Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Trouble is a Friend

    It’s Friday, so here is another song I like: Trouble is a Friend by Lenka.

  • My Career: Silverlight

    When I graduated from the University of Michigan, I decided to start my software engineering career at Microsoft. I accepted a position on a new small team working on what was at the time referred to as either Jolt or WPF/E (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere). The product was a cross-platform browser plug-in to support rich applications and media streaming. Upon release, it would be called Silverlight.

    The first version of Silverlight was very bare bones. It supported embedding a user interface defined in XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) into a webpage and interacting with those UI elements through the page’s JavaScript. The main goal of that v1 release was media players. At the time, Flash was the dominant way to embed media on a webpage because without plug-ins, browsers did not have a way to support video playback.

    From Microsoft’s point-of-view, the point of Silverlight was that competition with Flash. Microsoft wanted to sell their servers for media delivery, but the dominance of Flash for media playback was allowing for Flash Media Server to be the go-to server option for media. In order to support Windows Server sales, Microsoft needed an alternative to Flash so that companies could deliver rich media experiences without establishing a relationship with another server company.

    As a side note, when you’re working at a big company, it’s always worthwhile to know why the company is investing in what you’re working on. It won’t always be talked about openly, but figuring it out will help you to understand what outcomes will actually be valued by upper management.

    My main contribution to the initial version of Silverlight was its support for Firefox and Safari. I worked on pieces of both the browser interaction through the NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) and our internal platform abstraction layer for system calls on Mac OS. I hadn’t programmed either browser plug-ins or anything for Mac before this point, so my time involved a lot of learning new things as we pushed towards our first release.

    The second version of Silverlight, released about a year later, made things much more interesting. The plug-in now included a version of the .NET Framework allowing for programming of Silverlight-powered interfaces with C# rather than JavaScript, and it supported more media features – adaptive streaming and, unfortunately, DRM (Digital Rights Management). That second release is where Silverlight started to pick up bigger customers including NBC and Netflix.

    As Silverlight grew, I worked on other pieces of it and picked up more responsibilities. I implemented its networking APIs to give application developers the ability to make HTTP requests using either the browser networking stack, which allowed for cookies and auth to be used from the browser session, or directly through the operating system, which allowed more control but was independent of the browser’s state. I also worked on its support of out-of-browser applications, including support for multiple window Silverlight apps.

    It was a lot of fun to get in on a project from nearly its start and see it grow over the years as we shipped 5 major versions. The team working on Silverlight was also great. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. While Silverlight was successful in enabling customers to deliver great media experiences using only Microsoft products, shifts in the way people use the internet over those years meant that it had no future.

    Two big changes were happening. First, Google launched their Chrome browser and began to push for HTML5. Their search engine business meant that they wanted to both push application development to focus on websites and for those applications to use standard HTML and JavaScript that their search engine could understand. The other big shift was the iPhone. Suddenly people had a capable browser in their pocket that they were using for more and more of their web browsing. Supporting Windows and Mac was no longer a compelling cross-platform story, and Apple had no interest in supporting Silverlight in their phone browser.

    Between HTML5 allowing for rich media without any plug-ins and more browsing happening on devices without plug-in support, there was no longer a market for Silverlight. As work on Silverlight 5 wrapped up, Microsoft split the team. A small team would continue to service Silverlight until its inevitable end-of-life, and then the vast majority of the team was moved to either Windows Phone or Windows 8 to work on the application platforms for those two products.

    Another lesson from Silverlight is that sometimes even if your product is successful, the market can shift and change its fate. Silverlight didn’t end because we failed to deliver a good product or because we were out-competed by another plug-in. Instead, changes in the broader market brought about the rapid disappearance of browser plug-ins as a whole.

    I was on the portion of the team that moved over to Windows Phone, but that is a story for another post.

  • Digital Packrat Manifesto

    Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.

    While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.

    Janus Rose

    The Digital Packrat Manifesto (404 Media)

    Where possible I try to make sure I get DRM-free files that I can keep. For music, I buy mp3s, usually as albums. For movies and shows, I do mostly stream. For any movie or show that I want to actually keep, I buy discs rather than digital copies. On the rare occasions that I buy a digital copy of a movie, I make sure it is on Movies Anywhere so that there is less chance I lose access due to one tech company deciding to abandon their service. For books, I only ever buy ebooks from stores that sell without DRM, like DriveThruFiction. For other books I want to read, I’ll either buy a physical copy or borrow a copy from the library.

