Joel is going rogue...on himself

Something is definitely happening to Joel Spolsky these days. First he writes an article on how a software project was a major success despite violating most of his "Joel Principles". And then, all of a sudden, he attacks the whole genre of "pseudo popular scientific" literature, because it mostly uses anecdotal evidence and recycles stories, though he himself, as he honestly admits, have been doing just that for the last eight or so years.

Now first of all, I love reading Joel, and I think he is absolutely right. It's true that there have been quite a few books lately that built entire theories by extrapolating anecdotal examples. However, I think that this genre of literature, problematic as it is, serves at least one good purpose - and that is: it causes some people to think about stuff you otherwise wouldn't think about.

I will give two examples, and I will start with one from Joel himself.

One of my favorite posts is "Hitting the high notes", from 2005. In this post, Joel describes in great length, why he thinks that the formula "Best Working Conditions" -> "Best Programmers" -> "Best Software", works and ultimately leads to "Proft!". As part of the argument, Joel brings some statistics from "Professor Stanley Eisenstat at Yale", who has collected some data on the students of the programming course he has taught. Using this data, Joel shows that there can be a ten times difference in productivity between programmers, and uses this argument to make his point.

Besides this, roughly scientific, but nonetheless single and isolated experiment, Joel uses a vast variety of examples ranging from Jonathan Ive to Angelina Jolie and ties them all together into one of the greatest posts ever written on the subject.

Another example, comes from another great author and blogger, a favorite of mine, Seth Godin, who couple of years ago published a book called "The Dip". In this book, of over eighty pages, Seth offers these two invaluable pieces of advice:
1. Try not to start something you will not finish, cause otherwise you will waste your time. And...
2. If you are stuck somewhere, get out, unless you are not really stuck, in which case, keep pushing as hard as you can.
OK, mmm, let's see, that does not sound that hard. All I have to do is figure out what to start, and when to quit. Wait, I've seen this pattern before, it's called life, hey, my life is simple again.

Of course, it is not possible to follow the advice as it is given as it is not possible to deduce a system out of several anecdotal examples. But as long as those book's intention is to make you think, rather than provide ready made answers, they are useful as they might make you give some of these issues an additional look and probably come up with something new, exciting and useful of your own.

Quote with care

As we all know, the Wikipedia is the ultimate truth.

However, under the assumed definition, this truth is in no way constant or static. Since our knowledge about the world is constantly changing, so do Wikipedia articles, which is an important concept to understand, especially if you are about to quote one.

Wikipedia is an amazing phenomenon. It is collaborative, meaning no single author can be held responsible, and volatile, meaning that at any given moment each of the articles can be in an bad state, for a variety of reasons. This means that quoting Wikipedia articles is different from quoting regular encyclopedias and other printed work. Which is why it is important to always include exact version of the article, including time and date of the quote and described, ahm, here.

Truth changes fast, get used to it :)

Boxee, the new version

Check out the new Boxee version, just out. New, fresh and cool!

Hitting the scalability barrier, latest example: Top Gear Australia

You really should read Joel On Software. Because sometimes, it is not about software, it's about understanding some basic, some might say trivial, things that might sound obvious until it's too late.

In his article called 'Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef' written seven years ago Joel have explained why attempts to 'clone' a success by putting it down to a set of rules, and then making someone else follow them as automatically as possible are bound to fail. It sounds trivial until you actually see someone trying to do it. Obviously, the producers of Top Gear Australia never read that article, just as most of other TV producers engaged in a trendy show format trade.

Personally, I am not a big car fan. I can not nearly afford any of the fancy vehicles that are "reviewed" on Top Gear, not by a long shot. Needless to say, I could not care less whether a Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster goes from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds or in a century because chances are I will never see one in my lifetime. Then why, would you ask, I watch the Top Gear and enjoy it so much?

Because of the crew and the style and the production quality and the uniqueness and the humor and the uncompromising quality of every little thing they do in each episode. The hosts of the show, Jeremy, Richard and James, have developed an outstanding chemistry, and have perfected their distinct personal style which make the show very enjoyable even for someone who does not know the difference between a super charger and a turbo charger and will probably use neither in his life.

Why would anyone even think of creating another show, just like Top Gear, with the same studio, the same crowd and the same Stig, in Australia but with three completely different hosts. Do they really think it could be successful, just because of the similar camera work and decorations?

Some say, that attempt to clone Jeremy Clarkson has gone out of control, and that Stig is in fact a Finnish rapper. All we know, there is still only one "Top" Gear out there.

Power of Context

A useful feature for any cell phone, in my opinion, would be the possibility of automatically presenting contextual information during the call.

Recently I had to call some agency, and during the conversation dig up some account numbers and identification details that were stored inside the phone notes and I thought, why isn't it possible to attach some remarks or notes to the contact and be able to instantly retrieve them during the call.

Call it the "Context Notes"

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part VI - Free Your Mind

I have been busy, reading quite a lot about Nokia lately, however, in the meantime the world did not stand still. Just recently, right after the dust settled on the Google phone launch, Nokia rolled out its answer to the iPhone, the Nokia 5800.

Coming almost two years later, the 5800 may indeed exceed the iPhone in some qualities and it may be even more attractive in some markets, but this is just beyond the point. Which is that it represents absolutely no innovation whatsoever. Nothing can disguise this simple fact.

I also disagree that we are witnessing a major platform shift. If Apple would call the iPhone operating system OS X Mobile we would all have a flashback moment. While it is true that mobile browsing has been made really possible for the first time with the iPhone, and now with Android, it is far from representing a major change in computing overall. Don't get me wrong, it will become extremely popular but it will not intriduce a significant global change in the existing technological ecosystem.

Many sources refer to Nokia as number one cell phone company in the world, due to its market share. A company with such potential should not waste time lagging behind their new, unlikely, competitor trying to beat him on his own playing field. Not all users want the iPhone, or any smart phone for that matter. They need a phone, and not a multimedia device with phone function.

