Lap Cat Software Blog

In September I’m traveling to Illinois, affectionately known as the Land of 10,000 Tollbooths, in order to attend C4, affectionately known as C4. This year will be C4’s third, signified by the title C4[2] because programmers are terrible counters. In any case, I’ll be making an appearance there for the first, or nilth, time. The Rogue Amoeba army is planning to invade and conquer the conference, which we’ll subsequently rename to R4 (give or take an R, depending on how many of us show up).

The C4[2] online registration was unusual in requiring a Twitter ID. (@rentzsch I forgot to mention my special diet: Kobe fillet with Château Lafite.) As we all know, it’s against the law to ignore * in a web form. Thus, at the urging of my attorney, my agent, and my astrologer (all the same person), I signed up. Fedaykin, follow me!

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve been hired as Rogue Amoeba Employee 008. (Employee 007 is Longwell, Justin Longwell.) I’ll be working on Rogue Amoeba’s apps as a software engineer, as well as providing comic relief. Thanks to Alex, Paul, and Quentin for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. My coworkers at Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC include fellow bloggers Mike Ash and Guy English. Together we form perhaps the most talented group of Mac programmers outside of Apple. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Adobe and Microsoft.) Indeed, I haven’t seen such an array of stars in one place since the Ghostbusters music video.

I’ve joined Rogue Amoeba just in time to miss WWDC ‘08. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I left Marko Karppinen & Co. LLC just in time to miss WWDC ‘07. (I’ll make it there someday! ) The question is, what have I been doing in the meantime? Backpacking through Europe? Rotting in Gitmo? Running for President? No, I’ve been working on super-secret projects for Francis Technical Services, LLC. Although FTS is a little-known company, its software is well-known, at least inside Apple. For example, FTS is responsible for Radar, the Apple-internal Cocoa app that opens when employees click on the funny-looking rdar://problem/ URLs you often see. The number at the end of the URL corresponds to the problem ID of the bugs you file on the web with Apple Bug Reporter (also known as RadarWeb). It’s useful to have one of these URLs available when communicating with Apple engineers, because their managers forbid them from lifting a finger without a Radar problem number.

While at FTS, I did some bug analysis for Radar: that is, analysis of bugs in Radar’s source code, not analysis of bugs in Radar’s database, to which as a contractor I had extremely limited access. However, I mostly worked on other projects, such as Radar’s sibling app Sonar. Apple’s DTS uses Sonar to communicate with ADC members (such as me!). If you’ve ever seen sonr://request/ URLs — the Mighty Quinn provides one in an Apple Mailing List post — those open in Sonar. (By the way, I’ve read all of your emails to DTS. No, you haven’t been accepted to the iPhone Developer Program. Stop whining.) Another project that I worked on was Merlin, an app for Apple’s Human Resources department. I think that Steve Jobs is doing an outstanding job at Apple, so before I left I used Merlin to double his annual salary.

I’d like to thank Dave Francis, the owner and founder of Francis Tech, for the opportunity to work there. Despite appearances, I’m not really the type to hop from job to job. I’ve just been looking for Mr. Right, LLC, a company to fall in love with, marry, and have baby apps with. (As for any other support claims, sorry Billie Jean.) I can see myself growing old with Rogue Amoeba. (Easy to see when you’re already old?) Besides, someone has to stick around and keep an eye on mikeash, stop him from taking over the world.

Now without further ado, please take out your credit card and buy some of our fine software. As a special bonus for our Leopard customers, your purchase will be (code-)signed by your favorite Rogue Amoeba star.