about
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this whole thing is about me paying attention to software development, project management, and testing. i hope it suits you as much as it suits me.
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Notes from Enterprise IA discussions (Sydney) ( Column Two ) |
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I presented at the Oz-IA conference today in Sydney on "Succeeding at IA in the enterprise". I'll share the presentation file as soon as I work out why it won't let me upload the file to my site. In the... 2006-10-01T16:56:24+10:00
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Presentation: Oz-IA conference (Sydney) ( Column Two ) |
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I gave a presentation today at the inaugural Oz-IA conference in Sydney. The topic of the talk was on "Succeeding at IA in the enterprise", covering: Reworking our methodologies Taking a strategic approach Tackling organisational change Understanding technology Taking a... 2006-10-01T17:23:11+10:00
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The enemy of intranets is apathy ( Column Two ) |
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Many intranet teams see themselves as battling resistance to change when attempting to grow the intranet or deliver new functionality. The challenge is perceived as overcoming these barriers to a successful intranet. In practice, though, the real enemy of intranets... 2006-09-30T14:44:18+10:00
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The intranet homepage, protect it with a policy ( Column Two ) |
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The intranet homepage can be the most coveted piece of online real estate in your organisation. Everyone will have their own firm view as to how the homepage should be used to drive organisational imperatives. Managing these competing priorities is... 2006-09-30T14:37:57+10:00
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Separate design and the CMS ( Column Two ) |
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There are two major elements to most web redevelopment projects: the redesign of the existing site, and the selection of a new (or replacement) content management system (CMS). These two elements reflect the underlying issues that typically drive web projects:... 2006-09-30T14:50:28+10:00
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The ideal designer & PM ( Column Two ) |
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Scott Berkun has written an article on the ideal designer and project manager. To quote: One question I'm often asked is what is the ideal designer? - I get this from managers or VPs in tech companies, trying to figure... 2006-09-30T15:32:48+10:00
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Mysql Tuners ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Tuning a new MySQL install from the excellent MySQL performance blog. See also: MySQL performance blog, Related Entries Revisited, Recent Comments bug fix, Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications Tagged as: mysql performance Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:59:04 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Snapple grapple ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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Friday Fun: iPod vs Zune ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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Friday Fun: iPod vs Zune -- Great head-to-head comparison. Favorite observation: "Now that's what I call planning." 2006-09-29T17:33:00Z
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Feedburner Ad Network ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I'm going to experiment with splicing ads in my RSS feed. I've joined Explore Social Media (a FeedBurner Network). If any subscribers object to this, please let me know in comments and it will weight heavy in my decision. I'm... 2006-09-28T18:55:34-07:00
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De-Centralized Intelligence Agency ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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This week I participated in a workshop with the CIA on blogs and wikis. What was fascinating was not just that the participants included Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, Eugene Kim, Marcia Conner and Jay Cross. The agency perhaps... 2006-09-28T07:54:13-07:00
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Branding the intranet ( Column Two ) |
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Toby Ward has written an article on branding the intranet. To quote: Does this mean though that the intranet home page should look like the Internet home page? No it doesn't. It should not be a replication of the external... 2006-09-28T11:41:42+10:00
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I’m Giving a Public Class in Wisconsin ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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The only public class I’m giving in the U.S. this year will be in Wisconsin, on October 18-19. It will be a version of my Rapid Software Testing Class, focusing on Exploratory Testing.
Details can be found at http://wisqa.org/bachclasses.htm
Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:57:05 +0000
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More on boolean expressions ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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My examples below use a simple rule for deciding what values of a boolean expression to test. I should probably describe it and justify it.
Given an expression with all
So the table for
The case for
The reasoning behind these rules is based on mutation testing, the name for a long thread of academic research on testing. The way I state it (which is different in an unimportant way from how it's usually put) is that mutation testing involves assuming that the code is incorrect in some definable way, then asking for a test suite that can distinguish the incorrect code you have from the correct code you should have. Now, for any given program, there are an infinite number of variants, so mutation testing depends on picking a definition-of-incorrectness that (a) lets you generate a reasonably small set of alternatives, but (b) gives you confidence that you've caught all the plausible errors. The usual approach is to assume one-token errors.
