Insomnia

Since my employer got into the design business by acquiring a design firm, I have been trying to teach myself about design and how it is used in the software industry. It now seems obvious to me that properly designed software is the exception, not the norm. So, why is that?

Software companies are run by software engineers

Now, this is not a surprise to anyone but it has a major impact on the inability of design to penetrate software companies. Software engineers are "alpha people" they don't understand that they are the only ones that can figure-out how to use their software. I don't really want to expand on this because Allan Cooper did it much better than I could ever do it in The inmates are running the asylum.

Software people poo-poo waterfall

In his book, Cooper makes an analogy between the "design driven" software process and film making. You have pre-production, principal photography and post-production. When you tell this story to a software guy, the only thing he hears is waterfall. Then, he will promptly plug their ears with their index fingers and go "la la la la la... I can't hear you!".

The software world, especially in the past 5 years, the silver bullet has been agile methodologies. The software industry is blaming a lot of its past failures on the waterfall model and its inherent lack of flexibility. The whole industry has been moving towards a development model that lets team crank-out releasable product in small atomic iterations. If the "crazy customer/user" changes his mind, we only lose the work for the one iteration. Agile is not a process, it's a mitigation strategy. And the funny thing is that it is a mitigation strategy made indispensable by the lack of design.

What design brings in to the picture, and why it is not just another rebirth for waterfall, is that design is agile. It is interactive and it is flexible. And, by doing all the refactoring in pre-production, you don't have to throw away any expensive code.

You can launch a new product for 12000$

There is a lot of people that still believe that software is cheap. They read articles like this one and think that they can build gmail for that price. When you think that software is cheap, it is no wonder that you don't want to take the time to do proper design and save some money.

And this is a further obstacle because even software companies fall into that trap and keep thinking that they can make the development process cheaper. They should know better by now. They try to put new fangled processes in place to reduce the cost of the software, they adopt new tools to make development faster and they attempt to move the development to "lower cost environments". But ultimately, what costs money are failed projects and useless features.

If you are trying to build a digg-clone-social-media-crowdsourced-web 2.0 application, go ahead and hack away at it. You can probably put it together for 12000$. But anytime you're going to solve a new problem or try to solve an old problem in a better way... It is going to cost you actual money.

Good design is invisible

One of the main issues about good design is that it is invisible. It gets out of the way to let you do your job. When is the last time you entered a store and went: "Wow, that door was really well designed, I had no trouble finding the handle and opening it". It is really hard to put a value on something that is invisible. Features in software are visible. They can be sold and promoted. Well designed features are not easier to sell than badly designed ones because the good design is impossible to describe, it's invisible.

Design is only apparent in two cases: When it is in your way and when you pay attention to it. When it is in your way is easy to detect. You just get frustrated when you try to use something. Companies end up having to staff a call center full of people to answer customer calls.

So how do you detect good design? You don't need to be a designer to know enough to pay attention to design. You just need to educate yourself a little. In between books about Ruby on Rails and Agile estimating, toss in a book about design once in a while:

Start with The design of everyday things. You will start seeing the world around you in a completely different light. I promise you will never walk into a mall without looking at the door handles again.

If you are a software person, read About Face 3: the essentials of interaction design. It is a big book but don't worry, it has lots of pictures. It is full of theory but it is not enough to make you a designer. I can guarantee that you will find in there examples of things that you have actually implemented that are big design no-no's.

If you are involved in any way with the construction, marketing or sale of software products, you should also add The inmates are running the asylum to your reading list.

Labels: design

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In the Ottawa Citizen this morning, you can find an opinion piece about Earth Hour (Ottawa Citizen - Hour of reckoning). Essentially, the point is that many hardcore environmentalists say that this is just a PR move that makes people feel good about doing nothing concrete for the environment.

Reading this, I sort of agree. Only lasting, everyday changes can make a difference. One thing that it did though is make me thing about what I am doing personally to reduce my environmental footprint. The first thing that I can admit is that I like cars so I am not about to change my ride for a Toyota Yaris. However... during this introspection, I came up with a short list of things that I did in the past year to help.

Change #1: I got rid of bottled water at home.

