I recently spent a week visiting customers and giving talks in Europe and holy goodness, never have I been in so many countries in so little time. I flew from Seattle to London, changed planes, flew to Amsterdam, visited customers in the Netherlands and Belgium, then took the Eurostar from Lille back to London, and that was just the first two days! Continue reading
As I mentioned earlier, we spent the past weekend moving the Seattle office from temporary space on the north side of the 42nd floor of Columbia Center to the south side of the 12th floor. I initially thought that this would be downgrading my fabulous view but no, it turns out to be an upgrade! Here’s the non-Mount Ranier side of the view from my office: (click for full size)
Today we set up Coverity’s Seattle office! I’ve spent the day unpacking boxes and booting machines and discovering why it is a bad idea to ship desktop machines with the hard disks in them. Aside from a minor hard disk mishap, everything has gone very smoothly. Special thanks to my colleagues Deidre and Jeff, who came up from San Francisco to get the network humming and make sure everything was taken care of.
The view from my office is, to say the least, awesome. (Click on the images for larger versions.)
I haven’t gotten around to untangling all the wires yet, but we’re basically good to go here.
Next time on FAIC: I’ll start a short series on the uses and abuses of the static constructor.
No technology today; just some photos I took on my recent trip to Kauai. (Click on the small photos for a larger version of each.)
Kauai is the oldest of the Hawaiian islands and has fabulous topography and rich soil as a result of its violent five-million year history of repeated volcanic eruptions followed by heavy erosion. A few of the highlights:
The Allerton Garden on the south shore is an amazing collection of native, endemic and exotic (that is, introduced recently) plants artfully arranged and carefully tended. My favourite arrangement highlighting a single tree was this one:
The Allerton Garden is also the home of the famous ficus trees seen in Jurassic Park:
To get a sense of the scale of those amazing roots and for some more background on these incredible trees, check out this little tourism video:
Kauai tops out at 1600 metres today; it was far, far higher than that when it originally formed. The immense erosion has produced the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific”, Waimea Canyon, on the interior:
Of course each horizontal line you can see in the eroded layer is an individual lava flow. On the exterior the vulcanism and erosion has produced the Na Pali cliffs. (*) Here you can see an interesting feature: a sea cave with a tiny waterfall going over it. This was useful because you could stock up on fresh water without ever beaching your canoe!
All in all it was a lovely vacation, both relaxing and educational. I hope to some day go back and experience the north side of the island.
I’ve used some of the photos above as the header images for the blog; if you’re interested in seeing the full-size versions of rest of the header images, see the photo credits page.
Next time on FAIC: Why it is very hard to give a sensible answer to “which is faster?” questions.
(*) Na Pali means “many cliffs”, so those would be the “many cliffs cliffs”. The Microsoft cafeteria once offered a sandwich “with au jus sauce”, which is even worse.
Fabulous adventures in coding 