Insomnia

World usability day

2008-10-31T09:25:00.002-04:00

So, November 13 is world usability day. I will be at the OCRI event to listen to the discussion and maybe participate. I am looking forward to the panel and to meet new people interested in usability and design.

The internet is turning us into spastic readers

2008-10-25T15:24:00.003-04:00

I was reading the latest post on Fred's blog. It hit home for me as well. My personal problem is not that I have too many feeds to read (I prune my list regularly) but that I tend to skip anything that has any substance.

And it is only going to get worse. Apparently, blogging is dead, (many people have claimed that on blogs recently... completely missing the irony). Blog posts are too long for today's spastic readers. It's Twitter nation now. If it is more than 150 characters, you just lost most of your audience. "Smart" people don't blog anymore, they twit.

This translates in our everyday life and in our work habits too. Coincidently, I jut got an email from Fred this evening with a document to review. I read the first paragraph and I closed it. Preferring to respond to the stimuli of my Twitterific icon. This is a really bad habit.

Like a role playing game for programmers

2008-09-21T19:37:00.006-04:00

Last week, Stack Overflow opened to the public. I gave it a look. It is a simple system; people ask questions, people answer the questions. There is a system for upmodding and downmodding the questions and answers. Like many nascent crowdsourced web sites, the content is pretty good so far. Time will tell if the self-ruling system will continue to work or if the content will start to slowly drift towards mediocrity.

I am a lurker in most of the similar sites that I read. For this one however, I started to contribute right away. Why was that? After thinking about this for a little while now I think I have a theory: StackOverflow treats its participants like players in a role playing game.

Like many of the other community-based systems, there is a score that rewards user that create good content. Other sites call it karma, this one calls it reputation. The main difference is that this site gives you a compelling incentive to hoard the reputation points. You have goals, quests of sorts. You need to have gathered 15 points to be able to upmod someone else's content. You need 50 to be able to leave comments. There's a whole menu of things that you can do on the site but you need to gather some reputation to be able to do them.

In addition, the system will reward you with a badge for accomplishing specific tasks. You get the teacher badge for your first answer that gets modded up. You get another badge for completing all fields in your profile.

For me, this makes it very compelling to go there and participate. So, I'll stop writing right now and go see if I can't answer some questions. I really would like to get my good answer badge.

HP Goes Green and It’s More Than Just Marketing BS | Voltage Blog

2008-09-08T16:25:00.002-04:00

Reposting this link from the Voltage Blog.

HP Goes Green and It’s More Than Just Marketing BS | Voltage Blog

I'm not usually using a "green" label as a way to distinguish products. Usually... it is just marketing/PR. In this case, it seems like a genuinely original idea.

Proud to call HP one of my customers.

I will have to make sure I don't wear mine if I go to the UK

2008-08-15T13:58:00.003-04:00

I was really surprised to hear about it on Shneier's blog and then on boingboing a few hours later.

Then it was too funny I had to post about it. Police in the UK seized a boardgame called "war on terror". It is dangerous... It has a balaclava that "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act".

This is a picture of me with my Evil balaclava. I have owned this boardgame for over a year now. I don't play it very often because it is a 6 player game and you need to be in a certain mood to play it. But it is a very decent boardgame.

So be afraid... Be very afraid of my evil twin. He's the one wearing the balaclava.

They actually called back

2008-08-03T15:04:00.001-04:00

Remember my post about Winzip?

They actually called back to check if we did a license audit. I told their representative, in person, that we didn't really do a license audit as they requested. But that, instead of doing an audit, our staff was instructed to uninstall WinZip and use a free alternative like 7-Zip.

She seemed all happy at this conclusion and thanked me for my help. That's it! No sales pitch, no offer to help us with anything. They had me on the phone and didn't even make an attempt to establish any sort of contact. I had assumed that this was the reason for the whole license audit thing in the first place. But no. They truly just wanted people to comply with their licensing terms.

I am a little baffled.

Pretty good WebEx alternative

2008-08-02T15:04:00.001-04:00

Once in a blue moon, I need to demo a feature to a customer or host an application sharing session. Like many people, I had used the trial version of WebEx to do this. Since I don't feel like I do this often enough to subscribe to their service, I had not.

Last week, I needed to do another demo. Remembering the fact that the last time I had used their trial software, they called me for nearly a year to get me to subscribe to their service; I was looking for something else.

This is where I found Microsoft SharedView. If you are doing a demo for a small group (less than 15) and you have another mean of doing the voice conferencing, this should work great for you. I was able to set it up in 5 minutes, I already had a Microsoft LiveID (from MSN Messenger) and I had a sharing session setup in no time.