For example, suppose you are given
One-token errors aren't the only ones you could make. For example,
you might completely forget that
Suppose you have the original Trying all the possible combinations of variable values will either find a one-token error or kill all the mutants. But you never have to try all of them. There will be some test inputs that don't add anything: any mutant they kill will be killed by some other test input. So you can construct a minimal set for any given expression.
If you look at the table below, you can see that the rule
for
Remember all this assumes that tests powerful enough to catch
one-token errors will catch more complicated (but still plausible)
errors. A way to convince yourself is to try and find a variant
of
These rules are easy to memorize. The cases for expressions that
mix
When using the style I described earlier, I don't think you need
multi, because I'm tentatively advocating always breaking tables that
combine
1 I can't remember if the transformations I used when
working all this out included substituting one variable for another
(like 2 I'm leaving what it means to "run a program" vague. That gets to the difference of whether the mutation is "weak" or "strong". See this post by Ivan Moore. I didn't find much in the online literature about mutation testing; if you want to know more, you'll have to go to the library. There are some starting references at the end of this paper (PDF). (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Off the rails ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I'm too sick to write what I should be writing, and I can't sleep, so I decided to collect my thoughts and references about a current political topic I've been studying as I have time. The normal sort of posts will return shortly, but for the moment I'll use whatever reputation I have for careful-but-sympathetic thought to push back against an all-but-inevitable failure. My understanding is that habeas corpus is a method by which prisoners can challenge their imprisonment before a judge. The idea has worked pretty well for 700 years. It fits with John Adam's phrase "a government of laws, not men": no one has exclusive power; everyone is subject to being checked and balanced. It is now due to be removed in a hastily-considered bill. Despite what some say, the idea of habeas is not to "give terrorists rights"; it is to preserve the rights of those wrongly accused as terrorists or unlawful combatants. There have been many such people already. Sometimes people are just detained; some are sent to Syria and tortured. The bill allows for review of detentions by military commissions, but to date only ten have been held. People can be held forever without any recourse. (Some people have continued to be held even after review found them innocent, though a large number have been released.) In newer versions of the bill, "people" can include US citizens. Unlike the military's current definition of unlawful combatant, which covers only "those who engage in acts against the United States or its coalition partners in violation of the laws of war and customs of war during an armed conflict," the new one covers anyone who "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies. Who are our allies? What does "material support" mean? I guess some of us might just find out. During detention, what? It is simply not the case, as the President stated, that Geneva Convention Common Article 3 is impossibly vague about the treatment of prisoners. Ironically, on the same day as that statement, the US military released its new procedures, which explicitly conform to the Geneva Conventions. It's not surprising that, in over fifty years, we've been able to come to agreement about what the Conventions require. But now we're going to replace them with new language that will have to be freshly interpreted. Everyone, save the people who'll actually be making the decisions—who refuse to commit themselves—is running around saying "waterboarding is allowable" or "waterboarding is not allowable", but that's silly. In the absence of court review, what's allowable is whatever's done. The legal principle is that "there is no right without a remedy." (Stories about what's being done will leak, I suppose, as they always do. That could lead to some sort of remedy. I wonder if leaking, receiving, or reporting leaks counts as "material support"?)The pros apparently don't think torture is effective:
But there's no institutional check on the non-professionals or the rogue professionals. We'll just have to rely on the moral character of everyone involved. That's of course entirely opposed to the American tradition of rule by laws, not men, but <sarcasm> apparently we face a threat more grave than the 45,000 nuclear warheads the Soviet Union had at its peak and a struggle more threatening than World War II, and so cannot afford the traditions that have worked for more than two hundred years </sarcasm>. We certainly face threats—always have, always will—but I don't see any reason to give into the "this time it's different" fallacy. All this matters to me because my parents grew up in Nazi Germany. I grew up knowing that cultures can descend into madness, and that it can happen without the majority ever really explicitly willing it or being really conscious of it. No, I'm not saying that America is just like Nazi Germany; I'm saying that men like my grandfather—not politically involved, just trying to live their lives—somehow, through fear or anger or depression or just passivity, let decency slip out of their grasp. It also matters because I grew up knowing that the Americans were the good guys. My father (in the German Navy) was captured near Marseille. He didn't mind; he and his fellows didn't fight back. They wanted out of the war, and they wanted to surrender to the safest force: the Americans. Prisoner of war camp (American and French) was no picnic—my father weighed 130 pounds when he got out—and there was abuse, but it was not institutionalized (except in one