Tech

Feb 7, 2025 ∞

Perhaps my final team meeting

I could never say enough good things about my work colleagues and friends. 32 years ago I had no idea that my dream job actually existed, but it turns out, it does, and it’s working with this gang. It was great seeing everyone in New York this week and I’m happy they could meet Photographer Cathy too!

Y’know, it’s one of the odd things from working at home, which I’ve done the whole time (albeit with a LOT of work travel.). You get so used to video chats via WebEx and Zoom that you almost forget what it’s like to see people in three dimensions, and eventually you realize that your wife has hardly ever actually met anybody you work with. I’m glad I had that chance this week.

I’ve never really been a fan of hugging people at work but I made a lot of exceptions to that policy this week. (Cathy did too, but she’s always like that.)

Thanks, team. You’re all the best.

ps. wait, what, am I retiring? Well, yeah. Soon.

Dec 20, 2023 ∞

A different story about Apple and NeXT

Today’s the 27th anniversary of the Apple/NeXT merger, and instead of my annual rehashing of what that was like, you can just read what I wrote up for the 25th Anniversary.

So here’s a slightly different Apple/NeXT memory.

I really knew nothing about the Mac growing up. Although Dad had bought an Apple II, I never really even touched a Mac, not even in university.

(I do remember one other grad student who was using his Mac to write his thesis, while the rest of us were using LaTeX or troff or some other Unix command line formatting thing on the mighty Vax 11/780, which proved we were REAL computer scientists. Oh, how we laughed at Terry, trying to write his thesis on that Mac toy. Of course he got the last laugh, he finished his work about a year quicker than I did.)

In 1995 or so while working for Steve Jobs at NeXT, we had some sort of a sales contest. If your region hit 120% of its quota, you’d win a big-screen TV.

Our region did OK, and I did not particularly want a 1995-era big screen TV - which would have been some giant rear-projection thing in a huge cabinet - so I bravely asked the NeXT sales VP, “Can I get a Mac instead? I hear they’re kind of interesting. And we’ve got a two year old here and there are some educational games etc etc” and the VP said, “Sure.”

So, NeXT bought me a Performa 5200CD, which had a place of honour on our kitchen breakfast nook for years.

We had a lot of fun with that computer, even though I have since read that architecturally, it was one of the worst Macs. But what did I know? We hooked up a Microsoft EasyBall to it - a giant trackball, the size and colour of a grapefruit - and spent many happy days playing classics from Humongous like Backyard Baseball, or Freddy Fish, or Putt-Putt, or my favourite, Let’s Explore the Airport, with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug.

Buzzy would explore the airport, and you got to operate baggage conveyor belts and try to steer bags to the right destination.

update: holy cow there is a full 90 minute walkthrough of this game, and now I am getting superextranostalgic watching it - here’s part of the baggage handling game -

Of course this machine didn’t have Wifi, nothing did back then, but I managed to string an Ethernet cable from my office upstairs to the kitchen, thinking “It’d be nice if I could print from this Mac to my NeXT printer upstairs How hard can that be? It’s just a Unix print queue”

Well, interoperability was not exactly the Mac’s strong point back then. I think I dropped a couple of hundred bucks on some sort of Mac print spooler package that was supposed to let you print to a Unix printer and never could quite get it to work.

I spent a lot of time futzing with that. My wife, trying to be helpful, would say “Why don’t we just buy another printer and connect it to the Mac directly?”

because that would not be FUN, that’s why.

I don’t think I can quite spin this story as “Steve Jobs bought me my first Mac”, although it was Steve’s VP Marty Yam who did, but anyway, architecture be damned, my kids and I had a lot of fun with that Mac, and I started to think the odd positive thought about Apple, and a year later, Apple acquired me and 400 other NeXT employees.

Happy anniversary. Especially to the handful of us NeXT folks who are still here at Apple.

Aug 16, 2023 ∞

Handling a QR Code on your iPhone

Pro Tip: Your iPhone can decode a QR code if you point the camera at it, that’s easy - but what if instead you are looking at a QR Code on the screen (in a web page, or your photo library, or one someone emailed to you) ? Here’s a quick way to deal with a QR code like that.

