Technology
Fetch 4 Dissatisfaction
I saw an interesting advertisement last night while watching the Simpsons. A guy is walking out the front door of his house with his hockey bag over his shoulder and a he does, his wife uses this small bottle to spray this fine mist on him. He turns around and says “Forget hockey. Let’s go out and buy you some new shoes.” Then, you hear this sexy voice say “Sway…”. There are two more similar skits and at the end of the ad the overdubbing voice note that “wouldn’t it be great if there was such a product?” and that if there was, “wouldn’t it be great to go somewhere to get more information?”
The ad is promoting a new Canada Post service called Fetch, which is trying to allow privacy skeptics to get more information on a product without the fear of giving up their info directly to the product manufacturer. A consumer simply looks for the fetch logo and then uses a keyword to get more information anonymously. It seems like a pretty neat and useful idea.
The execution, however, is a completely different story. I have yet to see a Fetch logo anywhere other than on the ad last night. This morning I signed up for Fetch, thinking I would be able to try it out, perhaps with a real product or at the very least with a fake product. That “Sway” product would have been a great trial. Instead, there’s nothing. And I tried lots and lots of random keywords, even ones that relate to the advertisers they claim are using Fetch. Alas, nothing.
So here I am, excited to try this out, and I can’t. All I can do is register. Will I come back? Not sure. Depends on how long it is before I see a Fetch logo somewhere.
Oh, and the other poor thing about Fetch’s execution is that every page on their website asks me to login. Which is fine. Except that I already HAVE logged in. So once logged in if I click on the “About” there’s a box on the left asking me to login. Same with the privacy page. And if I want to get back to the page which shows me actually logged in, I click on “home” right? Nope. The Home links asks me to login (or register) also. So to get back to my logged in page I either have to log in again or click my browser’s Back button over and over and over. Nice.
According to a Canada Post press release ”fetch is the result of three years of work between Canada Post and its development partners: Sun Microsystems, Pulse, Impact Mobile, CGI and Innovapost. By working with these industry technical leaders, Canada Post was able to incorporate innovative, interactive technology with the stability, performance and integrity of a 150-year-old company.” That said, I’m thinking that perhaps an extra week or two of usability testing tacked onto the end of that three years would have been worth the effort to reduce complaints like mine.
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Ten minute database
It a party at Mike’s place tonight. There hasn’t been a party at “Mike’s place” since the end of second year when he insisted that everyone come over to his dorm room to celebrate the end of life in “traditional residence”.
I had about 15 minutes before some other friends showed up, one of whom typically steals all your liquor when you’re not looking. Of course, he’s still a good guy, but I digress. So I decided to take the plunge and give the new PostgreSQL a try on my laptop.
Total compile time was 10 minutes, 58 seconds. I’m serious. I just compiled an enterprise level database in under eleven minutes. What are the chances that Oracle compiles in under eleven minutes on my P4 2GHz laptop? Not likely. Sybase? Even less likely; it has trouble running let alone compiling.
It took longer to dump, zip and restore the database on my laptop than it did to compile the latest version of PostgreSQL. And the dump/restore process was flawless.
I’m sure this isn’t the case for all open-source projects, but when I can compile a complex application in a short span of time on an average system, then I think it’s safe to say that this is a great example of what OSS is capable of. I know compile time isn’t everything. In the end you want performance and features and reliability. But what if you got all those (as is the case with PostgreSQL and it compiled in under eleven minutes? Amazing.
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Make a name for yourself
This morning I surfed over to Wired News as per my usual morning routine and was bombarded by Microsoft ads. On every story I read were two versions of the same ad: one in traditional banner format at the top and one in the nuevo-square ad format. And both were Flash-based ads.
The gist of the story is that some guy from the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs and his team were traveling too much updating servers. But now he’s “made a name for himself” because he managed a bunch of servers in multiple countries from a single location, all using Windows Server System.
What make this worth mentioning is the incredible power of marketing combined with ignorance. Let’s stick with the Windows environment for a second. Back in the mid-1990’s you could do this in the Windows environment using Timbuktu. And there is a handful of similar packages like pcAnywhere. But to someone who may not know better, this sounds like a revolution in computing.
Of course, in a Unix/Linux environment, remote updates have been possible since the dawn of networked computing. I have a server co-located at a hosting facility that I haven’t seen for two years. And yet, magically, I’ve been able to keep it up to date, all without the use of Windows Server. How can that be? Well, it’s because my server runs Linux.
Oh, and my final thought on the man who made a name for himself is I wonder what his “team” thinks of this new software? Because it seems to me that the “team” that had to fly everywhere to manage servers is likely now out looking for work because they probably don’t need as many people any more. Funny how the ad doesn’t mention that. Maybe that’s because “…now he’s known as Mr. 500 Servers in 156 Countries Managed from 1 Location” sounds much better than “…now he’s known as Mr. Fired My Whole Team”
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Too many blogs
The problem with reading people’s blogs is that they are time consuming. I’ve narrowed my read down to just a small handful that have good things to say 80-95% of the time. And then I have another handful that I breeze over every once in a while. This morning all was quiet on the Western Front I call work, so I went though my inconsistent blogs (or consistently not as good, if you are so inclined) and one of those blogs led me to Eric Rice’s blog entry about the new Google Suggest.
So about the Google Suggest. I think it’s a pretty neat idea, at least for the more common or repetitive searches. Of course, that then begs the question, “Why am I searching for the same thing over and over?” At the very least the idea is cool and helpful in narrowing down a search… so long as you aren’t too specific so as to not have anything show up in the Suggest dropdown.
