed the talk. It's a really useful talk if you're working in an open source community.
  
  
• We had a lot of fun giving Subversion Worst Practices, which was a tongue in cheek answer to our "Subversion Best Practices" talk that we gave last year. This talk was an absolute blast to give, and the audience really seemed to enjoy it, even though we (sneakily) tossed in the actual best practices for each worst practice.
  
  
• Lastly, my favorite talk was What's In It For Me? How Your Company Can Benefit from Open Sourcing Code. This talk provided some reasons for a company to run an open source project in a true collaborative fashion as opposed to dumping code over the wall. I had some great post-talk chats with some of the attendees and I'll be refining some of our arguments for a future re-presentation of this talk. I'm hoping that Ben and I will get a chance to get this talk up on Google Video as well.
  
  

So that was OSCON 2007. I really enjoy co-presenting with Ben, and we've now co-presented over a dozen talks. We've actually gotten to a point where we not only finish each other's sentences but sometimes even provide words in the middle of the other's sentences. After our last talk, Cat Allman asked us if we'd be offended if she called us "Frick and Frack" (after Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers on Car Talk). All I can say to that is:

Don't code like my brother!

Interview in the Chicago Sun Times

The Chicago Sun Times interviewed me for their "What's my line" feature today. I'm pretty happy with how it came out except for the fact that it goes on and on about how much I like Chicago's architecture , lake and weather, making no mention of the fact that I met my wife here.

It's not a problem really—nothing that a few years in the Witness Protection Program can't fix.

Stallman Shoots Free Software Movement in Foot. Again.

For years, Richard Stallman has tirelessly worked to advance the Free Software movement, but I wonder if he understands just how much irresponsible accusations like this harm the very same movement that he works so hard to help. From emacs-devel@gnu.org (emphasis mine):

We did not switch to Subversion because the people who develop Subversion are not sympathetic to the ideas of the free software movement. That is a sufficient reason, given that CVS works fine.

See the full thread here, and don't miss Karl Fogel's response as well as Jim Blandy's response (Karl and Jim are two of the founders of Subversion).

As a Subversion developer and an advocate of both open source and free software, reading this kind of crap from Richard makes my blood boil. More importantly perhaps, it makes me want to remove the words "free software" from my vocabulary.

Richard, if you really want to help Free Software, you might want to leaf through a copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People", because you sure aren't winning any friends right now—in fact, you're in danger of losing the ones you've had for years.

Whew

It's been an amazing six days: I started with FOO Camp, flew back to Chicago, moved into our new office, and had the grand opening for the office, and just now collapsed into a heap. It was quite an awesome ride:

FOO Camp was, of course, fantastic--I went to some great sessions, saw old friends, had many hallway chats with new folks, and gave my own talk on why consensus-based "open development" is so important to open source. Oh, and of course, I played werewolf until the wee hours of the morning every night. I think I slept a total of about seven hours all weekend because I just didn't want to miss anything.

Our new office in Chicago is great--we've now got twice the space, and that includes a dedicated engineering area, which I'm excited to share with the folks from Feedburner (and I've never seen so many Noogler balloons in one place!). And to top it all off, I've got an 8' tall x 30' wide whiteboard wall right by my desk. Oh yeah.

We rounded off the hubbub with the "official" grand opening of our engineering office in Chicago which included a riff on the Taste of Chicago with our "Taste of Google" lunch and, of course, Chicago Google t-shirts for everyone. I'll try and scrounge up some pictures when I get a chance, but for now, it's time to get back to catching up on my sleep.

Change is Good

Even though I've typed exclusively on a Maltron keyboard for almost ten years, I'm about to change to a different keyboard. While the curved "bowls" of keys on the Maltron are quite comfortable, and I've gotten very used to the "Malt" key layout, I'm in the process of switching to a Kinesis Advantage USB keyboard using the Dvorak key layout. Here are the pros and cons as I see them:

Maltron Pros

• Comfortable keyboard layout
  
• I type about 85-110wpm on it
  
• I have three of them (2 PS/2 and 1 ADB)
  
• Like an old friend
  
• Weird design freaks people out
  
• QWERTY and Malt key layouts
  

Maltron Cons

• Keyboard has weird bugs--certain key combinations flip CAPS LOCK on, keys repeat or get stuck on occasion
  
• Keyboards don't feel very sturdy
  
• New Maltrons (USB) have different physical key layout, which means if I buy one new one, I need to buy three new ones as I can't deal with slightly different layouts. The physical layout has already changed once in the past. :-(
  
• $500 price tag
  
• I really need to buy at least two new ones
  

Kinesis Pros

• Even more comfortable key layout
  
• Slightly less weird design still freaks people out
  
• Does Dvorak and QWERTY
  
• Well made
  
• USB Native
  
• Lack of keypad makes it easy to mount a touchpad in the middle of the keyboard
  
• $300 price tag (still, ouch)
  
• If I learn Dvorak on the Kinesis, I can probably pick up Dvorak on a flat keyboard pretty easily
  
• If I learn Dvorak on the Kinesis and a flat keyboard, I don't have to drag my huge keyboard with me on road trips
  
• Got one at the office
  
• Only need to buy one
  

Kinesis Cons

• I can only type 32wpm on it so far
  
• I don't have three of them
  
• Not wired into my brain for emacs keybindings
  

So I'm switching to the Kinesis soon and my goal is to do it by July 19th (my next road trip that I'll need to do a fair bit of typing on). When I switched to the Maltron so many years ago, I taped a layout of the keyboard to the top of my monitor and spent an hour a day for two weeks typing in correspondence to get the hang of the keyboard. After that I switched to Maltron at home for two weeks, went on vacation for a week, then switched to Maltron at the office. It was a pretty painful transition with several extremely frustrating days when I was only typing on the Maltron.

So in the interest of avoiding a ton of pain and suffering by just switching cold turkey to the Kinesis, I'm spending 15 minutes a day with Ten Thumbs (which I bought many years ago) until I get my speed up to 50wpm on the Kinesis, which seems likely to take me another three weeks or so. I'm hoping that by the time I get to 50wpm, the cost of switching won't be quite so high as I'll at least be somewhat familiar with the keyboard.

So here's hoping... now if only there were a way that I could get Ten Thumbs to test me on my emacs keybindings...

If you use Gmail and Firefox, this could change your life...

[This is for people who are keyboard shortcut junkies. If you like to mouse around, you might want to skip it]

It's a five-step process:

• Install Greasemonkey
  
• Restart Firefox.
  
• Install the gmail-greasemonkey scripts
  
• Reload Gmail
  
• Go to your Gmail window and press 'h' to see what you've got.
  

These scripts were written by the amazing Mihai Parparita. Thanks Mihai!

Chicago Geeks++

My first post to the GoogleBlog: We're hiring engineers in Chicago