Long time no post. Why? I’ve been busy as heck!

Work at Apple continues to occupy most my time as we continue working on the best version yet of Mac OS X, “Snow Leopard.” My program management job has exposed me to a variety of new responsibilities, priorities, and skill sets over the year that I’ve been doing it. Back when I was an engineer, my work was very measurable: if I had no bugs in my queue and I was happy with whatever tools work I was doing, I could go home and not think about work. In addition, the amount of collaboration and communication involved was minimal. Those simple days are gone, because the product can always be more on time, more featureful, higher quality, and the production of it involves hundreds of people, ranging from engineering to legal to marketing and so on. It was a challenging adjustment, but a very rewarding one that has made me a better person.

Melissa and I have now been married for 9 months, and they happen to have been the best months ever in the history of months. Once again, there are definitely a seismic shift in goals and priorities that comes with marriage, but at the end of the day they prove to be extremely rewarding changes. We’re currently living in San Mateo, but now that we have had a bit of time to explore the Bay Area, we’ll probably move down south, perhaps to Santa Cruz to be near the ocean and mountains.

California is truly a beautiful state with great weather and amazing scenery. If I drive west, I come up against bluffs where the ocean crashes against what looks like the end of the world. If I drive east, I see mountains and lakes, and wonders of the world like Yosemite.

Taken together, these things have helped me realize that there are better things to do than futz around on the internet all day, so my post frequency will probably remain a bit lower, though hopefully I’ll put up more pictures (most of these are on our family website, so go look over there or email me to find out the address).

Until next time!

Wedding and Honeymoon photos are up!

Since I’ll be married in a literal handful of days, I’ve been giving some thought to what it is all about… Here is what I’ve come up with:

fundanity - noun - the quality wherein the commonplace and ordinary is considered enjoyable.

That Melissa and I have a solid fundanity base gives me a great feeling going into this weekend and beyond

After four years doing mostly low-level technical work on Mac OS X as an individual contributor, I’m now an engineering project manager working in the Mac OS X Program Office. I’ve replaced hours of being hunched over in front of my screen figuring out bugs with hours being hunched over in front of my screen sending emails. Ah, and the meetings, let’s not forget about the meetings. All jokes aside, I am enjoying the challenge of working at a high level, collaborating with dozens of managers and hundreds of engineers throughout the company on a multitude of projects. Looking back at my past experience and my interests, I suppose that management was inevitable. Fear not, I’ll still work on the occasional bug to stay sharp

Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is available on store shelves tomorrow, and tech journalists are already gushing about it in their reviews.

• Walt Mossberg (WSJ): Leopard Faster, Easier than Vista
• David Pogue (NYT): Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System
• Edward C. Baig (USA Today): Leopard, Apple’s new Mac operating system, hits all the right spots

Something that touched me was to have the work that my team is responsible in part for called out in Walt Mossberg’s review:

“In fact, every piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs — a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac — worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista. My old Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer, for which Vista lacks the proper software, worked instantly in Leopard, even over the network. And, unlike with Vista, it was able to print on both sides of the page. I popped my old Verizon cellphone modem card into the test Leopard laptop and it worked, too, with no software installation or tweaking.”

I can’t be prouder of my colleagues and all of their hard work and dedication to excellence.

So Mac OS X Leopard is nearing release, which means that I too am nearing release from the shackles of crunch time. For a bit of perspective, the last day that I took off from work was April 20th, which I took off to fly up to visit Nick in Boston. Since then, I’ve worked generally no fewer than six days per week for generally 10-12 hours per day.

So I need a break.

So I am taking one.

On 9 December, I’m flying to Tokyo to travel around southeast Asia for four weeks. My plan is still coming together, but the countries that I am expecting to visit are Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and possibly Laos and/or the Phillippines. I suspect I’ll do Japan last, as I’d like to partake in the New Year’s celebrations in Tokyo before flying back to San Francisco on 4 January.

In the two months leading up to my trip, I’ll be planning a rough itinerary and securing the necessary visas and innoculations. Generally speaking, though, I’m expecting to more or less bum around, going from place to place following my interests on my own schedule. I dislike “destination tourism,” in which people write down a list of things they plan to see in between meals at places that serve American food before leaving a country in which they never spoke to someone outside of a consumer context. Rather, I like to wander around and take in the people and their culture, customs, and cuisine. My style will be faciliated by the fact that I’ll be traveling alone for most if not all of the trip.

Thailand is probably the place I’m most excited to visit, as I’ve heard nothing but good stories about the beautiful environment and friendly people. There are myriad possibilities there, ranging from partying with the European and Oceanic visitors to scuba diving to trekking in the wilderness. I suppose I’ll need to pick up a camera.

More details to come…

A coworker forwarded me an interesting piece from OSNews on how Microsoft can prevent another poor development cycle like it had for Vista when it engineers “Windows 7.” The crux of the piece is that Windows should abandon its current userland code and break binary compatibility with the mountains of code that has been written for the WinTel platform ever since DOS was all the rage.

Quoth the article:

… For programmers, however, this desire to maintain backwards compatibility is a potential hell. This means that if you, as a Microsoft employee, have come up with a new killer feature, or maybe something less significant like a fix for long-standing minor bug, it needs to pass through a long process of testing to ensure backwards compatibility is not affected by your code. And if it does affect compatibility, your code needs to be rewritten, or, new patches need to be made to fix the compatibility breakage caused by your original patch. You can easily see how something like this is a restraint on many developers, and how it can hold back many envisioned improvements.

The author suggests freezing the “legacy edition” codebase with Vista or Windows Server 2003 and then only maintaining it with bug fixes and security updates while pressing on with development of a new codebase that is based on the NT kernel but with a new userland to be filled with new APIs and applications:

… Removing backwards compatibility means business users would never buy into Windows 7, and that would mean a serious lack of cash-flow for Microsoft. Therefore, Microsoft needs to cater to business users and other people concerned about backwards compatibility by maintaining a version of Windows based on the ‘old’ Windows NT; call it Windows Legacy, if you will. This version of Windows would be Vista (or, more preferably, Windows Server 2003), receiving only security updates and bug fixes.

An alternate and arguably preferable solution would be a black-box compatibility environment for the old apps, similar to Classic and Rosetta, which have helped ease Apple through some operating system and hardware architecture transitions.

The author somewhat underestimates the engineering effort involved with maintaining an operating system fork (winning quote: “Would this require more developers than are currently needed? I doubt it.”) and too easily casts aside the reasons for application compatibility. A particular failure is that the author only seems to consider how businesses would handle the issue, and doesn’t consider end-user impact. Namely, every user would be forced to replace every application they own, and a large number of “fringe” applications will never be revised. The user is left with the choice of paying to stay on an outdated operating system (no sale, frustrated user) or paying more to get onto an incompatible one (sale, frustrated user).

My take, of course, is that maintaining compatibility with at least the bulk of the most important apps on the platform is worth the engineering effort. I could be biased, though, given that it’s part of my job