In this example I have used Safari to visit Wikipedia’s QR code page.

So how do we figure out what that QR Code is?

Try doing a long-press on the QR code image and see if the popup menu shows you what the QR code is. . Sometimes that will work, but not always - how a long press is handled is up to the app displaying the code. (Looks like Safari will try to decode it for you, in which case you can skip all the steps below - but lots of other apps don’t.) (h/t to Tom for the reminder.)
Take a screen shot in usual way (press side button and volume-up on a FaceID phone, for instance), then tap the thumbnail image that appears to bring up the photo editor.
Tap the text-selection icon in the lower right (shown below in red.) If you don’t see that button, first tap the markup button in the top toolbar (shown in green.)

Once you’ve tapped that text-selection button, all the text in the image becomes copyable - AND - you can tap on the image of the QR Code to see what it is, or to open it in Safari, or to copy the URL if you like.

Easy peasy.

Dec 20, 2021 ∞

Apple + NeXT, 25 years ago today.

25 years ago today, I was a field systems engineer for NeXT, one of three NeXT employees in Canada - and our family was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, introducing a three week old baby to his grandmother.

Nobody had reliable cell phones back then, so most messaging was done through a voice mail system called Audix, and somehow I still remember the number. 1-800-345-5588. I dialled it the other day. Number not in service. But I can still dial it quickly.

So anyway, we got a sudden Audix message. Urgent. Everyone must dial in at 2 PM. I went looking for a reliable land line for the call, not having much idea what it was about, and somehow wound up on a pay phone at the Steamtown Railroad Museum. (which I kind of wanted to visit anyway.)

And there, we learned that NeXT had agreed to be acquired by Apple for $400,000,000.

In retrospect, the tech involved in the merger wound up being so one-sided that many people say “NeXT actually bought Apple for negative $400,000,000.” A few years later, something like 70% of Apple’s VPs were ex-NeXT people.

I was floored. I didn’t expect this at all.

NeXT was struggling. Our founder, Steve Jobs, seemed to be spending all his time at his other company, Pixar, and although we just just eked out our first quarterly operating profit (mostly based on selling WebObjects, a Java application server) we weren’t exactly setting the world on fire.

Here’s the sort of thing NeXT was selling at the time - a press release from three weeks before the merger, touting CyberSlice, a revolutionary new system for (get this!) ordering pizza from your computer. (WebObjects was also powering the Disney and Dell online stores, and Steve had even demoed using it to buy a plane ticket through a web browser. Heady stuff for the mid-1990s.)

"CyberSlice has enabled any small or large pizza provider to get online," said Steven P. Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software. "NeXT is excited to provide the enabling technology to CyberSlice, which combines fun with an innovative business concept. The success of CyberSlice shows the versatility of WebObjects in creating and deploying consumer web applications that are both sophisticated and original."

It must have been killing Steve Jobs that his vision of a revolutionary new workstation and operating system for higher education hadn’t panned out and that he was now reduced to selling enterprise server software for $50,000 a copy.

Apple was seemingly caught in a death spiral too and was getting awfully close to running out of money.

two weeks earlier

Two weeks earlier, I’d got a call from a former NeXT colleague Barb, who’d gone to work for Apple. She wanted to know if I wanted to come along.

“No thank you”, I replied politely, when what I was really thinking was “What, that bunch of losers? Why would I go there? They’re the only company going out of business faster than WE are.”

But the merger happened anyway, and Barb called me about a minute after it was announced to say “Well, we really wanted to hire you, so this is the only plan we could think of.”

I always wondered if the message of “We really need to hire Steve from NeXT” got garbled somehow.

shortly thereafter

Barb called and invited me to visit Apple’s office in Markham to “show us what the heck it was we just bought.”

What Apple was most interested in was NeXT’s NeXTSTEP operating system that originally came with the NeXT cube but had been ported to run on Intel systems as well. I wasn’t even using that day-to-day any more; most of my work was using WebObjects on Windows NT. But I managed to reinstall NeXTSTEP on my Toshiba Tecra, and took that up to Markham for a demo to the Apple team.

I remember struggling to get my laptop to work with their weird mutant boardroom projector, and thinking “geez, I hope this works.” and I wasn’t just thinking about the projector.

