The Popular Science of the 21st century, Oreilly’s Make magazine and blog are must reads for geeks. After perusing the site, I generally feel inspired and really really slow (though I’m still not sure why I should be wanting to give a roach an exoskeleton no matter how cool it is).
So I’m geekily excited to see that Philip Torrone at Make has linked to my post on “hacking” into the U10 interface.
I just got back to my desk, so I thought I would write a quick summary of the Tom Cruise event.
It wasn’t a bomber, it was a fighter. Specifically it was a P-51 Mustang. No wonder Katie was flying in the other plane!
Once he got there he apologized for keeping us waiting, and clearly seemed to feel somewhat bad about it since he repeated his apology several times scattered throughout the talk. As you might guess, the event was well choreographed, and there were no hard questions. He was there as a favor for Terry Semel (Semel said before Tom Cruise got there that he was not being paid to be there) and to promote his new movie, Mission Impossible 3. You have to admit though that it must have been a lot more about the first reason than the second. Talking to about a thousand Yahoo!’s is probably not his most efficient promotional work ever.
The really fascinating thing was the conversation between Tom and Terry (just got a mental image of Terry Semel as a mouse). They’ve clearly worked together a lot during Semel’s time as head of Warner Movies. The praise went both ways, but then they started talking about their vacations together. Terry told a really funny story about a trip that their two families took several years ago during a break in the filming of Eyes Wide Shut. Apparently Stanley Kubrick who was a genius, but a controlling genius, didn’t want Cruise to go on a vacation during the two year shoot.
Kubrick’s fears ran the gamut from having his star come back with a sun tan, to being attacked while at sea a la the plot of the movie Dead Calm. For those not familiar with Dead Calm, a couple out on a cruise comes to the aid of a ship in distress. They help the person on the other boat who then kills them. After finally relenting, Kubrick let them go on their cruise. A few days into it Terry noticed smoke on the horizon while they were eating breakfast (apparently Cruise is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs) which turned out to be a ship on fire. Terry went on to describe his feelings as Cruise took a smaller boat to check on the passengers of the other boat, and the even stronger feelings as Cruise came back towards the boat with the folks from the other boat. 
Some other notable moments were where Cruise made a bit of fun of himself by saying that his excitement about his upcoming child with Katie Holmes (who looks about ready to pop) made him almost want to jump up on the chair (which he then did to the applause and laughter of everybody). Mostly though he promoted his new movie and showed some good clips, and talked about shared stories with Terry Semel. I feel like I learned a bit more in the end about our CEO than I did Tom Cruise, but that is OK, I’m honestly more interested in Semel since he has such a bigger impact on my daily life.
Both Tom and Terry hinted at some exclusive marketing around Mission Impossible 3, but given that this wasn’t really a confidential event clearly weren’t going to get into specifics. It wouldn’t surprise me though. Yahoo! really can offer some impressive advertising possibilities, and movie studios haven’t been shy about using them.
My boredom is now your boredom.
Oops… Tom Cruise didn’t land just then (a half hour ago). he landed just now. Katie landed then. She took a different plane. Why? He flew a World War 2 era bomber. In this weather. Terry Semel is up on stage talking about his flight yesterday which took twice as long as normal. Apparently the bomber is so much smaller that SJC airport is even having trouble finding him on their instruments.
Terry is telling some personal stories about his interactions with Tom Cruise and showing us clips of his work. I hadn’t realized that Cruise had helped out Yahoo! adding a bit of celebrity to our showings at CES.
So right after I hit publish, someone came up to give an announcement that Tom Cruise just… um… LANDED. Scientology isn’t the only thing evangelized at the meetings. I guess Travolta has been busy convincing Tom to fly himself places. Tom is flying his own plane up here and just landed. They claim he will be here in 15 minutes.
About five seconds after the announcement, everyone here mentally calculated how long it takes them to get to work from the airport. 15 Min. is just a bit optimistic. Following the announcement, people are filing out. The common quote on the way out: “BRB… I need my laptop.” As people try to hold their seat with just about any possession they have, others are trying to find better seats. As an optimistic show confidence in their fellow employees, many of the caffeine deprived have left their laptops as seat holders.
