New MacBook Pro time

I suppose it was inevitable. My last MacBook Pro was Apple’s first, the 1.83 GHz 15″ model that was the first to bear the name back in 2006. That was one in a series of upgrades that saw me getting a new machine every few years, thanks to a series of good product launches by Apple and a series of appalling product failures (power supply failures on the G3, the stuck hinge on the G4…) As I noted back then, the first generation MacBook Pro had case damage that rendered the battery unchargeable.

What happened afterwards was the trackpad button started sticking. And suddenly every time I tried to select text or files, the mouse got stuck in drag mode. It finally got to the point, yesterday, where I couldn’t even type. And Lisa said, “It’s time for a new laptop.”

It was time. Four years and four months, the longest time between machine refreshes that I’ve ever had since the year 2000. A testament as much to our financial priorities as to the quality of the machine.

And now, the new MacBook Pro is here. Most everything has been migrated to the new machine, a 13″ Pro model, which has, for the record, 4 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard disk, and a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Twice the RAM, thrice the hard disk, and about 32% more CPU clock cycles doesn’t seem like it should make the computer a lot faster, but it does, oh it does.

And I am absolutely in love with the small form factor. The screen has about the same pixel dimensions as my old one but in a smaller form factor, and it’s a nice lightweight machine, rock solid, with a million nice features. We should have done this a lot sooner.

New features at the Glee Club wiki

Malcolm W. Gannaway

This weekend as a bunch of Tanglewood Festival Chorus members and I recouped our strength after the July 4 concert, we got to talking. One of the women was a Wellesley College alum from the mid-1980s who, upon learning that my friend and I were both from UVA, said, “I remember UVA, especially the Glee Club. The men were almost as nice as the cadets who would come sometimes, only they didn’t feel compelled to offer an arm to the women they found walking about campus.” She proceeded to say some highly complimentary things to the men of the Glee Club; they must have made quite an impression, over 25 years ago. The encounter gave me the motivation to dig into the Virginia Glee Club Wiki with renewed energy over the weekend.

The outcome: I added a bunch of new ways to look at the information on the Glee Club wiki. First, a milestone: we now have season pages for 70 years of Glee Club history; that’s half the Glee Club’s chronological age and more than half of the active seasons of the group’s history (given the hiatuses in the early part of the century). After last week’s president search, we now have pages for 49 Glee Club presidents, as well. (Next horizon there: the 1980s.)

I’ve also added some categorization to the wiki. You can browse the history by chronology, with sub-categories for every decade. There’s also a category (as yet incomplete) for Glee Club members who were Lawn residents, with a special focus on 5 West Lawn. You can also browse the available photographs (still working on clarifying the names of some of these).

And in the middle of all this organization, there’s still room for discovery. Today I found, in the Holsinger archive at the UVA library, a photograph of Malcolm W. Gannaway (see above), famous for serving as president in two discontinuous years and for providing the student leadership necessary to get the dormant Club up and running again in the Hall-Quest years. I would never have found him without the research already in the wiki, as his Glee Club affiliation is not mentioned in the archives. My hope is that as we continue to build out the records that have been begun in the wiki, we can continue to deepen our understanding of this group that affects lives so deeply.

Catching up

I’m starting to become that guy that I always laughed at at the office–staying up late working while the wife and family go to sleep around him. It isn’t that funny when it happens to you, though.

We’re in the final run to a big release, coming out in a week, and the days are packed between now and then–getting ready for my webinar tomorrow, two back to back big demos next week, lots of work coming on the horizon. I love this feeling when I’m on the cusp of a lot of big things happening, but already I’m looking forward more to beginning the next phase of work than I am to the release. There’s just so much waiting to be built. Maybe that’s why I never took to product marketing. I like building things more than talking about them.

Backstage at the Hatch Shell, July 4, 2010

At rehearsal at the Hatch Shell

This weekend I had one of those eerie experiences where you step into a picture you’ve always watched, but never imagined yourself in.

