Still going after all these years.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to work at an amazing company in the security space, wonder no more. Veracode is growing, and we’ve got quite a few openings in sales, engineering, QA, research, and even (particularly) in product management.
If you’ve read my posts about security and product management, if you’ve read about us in the press, and if you think you’ve got what it takes, drop us a line. Of course you’re welcome to contact me and ask questions about the company too.
Like Estaminet, I hope so. But I also fear that this motion in a General Assembly committee to recommend the deletion of G-6.0106b, the part of the Presbyterian Book of Order that requires “chastity in singleness” or “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman” of church officers, and therefore bans ordination of gays and lesbians, is destined to, at best, be defeated by conservative presbyteries, and at worst cause a schism in the denomination.
In an alternate universe, where the church would care about “all the ordination standards, rather than singling out just one,” the committee’s alternate resolution would pass easily. But in this universe, where there is a vocal group that out of fear is determined to deny rights to their brothers and sisters in Christ, there’s just no way this effort is going to succeed, I’m afraid.
TechCrunch: Nokia Acquires Symbian – Goes 3. Hear that sound? That’s the sound of Fake Steve Jobs just itching to skewer somebody, but since he’s on vacation I’ll do it instead.
Make no mistake: this is a defensive move by Nokia in response to the iPhone and Android, not an offensive one. Five years ago, an open source OS for smartphones might really have made the market. Now Nokia’s not even calling the tune any more: with Motorola, Samsung and LG eating them away on the low end, and RIM, the Windows Mobile folks, and Apple eating them away on the high end, pretty soon there’s not going to be much left in the middle.
I enjoyed the Symbian phone that I used from 2003 to 2005, but Symbian didn’t move quickly enough with the OS and it became stale. It doesn’t smell any better now. When you have unnamed senior execs inside Nokia calling Symbian a POS, you’ve got problems.
And what about units? Those 291 million handsets you sold in Q1? They’re legacy products. Apple sold 6 million in the iPhone’s first year as a brand new market entrant even without the benefit of enterprise mail integration or independent developers. Now granted, you can sit fat and happy on your 291 million units shipped, or you can reflect on the fact that you shipped 100 million of them in the last 18 months, and the other 100 million are in all likelihood no longer in use since your European customer base replaces its phones every 12 to 25 months, and the US customer base every 17.6. Is your market really still growing, or did you just sell replacement Symbian handsets to your existing customers?
And I haven’t even talked about Android yet–it’s probably a trainwreck, but it’s from Google so it’s going to exert some market pressure on you too.
And your developers are talking crap about the OS, too. And I can’t blame them. Which would you rather write apps for: an OS that’s forked three ways, requires you to use a crippled version of C++ with weird string handling practices and proprietary error handling, and needs a downlevel version of Visual Studio, all of a sudden the iPhone’s development frameworks and XCode look like nirvana.
So, guys: if your competition is a competitor who’s locked up the enterprise and a user centric market innovator, I’m afraid that open sourcing the OS (the POS OS) is not going to save the company. Maybe if there were already a bunch of really talented individual developers working on creating a great mobile experience, but guess what? They’re on Apple’s platform now, not yours.
Via Matthew Guerrieri, who writes “sometimes a clarinet is just a clarinet,” in reference to Woody asking Dick Cavett to hold his clarinet and then saying, “Don’t hurt it, because it affirms my Freudian totality.” <audience titter> “Should be playing the harmonica.”
What I love about this clip is how the first part makes him look like a stork romancing a tree limb.
The bonus 1965 standup act is also hysterical, though it does make one contemplate a young Woody Allen who looks surprisingly like Peter Sellers.
… are the fun weeks, aren’t they? I feel like I’m up to my eyeballs in work and yet the week just started.
Miscellaneous notes:
A few weeks ago my eyes turned bright red. They didn’t hurt but something was clearly wrong. I stopped wearing my contacts for a few days and got rid of the infection that had settled in. In the meantime, I relearned what I already knew: my glasses prescription was woefully out of date. Like, when I got these glasses, Clinton was beginning his second term. They didn’t correct for my astigmatism and I had a headache after a few hours wearing them. And the frames were loose to boot.
So I bit the bullet and got new glasses. They’re a departure—I went to heavier Italian black frames, about ten years after everyone else did, and the effect is a cross between young Peter Sellers and early 1950s British Health birth control glasses. This post is, as they say on Fark, useless without pictures, so I’ll see what I can do about that.
But I had forgotten what it’s like getting used to new glasses. I need to keep my head very still or the distortions moving in my peripheral vision give my stomach flip flops. And trying to glance down at my iPod while driving in was a whole different experience again. Like: if I ever give up contacts for good, I might need to go to bifocals.
So: not exactly the total stylish package that I imagined. But at least I can see through them, when I look straight ahead. I think the bottom line is that I’m really glad that I can switch back to my contacts.
This is one of those days.
Nothing’s really wrong. I’m just weary of winter. The sun is out and I’m not out there. I really, really want to put my snowblower in the back of the garage and pull the grill to the front.
Every now and then, you lose one of the truly influential people in your life. Earlier this year, it was my grandfather. Last week, I got word that another one had passed on: Myrtle Talbott, who taught my once-a-week TAG class when I was in fourth and fifth grade, who was a longtime member of my church, and who was the first teacher I had who really stretched me.
