On Everything And Nothing In Particular

Test

2011-10-09T03:12:00.000-07:00

No Country For Old Mann

2011-04-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

I have been enjoying the Back To Work podcast with Merlin Mann for some time now and following the 13th episode, which I hope will not be the last one, I want to express some thoughts on some of the issues raised and covered in it, to be specific I want to talk about four topics: Advice, Inspiration, Honesty and Productivity. I am mostly going to talk about Merlin Mann because I think he is the heart of the show, with no offense to Dan Benjamin being the great host

On Advice.

When I think of good advice I have ever received or about good advice in general, I think my biggest criteria would be its timeliness. When you are at G and you want to get to H, last thing you can use is advice on how to get from A to B (cause I already know that) or from M to N (cause I have no idea what you are talking about). Even though Merlin really tries to make the show useful for everyone, I think most of the advice is really for people who are currently trying to get something started, are stuck somewhere or on something or are beating themselves over the head with doubt on whether they are doing the right thing or making enough progress and all sort of similar neurotic thoughts you could and should really do without. I liked when on one of the shows Merlin mentioned his wife telling him that most of 'those' people really need a hug and some therapy rather then another index card management system. I totally agree with that.

The types of people who should not listen to the podcast include those who are not doing anything and are happy as it is and those who are already happily doing something and making great stuff on their own. These types do just fine with regular porn, they don't need productivity porn in their lives as well. For years I was in fallacy of nagging people who are just happy with the ways things are either doing something or doing nothing with all sorts of helpful advice and was extremely irritated when they told me to buzz the fuck off. I totally get it now.

In some way, all Merlin is saying is to stop listening to him because he does not have any real answers. This, in a way, is the highest level of mastery, if you get this kind of thing. To those who are doing nothing, he says, stop listening and go do something, only when you start doing anything you will get what I am talking about. To those who are really doing great he says stop listening to me and do what ever that is you do. And to those who are 'trying' to do things (as himself) he says, listen I don't know what you should do and the most I can do is either tell you what someone else did or what you could do. But never what you should do or what you will do, this is your job, pal, to figure out. Which brings us to the second topic.

On Inspiration

In a way Merlin has put it brilliantly in the episode on inspiration by saying that you can not really make something out of inspiration alone. At most, it can serve as an initial push, after which you will still have to do this clackity noise, regardless. And do you really need an inspiration at all, it might, after all, be highly overrated. I really like Seth Godin's book called The Dip in this regard, and the metaphor is provides. You see this tiny hump in the beginning, you are lucky if the inspiration get you there but all the rest of the way is still yours to cover. If you want to go to a distant place, inspiration might get you out of the door, but you still have to work out through the entire way. And do you really need inspiration at all, just get out with or without it and this is what I think Merlin is trying to tell you there.

On Honesty

It is clear the Merlin Mann has decided on being absolutely and brutally honest in everything he does and talks about whether it works for him or not. He is not trying to make himself a guru or claim originality in any way on things that do not belong him. One of the commenters on the latest show called him a hypocrite for preaching the stuff he does not practice and I think this is a wrong way to go, not because I want to defend Merlin in any way, but because life does not work this way ever and you really should not punish the person telling you the truth, disappointing as it may sound. I could have said that you do not ask your dentist to open your mouth before the visit or for your shrink to tell you about himself first, but I really don't want to go there. Rather, having read a shitload of self help books over the years, what Merlin Mann has to offer deep inside is much much much more valuable that any of that crap if you only listen carefully. If you really listen in to this, you will realize that this is probably the most honest thing you will ever hear on this subject from a guy you basically don't even know on the internet, so treasure it.

On Productivity

In the morning my wife, who is building this toy house model from Styrofoam for a theater production, told me that she just discovered that if you add some color to the otherwise transparent glue you can work much faster because you immediately see which area is already covered with glue and which is not. This allowed her to improve her productivity twofold at least, but since it was the first time she did this kind of job she only discovered it in the middle of her work. If I knew this earlier, she said, it would be done even faster.

That is true, of course, but how much earlier. Imagine someone walking up to you in a street when you are like twelve and saying listen kid, you better mix some color into your glue, that would be the moment that you run like hell and ask the nearest adult you trust to dial nine one one. To sum this up I will paraphrase an famous quote by saying: "Productivity favors the prepared".

MZ.

Locked in Pandora's Box

2011-04-23T03:17:00.000-07:00

It is coming up here and there, and I can totally relate, the idea that simplistic customization and adaptivity in information services can lead to you only seeing the same limited set of stuff you have been established to like. This topic is covered in the recent TED talk by Eli Pariser, who calls it 'personalization bubbles'.

One of the simple ways to demonstrate this is through Pandora, the best music radio site ever which I absolutely adore and which allows you to play music you like not by genre or artist but by its musical characteristics and does this extremely well. If you pick up some non mainstream music you can vote songs up and down until after a certain period of time you will be looping through a list of ten of ten songs or so.

This does have interesting implications in other areas as well, certainly when it goes into even more polarized domains such as, interestingly, politics.

Extraordinary as usual

2011-03-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

Merlin Mann is being absolutely awesome.

If you feel down, unmotivated or just could use a boost of good spirit I would recommend this podcast, and this presentation (slides) from Webstock 2011.

Enjoy

Introducing Familinearity

2011-01-21T05:27:00.000-08:00

Familinearity is when a person makes decisions in a new situation based on some other familiar situation while assuming that the relation between them is linear. This is also how software development planning is done in most companies.

The idea for this term came to me last Wednesday, when I have attended the FogBugz World Tour in Tel Aviv to finally see Joel in person and also learn a bit about version control and bug management. Both the organization of the event and the presentations were excellent and enjoyable completely making up for the apparent dryness of the subject. Even though I do not use FogBugz myself, I got an impression that it is an excellent and very powerful product, well integrated with version control systems and easy enough to use in both medium scale and large projects.

One feature in FogBugz that really caught my attention, however, was the Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS). The idea behind it was to match actual time of task performance to the estimated one for each developer over some period of time and then statistically process it to derive meaningful information about project planning and scheduling. Such information could, for example, include the developer timelines and velocity as well as estimated completion times that would allow you to determine a completion date for any subset of the project with definite probability.

A priori, I am extremely skeptical about the overall precision and usefulness of such methods. Not to say that evidence based approach in general is incorrect, it is certainly in fashion and gaining speed in medical community while also taking shots at other areas. It is other considerations, both practical and theoretical nature that cause my doubts and I will explain them in brief.

