Eric Warmenhoven

Lately I’ve been thinking that I’d like to buy a tripod, for a variety of reasons. I’ve been doing some research into them and decided that I’d really like to try a few out in the store before I consider buying one (especially since head and legs together will possibly cost $600). So today Lisa and I went out driving around to a bunch of different camera stores.

Or at least, we tried to go to a bunch of different stores. Los Gatos Camera closed, and we weren’t able to find a couple other of the stores on my list.

The Wolf Cameras that I’ve been to have had an extremely limited variety of tripods, and I wouldn’t consider buying any of the ones that they have.

Are there any decent camera shops in the San Jose area?

Apparently there’s lots of interest in the TiVo-Comcast product that I took a picture of. Already that picture has nearly 350 views, and the blog entry got a couple questions about it. And it’s a crap photo of something that was seen at CES.

The two questions that were asked were:

When can I get it?

I have no idea. All I know is that we got 1.0 done and Comcast currently has it. Most likely they’re going to be doing some testing of it privately, and then start market trials in select areas, but I don’t know when or where. (It’s also going to be available for Cox customers, but I have even less information about that.)

Should I wait for it or get a Series 3?

I can’t really answer that question. I have a Series 3 at home and it’s awesome. For me, if the choice were between this or a Series 3, I’d take the Series 3, despite the several hundred dollar price tag (especially since it’s currently available). Before I got the Series 3, I had the old Comcast DVR; and if I had to choose between that and the TiVo, I’d definitely choose the TiVo. (I’m biased, but I was a TiVo fan even before I got hired. That’s part of the reason I wanted to work here.)

Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that I’m not speaking on behalf of TiVo. I only work here.

TiVo!

Originally uploaded by warmenhoven

This is my desk. I’m planning on blogging about working at TiVo. I’m also testing phone-Flickr-blog.

I’ve been playing with my camera a bit more lately. The Wikipedia articles on photography and related topics are so much clearer now that I’ve had my camera for a few months. I got a new lens, an EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, and tormented Pixel with that for a while. I’m also thinking about eventually getting a tripod and a telephoto zoom lens, but probably not anytime soon.

And, as was probably inevitable, I set up a Flickr account and actually uploaded some photos to it:

I’m not really happy with most of the photos that I take though, and I think a lot of it is my framing. I just don’t have a real good feel for how to set up a shot. I guess the only things I can really do about that are to look through other people’s pictures, and experiment on my own.

About eight months ago or so, Lisa and I decided to get a new laptop that both of us could use. I decided I didn’t want to buy a Windows computer, so we “compromised” (she gave in) and we got a 17″ MacBook Pro. I was pretty impressed with it, and she found it usable enough (though Quicken for Mac is quite different from the Windows version, and she still doesn’t like it much).

Two weeks ago, we started having problems booting it. Problems like, the Apple logo on the boot screen would turn into a no sign and not boot. Or sometimes it would turn into a black screen and start printing console error messages before dropping me into a root shell. Or sometimes it would boot fine but then Finder would get into an infinite crash loop. Or sometimes it would boot fine and not have any problems at all for days.

I backed up most of my data and took it to the Apple store this afternoon, where they had pretty severe problems just trying to boot from an external disk. They took it and said that they’d try replacing the logic board and possibly the hard disk, and give me a call in a week or so when it’s ready.

I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving Brocade for a few months now. They’ve always been great to me, and I’ve enjoyed working there. But I’ve been there for nearly five years, and it was my first real job out of college, so I’ve decided I want to try something different. I especially want to get out of the storage sector; even though Brocade is really a networking company, their primary business (and everything I’ve ever worked on here) has been Fibre Channel, which is really only used for storage.

I’ve been monitoring jobs.joelonsoftware.com, and in early January (just after I had gotten Lisa a new Series 3 for Christmas) I saw a listing for TiVo. So I decided to apply. After a phone screen and two on-site interviews with a variety of people, they offered me a job, and last Wednesday, I accepted. My last day at Brocade will be next Friday, March 2, and my first day at TiVo will be Thursday, March 8. It’s finally been announced at Brocade; otherwise I would have posted this sooner.

