Is That Really Necessary?

I went to Zurich this week and thanks to a massive brainfart, I forgot to bring socks. Fortunately, a Puma store was less than 20 feet from the entrance to my hotel. I ran into the store, bought a pack of 3 pair of socks, and found this tag fastened to the socks:




What I want to know is: have they really had a problem with people not washing their socks when dirty? Is that something that shows up in a high volume of support calls ("My socks seem to be kind of gross... what should I do?"), or is this a general public service announcement?

I'm not sure, but I'm going to go wash my socks right now, just to be safe.

Packed

I was in an Apple Store the other day to pick up an iPhone belt clip, and I was totally flabbergasted by the sheer number of people in there. It was insane--there were people trying things out, two older women on folding chairs sitting at the feet of a store employee taking a class on something or other, and scads of people buying everything in sight. Most people weren't in line at a cash register waiting to buy their purchases, they were buying and paying for their merchandise at any spot in the store via handheld point-of-sale PDAs that most of the employees were toting.

It really was an unbelievable experience to see so much buzz around Apple products--and to think that some folks swore that the stores wouldn't work back when they were first announced.

I'd say they're working pretty damned well.

Wordle

Wordle is a great way to waste an hour or two creating pretty word clouds from a given corpus. Since somehow or other Red Bean has become a home for a number of version control books (namely the CVS book, the Subversion book, and the Mercurial book), I thought I'd run them through Worldle and see what came out (click on the image for a larger version):

Tivo Olympics

A few years ago I lamented the state of the Olympics on television, and while NBC hasn't done a whole lot to improve their televising of the Olympics, Tivo made it all somehow bearable. Tivo let me skip the commercials, the background pieces on athletes, the medal ceremonies, and the grating color commentary by Bob Costas and others. All in all it took me about two hours to watch each five hour stretch of the Olympics, and that somehow made it pretty OK.

I love my Tivo.

Stirling Engines at Sci Foo 2008

I spent last weekend in Mountain View at Sci Foo 2008, and it was incredible. I attended some excellent sessions, talked with a lot of interesting people, and, along with Robert, assembled some Stirling Engines that Cat bought for the conference. Since Stirling engines run off of any temperature difference, the obvious choice to power them is a cup of hot water or coffee, but I figured you could get a nice difference if you only had something cold to run the engine on. So I... well, I'll let you see for yourself:

My Other Computer is a Data Center

I was pretty happy last week when Dewitt sent me the article that Marc Benioff wrote entitled Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center. It's a good article, but the really cool part of the article was the last paragraph:

One of our developers has a bumper sticker on his laptop that captures the spirit of Web 3.0 perfectly. It reads: "My other computer is a data center." That's a claim that any developer in the world can now make. And that's the stuff of revolution.

Why is that cool? Well, because I designed that sticker.

That sticker traces its roots back to May 2006 when Jason Robbins and I were brainstorming some new sayings to put on the Google Code Hosting page and one of the saying Jason came up with was

My Other Computer is a Google Data Center

I thought that was an awesome quote for the hosting page, but it was crying out to be made into a laptop sticker. After all, it's the perfect companion to the sticker I used to see around in the '70's, "My Other Car is a Rolls Royce". It's fun, campy, and, unlike the Rolls sticker, it's actually true!

I ran over to Andrew, who was running Google Developer Day (the predecessor to Google IO), and wildly tried to convince him that this was the sticker to give out at the conference. He wasn't convinced, but he was busy, and I forgot about the sticker.

However, two months later I went to Foo Camp 2006, and Chris DiBona was manning the Epilog 35 watt carbon dioxide laser engraver and I just knew I had to engrave something. My laptop seemed to be the obvious thing...

But what to engrave? I wasn't feeling particularly artistic, and I didn't want to do anything too weird since I use my laptop to give dozens of presentations every year. I then remembered the "Data Center" idea and decided to etch a giant "sticker" on the back of my laptop. The saying didn't quite flow right, so I pulled "Google" out of the middle of the saying and added a big Google Code logo and a link to the hosting page. It wasn't particularly artsy, but definitely geeky, and hey, it's contextual advertising if bring it when I'm speaking at conferences!

After cleaning the NeXT sticker off the back of my laptop and giving it a good scrubbing, I headed into the lab where Dave Recordon was etching his laptop and he kindly offered to help me etch my laptop in the interests of me not completely destroying it--after all, you only get one shot with a 35 watt laser. After three test runs on paper (at 20% power, of course), it came out perfect:



Over the next year dozens of folks wanted to know where I got the cool laptop "sticker" from because they wanted one. I explained that it wasn't a sticker, but a laser engraving ("Really? Cool!"). In early 2008, since PyCon was going to be in Chicago and I was giving a keynote, I decided it was time to get some stickers made to give out there.