Picture this: I’m in elementary school, glasses and so uncoordinated they give me extra time in the gym outside of classes so I can learn how to do something athletic without falling over. I’ve been through third grade and the teachers are so tired of trying to keep me engaged that they shift me off in the corner with a book. Then fourth grade starts and they round me up with a few other kids, put us on a bus, and send us to another school halfway across town, where Ms. Talbott waits for us, along with a Spanish teacher, CPR practice, creative writing instruction, real-life biology and science, and a bunch of kids who didn’t seem to mind that I was so odd. And she wouldn’t let me just slide by on glibly knowing the answers. Indeed, she was the first teacher I had who gave me an inkling of that uncomfortable truth: sometimes there are no right answers, only tough questions.
Later I saw her all the time in church, but I never made that connection again. She had already put me on the path and I needed to find my own way from there. But I still wish I had been able to come back and see her before she passed away. I don’t think I ever really thanked her for everything she did for me.
So if you see this and were one of her students, stop in at the guestbook and leave a tribute, won’t you? It seems a shame to leave it empty.
Couldn’t resist pointing to this article about Sharper Image’s bankruptcy filing. I remember back in the 1980s when they were the coolest thing around, at least to a 12 year old boy. Tons of gadgets and insanely expensive lifestyle gizmos.
What changed? Well, for one thing, fewer yuppies. For another, their target audience got older. You can’t continue to draw a new audience, particularly one willing to pay a hipness premium, when you’re pitching to their parents. Exhibit A: Turbo Groomer. No matter how you slice it, a nose and ear hair trimmer is never going to be hip. But the damned thing is always on page 2 of the Sharper Image SkyMall pages. Exhibit B: Fresher Longer. Sorry, guys, it’s Tupperware. No sale.
I was driving my 2003 Passat home from the office on Tuesday when something weird happened: the car started idling very rough at a stoplight. I haven’t had a car run that rough since the days when I was driving my 1977 MGB. I thought that perhaps I needed to get a tuneup. I did what I used to do on the MG: put the car in neutral and bring the engine speed up. That calmed the idle a little bit, but when I started driving it past the light the problem came back. Then the check engine light came on. And started flashing.
At that point, I should have pulled over and turned off the car, but I was less than a mile from home so I nursed it there and parked it. Then restrained myself from kicking the car.
The rough running turned out to be caused by misfires in two of my four cylinders; when I got the car home I was only running on two cylinders. I was without the car for two days while the dealer replaced two ignition coil packs that had failed and reprogrammed the car’s computer. To my relief the bill wasn’t exorbitant, but it makes me wonder whether the other two coils are due to go too.
The capper is that I happened to look up Volkswagen Passat in Wikipedia, and found this lovely piece of text for the Mark 5 version:
A common problem that arose along with the introduction of the 2001.5 “B5.5” models was a common failure of ignition coil packs. This problem applied only to owners with the 4 cylinder 1.8T engine, whose coil packs are marked with the part number “06B 905 115H”. The solution is a simple swap of the coil pack for a newer version, a minor repair in both time and cost.
The article even cites a very detailed page on MyLemon.com about the problem, which apparently mostly affects late 2002 and early 2003 models. My car was one of the first 2003s.
So the question is: why hasn’t Volkswagen issued a recall of these cars?
I give you “Danny Boy,” as performed by the three finest vocalists in the Muppets: the Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker.
I hope to God I can stop laughing at this soon.
It’s eerily reminiscent of Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein singing “The Little Drummer Boy,” some ten years later, which is sadly not on Youtube.
I have a bellyful of lentils and zampone, and I’m watching Virginia in the Gator Bowl. So far, a pretty good start to 2008. It’s snowing again, of course, but you can’t have everything.
I downloaded Dave Winer’s new FlickrFan yesterday, which is worth a look if you are a Mac user—a quick and easy way to put other people’s photos on your screensaver, and as Dave says particularly good for putting content on your HD TV. I don’t currently have a Mac hooked up to our 32″ LCD, so right now it’s driving my screensaver. I think the biggest stroke of genius in the thing is the default inclusion of the AP Photos RSS feed—absolutely brilliant to see totally world class photos of events almost as they happen.
Sickening: Bhutto Assassinated in Attack on Rally.
If you want an illustration of how badly the Bush administration and its allies around the world have failed in their stated goals of preventing terrorism and “exporting democracy”, look no further. While Bush and Musharraf both decry the violence, it is clear that they themselves cannot take any credit for preventing such an attack.
When you think your coolest Christmas gift is an 11″ AllClad skillet, it can safely be said that you are a culinary geek. Especially when you then make up an excuse to use it in the preparation of the Christmas dinner.
Since I got the iPhone around the time of my birthday, my Christmas gifts were pretty moderate, though I was very grateful for my gifts: the skillet, a new pair of slippers (badly needed), and a set of brass collar stays (a gift I didn’t know I needed until I started doing a lot of traveling and our otherwise superb dry cleaner systematically ate all my plastic ones). We’ve had a quiet day just decompressing; tomorrow, with a visit to my family in Pennsylvania, it should be a lot less quiet (and a lot more driving).
No, not the actual candidates; more the realization that today I am of the age where nothing could stop me if I were to decide to run for the highest office in the land.
No, not American Idol judge.
A nice day—got a fair amount of house cleaning done. Amazing how being a little domestic feels really good from time to time. Also had Niall and his fiancée Julia over along with our next-door neighbors Ross and Heide, which was fun.
The big news, of course, is that I’m now within striking distance of getting an iPhone. And at this point I have to be honest: I’m more excited about getting rid of the old Sony Ericsson right now, which is a total boat anchor.