camp, for a short time). He got what he expected, and he believes he has no cause for complaint. In contrast, my Uncle Paul was captured by the Soviets on the eastern front. I imagine he fought harder than my father to avoid capture, because everyone knew what happened to Russian prisoners. And it did happen: it was 1950 before he even knew the war was over, and he came home broken for life. There's practical value to being seen as the good guys, the just guys, the humane guys. That's not just true when fighting Germans; it works in the middle east, too. Out of fear or anger or depression or just passivity, we're letting our elected representatives—our employees—reinforce hysteria to no effective end. If that bothers you, here is your Senator's contact information, and here is your Representative's. Although this bill is being pushed by Republicans, I believe it should not be a partisan issue. The bill does not square with the conservative tradition of Chesterton's gate. It's being rushed through because what being a Republican politician today means is all about winning at domestic politics. (Just as being a Democratic politician appears to be all about not losing.) I can echo the the author of this fantastic essay: I miss Republicans. I miss Eisenhower; he'd surprise you. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Stevey on Agile ( Joel on Software ) |
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Steve Yegge: “Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called ‘Agile’ programming, namely that it’s an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who’ve never read ‘No Silver Bullet’, the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don’t know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier.” See also Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP. Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people. 27 Sep 2006 19:33:11 EST(link) [ Joel on Software ] |
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Gmail Storage Limit ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”Over the past couple of weeks, I've reached my Gmail storage limit, currently 2768... 2006-09-27T07:48:42-07:00
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Introducing collaboration technologies to the enterprise is a challenge ( Column Two ) |
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Dennis McDonald has written a piece on the challenge of introducing collaboration technologies in the enterprise. To quote: Successful collaboration tool introduction is based less on the characteristics of the tool itself than on the motivation users have to use... 2006-09-27T13:26:59+10:00
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Sponsoring Techmeme ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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I was too busy to blog this yesterday, but Socialtext became one of the first sponsors of Techmeme's new ad format and it might be helpful to share the rationale. What is appealing about the format itself is the ability... 2006-09-26T22:00:30-07:00
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Question: How do you stay sharp as a tester? ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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Shrini writes: How does a good tester keep his testing abilities sharpened all the times. compare it with keep our body fit as we grow old ( walking, jogging and going to Gym, eating healthyfood etc) - what you suggest for keeping “Tester health” in ‘fit and sound” condition?
Testing is analysis and problem solving. Here [...] Mon, 25 Sep 2006 06:56:04 +0000
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Describing yes/no choices in Fit ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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Using Fit to describe boolean (yes/no) decisions can be much clearer if you just insist that all decisions be expressed in multiple, uniform, simple tables. No boolean expressions in the code may mix Suppose you're given a jumble of three packs of cards. You are to pick out every red numbered card that's a prime, not rumpled, and is from either the Bicycle pack or the Bingo pack (but not from the Zed pack). Here is a way you could write a test for that using CalculateFixture:
I bet you skimmed over that, read at most a few lines. The problem is that the detail needed to be an executable test fights with the need to show what's important. This is better:
That highlights what's important: any card must successfully pass a series of checks before it is accepted. This test better matches what you'd do by hand. Suppose the cards were face down. I'd probably first check if it were rumpled. If so, I'd toss it out. Then I'd probably check the back of the card to see if it had one of the right logos, flip it over, check if it's black or a face card (two easy, fast checks), then more laboriously check if it matches one of the prime numbers between 2 and 10 (discarding Aces at that point). The code would be slightly different because it has different perceptual apparatus, but still pretty much the same:
It does bug me that the table looks so much more complex than the code it describes. It still contains a lot of words that don't matter to either the programmer or someone trying to understand what the program is to do. How about this?
From this, the Fit fixture could generate a complete table of all the given possibilities, run that, and report on it. (Side note: why did I pick Queen as a counterexample instead of Jack or King? Because if the program is storing all cards by number, the Queen will be card 11. Since I'm not going to show all non-primes—believing that more trouble than it's worth—I should pick the best non-primes.) The same sort of table could be created for cases where any one of a list of conditions must be true. Now, many conditions are more complicated than all of or none of or any one of. However, all conditions can be converted into one of those forms. Here's an example. