webtuitive

Time

2009-10-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

We recently had the pleasure of hosting three of my wife's cousins for five days, women who I'd only met very recently. There's a whole collection of stories in those five days, but what triggered this post was reading Observational Time with John Goodman.

One of the cousins asked for an alarm clock for the day they were flying out and I realized how long it had been since I used one. She was surprised when I told her that basically I got up when the dogs woke me, and said "So you don't have a schedule?"

I said "no, I guess not", but realized later that the right answer is: "yes, it just doesn't involve machines". Between the light coming in the windows and the dogs' sense of, well, hunger and wanting to go relieve themselves, we have a pretty predictable schedule, appropriate to our lives.

So "time is ... an art of observation" -- yes, I'll second that.

Variety-seeking

2009-01-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

Ran across an interesting reference to " Food variety-seeking in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)" - and no, I'm not a biologist or animal behaviorist, so it was totally serendipitous.

From the abstract:

Variety-seeking is a central issue to consumer behaviour research and a phenomenon of crucial relevance, both for human and animal nutrition. Variety-seeking increases the probability of nutrient adequacy in omnivores, and in humans it may also contribute to obesity epidemic by diversifying food selection and leading to excessive food intake.

Replacing the references to food with ones about information makes for an interesting perspective on the place of tools like Twitter.

Following the tweets of a people from a spectrum of backgrounds and interests provides an "information omnivore" with a variety that would be much more time-consuming to find on one's own. And "increase the probability of informational adequacy" -- with more sources of input, you're less likely to be informationally deficient in a given area.

On the other hand, there's probably a challenge in making sure that it doesn't lead to an "information obesity epidemic" through "excessive data intake" :-)

When's it time to go on an information diet?

The Strangest Direct Mail Piece Ever

2008-12-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

How do they do it? By "they" I mean direct marketers, and by "it" I mean choose their victi- I mean, recipients? Check this out:

What list could AT&T's marketroids possibly have gotten my name off of that would make them think I am

Japanese
interested in online access, but so cheap that $14.99/month for a 768kb DSL line sounds like a good deal? or perhaps so ignorant that 768kb sounds like "High Speed Internet"?

Truly amazing. I'd love to know someone who could tell me what kind of response that campaign generated. Though to be fair, the ads on Gmail are frequently as mis-targeted.

Since I read a lot of technical mailing lists via Gmail, I get to see things like Java programming discussions containing references to the "String" class accompanied by ads for, say, "where to buy Kabbalah strings".

Semantic web, next stop, you betcha!

Yahoo! Developer Network: FAIL

2008-10-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

No one's perfect, and I have a long history of rooting for the underdog, but Yahoo! is just hopeless. Case in point:

I just saw a tweet referencing this Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) services map. Interesting idea, I'm a sucker for that type of organizational graphic, so I'm checking it out, and there are certainly things that I've heard referenced but never had time to investigate. Ooo, shiny.

Like "pipes". Yeah, that sounds interesting. This is probably as good a time as any to take a look, so... Where can I get more info? Hmmm. The PDF has only the top-level YDN home URL. And none of the graphics or text in the PDF seem to be linked to specific topics. That seems strange, but what the heck, can't expect everything, eh?.

Now I know from past experience that other YDN areas have pretty obvious name=>URL mappings, e.g. YUI is at developer.yahoo.com/yui/, OAuth is at developer.yahoo.com/oauth/ -- couldn't be easier, eh? So of course I should be able to go to developer.yahoo.com/pipes/ and find -- nothing. 404. "Sorry, the page you requested was not found."

O-tay. Well, the main YDN page has a search box, so let's just enter "pipes" and see what happens. Oh, boy. Above the results list it indicates that the search was limited to developer.yahoo.com -- right, good, what I wanted -- and at the top of the results list I see:

Also try -- "exhaust pipes"?? Yeah, I might want to hook a hose to one, at this rate.