In next posts I will elaborate on some plans Nokia has for the future, but let me just say, they are indeed pretty futuristic. As if designing a good phone was so desperately boring and unnecessary. I beleive it is not boring, and is definitely very necessary. All you need to do is free your mind, however difficult this could be. This is what I expect from number one.

Really like this one

I really liked this post from Seth Godin. Good point.

Down The Rabbit Hole : Part V - We'll need a search running...

So far we have been pointing out some shortcomings of latest Nokia products, and let me assure you we are nowhere near the end of that subject, starting from little annoyances like the inability to distinguish between the the times of several missed calls from the same number to major problems like the performance of the S60 models. It is time, however, to start figuring out where those ideas and decisions come from. Our goal is to get a little insight into the mind of this great company.

It so happens that these days, we have a unique opportunity to do just that. Turns out that Nokia had organized an even called "Nokia Open Lab", which purpose was inviting representatives of social media and bloggers to Helsinki and "provoking global discussion on a mobile future". An event took place between September 11th and 13th, this year, just a few days ago. As far as I understood, it was first even of this kind.

Beside the materials from the event itself which are available online and will undoubtedly allow us to shed some light on the Nokia thinking and ideas, it would also provide an updated list of people who were invited and thus are interested and participating in the process. Those people have blogs which should be nice to explore in order to achieve our goals. The event was also attended by one of the most important people in Nokia, certainly for our cause, Adam Greenfield who, accorging to Wikipedia is, "head of design direction for user interface and services".

A really good place to start searching for answers...

Down The Rabbit Hole : Part IV - Whoa, Deja vu

One of the things that have become painfully clear after the Apple iPhone release, is the absolute state of cluelessness, if there is such a word, in which other handset manufactirers have been blissfully stuck for years. Instead of leveraging vast experience collected from millions of worldwide users into a series of killer models, every other company ran to copy Apple's innovation without even thinking twice. Read here, did they actually say, with pride?

I have a theory on why Nokia got so out of touch with the users and it goes like this. When I have studied history in school, I have learned about the feudal hierarchy in the middle ages. True, it was in a communist country, and now they say it was all lies, but I do remember one lesson, in which they told us that the feudal hierarchy was so strict that the lord could only command his own vassals but not their vassals. They called it "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal" rule.

Whether this is historically true or not is beyond the point, however, this is exactly what I think has happened here. Operators have become the customers Nokia cares about and it provides the features operators want, without any regard to the real actual end users. We could call it, "the client of my client is not my client" rule. Operators, by the way, are notorious for pushing whatever brings them more money, without any regard for anyone's needs.

How is that for an explanation?
(Hint: use the comments :)

Real Genius

Just today, Apple introduced the iTunes 8 with this new 'Genius' feature. As usual, it was introduced as the new revelation, look one click and you have a playlist of the songs you like. How does this work? Oh, it just sends everything you play to Apple, completely anonymously of course, and then using the Apple algorithms (great name) they add other songs that match to the playlist from both your local library and, more imporantly, iTunes store, thus allowing discovery of new content.

How original, though wait, it kinda remind me of something. Mmm, ah, Pandora? Pandora, is a really genius service that matches songs by their musical characteristics, really good stuff. And what do you think happens to this great service as we speak? It is being muscled out of business by the music industry, first the international market and now the US.

In the world of "On demand" everything, discovery of new content is extremely important and can be achieved through social networking but also, through automatic recommendation engines. Now, I should not remind anyone, how well this works in advertising, see Google Ads. This is also working great in Internet radio, like Last FM, with features like 'Similar Artists', allowing you to discover new songs you might actually like. I think it is important, to maintain a clear distinction between the 'sponsored' recommendations and the regular ones, improve the quality of the engines, add more criteria and content variety. The more democratic and social those engines are the better it is for all of us.

Pandora is a really excellent service in this regard, I have discovered and purchased a lot of music while using it. It is a real pity to see it disappear, and the hear about the "great news" from the powerful and well connected Apple. Now I certainly don't say that iTunes should not introduce this feature, it's high time and this is the way of the future. But the current practice of the music industry, is extremely greedy, inconsiderate and rude.

Bring back Pandora.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part III - Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

What does everyone want in a cell phone. Forget money, size, tradeoffs and marketing. What are those features that would represent the base of a good phone. Well, I don't know about everyone, but here is my pick.

1. Large buttons - both numeric and functional. Though it is true that we dial less since the invention of a phone book, we still type lots of messages, hence large usable keys are important. I personally prefer two separate buttons, for calling and and for hanging up. There should be no unnecessary buttons on the phone, like connect to the internet button or something like that. Buttons should be strictly rectangular and should fit an average human finger tip. In my opinion, one dimensional navigation is more than enough, but if you really have to use two dimension, the Nokia five way selection button is the best existing solution.

2. Phone book, with synchronization, backup and search. You have a phone right? If it would diasppear today, how many numbers would you loose? If you answer is larger then zero, then your phone is not good enough. We have bluetooth, we have cellular data connection, how hard could it be to create a decent backup with all that stuff. Another question. Do you have to remember whether your friend John Howard appears as John Howard or as Howard John? If you do, then your phone book does not have a decent search and amazingly most Nokia phones do not have this simple feature.

3. SMS, with T9, storage and search. People are real nasty, when it gets to devices. They assume that devices should make their life easier, and they also get used to good things very quickly. Which is why, no one would ever delete an SMS message from his cell phone until the phone explicitly asks the user to do so. All well and good, but the modern phones have lots of memory and they do not complain even when the number of SMS messages on the device gets to thousands. What they start to do instead is misbehave. One of my friends, had a Nokia E65 which would take more than 30 seconds to open an SMS under this scenario.