I used to have one of those water coolers with the 18L bottles of spring water. I originally got that because the water from the municipal distribution smelled too much of chlorine. I took the water cooler away and I had a water conditioner installed on the main water entrance of my house. This system removes some heavy metals, calcium and all chlorine taste. It has a permanent filter that gets cleaned automatically with a backwash system. It is virtually maintenance free.

It was a little pricey but it has many advantages:

• Every faucet in my house delivers great tasting water. Just as tasty and refreshing as the bottled water.
  
• I need about 30% less detergent when doing my laundry because the water is softer.
• The same applies to the dishwasher and it doesn't smell like chlorine all over the house when it runs.
• I have softer skin and more manageable hair because the water in the shower is softer.

Change #2: Pack a lunch every day to eat at work

That was hard. I used to go out pretty much every day for lunch. It was convenient and I did not have to think about it. But my office is in an industrial park and there are no restaurants within walking distance.

Results:

• I save so much money on restaurants, it's not even funny.
• I save 10-15 litres of gas per week because I don't take my car out at lunch.
• My pants are starting to fit better. :)

Change #3: Reusable bags at the grocery store

That one sounds obvious but it is one of those things that you have to keep top of mind. It is really convenient to just grab new bags at the checkout counter. This one is interesting because I already reused all my plastic bags. I used to think that if I reuse them I was good. But cycle is "reduce-reuse-recycle". So reduce wins over reuse.

After doing the reusable shopping bags for a while, I realize that I like it better. Those reusable bags don't randomly break, they fit a lot more groceries and I can bring in the groceries in a couple of trips to the car instead of 3-4 trips with the smaller bags.

To help me think about them, I split the stash of bags in 2 and me and my wife we keep half the stash permanently our cars. So we don't have an excuse for not having them when we go shopping.

I am sure that there was more and there will be more. But that is what came to my mind. I don't know if I will turn-off my lights tonight at 8:00pm. But at least I spent a minute to think about it.

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I have been a Foldershare user for a long time. I use it to backup data offsite between my home computer and my office computer. I also use it to share some web work that I do for a local NPO. I was exited to see that Microsoft bought them and integrated this in their Windows Live offering... over 2 years ago.

But since then, nothing. No updates to the software, no apparent updates to the web application and there were a few scary outages recently.

And then surprise! Sometimes in the course of the past few days, the entire site was redone to adorn the look and feel of the Windows Live applications and there is a new satellite application that also changes the look and feel.

Hopefully, this means that the service is alive and well and will receive the support it deserves from Microsoft.

Labels: tech

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There it is again. The glass ceiling:



A couple of days after the SP1 install, My OS stopped responding two days in a row and I was back at 3.4. I scrolled back the chart to see where that behavior started. I have had this 2-3 week cycle of "up to 6.5, back down to 3" stability index since February 13. I looked at the software installs for that day and there were a whole whack of things:

• Many updates from Microsoft (half a dozen or more)
  
• Adobe Reader 8.1.2 install
• Many drivers were updated too (touchpad, keyboard, USB mouse, ATA adaptor)

The Adobe Reader looks like a winner to me. Using autoruns, I figured-out that it automatically starts a "speed launcher" utility when Windows starts. I disabled that. Let's see what happens in a couple of weeks.

Labels: Vista

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Sony is offering a service called Fresh Start^TM that lets you purchase one of their VAIO laptops with none of the preinstalled crapware that usually comes with a laptop. That is cool. What everyone is bitching about (and why I say it is clumsy) is that they charge you 50$ for the privilege. (see here)

What is interesting though is that in one way, this is really honest of them. Essentially, they are clearly stating that all the companies that put trialware and special offers on new PC sponsor your purchase for approximately 50$.

I have long said that I would pay extra for a new PC that comes clean from the factory. I can clean a PC myself but I don't have the time. Plus these things never really go away when you uninstall them. They leave dust-bunnies everywhere. Especially the free anti-virus software you get with new PCs. Those things are particularly difficult to fully get rid of.

What PC buyers have to realize is that all these free things are never really free. They rob you of your disk space, your CPU power, and your screen real-estate. Three things that you pay for when you buy your PC.