OK, top result is titled "Yahoo! Maps API/Pipes - JSON example" which really doesn't sound exactly relevant, but maybe it'll lead to something else, so let's take a look.

Oh, good. It "displays" an utterly blank page.

Unreal. On the second results list page, the top entry turns out to be "Gateway to Yahoo! Services - YDN" with the URL http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html. Hmmm. Wouldn't you expect the first page of developer.yahoo.com to be the "gateway"? What's it there for, then? Maybe we're a wee unclear on the concept of an "index" page.

But working my way down the Page That Has Everything I eventually find a link to:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Sheesh. If this confusion on creating a positive user experience for Yahoo! developers is indicative of the thought that went into the tools... scary, and perhaps better left unsaid.

But worse, Yahoo! is primarily a search company. And their search just doesn't seem to work. Being unable to find the most obviously relevant entry within a very restricted context -- that's really scary.

"A Funny Thing" -- A Customer Feedback Loop Disconnect

2008-09-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

This article's title links to a great posting by George Dinwiddie, about how a financial institution lost a customer -- him -- through, not bad interface design, but an unwillingness to deal with customers reporting that bad interface design.

I had to laugh, because just yesterday my wife was venting about a similar situation. She'd placed a first order with an online vendor, for half a dozen items, and received multiple "confirmation" emails, with different confirmation numbers -- and all showing the same items. Confusing, not at all typical, so she called the vendor to make sure the order wasn't somehow submitted multiple times. The response? "Oh, that's just the way we do things."

No interest on the part of the person taking the call in using the opportunity to learn how to improve their relationship with their customers. Sad, and that company probably won't get any more of her business, either.

Leads 1.0

2008-07-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

Following a tip on a mailing list, I was signing up at dzone to sample their "reference cards" for various technologies (always a sucker for memory helpers).

And having filled out a zillion forms for trade rags, white papers, and what not, it's pretty obvious when a form is designed to figure out if you're the one writing the checks for IT stuff, and how big those checks might be. Or if you're part of the process to get those checks written.

So the "Your Role in Decisions" choices are:

Authorize purchases
Evaluate brands/vendors
Specify brands/vendors
Create IT strategy
Determine needs
None of the above

And then you also choose Company Size (ranges 1-49 up to 100,000+) and Total Developers (1-4 up to 250+).

This has always given me pause, since as an independent consultant there's only me in my company, but in a given engagement I may be acting in one of the above roles for a company on the high end of each spectrum. So which "company" are they really asking about? Taken literally my opinions (and budget!) wouldn't count for much; taken liberally, much more so.

But that was then, and this is now, and it occurred to me today that this form is missing the boat in an even more profound way.

Where are the questions about "how many Twitter followers do you have" and "how many people read your blog regularly"? Where is the interest in how wide a community you may be influencing?

Is there anyone collecting leads like this that's interested in community, rather than company? If you know of any, let me know.

Support Follies

2008-07-16T12:05:00.001-07:00

Actually, the company in question uses the phrase "customer success team" rather than "support" to characterize how it's going to help you. Nice marketing spin -- we're partnered with you, your success is our success, this land is your land, this land is my... Anyway.

Unfortunately, when it comes to actually delivering -- here's the story:

I'm in the process of advising a client on whether or not to commit to this company's platform, outsourcing an essential component of their website. I'd really like to be able to say "yes", because otherwise I have to essentially recreate that platform (non-trivial) as well as deal with SOAP (blech) stuff and a horrific third-party API.

So in preparation for a conference call to discuss the integration issues, I prepare a couple of flow charts, write up some descriptive background material, not too much, just something to frame the conversation so we jump right to the heart of the matter.

Conference call (GoToMeeting) information arrives after the meeting is supposed to start. I call the dial-in number, to find no one there. It also takes a few minutes to discover that GoToNowhere apparently doesn't work on Safari and retry it, this time successfully, in Firefox.