4. Battery, battery, battery - if I have to charge my phone more then twice a week, you failed. Wait, but what if I am talking all the time? OK, let's not talk about the absolute time, but rather about the features that would help me preserve it. Don't give me a screen saver, just shut the screen at the first hint of idle time and during phone calls. Battery life is so important in a phone that I would choose it over the cameras, music players and fancy 3G features.

5. One normal ringtone, with vibration option and the ability to instantly turn it off - you would be surprised how difficult it is sometimes to pick up a decent ringtone, because as much as I love Beethoven, putting his sonata on my phone is out of question.

6. Good reception and great audio quality - as one would put it, what good is a phone if you are unable to speak?

Don't get me wrong, this is not the complete list, but this is the minmum. Don't sell a phone that does not have even one of these. Please.

Oh, and if you have other minimum requirements, you think everyone should want, well, that's what the comments are for.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part II - You've been living in a dream world

One of the problems with Nokia is that they look too much into the future. Look here, here and here to see what I am talking about. This is all bloody marvelous. Really. But today I have to stand in the middle of the room, holding a Nokia cellphone in one hand and my land line phone in other hand when I want to call one of my buddies from the landline.

How is that for the future. How come Nokia does not make an adapter allowing to connect the phone to the land line using bluetooth or any other technology. How come, there is absolutely no synchronization between the Nokia cellphones and any cordless land line phones, not even via computer. Land lines are still very popular and usually cheaper than the cell phones, so how come when I get home I have to put down one phone and pick up another one. Not so futuristic at all.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part I - I want my phone call

At some point in the middle of 2000, I had to switch an operator, and at that point, unfortunately, I could not stay with my beloved 6110, as it was operator locked, so I had to change. Having decided to go for a cost effective solution, I picked the 3210, a nice, solid phone which was quite affordable at the time. Immediately, I have noticed that the phone was much slower to respond than the old 6110, making the phone book more annoying to use. It also included animations, for example, after sending a message, or adding a contact, that were slow and could not have been disabled from the phone settings. However, the phone was small and had no bulging antenna, had a T9, and was generally nice, once you got accustomed to the different location of the alarm clock menu.

After a year and a half with the 3210, I was yearning for an upgrade and I have decided not to compromise and got myself, or more precisely convinced my mom to get me, a 6310i which was rather expensive for the plan we had.

Now, 6310i is an epic phone. Epic. No other word would describe it better. It had enormous battery life, was blazing fast, had great interface and large buttons. It was slightly better than its older brother the 6210 which was also a great phone. It came in two color schemes, the awesome gray and the awful black and gold. You would pick the awesome gray and live happily ever after. End of story.

After few happy years with the 6310i I have been given a phone by the company I worked for, it was the 6630. If you would put those two phones side by side and wipe the logos, you never believe that it was made by the same company. Weird shape, smaller and weirdly positioned buttons, a camera sticking from the back of the phone, as if it was added at the last minute. Very inconvenient to use. It was 3G, but as it lacked the front camera it was completely useless for video calls (I will get to those later), unless you used a contraption called 'Nokia video call stand'. Whatever.

If you read a review of this phone on the net you would think you are buying a camera, or some kind of smart organizer or a media player, anything but the phone. It was wide and not convenient to hold or to type, it had bad audio, and in most cases required a headset for convenient operation. Since the headphones that came with the kit were a bad joke, you were tempted to buy a blue tooth set that would kill the already weak battery. It was a disaster. Rumor had it that our company was given those phones by the operator who could not move them otherwise and at a great discount.

Now here comes the question, why would the company that is capable of creating an engineering marvel of 6310i would ever release a product like the 6630. What went wrong in those few years between them. So many things have changed, the technology, the UI, the operating system, which of the factors contributed to this fall. I will try to talk about some of this, so stay tuned.

Down the Rabbit Hole - What Happened to Nokia?

When 'The Matrix' hit the screens in the summer of 1999, it had one of the greatest product placements ever - the very sleek and sexy Nokia phone. The phone was featured in the key moments of the movie and had a cool, spring loaded sliding cover, which made answering a call look like lots of fun. On the surface, it appeared to be the Nokia 8110, a top range model of that time.

By then I have already been a devoted Nokia user for a couple of years. I have owned the old 6110, which I liked very much. It was an executive class model at the time, very convenient and with great battery life. But the 'Matrix Phone' was so cool that I have decided to look it up. After a while I found it in one of the local operators offering and few hours later I was holding one in my hand. To my big surprise, the spring was nowhere to be found, the sliding cover was to be moved manually. I was very disappointed. Needless to say I did not buy the phone. Later I heard from my friend who had connections in the operator that those phones had bad audio problems. The model flopped, at least in our local market.

Later I have learned that Nokia did release a spring loaded model, a 7110, but it was not till the end of that year and I have never seen it anywhere, surely none of my friends, all big Matrix fans, owned one.

It was the first, but surely not the last time, I have raised an eyebrow, about the ways of Nokia, however they have continued to make good, solid models, until some point in time, few years ago, when something changed, and Nokia lost their way completely and entirely. This series of posts will try to investigate what happened to this great company and why.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Google released the 'Chrome', nice, fun, nothing special at the first glance. But wait what is that? Looky here, bullet number four, there it is. Unique numbers, hmm, that can't be good. See additional discussions here and here. Yeah, put privacy in the bowl, flush, repeat.

Here is what the big G has to say about it.

I have already uninstalled mine.

Dial one for usability

The telephone is one of the greatest and most straightforward inventions in human history. A human, who wishes to talk to another human but unable to do so in person due a great distance between them, be that his mother, his friend or a representative of his insurance company, picks up the phone, dials a number, waits till the other person answers and talks. As simple as that, end of story.