The system is free, lets you send invites by email and doesn't require the attendees to have a Microsoft LiveID. It worked flawlessly for me even if there were 2 firewalls and a whole lot of routing equipment between me and my customer. I had no special setup to do. Performance was similar to previous webex experiences. The system lets you give control to any attendee and lets the attendes "scribble" on the screen as they talk to point things out.

One thing that seemed different than webex is that you can only share one application at a time. If you want to share more, you have to share your entire desktop. Maybe there is a way around this but I didn't bother trying to figure it out, it is not that big a limitation. Obviously, this is Windows specific so that might be a no-go for you.

You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker

2008-07-22T08:18:00.003-04:00

My company is in the product development outsourcing business. We write software on behalf of other companies. Often, we work with other software companies. This is a hard sell. It requires a lot of versatility from our sales staff. They have to sell a service that they individually have no use for and that they don't fully understand themselves. Sometimes, the discussion with the customer becomes very technical and they need some backup from the technical staff to convince the customer.

That is usually when they call me. They start the discussion, introduce the company and then, they call me to fill in the gap. Once all technical questions have been addressed, they get back into closing mode and make a deal. So, in my naïveté, I thought to myself... How hard can this be?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get my perceptions reset. I went to visit a new prospective customer solo. This was a last minute thing and we couldn't assemble a team fast enough. I had experience with those meetings and I was prepared, I had a presentation ready, sample projects to talk about, I thought that I would just walk in there and close my first deal. The meeting went well. After the meeting, the customer and I were chatting on our way out of the office and he said something to me that just shocked me:

You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker.

That's it I thought. I flew all the way out here just to screw it up.

Seeing that I was... perplexed by this statement, he promptly clarified: You are the kind of guy that would walk away and not look back if the deal doesn't make sense to you. You will not try and fix it and close a deal that is not that good.

I blinked, not knowing if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He picked up on that and told me that he was happy that I was a dealbreaker. He said that he wanted to deal with someone that would take ownership of their product and that would not compromise on achieving the objectives. He asked me a few questions and he asked me to work on some pricing to be discussed the next morning. Two weeks later, we're still negotiating and it looks like we're going to work together.

I realize now that I was lucky. I just happened to fall on the one customer that needed to deal with someone like me. I realize that I will have to let dealmakers make deals. And that I should just be happy with my support role. It takes a lot of skill to convince someone to spend tens of thousands of dollars with someone that they have just met. Without the dealmakers, us dealbreakers would be out of a job.

Wall-E

2008-07-01T13:13:00.003-04:00

Image via WikipediaThis week-end was a rainy week-end. So I went to the movies and saw Wall-E. To my opinion, this is the best Pixar movie so far. The visuals are stunning, the story is interesting and is different from their other animated movies. Plus, there is no dialog in the first 40 minutes or so. Only robotic bleeps that carry more meaning and emotion than any Ben Affleck scene ever recorded. Oh and the short animated movie they show before the main feature is really cool.

I knew little about the movie before I went. I had just seen one preview and it had nothing to do with the central theme of the movie. It was just the preview with robots flying around in space.

But right at the opening scenes... I was very pleased. The visual approach to the movie was reminiscent of Idiocracy. A relatively little-known film by Mike Judge. The story is different but there is a definite connection between the two movies. Especially in the way the movie portrays people as ignorant, wasteful consumers. The way that they are lazy and stupid and happy in their ignorance.

There are obviously differences between the movies. The fact that people didn't become idiots, they always were idiots. Another difference in Wall-E is that they had the technology to leave earth. So they did and their behavior didn't change. There's just more room in space to throw out your garbage.

Ignoring your gut

2008-06-29T20:58:00.001-04:00

Plug image by pulpolux.

Sometimes, ignoring your gut might be the thing that you do that requires the most experience and intuition. I find that this is a rule that often applies when trying to solve a software performance problem.

You see, my current project is a business intelligence and reporting product powered by Microsoft Analysis Services. I have spent a while on this project an I am getting pretty good at understanding what happens under the hood of the engine when the application performs queries. I have also spent a lot of time so far tuning the data cube to allow the application to achieve a good level of performance.

Recently, my customer started using the application with real-world data and was puzzled by the response times he was getting from one of the datasets. It was a rather small dataset with nothing out of the ordinary. One view, no calculations. Something really basic. But every time you performed an operation, you had to wait for an unusual 5-7 second delay before getting responses from the database.