Ultimately we got it to work at a cramped 640x480 resolution and I was able to show off NeXTSTEP, Unix, Interface Builder and (horrors) the Terminal program, which was pretty much the opposite of what Apple had been providing.

Everybody at NeXT was so unclear that this merger was going to work that we all handed out our NeXT business cards for as long as those phone numbers and emails still worked. (Remind me to write up my “I was steve@next.com” story some time too.)

eventually all was well.

It worked out OK, though. The merger happened at a historic low point for Apple, and once Steve Jobs came back as CEO, an incredible technical and business turnaround began.

NeXT’s software and hardware became the foundation of everything Apple made. The NeXTSTEP operating system - which NeXT was just about to shelve, until a midlevel NeXT guy John Landwehr (hi John! How are things at Adobe?) cold-called Apple’s CTO Ellen Hancock to ask if they needed a robust operating system because Mac OS was really shaky - became the foundation of Mac OS X; NeXT’s Project Builder and Interface Builder became Xcode; NeXT’s love of the Objective-C language eventually created Swift.

And, all that technology that I started learning when I bought my $11,000 NeXT cube in Indiana in 1988 now runs on my phone. And my watch! On my wrist. Objective-C and NeXTSTEP runs on my wrist today. Crazy.

And here we are. It’s been a pretty amazing run.

The three week old baby turned out to be a fine young man too.

My NeXT badge, and over my shoulder, my NeXT cube.

the people

At the time of the merger, NeXT had about 400 employees, and Apple had only a few thousand. Today. Apple has 160,000 people. I’m curious how many of the NeXT crew are still here. I know about a dozen, and I’m sure there are more. 100 maybe? Who knows. We’ve all been incredibly lucky.

PS. This is a photo of the last ever gathering of NeXT employees before the merger was legally finalized. To my great regret, I was not able to get out to NeXT’s HQ in Redwood City for this picture, but it sure brings back a lot of memories.

Feb 7, 2021 ∞

Remembering NeXT's Black Monday. Or possibly Sunday.

NeXT's Black Monday

Today’s the 28th anniversary of the day in 1993 that NeXT decided to

stop making its iconic black computers
abandon work on a PowerPC-based workstation
try selling its hardware business and factory to Canon
focus on software
rename the company "NeXT Software"

and not insignificantly

lay off 300 of its 540 employees.

Including me, Systems Engineer for NeXT Canada.

(Later on, of course, Apple purchased NeXT and its software became the core of iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, all running on hardware that was inconceivable to any of us in 1993.)

or possibly Sunday

Looking back at my calendar I see that February 7, 1993 was actually a Sunday, so I might be off by one in my reminiscing. But still. It was kind of a big deal, personally.

vague reminiscences, previously tweeted

I remember we all got an urgent voice mail and the entire NeXT Canada office - all 3 of us - were instructed to fly to Chicago immediately for some news.

That was an interesting trip as Phil, Paul and myself debated exactly what was going on and who was going to be left standing. We knew that the regional manager was out.

And we all got let go, effective immediately, and - I still can’t believe we felt we needed to do this - we went to visit our big customers back in Toronto in person the following day to let them know what was going on.

You know those tables where they assign numerical values to various stress factors? Getting laid off was one thing but we had also (2) just bought a house and (3) were expecting child #1. I needed a bigger chart.

I remain, however, eternally grateful to Trimark Investment Management, one of our biggest NeXT customers, because when we visited them to tell them all of NeXT Canada had been let go, they said “Huh. That’s unfortunate …. Steve do you want to do some consulting for us?”

Thus began the historic short life of the consulting firm of Steve Hayman and Associates *

there were no associates

One thing I remember from the layoff meeting in Chicago, where somebody I had never met before told me I no longer had a job. “I want to keep my computer.”

— OK … what computer do you have?

(Changed the subject quickly. I think I actually had two computers.)

One other thing I remember. Consulting for Trimark, they had a fleet of NeXT computers, I had one at home, so I bought a portable SCSI hard drive to carry my work back and forth because how else were you supposed to do it in 1993

a ONE GIGABYTE SCSI hard drive. Massive! And it was only $1000!

