My friend Rob (whom I share an office at work with) made the mistake of sending me the following picture, which I couldn’t resist turning into a motivational poster. I’m just having trouble coming up with the perfect tag line… Comments welcome.
… and my favorite:
Den of Geek has an interesting interview with Angus MacLane, Pixar’s supervising animator of Wall-E. He reveils plenty of good insights into the development process of Wall-E, but my favorite parts are about the software (of course):
[Interviewer] And does the software you use alter much as you go along, over a three year production cycle?
[Angus] The software for the actual execution of the film doesn’t change that much. Because you really need to lock it to one piece of software. Maybe there’ll be an update here and there, and they’ll be individual sub-programs developed. For example there was a program developed for Wall E just to get his treads to lock to the ground, so they recognise the ground and wrap around and drive as you translate him along. That was technology that was developed as an offshoot from a very similar program from Cars, in keeping the tyres on the ground. But that’s about as automated as we get. Everything else is pretty much hand animated.
I also liked this little tidbit:
[Interviewer] Finally, for anyone looking to break into animation, what advice would you give them?
[Angus] I would say be persistent, and keep trying. A friend of mine, he’s a music composer, he’d got some advice from an old pro when he started. And the old pro said to him that people who succeed in the business are not those that are the most talented, and they’re not the people that know the most people, but they are the people who are able to endure. I think that there’s something profound about that. It’s the old saying, it doesn’t happen by mistake: it’s opportunity met with preparation. So when you get the opportunity, make sure you’re prepared.
You can read the whole interview HERE.
One more thing to add to my list of things to learn on the bass 
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
Update 7/22/2008: The issue may be more complex than it first looks (of course, the media always over-simplifies things). Click HERE to read an insider’s account of the situation.
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Okay, THIS is funny because of the glaring security mistakes made by San Francisco’s Department of Technology (or Department of Ignorance, after this one). From the New York Times:
A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail…
Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology… tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.
Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.
This is like security 101… you never give this much power to any single person. On critical systems like this, you always have check-and-balances, outside security code reviews, and strict audits. The S.F. DoT was basically driving around without insurance and got in an accident… I don’t feel sorry for them. It’s really sad how ignorant the world is about security (sigh).
Here’s another great Marcus Miller clip. You’ve gotta love the organ work. Props to Josh Brahm for the link.
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
O’Reilly has a great interview up with NASA’s Peter Gluck, project software engineer for the Mars Phoenix Lander. I always find the design and implementation of mission-critical systems interesting. In short, they’re running a radiation-hardened system (the RAD 6000 board) with a 33MHz CPU, 128 megabytes of RAM, and a PCI peripheral interface… pretty advanced stuff for space. This usually surprises people when they first hear about these systems, but the circumstances require proven technology that is hardened against the perils of outer space (for example, the Hubble Space Telescope was recently upgraded to an Intel 486 processor… the Space Shuttle still runs on hardened PDP-11s).
The software is written in C and running on the VxWorks real-time OS… Lockheed Martin (who wrote the control systems) switched from ADA to C a few years back. There are plenty more interesting details in the article. Here are a few teasers:
The RAD 6000 has built in error detection and corrections. So the hardware does RAM scrubbing. There is a RAM scrubbing that occurs on a continuous basis. And beyond that, we have internal fault protection that monitors the health and safety of the software. And if a software task, for example, fails to respond to a ping, we have pings in the system, then the fault protection task will declare that a fault has occurred and will safe the spacecraft. And what that means, by “safeing”, we mean that the spacecraft will enter into a power and communications safe mode where it will just sit and wait for the ground to respond. It’ll basically phone home and say, I’ve got a problem; somebody tell me what to do.
So if it were to completely lock-up, the hardware has to be stroked every 64 seconds. There’s a watch-stop timer. And so if that 64 second period expires, then the hardware resets and the software is rebooted, and hopefully that clears whatever error occurred. Now in the event that that doesn’t work, we have a whole second set of avionics onboard. So the hardware will try to boot to the same side, and if the same side doesn’t come up and start stroking the watch-stop timer, then it will swap to the other side and boot the first side.
Interviewer: Am I right in assuming that there’s very little process separation in the older RAD 6000 boards?
Peter: Exactly… We have strict coding guidelines that we use. We don’t allow dynamic memory allocation, for example.
These are true fail-safe systems… not the stuff we mortal engineers play with. Click HERE to read the rest of the interview.
TechUser has a great article about possible reasons Microsoft would be interested in purchasing Yahoo’s paid-search business (click HERE for the back story). For those of you new to the subject, paid-search is where advertisers bid against each other to get better/more frequent placement of their ads next to search results (think Google AdWords). This is big business. Believe it or not, it’s what drives Google… search, Gmail, Google Docs, etc all revolve around their ad business.
The afore mentioned article puts forth a compelling argument that Microsoft is only interested in the infamous ‘361 patent held by Yahoo. This is the patent on the whole idea of paid-search. Apparently, Yahoo has been dening Microsoft a good licensing deal on the patent, so Microsoft is retaliating. From the article:
Microsoft is still chafing under Yahoo’s influence and is desperate for unfettered access to the ‘361 patent. It is quite possible that the size of the royalties Microsoft is paying to Yahoo are forcing Microsoft to neglect its paid search operations in order to minimize payments to Yahoo, and to minimize the size of an eventual settlement with Yahoo.
Microsoft is completely aware of the ludicrousness of its attempts to buy Yahoo’s paid-search assets and Microsoft’s earlier acquisition bid seems to have been an attempt to soften up Yahoo’s opposition to a paid-search asset acquisition.
The entire theory is interesting. Click HERE to read the full article.
It’s been said that managing engineers is like trying to herd cats: we’re independent, suspicious, and we only do things because we want to. I was reminded this week about a great ad that aired during the SuperBowl a few years back… all about cat herding. Enjoy!
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
Some grooves just speak for themselves…
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
Click HERE to visit Marcus Miller’s website.
Tom Distler is a senior software engineer at Pelco. He has a beautiful wife and a baby on the way. He enjoys playing the drums and writing about himself in the 3rd-person (not really :-)). Read more...
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