As for me, I’m just sitting here. Once I finish this post it will be back to Flash for me. Though I am ratcheting down my computers power consumption. This could be a while.
Doors opened at 10 AM for the Tom Cruise event at Yahoo!. I got to work around 9:45, picked the short line to get into the Urls cafeteria (multi-step pun… 1. think “Eat at Joe’s,” 2. now substitute “Eat at Earl’s,” 3. change the spelling and drop the “Eat at,” 4. chuckle). There was a bit of nervous chatter in the line over just how many seats fit in the cafeteria, and how many of the folks would get in. Some folks even lined up some time last night or in the wee hours of the morning to get in to the event.
The engineers started trying to calculate the number of seats, the PMs are calculating the negative productivity impact of the line, and I just kept trying to wake up. As things progressed, the lines swelled… from the middle. Funny thing with an event at a company you work at. You tend to recognize people in line. This is one of the few lines I’ve been in where I had to physically walk backwards a bit.
Once the lines started moving, everyone got in very quickly. Well provided you didn’t leave your badge on the coffee table (at this point Ray is reading this and dashing to the coffee table to check). I did indeed remember my badge today, though it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for me to forget. Unfortunately for others they were not so lucky and were bounced by Y! security.
This event is closed off to all but Y! badge holders. No friends, families or smuggled reporters, unless you count the see of laptops I see that are probably blogging this too. I’m looking at you Jeremy. Well, not really, but I assume you are in here somewhere.
So here we all sit (10:52 now). The presentation was supposed to start at 10:30. I’m sure he is just being fashionably late, so I’m very happy I have my laptop. I think I will wrap this up for now until he gets here. For now I am going to enjoy how one person standing up to stretch or take a picture gets people thinking that someone has spotted… him.
My partner Ray is a privacy expert and does a lot of advocacy for consumer privacy rights. He is also does a lot of thinking, talking and writing on the subject. His latest column for eSecurity Planet really captures the dawning reality of how ethically off-kilter Google is when it comes to privacy and got me thinking.
Often it seems the media just gets it completely backwards on privacy. In the one instance of Google demonstrably doing the right thing (though I think it was different business reasons temporally aligned with privacy), Google resisted the government’s request for search data. The media and the market took Google out to the woodshed for that one. In every other case though they have had very few consequences for their privacy blunders.
On privacy, Yahoo! has often been treated strangely by the media. There was a much-publicized incident about a year ago when Yahoo! refused to hand over the email of a dead Marine to his parents. Throughout the process Yahoo! was vilified as being hard-hearted, and sometimes even unpatriotic. Against the public consensus, I was really proud of Yahoo! that day. Yahoo! has a privacy-friendly policy and despite the dramatic nature of the circumstances we held to it. This is what you should want a company doing for you.
My take on the situation is that Yahoo! shouldn’t be in the business of deciding who to give YOUR email to. The correct process was for the parents to go through the probate court and get the proof that satisfied Yahoo!’s policies. They did just that and got their son’s email. Upon taking legal possession of their son’s estate, Yahoo! should comply with the request for the email. And they did. Hurrah, the system works and we get to keep our privacy.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 in ActionScript 2.0. Positively poetic!
More than being a cute project, I think it is also a good example of just how readable ActionScript is. Oh AJAX person… would you be a dear and come over and read this for me? Doesn’t it look hauntingly familiar? It harkens back to your DHTML days of old, but much like English has moved on from the days of Shakespeare, ActionScript has taken ECMA-script and undergone a little linguistic evolution.
Now if you wanted to make a whole play, you might also see how ActionScript has also added the many benefits of object oriented programming. I look forward to AS3 Romeo and Juliet. But I will leave Object Oriented Shakespeare to one that is geekier than I.
Tom Cruise will be at Yahoo! next week to present as part of the influential speakers series. Other speakers in the series have been Tom Brokaw, the governator (briefly-may-he-reign), and Suze Orman. Clearly Media has been influential in getting our speakers lined up.
Though it may be tempting the fates, we are even encouraged to submit questions for Tom to answer. I really pity the person that has to sort through the questions looking for something that will be interesting to ask but won’t set off the famously touchy Cruise.