Cell phone rings -- it's the "customer success" person. Apparently he's the only one that'll be involved; not much of a "conference" call. But OK. Let's talk.

He starts reading the email sent by the company's account manager. Uh, no -- that's what I've already replied to (the day before) correcting the simplistic description of the issues. Has he read that reply? Well, no. So obviously he hasn't seen the flow charts, either. Great. So let's use some phone time while he looks at those, and I try to explain further.

Gosh, yeppers, it is more complex than originally stated. But he's out of time, has a hard stop though we've started late, and will have to think about it, consult with his peers, and get back to me.

As I said, I'd really, really, like to tell the client to go with it -- but at this point, I'm seriously concerned by the level of "success" I'm having getting to the point of even starting to integrate the two systems.

Blast from the past

2008-07-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

In an ongoing effort to lighten the house by getting rid of old papers, outdated technical books -- clutter -- I ran across a paper bookmark from the fabled (if you're of a certain age and live in Silicon Valley) Computer Literacy Bookstore.

On one side is store information: address, phone, map. On the other is:

"Yup, we have it.
Would you like us to
hold a copy for you?"

-- a typical phone conversation with a customer

That could have been me on the customer end. That store had just about everything computer-related. But that quote -- and the fact the store no longer exists -- makes me reflect on how the Web has altered the face of distribution, particulary for "knowledge products".

If you're not "of a certain age", see this wikipedia entry for more info.

more CommunityOne

2008-05-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

Last session for me, most likely, but wild: check out mod_ndb (http://code.google.com/p/mod-ndb/), an Apache httpd module that allows direct RESTful access to a MySQL cluster, from 5.0 on.
Results can be returned as JSON, XML, XHTML, or other.

Props to the author, John David Duncan (of MySQL/Sun).

CommunityOne

2008-05-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

Interesting day so far.

The keynote panel discussed (without reaching any real conclusions) the impact of companies, particularly large ones like Google and Sun, participating in open source projects. And there was an interesting demonstration of the resilience of a ZFS-based system having 2 of its 8 drives destroyed while running, one by sledgehammer and one with an electric drill. Who hasn't thought of doing that anyway? :-)

Didn't originally have this in my sights but wound up at a talk on extending OpenOffice via the available plugin API. While I've been trying to spend more time on Ruby than Java, this extensibility could address an operational problem for one of my clients in a very elegant way. And the demo using the NetBeans plugin was impressive.

The "Turn Your Web Site into an OpenSocial Container" session gave me a little more insight into the OpenSocial API but also introduced a project at Sun developing "SocialSite" (https://socialsite.dev.java.net/), an OpenSocial server, with tooling support for Widgets/Gadgets through jMaki in NetBeans or Eclipse.

Today's Your ....

2008-05-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

I love dogs for their Buddha nature. It's all about now. Yesterday is over, tomorrow doesn't exist, every morning is new and the same simultaneously. The back door opens to the same yard, which must be diligently inspected. Same/not-same.

Just being philosophical on my birthday, of which there have already been many. many many. many many many. Living with dogs is a blessing, though, for the life lessons and laughter.

Though our youngest dog, 6 months old, has now taken to stealing my sandals, as well as socks and undergarments. And he has a little cloth "house" in the living room. So if I find one sandal's gone missing, that's now the first place I check.

But who can get mad at a face like this?

Here's the full-size version as well as links to the rest of the pack's pictures.

And happy birthday or unbirthday to everyone, as applicable. :-)

The March (or April) of Time

2008-04-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Sweet $DEITY -- nearly the end of April already?

Once again, I've let this blog lie fallow for too long. Not that hordes of people are clamoring with disappointment, but for my own personal development I should be a bit more conscientious.

In any case, part of the Lost Period since my last post was taken up with dealing with a death in the family, which is still requiring some time and travel.

The good news was that, because I had to spend so much time out of town because of that, I finally sprung for a decent laptop -- MacBook Pro -- and it has made life as a consultant/developer so much easier.

