======================
From: crash!bwebs…@SDCSVAX.ARPA
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 85 01:26:31 PDT
Subject: 2MB Macintosh!

Well, space cookies, I did it.  In a fit of passion, I went down to
Levco Enterprises (which is conveniently located here in SD) and had
my 128K Mac upgraded to 2MB.  A bit of a jump, what?  I’m still
waiting for the final PROM set (due in a few days); when those come,
I’ll really start wringing it out and let you know the results.  In
the meantime, I’ve had fun running it, usually with a 1MB RAMdisk and
1MB of application RAM.  Makes the Little Beige Toaster scream along.

“What,” you may ask, “about the ROM upgrade problem?”  My basic
response is, “I don’t really care.”  However, since the big shakeup at
Apple, new rumblings have come out indicating that Apple is suddenly
concerned about supporting 3rd party upgrades and that the previous
hard-nosed attitude is becoming very soft indeed.  This would tend to
confirm suspicions that the previously promulgated (if not announced)
policy sprang from the brow of Steve Jobs.
..bruce..
[Usual disclaimer...I'm *paying* for my upgrade.]

Bruce F. Webster/BYTE Magazine
ARPA:  crash!bwebster@ucsd
uucp:  {ihnp4, cbosgd, sdcsvax, noscvax}!crash!bwebster
CIS:  75166,1717
USPS:  c/o BYTE, 425 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111
======================

Those were the days, eh? Here are more (contemporaneous) details on the Levco upgrade from my old friend Joel West. Something to keep in perspective when you feel constrained by 4 GB of RAM.  ..bruce..

Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server running Windows Home Server 2003, primarily two solve two problems: (1) run nightly backups of all my Wintel PCs; (2) provide a common media file repository for myself and my wife (who runs Macs). After a few bumps, it worked just fine and has been working fine since.

Except that a few months ago — which at this point may mean something like this past summer or even late spring, given how time flies — I noticed that I could no longer run the WHS Console app from any of my PCs (all running Win7 Pro). Any attempt to do so resulted in an error box with the message:

This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.

Here’s what’s strange: the server itself still shows up in the Network panel, I can still access all the shares, and I can still log onto the server via the Remote Desktop Connection application (and, by the way, run the Console app there, on the server itself). I can ping the server in a console window via its name and its (fixed) IP address. And the automated backups keep happening (though more on this below).

At roughly the same time — and it may have been exactly the same time — I began to get certificate warnings when I used RDC to log into the server. This is a well-known problem with a kludgy work-around (configure RDC to ignore certificate warnings). That problem appears to be associated with Service Pack 1 of Windows 7, and I suspect the Console problem showed up at the same time as well.

However, to date, I have not found a workaround to the Console problem. What’s more, I’m starting to have backup problems. In particular, one desktop system stopped backing up. In an effort to fix that, I uninstalled the WHS Connector Software and attempted to re-install it. No go — I get this error during installation, after entering the server’s admin password:

This operation cannot be completed at this time.

Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact Product Support.

This appears to be a well-known, if intermittent, problem, but one for which a variety of suggested-but-not-necessarily-effective solutions have been offered. I started to tackle the problem again this morning, trying some of the solutions, and found some other oddities:

• Even though I can see my server (which we’ll call foo-bar for now) in the Network panel, can access it, can ping it (by name or by IP), and can remotely log into it, I cannot bring it up in a browser, e.g., http://foo-bar or even http://<fixed IP address>. That last one is particularly surprising.
• Yesterday, I brought down and then brought back up my entire home-wide network (modem, router, access point, lots of computers and other network-accessing devices). I noticed that the Acer server box took forever (probably 15+ minutes) to reboot itself and reappear on the network.
• I’ve been getting flaky behavior from WHS itself over the past few months when I remotely log in (which I don’t do that often). For example, when I logged in today, I got three standard Windows “unexpected error – send info to Microsoft?” boxes, all associated with the backup utility.
• I did bring up the Computer Management panel on the server, thinking that the inability to browse to the server may depending on something running here. I did find that IIS Admin Services was not running and would not start, even though its two dependencies (RPC and Security Accounts) were, in fact, running.

I suspect that what I may actually need to do is reinstall WHS 2003, but that means that I will have to (for safety’s sake) back up the (non-automated) shares. Not a bad thing to do anyway, but not how I envisioned spending my Thanksgiving weekend.

