We've been working to bring together our new IM service.  Most of the development was centered up here in the Kirkland office.  Watch this space (and others) for more news over the next couple of days.

In case you've missed the fireworks, here is the summary of what we've done:

• Instant messaging server based on the XMPP/Jabber protocol.  This is an IETF approved protocol.  Check out www.xmpp.org for more info.
• Out of the box support for many third party clients.  Choose iChat, Gaim, Trillian or a host of others.  We support them from day one.
• Our own client available for download from talk.google.com.  We've concentrated on a simple to use and clean interface.  We've tried to strip IM down to its essence.
• Support for voice calls between clients that just work.  We've worked hard to support all sorts of network topologies.  We are also using first class industry leading audio codecs.
• A commitment to openness moving forward.  Choose your platform (Window, Mac, Linux, etc), choose your client (ours or others) and choose your service provider (we are commited to federation).  We want to make IM as open as the web or email.

With the new baby and the new car (Honda Element) I'm not driving this anymore and I don't have anywhere to park it.

Details here.

[8/2/2005 -- Let me prostitute my blog some more.  There are now more real life pictures at that link above!]

[8/5/2005 -- Sold!]

I'm an engineer at heart and I like to understand how things work.  Our new baby, Anne, is no exception.  Let's take a programmers approach to understanding this mysterious black box.

Inputs (the 5 senses):

• Sight Anne certainly likes to look around.  My understanding is that babies generally see only high contrast at a pretty short distance (1 foot?)  She certainly likes looking at faces close up.
• Sound Whitenoise is supposed to be soothing.  She also likes U2 and (heaven help me) Cher.  Loud.  I think she likes my singing too.  I'm not sure why.
• Taste She eats a lot.  I'm not sure how much variation in taste she actually gets.  There are theories that the mother's diet can affect the milk, but I haven't personally verified that. Ewwww.
• Touch Babies need to be held and touched.  They also need to be warm.  One input is swaddling -- wrapping her tightly so that she can't move her arms or legs. Rocking and dancing with her count here too.
• Smell Smell is supposed to be one of the most powerful senses.  I've yet to see her react to any smells specifically, but I'm sure she is paying attention.

Outputs:

• Biological Outputs Doctors are funny creatures.   They are really concerned about all forms of matter escaping from our bodies: liquid, solid or gas.  Parents also pay close attention to this.  The amount, type and origin seem to be important clues to understanding the baby.
• Cries She has many and varied cries.  Some of them are short yelps to draw attention while others are reports of murder nearby.  Then there is the scary quivering lower lip.  This is supposedly normal and a byproduct of her immature nervous system.  It just kills me to see her do it though.
• Posture The way she holds her body is an important clue.  If she is curled up like a bug or stretched out and rigid means something.
• Eyes and Face Her eyes and face are very expressive.  Almost too expressive.  She goes through a facial expression every 5 seconds or so.
• Sleep You'd think that it would be easy to tell if she is asleep or not.  It really isn't though.  She can be sleeping with her eyes closed or just pretending to sleep so that the minute you put her down she perks right up again.

There you have it -- 5 inputs and 5 outputs.  Sounds like a pretty simple system to me.  The problem is that she is indeed a very complex state machine.  She is so complex that there is no way to map the effect of the inputs (feeding her, for example) to the outputs (her current crying state).  One would think that it would be easy to empirically derive causal relationships between certain inputs and certain outputs.  Nope. She has more states than a Rubik's cube (43,252,003,274,489,856,000). The baby is indeed a very complex creature that does not yield her secrets to such a naïve logical approach.

The amazing part is that biology takes over.  My own brain is more complex than it can understand.  It has adapted to the baby and somehow we're able make it work.  Except when we can't -- like last night when all of us were up every 90 minutes.

Dear Lazyweb,

Where can I download a debug version of Firefox?  It just started crashing on start for some reason.  I'm sure debug spew would clear it right up.  I now I can build my own copy, but I have other things on my mind right now.