Of course, all the tools in the world won't create more time. :-)

Everything Old is New Again

2007-08-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

So I read that IBM will work with Sun to bring Solaris to IBM mainframes. Amazing. Sorta. In a very deja vu sense.

In the mid-'80s I was working for National Advanced Systems (NAS). Originally a builder of IBM "Plug-Compatible Machines", NAS was at that time selling Hitachi PCM mainframes and peripherals.

Leaving my field support specialist position (and 24x7 pager tether!) in 1988, I joined a division called the "Engineering and Scientific" group which was exploring other businesses outside of basic mainframe sales.

One of those projects was a joint venture with Sun Microsystems to port SunOS to run natively on the Hitachi mainframes. My role was to provide insight into the maintainability aspects of the System/370 architecture.

Unfortunately, NAS' parent company (National Semiconductor) pulled the plug on the entire group the day before Thanksgiving, so the project was never completed. Let's hope the current effort is more successful!

The Triumvirate of Web Skills

2007-08-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

I recently (very belatedly!) noticed a posting by Jeremiah Owyang from last year, describing the three areas that a "Web Strategist" needs to understand.

He identified them (my very abbreviated excerpt) as

User -- "what users want"
Business -- "(alignment) to business or market objectives"
Tools -- technology options

When I was giving presentations on the Web to Sun customers back in 1994, I described the requirements as

UI -- though now I would prefer to characterize that as User Experience
IA -- Information Architecture; making sure that relevant information was available and findable
Infrastructure -- the hardware, software, and maintenance activities involved in running the site

I 'd say the major difference is that I see both UI and IA as passing through a Branding and Marketing filter; the company wants to provide a positive experience and real information, while communicating its own message(s). Done right, it's not an either/or situation. Done wrong -- well, we can probably find lots of examples of that, eh?

Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is the proliferation of technologies to keep up with. Quoting Jeremiah: "Lastly, a Web Strategist needs to know how each and every tool and technology work, they’ll need to know the strengths, benefits, limitations and costs." Best of luck to all of us on that one!

Community

2007-05-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

I attended CommunityOne yesterday, a Sun Microsystems-sponsored event the day before the JavaOne developer confab.

There were multiple tracks available -- NetBeans, GlassFish, etc. -- but I was particularly interested in the "Web 2.0" track. From a technical perspective, it was interesting seeing how people were extended the browser interface with AJAX-driven interactivity as well as enabling off-line use (e.g. Zimbra). The new jMaki wrapper system for multiple JavaScript toolkits, along with plugin support for NetBeans, looks very promising.

However, from a less technical perspective, the Tim O'Reilly general session opening keynote and subsequent panel discussion drove home the idea that "Web 2.0" is really about collaboration, and that "collaboration" can take multiple forms, not all necessarily intentional. (A tag cloud, for instance, reflects the activity of multiple people, and improves as more people "contribute".)

Tim also touched on the area of data accumulation, and how it behooves an application not to simply collect data but to provide value to the end user based on that data. Example: if Google were the phone company, they would likely use your call record to build an automatic phone book for you, most-called-numbers first. What does your current phone company do for you with all the data they have on you?

Simplicity

2006-09-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

Maintainability, continued --

I know a lot of smart people have done a lot of deep thinking about software design patterns, but it really seems to me that levels of abstraction can be way overdone.

When your application has multiple nested methods, all but the last basically calling the next one in the chain to get to the last one that does something -- access a database, or whatever -- you're creating places where there's a possibility, even a likelihood, of "errors and omissions": typos, forgetting to flesh out a stubbed in method, etc. Simply following this sequence to troubleshoot or make changes can be time-consuming. Is deliberate complexity a good thing? My consulting company (Webtuitive Design) tag line is "Simplicity · Balance · Power", so you can probably guess what side of that question I come down on :-)

MVC -- Model/View/Controller -- is a good overall design pattern, but think seriously about how many layers you want to split each of those into, and how that really affects your application's maintainability.