What struck me while researching on-line is how many people had posts that said, in effect, “I did this and it fixed everything”, followed by posts saying, “I tried that and it still doesn’t work”. Similarly, not everyone running the same systems gets the same problems. It goes to the heart of the underlying complexity, uncertainty, and — to a certain extent — unknowability of the systems upon which we depend.

That said, I welcome suggestions.   ..bruce..

Today, I bought a new (smaller) TV for our bedroom, replacing one that we have had for 8 or 9 years. On impulse, while picking out the TV at Costco, I also picked up a Roku 2 kit (Roku 2, HDMI cable, 2 month subscription to HuluPlus). I figured it would be interesting to see the comparison. Once home, I set up the new TV, hooked up the Roku 2 to it, and started the Roku 2 setup process. I got it talking to my in-home LAN (dual-band 802.11N router), and it signaled successful connection all the way out to the internet. It then told me that an update was available and gave me no other option than to download that update. Not a problem, I thought — always want the latest software.

Sigh. The Roku was never able to download the upgrade, and — this is critical — gave me no option to proceed to use the device without the upgrade. I made half a dozen attempts (all with the same failure, Code 011, unable to connect to Roku server), went to roku.com/support and had a nice chat with Jane, who suggested I reconfigure my router with explicit DNS addresses and then reboot my network. Did so — same problem.  She opined that the Roku server might be having troubles, or that it might be some other unspecified error.

Just to make sure there wasn’t some specific problem with the actual physical location of the Roku 2, I went out to the living room, unplugged my Apple TV, brought it into the bedroom, and plugged it in sitting right where the Roku 2 had been. Worked like a charm. I then went to Amazon and ordered a second Apple TV unit (scheduled to be delivered Saturday morning for just $3.99 in shipping, even though I ordered it Thursday evening — Amazon Prime is just brilliant).

I will probably hang onto the Roku 2 unit and in fact will likely connect it to the living room TV (along with the new Apple TV unit). Assuming that I can get it to update itself and let me use it, I’d like to see what it offers that’s different and/or better than Apple TV. But having had a fair amount of contact with Steve Jobs back during his NeXT days, I know that one of his product mantras was, “It just works.”

The Apple TV, like so many Apple consumer products, just works. And that’s why Apple wins.

[UPDATED 12/19/2011] Of course, having written that firm statement, I am now having problems with my Apple TV units. In the meantime, I did finally get the Roku 2 to register the day after I wrote this post, and it is working fine even though my Apple TV is not. Sigh…

A few years later — in 1982 — my close friend Wayne Holder hired me into his nascent software company, Oasis Systems, in part to help with his existing and planned word processing utilities (The Word Plus, Punctuation + Style), but mostly to develop computer games. And we did, developing Sundog: Frozen Legacy on the Apple II, a game for which I still get e-mails (and which Wayne is even now working on resurrecting for modern platforms). In January 1984, a few months before Sundog shipped, we were invited by Guy Kawasaki to come up to Apple to see a preview of the Mac and to talk about what software we could port to the Mac. Through my connections with computer stores in San Diego, I was able to get a personal loan of a Mac for a few days at home prior to the official announcement in Cupertino later that month, which Wayne and I attended as well. That was my first time seeing Steve Jobs in person, and it remains a memorable highlight of my professional life.

When the Mac shipped a few days later, I went down to the one computer store in San Diego that I knew would be getting machines from Apple. I took $3000 in cash with me and managed to convince the store owner — a friend — to let me have one of the three Macs he had to sell. Through a connection with Phil Lemmons — editor-in-chief at BYTE — I ended up writing the official BYTE review of the 128K Macintosh (August 1984 issue). By the end of 1984, I was writing full-time for BYTE, including on-going coverage of the Macintosh, particularly once my BYTE column started in mid-1985. After a few years of writing for BYTE, I switched to writing for Macworld magazine. Steve was now long-gone from Apple, and Apple was having some of its own problems going forward.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

To quote John Perry Barlow over on FB, “The world is suddenly a less interesting place.” ..bruce w..

[1] The first was an HP-67 card-reading programmable calculator.

[Cross-posted from And Still I Persist]

The first key step was buying a Windows Home Server box last summer. It took me a while to get all the kinks out (read my review at the link), but since then it was worked pretty much trouble-free, 24/7. Not only do my various computers get backed up each night, but it’s become the standard iTunes repository for both my wife and me, and we use it to share (legally) media that we purchase separately on iTunes.