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LG6190
I picked up the new LG6190 this afternoon. It’s a replacement for my Samsung A540, which I hate. Review, thoughts, gripes to follow. I’m especially excited to put this new Fastap gimmick to the test.
Of course, with all things in life there’s a tradeoff. My tradeoff today was to buy replacement luggage because the stuff that Alison brought to our relationship is falling apart. Secretly, though, I love our new luggage. More so than my new phone I think.
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Disappointment with 2004
I was thinking last night about all the things in the software development that disappointed me in 2004. Don’t get me wrong, 2004 was a great year in some areas, such as the one dot oh releases of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, but there other things that I was sure would have been available by now; and sure would be nice to have.
APM/ACPI: no solid support on Linux-based laptops
At one point I had APM somewhat working on my laptop, though it only worked about 85% of the time trying to recover from suspend. And now, with 2.6.9 and 1.0-6629 of the NVIDIA driver it doesn’t seem to work at all. So I have my laptop for portability only; when it’s time to move somewhere I carry it with the screen open for short distances (say from my office to the boardroom) or shut it down completely for anything longer than that.
Encrypted email: available to the masses
It’s been 14 years now since Phil Zimmermann developed PGP and made it available to the world. And yet, I still cannot send an encrypted email to anyone I want; as it stands now of the 800 people in my address book (yes, okay, so 581 of those are Thunderbird’s “Collected Addresses”, still the point is the same), I can only send encrypted email to four of them; Mike, Charles, James and myself. All of us are developers by trade and one of the people is me. So really it’s 3 people out of 220 or so. That’s less than 1 percent. And only James really counts since he was the only one who had it set up already. That’s totally rediculous. More so since the software is readily available for the most part. Plus no one seems to know about it. Yesterday I sent an email requesting that my subscription to a magazine be renewed and the reply was for me to call since “email isn’t secure for sending credit card numbers”. Sigh. Hopefully Thunderbird will make an impact on Outlooks dominance and the percentance of email addresses that accept encryption will increase.
Gabber 2: development ceases
Gabber is a client for the Jabber Instant Messenger protocol. For the past couple of years up until the middle of 2004 I had been running the latest CVS tree version of Gabber, helping out Julian and Thomas debug it. And then when they started Gabber2, I helped out with that; again, all I was really doing was building daily from CVS and helping to track down bugs and such. Unfortunately gtkmm 2.4 broke some serious architechture constraints in G2. And given that the public use of G2 seemed to be dwindling, the guys basically packed it in.
Home computers: no steering wheel
Finally, I’m disappointed that home computers didn’t “live up” to the predictions. *g*
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Hype vs function
The current PCS phone I have is most likely the worst designed phone you could purchase and use on a regular basis1. But my contract is up and Telus Mobility has graciously given me a credit with which to purchase a new phone and extend my contract.
In addition to the basics, I am limiting myself this time to phones with Java 2 ME on them. Not so I can download and play games (though I admit that may be fun for a few minutes) but so I can develop some applications for phones and have an actual phone on which to use them. This led me to the LG 60702.
That is until I ran across the latest in hype – FastapTM, a technology put out by Digit Wireless. They have come up with a tiny keyboard that makes entering text faster as you no longer have to rely on a built in dictionary or the old multi-tap text entry techniques. Imagine that.
Okay, while I can see that having all the letters of the alphabet each on their own key will likely be faster, there are two problems. First, other than the fact that Digit Wireless has come up with a way to fit all the keys on the PCS phone there doesn’t seem to be much to the technology, so to speak. But there’s lots of hype – so much so that I’m even going to check out the LG 6190 to see if lives up to it all.
Second, the keyboard itself seems to have been laid out without any thought to functionality whatsoever. It’s simply an A to Z layout, with A in the upper-left and Z in the bottom-right.
Seems logical, given that it’s the same layout basically as phones have now with respect to letters, right? Not so when you read this excerpt from the Digit Wireless website:
Digit Wireless, LLC is a technology development and licensing company focused on advanced interface for next-generation mobile and portable products.
Hmm, an alphabetical keyboard doesn’t seem like a very advanced interface at all, especially if you have read Donald A. Norman’s study of alphabetical and Dvorak keyboards or perhaps read Norman’s book ”The Design of Everyday Things.” Long story short, according to Norman, an alphabetical keyboard works barely better than a keyboard with a random layout3.
So in the end, it’s all about the hype. Same phone, pretty much the same keyboard, somewhat improved functionality4. Hype.
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1. At least if you have been using mobile phones for ten years or so anyway. If you have, then you probably aren’t a teenager and what you care most about is does the phone have a normal ring of some kind, does it vibrate so I can actually feel it and, most importantly, does it have good sound quality in and out.
2. The LG 6070 appears to be a decent phone, subject to an actual working trial.
3. Donald A. Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is one of those rare books that, although would seem to apply more to designers of products, software, etc, is enjoyed just as much by everyone else. I bought my copy in 1995 for $20 or so for use in CPSC 481 (Human-Computer Interaction) at the University of Calgary and since then have re-read it on multiple occasions and referred to it on a regular basis. But several non-developer friends have also borrowed it and read it.
4. I’m not convinced (until I try it) that FastapTM is actually much of an improvement. The current hype around the “improvement” is based on measuring the number of keypresses. And while that is indeed one way to measure it, anyone who has ever seen a regular SMS user will have found themselves in awe of the SMS user’s ability to generate messages at a rapid rate. But you can’t simply presume that reducing the number of keypresses will make text message generation that much faster because we’ve changed the actual interface.
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