and I should blame Leopard, which Apple recently announced the ship date for and so which I guess I can now say has been consuming most of my time for much of the summer. Leopard ships on 10/26, so it’s pretty clear that we’re done with it by now and busily making DVDs and boxes of Leopard to ship out as fast as we can. My main contribution to Leopard isn’t really visible to end users — I wrote a component of the OS...

I work on Mac OS X, and long ago it was announced that Mac OS X 10.5, codename Leopard, would be shipping in October, so it’s no secret that the process of wrapping up the release has been going on for a while. It’s an interesting time for an engineer, at least for me at Apple, because it generally means that I’m hip deep in bugs and the goal every day is to make them go away as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means...

For the last, well, while, Leopard has been kicking me to the ground quite regularly. Steve promised it would ship in October, and that means that the closer we get to October the more frantic everyone is to get every lastissue either addressed or punted. Every time I think I’ve got my bugs under control a bunch of new ones arrive. Argh!

OK. So, for the last day or so, it seems I can’t turn on CNN without seeing the “human interest” story about the cat that goes and sits on the beds of patients in a nursing home who are very near death. Then, they go on and on about how accurate the cat is — capsule summary: If you’re a patient in this nursing home, and this cat comes to sit with you, make sure your will is up to date. And speculation about how...

Original story here, but there’s not much more than you see above. I applied to be a planning commissioner last year, but wasn’t selected. When an opening came up again this June, I threw my name into the ring again, and this time they picked me. Yea! Wish me luck. My first meeting will be August 22nd, since I’ll be out of town for the meeting on July...

Here’s a spam I received today. It ended up in my spam folder, so it’s not like it really impacted me, but I was checking to make sure that an email I was expecting hadn’t gotten trapped, and in the process came across this one. On the surface, it seems like an email from some health department, warning about the risks of buying drugs online where there may not be sufficient safeguards: Dear valued member. This letter is a...

When I was young, due to allergies, I couldn’t have a dog or cat. I don’t think we would have gotten a cat anyway, since I suspect my parents viewed cats more as pests than as pets, but we might have had a dog if I hadn’t been fairly allergic to them. So, we had some pet goldfish, which died. I found a garter snake once; it freaked my mother out and so I didn’t get to keep it. Around 4th grade, I got a hamster as a pet...

We aren’t going to hear anyone referring to Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech gunman, as a Christian terrorist. Sure, he most likely is one – in the “manifesto” he sent to NBC he almost compares his suffering to Christ’s on the cross – so I’m pretty sure he thought himself quite religious. He apparently railed against the hedonism and other behaviors of his classmates at school. But he’s not a Chris

I found this the other day, somewhere on the web and it’s eerily captivating*. There are certainly days that I feel like a code monkey; especially the first verse. If you like it, go to the link here and give the guy a buck. And, I swear, every day it seems I’m getting dumber. I don’t think I am; and I’m reminded of that study that came out a while ago about how incompetent people don’t know the limits of what...

So, Miguel in comments suggests that I should chat more about Mac OS 9 stuff here in the blog. I’m not sure how much I can or want to talk about. I still work at Apple, and I like my job, so some things are certainly still confidential. But, beyond that, a lot of stuff probably isn’t terribly interesting to most folks. I’ll write about what I remember, and see if anyone seems to care. I started at Apple in April of 1989,...