The practical concerns for the applicability of this tool are too long for this post, probably too long an entire book. Just a quick look at the article called "How to estimate software tasks" from FogBugz documentation can give a great example of the problems we face in this area. One paragraph towards the end of the article claims that giving people unrealistic schedules and hope they will be "motivated" by them is "brain-dead", a statement with which I completely agree. It is still a fact, however, that there are entire companies that live by this principle and lots of managers who did not read "A Mythical Man-Month" even though it is, as the article claims, a requirement. Joel Spolsky himself, of course, knows more than most people about those problems and have written numerous articles on the subject. These companies, by the way, can at times be very successful, and you will have a hard time trying to convince them that their management practices are flawed.

My point, in this case is that when a tool like EBS is deployed in an organization that has that specific management culture and later, one of the team leaders comes up to his boss to claim that based on previous experience his estimate has only 2% chance of being correct, it will more likely result in fireworks than in the manager amending his ways. Another problematic situation might occur when the manager will come to the above team leader and inquire why the feature that was a week ago 99% on time still late. All that, assuming the organization really deployed EBS and paid all the additional costs of constantly updating all estimates and drilling down all tasks without which the method will not work at all at best or produce highly inaccurate results at worst.

But even if we leave the practicalities aside, the theoretical aspects of using bootstrapping based statistical methods seems a bit problematic. As Joel himself would tell you, in software you rarely do the same things twice. It is design, and design is similar to an exploration of a highly fluid terrain, with high complexity. Using methods that use linear extrapolation based on precision of your previous estimates to provide precise answers seems at least problematic and might raise similar objections to the ones Nassim Taleb provided for the use of VAR formula in economics.

I am not saying that this tool is not useful, it might for example, reveal the "epistemic arrogance" of the management by showing the ill precision of their previous estimates and thus benefit tired and demotivated programmers. It might provide a good bottom margin for the prediction errors. But not taking into account the complexity and non linearity of the domain at hand it could hardly offset the existing "familinerarity" of the software development planning process.

Software Development and Complexity Theory

2010-11-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I have become interested in Complexity Theory. I do not remember the exact path that lead me to it, but as usual it was probably one thing dragging another until one of the links I clicked brought me to it and I was hooked.

Complexity Theory is a rather broad field of knowledge involving many different scientific areas and disciplines. It is far from coherent and complete, even some definitions of what complexity really means and how it can be measured are still being debated.

Once I have started reading on the subject, I have immediately become interested, among other things, in applications of Complexity Theory to software development, management and creativity. To understand how these fields might be connected, lets start with the following diagram taken from the Cynefin framework, created by Dave Snowden and his company "Cognitive Edge".

This diagram describes a framework for thinking about systems in four different categories: Simple, Complicated, Chaotic and Complex.

An example of a simple system is an old bicycle, the input of force to the pedal is transformed into a wheel rotation in an obvious and predictable way. A complicated system is a watch, which has a much less obvious structure but is still linear and predictable. An example of chaotic system is, say, gas molecules in a closed volume. We can not predict the movement of each individual molecule but we can statistically predict their behavior in general.

Complex systems, however, are something entirely different. They are non linear and dynamic, meaning that the same input may sometimes result in entirely different output. They are, thus, inherently unpredictable and can not be controlled directly requiring an entirely different type thinking and a new set of tools to deal with. (I will talk much more in next posts but for for now if you want more info please read the Wikipedia entry and watch this video of Dave Snowden explaining this concept and other related ideas)

This is all of course a monstrous oversimplification, for a great introduction I would recommend an excellent book "Complexity: A Guided Tour" by Melanie Mitchell.

What I will talk about here however, is specifically the implications of complexity in software development. While most software is complicated, the software development process however is complex. And this has a great impact on how the software development process should be organized and managed.

As obvious as this may sound, far too many managers in software companies have little or no understanding of this fact and keep trying to construct complicated rigid processes that should cover every little detail in the work flow, or use outdated methodologies that were originated in the large factories of the early industrial era. Since measuring complex systems in general, and software development process in particular is extremely difficult if not impossible they usually get away with it and move on to another project by blaming the failure on some external circumstance that is always out there.

I am convinced, however, that proper understanding of complexity issues and their impact on software development can improve the process as well as the resulting software and is important to study and understand. To kick off this track that I am hoping to continue researching in the near future I would really like to recommend this terrific presentation by Jurgen Appelo. It might sound a bit complicated for a beginner, but it is spot on, covering many issues and providing extensive list of references for future research and discussion.

Possibly the best (worst) poker beat I have ever seen

2009-11-14T05:33:00.000-08:00

I have always thought that a Poker is a nice simplistic model of our reality, but this one beat is just plain awesome!

Prices of eBooks

2009-10-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

The eBook reader market is on the rise. I have just got a brand new Sony Reader 600, and the Nook from Barnes & Noble, due in November, also looks fantastic. The prices of eBooks however, are still way to high, and for no apparent reason. After all, conventional logic shows that if you do not have to print, ship and store the book, it should make it much cheaper for the publishers. You can sell any amount of books and never run out of stock. You also don't take the risk of getting stuck with shelves of unsold books nobody wants. You do not need to rent a store, pay the cleaning lady and the clerk and the driver and the supervisor. Doesn't all this amount to something?

In order to understand why the prices are so high, I had to undertake a little investigation (read few blogs and do few searches). I have found several "logical" explanations why an eBook should cost 9.90 (as they mostly do) and why not printing the book does not really affect the cost too much. Some of the authors go to great length and provide some interesting numbers.

This guy, for example, shows a detailed breakdown of a book cost. He argues that this shows that printing is actually a minor part of expenses. And he is not alone. Here is another guy who is wrong and another. Let's take a look at this and see what is wrong with this picture.

"Based on a list price of $27.95

$3.55 - Pre-production - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like (John) Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.

This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however, when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price."

He then suggests to count the costs from zero up, and suggesting that pre production, marketing and author fees are essentially the same, 9.90 is actually pretty cheap even for an electronic edition.

Everybody got that? Now let's see why this should clearly not be the case. In order to illustrate the point I will take Malcolm Gladwell as an author, and his three books, "The Tipping Point", "Blink" and "Outliers", last one published in 2009 and has a list price on Amazon of 27.99

First let's take a look at marketing. I first saw Malcolm at TED for free. Cause you see, where I live, there are no book tours, no New York Times and no New Yorker. So all that money spent on that advertising, for me, is money wasted. Now let's note, that Malcolm Gladwells first book sold about 2.5 million copies, which according to the above breakdown should amount to 5 million bucks in ads alone.

If this sounds strange, check this out. According to the above logic of breaking the book cost down to it's components, the cover editors and graphic designers of the above book earned little under 9 million dollars. Wow, I must be in the wrong business. Not to mention the author, who (once again according to the above calculation) got 10 million dollars in royalties.