The next step was upgrading our internet access. We live in a semi-rural area outside of Denver, and when we moved here 6 years ago, our only internet access options were a dedicated T1 line (our next-door neighbor had one), satellite access, or a wide-area wireless (with dedicated dish pointing to an access point about 6 miles away). We went with the last option, which was given us roughly DSL-grade access (1.5Mb). However, about six months ago, we started getting flyers from Qwest claiming that high-speed phone line access was finally available in our area. We signed up and found ourselves with access speeds running typically from 4 to 12 Mbits/sec. Not much compared to some of the very high speed (>100 Mbits) access available in some cities now, but a major step up from what we’ve been living with.

The third step was getting a new HD large-screen TV this past week — in this case, as an astonishingly generous gift from our youngest daughter and her boyfriend. We bought our existing Sony 42″ plasma TV some 8+ years ago, and I won’t tell you what we paid for it then. Not only was it getting long in the tooth, with the display losing contrast, but the TV itself only had one (1) set of component inputs; the other four were all composite/S-video, and there were no HDMI ports at all. The new TV (a 55″ Sony LCD) has a much sharper and clearer picture as well as up-to-date ports (4 HDMI ports, an optical audio out, etc.).

The fourth step was buying an Apple TV unit today. This not only gives us Netflix streaming, it recognizes and lets us access that iTunes media share on our WHS box. [UPDATE: But wait! Not really! See below.] After getting it hooked up, I sat down and watched an episode of “Castle” that I had downloaded from iTunes (and moved onto the server) but had not yet watched.I then listened to some of the music on the server, then went out and connected to one of what appear to be at least a few hundred streaming radio stations from the ‘net. Oh, and I watched a few minutes of both a TV show and a movie from Netflix (we are long-time Netflix subscribers).

To quote the great Steverino, it all just works.  And it works beautifully, too — the video and sound quality is outstanding.

I’ll note in here that a few days ago I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player with ‘net connectivity. It actually sees more of the computer on our home network, but it does not recognize or play iTunes media. If it did, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Apple TV unit.

As per the headline, this is almost enough to persuade me to drop our DirecTV subscription. Almost, but not enough. I love college football and especially love watching it in high-def. I also watch (or at least have on in the background) a lot of local and national news. If and when I have streaming options for those that I like, then DirecTV will likely go away; it’s just not worth the cost.

I give it a year or so.  ..bruce..

UPDATE: Thought I was going crazy there for a while. After seeing the stuff on my WHS box, I went back later and found I could only see stuff on my Win7 laptop (which is where I keep all my ‘active’  iTunes media and where I sync my iPhone and my iPad). I thought maybe I misread what I was seeing, but then I disabled and then re-enabled iTunes sharing on my WHS box, then brought up iTunes on my Win7 laptop. The WHS iTunes library showed up in my laptop’s iTunes app — and now all the media files on my WHS box are showing up as well. But it will only play the files on my laptop. Any attempt to select, say, a TV show episode that’s only on the WHS box results in an error message.

So, I’ve got a couple of choices: install iTunes on my WHS box (which is not as straightforward as I would like) or move all the iTunes media on the WHS box onto Sandra’s MacPro (where her iTunes library resides and which, fortunately, has a couple of terabytes of free internal disk space). Since the Apple TV readily sees her iTunes library, and since her MacPro (unlike my laptop) is almost always on, that may be the easiest solution. Stay tuned.

I’ve joined Google fairly recently after spending nearly a decade at MSFT, and I’m having to unlearn a ton of things I’ve learned at MSFT.

First, I had to unlearn that my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Engineers do, in fact, run Google, and I’m an engineer. A LOT depends on engineers here. Barely anything depends on the management or PMs. The comfortable, asphyxating bureaucracy of Microsoft simply does not exist. It is up to you to define the direction, and execute on it. If you’re good, you will also get other people to execute on it, by means of which you will establish yourself as a leader.

Second, I had to unlearn that my teammates are plotting something behind my back. As far as I can tell a few months in, they aren’t. Or they’re so skilled at it that I don’t see the plot (which after 10 years at MSFT is unlikely). They’re just building a product.