I spent a day working with that dataset, massaging it, creating indexes and aggregations. pushing and prodding every which a way. Applying the same recipes that got me some level of success in the past. But nothing happened. I knew that what I was doing was improving things because I could measure the imrovement on the other datasets but this one remained very sluggish.

So I resigned myself to write to my customer with a hypothesis that I had about the reason why this dataset was slow (lots of "zero" values instead of nulls... that was my hypothesis... really lame in retrospect). As I was writing, I spent the time to explain the things that I had tried and, since my customer is smart but he is not necessarily an MDX query expert, I "took id down a notch" on the technical side. Taking care of going through all the details and all the steps. And as I was explaining, It struck me that I didn't really do all that I was writing. I didn't examine the data to see if it was different, I just quickly glanced and the text files containing the raw data and gauged the complexity of the dataset by their number and their sizes.

So I took a step back and I went back to the basics. I carefully examined all the dimensions of my data cube to realize that I had one dimension with a really large number of members. A 100:1 ratio compared to the other datasets that I had imported in the application before. It was so simple. The total "size" of the imported data files were similar but the "shape" and size of the resulting data cube was radically different. The way the queries were constructed made assumptions that were wrong. After that was identified, it was easy to come-up with a plan and test a few queries to validate my findings. All of this would have taken an hour if I had spend the time to go through all the steps.

Today, my experience and my knowledge was my worst enemy and it led me on a wild goose chase. When I started questioning my assumptions, the answer was staring at me right in the face. And yes... sometimes, you have to check if the computer is still plugged in.

Personal comfort and working with overseas colleagues

2008-06-27T10:28:00.001-04:00

Phone image by grumbler.

Recently Matt was telling me that there was a certain amount of backlash in "The Valley" against working with Indian or Chinese colleagues. Not because they are not competent. But because it required people in California to stay at the office late in the day to be able to attend meetings with their Asian colleagues.

Interestingly, on the east coast, the situation is a little different. We benefit from the willingness of our colleagues in India and Eastern Europe to stay late for meetings (sometimes quite late). In order to be considerate to our colleagues overseas, we scheduled our daily SCRUM meeting early in the morning. By early, I mean 9:30.

Now, what is starting to happen is that our employees are complaining that this meeting does not match the core hours of our flexible time policy. The core hours are described in the employee manual as 10:30 - 15:30.

So begins the clash between HR needs and business needs. We need the help of our overseas colleagues to complete projects because there is not enough local talent to answer the demand. And we need to provide a comfortable, inviting work environment for our employees in all of our offices.

Anyone has smart ideas on how to solve this?

Shouldn't there be an easier way to do this?

2008-06-26T21:00:00.001-04:00

Those that have been reading my blog for a little while will remember that my wife has been having all sorts of trouble with her HP desktop computer with Vista on it. The reliability of the machine has been so bad that I decided to install the release candidate of Vista SP1 when it became available. That improved things slightly but the computer still couldn't properly shut down 2 times out of 3.

Well, the release candidate started complaining that it was not going to be supported anymore and that I had to install the real thing. So, on a rainy morning this weekend I started the process that would eventually take over 4 hours of my life.

The first step was to remove the outdated version of the the service pack. After some Googling to make sure that I was removing the right update I started the removal process. The first time, the machine froze and it had to retrieve a restore point to recover. The second time, the removal succeeded. But alas, the service pack did not show up in the Windows update dialog. Instead, Vista informed me that there were 19 updates to download and install first. I started the process and the computer froze at the 3rd update. I had to force a reboot of the machine and Vista retrieved another restore point. Back to square one.

Looking at the install log yielded no useful information. I turned to the HP web site for help. After describing the computer model and navigating to the support and downloads page. I was informed that I had to update drivers for SP1 to install properly on this hardware. No less than 6 driver updates were critical or recommended for this particular model of computer. From the Video card to the SATA drivers without forgetting a good old BIOS update. Each one of those updates had to be downloaded and installed individually. And each one required a reboot after installation.

An hour later, I was able to apply the 19 updates that would not apply before. After those 19, there were 3 more that appeared. And finally, Windows update offered SP1 for my installing pleasure.

So why the big rant? Is it just me or was this a really big missed opportunity by the hardware vendor? That PC came with a disk full of crappy software I didn't want. What if HP had invested some money and offered real value to their customers? What if they invested to streamline the delivery of critical driver updates. The same way Microsoft does it with its Windows updates. Something that a normal consumer, one without a degree in computer science, could understand. Something that didn't require me spending 4 hours on a weekend watching my computer reboot.

Interestingly, my Dell laptop had a different issue with a similar resolution. I was having trouble with the sleep/hibernate functions and I had to update the BIOS and Video drivers from the Dell site. The process was not much easier but at least, the hardware didn't hang while applying updates.