All this leads me to the conclusion that the above breakdown, is a little bit problematic. The costs of producing, storing and selling books online, are close to nothing, taking into consideration the advantages of online distribution such as:

Instant access to any book (30 seconds from seeing Malcolm on TED to buying his book on Amazon).
No need to wait for delivery, start reading immediately.
No forests are hurt in the process
Availability of recommendation engines save marketing costs.
Vast worldwide markets, not covered by paper book distribution.

So to conclude, since there are almost no necessary costs, save for author royalties, a fair price for an average eBook is 1.99$ US. What should be understood that in a modern networked world there should be an author and a reader and everything in between is irrelevant and not interesting. Period.

New Apple Mouse Looks Amazing

2009-10-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

If you had not already go to apple.com and marvel the new Magic Mouse. What they basically did is put their superior mouse pad that was used in laptops on a regular mouse thus creating an all touch interface that supports gestures in combination with a regular convenient point and click experience.

The "wow" effect is guaranteed and it looks really slick and amazing.

PS: Just to balance things, they did a much poorer job on the new Apple Remote.

Michael Moore Movies Free Online

2009-10-20T14:22:00.001-07:00

I have seen some interviews with Michael Moore on YouTube recently. I have heard about him before but only recently due to his Capitalism movie I have taken the time to study his work more closely.

The very first thing that struck me is why are not all of his movies available for direct download online and for free, I mean if he is such a democrat. After all, he has made a lot of money from those movies already, covering his costs many times over. What's the matter? Maybe he is greedy too? Does he really want to spread his ideas or just make some more bucks on the other part of our fears, the ones that has not been yet exploited by the government.

The only thing I found immediately is his movie "Slacker Uprising" and it was only available for download after you supply and email (what for?) and for citizens of US and Canada.

Well I guess it is much easier to talk about democracy and freedom than really practicing it.

Windows 7 Annoyances: Aero Peek

2009-07-27T05:30:00.001-07:00

Are you annoyed by the Windows 7 Alt + Tab hiding your windows and behaving weirdly, want to go back to the old way, go to System Properties -> Advanced -> Performance Options and disable "Aero Peek" option. Downside, this will also disable full window preview from of multiple windows from the taskbar. Make your choice.

Great Presentation on Positive Psychology and Happiness

2009-05-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

During my recent searches I have stumbled upon some lectures by Tal Ben Shahar, a psychology professor from Harvard, who represents a movement called "Positive Psychology" and human happiness in general. Besides the general interestingness of the topic itself, I mean, who wouldn't want to be happy, these lectures are good because they are both scientific and very well presented.

As you know, I treasure great presentations and presenters and this is by all means a great example of such. So whether you want to be happier or just improve your presentation skills, enjoy!

http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/positive-psychology-science-happiness

http://in.truveo.com/positive-psychology-lecture-1-tal-benshahar/id/2472580271

Data Preservation Instinct

2009-05-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

If you would sit down to write something meaningful, personal and long lasting, not real memoirs, but something you would definitely want to review some time later, where would you write it. From one side you would definitely want it to be organized, structured and searchable, in other words digital, but on the other hand you would not want it to be on that hard drive that just failed or that nice site that closed recently or that network storage provider who went under and took all your precious data with you.

And what editor would you launch? I use a Mac now, so I have launched the Omni Outliner Pro, the only software I have bought out of sense of gratitude to its creators. However, I will only use it for editing the immediate stuff and initial organizing. I will not be able to store my materials here indefinitely, because it is not portable enough, so I can not use it if I move to another operating system like Linux or Windows. I can not count on it for sustaining over several (or many) years. I will not provide enough organization for large amounts of materials etc. etc.

The same is true for almost any other commercial editor, Word or whatever. Their file formats are very problematic, usually combining both form and content together and having a few years life span. Yes you would be able to open older ones (in most cases) but you will usually have to upgrade and convert your older files, especially if you have used some formatting. And if, god forbid, you would want to change to another environment then you will have real problems on your hands.

You would really want it to be there when you need it in three or five years. Editable, with the structure, the keywords and the formatting. But achieving this, seemingly obvious, goal with current technology is very difficult and required vast technological expertise. You can not really count on anything, these days, not even file dates can be reliably preserved over time. Not to mention any other metadata. Say you invested the time to add some comments to a file in Spotlight, copy it to another machine via a FAT partitioned drive, they are gone, this is just an example.

Even though, it costs absolutely nothing to copy digital data, the fact that saddens some content publishers, the volatility of such data is so high that preserving it usually costs much more in the long run, especially if you really care about it. This is another in the long list of reasons, why most of the existing models of digital data consumption are obsolete. You could have a few thousand dollars worth of music on your iPod only to loose it in a second to a toilet bowl. But wait, the music is still available there on iTiunes and you already paid for it once, so why can't you get it back. At least with software you pay for the license and then can always get the software itself even if the original disks got damaged. What did you really buy when you paid for those thousands of songs?

Fast forward to a perfect world of tomorrow, an international standard for a database backed file system with secure and transparent distributed backup and universal encoding is available and all the problems described above are history. What would it take to get there short of a miracle.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend, about the state of user data backup today. In fact the only OS coming with any decent usable tool for this purpose is the latest OS X, Leopard which has a reasonably easy to use utility called Time Machine. My friend told me that most of the users did not need any such backup, since they did not actually produce any substantial materials on a regular basis, at least not till the development of the personal digital photography. So till fairly recently, there was not real need for sophisticated backup and data structuring systems, at least not at the demand level that would justify the creation of one. Even today, when hard drives are very cheap, I keep seeing people loosing their entire collections of irreplaceable family photos in a second.

Well, I think that now, as our creativity in the digital world rises and more people produce their own digital artifacts we must think of keeping our creations in the digital world at least as safe as they would be in the real one, and even safer.

Spotlight Tip

2009-02-27T04:48:00.001-08:00

Ever wondered how to get from the list of results in Spotlight to their actual location in Finder. Turns out holding 'Command' down and clicking it does the trick.

Untitled

2009-02-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

Windows 7 is so ugly, that I often go to "Adjust for best appearance" setting to make sure it is still on.

We are the Borg

2009-02-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

Just started playing with Python, after C++ and Java it looks... refreshing. Anyway, it's a nice thing to see how most design patterns become obsolete with little use of Python wizardry. Once thing I particularly liked is the "Borg" pattern, which replaces our good old Singleton. Read here for details, very cool.

Fudge

2009-01-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

An interesting site I would like to explore is Fudge, a social network for programmers.

Good thinking

2009-01-21T01:09:00.001-08:00

Here is an interesting presentation about philosophy and programming from the Ruby guys http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/aristotle-and-the-art-of-software-development.html

Starts a little funky but the patience is worth it.