During the years the telephone has somehow become a device most people really hate. I mostly blame operators, handset manufacturers and providers of added services, namely the industry people who only care for their own pockets way before the well being of their customers.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Suppose you want to call a customer service of whatever company you need to receive service from. Here is how this should happen.

You pick up the phone and dial the number, after exactly one ring, the system answers and informs you of the average waiting time for this service. If you dial from the recognized phone the system addresses you by name, otherwise it just politely calls you "Dear customer" and asks you to enter the number you wish to be reached at. After that you are free to hang up. This is it.

After the time stated by the system is up, your phone rings. The human representative of the company is on the line, with all your information right in front of him, ready to be at your service without any additional delay.

Attention, you did not wait on the line listening to a bunch of crap all the time, they had enough time to pull your data, if for some reason you can not take the call at that time, you can just hang up and try the same later. If for whatever reason, the call is disconnected, the system knows who was the last person you were talking to and it will call you back. Everyone is happy, and you know what, if that company is so cheap that it does not want to pay for the call, I am sure you could work out some arrangement so that you will be charged with the operator fees, you would pay them anyway.

Even if for some reason, you do not agree with me that this is the best possible solution, and indeed I did not provide answers to all questions in this short post, you should at least acknowledge that this is a possible one. How many systems you know that work like that? None. If you do please tell me about them.

Now it's time to wake up, the dream is over, back to endless cyclic menus, annoying commercials, battery life screwed by endless waiting online for the people that are kind enough to give you the service you have already payed for. Good morning everyone.

Listen to Mr. Pink

Don't get me started on Nokia. I liked them too much in the golden days of 6310i, the best phone I have ever had. It all went down hill from there. I have hardly managed to find one I could use, the 3310c, at least from limited offering we have here on our planet.

Trying to synchronize the phone with my Mac, in order to backup my phone book, however, have brought me nothing but suffering and anxiety. First this happened, then after I finally managed to make it work, it filled my phone with corrupt and duplicate names. Frustrated, I wrote the "Why is that?".

Amir Kirsh wrote his post in response, claiming that a successful company should focus on what to do and what not to do, choose what is important and what it could do without. I certainly agree, and in a way, this is exactly the problem with Nokia. They should have focused on making a good phone.

Listen to this. According to the GSM arena, Nokia have around 250 different models of phones. Even if you don't agree with Barry Schwartz, it is way too much. So speaking of focus, we would all rather Nokia produced ten good, well engineered and very well supported phones, now don't we? Instead, they save their effort on providing a decent iSync plugin, when they wrote a complete and totally useless Nokia suite. Need I remind you, we are talking about number one cellphone manufacturer in the world. Number one. And they are too busy producing yet another half baked and unsupported model. Why is that?

Allow me to finish with a quote from "Reservoir Dogs".

Mr. Pink: Look, I ordered coffee. Now we've been here a long fucking time and she's only filled my cup three times. When I order coffee, I want it filled *six* times.
Mr. Blonde: Six times. Well, what if she's too fucking busy?
Mr.Pink: The words "too fucking busy" shouldn't be in a waitress's vocabulary.

They really shouldn't

Deathwishers

Some industries just never cease to amaze me with their strange stubborn behavior that follows them right to their death. Take, for example, the case of computer related literature. It died, almost completely due to the fact that Internet covers all possible needs of a learned and resourceful professional to an extent no book could ever reach, especially in our rapidly changing reality. One would think that book publishers would do something about it before they find themselves out of business. Well it certainly does not look like it.

Let's take a more specific example. Follow me, go to amazon.com and type 'eclipse' in the search bar. Scroll down a bit, to the 'eclipse, building commercial quality plug-ins' title. See it? Good. Now, I would not buy this book. Why? Well, you see, it's from 2006, two major eclipse versions ago. And look, it still costs a little over forty bucks, not to mention shipping to the planet I am writing from. And it does not help that there are twenty pages of reviews, recommendations and links on the Amazon, page. Good job guys, but I still won't buy it.

What would help, however, is the ability to search and view the contents of this book online, for a small fee. Say, five dollars for this book and like, fifteen bucks for the entire eclipse section, for all books up to last year editions. This is an amount I could and would like to invest in something like this, because, even if the book is outdated it may still contain techniques and ideas I could use. I am not talking downloading, just viewing on demand. It would also be great if searches could return results from all books I have purchased this way. Sort of small digital library.

Certainly beats not selling the book at all.

"That's pretty sick"

Now this one is funny.

You see, Microsoft - they were always notoriously bad on PR. They built products almost everybody used, and at the same time, the same people hated their guts. They have managed to get in trouble over same issues other companies walked from, just because they had very bad publicity all around. Their marketing campaigns, remember the dinosaurs, were not even funny.

So Microsoft has decided to make a funny one. They have decided, that the reason Vista did not fly was not because it failed to deliver on so many promises, took hell of a lot of time to get out and copied way too many features from Mac. Nope. It was because of the prejudice. Because people judged Vista before they even saw it. Have they seen Vista with fresh, unbiased eyes, they would just fall in love with it on a spot.

So, in order to scientifically prove their point, they have created The Mojave Experiment.

You can look at it here. One word. Moronic. You are not going to believe what you will see there, I promise.

What they have done is, they invited a bunch of, er, "typical users", that have never used Vista before and asked them what they think about Vista, in general. Then they have shown them the new version of their most advanced, top secret operating system that was currently under development and would only be out like much later and asked them what they thought about it. After everybody said that it was the best thing that have ever happened to them in their entire life they have told them that it was actually a Windows Vista. And in an instance, all the people that just moments ago thought that Vista sucks, suddenly agreed that it was, in fact really great and they want one so bad they would never leave the room without a copy.

It would have been funny, but they have gone so low with it, that you would really think their target audience was a herd of retarded sheep. Here are some highlights.