Third, there’s no “jihad” against anyone. Not even Microsoft. People are discouraged from thinking in those terms. No one is trying to “kill the fucking Microsoft”. No one is throwing chairs or calling Ballmer a pussy. People just build their products and services the best they can.

Fourth, there are very few people who can say “no” without motivating their answer with data. The first answer you will hear from anyone (including Legal!) is “yes”. It’s not blind acceptance or anarchy either, it is expected that you will motivate your changes, with data, if necessary. Want to change the way Google runs ads? If your change makes sense and you can demonstrate it, it will be accepted. Search? The same. This one is particularly hard to unlearn – after burying so many great (or at least I thought they were great) ideas because they weren’t _politically_ feasible, sometimes within the same extended team.

And so on and so forth. I wasn’t a bad performer at MS by any means (left the company 5 levels up from where I joined), and as a matter of fact I admire bits and pieces of Microsoft to this day, but Google made me realize just how miserable I was there. I don’t yet feel Google is the ideal place for me either, but one thing is clear – it’s much easier to breathe here, if you know what I mean.

When I wrote The Art of ‘Ware back in 1994, I came away from it with a greater appreciation of why Microsoft had achieved the success that it had. It appears that Microsoft has lost its way. ..bruce..

Many large-scale software projects, whether commercial, two-party, or internal, end up poorly matched to their intended use and fail to achieve their intended use. But the same factors that lead to such disappointments occur in all industries and settings. Though I never drove one (and probably only saw them rarely while growing up), as a child I constantly heard of the Ford Edsel (above) as being the archtypical failed product design.

Car Lust gives the history of that failed product, and there are many lessons for software product designers, architects, and implementers to learn:

The tale of the Edsel is fascinating because it’s an instance of a large organization full of talented, competent, well-intentioned people setting a goal that seemed perfectly reasonable, marching confidently toward that goal–and going straight off a cliff. There was no one big colossal mistake–well, actually, there was one big mistake, in my opinion, but we’ll get to that–so much as there was a long series of minor to moderate miscalculations that all added up to an idea that not only didn’t fly, but crashed and burned on takeoff and left a great smoking hole in Ford’s corporate treasury. . . .

To make the Edsel different, it was decided to feature a pushbutton interface in place of the usual column shifter. Rather than put the pushbuttons in a logical location on the dashboard, like Chrysler did, Edsel’s brain trust stuck them in the center of the steering column–creating the infamous Teletouch Drive found on something over 90 percent of 1958-model Edsels. As a matter of ergonomics, the Teletouch Drive was just a little bit dodgy, as it put the shifter where most cars traditionally put the horn button. (Edsel owner tries to honk horn, puts Edsel in reverse, hilarity ensues.) It also later proved to be unacceptably fragile. . . .

In the last weeks before E-Day, build quality suddenly became a critical issue that threatened the whole project. Since the planned new Edsel factories did not yet exist, the Edsels were being built at Ford and Mercury plants. Edsels were different from Fords and Mercurys, they took different parts and had different assembly sequences–which made them inconvenient and annoying to deal with–and they didn’t really “belong” there. As a consequence, Edsels didn’t get the attention they deserved, and they were coming off the line with parts missing and body panels out of alignment. The Edsel sales and support staff, and many dealers, had to scramble to make those first cars presentable, and quite a few Edsel dealerships had “hangar queens” squirreled away in the back room on E-day, waiting for parts to come in. . . .

It was about this time that a lot of the build quality issues that had been hastily covered up in the month before E-Day began asserting themselves. Cars developed squeaks and rattles and minor (and major) malfunctions. The fragile Teletouch Drive began misbehaving with alarming frequency. Edsel dealers’  service departments suddenly became very busy. Word got around that the cars were lemons. Wags began claiming that the name “Edsel” was an acronym for “Every Day Something Else Leaks.” Bob Hope added Edsel jokes to his stage routine. Just a few weeks after hitting the market, the Edsel had gone from being The Next Big Thing to a national punch line. . . .

You mean, kind of like Microsoft Vista? Be sure to read the entire article: it’s fascinating, informative, and entertaining to boot. Hat tip to Instapundit.  ..bruce..