Thanks,

Joe

We aren't getting much sleep, but this has been the best experience of my life so far.  I never thought I could love anyone so much.  I've been trying hard to support Rachel and Anne as much as possible as we all figure out how to deal with each other.  Here are some more pictures of Anne (and Rachel).

Introducing Anne Elizabeth Beda

Beautiful little Anne was born at 1:10 am this morning.  She weight in at a healthy 9 points and 14 ounces and measures 20 20½ inches.  She has 10 fingers and 10 toes and Mom and Dad couldn't be happier.

More pictures to come soon.

Once in a while I get approached by a reporter (either local newspaper or national business magazine) to comment on some story.  I'm really not sure why they approach a B list blogger like me (how long since I last posted?) but it probably has something to do with the fact that I'm one of the only bloggers that went from Microsoft to Google.  If there is a story that involves Google and Microsoft, my name seems to come up.

My standard answer to any requests like this is that I can't comment.  Here is the mail I sent in response to a message last night:

Hi XXX,

As much as I would love to help you out on your story, it is probably best for me to not comment on stuff like this. I want to keep my discourse on Microsoft (especially compared to my current employer) as positive as possible. I'm afraid that any thing that I might say would come across as "Microsoft bashing." This isn't just the Google PR dept. talking either -- I really want to take the high road.

I'm sorry that I can't be of more help. Good luck with your story.

Joe

The funny part is that talking to the media has absolutely no upside for me. If I had something important to say, I would much rather post it here on my blog and let people link to it and forward it around if they find it interesting. 

Reasons to blog over talking to a reporter:

1. My voice gets through unfiltered.  No matter how hard they try, I've seen reporters misinterpret what I and others have said again and again.  I'm sure most of them think that they are faithfully transmitting the meaning of the primary source, but they invariably change the meaning along the way -- in some small (or large) way.
2. I want the link traffic.  Flow is the currency of the blogging world.  Talking to a reporter gets me no flow.  Even when they mention my blog (rarely) they almost never link to it.  It seems like they just don't get how the web works.
3. Talking to a reporter could get me fired.  Google really doesn't want me talking to reporters.  Blogging is walking a fine line that requiring a healthy dose common sense; but talking to reporters is suicidal.  The problem again is that what the reporter writes isn't necessarily what you thought you were saying.
4. No mountains out of mole hills. Writing something on your blog that people find interesting enough to link to and pass around is hard!  The real time web (new name for the blog-o-sphere) is a very hard filter.  While the media can produce its own buzz, it takes real work and something truly interesting to make an impact on the much more democratic medium that is the true internet.

So -- reporters -- feel free to send me email.  I'll happily respond in a polite way.  But don't count on getting any comments out of me that I'm not willing to share on my blog.  And I'd much rather put them on my blog in the first place.

I wasn't going to upgrade to Photoshop CS2 because I didn't think that I need it.  But that was before I found out about the new support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) and 32 bits per channel floating point support.  Michael Reichmann over at The Luminous Landscape has an article talking about the new "Merge to HDR".  I was going to how current cameras only handle 6 stops and all (and what a stop is) but Michael does a good job of that in his article.

I'm excited about this feature because I think that it will enable me to capture images that I haven't been able to before.  I've often shot bracketed exposures with the thought that I would merge them together by hand later. The results rarely are as good as I imagined when I took the image.  For instance, shooting a sunrise of a mountain where the top of the mountain is in the sun but the rest is in shadow can be very difficult.  Having a tool that approaches this in a more methodical way is exciting.  On top of this, I'm excited by the possibilities of this combined with panoramic photography.  Wide angle and pano photography has a problem whereby you are taking in so much of a scene that you are much more likely to have parts of the image be very bright and others be very dark.  One of the skills that I've been developing is the ability to pick a scene where I won't run in to these problems.