The Rise of A Social Programmer

2009-01-20T13:12:00.000-08:00

Last month, I saw a presentation by Ohad Barzilay, a Ph.D. student at the Tel Aviv University who is conducting a very interesting research. As part of the research, he has joined several professional programmers at their place of work, and observed the set of activities they perform during a regular working day. One such activity that clearly stood out, in terms of frequency, was looking for examples, either in their own code base or on the web, and integrating them into their own code. Using the examples turned out to be much more effective for completing the specific task at hand then reading an available API documentation. Although this might seem pretty obvious to anyone engaged in professional software development, Ohad discovered that this activity was not defined, described or facilitated by existing software tools.

Three days ago, I was working on the implementation of an eclipse plug in for my studies. I wanted to add a new marker view, and found a great blog post on the subject which explained exactly what I had to do by providing a detailed example I have copied to my code and modified to fit the application requirements. It did not work at first, and I have posted a comment on that blog asking what could be the problem. Even though the post was written in November , I have received a reply in twelve minutes with a solution. It still did not work but it helped to focus my search and after a while I have realized where the problem was and posted a comment with a solution.

Software development have always been a highly collaborative process. Communicating design and implementation ideas across the R&D team was always one of the greatest difficulties encountered by organizations. No documentation could ever be complete enough or updated enough to achieve this challenge. People who wrote the code are rarely around long enough to be of any help and large code base is usually hard to mine for examples and solutions.

All this is changing today thanks to open source code and the abundance of social networks. Open source community provides a very large repository of live and working code for a large variety of applications in all imaginable languages. Social networks use this information to create instant conversations around the topics of interest. A magic mix of those two ingredient produces a 'social programmer'.

Programming forums and discussion groups were here for a long time. Today there are many blogs dedicated to programming topics and people realize the power of wiki for knowledge sharing and collaborative documentation. But this is just the beginning. Software guru Joel Spolsky, has established an open site called "Stack Overflow" for programming questions where you can vote for good answers. There are code snippet repositories, annotated with social tagging like DZone, Snipplr and many others. There are many programmers on twitter, and there is probably a place for a more capable client, something between the twitter and the late pownce, to enable fast sharing of code examples.

Large repositories of open code together with the fast evolving swarm of social networks make software development a much more 'social' experience. Availability of experienced and responsible example providers will improve the overall quality of the code together with programmer productivity. To conclude, here is a small cheat sheet to reiterate the basic steps:

Join -> Talk -> Copy -> Modify -> Compile -> Run.

And don't forget to publish your best results :)

Creating empty file of specific size in Windows

2009-01-01T05:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you need to create a file of specific size, just of testing. You could, this would never happen to me, but just in case you do, here is a way to do this in windows (I found it here after downloading several miserable utilities that claimed to do the trick but did not work).

Go to the directory you need the file in with your shell and run this (size is in bytes)

fsutil file createnew FileName Size

Joel is going rogue...on himself

2008-11-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-21T13:59:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

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

Hitting the scalability barrier, latest example: Top Gear Australia

2008-10-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

2008-09-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-13T05:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-07T13:58:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

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"

2008-08-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-29T01:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-25T15:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-07-18T02:38:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-07-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-04T02:29:00.002-07:00

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

2008-06-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-16T00:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-22T02:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-15T23:17:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-15T23:10:00.000-08:00

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".

I am blogging this

2007-10-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

Here we are in Montreal. OOPSLA 2007 is on the way.

After two days of workshops tutorials and great weather, we are today in the first official day of the conference. So far, it was OK, but my expectations are high. There are about 1250 people from all over the world, I guess some of them will have some interesting insights and ideas to present. Our presentation is still two days away, but we are mostly ready.

We also took some time to explore Montreal, which was very nice especially in a view of unbelievable 24C heat. I will be attaching a pic or two when I get the time.

Stay tuned :)

Mac and PC: End of the battle

2007-10-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

I have got a Mac recently, I actually wanted one for quite some time. Before I got a Mac I was, for a while, a part of the ongoing discussion on Mac vs PC comparison. I was reading posts on the subject, listening to podcasts and marveling the Steve Jobs keynotes. I was getting a lot of how Mac was better in so many ways and so on and so forth. Until I got a Mac of my own and discovered a very important thing about a Mac and a PC. They are exactly the same.

What??? Yes, yes. They are. In every practically important aspect they are exactly the same.

Here is the list of examples that I came up with.

Apple is bragging about Mac OS X not having any viruses. I haven't had a virus on a PC for seven years now. Apple is bragging about the ease of use and how things just work. For me, using Windows XP is just as easy and stable. Design flaws? They both have some. See the window switching on Mac OS X, it's really horrible.

Media? Same thing. Yes, the Mac comes with a remote and turns into some sort of media center, neat indeed. But don't get me started about iTunes or Quick Time, they are incredibly bad. So in the end I use BSPlayer on Windows and VLC on Mac and I use plain old folders to keep my stuff.
Development tools? Well, eclipse runs everywhere. I had hard time finiding a good text editor for both. I settled for UltraEdit for windows long time ago, on Mac I am currently on jEdit which is not that good but it does the job.

The Office suite is almost the same, so are all other productivity tools which for most of the world are online anyway. Yes there may be some amateur editing apps bundled with every Mac but for the heavier stuff you quickly move to the very same Photoshop and more professional video editing software.

Speaking about hardware, sure Macs are pretty, but there are beautiful PCs out there as well. Sony makes some great looking notebooks and for the desktops there are great looking cases coming from Thermaltake and Antec, not to mention modds and customs. Glossy displays have also become a common experience today as well.

That's enough, though there is much more. To sum this all up. Regardless which platform you get, you will require a lot of tinkering before you get it just the way you want it for this period of your life, after which it is a smooth ride until something changes.

For all practical purposes, Mac and PC are exactly the same.

Changes

2007-10-05T09:18:00.000-07:00

There are some changes around here so it's about time they got to this blog as well.

First of all, I have changed my workplace. I will not talk about either my previous or my new place of work as of right now, but one thing that has on this blog is that I am no longer developing eclipse plug-ins. For this reason, the topic of this blog will change to more general issues. Usability will, of course, remain one of them, but others will follow. Eclipse will also not be abandoned since I remain a great fan of the platform as well as it's evangelist and supporter.

Second, I have decided to write more often than I did before, therefore expect more smaller and less technical posts. It's not that I have more time on my hands, it's just that I feel the itch. We will see what will happen next.