Today for $1000, you’d get, what, 50 terabytes? 50,000 times as much? Storage is 1/50,000 th of what it was? How many other things are 50,000 times cheaper? That’s basically FREE now.

I know this will come as a surprise to nobody but Steve Hayman and Associates was not exactly a huge success. (I blame the associates, of course.)

18 months later, as NeXT pivoted to software, the regional team - from Michigan - came to Toronto to present to, I forget who exactly, some bank or something. They kindly invited the entire Steve Hayman and Associates team to attend.

Before the session started, the NeXT team said in a kind of off-hand way, “Hey Steve, how about you do the presentation?”

I guess in retrospect it was kind of an audition.

And, whaddya know, I guess NeXT saw (one of) the error(s) of its ways, and offered me a job again.

note: it is possible I am still telling the same jokes in presentations, because, you know, Object Oriented programming encourages re-use

So, miraculously, even though this day in February 1993 was a very stressful low point for me and hundreds of others, I was lucky enough to get drafted by NeXT a second time.

For a while, NeXT Canada was me in Toronto, and a guy in Vancouver (hi Scott.) We’d phone each other on Memorial Day, or July 4, or US Thanksgiving just to verify the other guy was actually in the office.

I still have a surprising quantity of NeXT business cards. I keep those with my SCSI cables. Hey, you never know.

Mar 14, 2019 ∞

Pi Day

It’s Pi Day. March 14. 14th day of the third month. And if - for some reason - you insist on writing the date as “3/14”, it kind of looks like π, except that 3/14 = 0.2142857….

We might all be better off celebrating Pi Approximation Day - July 22, which some would write as 22/7, which is 3.142857… That is much closer to the true value, which is, of course

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679....

I typed that from memory. Trust me.

So anyway, math lovers will temporarily put aside their advocacy for the one true ISO8601 style of writing the date, which is

DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS
WRITE THE DATE THIS WAY
ALWAYS
2019-03-14

for one day, in the interests of the greater good of society. We will write the date wrong, just this once.

Sidebar: The 2000 version of the ISO8601 standard allowed for writing dates with "reduced accuracy", and allowed you to use the notation "--MM-DD" for a date without a year, so you COULD write "--03-14" and be within the standard. But for reasons I don't know, mainly because it costs money to download a copy of the standard, the 2004 version of ISO8601 apparently disallows writing the month without also writing the year.

Every –03-14 I always wind up thinking about Pi. I can’t help it. Everybody at work is sending me pi jokes and links to pi T-shirts and this is what happens when you make the mistake of standing up in a large team meeting 20 years ago and reciting Pi to 100 decimal places in order to make some point about Applescript programming; you are now “the pi guy” and every year, it never stops.

do you know a lot of random facts about pi?

yes

are they interesting to lots of other people?

are you going to write a blog post about them anyway?

eventually

ok just for now, why do you know π to 100 places?

well I memorized it to 200 places in grade 10, but I’m getting older.

why did you memorize it to 200 places in grade 10?

Because I thought it would impress girls

did it?

It took a while. Cathy married me several decades later. It was worth it.

Dec 30, 2018 ∞

New shirts for the Moon Shot 1969 50th Anniversary

fifty years ago

July 16, 1969. Mom and Dad took my brother and me to Florida to see the Apollo XI launch. I will be grateful to them forever for taking us to see the greatest scientific thing ever.

I took this picture with my Kodak Instamatic 100. It’s still my favourite picture I’ve ever taken. See that white dot above the two puffs of smoke? That’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins heading to the moon.

We watched this from what is now Parrish Park in Titusville, on the SR 402 causeway heading to the Kennedy Space Center. Dad rented a camper van and we patiently waited it out, along with a million other people…

and we checked out the same spot in 2015 (this time with a slightly better camera).

Oh, and we got souvenir shirts. Here we are, having just returned from Florida in this spacious camper van - me, Mom (who, sadly, didn’t get a shirt), Dad and my brother. Our family in our MOON SHOT 1969 shirts

Check out the cool shirts with a beautiful late 1960s aesthetic. “MOON SHOT 1969 - I was there.” They weren’t quite bold enough to put the actual launch date on the shirt. Just in case.

