Oliver Roup’s Blog

Rio feels a lot like New York City, or the place New York would be if it were consistently a lot hotter and the divide between rich and poor were even more insane than it is. It definitely takes a few days to get your travel legs. Challenge #1 getting money from an ATM, not as easy as it sounds. Hint: Just because it has the Cirrus logo does not in fact mean that your Cirrus card will work there…

I stayed the first two nights in a hotel just to get my bearings, but on reflection I would not recommend this. Meeting some English speakers is what takes this place from feeling harsh and expensive to the truly wonderful place it is. I stayed in the “Girl from Ipanema” hostel for R$30 a night an really enjoyed it, lots of friendly people. Alex the guide will tell you where to go to see some great stuff. I actually tried to push my flight to Fortaleza out a few days so I could catch a Futebal match, but alas the travel agent I used was closed all day Sat and Sun…

I ended up meeting some folks who are finishing up at Stanford GSB (what an incredibly small world) and hanging out with them one night. There was supposed to be a big party at the Jockey Club which unfortunately was cancelled (and there were a lot of decked out and pissed looking Brazilians standing outside). We went to “Club Zero Zero” a nightclub that could compete with any I have seen.. not the most Brazillian of experiences but a lot of fun nonetheless and we brought two fantastic women we met standing outside the Jockey club. Even if the drinks seem a little expensive, keep an eye on the guy pouring. They tend to come VERY strong so you may drink a lot fewer than you would back home..

One of the fascinating things about Brazil seems to be the amount of internal tourism they have. Even at the most touristy of touristy place, almost everyone is speaking Portugese and seems like they come from Brazil. I met a number of people who were just travelling inside Brazil, from Sao Paulo or Brazilia. Of course this is only the wealthy Brazillians who can afford to do this.

My flight out of Brazil is in Rio at the end of the month so I will pass through again and check out some of the stuff I missed the first time. Now it’s on to Jericoacoara.

Rio

It’s amazing how much work it is to sort out and shutdown your life in a city. Packing, shipping, change of address, goodbyes, etc… Especially if you’re planning on being out of the country for a few months, there’s a lot of crazy stuff to do. A few things I discovered in my preparation:

• Remote Control Mail is a company that you can have your mail sent to and they will scan it, PDF it and let you read it on the web. It takes a while to get set up (You need to send a notarized permission slip to the US Postal Service) but once it’s going, it’s very cool. The interface is a little crude and not tuned for low bandwidth connections but still it’s a great service. This is a business I looked at starting at one point so I’m glad somebody is making a go of it. Now they just need to get indexed by Google (but only for you…)
• Onebag.com is really marvelous about telling you how to pack light for a long trip. In particular the MEI Voyageur bag they recommend is fantastic. It’s sort of a pain to get (You have to call the guy who makes them) but it’s really fantastic. Being able to carry everything you have on your back easily makes a big big difference to how you travel.
• A stick of body glide is a great investment. If youre in 120 degree heat and 100% humidity and walking carrying 40lbs or so, skin in some sensitive places can start to get a little tender.
• Moleskin notebooks are perfect for sticking in your pocket and writing down addresses, people’s names, thoughts that occur to you etc… If you’re in a place you don’t speak the language you can often show a taxi driver a written address and he will take you where you need to go.
• Make sure that your guidebooks are recent. I have a 2004 Let’s Go (whoops) and things have changed a little.
• I brought black leather shoes “in case I want to go somewhere nice” and right now that feels about as likely as going to the moon.
• Do not, under any circumstances, lose your ATM card. Seriously.

On March 10th, the day after my last day at Microsoft, I threw a party to celebrate all the good times I’ve had and people I’ve met over five great years in Seattle.
I’ve still got a lot more to say about Seattle, Microsoft, the last 5 years and the next 25 but for now I just wanted to get the photo album out there. As usual, the photos don’t really do the party justice. I was too busy having fun to take many photos.
To everyone who made it, thanks for coming! Take care and I hope to see you soon.

Goodbye to Seattle

Today, I did something crazy.
I announced that I’m leaving my job, a job that I really like and that others would kill to have, a job with a great team on a project I enjoy and helped start, a job for which I am well compensated and at a company that is probably unmatched in its ability to take on these kinds of hard problems. Who would do such a thing?

