So I’m typing away on a design document today when I see the following story crawl through the RSS reader:

Bribing Bloggers by Joel Spolsky

It was basically a post bashing another one at Robert Scoble’s blog.

Which lead to another post at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog.

All this revolves around the question of whether it is ethical to give bloggers free laptops with Windows Vista installed on them. I suppose Microsoft was looking for some good grassroots reviews or something, but the blogging community wasn’t going to stand for it. Because, you know, free stuff is bad. I guess. The poor guys just can’t win.

Now if they were offering free ovens, that’s something different entirely.

*Waits for audience to catch up from that tangent from left field.*

*Shuffles feet*

*Looks out window*

See, last night I was trying to make a pizza. I even had the kid (2 years old) helping me by putting the pepperoni on. This means I’m either a great Dad by being involved with my child or I’m using cheap child labor. Looks like I can’t win either.

When I went to put the pie in the oven I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t getting hot as quickly as it should have. A quick examination showed the top heating coil working great, but the bottom one was ice cold. Of course the big burned out gap/hole in the coil might have had something to do with that.

We’d been waiting on this thing to die for years and thus I find myself in the market for a new oven.

Now what I need Microsoft to do is to install Vista on a new oven and send it to me for review. It doesn’t even need to be Ultimate Edition or have a good usability score or whatever that stuff means. As far as I’m concerned if it gets hot on the inside we pretty much have a winner. I’ll even change the name of the blog to something catchy like:

“I proclaim that I’ll disclaim that Microsoft sent me an oven because of my blogging fame.”

And since Vista supports IPv6 that means that the old Toshiba vision of the “every appliance should have an IP address” would work smoothly. Actually, that would have been an awesome feature for my dead oven. Could you imagine the messages it would have sent to me as it was dying?

“Warning: Oven heating non-optimal”
“Warning: Oven heating non-optimal”
“Warning: Ventral heating coil not functioning correctly.”
“Critical: Oh sweet Kenmore, I’m dying.”
“Critical: I can’t feel my lower coil.”
“Critical: It’s getting dark in here. I’m so sleepy.”
“Critical: Is anyone there?”
“Fatal: Dammit”

Anyhow, I’ll be waiting for the package in the mail.

So I have a daughter who is just over two years old. I know, not really germane information for a corporate tech blog but bear with me. In order to get the real story I have to tell a story that leads up to a story that turns into the real story.

Anyhow, being two years old means that formalized communication is a bit of a mixed bag. There are of ton of individual words that are oftentimes oddly annunciated, sometimes strung together as sentences and nearly always mixed together with pieces of American Sign Language. (When she was little we started using sign language with her as a bit of an experiment, it turns out she took to it like a fish to water. In fact, her sign vocabulary has eclipsed mine and she’s giving my wife a run for her money.)

The other day we were sitting on the couch and she turned to me and “said”:

“Ice cream” in sign language
“Me” in sign language
“Farm” in sign language
“Brown” in sign language
“Nana Papa” in spoken English
“Papa” in spoken English
“Num” in spoken English

To translate, that means she wanted to go for ice cream at a place called Farmer Brown’s with my mom and dad while having my dad pay for it. Oh, and that it tastes good.

All right, so that’s back-story #1, which is her giving a recap of back-story #2. What happened was that we went to visit my parents for an early Christmas since my brother was going to be in town from New York. Now, my parents live in the middle of nowhere. They don’t even live in a small town, it is just a normal house that sits on a few acres that is surrounded by farmland. Not far away though is a farm that is owned, as you might guess, by a guy named Brown. Now, apparently during fair season he would supplement his income by making a special sandwich, called self-promotingly a “Farmer Brown,” and sell it at a fair booth.

For the curious a “Farmer Brown” sandwich is beef with mushrooms, a special secret mayonnaise like sauce and probably some other stuff. It is fairly messy but super crazy fantastically tasty.

I guess that the sandwich was so popular that he ended up building a restaurant on his farm, again called Farmer Brown, specifically to sell these things. It was here that we went for lunch and my daughter talked my dad into buying her ice cream as a treat because he’s a complete pushover when it comes to the cute, little granddaughter.

See, back-story #2 done and you’re still with me. Take a moment to congratulate yourself, really, I’m proud of you. You just slogged through 500 words that could have been summed up like this:

My dad is a pushover for his granddaughter.

But, brevity isn’t too interesting and I don’t have an editor watching my word count so we’ll march on.

At dad’s house in the middle of nowhere the way he gets high-speed internet is through this wireless thingamajig that is installed in his attic that runs an Ethernet cable down to his computer. What this allows him to do is stream flash games from the Sesame Street website, a fact not lost on the granddaughter. This last time we were there he had also invested in a wireless router so that my brother and I could connect via our laptops, which I suspect is less of a gesture for our comfort but more of a strategic move to make sure his computer is always free in case the urge to play Elmo’s Keyboard-a-rama hits.

