Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Microsoft reconsiders, supports anti-discrimination laws

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Via Scoble, Ballmer’s e-mail announcing Microsoft’s re-committing to support anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation.

After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.

Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.

Good to see.

Update: Here’s the Seattle Times’ story.

Gilbert and Sullivan review Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

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The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its “private browsing” mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There’s a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk –
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There’s a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn’t slow you down – and these days, that’s enough.

— David Pogue, in the New York Times

(via adavies42, on /. — I originally didn’t notice the poem in the NYT article thanks to their horrid online formatting)

April Seattle Weblogger’s Meetup

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I finally made it out to another Weblogger’s meetup! It was long past time, as the last time I’d made it out was back in November. While I don’t have much basis for comparison, it seemed to be a pretty good turnout again, 20-some people all told, I’d guess. People I know were there and can remember names or websites for include Anita Rowland, Chas, Chris Prillo, TDavid, Jake, Dayment, Jeannie, and Samantha, plus a bunch more people that my brain couldn’t hold onto names or URLs for. I’m sure Anita will have a full attendee list soon.

I’ve tossed some photos up into a photoset, named and tagged as much as possible. Of course, if anyone can identify any of the people I had to leave unnamed, comment and tag away!

(Photo courtesy of Chris Pirillo)

iTunes “Cornflake Girl” by Amos, Tori from the album Under the Pink (1994, 5:07).

Friday cat Tribble blogging!

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“Friday Cat Blogging” is a well-known, oft-derided, but much loved cliché in the weblogging community. However, for those of us that don’t have cats, while we might enjoy looking at everyone else’s, we sometimes end up feeling a bit left out.

However.

I may not have a cat…

…but I do have a Tribble!

And so begins “Friday Tribble Blogging!”

Friday Tribble Blogging, my apartment, Seattle, WA

Isn’t he cute? :) He’s nestled up on my bed right now, napping on my pillows. They look so innocent when they’re asleep….

Google Video PC only (for now?)

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This really shouldn’t surprise me, but Google’s just-announced 1 has continued their tradition of being Mac-unfriendly at launch.

Google Video Uploader Installer.exe

At this point, they don’t even provide a backup web-upload option — just the Windows-only uploader application. Pity, that, as Ourmedia.org seems to be going through some growing pains (I uploaded a video three days ago, and it’s yet to actually appear in a useable form on the site), and I’m looking forward to being able to host some of my more bandwidth-intensive experiments on servers more powerful than mine.

Still, I’ll hope that this is just a temporary thing, and as with Gmail and Google Maps, Safari/Mac OS X support will come along before too long. In the meantime, though, I’ll just have to keep poking along as I have been until now.

Update: As of May 18th, they now support Mac (and *nix) uploading thanks to a Java-based uploader.

iTunes “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes from the album Violent Femmes (1982, 2:24).

Bloggers in my neighborhood

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Here’s an interesting little web toy: feedmap.net. Give it your weblog address and (if necessary) physical address, and it returns a map of other weblogs close to you in the real world.

Apparently there’s about 154 other webloggers close to me though it seems to be a fairly loose definition of “close” — the map radius extends from Bremerton to past Sammamish east to west, and Woodinville to Renton north to south. Not terribly surprising, given how tech-centric Seattle tends to be, but fun to know.

Time to start clicking around to find out who all my neighbors are!

Search Engine Wars

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Statcounter has introduced a new section to the statistics they track titled “Search Engine Wars” — it’s a graph of how much traffic your site gets from each search engine. Out of the last 1,100 hits to my site, here’s what it shows me:

Search Engine Wars

Admittedly, my site isn’t representative of the ‘net as a whole, but from where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like much of a battle.

iTunes “Injected With A Poison” by Khan, Praga from the album Pragamatic (1998, 5:06).

WordPress, Inc.

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Congratulations to Matt on turning WordPress into WordPress, Inc. — and to [Jonas](http://www.jluster.org/ title=”Jonas Luster”) for being the first hire at the new company!

I haven’t met Matt, but he was kind enough to contribute one of the “pink” themes for this site, and I got to hang out with Jonas some time ago when he came through Seattle. Congrats to you both!

ecto powered

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Powered by ectoI’ve been using and recommending ecto for quite some time now (as well as its predecessor, Kung-Log), but as long as Adriaan’s starting to run a weekly “ecto powered blog” showcase, I figured I might as well make it a little more obvious and pop a “Powered by ecto” badge into my sidebar. Who knows if he’ll ever actually showcase me, but it’s worth a shot, right? ;)

(And on a totally unrelated note, take a brief look at the timestamp on this post. That’s what happens when I lie down for a short nap mid-day and wake up four hours later and have a neighbor who insists on keeping the volume on his TV loud enough that it actually wakes me up — and that’s not an easy thing to do. Complaints have been made, but progress hasn’t. This sucks.)

iTunes “Eye on the Gold Chain (Cut Chemist)” by Ugly Duckling from the album Journey to Anywhere (2002, 4:05).