Third, I am writing this on my new Mac Book. Yes, I have joined the fine cohorts of Apple users, but don't worry, I will not join the Microsoft critiques or Apple fan boys. In fact, I will not write too much about the whole Win / Mac comparison theme, except for the next post in which I will explain my position on these issues. So it will be quiet on that front unless something really exceptional comes along.

Well, this is kinda it. So you have been warned :) Keep on reading.

OOPSLA 07'

2007-10-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

If you want to learn eclipse plug-in development, we are giving a tutorial at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal. The tutorial is called "Developing plug-ins and applications on eclipse platform", it's number 49, on Thursday afternoon. There are still places available and the registration is almost over so hurry up. Together with Amir Kirsh, we will have a beautiful presentation, comprehensive eighty page long companion and breathtaking demos. We will cover GEF, RCP, SWT and jFace, all this on the new eclipse 3.3.

It will be fun, so you are all welcome.

See ya there.

Oh, I just want it to work as, you know, in Explorer

2007-08-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

"I mean, is it too much to ask" said my product manager. All she wanted is to be able to rename an element in the tree viewer we have in our application. "Just like in Windows Explorer", she said.

Right.

In Explorer, when you click an element and then click it again, after some time, an in place editor is opened allowing you to rename the file or directory. But if you click fast enough, the system recognizes this as double click and performs the associated operation (i.e. opens a file or enters a directory). We wanted to do the same in our tree control.

At first it looked easy, the Internet is full of examples of how to add an in place editor to the SWT Tree control. However, problems began when we tried to determine when the editor should be activated. It should be when the same element is selected twice in a row, but not it should not happen when the element is double clicked.

Now, I have to admit, I am a little confused since there are two different types of events. There is a Selection event, which can handle both single and double click operations. There is also a MouseDown event, which also can be used for this purpose. In addition it is possible to monitor events that occur in the jFace TreeViewer or the underlying SWT Tree control itself. Very confusing.

First attempts left us with buggy, inconsistent behavior, nowhere near our Explorer ideal. We had problems with activation, the double click still activated the editor. We also had different problems with TRAVERSE_ESCAPE event due to the fact that we did not know how to correctly handle FocusOut. It was really frustrating.

I would like to present a solution which seems to satisfy all our requirements, though I admit it is not a peak of beauty. It does seem to work, however, which in our line of business is a plus.

The solution is based on a single SelectionListener implementation attached directly to the Tree which handles both single and double clicks (through widgetSelected and widgetDefaultSelected methods). In addition we remember the last selected element and whenever a double click is recognized we raise a special flag. The purpose of this flag is to avoid entering the editor in case an already selected element is double clicked.

Each time widgetSelected is called, it updates the last selected element and then waits for about half a second. It then checks whether a double click flag is up, and if it is not, opens the rename editor. After the editor exits, the flag is reset.

I really hope there is a better and shorter solution which provides the same functionality, I did not check Eclipse 3.3 yet, I hope it is there. In any case, if you need this solution add comment with your email and I will send you the source. It will also be available for download from here as a part of the new RadView Reporter. Look for version 10, it should be there in about two weeks. You will be able to find this code in the TemplatesView class.

Would you trust them?

2007-08-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Several days ago Steve Jobs announced a new line of iMac computers, beautifully designed, thinner than ever, great products for those who care. Not only are they a better value than the old ones, but the 17" model was replaced by the 20" one for the same price. Clearly no one in his own mind would buy an old iMac today, wouldn't he?

Not in the opinion of this, large (by local standards), computer store chain, here in Israel, who keeps advertising and selling old iMacs on their site without a word of warning. I am really interested whether one of those was sold these days. I bet there weren't any, since Apple users are generally perceived as an knowledgeable and updated bunch.

Yet, if this obsolete piece of machinery sits happily there on the site, then what could we say about less celebrated computer related products. Hard drives, cameras, computer monitors? Would it be nice to buy a 22" display just to find out that a better model is already out for the same price. Not keeping the site updated, just teaches the consumer not to trust this store and its site and always double check everything.

Clearly not a reputation you want to have.

Weird behavior

2007-06-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was working on final graphics of our new Eclipse RCP based application (http://www.webload.org/ ). Among the icons, we have asked the designers to prepare an application window icons, which are set in the branding section of product configuration. The designers did a great job, the icon looks excellent.

But when we tried to put it in place, we have discovered that the dialog is only able to accept GIF format, nothing else.

The designers, have supplied the icons in the PNG format, clearly a much better suited for graphical work. I have asked them to convert the icons to GIF, and they said, "OK, which background would you like?". I didn't know. I said, well, I kinda need it transparent, to look good in the different versions of windows and in the Alt + Tab window, is that possible? They said "yes, it is". However, they said, there are no transparency levels, it is all or nothing. So, the icon looks pretty awful, especially when switching between applications.

Clearly I was not satisfied. I pointed at the eclipse icon, which looked great and asked them to make ours in the same way. The said that it could not be done with GIF and offered me a bet if I could find that icon in eclipse installation and show it to them. They sounded confident enough, so instead of taking the bet I have downloaded a small utility that can look into JARs and looked for all images called "eclipse" in the installation directory. I found quite a few GIFs, but none of them was what I was looking for. On the other hand, I found quite a lot PNGs, just like designers have said. I was very glad I did not take that bet but I still had a problem. How would I put PNG into a field that only accepts GIFs. One of the designers suggested that I put it there nonetheless. I was skeptical but decided to do it. It has produced an ugly warning, but, amazingly, it worked. The icon worked exactly as required.

Needless to say I was looking a little stupid, I also felt bad for eclipse, after all - what is that? I did not manage to find a good explanation for this strange behavior so far. Why would this dialog only allow to put GIF images and not PNG images that work much better. I will try to investigate this further and keep you posted but if by any chance you know the answer, or you know an already open bug on the subject please tell me.

iDay tribute

2007-06-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

This days I am a little confused. What will it be, the long tail or the fat head?

The long tail sounds smart, insightful. One of those, "did you know" things. Fat head sounds simple and powerful, you are the best in the world and you get four times more than the next guy. What are you doing now? Quit it and go be the best in the world.

So which will it be?

Well, both, of course. Be the head and use the tail. Just like Apple does today with iPods (the head) and iTunes (the tail). But though both are smart ways to make money, the head has something that the tail doesn't. Romance.

Now, as I write these lines, there are people sleeping in the street. There are people, sleeping in the streets of New York. People sleeping in the streets, with little tents and blankets. Waiting for iPhone, to arrive three days from now.

It's not a gadget, it's not a product, it's a dream. It's a romantic dream of red eyed high tech workers and amateur tech lovers, consumers and engineers. You see, now that's a product. It can do this, it can do that, it's amazing. It's something worth waiting for, for three days in the street. That's what this is.