  • Deleting ‘Justice’, ‘Dignity’, and ‘Respect’

    “Justice.” “Dignity.” “Respect.”

    Those words are now considered red flags by the Army as it does a wide-ranging scrub of the massive amount of digital content the service has created online over the years — a purge that is leading to the removal of images and videos featuring women and minority soldiers from official platforms.

    The deletion of photos, video and other content is part of an order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that all the military services eliminate online material not allowed by the Trump administration. Hegseth has pushed to eliminate any trace of diversity efforts, which has included policies and programs — and now media — that recognizes women and troops with minority backgrounds.

    Steve Beynon

    Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities Using Key Words Like ‘Respect’ and ‘Dignity’ (Military.com)

  • Trump against Zelenskyy

    Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.

    Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

    EU’s top diplomat: ‘The free world needs a new leader’ (The Hill)

    We are perilously teetering towards a global disaster, one that few seem to fully comprehend. Today’s obscene spectacle in the Oval Office, where the President and Vice President of the United States berated the leader of a sovereign nation fighting for its survival, is not just a diplomatic misstep. It is a stark warning that we are perilously close to the collapse of the post-World War II international order.

    Mike Brock

    This is an Emergency (Notes From The Circus)

    Why did they hammer him? Because they don’t want Americans to view Zelensky as a hero. That view will complicate Trump’s plan to surrender Ukraine to Putin. Trump is ready to give Putin everything he wants. And then carve up the world.

    Make no mistake: Putin’s aggression will not end with Ukraine. By giving in to Putin, Trump is inviting him to invade Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland — and then the rest of Eastern Europe that used to be under Soviet and Russian control.

    Trump wants Canada, Greenland, Panama, and much else.

    Robert Reich

    Today’s disgusting scene (Robert Reich)

    If you want to watch the entire meeting, C-SPAN has it available. If you want to jump to where it goes off the rails, that starts to happen around 38:20 after a reporter asks President Trump a question about how some people see him as too aligned with Putin.

    Full Meeting between President Trump, VP Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Oval Office (C-SPAN)

  • I Sit up in My Window

    The world feels pretty broken right now, but it’s still worth having some hope and determination to make it a better place. Here’s another song I like along those lines: I Sit up in My Window by Jem.

    I Sit up in My Window (JEM)

  • Society’s Kind of Like a Video Essay

    I thought this was a well-crafted message about the focus on efficiency, not just in government, but as a goal for society as a whole. Is efficiency really what we should be aiming for?

    A Video Essay About Efficiency (Pillar of Garbage)

  • Climate Reanalyzer

    Climate Reanalyzer is a site by the Climate Change Institute and the University of Maine that provides visualizations for weather forecasts and climate trends. For climate change, it makes it easy to check historical data on air and sea temperatures as well as sea ice at the poles.

    Climate Reanalyzer

  • Let’s Play Fair?

    This is a good metaphor for why programs and policies to support groups that have long suffered under bigotry are important. The bigots have been cheating the system for years, so just putting an end to the cheating doesn’t suddenly make the whole game fair. And of course, many people making anti-woke and anti-DEI arguments aren’t actually interested in playing fair at all.

    Whites: 140
    Blacks: 3
    10 Seconds to Go

    A lot of people, most of them white, call affirmative action ”reverse discrimination” and wonder why black people shouldn’t be satisfied with a simple repudiation of discrimination of any kind. With its ruling striking down minority set-asides in city construction contracts, the Supreme Court seems to have decided that affirmative action programs in general violate white people’s right to equal protection.

    But in case a majority of their honors might still have an open mind on the subject, I offer a little metaphor in affirmative action’s defense. It comes in the form of a football metaphor because I have a feeling that the conservative majority on the Rehnquist Court might appreciate a football metaphor. So here goes:

    The White Team and the Black Team are playing the last football game of the season. The White Team owns the stadium, owns the referees and has been allowed to field nine times as many players. For almost four quarters, the White Team has cheated on every play and, as a consequence, the score is White Team 140, Black Team 3. Only 10 seconds remain in the game, but as the White quarterback huddles with his team before the final play, a light suddenly shines from his eyes.

    ”So how about it, boys?” he asks his men. ”What do you say from here on we play fair?”

    Andrew Ward

    The DEI Argument is Stupid. But Here’s How to Win It. (The Rip Current)

  • A Purge of the Military

    Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.

    …

    Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.

    The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.

    Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”

    Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky

    Trump administration fires top US general and Navy chief in unprecedented purge of military leadership (CNN)

    Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

    Heather Cox Richardson

    February 22, 2025 (Letters from an American)