James's Weblog

My claim: a set of 2000 people has a greater than 50% probability of having someone else with my name.

VMware recently hired someone else named “James Lin”. Today I received four separate emails for him. I wonder if he’s receiving any of mine. Maybe he can fix some of my bugs.

At CHI 2006, I finally met Jimmy Lin. He entered grad school at U.C. Berkeley while I was an undergraduate there, but for some reason I never had gotten around to meeting him until a couple of weeks ago.

Jason Hong, his former officemate and one of my old teaching assistants, recorded the event with a photo of us, joking that it would be sad if I were known only for being “the other James Lin”. Gee, thanks.

Miscellaneous happenings:

• Sony had a very restrictive Internet proxy server; it didn’t allow ssh, newsgroup access, or instant messagers (AIM worked eventually, though). I had the “bright” idea of resorting to a dial-up ISP with my second phone line. (I split a cubicle with someone else. There was a telephone line for each of us, but we shared one instead, giving us one extra.) Of course, businesses don’t have flat-rate local calling plans like residences do, which isn’t something I realized until after I had racked up many hundreds of dollars’ worth of telephone charges. Oops.

• One day, on my way to the bathroom, I overheard part of a telephone conversation: “Sony. S-O-N-Y. Like the televisions.” I could only wonder what planet the other person was from; who hasn’t heard of Sony?

• Sony provides an emulator for the CLIÉ handheld. It’s based off of PalmSource’s standard Palm OS Emulator, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For anyone not familiar with the GPL, the gist is that any derived work must have its source code available. (This is a gross oversimplification for a number of reasons, but it’s close enough.) Sony sometimes was delinquent at providing the source code. (Developers want tools available yesterday; GPL zealots say nothing should be provided without source. There’s no pleasing everyone.)

  Eventually, one of my worst fears came true and someone submitted a story to Slashdot about the lack of code. We were used to receiving hate mail, but were we prepared to deal with a gajillion emails from angry, GPL-crazed Slashdot readers?

  We received only one email about it. The complainant didn’t even understand the GPL all that well.

• After too many incidents of rolling into work at around noon-time, my manager instituted a policy: If you can’t make it in by 10:30 AM, don’t bother coming in at all. Uh, so rather than showing up late and putting in 8+ hours of work, I should take the entire day off from a job I hate? Okay.

• I wasn’t there for this, so this is second-hand information: apparently, after I left Sony, they almost hired another person named “James Lin” to replace me. Bizarre. Some cheap Chinese knockoff, no doubt. I wonder if they would have tried to pass him off as me in emails. (Not that Sony didn’t have enough James Lins working for them already; Sony’s silly Microsoft Exchange mail server regularly got confused and sent me mail intended for other James Lins.)

Incidentally, for anyone who ever wanted to know about the meaning and design of Sony’s “VAIO” name: The Origin and Philosophy of VAIO(R) PCs. The “VAIO-let” color scheme is a clever touch.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that kind of thought or ingenuity went into the oft-mispronounced “CLIÉ” name.