The problem we ran into was that my brother’s Windows XP notebook wasn’t routing traffic correctly to the internet while my Mac was cruising along just fine. It turns out that we tracked down the issue to him having an IP address populated in his wireless card’s gateway field, EVEN THOUGH THE FIELD DISABLED. So while DHCP was working fine and giving him the correct IP address the gateway was being overwritten by an old value that was in a disabled field. Once we cleared that out, after about twenty minutes of head scratching, things worked fine.

My dad and brother both asked why a disabled field like that would still work and I admitted that I had no earthly idea. I probably said something about a troll living inside his computer.

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a troll. I’ll bet it was a Grouch.

I remember walking out of the theater after seeing Ghostbusters for the first time and thinking ( age 8 ):

1. OhmygodthatwasawesomewhenIcangoseeitagain?

2. I’ll trade anything, including by little brother, for just five minutes with a real proton pack.

A line that I’ve used ever since to indicate what happens when something once thought impossible actually happens comes from Peter Venkman:

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

He happened to be talking about a 100 ft. tall demon masquerading as a giant marshmallow but it could have easily been a reference to this:

That’s IE7 running on Windows showing up a stand alone application on Mac OS X. Even though I had read about it I still didn’t believe it until I was able to see it for myself. It even caused a mini-gathering to break out around my desk this morning as four of us stared at it and tried to think of funky things to do it.

“Does having auto-hide set for the Start menu taskbar work?” — Yes.

“What happens if you move a Mac window over top of it?” — Just what you’d expect.

“What happens if you move a transparent Mac window over top it?” — That works too.

“Does each Windows window get its own focus on the Mac desktop?” — Nope, it treats Parallels like an app still.

“These guys must be selling a ton of these things.” — *Nodding*

“What if we bought some more licenses and then moved all our build machines to some big Mac Pro or Xserve?”

Hmmm.

That last question was fun because it made us then wonder what a fully pimped out Xserve would cost. I mean everything, leather seats, huge rims, LCD TV screens not only on the head rests but also as floor mats. No price was too high for awesomeness so great.

By default a standard Intel Xserve starts at $2,999.00. To that we had to “customize” a bit…

1. Two 2.0 GHz Dual Core Xeons would be way to slow, we need 3.0 GHz. Add $1799.
2. 1 GB of memory? Phbbt. My notebook has more than that. 32 GB is more like it. Add $23699.
3. Hard Drive Bay 1 comes 80 GB @ 7200 rpm. Whatever. 300 GB @ 15,000 rpm is either two or four times better depending on your math. Add $799.
4. There’s a Hard Drive Bay 2 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
5. And a Hard Drive Bay 3 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
6. Optical drive upgrade from a Combo to a Superdrive. Add $79. (What a deal compared to this other stuff.)
7. Expansion Slot 1, Dual channel 2Gb Fibre Channel card with PCIe riser. Add $499.
8. Expansion Slot 2, Dual channel gigabit ethernet card with PCIe riser. Add $199.
9. Gonna need two power supplies to fuel this beast. Add $199.
10. So far I only have 900 GB of hard drive space. A 7 TB(!) RAID will give us some extra breathing room. Add $12999.
11. Mac OS X Server maintenance program. Add $999.
12. Unlimited Apple Remote Desktop. Add $499.
13. AppleCare service parts kit for Xserve, sure, why not. Add $999.
14. Mac OS X Server Software Support - Alliance version. Add $49995. Sweet mother of all things good and right in the world.
15. AppleCare Premium Service and Support plan. Add $950.

Grand total (without sales tax):

I’ll tell you what, if I can get that price on a real proton pack I’ll still throw in my brother, even if he is 26 years old now.

A while back Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University telling the students how he had become a multi-bazillionaire by dropping out of college. Just the sort of thing that you want to tell a crowd of parents that have been spending $30k a year for the past four years.

During the speech though he did talk about how he took a calligraphy course after he dropped out which gave him a love for all things fonts. It would be cool to say that what I’m about to show you is because I too love fonts, but I really just wanted our tools to match the look of the fonts in Xcode.

So by default, out of the box, TestTrack and Surround SCM kinda look like this:

Surround SCM before (click to enlarge):

TestTrack before (click to enlarge):

This is really perfectly fine, but if we want them to look a little more like Xcode we need to make them look like this:

Surround SCM after (click to enlarge):

TestTrack after (click to enlarge):

The magic to do this is to send me a million dollars and I’ll send you a special build. (Give me a break, I made the mistake of graduating from college which apparently torpedoes my chance of becoming a Jobs-like multi-bazillionaire. I’ve gotta make up it somehow.)

(Seriously though, sending me the money really will make this happen.)

Short of that, the way to change the font is to edit your ~/Library/Preferences/com.trolltech.plist file and add/change the Qt.font string key to this:

Lucida Grande,11,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Save and restart the TestTrack or Surround SCM clients and you should be good to go.