Category — computers

It's a joke, but not really. We know our software sucks. But watch, we'll make it suck less.

Tech developers and users (Scripting News)

The Economist’s editorial on Bill Gates, The meaning of Bill Gates, is one of those thoughtful big-picture pieces that keep me hooked to the publication. You might agree or not with what they write, but they sure provide some perspective and good food for thought.

Some snippets to whet your appetite:

Mr Gates has revelled in the day-to-day details of running his firm. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.

But Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

Mr Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet computing. This does not diminish his achievement. Nor, as some would have it, does his philanthropy necessarily magnify it.

You can read the full article online.

Sometimes the web is just wonderful.

Apple 1984 commercial, found sifting through Flashdance videos.

Gorgeous T-shirt. On white background, ‘Baby Doll T’ cut (uhg, I hate that name…) and the smallest size, please.

These days I am testing how it is to use Thunderbird for mail. So far I am just finding my way through it, so I am probably missing most of the functionality.

However, the junk mail filter seems to work very well with very little training, and the Thunderbird-Tray mini-app was easy to install and really helpful to put Thunderbird out of the way withouth closing it completely.

There are some more “minimize Thunderbird to tray” applications at Minimize to system tray (Thunderbird) – MozillaZine Knowledge Base, but the MinimizeToTray extension listed there did not work with the newest version of Thunderbird. A pity, as I would rather use an extension than an external app.

So far, it is been a pleasure to migrate (from Outlook). But I am still in the honeymoon period, so I will let you know how it goes.

Just a quick note to point out that I have slightly modified the sidebar links from my ‘clipblog’. Now the links point directly to the referenced items, instead of the Bloglines ‘preview’ URL. It took some scraping of the HTML+Javascript from Bloglines’ preview pages, but it seems to work ok now.

Just a quick note to say that I am trying out a small hack to integrate links from my Bloglines ‘clipblog’ into the sidebar of this page. The clipblog contains quick links to interesting feed items that I come across during my everyday news reading.

As you might have guessed already, I read my feeds with Bloglines. I use liberally the ‘Clip/Blog This’ functionality, too. If you find my ‘feed juice’ interesting, you can suscribe directly to the clipblog rss feed.

Anyway, this hack of mine is still in alpha, so please let me know if you see anything funky, or if you have any suggestions for improvement. I will play around with it some more days, tidy up the code and then I will explain more in detail what it does. If you are wondering why I didn’t use one of the existing clipblog hacks/plugins, it is just that they don’t do exactly what I wanted (or I couldn’t find one that did what I wanted). But I will talk more about this later.

Summarizing: ‘feed juice’ in sidebar in alpha-testing. Please let me know what you think.

Kathy Sierra has a great post called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak where she talks about the importance of keeping products (all kinds of products) usable, instead of trying to add constantly more functionality. Just a look at the graphic that illustrates her post says it all.

She summarizes:

Be brave. And besides, continuing to pile on new features eventually leads to an endless downhill slide toward poor usability and maintenance. A negative spiral of incremental improvements. Fighting and clawing for market share by competing solely on features is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfun way to live.

Be the “I Rule” product, not the “This thing I bought does everything, but I suck!” product.

A very important lesson to bear in mind when writing software.

Terminal Island is an awesome command-line blog. Go on and have a look. ?É?ìbergeek and hypercool, if you ask me.

Mychael Hyatt @ Working Smart: Sometimes Life Is Like Skiing:
“I’ve especially missed blogging during the last thirty days. I find that blogging makes me slow down just enough to process what is happening around me and in me. It helps me clarify my thoughts and keeps me focused.”

I have watched this video twice in search of what is so wrong about it. Conclusion: it is a perfectly ok video. The video is part of Google’s campaign for recruiting female engineers, and according to others it is ’slightly off-key’, and it is also worth this very funny parody.

Really, the video is not that bad. Actually, I would say that it is not bad at all. Although it could be better, of course. But hey, room for improvement is always stimulating, isn’t it?

The worst of the video are definitely Brin’s high heels, and the bit about ‘Google is so cool they paid me 75% of my salary during 12 weeks I took off after giving birth’ is simply appalling for those watching from other countries (countries with better social systems in place). Geeks stealing each other’s undies from the laundromat is also an interesting idea… which will probably give me nightmares tonight…

There is one thing in the video that has me confused, though. Google’s women don’t look anything like the PSP users featured in the new PSP publicity campaign. Might it be that Google is getting all the plain female geeks, and Sony all the gorgeous ones?

(found via Misbehaving; PSP ad found via Pixel y Dixel)

I asked and got a Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? invite from Dave Winer. You can now find my Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? space at http://360.yahoo.com/anaulin. Not yet clear what will I do with it, though.

Random thoughts after playing around Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? for some 10 minutes, in no particular order:

• Extremely easy to use, integrated with the whole Yahoo! system. You can use your existing Yahoo! login.
• Offers what today seems to be the basic life-online toolkit: social networking, blogging, photo albums. Additionally you can display your Yahoo! Groups on your Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? page, and you can check other’s Yahoo! IM status and show your own.
• I like the ‘Blast’ thingie. I might find some use for something like that on this page.
• No tagging anywhere, though you can put your friends into categories.
• No integration with other services such as del.icio.us, Technorati or Flickr.
• I agree with what already has been commented elsewhere about Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? not being aimed to the ‘techiest’ among us.
• They provide feeds of whatever contents you create.
• There are apparently no skins or any other way to customize the look of your page. Not even the basic color-scheme controls of Yahoo! Groups. Annoying. Very.