My wife's HP desktop machine (the one with Vista that I talked about before) came with a lot of pre-installed stuff that just loaded on startup. Making the Vista boot process (which is already painful) nearly unbearable. Plus it added a toolbar to the desktop (in addition to the Vista widget thing) robbing her of precious pixels at the top of the screen and a plethora of icons in the tray that essentially rendered the tray unusable because Windows has to arbitrarily shrink the whole thing to get back some room for the task bar.

Worst of all was the HP care center that must have had a busy loop in there somewhere because the CPU on her machine would always be stuck at 50% (two cores) when it was idle. Finding the culprit and getting rid of all that took me the better part of a Saturday morning and gave her back a machine she could use. Definitely would have preferred to pay the 50$ to get a clean machine.

Labels: tech

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Just another me-too post about installing SP1 of Vista. It just finished installing (took over 90 minutes) and it seems to have installed without any problems.

Now, the real measure of how much better it will be with the service pack will lay in the reliability monitor screen. Here's a screen shot of my reliability monitor as it was just before I installed SP1:



Lets see in a couple of weeks if I can ever get passed the 6.5 (or so) mark that seems to be the glass ceiling that I have always hit in the past.

I sure hope it improves. This is on a brand new XPS M1330 Dell laptop that has no additional strange hardware installed. Only what was installed in there by Dell.

Labels: Vista

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Many people complain that there is no real fine dining in Ottawa. This couldn't be further from the truth. This was my birthday dinner from yesterday:

Appetizer:
Egg Custard with Shaved Bottarga & Truffle Oil; Beef Carpaccio with Caper Berries & Parmesan Shards

Main course:
Cornish Hen served with Chicken Liver Sausage, Swiss Chard, Mashed Celery Root, Braised Celery, Oyster Mushrooms & Tiny Celery Leaves

Served with an interesting Pinot Noir from the Norman Hardie winery.

And for desert, I had a blue-cheese apple crumble.

The entire meal was excellent (the appetizer floored me in particular) and the service was first-class.

Labels: fun

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Go sens go!

Labels: fun, work

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So, after a few weeks of experimentation, I finally am happy with my Gmail setup and I was ready to completely migrate my Outlook content to Gmail. I moved my address book, and I downloaded the Google calendar sync tool.

I still need to keep my Outlook around until I find a way to sync my WM6 smartphone with the Google calendar/Address book.

Everything worked fine. However, in the middle of the day, my entire Google calendar was obliterated. Every single item gone. After investigation, I was able to tell that the Google calendar sync tool was getting errors trying to access the calendar in Outlook (through MAPI) and interpreted this as me having removed my items from the calendar.

I was able to retrieve my calendar from my smartphone. Everything was not lost. But the Google calendar sync was promptly uninstalled. I guess I am waiting for their next version.

Labels: gmail

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This one has been brewing in my head for a while. Maybe I am too harsh. Maybe I am getting soft in my old age. But it has reached a level where it is more annoying to me than I can handle.

Can you guess what one of the favorite topics of conversation is right now in the hallways where I work. Developers are laughing it up about the latest "stupid" answers that such and such recent candidate gave in a job interview.

"Can you believe that this guy claims to have extensive web experience and doesn't event know the encoding scheme of the ASP.Net viewstate object?"... or some such nonsense.

This has become so common that it slips in casual conversation. It even slipped as an example in a recent training session. People think nothing of it. They think that it is ok to make fun of some guy they don't know because he failed to answer some obscure technical question about C++ multiple inheritance and its effects on the "object-oriented-ness" of Java or something.

This is even more annoying to me because I have a hard time believing that this behavior stays behind closed doors. I am also having a hard time believing that this does not transpire into peoples attitude when they interview candidates or they meet people at job fairs or other industry events. Events where they represent my employer. Ultimately, these people represent me and my livelihood. It annoys me that they act like "know-it-all" jackasses that think they can still behave like they are in high-school.

This goes against my values and I think that this goes against the values of my company. This is not how we treat customers, employees, candidates and people in general. Period.

Sorry for the rant... I just had to vent.

Labels: work

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