I’ll be interested to see if he has any reaction to fellow Scientologist Isaac Hayes announcement that he is leaving South Park because of its religious insensitivity (towards Scientology only). On a related note, I am rather pissed at Comedy Central for pulling last night’s South Park episode about Tom Cruise. It was a very relevant episode in light of Hayes’s resignation. While my Tivo’s description still showed the originally schedules show, Comedy Central instead showed the episode about Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls (which is also a great episode).
All I can say is wow. Getting into Flash Lite seems to have been a good PR move for me.
Adobe recently launched Stories, a video series letting several developers and designers tell the story of one of their projects. I was thrilled to be included in the project and was more than a bit amazed when I heard who else is in the stories.
This has my work being shown on the front pages of Adobe and Macromedia, the Engage with Flash microsite, and now Stories.
My story is about Flash Lite development and building my NYC Traffic Cam viewer. The whole experience of participating in the video was a blast. The shot of me in front of the traffic signs is at a building that houses all of San Francisco’s (just mentally pretend it is NYC!) street and traffic signs. That was just a fun warehouse to poke around in. After the many takes there where the director was pretty much begging me to demonstrate more emotion (no future in acting for me–I guess I will stick to letting flash be expressive instead), we headed on to the taxi cab.
For the rest of the evening we drove around the city continuing the interview. When I saw “we,” I mean the director, sound person, and driver/video coordinator. Oh yeah, and the three HD cameras and lights mounted in the car. We were a little crowded in there, but we spent a lot of the time just trying not to crack up as every time I got a good take the check engine light would start making noise.
After a while the crew changed the cameras and mounted one on the outside of the car. That was when the real fun began. Try driving around a city on a Friday night with people, lights and cameras packed into a taxicab plus a rig on the outside. You will get some attention. Then gaze out the window as “the world passes by,” but in reality people are making all sorts of faces at you.
All in all, I think it was about 10 hours of filming, and lots of patience on the part of the crew. I’m sure they all had better things to be doing that night.
A few weeks later, I went to visit Scott, one of my friends up in Yahoo!’s San Francisco office. We went to lunch at a nearby soup place only to discover that there was a video shoot going on there of a bike messenger driving around. I thought I recognized the cameraman, but didn’t think any more of it. Now with the Engage with Flash project, I realized that the second segment with the bike messenger, was actually that video shoot! If you click “learn how” on the bike messenger segment, there it is again… my NYC Traffic Cam viewer and a different video taken about a year ago.
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The last book I worked on was Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Programming which was part of that big book series with the green spliny landscape on the front. The book was originally for Flash 6, but then Flash 7 appeared on the horizon and was re-factored for 7. As with most of the books that come out right after a product release, the concepts are still tied a little too much to the previous version since the authors haven’t really gotten into the workflow of the new version yet. This book was no exception. AS 1 abounds and the new features are only touched upon.
Also like most books that try to ride the wave of readers wanting to learn about a new version, the book doesn’t have staying power and goes out of print pretty quickly. Once again, no exception. The strange thing though is that the book seems to be doing better than ever despite being severely out-dated and out of print. I get email regularly asking for the files from the CD. It turns out that the book is available on Safari Bookshelf (without the relevant files). Also several community colleges decided to use the book as their text book.
All of this leads to a really funny email I got from a reader today. Ron writes that he was thinking about buying the book used on amazon just to get the CD but when he checked, the book is being marked up. Like all technical books, it retailed for $49.99 USD and was often marked down. In the used section of amazon there are three copies available ranging from $110-$141USD! Why on earth is there such a market for what amounts to a Flash 6 game development book plus a gentle introduction to OOP by someone who in retrospect really wasn’t qualified at the time to say much on the subject (me)? Most of my other titles are running at an average of $3 USD.
So if anyone wants to overpay for my book, let me know. I have signed collectors editions all set (well, I will once I go find a pen).
If you are one of those Safari Bookshelf readers that is looking for the CD source. There you go. If however you are from my publisher, Premier Press, let me know if you don’t want me putting the source up. At that point you can also explain why I don’t get royalties from the Safari readership.