That said, I did pull an April Fool’s [...]]]> Although Apple was founded on April Fool’s day, there isn’t a big emphasis on it within the company. Folks don’t really plan much in the way of jokes, and it’s reasonably safe to believe what you read in emails and conversations much of the time.

That said, I did pull an April Fool’s Day prank many years back, and it caused one idiot at Apple to spend much of the rest of the day trying to get me fired. Back in 1994, I was working in Apple’s information systems division on the application which everyone used to look up phone numbers and email addresses ( and Applelink IDs! ), etc for everyone else. It was the Apple Directory, and it had been around since 1988 as a desk accessory. I was working on a rewrite of the entire thing, mostly on the client ( which I rewrote an an app, 68k and PowerPC native ) and also on the back-end server and system, which used Oracle and a custom ADSP/TCP server process.

At the time it was a pretty useful app — a fast way to find out how to call someone, or their email address, or even a map of their floor with their cube location highlited so you could find their office. Since I was still working on the system, it was in a late beta, and so I had a couple hundred users, while most folks still had the old version. We didn’t restrict who could get it — if you could get the client, it would work, and since it automatically updated itself to the latest version, my beta pool kept growing as folks would show the new ‘cool’ app to their coworkers.

For April Fool’s day, I decided that everyone at Apple should have a nickname. So, since I knew the back end server reloaded all of the data every day at 4:30am from Apple’s Human Resource system, I set an alarm for 5am, then got up and connected into campus using Apple Remote Access, then telnet into the back end server machine, then ran a query to change everyone’s first name in the table the new client was using to end in “-o”. So, “Keith” became “Keith-o”; “John became John-o”, etc. Viola! Everyone has a secret Apple nickname.

I’d also put something into the client and server a few days earlier so that the “-o” part wasn’t searchable. If you searched for John Vink; you’d see John-o Vink; if you searched for John-o Vink you’d seed John-o Vink. In effect, the nicknames didn’t keep anyone from finding anyone.

And, during that morning I got emails from my beta list of folks, mostly complimenting me on the joke. I got one or two bug reports saying that everyone’s name seemed to have been corrupted by the server, and so I explained that the problem would be resolved the following day. Everyone was happy.

Everyone, that is, except a certain lead engineer over in Apple’s Copland group, who decided that because I’d stuck “-o” on the end of everyone’s name in a beta, I should be fired. I know this because he called me just after lunch and screamed at me for a bit, then let me know he’d be calling my boss to get me fired. It kind of pissed me off, but I wasn’t going to let this idiot ( let’s call him “Wayne” ) bug me, so I did what I thought was reasonable: I telnet-ed back into the server, and changed his name in the table back to “Wayne” from “Wayne-o”, then went and warned my boss.

And, “Wayne” did in fact call my boss, who essentially told him to take a hike, so he called my director, who told him to screw off, so he called the vice president of IS&T, who was out of the office, so I think that’s where it ended. “Wayne” got shown the door at Apple a couple months later, not because of this but because Copland failed, but I did a little happy dance that day.

was based on some work I did about two [...]]]> Now that Leopard has shipped, I suppose I can finally point to one thing that I had something to do with in Leopard. If you go to the Leopard Features Page and scroll down to the Safari section, you’ll see that it has 13 features. This one

was based on some work I did about two years ago in Safari, because I wanted to be able to re-find stuff I’d seen on the web recently so I could show it to folks, but I’d forgotten exactly where I saw it. I could remember what it was, just not where.

Here’s an example. Last week I read a recommendation for Bananas Foster that I wanted to try to make sometime at home. Now, a week or so later, I’m at home, and want to do it, but I don’t remember where I found this particular recipe. I could go back to Google and type “bananas foster” in again, and then hope that it finds the same one I found last week, but I came across that one while reading a webpage linked off a blog that someone emailed me, and I don’t remember any of the details, so the odds of Google finding that same one are pretty low. I What can I do?

Well, my computer knows where I’ve been lately — it keeps the history of all of the urls. But, that isn’t terribly helpful, since I don’t remember what site it was on and I don’t pay attention to page titles. I suppose I could flit thru the history of everywhere I was in the last week, but that’s a couple hundred pages and it’s not fun to do.

Why can’t my computer keep track of the stuff on the pages that I go to, so I can search that later? Well, Safari in Leopard does that, and it lets you do full text searches of your browsing history to help narrow down what you’ve seen before.

So, how do you use it? Easy. In Safari, go to the History window by selecting “Show all history” from the History menu. Now, in the upper right of the window is a search box type some text from the webpage you’re trying to find — “bananas foster”, in my case. Safari will now show you all the pages you’ve been to recently that have that text on them.

In my case, the recipe I was looking for was this one. I’ve made them; they are quite yummy although I always seem to have too much syrup for the quantity of bananas.

I also contributed in some way to “Full Unicode Support in AppleScript”, fixed some bugs and performance tweaks in Mail, provided some of the support that the new Parental Controls needed to enforce limits of certain kinds, made it possible for application launches to be halted while the system warns you that the app was downloaded and verifies that you do want to run it, provided some of the underpinnings for Spaces to work, updated a bunch of things to be fully 64 bit capable, and fixed a bunch of bugs in lots of places.

Next [...]]]> I’ve applied for a couple patents, and two of them have actually been granted. For the one a couple days ago, a friend of mine at a conference told me that I’d been awarded a patent the same day it was granted, because he’d read an analysis-type article about it on someone’s blog:

Next Wave: Apple granted a patent for an Apple NC system

For the earlier patent, and also for this one, I got a USPS notification of my patent two days later. No, not from the Patent Office; not from Apple either. In fact, I don’t think I heard from Apple that my patent had been granted for about four months, when I got a notification that the $500 patent bonus would be on my next paycheck.

No, I got a piece of mail offering to sell me a plaque commemmerating my patent from a company which, I assume, is in business because they’re always the first company to tell folks their patent has been granted, and people order from them because they’re first. I didn’t order a plaque or anything ( Apple does eventually send me a plaque, about 6 or so months from now ), but I’ll put their url in here in case anyone wants to order one of these things.

www.patentawards.com

Wow. Now that I’ve actually looked at the mail, their prices are crazy — $80 for the real low end; $170 or so for the midrange. No wonder they can afford to postal spam the known patent-grantee universe.

Sure, it’s not going to change the world, but it was kind of handy back when I worked on Mac OS 9.