There is that one young guy who is being told that instead of having a "dull background", he could have a moving video or a picture instead. Wow, he is amazed, he says it's "sick", except...wait, would not the video in the background be like, totally unusable. And having the picture there, I thought it was the future already. Wait, it gets better.

Some guy is being shown a totally new concept, the pride of Microsoft research... the Gadgets. To the uninitiated, it's just like, ah, say OS X Widgets, or Yahoo Widgets you could use on XP. Just like them, only... no, exactly the same actually. Needless to say, the guy is very impressed and says he likes Gadgets.

I could go on forever, but just one more. On the bottom on the page, there are links to demonstrations of actual Vista features. Let's see... Record a TV.. that's new. Oh wait, what.. only on Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, what ever that is... oook. Let's see what else, parental controls that allow you to limit which games your child can play by their rating. Unless your child is anything like you, good luck with those. Right. Let's stop here.

If you really want to sell more Vista copies, do not use a bunch of second grade actor college dropouts. Just keep bundling it with every new PC on the market, as usual. You will do just fine.

Disappointed

After a while working on eclipse Ganymede, I am back using the Visual Studio Express 2008 C++ for some windows related tasks.

First thing I noticed, you can not stop the compilation on the first error. It has to build everything only to find out that there was a problem somewhere in the very beginning and then you have to scroll a hundred lines just to find it.

Very annoying.

Live well and then, well... leave

Sad moment. Randy Paush, author of "The Last Lecture", has died. What he did was so powerful and touching. And very hard to deal with. Frankly, the best presentation I have seen in my life. Check this link to digg, for the summary.

Wikipedia is the ultimate truth

The term "truth" has no single definition and lies as a cornerstone of many philosophical discussions. One would agree, however, that a commonly recognized statement is as close to truth as the number of people that recognize it, for all practical purposes within a given cultural context. This means, that the more people agree on a certain issue the closer to "truth" it becomes, at least in a simplistic meaning we commonly assign to it on a day to day basis.

The above is exactly the definition of Wikipedia, which has the power of accumulation of everyone's knowledge, constantly updated and corrected to reflect the most current reality. Taken at the limit, the Wikipedia represents the ultimate truth as we know it.

Why is that?

You buy a Nokia phone, say, in my case, a 3110c. Then you try to sync it with your Mac, and you discover that this phone is not in the list of supported phones. Then you go to Google and in ten minutes find some modified conduit that does the job. Why is that?

Why can't Nokia either provide the plugin for all phones, if it is not that hard, or at least provide a centralized community page to organize the effort. Maybe test and autorize some of the plugins, to ensure their quality. Don't they care?

Worried for your culture?

Some time ago, the papers reported that Europeans are upset with the tactics used by MPAA and the US government in general for spreading the Hollywood production around the globe. They said it violates some conventions against forcing "cultural goods and services" on other nations, conventions which should provide "a crucial defense of national cultures against the onslaught of "global mono-culture" (especially Hollywood films)."

Americans said: Culture? What culture? Hollywood films ain't no culture. They are business. Our business. Our global million trillion dollar business. So would you please be so kind to take your cultures and stay out of our way.

In my opinion this point is rather interesting and not entirely trivial, that is - can Hollywood films be considered an American cultural export? At first it might seem like they certainly are. They picture the American way of life and American values, laugh on American stupidity and shed tears on American love stories. People in those movies speak American English, play American sports, shoot American weapons and eat American food. They also laugh on other nations, especially French.

On the other hand, those movies, with some rare exceptions, are much more likely to be categorized as entertainment, rather then cultural artifacts. One can not ignore the fact that Hollywood is number one provider of movies in the world, exactly because of the fact that it is a multi billion dollar entertainment machine that holds profitability above all and especially above quality and cultural complexity. Using money and status, it attracts the best actors and directors it can get, just like the NBA and the NHL attract the best players from around the world. What can you say, for those guys it is as good as it gets.

Occasionally, these people, being after all creative and talented, produce true cultural masterpieces, great movies like Apocalypse Now, Shawshank Redemption or Godfather. Occasionally they produce really good, kind and touching movies like Smoke, K - Pax or Pump Up the Volume. Sometmes they produce cult movies like Pulp Fiction, Big Lebowski or Blade Runner.

But mostly they produce crap. Pure entertainment, mindless and fluent. You go in, you pay the money, you enjoy it (or not) and you are gone. Hardly a cultural experience. So the question of whether or not Hollywood production has anything to do with culture is not idle nor is it easlily decidable. Most movies represent American culture no more then any other globally available product from McDonald's hamburger or Nike shoes.

Besides, it will be over soon becauase they are running out of superheroes to recycle :)

Present and Represent

I guess nobody sees as many bad Power Point presentations as the high tech workers, especially in large corporations. There is hardly a position in which you would not be expected at some point to give a presentation of some kind, from Marketing up to the last Developer. Here are few general presentation ideas, we came up with together with Amir Kirsh. Use comments below to add your own.

Make your point

Wait, do you even have a point? Or are you just doing this because your boss asked you to prepare a report on testing status. Even then, you should make sure that every last one of your attendees is able to say in one sentence what you have been taking about when describing your speech to his collegue who missed it. It would be better if he said "John talked about lack of right equipment which affects our testing" than "Well, he was talking about bunch of stuff" or "He said our testing is bad".

I personally find great inspiration in watching TED talks, I find them fascinating. I will be going back to them quite a lot in this post, but there is one that I would give here as an exceptional example of making a good point. Once, you see it, you will never forget the point he makes, see for yourself. You may agree or disagree, but you will never ever be able to say, "I don't know what this guy was talking about".

Talk short, finish early

One thing I really like about the TED talks format is that they are short. Turns out, fifteen minutes are enough to communicate even the greatest of ideas to the point from which the audience can follow and expand it further using the almighty Internet, if it finds it worthy. Fitting into the tight frame makes you drop the inconsequential and focus, focus, focus on the very essence of your work. It also makes controlling the public attention much easier. So next time they tell you that you have only twenty minutes to speak, don't be mad, be thankful.