It's a dream about doing something right. Right now. Will it work well right from the start, maybe not. But we dream it will.

It's an epic launch. Will it sell? Who cares. Windows 95 launch was a blast. Did it sell? It did. So what. Was it a great product, probably, at the time, I don’t remember. What do I think of it now? It sucks.

So what is it about. It's about hype. And today, hype is global. It's about inspiration. It's about watching the commercial, and wishing there were more like it. More dreams.

It's about lifestyle. It's about what you think about when someone around says "simple", "clean", "white".

It's not about tomorrow. It's about today.

It's about winners. It's about being the best in the world. It's about big fat head.

I choose the head.

Dear computer, please tell me why...

2007-04-20T03:28:00.000-07:00

It might sound like a regular customer service rant.

Yesterday my wife and I went to a large supermarket near the house. Among other things we have bought three bottles of juice that had a special price, something like "take three and get 40% discount". I am not a great believer in discounts so naturally, when we approached the cashier, the only thing that really interested me was to make sure we get it.

As expected, once the purchase was complete, we found out that the computer did not give us the discount on the juice. I would be actually surprised if it did since the complexity of these, so called, discounts is just too large to be practical. It would take a supercomputer to track them all. Without going into technicalities let’s just say that Jurassic Park failed for the same reason.

Of course, we asked: “Why?”

Now, cashiers in those kind of places are caught in constant crossfire between bosses and customers. They have to enforce the random policies invented by the store managers and at the same time patiently explain them to the angry customers that argue with it. Of course the woman at the register did not know why the computer missed the discount in this particular case. She did not invent it and she did not program it into the system. What could she do?

It was at this point that the giant usability problem in this whole system became painfully obvious to me and the poor people stuck behind me in the line for whole ten minutes. This system was not designed to answer the question why? The cashier had nothing she could do with all this complex, full-of-colorful-buttons, vertical-shaky-touch-screen piece of junk. It was of no help at all. In fact, she had only two good old fashioned choices. She could either call the manager or get up and go across the floor to the shelf to see with her own eyes what was written on that bloody label.

Well, since it was never about the money, we closed the account as it is, right before the raging mob behind us managed to get hold of their lawyers. Later, I went to the store management and got my couple of dollars worth of discount back by proving them I was right and they were wrong and we went home happy, to sleep off the heavy headache.

Now we get to the point.

The point is that we were wrong. The very small letters on the discount label stated that it was for “some blah blah card holder only” and we didn’t have that specific blah blah card in the first place. So we were not actually supposed to get this discount and the computer was right after all. It just could not explain it to us, the cashier or the store manager. As a result we all have wasted lots of time and nerves because the computer could not answer the question why?

Deeper analysis of the situation shows that it is as simple as one, two, and three.

One. All these discounts, sales, cards, rules and policies are too complex for any man to grasp. They can only be upheld by complex dynamic computer systems like the one we have seen in that store.

Two. People dealing with these systems are tired cashiers with sore finger from touching the screen all day from one end and angry, suspicious customers, tired from constantly checking, arguing and eventually returning products that were not priced as they expected because they failed to read some small letters somewhere or made a mistake in some complex percent calculation on the other.

Three, and the most important. The system is not designed to explain its rules to the user. It can make a decision but it can’t explain why it made it.

Back in time, moment of sale, customer asks a question, the clerk pushes the “Why?” button, screen comes up. “Dear Sir, the discount for juice is for: 1. Card holders only 2. That bought over this amount 3. And wear a black tie. You were rejected for 1. not having a card. Please be more careful next time and have a nice day”. And if the customer does not believe it, it will show the exact scan of the label that appeared on that shelf so that the customer can be sure he talks about the same sale.

How cool would that be.

Have a nice day indeed.

Guess What Happened

2007-03-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

I will start with an old haiku which seems painfully appropriate for the moment:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

It all happened so quickly. I have created a new project in Eclipse to add some minor library to the prototype application I have been writing for three days. Since my projects sit outside the workspace, I had to uncheck this little checkbox suggesting me to put a new project in default location and type the new location (a directory not far from there) by myself.

For some strange reason, when you uncheck this box, the text field with the directory path becomes empty so despite the fact that the directory I needed was just beside the one that is already written there by default I had to switch to explorer, copy and paste the path manually into the field.

This is where I erred. After pasting the directory, I forgot that this was the path of the directory where all my projects resided, the parent directory - not the directory of the new project I wanted to create. Before I realized that I hit OK, and there it was - my new project created in the projects parent directory instead of a nice little directory of its own.

Well, I suppose these things happen, said I when I realized my mistake, I will just delete that project and create a new one in the correct directory. So I said, and pressed the "delete" button.

But this story is not about me, it's about Eclipse. After I pressed that button, Eclipse inconspicuously asked me whether I wanted to remove the project from the workspace only or delete its contents as well, all that with straight, poker face, calm as a frozen lake. I thought "why would I need to keep contents of an empty, just created, project in the wrong location" so I hit "delete contents" - and that was exactly what Eclipse did.

He deleted the contents of the entire directory, all three meaningless files that were created with the new plugin project and ALL SUBDIRECTORIES WITH ALL MY OTHER PROJECTS as well.

It was almost too easy. BOOM - everything was gone.

I know what you are thinking so NO - I did not have a backup, NO - it was not in a source control and NO - I did not have anyone to blame. Three days of work, were gone. Eclipse does not have any Recycle Bin and I did not have a good recovery software installed, and I only have one logical drive - so if I would install one I would risk accidentally overwriting the very data I was trying to rescue. The irony tends to get thick in situations like these.

It looked hopeless, but I know you are waiting for the happy ending, so here it comes.

Once, in one obscure Eclipse conference, I heard that there is such a thing called "local history" in Eclipse 3.2, and that in that history they save all the files you work on so you can go back and undo some changes that you have done and compare previous versions. Lucky for me, this history is saved in the workspace .metadata directory that was not deleted during the accident. After a few minutes I have found it, a bunch of tiny little files with long meaningless names, just lying there happily, each holding a class full of my precious code.

It only took three hours of scraping around to restore 90 percent of the code I have written, and I filled in the rest - so in almost no time I had all my stuff back in good working condition, even better, as in some cases I found bugs while reviewing the code and looking for the changes.

Now for the moral.

First, do backup, do use source control and don't be an idiot.

Second, be extra careful with what you DELETE with Eclipse. Eclipse has it's own file system underneath, so everything it deletes does not go to the Windows recycle bin, or any other place you can salvage it from. This is just plain barbaric. Even my browser has a trash can, in case I accidentally close a tab I did not yet bookmark.

Third, just for the sake of emergencies. Find, try and buy a good piece of software that restores deleted files and keep it installed on your computer at all times. It might save you some nerves one day or another.

And last, listen carefully in conferences, you never know what might save your day next time :)

One File Is Not Enough

2007-02-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I come to a situation where I need to attach together different types of data. It could be a PDF to which I want to add some notes, or a picture that I want to describe, or a song to which I want to add lyrics. In certain cases I want to bundle together several files, some of which could be pretty complex themselves, such as add the Visio diagram of a database schema to an Access database file.

What I basically need, is to put together several different files while preserving the ability to access each and every one of them individually.

Sure I could zip them, but that would not really solve the problem since I would have to unzip them before I can use them. I could put them in a folder, that would help the situation, but it I would still be able to delete one and leave another and I would have to separately manage their names and so on, definitely not a solution I would prefer.

It seems that in the current state of affairs, there is no way to do this in neither of the existing file systems. Why? Well, I guess there are several reasons.

First let's look at the definition of the file. The way I would describe it, a "file" is a collection of data of the same type. Of course, this is no longer entirely true for modern files which may include different types of data (think about a Word document with embedded picture), but it still works most of the time (you could still call it a document, only with picture). Wikipedia, defines file a little differently (take a look). I liked the phrasing "available to a computer program". It means that a certain file is related to a certain computer program as in - can be open by a certain editor. Another editor, another file. This makes sense and correlates with the everyday experience, indeed, how often did you see files that could be open in two entirely different editors (I don't count similar editors from different vendors and text editors that can open everything).

Which brings us to the second point, the file extension. OK, the names are no longer eight characters short (though I still avoid putting spaces in file names) nor are the extensions limited to three characters but they are still very important and dominant in a way we manipulate files today. In most cases, extension determines the type of editor that will be open (at least by default) to edit the file. This can be changed, of course, but if a .pdf you download turns out to be an ArcView Package Definition File - you will be very mad. After all, extension defines format, and implies content.

And finally, let's take a look at our file systems, ladies and gentlemen. They are, well, old. I use Windows XP which came preinstalled (see: Windows Tax) and I think I have NTFS, but I don't really care, since I dont use it's "advanced" features anyway. For those who were sad when WinFS was dropped from Vista, relax - I am not sure it would improve the situation. It was more about being a database, and having meta data. We are very obsessed with search these days.

We have gone a long way since 1977 (that was a good year), but we still can't treat several different files as one. Sad, and frankly, a little bit strange. Haven't anyone encounter this problem before?

I think, in a way, media guys did. They had this problem of distinguishing between two different types of file content (audio and video) and the file container that will bundle them together. The way they solved it is, in my opinion, far from optimal but it is a good point for the case. They distinguish between a codec, which is used to read and understand specific video or audio data and the file format used to hold them. Each media player in the world supports this scheme, as well as every other tool which needs to access the media files. First it reads the file, just as regular editor, in a way determined by file extension, and then it uses a codec specified in the file to read the audio and video data. This way your media streams always stay together, you can't accidentally copy a video and forget a voice track or vice versa.

Does this solve a problem? Eh. Well, partially, for this specific case, you still can't add anything else to your file - those who ever used subtitles will see what I mean. This solution is not scalable enough, and besides do you know how many video file formats are there?

I believe this is a real problem, a solution of which will present a next big step in file systems, no less than the search and the database stuff. I think that this problem is encountered and solved each time with one compromise or another, mostly as a workaround. I don't know what you think (I will if you comment) but for me: One File Is Not Enough!

Changing shape size in Microsoft Visio

2007-01-25T01:59:00.000-08:00

I use Visio quite a lot. I find it really useful for creating all sorts of diagrams for various presentation purposes and for visual thinking in general.

In many cases, editing a diagram involves dropping many different shapes on a sheet and then playing around with them, arranging them into a visually acceptable layout. In this process, it is often required to perform operations on the shape which are relative to other shapes on the same sheet. Some of those operations are supported by Visio, such as shape distribution, grouping and alignment. However, there are some very basic functions which are simply not there, for example - making several selected shapes the same size.

In my opinion, this is a major usability flow. All you want to do is select several shapes and then click something to make them all same width or same height. It is hard to believe that this operation is nowhere to be found, not even in the 2007, which, frankly failed to make the same breakthrough progress as Word or other Office applications in terms of usability improvements.

Untill now, I have found two ways to deal with the problem. If shapes are of the same type, I copy them instead of dropping fresh ones from the stencil and then carefully adjust the font size to fit in all of them. If I have to adjust their size, I carefully select them all and resize them all at once, which is possible for some not too populated diagrams.

Another, more civilized, way of doing this is to open a Size & Position window from the View menu. In this window, you can see the size and position properties of the selected shape. You can then select several shapes, and update their width or height by typing the required value into the box. In order to make those shapes the same as the one you want, you have to select it first so that its properties are shown in the window. Ah, but there is another problem. You can't just hit enter, the edit box recognizes the fact that no change was made and does nothing, you have to retype the value again to have the desired effect. Still it's better than nothing.

I looked all over the net for the solution and I can't get rid of the feeling that I am missing something here. Can it be? Well, maybe they are saving it for the next version :)

No Excuse

2007-01-13T21:56:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I watched the Steve Jobs keynote introducing the iPhone. As always, it was an impeccable presentation, delivered with the usual quality and style. The iPhone is simply amazing. I have watched the whole event twice and I have enjoyed it like a good movie. It was just awesome.

However, this blog is not about Apple or iPhone, it is about usability. So let us for a moment forget about most of the features iPhone has. Let us forget about the beautiful multi touch display and the wide screen videos. Lets us put aside the full browser and the email, and even widgets. Let's just concentrate on the phone. Just the phone with the most basic stuff. Even without the camera.

Just the phone.

It has occurred to me that there is something strange going on. I mean, Apple, after all is not a cell phone company. Well, of course they have great designers and innovative thinking, but they are not Nokia or Samsung or Motorola.

Yet, amazingly, all of those companies that have the expertise and experience in building phones for nearly two decades have failed to produce something matching the iPhone usability, not even by a large margin.

There is no new technology there. The magnificent scrolling can be done without the multi touch display. Same for the soft keyboard, which has existed for years on all PDAs. The convenient address book with all the details available at a glance as well as the easy interface for putting someone on hold - not to mention the conference call, all of these are not new. A sensor that turns off the display when I hold the phone to my ear is not impossible to imagine either.

The SMS conversation feature, which allows you to see previous messages from the same person in a same thread, is especially painful. After all, instant messaging services were around for a long time now, and technically it is very simple to implement.