It’ll be nice to work on something that I actually use again. (I’ll be working on the TiVo service for Comcast DVRs.) It’s easier for me to be self-motivated when I’m working on something that is potentially going to benefit me, outside of just the usual compensation. That’s the whole motivating factor of open source, at least in theory, right? I know it’s why I worked on gaim. Also, it’s a lot easier to explain to people. Telling people I work on a Fibre Channel Router, if they don’t know anything about storage, is just gibberish, and trying to explain it is aggravatingly time-consuming.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Partly in preparation for an upcoming baby, and partly by watching mid, I started thinking about cameras. I’ve decided that my little old Canon PowerShot S230 is getting a little worn out (its second battery can’t hold a charge that lasts longer than a few dozen photos). So, after a lot of advice from mid, I decided to get a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also known as the EOS 400D). Also, partly on his advice and partly on the advice of a few Amazon reviews, I decided not to get the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; not the one with the USM), and instead got another lens that sometimes is sold along with the XTi body (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM). I also got a 2GB compact flash card.

As someone who’s always had point-and-shoot cameras, this is a really awesome camera. Part of it is that all of my cameras up until now have been 3.2MP or less and this one is 10.1MP. But a lot of it is that I get to control things like shutter time, and that the lens has image stabilization (IS), so I don’t get nearly as many blurry pictures. But I’ve had the most fun playing with the aperture, which creates some really neat effects that just weren’t possible with my point-and-shoot.

Pixel, however, was unimpressed:

Anyway, I can see now why people spend so much money on cameras, and especially on lenses. And I can tell already that I’m going to want a tripod. Also, I understand now why mid has a 4GB CF. My 2GB CF holds about 200 RAW images, which would be plenty with a point-and-shoot. But with this camera, it goes quickly, since it’s so easy to take multiple pictures in quick succession. Thus far, I haven’t really run into any problems with the camera itself, other than feeling like I need or want more accessories.

As I said a while back, Lisa and I had been in the process of finding and buying a new house. A few months ago, we found one, and moved. We left behind a bit of our furniture that we have had since we were in college, and since then have been in a rather involved process of finding furniture that we’re willing to live with for the next few decades or so. It’s been a rather painless process for me, since Lisa’s been doing all of it. I just have to stay alert for when new things show up. I still tend to miss lamps.

We were in the process of selling our townhouse; but after a few months we only had two offers, and both were significantly below our asking price. So we’ve taken it off the market for now, but will list it again in the spring. Fortunately for us it’s paid off, so other than property tax, it isn’t too big of an expense. We considered renting it but have friends who did that and their experience has convinced us that we’ll never rent anything ever.

Also, a couple months ago, after we moved, we found out that Lisa’s pregnant. We’re both really excited about it. We had been married for just less than a year when we found out, which doesn’t seem like a long enough time, but we had been together for seven years prior to that. So it seemed like a good time for us. We have our third ultrasound in a couple weeks when hopefully we’ll find out the baby’s gender. Lisa’s hoping for a girl, but she thinks it’s going to be a boy; I think it’s going to be a girl. Everything seems to be going well so far, and Lisa’s starting to show a little.

We haven’t started doing any of the baby-related things yet, like picking names, or setting up a nursery and buying a ton of crap that will probably end up being mostly unused. We did receive our first baby-related gift from my grandmother though, and Lisa’s grandmother is busy knitting booties and blankets. One of these days we’ll probably head over to Babies R Us and set up a baby registry, but probably not until after the new year.

Update 12/10: Lisa has clarified her position for me. She wants a girl eventually, but doesn’t care if the current one is a boy or girl.

All I have to say is, damn you Evan.