Even if you have time, it makes sense to prepare less material and finish early. People like that. No offense, but in most cases whatever you are saying up there, means less to those people than having a good hot cup of coffee over discussing the latest "Survivor", unless you are just handling them the Tablets, and even then they would prefer you do that quickly. You would not believe the gratitude people would feel for those extra ten minutes of their lives that you rewarded them with. Of course, running out of time is completely out of the question.

Use less slides

Once you have prepared the first draft of the presentation, you will most likely notice that some of your slides are better than others. Be it because you have found a really good picture to match your point or that you have produced a very convincing graph, you will distinguish those slides from other boring, bulleted, unreadable lists, we see way too often. One idea to handle it is to just drop, completely drop all but the best slides. Could this work?

Once again, in TED it works. If you watch enough presentations, and I strongly recommend that you do, you will see that some speakers only use four or five good slides through the entire talk. You see, once you manage to stop using the presentation as the kind of cheat sheet you use to memorize how your speech going, you will find out that the slides actually divert the attention of the audience from one important part of the presentation. You. The speaker. Unless of course, those slides really help you to make your point.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Yes, but a good picture used at the right time is priceless. Using high quality pictures to illustrate your ideas, can really boost your presentation. It is best of you took the picture yourself. Here is an example.

Amir took this picture himself and used it in a slide that urges developers to take ownership and proudly put their name on their code. "Look at this building" he said, "this guy must have been really proud of it. It may not be the prettiest building in the world, but at least you know who you should complain to".

Don't use low quality pics from the Internet, especially avoid beaten up photos and cliches. When using documentary photography, try to watch the context to avoid unwanted connotations.

I guess this is long enough for one post. Enjoy your presentations.

It's garbage time

Well, I am usually as concerned with our environment as anyone else, but this is really an outrage. I have just read in the morning paper about some poor guy in England that got fined for a hundred pounds and charged with a criminal case because he threw out too much garbage and the lid of his garbage bin could not be close leaving an 8 cm gap.

Excuse me? What is exactly this guys fault?

You see, the problem is, me, you and any other average person does not, strictly speaking, produce garbage. The companies and corporations that sell us their products do, both directly and indirectly.

Indirectly, they have been using millions of dollars worth of expensive paint and air time over dozens of years to drill our brains so we buy their beloved products as often as possible. To lessen our doubts, they have made those products as unreliable as the law would let them and shortened their life spans to last less than a minute after the warranty period. They wrapped those products with overly expensive and redundant packaging, just to make them take more shelf space and be more "attractive" to the consumer as if we were butterflies. They have wasted gazillions of fuel transporting them from one place to another just to increase their profit.

But never mind that. Directly, the corporations create tons of garbage for every tiny little product they sell. You open a huge plastic box, just to get out a tiny media player you have just bought. You throw the box away, along with the one hundred page instruction manual in every european language other than English (sorry rainforest). Oh yes, and the stupid leaflet explaining that this device does not cause cancer and interfere with the radio, aha, and the additional packaging for the headphones and the cable and we are done. Oh wait, I have also bought some cookies. It's eight cookies in a plastic container with four sections (two cookies in each) wrapped in the colorful tin foil, out into the garbage you go. Wait, what's that? A Ferrero - Rocher, a present from my wife, yummy. I will just open the big and rigid plastic box, and get them out of the plastic piece holding each chocolate and unwrap it. Here that's it.

Oh my god, no. All this shit does not fit into my garbage. What do I do? They will fine me and if I throw it in the wrong can they will hunt me down. Wait, the candy box has the recyclable sign, maybe it goes into there. Yes! No! It still wont fit. Why did I have to buy that watch in the metallic box that weighs so much.

I know what I should do. I should go into the supermarket with my cookie jar. I will open the cookies right there and put them directly in the jar. This might take some time, annoy some other customers and will NOT preserve the planet any better, but it will reduce the amount of MY garbage. After all, I do NOT want to buy the packaging. This way it will be supermarkets garbage now.

If you want a better planet, this is not the way to go. If you want to do something useful deal with big companies and their wasteful practices and get the hell off my back.

If Janus had a phone

It is not new, but I just saw it on the net. If you ever need any proof that we live in an excess-ridden society here it is. A dual sided phone from Wind, a complete phone on each side with buttons, screen and, I believe, speakers. They say it's good for people who usually carry two GSM phones. I say, how about a phone with two SIMs and a simple, good looking switch with clear visual feedback making sure that you know which one is on.

But, if it work for you, why not. Electronics are cheap these days.

iSupport

When you buy a computer in our country and you need support for the operating system that is installed on it, who do you call? It's better be Ghostbusters, cause neither the store nor the the technical support will help you with any of the big three. If it's a free Linux distro, obviously you are on your own. But when it's a Microsoft or Apple, it seems like you should be able to call somebody with your woes.

One day, at work, I was trying to convince the guys that neither Apple nor Microsoft have any support just like Linux , so there is really no difference between them in this category: whichever you get you are on your own. They agreed with me about Microsoft, but one of them was convinced that Apple guys will be up to the challenge.

Now, I do not live in the US, as you might have guessed. Here we have one company which is officially responsible for importing, selling and supporting Mac products. I am not gonna name names, we all know who those guys are. Anyway, they have a local support number, so we called it and asked a question I have thought up for the occasion.

Please be the judge of whether this is a fair question to test the support level: I asked, how to copy a path of the file I see in Finder to the TextEdit application. I did not really invent this question, I was something I really needed to do once, based on a true story, so to speak.