It is very strange that such great companies as Nokia and Motorola failed to compete in their own field with an outsider such as Apple even in the most basic of the features of a most basic phone. The usability gap between the iPhone and the existing offering of phones (not just smart phones) is really huge.

They really have no excuse.

The Thirteenth Step

2006-12-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

Well, as the title clearly states this blog is "on everything", so today I want to talk a little about software development in general. I have been interested in software development and related topics for quite a while now, and if I would have to name one person who had the most influence on my views and opinions on the subject it would without a shadow of a doubt be Joel Spolsky.

Back in 2000, Joel has introduced a Test to measure how good a software company is using twelve simple criteria. The Test is very useful, in fact, it is successfully used to rank software companies that appear on Joel's job listing site, and provide a great reference for job hunting developers.

One thing, however, bothers me a little, and it's an issue of a "code review".

A "code review" is, naturally, a process in which a portion of written code is read and examined visually by programmer's peers or superiors short time after it is written and usually before it is committed to a next build or release. This is by no means a definition, "code review" has many uses, but it's the phrasing I would use for the purpose of creation of another step in Joel's test.

"Step 13: Do you have a regular code review? "

Maybe it is so trivial that it is implied and maybe not, I think it is worth mentioning explicitly and I will try to explain why.

Although most would agree that "code review" is a useful and effective practice for continuous improvement of code quality, not everyone is actually doing it, to any extent. The reasons, or to be more precise - excuses, ranges from "I am the best programmer they have there, no one can review MY code" to "We would be glad to, but it takes too much time to review all the code we write here". There are also those who say: "We are so agile, we review our code as we write it". Well, if all your code is written in pairs, then I think you are covered.

It does not take a programming genius to review somebody else's (even another genius's) code. First, if the code is that good it is usually readable and well commented, isn't it. And if it is not, well, here is where the questions will start. In any case, a fresh pair of eyes and a new perspective will already allow to discover wide variety of problems.

The issue of the personal abilities of the reviewer is so unimportant that I once thought of creating a tool called "semantic debugger". It would go over a code, compiler style, analyze it a little and ask you random questions like: "What is this variable for?", "When do you enter this function?", "Why is this exception unhandled?" and so on. I think the very fact that a programmer would have to think about answering those questions would by itself uncover a bug or two.

To conclude, the "code review" helps to find bugs, improves coding style consistency, allows less experienced programmers to learn from the more experienced ones and much more. A code review is definitely an important procedure one would want in a good software team, and possibly important enough to make Joel's list.

P.S. To the more theoretically minded, here is a link to an interesting work(.PDF) on how to estimate the number of problems that iterative code review allows to discover.

Why would you use the Package Explorer to delete a function from your class?

2006-12-21T23:30:00.000-08:00

This is a good question, however, since it is allowed, I might as well do it if I please. One might, if so inclined, expand a class in the Package Explorer and the delete a specific function or member or whatever, no problem at all.

There is however a little something one should be aware of. In case this operation is performed on a class that is not currently open in an editor, there will be no going back - no undo will be available!

I have discovered this little glitch while trying to work with the new Common Navigator framework that was added to the 3.2. After reading the excellent tutorials on the subject, I have tried to create a view very similar to the Package Explorer, but for my own file types. In order to show the contents of my file, the view should be aware of my model. In case the file is also being edited in the editor, the Common Navigator view should be updated to reflect the current state of the model and correctly display the model in the tree. In the tutorial example this is done via the file system - each time the file is saved in the editor the navigator view is notified and updated. This is OK, for the example, but it is very inconvenient when working with a real model. Also, this is not a way Package Explorer behaves, a function appears there as soon as it is written even before the file is actually saved.

A friend I have been working with has suggested to put a model in a singleton container, so that it would be accessible from both a view and an editor, and implement some kind of notification mechanism to track the changes. That eliminated the need to reload the file from the Navigator view each time a change was made. Everything looked really good.

Until we started to implement the actions we wanted to perform on our model elements from the Navigator View. There we discovered that it was impossible to undo the operation that was performed on the model when the editor was closed, since that's where our command stack has resided. The only solution we saw was to move the command stack from the editor to the same singleton and thus allow to undo the performed operations from both the editor and the Navigator view.

During our attempts to determine whether this was a wise decision, we asked ourselves how did this work in the Package Explorer? Well, the problem was there too. The undo for operations on the file contents did not work, unless an editor was open, and even then it only worked from the editor and not from the view itself.

Unfortunately, we did not yet have time to go deeper into the code of the Package Explorer to understandit's inner workings. We also did not find a bug on this in the list. So meanwhile, the question remains: where to hold the model and the command stack so that both actions and their undo are available from both the Editor and the Navigator.

If, by any chance you know someone who knows the answer to these questions, please use the comments. That's what they are there for, you know :)

The Update Manager and the RCP

2006-12-20T06:51:00.001-08:00

Two days ago I needed to create a small demo of updating an RCP application using the Update Manager as a part of the presentation I was doing on Eclipse technology. The point was to show how easy it is to update an existing application by downloading a new feature from the update site.

Since the point of the demo was the update process, I chose a simple plugin example called the "Intro". For a "new feature" that will be added, I wrote a small plugin that contributes a single menu item that would appear after the update is performed. When clicked, it displays a message box that declares that the demo has succeeded. Nothing fancy, but it illustrates the point.

All went well for a while. I used a nice tutorial to create an update site, at this point as a local directory, and published there my new feature. I also manually contributed a "Software Updates" submenu (the "Help" menu already existed in the example) and delegated the operation to the UpdateManager class as demonstrated in this article (.pdf).

And then the problem began. I would not install my feature. Whenever I checked my feature on the update site, and error status would float up declaring that "Resulting configuration does not contain the platform." Mmm, that's strange. Last time I checked the platform was alright...

Not having a clue what that meant, I tried to Google my way out of it, but it did not work out very well. A first search discovered that this specific error is either very rare, or extremely unpopular. In any case I did not find a quick fix, nor after hours of playing with configuration, adding and removing plugins from features and dependencies. It just would not install my feature.

I will make the long story short. I really should have read my tutorials thoroughly. In the RCP tutorial is clearly says that "If your product needs automatic update, then eventually you should convert it to use features." And I didn't even look in this tutorial since I thought I know what I'm doing.

Well, when I converted my RCP to use features instead of plugins the update finally succeeded. As an extra "bonus", since I included platform and RCP features, I have received the "Search" and "Run" menus, as well as another "Software Updates" submenu. Now I had two update menus when I only needed one and two additional menus I did not need at all! I was able to get rid of the search menu by removing the search plugin and I also removed my "update" menu contribution. I have decided to leave the "Run" menu and not waste time on removing it programmatically. I hope it will be easier in 3.3 :)