Out of Cheese

Spirit landed on Mars four years ago todayландшафт and Opportunity landed three weeks later. The two rovers were only supposed to last three months at most. They’ve traveled much farther distances than anyone expected and produced scientific data beyond nearly everyone’s expectations, most notably providing very strong evidence that water once existed on Mars. Spirit is sadly very obviously getting on in years, but Opportunity is still in great shape.

Here’s to four years of incredibly cool research on the Red Planet, with hopes of years more to come.

Neil Gaiman mentions, and other sites confirm, that the Nazis tried to eliminate German Shepherd dogs with white hair. Strange.

I found myself looking into what Neil said because his phrasing caught my eye:

There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn’t decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family.

Ditto for my family too. I often forget that Neil’s Jewish, or at least that he was raised that way.

Back around the dawn of time — the summer of 1999, specifically — I was an intern at Homestead Technologies. My three months there were a terrific learning experience. I wrote a ton of Java code, doing serious Java development for the first time; wrote my first seriously complex real-world application — an IIS plug-in in C++ which could accept a file of any size as a download without using more than about 8K of memory; learned a terrific lesson about the non-portability of HTML as I spent two weeks working on an HTML renderer in Java which tried to match the layouts of both IE and Netscape; and learned a lot about how startups work while meeting a lot of great people. Homestead at the time was a hotshot startup of about 35 people, vying for the consumer home page creation market along with Geocities, Tripod, and a few other competitors. That’s the summer Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.5 billion (more than eBay paid for Skype many years later), and at Homestead we knew we had a better product than Geocities.

Since Homestead’s Java-based site building applet didn’t work on the Mac, I asked question after question on Apple’s mrj-dev mailing list as I tried to make it work and by October or so I decided that I’d just ask Apple if I could work there so I could fix all of the problems I was hitting. I sent a note to Jens Alfke, who was the tech lead of Apple’s Java team at the time, and a few interviews later I’d taken a job as a Java intern for the following summer. That internship led me to .NET and Rotor at Microsoft, which led me to the Intel team at Apple, which led me to the iPhone. If not for that summer at Homestead I’m sure I’d be doing something else today.

Meanwhile, Homestead grew to 200 people or so at the height of the dot-com boom, then shrunk rather dramatically when everything collapsed. Many of the core employees stayed there throughout, though, and the company survived. Their focus narrowed from general consumers to small businesses, but the core philosophy was the same — provide tools to make the power of the Web available to folks who don’t want to worry about the details of how Web pages are implemented.

Two weeks ago, Homestead agreed to be purchased by Intuit for $170 million. It’s obviously a far cry from Yahoo’s price for Geocities, but knowing Homestead, it’s much more about the fit than the price. The Homestead folks are very excited about it. My congratulations to all of them — Justin Kitch; David Wu, whose CD from his time in Occam’s Razor I still listen to; Thai Bui; John Tokash; Mona Bergevin; and any others who are still there from those halcyon summer days of 1999. They’ve worked incredibly hard for a very long time, and it’s great to see it turn out so well.

I received a note today from someone asking for help getting started with Facebook application development. Why’d that go to me? I’ve never even installed an extra app on my Facebook page, let alone tried to write one.

Well, it turns out that Facebook’s Java client library includes a class called BrowserLauncher, which is a simple class which can open a URL from Java code in the user’s default web browser. I wrote BrowserLauncher for my senior project in college, which needed a way to display HTML documentation. Soon after I wrote it I realized that more people could use it, so I released the code and later moved it to SourceForge. But SourceForge was a pain in the neck to deal with — their site has always been in need of some good usability work, in my opinion; testing new versions of the class on every supported platform was far more work than I’d originally thought (a good lesson to learn); and I stopped working on Java; so about five years ago I stopped maintaining the project.

Apparently some folks picked up the project and started working on it, creating a new project at SourceForge called BrowserLaunch2. They seem to have modified my license terms a bit. My license essentially said, “You can do anything you want with this. If you use it it’d be great if you could let me know, but that’s not required.” I remember getting quite a few questions from various legal departments trying to make sure they were adhering to those terms — they were very worried about whether they were OK. The BrowserLaunch2 folks have released their version under the LGPL. I think that’s lame — the point of my code was to help everyone, and the LGPL doesn’t allow that — but it’s their choice.

Facebook’s client library includes BrowserLaunch2. BrowserLaunch2 surprisingly hasn’t changed my original package name for the class, which in a fit of insanity I’d named edu.stanford.ejalbert. The complex package name means that you have to understand classpath references in .jar files to get code using the class to run, which is what the person who mailed me today was having trouble with.

I guess the short summary here is this:

• Facebook’s shipping some of my code. Neat.
• Open source code lives on for a very, very long time.

This is terrific.

Update: The video is from The Richter Scales, who are a Bay Area a capella group which happens to include super-cool Stanford CS lecturer Jerry Cain. Neat! Thanks to Evan for pointing out Jerry’s connection to this.

A little while back I happened to end up sitting next to Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group on a plane flight. He has an interesting blog at the SVPG site about product management and building great products and teams. Today he wrote about the role of the CEO. It’s definitely worth reading.

I can’t help this…I actually have to say something complimentary not just about Cal, but about their marching band. I feel like a traitor to the LSJUMB, which I must say is absolutely my favorite marching band anywhere, bar none. But Cal’s band (boo!) put on a terrific performance on November 3rd with a tribute to video games. Watching them march in formations for Pong, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and other games is just incredibly cool. If a band’s going to march in formations, I vote for these.

I don’t play poker, but I know quite a few people who do, and a few who play online. This post by Ian Ayres makes a fascinating argument that online poker might not last much longer. Not due to legal restrictions, but because computers are getting to be too good at playing.

Brooks points out how Mountain View is not like the rest of the world. This is part of why I like living there, though sadly I can’t do any work at Red Rock.

The reference is to xkcd 304, but I think I like the comic a bit more than the real-life example.

Over on the Freakonomics blog, they interviewed Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. One of the Q&As jumped out at me:

Q: My all-time favorite Dilbert cartoon is the one where he gives some kooky well-thought-out amount of payment for an item so he’ll get back an even dime, and says it’s for the clerk’s convenience. Do you really do that in real life?

A: I don’t do that. I prefer to use my mind for daydreaming while the cashier works out the math.

I do that all the time. I’ll buy something which costs $6.26 and have a $10 bill but no 5, so I’ll pay $11.26 instead to get an even $5 back. Or if I don’t have a quarter but I have three dimes and a penny, I’ll pay $11.31 and get $5.05 back. I’d never thought of that as being particularly weird, but in thinking about it now, maybe it is. Hmph.