Even if every step of a path feels good, it’s important to pause every once in a while and look at where it leads and understand if that’s really where you want to be headed. Much as I love my job day-to-day, I look forward five or ten years and I think that there are some things I’d like to do in my life that my current path is not equipping me for. So, scary as it is, I’m stepping off this path and choosing a new one, even if the destination of the new path is much less clear than the old one and there are no guarantees that I’ll be happier with where it leads.
I’m taking six months off to travel and see the world and then in the fall I’m moving to Boston where I’ll be attending Harvard Business School to get an MBA. There are plenty of people telling me I’m crazy and they absolutely have a point. But I’ve thought about this long and hard and I believe in both following your dream and putting your money where your mouth is so I’ve decided to do both.

I’m trying to say my goodbyes privately, but if I miss you somehow, let me say it here. It’s been an amazing five years in Seattle and four years at Microsoft.  I lived in Seattle from the ages of 26-31 - some pretty critical years as far as figuring out who you are and what you want out of life and the people I’ve spent time with have changed me profoundly. I’ve grown to love this city in a way that I never suspected I would; so much so that I certainly wouldn’t rule out moving back here if the circumstances are right. So not goodbye then, but à bientôt.

Have you ever wanted to compute distances with latitude and longitude? At first it seems so simple. We all learned the pythagorean theorem in elementary school:
d=sqrt((x2 - x1)^2 + (y2 - y1)^2)
So if we have our two points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) then we should be able to find (x2-x1,y2-y1) and find the distance using the Pythagorean theorem, right? Well, no.

The Pythagorean theorem finds the straight line distance between two points. However, for two points any appreciable distance from each other on earth, trying to get to your destination would involve a lot of digging. Assuming you want to travel overland, you must travel further than the linear distance to account for the curvature of the Earth.

A little further research yields the Haversine Formula which is useful for computing surface distances on a sphere and correctly accounts for points that are very close together:

Haversine Formula (from R.W. Sinnott, “Virtues of the Haversine”, Sky and Telescope, vol. 68, no. 2, 1984, p. 159):

dlon = lon2 - lon1
dlat = lat2 - lat1
a = sin²(dlat/2) + cos(lat1) * cos(lat2) * sin²(dlon/2)
c = 2 * arcsin(min(1,sqrt(a)))
d = R * c

But what is R, the radius of the Earth?

It turns out the Earth is not a sphere after all. The spinning motion compresses the planet so that the equitorial radius is considerably larger than the polar radius. The shape of the Earth is well approximated by an oblate spheroid with a polar radius of 6357 km and an equatorial radius of 6378 km.

R’ = a * (1 - e²) / (1 - e² * sin²(lat))^(3/2)

where a is the equatorial radius, b is the polar radius, and
e is the eccentricity of the ellipsoid = (1 - b²/a²)^(1/2).

Wow! So there you have it.

Of course if you’re trying to compute these values in client side javascript, it may take a while. It turns out that for short-ish distances at latitutudes within the continental United States, just pretending the Earth is a sphere yields errors of roughly 20 meters. That’s good enough for me..

(All from Google and http://www.faqs.org/faqs/geography/infosystems-faq/ )

The Google Maps API is generally a pleasure to work with. After more or less inventing the whole Web 2.0 thing, the people behind Google Maps have continued to innovate, recently adding a Geocoder to their API, allowing address information to be translated into coordinates in Latitude and Longitude. Naturally having this information expands considerably the number of things you can do with Google Maps. Even better, it doesn’t just return Coordinates for an address, it “normalizes” a query and returns the address in a structured way.
There’s no doubt that creating a global XML standard for addresses must have been a challenging thing to try and do. Some countries use street names in addresses others do not. Some nations use island names, others have no islands. Some (like America) has county names but do not use them in addresses. So Kudos to OASIS for creating a standard called xAL and kudos to Google for trying to use it in their Google Maps API. Unfortunately, the devil is always in the details.

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C|Net hosts an interesting interview with Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun, where he articulates the Sun argument that there will only be a small number of companies in the world that can achieve the scale and efficiency of data center operations to compete and that everybody else will get squeezed out. I think this basic premise is correct - certainly running a huge datacenter is hard and expensive. Google has done better than anyone else at making the complements of good software - CPU time, disk space, bandwidth and programmer hours - relatively cheap and easier to deploy than any of their competitors. That superior execution is throwing off dividends.

Other software companies must look at that scale and infrastructure cost and be struck by a combination of jealousy and fear. Certainly Microsoft is and it’s started serious investment around datacenter scale.

While Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Sun, and Amazon are all attempting to build the common platform that everybody writes their apps against, Amazon’s EC2 effort has some uniquely interesting attributes not mentioned in the article: While Salesforce.com and Sun both make you write code to their proprietary API (and Google and Microsoft won’t run your code at all) Amazon sells access to their grid the “CPU Hour” where the “API” is just a bootable linux disk image. As a potential consumer of these services, this is immensely attractive to me. Much as Open Source software gives me the at-least-conceptual threat that I might take my existing software to another vendor, Amazon’s design gives me confidence that if they ever get too pricey or just go away entirely, I can always go throw my own boxes into a datacenter and run the machines myself. Who wants to make the same bet that the Sun API or Salesforce API will still be around in 5 years or they won’t jack up the prices? What’s in it for Amazon? Amazon gets to achieve scale on the backs of other people’s companies, driving down prices for their own needs.
Of course a raw Linux disk image is a pretty primitive construct to start building massively parallel and reliable systems. Code needs to be written to decide when to spool up new CPUs, for splitting and joining work like Google’s MapReduce and so on. This seems like some complementary software that Amazon should write to spur adoption of EC2.

At the WWDC last summer, Steve Jobs made a big deal about how he was keeping a few features in the next release of OS X (Leopard) secret because he didn’t want the folks in Redmond (ahem) to ”start their photocopiers too early”. Although the whole photocopiers angle is an obvious jab (and not even plausibly realistic) I do think there are some interesting features that still haven’t been announced in Leopard.  There’s been a fair bit of speculation as to what Steve Jobs still has up his sleeves, but to my eye, nobody has quite nailed it.

I think the well known work to make OS X resolution independent will be applied to creating a “google maps style” interface for the desktop UX. Imagine a desktop that is a variable number of pixels across. Dragging a window so that it sits partially offscreen causes the viewport to smoothly zoom out and everything is visible, just scaled down. In this context, Expose is just a zoom out, instead of tiling programs in a flat grid with no relation to how they were laid out on screen. Naturally you can zoom in too or do the google-eque “drag” which is really just panning the viewport across a large area.

What’s my reasoning?

• It just makes sense as a feature. You’ve always got more stuff running than you can deal with. It is much more natural and makes a hell of a lot more sense than multiple desktops, spinning cubes or Flip 3D. 
• This feature doesn’t affect developers lives at all. They don’t even need to know about it so keeping it secret is possible.
• It is indeed difficult for others to copy. Nobody else has done the resolution independence work that Apple has. (512*512 icons? Wow.)
• It can have some super snazzy sounding name which Jobs loves so much. Time Travel?

I’ve read a fair number of the Apple blogs and haven’t seen this prediction anywhere else, but I’m not a regular so it’s possible I’ve missed something obvious. Personally I’m going to be shelling down for a new Vista laptop with a snazzy SideShow display, but I’m definitely pretty impressed by the Apple stuff.

The always insightful Scott Adams has a hillarious new blog post: Atheists: The New Gays

While I think many Atheists have an unfortunate tendency to be evangelical about their non-belief, I do think that recent events have made atheism more publicly acceptable in America than ever, even if it’s unfortunate that it’s at the expense of Muslims. I personally very much doubt that Bill Gates will ever run for president and I think it would be easy to go overboard with the “Billionaire as benevolent dictator” meme. Think, what if it were Larry Ellison?

It’s 6am the morning after the election and the democrats have done it. They’ve taken control of the house and the Senate is still up for grabs. Montana and Virginia are too close to call. If the democrats take both of those, they’ll have control of the Senate too, 51:49.
While I’m very pleased with this result, I’m afraid that the Democrats will get the wrong message, that the people of America somehow voted for them. They did not. This election was about turfing out the incumbents and the Democrats were the available alternative. The Republicans are smart. They will re-think and re-tool and in 2008 they will be back with a vengeance. If the Democrats don’t have an actual leadership plan (as opposed to just opposing the Republicans) all those hard fought gains will be lost.

I was pretty inspired by the speech Arnold Schwarzennegger gave at the 2004 Republican convention where he described why he is a Republican and why he thought everyone else should be too. The funny thing is I can imagine how if your initiation to politics is watching Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan, you’d make that decision too.

The Democrats need to decide the list of things they’re for and then be behind those things even if it means siding with Republicans.
I see three key areas that matter to me. The party that is for these things is the party I will vote for:

1. Fair, Reality-Based and Success-Driven
2. Socially Non-Interfering
3. Sustainable

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