I designed the sticker with the quote in white on black and placed the Google logo off to the side on a white background so that if people wanted to put the saying on their laptop but not the Google logo, the only thing standing in their way was a sharp scissors.



(photo used under CC license from ryanobjc)

I ordered 1,000 and distributed about half at the conference and sent a few dozen off to Googlers in other offices who had asked for them.

Well, once those few stickers showed up in our offices, I started getting email after email from other Googlers wanting stickers. I cooked up another 10,000 stickers and sent packs and packs out to the teams requesting them, and gave a ton away at Google IO, OSCON, and various other venues. I've seen them on the laptops of VPs at work, hundreds of other Googlers, strangers at conferences, and even several Yahoo engineers! (with the Google part cut off, natch)

And now it's being talked about in essays by CEOs. Quite a journey for a humble little sticker.

Holy Banana: TR2N

Tron has always been my favorite "computer" movie. I don't remember if I saw it in the theater, but I do remember that my friend Will had a copy on Betamax that we watched probably twenty times, even on his "portable" tiny 5" black and white TV. I loved the movie--it actually had a plot, a geek for a hero, some great sets (e.g., the Big Door), and—at the time—some incredible computer graphics. I always thought that the light cycles were the coolest thing I had ever seen, and was constantly disappointed by the video game with its crappy graphics and lack of cool, screaming sound effects.

I remember when the Laserdisc release came out 12 years ago and I realized just how crappy the VHS transfer of Tron was—the Laserdisc had gorgeous colors and incredible details. I even pull out my DVD copy every year or so and give it another watching just for fun. I would occasionally peek at the Internet Movie Database to see if a sequel was in the works (partially in excitement for new Tron action, partially in fear of yet another rape of my childhood, but I never found anything.

Well, it looks like the long-rumored "Tron 2" or "TR2N" is actually being made, and a grainy crappy copy of a teaser leaked from Comic-Con this weekend all but made me explode because, well, it looks awesome:

TR2N cleaned up 001
Uploaded by genchang2112

Let's see what we've got here:

• Light Cycles: Check.
  
• Kick-Ass CGI animation: Check.
  
• Jeff Bridges: Hells yeah check.
  
• Plot: Maybe?
  

And now I have to wait until 2011 to see it. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!

Dear Disney: Please hurry. Also, please don't screw it up. KTHXBAI.

END OF LINE

The Ben and Fitz Show Goes to OSCON

At OSCON this year, Ben and I are giving three talks and sitting on a panel, including:

• Do You Believe in the Users?: This is our latest talk—we'll give examples and anecdotes to show why it takes more than just great code to make great software.


• People for Geeks: This is a reprise of our infamous Poisonous People talk, given as part of a larger tutorial


• Subversion Worst Practices: The top 10 ways to destroy your project with Subversion—always a crowd pleaser


• An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid: I'm going to talk about "Feeding the Trolls" while Ben is going to show you how to "Rule the Code With an Iron Fist." Come by and see why writing code on the internet is like trying to build card houses on a trampoline

So there you have it—all the Ben and Fitz you can stand, plus a whole lot more. If you see me at the conference, ask me for a My Other Computer is a Data Center sticker if you want to pimp your laptop (or, um, your car, I guess). Hope to see you in Portland.

Protocol Buffers: Now in Open Source Flavor!

Google has open sourced protocol buffers, our data interchange format that we use for, well, just about everything we store. Protocol buffers are fast. And cool. And fast. Did I mention fast? I thought so.

Congratulations, Louis and Jim

[Before I explain who Louis and Jim are, and why congratulations are in order, indulge me as I tell the story of how I met them]

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I had a cousin Louis. Every so often, his name would come up and that he lived in San Francisco. I don't recall ever meeting him, and the only picture I ever saw of him was with a black cat that had a piercing stare. So I always remembered Louis and the cat... Louis and the cat.

Fast forward to my teenage years when I finally discovered why I'd never met Louis. It turned out that Louis was gay, and because of this, his parents basically disowned him, which is why I didn't remember meeting him. He ditched New Orleans and moved to San Francisco, and that's pretty much all that I ever heard of him. My grandparents did visit him once or twice on their travels, but for the most part, we never spoke about Louis. He was just Louis. He was gay. He lived in San Francisco.