When I was growing up, the Fourth of July meant band concerts at Fort Monroe–if you’re growing up in Tidewater Virginia, military base concerts are your best bets for live music and fireworks–but it also meant the Boston Pops on TV. I remember vividly watching in the late Fiedler years, then later in the John Williams era. I made a pilgrimage to see the event in person in 2001, at the dawn of this blog. When we lived in Seattle we’d watch the show televised from the Hatch Shell and think about being in Boston. When we moved back to the area, we watched on the big screen at Robbins Farm Park, or else simply flaked out in front of the TV (the best place to watch the Aerosmith spectacle from a few years back).

But I never dreamed I’d be singing on the stage, in front of about 800,000 people. We had a warmup concert on the 3rd with an audience in the tens of thousands, but it was no preparation for the crowds, the heat, and the excitement. The music for a July 4 concert can be expected to be the usual patriotic numbers, and this year did not disappoint, but there were also some truly moving moments, such as the tribute to the Kennedy brothers–which, judging from the feedback on Twitter was a highlight of the show (at least for some). I hope we get a chance to do the show again soon–maybe with a few more lyrics and less humming.

See also: my photos from the weekend.

Grab bag: Trailblazers and dilemmas

Doing secure development in an Agile world

My software development lead and I are doing a webinar next week on how you do secure development within the Agile software development methodology (press release). To make the discussion more interesting, we aren’t talking in theoretical terms; we’ll be talking about what my company, Veracode, actually does during its secure development lifecycle.

No surprise: there’s a lot more to secure development in any methodology than simply “not writing bad code.” Some of the topics we’ll be including are:

  • Secure architecture — and how to secure your architecture if it isn’t already
  • Writing secure requirements, and security requirements, and how the two are different.
  • Threat modeling for fun and profit
  • Verification through QA automation
  • Static binary testing, or how, when, and why Veracode eats its own dogfood
  • Checking up–internal and independent pen testing
  • Education–the role of certification and verification
  • Oops–the threat landscape just changed. Now what?
  • The not-so-agile process of integrating third party code.

It’ll be a brisk but fun stroll through how the world’s first SaaS-based application security firm does business. If you’re a developer or just work with one, it’ll be worth a listen.

Blogdentity crisis

In the beginning of my tenth year of blogging I find myself thinking more and more about what my blog is for.

In the early part of the decade I thrived on reading blogs, because no one else that I knew was doing it and no one else knew what was going on. The tech press was moribund, though it didn’t know it, and all the interesting stuff was happening on people’s blogs. My blog was a voice among that group.

To a certain extent that’s still true, except that a lot of the blogs that I read now aren’t “people’s blogs.” Oh, there are exceptions: Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball is certainly one strong individual voice, and so is Dave Winer’s Scripting News (which never really stopped being an individual voice). But others are collections of writers with an editorial voice. And they are always, mercilessly, on topic.

I don’t think I could keep this blog “on topic” if I tried. Bad enough that I have three or four topics (Glee Club history, singing with the TFC, listening to music, software industry stuff, product management) that I can’t quit, but I can’t imagine making the blog all about any of them. I know I lose readers that way, but what am I to do? This blog is just about me, not about me the product manager or me the software business theorist, or me the singer.

And sometimes that makes it that much harder to write. Like yesterday: a bunch of things at the office that I can’t blog about, a sick kid, a short TFC rehearsal. Not much blogging matter there. So I missed a day. Part of what made blogging fun before was always thinking about things that I could blog about. I need to get back into that habit.

Grab bag: iBooks and two annoying things

Glee Club president search

Over at the Virginia Glee Club Wiki, I’ve embarked on a mini-project-within-a-project, trying to find and list as many presidents of the Glee Club as possible. So far, we’ve got 37 presidents named, including five whose last names begin with M and a full nine Bs. (Still working on getting a representative set of data to see if those distributions are skewed.)

In the meantime, you can help a VMHLB brother out by identifying any presidents who are missing. There is definitely some low hanging fruit–I’m missing many from the 1980s and late 1990s and almost all of them from the 2000s, for instance. Even better is if you have any other officer names from those years. Just leave a comment on this page, or–even better–put ’em in the wiki yourself.

Update: Thanks to Frank Albinder’s contributions, we now are up to 44 presidents, filling in most of the 2000s.