My sister was a baby at the time and didn’t come along, and I’m sure she has been very tired of hearing for almost 50 years of what an amazing thing this was. And she didn’t get a shirt either.

I don’t know where my original shirt is. Of course it most likely wouldn’t fit, seeing as how it was probably a boy’s medium, and I’m now an adult extra-medium. Dad still has his - and my brother even wore it to the final Space Shuttle launch.

christmas 2018

But with the 50th Anniversary coming up, I thought of a fun Christmas present. How about getting those shirts re-made in the correct sizes? Michael sent me a snapshot of his carefully preserved shirt, and I touched it up (in Pixelmator) and submitted it to Entripy, a great local producer of T-shirts who seem willing to do really small orders when they’re not cranking out 25,000 at once for the Raptors or Leafs.

I ordered 4 reproductions for me, my parents, and my brother. And then thinking of everyone else we’d see at Christmas, who have all kindly listened to our stories of the Apollo XI launch without complaining, I ordered a few more of a slightly different design. See if you can spot the difference.

Many thanks to Entripy for doing a great job on these. I hope everyone in my family wears the right one next July 16.

the designs

Moon Shot 1969 - I Was There

Moon Shot 1969 - I Wasn’t There, But I Know Somebody Who Was

the end result

(I’m holding a reproduction of the July 21, 1969 New York Times, headline “MEN WALK ON MOON.” Thanks for that, Michael!)

Dec 10, 2018 ∞

a Twitter CFL experiment

So this is kind of interesting, isn’t it?

twitter.com/CFLPredic…

Wow, isn’t that wild. A twitter account called @CFLPredictor that posted exactly one tweet, on June 13, before the season started, correctly calling the outcome of the 106th Grey Cup, played in November! What are the chances of that?

Well … I gotta come clean; as it happens, I have a pretty good idea what the chances of that are, because I …

created the CFLPredictor account on June 10, as a private account not visible to anybody.

<li>wrote a script (using a nifty <a href="https://github.com/sferik/t">command line twitter tool</a>) that posted hundreds of variations of the above tweet - essentially, every possible combination of <em>Team A</em> over <em>Team B</em>

in a close one
in overtime
by a touchdown
by more than a touchdown
in a blowout

Essentially it did this ..

#!/bin/sh
for t1 in BC Edmonton Calgary Saskatchewan Winnipeg Toronto Hamilton Ottawa Montreal; do
    for t2 in BC Edmonton Calgary Saskatchewan Winnipeg Toronto Hamilton Ottawa Montreal; do

        if [[ $t1 != $t2 ]]; then
                tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in overtime."
                tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in a close one."
                tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 by a touchdown"
                tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 by more than a touchdown."
                tweet "My Grey Cup 2018 Prediction: $t1 over $t2 in a blowout."
        fi

    done
done

To be safe, my script had to include various extremely unlikely options like “Toronto over Hamilton”, because with the CFL’s crossover playoff format, any team can potentially beat any other team.

(It didn’t post “Toronto over Toronto”. I have my integrity here.)

admired the 9 * 8 * 5 = 360 different tweets, none of which were visible to anybody other than me.
waited until November 25, Grey Cup day
PANICKED because in looking over my script, it had encountered an error months earlier and had neglected to tweet two possible Ottawa-over-Calgary outcomes.
on November 25th, watched the game carefully, hoping desperately for anything BUT "Ottawa over Calgary in overtime" and "Ottawa over Calgary in a blowout".
watched with relief as when Calgary beat Ottawa 27-16
deleted all but one of the tweets
made the account public so anybody could see it
retweeted the now-visible one remaining tweet [twitter.com/shayman/s...](https://twitter.com/shayman/status/1067155775980736527)
sat back and waited for the flood of people to comment WOW, that CFLPredictor account must be either a football genius or some sort of amazing artificial intelligence to have correctly called the outcome of the Grey Cup months before it happened.

I’m not sure what my plan was going to be if anybody else actually picked up on this but naturally I was hoping it’d get mentioned in the media somewhere.

To my slight disappointment but ultimate relief, everybody on the Internet must be smarter than me because nobody fell for this fake news ruse.

So anyway, next time you see an amazing Internet prediction, consider the possible source.