Fast forward again to the late 90's. Working for Apple, I found myself travelling frequently to the Bay Area—usually to San Jose, but occasionally to San Francisco. At some point in the year 2000, I remembered that my cousin Louis in San Francisco and that it would be nice to look him up since I was out there so often. It never seemed fair that he'd been unceremoniously drummed out of the family, and especially unfair to me that I hadn't gotten to meet one of my cousins.

I called my grandmother and got Louis's phone number and dialed the number. As I anxiously listened to the phone ring, I thought about what I was going to say. Would he be happy to hear from me? Shocked? Annoyed? Angry? Anxious as I was, of course, I got his voicemail. I left a somewhat awkward message and waited for him to call back—if he ever did call back.

A few days later, Louis called me back. I explained that my job took me to the Bay Area somewhat often and that I knew he lived in San Francisco (Wrong! He lived in Oakland!), and that maybe we could get together for dinner or something. He graciously invited me over to his house to meet him and his partner of many years, Jim. As we chatted, he asked about my family as he'd been out of touch with them for some time. I'll never forget the lump in my throat when he asked how his uncle—my grandfather—was doing. I didn't know how to tell him that he'd died two years earlier and I felt like a total jerk when I just blurted it out. I mean, how do you tell someone something like that? But I digress.

A few nights later, I took the BART to Oakland and Louis picked me up and drove me to their house, popping half a dozen pieces of nicotine gum on the way home. I didn't know a lot about him, but he sure liked his nicotine gum!

Dinner was some of the best Italian food I'd had in a long time, and the conversation flowed even more easily than the wine. Louis and Jim turned out to be what they call in the industry "good people." They were clearly two people who were made for each other, and they were a joy to talk to--passionate, irreverent, curious, and downright hilarious. We talked for hours before they drove me back to San Francisco sometime close to midnight.

From then on, it was no longer just "my cousin Louis," but "Louis and Jim," and we kept in touch more often as time went by. Marie came out to the Bay Area with me on one of my business trips and visited their house and spent the next day up in Sonoma with them. We had a blast (and a whole lot of wine).

I was honored when they accepted my invitation a year and a half later to come to my wedding. They even came out to spend Thanksgiving with us one year. Who knew that that simple phone call eight years ago would bring not one but two wonderful people into my life. I guess I'm a pretty lucky guy.

And all that brings me to why I'm writing a post titled "Congratulations, Louis and Jim." It's because after 35 years of being together, they got married today—all because the Supreme Court in the state of California finally ruled that same-sex marriage was legal.

When I got an email from Jim earlier today announcing that they'd gotten married, I let out a whoop that scared half my office mates. I was so excited that I pretty much told the good news to everyone I saw this afternoon. In fact, I'm still pretty excited. They even got interviewed by a few reporters for the LA Times and the San Francisco Gate (Picture and an audio clip on that second article).

So, congratulations to two of my favorite people. May you have another 35 years together.

(photo from SFGate as Louis hasn't sent me his pictures yet, ahem.)

I'm Sorry, You've Reached an Unlisted Email Address

Lately, I've been encountering more and more people who want to participate in open source communities (and other online communities) but seem to be afraid of having their email address posted anywhere on the internet out of the sheer terror of drowning in spam. Given how easy it is to setup an extra email address, why not just create an extra account and use that for your public address, saving your "private" address for your friends and family?

I've had the same email address for over 10 years, and according to GoogleBot, it's listed in at least 960 places on the web. According to Gmail, I get about 1500 spam emails a day, and Gmail catches about 99% of them on any given day, which is extremely manageable (thanks, of course, to the extremely hard work of Brad and his team). Does Gmail get any false positives? Maybe--I just don't have time to go wading through the river of spam to check (54,061 at last count). Long ago I decided that I'm OK with any false positives that get through--if someone really needs to get a hold of me, there are a number of ways to do so.

In short, if you want to participate in online communities such as open source projects, just setup a "public" email address, use that, and don't live in fear of getting buried in spam.

The Best Place to Work in Chicago

It's been almost a year and a half since our Chicagoist interview was published, and a lot has changed since then. The Google Chicago engineering office has grown tremendously since we started hiring in May of 2007, and I have to say that I was pretty excited to find out today that Crain's Chicago Business ranked Google first out of the top 20 places to work in Chicago. They even created a slideshow to give you an idea of what it's like to work in our office (narrated by Ben and I). It really does a great job of capturing the look and feel of our office.



Photos by Steve Serio (who photographed, recorded, and helped produce the slideshow). Thanks Steve!

PS If you'd like to work in Google's Chicago office, take a peek at the open positions.