Well, it started with the guy from the support asking me to give him my full name and phone number. I said that for the purpose of our conversation my first name should be enough. He became really angry but told me to ask my question anyway. I asked the question. He told me to wait a second and put me on hold. After about a minute he told me that he is "not familiar with anything like that", his exact words. He told me that there might be some script that does that and when I asked where I could get such a script he told me: "On Google".

I let him go then and there, of course, I think I have proved my point. Have I really needed him to answer this I would have acted differently. I thanked him politely for his trouble, while he warned me that next time, if I did not give my phone number they would not even try to help me at all.

Really scary.

On Demand

We are moving towards a world in which every movie, song or book is available to you on demand, instantly and at a reasonable price. In such a world, the biggest question for you is "what should I demand next"?

This is where the magic word "social" comes in, in most cases meaning just your good old friends. I know many people theses days that shun this word, staying off the mass market social networks as well as niche communities. In most cases these people state that they have nothing to gain from the lame online social interaction and they are way better off in the old fashioned, dark and dusty whiskey bars.

And I heartily agree, but...

In the 'on demand' world, social networks, in the wide sense, are the main demand drivers using a wide arsenal of technologies and methods to help you determine what you should demand next. I would like to talk about two methods that are used either separately or together I will call "recommendations" and "activity" based social demand models.

The "recommendations" model allows you to actively recommend someone you consider a friend some product or service and waits for the friend to pick it up counting on existing level of trust between you. Do not mix this with anonymous statistical recommendations (also sometimes effective) that are used in the likes of Amazon and Netflix and typically having the form of: "people who bought X also bought Y". I am not talking about those, though they undoubtedly have their place under the sun.

The "activity" model is based on your ability to watch your friends actions and find interesting things that they have done lately to follow on. Though it might seem like this has anything to do with the latest advancements in web technologies that allow and encourage everyone to open their life to the web, it is something that has been going on forever. Effectively, every time you tell your friends about something you did ("I went to the Zoo last Monday") and you express your opinion about it ("I loved it, the zebras are so cute"), you provide an opportunity for your friends to perform the same activity and build up their expectations for it.

The main difference between the models is that the first demands an action to come from the side of the recommender and the second uses the nosiness of the potential recommendees. Both models can be used together as they indeed are in Facebook and Boxee, the social media center. The latest success of follower based services such as the Twitter, as well as the good old blogs and live journals are all points to the case.

On Software And Other Animals

Just wanted to bring to your attention that Amir Kirsh has just started a new blog called "On Software And Other Animals". The first post deals with the role of API in quality code. With Amir's experience and talent I really hope he finds the time to write often.

What the Mac?

Mac is full of surprises, just found out that Mac OS X file system is not case sensitive. It is case preserving, meaning that if you create a file calle MyFile.txt it will show it that way, but you can not put a file called MYFILE.txt in the same folder.

As usual I found out the hard way, when trying to check out an SVN repository that originated from Linux, which, as we know, is case sensitive . The error message that I have received was hardly useful. I really owe it to this post for the solution.

You live, you learn.

Adjective Driven Development

A good friend of mine decided he wanted to try developing applications for the iPhone. So he got one and downloaded the 1.3 gigabyte SDK . Since he does not actually own a Mac machine at this point, he phoned me up to join him and try to get the feel of it. It sounded interesting so I packed my trusty MacBook, drove up to him and we settled down to watch the introductory videos.

We did not do any coding that evening since the SDK required a Leopard while all I got was a Tiger. We did however watch some videos, and boy what an annoying experience that was.

You remember the time when during the installation the program (Windows, or some other) would tell you how great it is and how it has got so many new features. It always seemed kinda unnecessary to me, I mean, I already bought the damn thing. That might have been OK back in the day, but those Apple guys, they really got over the limit, big time.

When you are talking to developers, especially those who are eager to start working on something new and cool, you should get to the point and take it easy on the adjectives and superlatives. Most of your audience will not even start really listening before they see some code in front of their eyes anyway, some Hello World application, something. They will not really get it until they get some hands on, that's where you should start and finish. Right there.

Here are some transcripts from those films, just to give you the sense of it:

"The iPhone SDK includes everything you need to build a next generation of innovative mobile applications for the iPhone. And with access to the rich set of APIs you can create applications with amazing user interfaces that leverage ground breaking multi touch and animation technologies available only on iPhone". "iPhone is running the most advanced mobile operating system in the world" and so on...

In Wikipedia articles those are called peacock terms. They are useless and usually sound phony. Especially when coming from an engineer.

Obvious

I have recently read a post by Seth Godin, whom I like very much. I thought it was good so I dropped a link to a friend of mine. In response, my friend told me that in his opinion the post was "nice, but obvious".

Indeed, some, or you could say most of Seth's posts are rather obvious, this is true however, somehow he manages to put things in the right words, that simplify some thinking you do about them later. You could say that also about his books. Obviously, you should only make products that are remarkable and quit when your career is really stuck, of course you should. Isn't this obvious?

In my childhood, books of Dale Carnegie were very popular. He gave some very useful advice too. For example: "always tell people what they want to hear". Ah, OK, I will. Wait, but what if I need to tell them something they don't want to hear. I guess I have a problem then. Or, "always prepare for your lectures, know your material". No shit.

Despite the fact that those books and ideas are mostly rather obvious I sometimes find them cool for their entertainment and motivational value.

When I read "The Dip", I was very excited. I was in the middle of some career moves in my life, so I felt inclined to apply some of the preachings that appear in it to myself. I had, however, hard time explaining the value of this book to my parents who thought that it was obvious that you had to overcome hardships in order to get somewhere and if you quit in the middle you get nothing but wasted time. It was plain obvious to them. After all, it's not that the book tells you how to distinguish between the times when you are hopelessly stuck in your job and should quit as soon as possible, and the times when you should just bite your lip and push like crazy. This you have to figure out all by yourself. Obviously.

