WWDC Update

Having a really busy time here at the World Wide Developer Conference. I found out that the reason they kept the labs open on Tuesday night until midnight and delayed "Stump the Experts" until Wednesday was because Steve Jobs heard that the guys organizing "Stump" were planning on cheating and stacking the audience question deck with a bunch of Intel-related questions. So he said "Screw you experts, we're keeping the labs open for an entire evening and letting the developers hack away at them and kick your asses." So it's thanks to Steve Jobs' generousity that we were able to stay late on Tuesday and get that 3D engine code compiled for Intel and GCC 4.0. Also, after all the business weasels left and it was only developers, the caterers wheeled out crates of Ben'n'Jerry's Ice Cream bars and all sorts of caffeine and candy and popcorn and other goodies just for the dedicated developers.

I can't even describe how awesome a feeling it was to be in a lab working on code on absolute bleeding-edge technology, and to be right beside the biggest names in Mac software who are all doing the same thing, at the same level, all asking the helpful Apple engineers for help, all running into similar snags. I felt like a real programmer for a while and not trapped in an insane parody like I feel when I'm on PEI.

'Stump The Experts' was pretty jaw-dropping itself. At the front of the room was a whole line of Apple graybeards who knew absolutely everything there is to know about Apple and Macintosh hardware and software going back to the early 80s. People asked questions like "What violation of the SCSI standard is required to boot early Macs?" or "How many black and how many white pixels made up the mouse pointer on the original Mac system?" or "On an Apple IIe, if all other memory is zeroed and the following piece of machine code is placed at address 0x1000, what will happen?" (this was answered correctly, it was a trick question involving an undocumented opcode, an implied jump that doesn't get executed and thus what looks like an infine loop but isn't. They described the guy who answered the question as "you know, for the longest time I didn't want to talk to him, because he was an Apple II guy, but it turns out he is an Apple II."

I went up to answer one of the questions they put to the audience, "What audio differences exist between the US and European iPods?" (Answer: the European iPods have lower maximum volume) but someone ahead of me in the line to the Microphones got there ahead of me and claimed the question.

The other cool thing last night was the Apple design awards where they give out tons of great gear to people who win in categories like "Best use of open source", "best use of Mac OS X Tiger technologies", "Best scientific product" and "best student product". We decided we're goiing to win one next year. Just you wait.

Today there will be a bunch more sessions. Perhaps I'll go check out what the garagegames guys are up to in the labs if I can find them, see if they had the same problems we did, then tonight is the campus tour and campus bash at Apple HQ in Cupertino. (!!!!!!!!)