Author: James Kebinger

Miracle on grass

My kickball team, the Somerville Land Pirates (yarr!) won our first game of the season at long last! We entered the playoffs last in the league with a perfect 0-8 record, having never led in a game. Our opponent had the good kind of perfect record, and had beat us twice already in the season.

Last night none of that mattered though (nor did missing half our team); we cruised to a convincing 6-1 victory over the number one seeded Stewie’s sexy party. Things looked good right away with a four runs in the first inning, and we never surrendered that lead thanks to some great defensive plays by Tom and Ander.

Don’t think too hard.

I haven’t flown since the whole liquid bomb scare, but my trip down here to visit Frank reminded me how inane these new anti-liquid guidelines are. In fact they’re so nonsensical that the page of prohibited items asks that you not try and make sense of them at all:

We ask for your cooperation in the screening process by being prepared before you arrive. We also ask that you follow the guidelines above and try not to over-think these guidelines.

I think that speaks volumes.

Remember this: gel bras ok, gel insoles, not ok.

Late to two-way sync party…

I was disappointed this morning to see on digg that someone is already writing software to do bidirectional syncing between google calendar and icalendar. I have been preparing to write such a beast by familiarizing myself with the syncservices API, all the while wondering why no one had done it yet. SyncServices makes it surprisingly easy to do, and that’s been around since Tiger came out over a year ago.

There was clearly a pent up demand for a tool like that, lots of blog posts and comments on the topic here and there – definately something that would fetch a token 10 or 20 bucks for use. I was wavering between a free/open source model and doing a a for-pay client (which would probably require lawyering and accounting) so now that there’s competition, if I proceed it’ll definately be the former. That’s only fair really since I wouldn’t have done it at all if PyObjC wasn’t free.

At least now there’s no real rush to beat some unknown competitor. I can go back to learning ruby on rails instead as originally planned.

Movies: The Departed

I saw The Departed last weekend. It was very good overall and had surprising twists and turns at the end. For me I was so used to seeing Martin Sheen as President Bartlett that I kept thinking that its a good thing the president was able to keep himself busy fighting crime in Boston now that he’s out of office.

One nit about the movie: the movie has two characters talking on the phone (to each other) on the T, but there’s no cell phone reception on the red line between Park Street and South Station.

SyncServices Example Code in Python

I’ve continued my earlier efforts to learn the SyncServices API and their use from Python using PyObjC and am pleased to share this example script. (I’ve also submitted it to the PyObjC project). The example code interacts with Apple’s Simple Stickies example. The script performs a full “truth” retrieval, registers an alert handler to join sync sessions, adds a new sticky, then waits to handle any sync events.

Now that’s done I can use it as a basis to explore calendar syncing…

Can you tell a company by its website?

I’ve been looking for a new job of late, so I’ve been looking at a lot of company websites to get a feel for the company. I know the saying is you can’t tell a book by its cover (even though a cover can catch your eye and make you buy it anyway), but can you tell much about a company by its website?

I like to think you can.

The following factors tend to weigh heavily against a company in my mind (especially if they create web applications):

  • Site looks ugly or broken under firefox (I know most people use IE still, but come on. This also indicates they may be writing IE-only webapps)
  • Messy javascript
  • Poor HTML- no css, lots of inline css
  • Bad information design

I understand that a lot of these companies probably outsource their web presence, but I would think that if there were some talented designers at a company, one of them would raise some concerns about or fix the issues above, particularly poor information design.

Here’s a case study. One of my recruiters told me to take a look at Outstart which appears to be in the business of information delivery (e-learning etc) via the web. So it was especially alarming that they didn’t seem to be able to deliver information about their product line very effectively. Take a look at the screenshot below (taken from here). I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of visitors to the page try to click on the product names (in blue, bolded) next to the short descriptions before figuring out that doesn’t work and using the menu at left. Talk about misleading information scent. (Click the image for a larger version)

Lame info design

Other strikes here (besides the different order of the products in the page and in the menu):

  • Parts of the site don’t render well in Firefox. (like the country drop down box) I don’t want to work on an IE-only app again. Ever.
  • The url is ugly and complex. It contains at least 100 characters, many of which are in hexadecimal. They break down into three coordinates on the menu to decide which page to show. Only each id is a 32 hex characters, which means there are 10^24 possible menus, and the same number of possible items per menu, and the same number of base menus. I guess they’re thinking about growth, or adding the entire internet to their menu structure. At 10^72 combinations, they might be able to have a page for every atom in the universe. Way to plan ahead for growth.
  • The HTML is broken. There’s a chunk of CSS before the html tag. No Doctype.

I’d expect more from a company that builds web apps to deliver e-learning, wouldn’t you?