Good Practice, Bad Practice

2006-09-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

Over the course of this year I've had to wrestle with an very complex legacy system. The documentation is sparse to non-existent, and the original developers are, with one exception, gone. (And that one exception's another consultant who's not always been available.)

Trying to maintain and update it has been painful. But at least, I thought, I've got quite a perspective on what not to do when architecting the replacement system, which is what I was originally brought in to do.

Oh, well. The person who brought me in left, the person who I now report to has his own ideas and team, and so -- I see all the exact same mistakes being made developing the new system that made the old one brittle and near-impossible to maintain. How depressing.

But hopefully someone can benefit from what I've learned. The what and why that I'm going to explore here is going to break down into a lot of separate lessons -- and so immediately to #1 in a list of Recipes For Failure:

1. Develop your project with people who don't care.

There are lots of ways to assure this, but a key one is using people who won't ever have to maintain it.

Pay them based on "deliverables" -- once they've handed over "it", whatever "it" is, they get paid and it's Invoice Time. Crappy or non-existent error logging? Not their problem. Inconsistent and uncommented coding styles? Not their problem. Designed to assumptions that don't reflect your development and deployment environments? Not their problem.

Fragile, brittle, difficult to maintain post-launch? Not their problem.

It's so much better if everyone's signed up to the idea from day one that maintainability is each and every developer's "problem".

What's An Error?

2006-09-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

Carrying on the theme of maintainability --

I see junior developers who have apparently never been involved in the ongoing operation of an application. While everyone has to start somewhere, the result is often code with exceptions that are caught and neither logged nor acted upon alongside exceptions thrown and logged when that serves no useful purpose.

Case in point: The logging for the current project sends an email when an "Error" is logged. Yesterday I started getting these when an invalid user name was entered. Excuse me? This is an expected behavior. People will make mistakes, unauthorized people will try to gain access, a test case will enter known invalid data to make sure it doesn't get in.

A proper response would be to prompt for input again, perhaps limit the number of attempts, provide a "forgot your user name?" link -- but certainly not log this as an "Error".

The only things that should log at that level are things that require a developer to investigate.

Time Warp

2006-08-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

The post immediately prior to this was a blank draft that I'd saved.

Apparently the original date gets used regardless, since I just published it today (August 29). That seems wierd and potentially wildly misleading, considering the life span of things published online!

Break Time

2006-03-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

Yes, that was a long break, since my last post :-)

Totally got away from this while involved in a long, painful, full-time consulting project. Still going on, but a little less frantic, thankfully.

Originally I expected the project to be more intranet-focused than turned out to be the case, but I've come away with a lot of fresh (or refreshed!) insights into web development in general that I'll start sharing. And it looks like some attention to the client's intranet is on the horizon.

But shorter and more frequent postings, that's the ticket. Otherwise too much time goes into the write/review/edit cycle...

Getting Real

2006-03-05T09:33:00.000-08:00

So "Getting Real" is the title of a new download-only book from 37Signals; here's a short quote from the introduction (PDF):

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics,
wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).

So it's nice to hear someone else saying exactly what I've been pushing for years: just start with an idea for what you want and start building, in the medium of the eventual deployment, whether that's HTML, Flash, whatever. Don't "mock it up" in some other medium -- what's the point? A static mockup offers no help in evaluating interactivitity, and translating the design to something real (there's that word again) later is time-consuming and unnecessary.

Make something, show it to people who'll be using it, listen to what they say, and incorporate that feedback. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All those old Visio wireframes and Photoshop "comps" are simply going to be file system clutter that at some point will require a "do we really need these?" decision from someone -- and I guarantee that person could be doing something more productive...

Being Productive in a Cross-Platform World

2006-02-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

Someone asked me about a reference I'd made in another context to VMware, so...