Surprise me, on demand

Beautiful, simple and entertaining. A service is called Muxtape, and it just allows anyone to upload a bunch of tracks and create their own unique audio mix in seconds. No search, no ratings, no guessing your taste, nothing. You just pick up an name and you listen.

Back To Backup

While browsing through the paper few days ago I saw an article by David Pogue praising the online backup service called SugarSync (see interview here). While it looks like a very nice service indeed (at least for countries where upload is not a problem), the article itself sounded really strange, really old, like it belonged to a fifteen year old PC magazine. It was not only the language that made it sound old, though names like "Magic Briefcase" do bring back some memories. It was the topic itself of keeping your data safe and synchronized that sounded like it belonged to the past.

With that feeling, I have picked up a 1993 PC Magazine I happen to have on my shelf, and looked for reviews of backup solutions from back then. To my surprise, I have found none. It was a Perfect PC 93' Edition and the recommended hard drives ranged between 200 and 350 megabytes. I did not find, however, any references on how to make your data safe while using them.

I said, well, maybe back in those days people did not really have anything important to store on those drives. Maybe they mostly used the computer at work and the digital photography was not yet that popular. So I skipped forward five years to 1998, again, the Perfect PC edition. Now the drives jumped to the 8GB range but still, no mention of back up software whatsoever.

I found this to be somewhat strange. I mean, what is going on here? We are using personal computer for quite some time now and for many of us it's a most important tool in our life, but we still depend on this tiny, cheap, mechanical device that spins like crazy at 10,000 RPM almost every hour of every day. How could that be?

I think this has happened mainly for historical reasons. During the last thirty years of personal computer evolution, there were never a period of time when investment in quality of personal storage would be profitable, so it just never happened. Large businesses have RAIDs, tape backups, version control software and search appliances. What do you have?

Few years ago, the answer to this question would be - nothing. A typical family usually had one or two computers with a single hard drive and a DVD burner each. The most they were able to do is to burn their documents and digital photos every once in while and write the date on it with a marker. If the hard drive was to fail, it was very hard to even understand what exactly was lost and what was backed up, let alone completely restore it. Backup software was not simple to use and was generally unreliable. The incremental backup options were confusing, and did not work well since they required careful management of recorded volumes and very rigid discipline.

A small example to the point. My father, being an organized person, has stored all the documents he worked with on the D drive, reserved especially for this purpose. Once he had made a backup of his files on a CD and the "DBackup" directory was born. After he upgraded his computer, adding a new hard drive, he copied the directory to the new drive but left the old one as well "just in case". Soon enough, father changed some files in the copied directory and created some new ones. When there came backup time again, he had to backup both directories since they were no longer identical, causing the "DBackup" to reproduce with each hard drive related metamorphosis until it turned into a complete nightmare. It was never safe to delete an old copy for the fear that it might hold something valuable that was no longer available in the new ones. This directory continued to haunt father for years.

Even if you did manage to backup your stuff on CDs in an orderly fashion, you still could not sleep sound at night. As prices of recordable CDs and then DVDs went down, so did the quality and the reflective layer often deteriorated leaving you with a nice coaster with unrecoverable remains of your precious data in less than a year. You could purchase a tape recorder but, in most cases, no regular household could afford the price.

That was few years ago, since then we have seen that well known slope in price per gigabyte chart which changed the situation significantly. Drives grew larger and became cheaper. Every time you bought a new drive it was a double, triple and quadruple the size of the previous one. They were cheap too. One would think that keeping your data safe would now be easy as a feather. Mmm, no, it just meant that more data was lost every time the drive snapped, taking with it more photos, documents and home movies than ever before.

So finally, today, mid 2008, we have got a backup service David Pogue would consider useful. Only today, the latest edition of what aspires to be the most advanced operating system, the Mac OS X, would include such a basic feature as the TimeMachine, and couple it with the network hard drive. Only today we are starting to see the beginning of truly useful integrated back up solutions for home users that do not require superior technical knowledge and extreme discipline to use.

Well, it's about time.

Equality and Usability

I might have called this one Symmetry and Usability, but I think equality is a better, term for what I am about to describe. We all know that when desigining anything that has to do with human interaction we have to highlight the more important parts and hide the less important things that are only used occasionally and infrequently. Here are several examples of severe violations of this important principle.

Very recently, I was told about a very cute site called the "Songza". It's a very nice service that allows you to listen to the music via YouTube. As we know, there are quite a few music videos on YouTube, which are mostly of poor quality and rather annoying to play. The sound is generally good though, so the Songza only play the audio from the song, turning it into an on demand music channel, clearly one of those ideas I wish I thought of first.

The site is nice too except for one thing. When choosing a song to play from the list, it presents this strange on screen selector that allows you to either play the song, rate it, recommend or add to play list. All of those functions are indeed cool and necessary, however, I bet in most cases I would want to play the song, so having to "click - select - click" every time would be most annoying.



And indeed it is.

The play function is clearly the most important one here. You have tons of free space, why dont just put it right there and move the less important buttons somewhere else.

Another great example comes from the manufacturers of cheap mp3 players, oh, those never cease to amaze me. I got this one a few month ago, cause I needed a simple player for something, and it is absolutely and remarkably annoying to use.
If you look at the picture carefully, you will see that play and record buttons are exactly the same (small) size, side by side and almost completely equal.

Now guess how often do I want to record something with this thing?

You are right.

Never.

Back To Blog

Coming back to a blog after a long break is like coming home after a few month of traveling. Everything seems to be just as you left it, but is somehow distant. You blow the dust off the old posts, carefully arrange the cards with post ideas you have accumulated during the leave and marvel the feeling of being back home again, really nice feeling.

I have been really busy lately, is the excuse I choose, but I am back and there are several issues in my backlog. First however, I will dedicate some time to current issues related to usability mostly. The first one is called "Equality and Usability".