Back when I was in college (six years ago), I took CS 162, “Programming Languages”, which was a required course but I would have taken it anyway. Most of what I remember focused on explaining the features of the languages we already knew (Java and C++) and explaining that things didn’t have to be that way. They introduced Generic Java (I hear generics have been added to Java now) and had us write several programs using generics, which was about the only language that we actually had to program in. But they also made us use Haskell.

As I recall, the assignment in Haskell was to write a B-tree. We didn’t have to compile anything; we just wrote a small file and loaded it in hugs and ran commands in the interpreter. It actually ended up being really easy, which left a favorable impression of Haskell in my mind, but I never learned more about Haskell. Instead I went off and learned C by hacking gaim. And look where that got me.

Anyway, over the last year or so, Evan Martin has written about Haskell fairly frequently, and every time he does, it brings back fond memories of my earlier Haskell programming experience.

And two weeks ago, I finally decided to do something about it. I downloaded hugs and GHC and read a lot of documentation, and wrote a lot of test programs. This time, with the aid of GHC, I actually compiled an executable. And it was fantastic. Suddenly Haskell became a real language for me. Though it took a lot of reading first to figure out how to get the list of command line arguments, and then to understand how the IO Monad works so that I can actually use the getArgs function without screaming.

So here I am, a Haskell newbie coming from a C world, trying to make sense of it all. And naturally, I have questions.

• Where did all the shared libraries go? Turning a Haskell module into a static library looks like it’s fairly straightforward, but it looks like it’s impossible to create a shared library that’s usable by other Haskell programs.
• Why do header files have a bizzare suffix? If module A uses something from module B and module B uses something from module A, there’s a circular dependency that GHC can’t resolve on its own. The solution to this is to create a “boot” copy of module A that defines the things that B depends on without depending on B. In C this is called a header file. In GHC this is called a boot file and is given the extension “.hs-boot”.
• Why does everyone ignore all the practical stuff? I read through five tutorials before I finally found one (on Monads, of all things) that actually had a usable getArgs example.
• Where’s the Debian-specific documentation? For example, there’s a GTK module. Where is that? How do I get it? Is there a package for it? If not, how do I make one? (I saw the debian haskell mailing list but didn’t feel like wading through the archives hoping that one of my questions might be answered.)

When I first started working at Brocade, we were in Con-6, and I was on the eighth floor. This posed a slight problem for me since I was the only one in my group who wasn’t on the seventh floor. So eventually I was moved down to the seventh floor and given a cube with a really great view.

After we bought Rhapsody, engineering was slowly migrated over to Skyport-3, where we all currently are. Originally I was on the second floor with the rest of my group, but then something weird happened. I changed groups at the same time that my old group moved up to the sixth floor. I moved up to the sixth floor, but my new group was on the fifth floor, so a few weeks later, I also moved down to the fifth floor.

A month or so ago, there was yet another reorg, and my old group and my new group merged. This past Friday, the people who had been on the fifth floor moved up to the sixth floor. This means that I’ve moved cubes five times in less than four years. The awful part is that when I was on the second and fifth floors, I was right next to the printer, and now that I’m on the sixth floor again, I’m right next to the printer yet again.

One of the cubes on the sixth floor has freed up, and I want it. The problem is, it’s a window cube, and so everyone wants it. My boss has said that it’s usually distributed based on tenure and rank, which means I’m likely not to get it, which really pisses me off, since I’ve had a really awful cube for a long time.

One other thing that really pisses me off is that the soda machine on the sixth floor charges $0.60 instead of $0.50 like the fifth floor machine, and also the sixth floor machine only has Coke products, whereas the fifth floor had a healthy mix of Coke and Pepsi products, and I’m a Pepsi drinker. So I’m thinking about getting a cube mini-fridge. My space requirements are max 23″Hx19″Wx19″D and preferably less than 17″W and 15″D, so I’m thinking about getting this fridge from ThinkGeek. Any reviews on it? Any other ones that anyone would suggest?