And of course, I can now invite you, dear reader, to join Yahoo! 360?Ǭ?. So if you are interested in trying this new Yahoo! service, just drop a comment with your e-mail address and I will invite you.

Yeah, that’s right: move your laptop and it will feel it.

PowerBooks (and some ThinkPads too, apparently) have a sudden motion sensor that is used to protect the hard drive in case of violent movement such as dropping the computer. This sensor returns accurate data to the OS and creative hackers have already written some programs that make use of this function. Bumptunes is a Python script that enables you to control iTunes by literally bumping the laptop. Bubblegym is a tilt-sensitive game.

If you still don’t know what to give me for my birthday next week, here is a hint: I don’t have a PowerBook…

(From Wired story Wired News: Hackers Tilt PowerBook for Tricks.)

My good friend Helga kindly translated her Born to be geek essay into English (the original was written in German).

This text of Helga’s is funny. But it’s not only that. What it says is too true.

[...] Often the following is your chat-up line: “Hey, I saw you at the lecture today. How come that a girl studies Computer Science?” We are in the 21st century, aren’t we? Why is it so amazing that there really are girls studying Computer Science?

So go and read it and have a good laugh. And then, please, come back and tell me, what is so strange about women tinkering with computers?

(BTW, Helga is also a talented artist. The cartoon here is one of her depictions of herself for her ‘My perfect day’ page.)

In his new entry The Curse of the Secret Question, Bruce Schneier offers some very interesting reflections on the security offered by passwords and the ’secret questions’ that many sites use to identify a customer that has lost his password. He summarizes:

Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.

Bruce talks about calling the customer service and proving his identity to them in some way. I had to do this with my bank too, once when I misstyped my password thrice. They connected me to their “security department” where they nicely asked me for data such as my ID number, my address and my birth date. In short, it was the telephone version of the “secret question”.

I just wonder, what other alternatives do we have? I fear that we do not have a better idea than passwords, yet.

Liz Lawley of Mamamusings has an interesting piece called Broken windows and technical debt. She refers to an article which extends the broken window theory to software development and introduces the term technical debt. The idea is that for each problem in the code that doesn’t get fixed, the developer(s) incur a debt. After too many postponed fixes, the debt might become unmanageable.

While the broken window theory sounds very interesting, it is not clear if it can be applied to software development. It is not even clear if this theory makes sense from a sociological point of view. As folks point out in some comments, it is often difficult to decide what is ‘broken’ in code, and fixing it may incur a bigger cost than just letting it be. Someone else relates this idea to the concept of emotional debt.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting idea that can be applied to many areas of life. See, for example, the mail metaphor of Dave Thomas:

My current metaphor for that is my email inbox. Because I have this habit every now and then of not answering email for a while. And then it gets to the point round about the 250 message mark, where I suddenly realize, I’m never going to answer these messages.

It is just what our mothers try to teach us: that there is a big price to pay for postponing what we know we must do. So all of you who are reading this to avoid exam preparation, acticle revisions, housework and what not, I hope I gave you at least a bit of bad conscience.

The case for women in the technology business (The Register) interviews Rebecca George, director of director of UK government business at IBM and chair of the “Women in IT” forum. She seems to have a sensible approach to the issue, rejecting nonsensical positive discrimination policies and emphasising mainly the need for diverse teams as a key to success.

“A field like application development is, these days, about working in teams,” she points out. “Women bring many needed skills to the team, particularly in data analysis, for example. When you are working on the kind of diverse problems that software developers face now, it makes sense that a diverse team will lead to a better output. You need a variety of different approaches to solve things.”

[...]

She argues that the culture of a company is fundamental to its success or failure in retaining women, and that this is where the effort must go at a corporate level if companies want to have a diverse workforce.

“The kinds of programmes that are attractive to the whole workforce will be the ones that change the culture,” she says.

[...]

George is equally clear about how not to tackle the issue: “This is absolutely not about, and cannot be about positive discrimination. We don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have quotas, and we don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have targets.”

From “Why specs matter”, at dive into mark:

Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes. I have at various times counted myself in both groups, so I can say this with the utmost confidence.

[...]

The second faction of morons work from examples, ship code, and get yelled at. But when they get around to reading the spec, they magically turn into advocates and write up tutorials on what they learned from their mistakes. These people are called experts. Virtually every useful tutorial in the world was written by a moron-turned-expert.

At the beginning of this week this website was hacked (twice). A security vulnerability in Pivot (the blogging system I use for this blog) was exploited. Fortunately,  the site didn’t suffer much damage. The first of the attackers uploaded a script called PHPShell, which is supposed to give you the possiblity of running shell commands through a web interface. They hid a copy of this script in a file called “quad.jpg.php” and another in “image.php”. The second attacker simply defaced the index.php file, leaving just a line with a greeting from one script-kiddie group to another.

The worst thing is that it was all my fault. An update that solved the security flaws was released in the beginning of June, almost two months ago, but I wasn’t aware of it.  Now the site has been patched and I have learned the lesson. I will be much more careful now and won’t dismiss funny little details like weird searches in my search engine referrer log (like the ones that use Googles “allinurl” operator) or files with funny extensions like “.jpg.php”.

Via Las penas del Agente Smith I found “The Final Virus”,
a short science-fiction story that is frighteningly close to reality,
as most good science-fiction is. It is a fun and easy to understand
reflection about the potential dangers of a computer culture dominated
by the “incurably insecure” Microsoft Windows.

I always think about my mom when reminded about the dangers of the
widespread use of Windows. And I still see no viable alternative OS to
Windows for her everyday surfing, e-mailing and text-editing. Specially
after she has been using MS Windows for so long. Let’s hope that some
alternative does emerge soon.