Now, and again courtesy of Rand Simberg, comes this brilliant video, made recently by frustrated workers within NASA to show how efforts to innovate and improve a troubled project (can you say “Ares”, boys and girls?)  get blocked by middle managers:

Simberg actually pointed to a post by Wayne Hale, a long-time NASA manager, on an official NASA website blog. Hale felt that many of these problems had already been addressed and was surprised (or Simberg put it, “shocked, shocked”) to find them still pervasive at NASA:

Recently I had a couple of events which affected my thinking on this.  I have been out of the Shuttle Program manager job for almost a year now and a trusted coworker just a week ago told me that people in his organization had been prevented from giving me important alternative choices for some program choices that occurred a couple of years ago.  This was staggering. It was happening right in front of me and I was totally unaware that people – who I trusted, who I hoped would trust me – kept their lips sealed because somebody in their middle management made it clear to them that speaking up would not be good.

Astounding.

About two weeks ago an activity that Mike Coats started at JSC had an all day report out period.  The Inclusion and Innovation Council was to propose ways to improve innovation at NASA.  Various teams reported out, including one team of young employees who has the task to talk about the barriers to innovation at NASA — specifically at JSC.

The video attached was their result.  I found it extraordinarily funny and not at all funny.  These young people have obviously found themselves in situations RECENTLY in which managers at various levels applied sociological and psychological pressures to keep them from bringing ideas forward.

I am convinced that if we asked the managers who were the models for this little morality play whether they stifled dissent or welcomed alternate opinions, they would respond that they were welcoming and encouraging.  Probably because they have that self image.

But actual behavior, not inaccurate self perception, is what we really need.

Watch the video, read Hale’s post, and then ask yourself: how many of these problems affect innovation and product development in both organizational and commercial IT development groups? ..bruce..

And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them.  ..bruce..

Dr. Ashton was an outstanding instructor. I took this class in 1974, and all our programming was done on an IBM 360/65 mainframe in 360/Assembly, on punched cards no less. Yet Dr. Ashton thoroughly inculcated in us the concepts of structured programming, having us (for example) come up with half a dozen different ways of implementing a WHILE loop in assembler.

At the same time, he did his best to teach us the realities of software development and engineering. One of his comments in class seemed so axiomatic that I immediately thought of it as “Ashton’s Law” and have quoted it as such ever since:

Ashton’s Law: Whenever someone tries to do something for you, they usually end up doing it to you.  — Dr. Alan Ashton, 1974

I have long lost track of how many times over the past 34 years I’ve thought of Ashton’s Law or have spoken it out loud to others. Dr. Ashton made the comment in the context of operating systems, software tools, and applications; all we have to do is look at something like the User Account Protection in MS Vista to see that Ashton’s Law is all too much alive and well.

But there is a deeper issue here in software design and implementation, which I’m also sure Dr. Ashton had in mind. When two software components have to interact, there is usually an explicit and documented (by the source code itself, if by no other means) interface for one component (the ‘called’ component, for lack of a better term) that the other (the ‘calling’ component) makes use of.

In designing functions or services of the called component, we often end up as perpetrators of Ashton’s Law. That is, in our desire to do something for those who will invoke these functions or services, we end up doing something to them.  We make decisions about preconditions, calculations, and results that may seem quite reasonable to us, and that we may have the best intentions for; still, our decisions may lead to others cursing our names (or at least our functions).

There are always tradeoffs in software development among such desirable features as reliability, performance, memory footprint, calling/service standards, security, simplicity, and so on. Our priorities — even our requirements — may differ from those who will use our component’s functions and services, and so a certain amount of friction is perhaps unavoidable. What we can do is spell out all our assumptions and restrictions, and the reasons behind them, so that those using our functions and services know what they’re getting (or not getting).

However, there may exist also what is variously termed a deep, hidden or undocumented interface for the called component. This deep interface deals with invisible and often unknown requirements, side effects, and consequences of a given function or service provided by the called component. For example, the function or service may leave some aspect of the software system or the host computer system in a different state (e.g., changes to internal data structures, changes to files or databases, launching or killing of processes, and so on) without making that fact explicitly clear in any documentation or the API itself. You may feel there is a good reason for this, but it may also interfere with the calling component’s on-going functions.

As with much of what I post here, this may seem quite obvious to you, but trust me — obvious or not, it’s incredibly common and quite frustrating for those having to use the offending software. As software engineers creating software components, systems, and applications to be used by others, we need to constantly keep Ashton’s Law in mind and ensure that we are truly developing useful functionality for others instead simply making their lives more difficult.  ..bruce..