Does your employer need shock therapy?

2008-06-25T09:13:00.000-04:00

I was reading this article about the shocking steps that General Motors was taking to bootstrap their electric car project (called Volt). To allow themselves to innovate, they brought back a senior engineer from Germany and they threw all their processes out the window. The rest of the article describes how they peeled-off the industry's assumptions about car making (in general) and electric cars (in particular).

To me, one of the most interesting things that this article is the fact that they eventually realized that they cannot afford to just keep up with the Japanese car companies. They cannot play it safe. They had to "leapfrog" the competition and force them to follow their lead. This is the only way they could regain the technological edge.

The Volt is not available to customers yet. And it might still be a while before it is; But, according to the article, other car makers are already using the Volt's "technology" to design a new generation of electric cars. Even if the Volt never becomes a commercial success, the strategy already paid off for GM as it re-established them as innovators in their industry.

Popping corn with your cellphone

2008-06-09T08:50:00.002-04:00

Maybe this is old news to most people. But this is the first time I see this video. It is a little scary.

[Edit] Many people say it is a hoax. Here's the page from Snopes.

AideRSS -- when you just want to hear about the hits

2008-05-30T12:56:00.000-04:00

I was made aware today of a new RSS utility called AideRSS. It takes the content of a blog, analyzes it and collates a whole whack of statistics related to the relevance of the content, participation of readers, other people that link to it (diggers, reddit, del.icio.us etc...) and gives each post a ranking. That it itself is cool.

But then, it republishes the RSS feed for the blog. But the twist is that it republishes it in multiple flavors, filtered by their PostRank score. So if you follow a lot of blogs, you can subscribe to the "just the hits" RSS feed and you will only be made aware of posts from that blog that generated a lot of "excitement".

Here's what my blog looks like when viewed through the AideRSS tool. It determines that about 50% of my posts are "great". I don't know if that is good or bad.

Insomnia - AideRSS

Vista SP1 (one month later)

2008-05-26T09:34:00.003-04:00

Finally, I got rid of my glass ceiling

A quick look at the reliability meter tells me that I am having a much more stable system.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is related to my last "tuning" of disabling the Adobe quickstart application. There was another Windows update in between and the number of failures has been a lot lower recently. Pretty much all the failures that I see in the reliability meter now are Windows shutdown failures. You shut the computer down and it freezes on shutdown. Aside from that, my system has been really stable. I guess I am going to stop bitching about it now.

A strange way to treat customers

2008-05-20T12:55:00.003-04:00

This morning, I received an letter from WinZip Computing. In this letter, they were respectfully asking me to make sure that no unlicensed copies of their software was being used at our company and to prepare for a call from their representative that will assist us in our audit.

I'm going to channel Seth Godin here but that was an awful piece of negative marketing. The letter is full of words and phrases like: "It has come to our attention" and "internal compliance". Nowhere in the letter do they tell me what their software can do for me or my organization and why it would be a good idea to give them money instead of using what is available for free in my OS or on the internet. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying for software, I make my living from people selling software. But it has to add value.

What is more ironic is that I got this email because we were a WinZip customer. We bought licenses a few years ago when there was a compelling reason to use their software. Now that the reason is not so compelling, they "threaten" me into compliance instead of telling me why I should continue to do business with them. If I was not a customer of theirs, I would not have gotten this "request for compliance".

There was an email address on the letter and I will follow-up with them with a letter thanking them for the reminder that I should let everyone on my staff know about the existence of excellent WinZip alternatives like the free 7-Zip. And that they should uninstall WinZip to be compliant with their license requirements.

Why did design become so important to me

2008-04-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

I have been ranting about design for a while. However, I am not a designer, I am a software engineer dammit. I got all the design information that I know from books and blog posts.

I finally got it this week. I just finished reading Made to stick. I finally realize that it is not all the books with their statistics and theories about design and usability that stuck. It is the personal experience that I had years ago (with a previous employer) when I participated in a usability study of the software that my team was writing.

It was one of those one-way-glass usability studies where the developer team sits on the other side of the glass watching user after user struggle doing simple tasks with the software. It was a softphone type application and users had a lot of trouble just making a call. Despite the huge button that said "call" in the middle of the application window. Some of the developpers were litereally yelling at the glass: "Push the damn call button!"

The Made to stick book made me realize why this experience stuck with me. It was Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible and Emotional. Given the fact that I have a good story to tell about it, it scores a perfect 6 out of 6 on the stickiness scale.

I highly recommend this experience (witness a usability study of your software) to anyone involved with creating software. Then, tell me if it sticks with you.