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in VMware or anyone or anything associated with it. Having gotten that out of the way, I can say that VMware rocks :-)

Several years ago I switched my development desktop and server to Linux. I've spent a lot of time working on *nix boxes, and am simply more productive with a decent command shell environment. On top of that, most of the tools I use, and technologies I deploy, are in Java or are otherwise platform-agnostic.

But -- and there's always a but, eh? -- there are a few residual problems with that. The biggest one is Internet Explorer; it's the browser used by too many people to ignore, and its poor standards support means you can't get around testing in it for most Web deployments. And there's the occasional application that you'd like to use (or at least try out) that's Windows-only.

Initially I maintained an old PC running Windows with a KVM switch to jump back and forth. Acceptable, but not that convenient: no copy-and-paste across environments meant lots of back-and-forth switching and retyping URLs, etc.

One day I was lucky enough to receive an email invitation to a VMware seminar; the reward for four hours of my time was a free fully-licensed copy of VMware Workstation. Woo-hoo! It installed with no problems on my SuSE Linux desktop system. Decommisioning two old (and problematic) PCs gave me licensed copies of both Windows 2000 and XP to install.

So now I have the best of both worlds. The VMware windows occupies one of my six virtual desktops (a technology I'd sorely missed while running Windows). Checking a page display in IE or using some Windows-only software is just a mouse-click away. The "snapshot" capability means I can easily revert to a clean version if some installed software borks something up, or won't uninstall cleanly.

If I want to try out another Linux distribution, or some other X86-based software -- no problem. Well, other than disk space, which is a solvable problem :-)

The bottom line: I can't recommend VMware enough as a personal productivity enhancement for someone who prefers a *nix environment but needs access to multiple platforms for testing. And for a Windows user wanting to start learning about Linux, or have a testing/staging version of your production Linux server right on your desktop -- perfect.

MacOS continues to be the fly in the virtualization ointment -- but you can't have everything. Though -- wouldn't it be sweet if Apple and VMware collaborated to offer virtual hosting of MacOS? Hmmmm... anyone got Steve Jobs' number? :-)

IT and intranet development

2006-02-08T18:19:00.000-08:00

I'm on a mailing list called IntranetUX ; I've been involved off and on in intranet development since 1994, so it's as interesting to watch the evolution of expectations and technologies as it is for those of the "public" web. And I've recently begun a consulting contract for a company doing a very interesting intranet based on Flex /Flash with a Java/Oracle back end. So I'm finally writing about intranets as well as other technology issues.

The moderator of the IntranetUX group, Jeremiah Owyang, pointed out this blog entry by Patrick Cormier. Here's my response:

I'd agree that the capabilities he describes for IM (Information Management) are necessary, but disagree that they should be in a separate group. Here's why:

Traditional IT is about stability: robust and secure infrastructure, software licenses, regulatory compliance, sales recorded and checks paid, no foolin', no monkey business, no changes to anything without authorization.New technologies and applications threaten stability -- hence the typically ponderous pace of application development when it's done by IT. Requirements to the micro level before a line of code gets written, document, document, approve, approve.

But most organizations have a Chief Information Officer, not a Chief Cables/Servers/Ink Cartridges Officer, and at the end of the day the CIO's job is to deliver the information to end users that they need, in a form they can use.

Agile Development -- eXtreme Programming et al. -- is not an irrelevant-to-non-programmers geek buzzphrase/fad du jour; it's about creating competitive advantage for the organization by delivering the new capabilities that end users need accurately, because it depends on direct, iterative contact with those users as part of the development process, and quickly because in the real modern world, a requirements doc written six months ago may well be utterly worthless.

So the CIO who aspires to live up to the title must incorporate IM thinking and people into IT, put those people into the closest possible contact with their clients, and embrace agile methodology in the context of still providing reliable infrastructure.

Two groups with conflicting goals will always compete for resources and control. When IT controls too rigidly, entreprenuerial business units will always try to roll their own solutions; when IM is the client-facing side of IT, there will be far less need for that, and the synergies Patrick suggests will also be possible.