Getting more organized at last

I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done at least twice now but never really implemented many of the ideas until now. I’ve looked at many productivity tools, both open source and not, in search of something I could use. I liked the tiddlywiki and GTDTiddlyWiki apps, but I don’t carry a laptop to and from work and didn’t want to have to carry a USB key everywhere. I’ve used backpack a bit recently, and its handy for some simple things, but it wasn’t really enough for my needs (especially without paying for it – I already pay for hosting so I might as well use it more than I do).

I found Tracks and its been great! Its written in Ruby using Rails, so you can easily host it somewhere public (as I do now) or run it locally on your own computer. There’s a free to use install at zenlist

As an aside, I was building ruby 1.84 on my macs, and I was really taken back that my macbook compiled twice as fast as my G5 Imac given that they’re roughly the same clock speed and the Imac’s disc is probably a bit faster. I was also surprised back when i got the imac that it wasn’t that much faster in non floating point tasks than my old G4 ibook despite an 800mhz advantage, so I guess I shouldn’t be amazed that the duo runs circles around the G5.

TRETC Panel: Innovation and The Energy Crisis

The most captivating and depressing session from TRETC was easily “Innovation and the Energy Crisis”. The panelists (well three of them: Nathan Lewis, Joseph Romm and Robert C. Armstrong) painted the most dire picture of global climate change that I have heard yet. They argued that within twenty years there will be massive redirection of capital into mitigating the effects of climate change, which will have such priority that relative luxuries like the space program will go by the wayside (clarification on this here).

The central issue is that in order to minimize climate change but still meet growing energy demands, we have to double today’s energy infrastructure but without any increase in carbon emissions. The problem with this is there are no magic bullets – society has to start using every technology at its disposal from conservation to generation, and the sooner the better so that we can figure out if some technologies (like carbon sequestration) will even work. Discussions on energy policy based on cost alone will never help to solve this problem, risk assessment must become part of energy decisions.

Some interesting tidbits from the discussion:

  • Wind power can likely never account for more than 10% of the worlds energy output.
  • Almost all the significant hydro-power resources are already tapped.
  • There is more energy worldwide in natural gas reserves than uranium. If the world’s ~11 TW energy was to be generated entirely with uranium, it would only last 10 years. This means that breeder reactors using plutonium have to be part of the arsenal, which means dealing with their proliferation issues.
  • The amount of geothermal energy available is on average just 55mW per square meter – so large scale geothermal power may never be possible (but home and business heat pumps are still an effective way to assist in cooling and heating)
  • China’s geology prevents any underground carbon sequestration except for a small portion of the north west. (They’re also apparently asking for the right to “catch up” with the developed nations in terms of cummulative CO2 emmissions before having to participate in any reduction treaties)

The short time frame to turn this around immediately made me think about patents and how they could help or hinder the process – as companies invent better energy technologies, can governments incent them to turn them over to the public domain or make them available for inexpensive licensing without taking away the financial incentive to invent in the first place?

I put the question to the panel leader Robert Armstrong after the talk. He drew a parallel to the mobilization of the US economy during world war 2, where it took just 9 months to switch from cars to bombers and any inventions were quickly disseminated among all producers. (I think another parallel is the way the US government guarantees certain sized orders of vaccines in order to foster their development today)

I wish the audio of the panel was online. [UPDATE! sometimes wishes come true quickly!. The MP3 of this talk is here.] There is this brief article. Here’s a description of some new research that appeared just before the conference and drove some of the discussion.

Bad things happen when the buyer and the user aren’t the same person

I was at Technology Review’s Emerging Technology Conference (TRETC) today which was great and about which I have much to say. Before I delve through my notes to put up some posts, something occurred to me based on several things I heard today.

First I overheard someone say to a colleague who had just gotten a new motorola phone that Motorolas have crappy interfaces, which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Second In the panel discussion “Online Application War” someone pointed out that the reason so many enterprise applications (interestingly he singled out all of Oracle’s back office applications) have crappy user experiences is that the buyer probably never has to use the system. This likely means that these apps are being bought on the basis of feature checklists. (The extension of this is that the beauty of web apps is that people can make an end run around their IT department to use apps they want to without having to get permission).

So this brings me back to my hypothesis about why people buy so many Motorola phones: the “person” who is buying the phone has never used the phone. They’re making a decision based on features (camera: check, games:check) and the look of the phone. Most buyers never get an opportunity to actually try the phone out, because most of the display models are empty cases with stickers for screens. Which is why Motorola must justify spending so much more on industrial design than UI design. Imagine if people were forced to buy cars this way?

Once the user gets the phone home and uses it, it is either too late or too much hassle to return it (or they just don’t expect enough). Then they get used to the warts, two years go by and the cycle starts anew. Should I take the pink phone, or pay extra for the same phone in blue?

[Update] – I found this post (and related comment thread) on the lackluster UIs in all cell phones over at 37signals.