But, as great as the new Photoshop might be, there are other parts of the digital photography system that need to catch up.  The first is on the display side.  While the data in a photograph might contain lots of dynamic range, today's displays can't show it all.  That is going to change over the next couple of years.  On the software side, there is plumbing being laid to support 32bpp through the Windows desktop and to the video driver.  (The 3D APIs and graphics cards are support a lot of this already because it can be useful in 3D rendering).  The displays are going to get better also.  Over the next couple of years, expect to see wide gamut and HDR screens coming out.  Sunnybrook is one of the companies that has been pioneering this LED based display technology.  Where normal LCD or CRT displays can get a contrast ratio of 300-400:1, they claim their LED technology can get 60,000:1.  That means the bright spots are brighter and the shadows are darker.  I haven't seen one of these displays myself, but I'm super excited by the technology.

The other side that needs to improve is on the image capture side.  I have not specific knowledge of any plans from any camera manufacturers, but it is obvious that the megapixel race is slowing down.  We are reaching the limits of the glass.  Another example is the fact that the new prosumer level Nikon SLRs are still only 6 megapixel.  It is clear that the camera makers are going to compete on more than just the number of pixels.  They will start competing on the quality of those pixels. This is going to be very exciting.  We are entering a world where digital cameras are not just matching the abilities of film cameras, but they are on the verge of surpassing them.  A camera that can capture higher dynamic range and a wider gamut?  Sign me up!

The big question in my mind is the print making side of the equation.  When I print my photos, I usually send them out (WHCC or WCI) to be printed on a Chromira printer.  This is a printer that uses LEDs to expose regular photo paper.  This photo paper is then printed traditionally.  The gamut of these devices (and that of the ink jet processes) can be larger than current displays but is still fairly limited.  The dynamic range of all of these output devices is pretty low compared to what can be done with an emissive display device.  The bottom line is that the printing technology isn't keeping up with the rest of the system.  What does this mean in the long term?  I'm not sure but we will start to see a vast divergence between the quality of an image when displayed on a good monitor compared to they quality of an image when printed.

It certainly is an exciting time for photography...

Rachel (my wife for those of you not playing along at home) has been struggling to get parking passes for our cars.  In our neighborhood in Seattle, you need a permit to park on the street for longer than 2 hours.

How hard can it be to get this pass?  The website says "to have an application mailed to you, please call (206) 684-5086."

The response at that number: "We're sorry, but the voice mailbox for this number is full"
Two days later: "We're sorry, but the voice mailbox for this number is full."

So Rachel decides that this isn't working and goes downtown, parks (no easy task) and treks up to the 37th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower.  Let me set the scene for you.  There are two workers helping citizens with their Traffic Permit needs.  There is a third that gets up to help Rachel.  Then there is a rotund woman sitting next to a ringing phone.  I wasn't there but I imagine that she had an unpleasant look on her face.  Let's call her Bertha.

Rachel: "I'd like to get my zone parking permit"
Helpful Dude: "Great!  Do you have your forms filled out and your check ready?"
Rachel: "No.  I tried calling to get the form but the voice mailbox was full."
Bertha (who chimes in from her chair next to a ringing phone): "Well it isn't full now."
Rachel: "I called twice and it was full both times."
Bertha: "I just emptied it.  It wouldn't be full if you people didn't call so much."
Rachel: "The website instructed me to call.  Why don't you guys just put a PDF of the form on the website so that people don't have to call?"
Guy in next line: "That sounds like a great idea!"
Bertha: "Nah, that would never work.  People wouldn't know how to download it or they would screw it up and it would just create more work for us."
Rachel: "All right then.  I'll just get my pass and be on my way.  I see that I've done all that I can do here."

Seriously folks, I can't make this stuff up.

In honor of the Kansas school board, I have this for you to ponder:

If we were descended from dogs instead of apes, would we bother putting windshields on our cars?