Why developpers should never disable the Vista UAC security prompt

2008-04-11T19:02:00.000-04:00

As ars technica hypothesizes, it was put there to annoy you. Yes you, the software developer.

In the past, Windows developers were making assumptions about their privileges and calling all sorts of Windows APIs and accessing all manners of resources and files without thinking about the required privileges. Now, with the UAC, if you want to avoid being annoying to your users, you will attempt to get your work done without requiring an elevation of privilege. And yes, that includes things like installers.

So, developers, don't disable your UAC. Feel your user's pain. It will make you a gentler, kinder developer.

The developer totem pole

2008-04-09T08:00:00.002-04:00

Totem pole image by brewbooks.

Web developers get no respect. I swear this is the sentence that I used the most often in the past few weeks.

I have said that sentence in frustration because I had to fight the perception that web development is easy. That any developer (except maybe for a VB developer) can do it. This perception is ingrained at all levels of software organizations. From the developers themselves all the way to management.

There is a pecking-order, a totem pole where developers can be classified based on what kind of developer they are. You won't find that description in any programming book. This is not explained in any school curriculum. But it is there nonetheless; implied in the way projects are funded and staffed. It is often assumed that the people at the upper echelons of the order can (when they are coerced or there is no-one else available) do the work of anyone located below. Conversely, it is assumed that you're going to be in a world of hurt as a manager if you are forced to use a developer at a lower level to do some work "above his skill".

Some might argue that Linux kernel hacking is measurably more difficult than ASP.Net web development. That might be true but I don't think that it is so much more difficult that we can assume that it is impossible for a web developer could ever undertake a Linux kernel project. I think that we just have to understand that making a switch in programming discipline requires a certain level of learning. Whether you're going up or down the totem pole.

We have experienced the "going down the pole" phenomenon recently at work. We had an exiting project to complete that was a Java-based web project. We were short on web developers to complete the project so, naturally, it was assumed that if we put a bunch of Windows VoIP developers on the project, they should have no problems completing the work. After all, it's only a web project, how hard could it be?

A few months and a lot of overtime later, we successfully delivered the project. But it turns-out that it was a difficult transition. Everyone involved had to brace for a rough ride and pull together to make it work. It was not as easy as expected. I hope that the developers that were assigned on this project have a new found respect for web developers.

In my career, I have worked at pretty much all the echelons of this totem pole and I felt that I had earned my stripes. But recently, I have been involved in a lot of web development and I have noticed that the perception of my coworkers towards me was different. I have the stigma of the web developer. I do easy stuff now.

I think it is time we get rid of the totem pole. Working in software is challenging enough without the attitudes and the disrespect.

Innovation and creativity

2008-04-07T09:45:00.003-04:00

Innovation is the creativity are the holy grail of employees everywhere. Pretty much everyone wants to work for an innovative and creative company. Manager want to manage hot, creative teams that deliver new innovative projects. CEOs want to be CEO of IDEO.

Employees drool over pictures of the office space at Google. The read articles about the kind of innovation that Blizzard brought to their work environment. They all think that this is the hallmark of a cool, creative environment. Put your people in a great office and give everyone a Nerf gun and you're done. I think that I used to think that too.

I am halfway into the art of innovation and I realize now that this is not about the office space or the product. It is about the DNA of your company. When you are a creative/innovative company, everything you do is done to support this. From the products/services you chose to offer all the way to the people you choose to hire. And of course, to a certain extent, the office space and furniture.

The hard realization for me is that I work for a successful company that is focused on quality production much more than innovation and creativity. This means that the DNA of the company has coerced it to grow to be an effective product delivery machine. It has hired the best software people to predictably and reliably deliver products.

This means a lot of things. For example, for most of our employees, work day starts at 9:00 and ends at 18:00. This is something we advertise to prospects that we interview. This is definitely something that becomes "untrue" when most of your work is creative in nature. Creativity might happens at odd hours and requires that you be fully absorbed into the process.

So the challenge for a company like ours if we want to become an innovation powerhouse is the significant changes to the core values of the company on the way to get there. There are a lot of examples of successful companies that started-off with that core DNA. Does anybody know of a company that reinvented itself all the way to the core and managed to turn it into a success?

Why is design failing to penetrate software companies

2008-03-31T08:47:00.004-04:00

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.

Earth Hour

2008-03-29T12:44:00.001-04:00

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.

Microsoft finally does something with Foldershare

2008-03-26T12:43:00.004-04:00

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.

Vista SP1 (one week later)

2008-03-26T12:04:00.003-04:00

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.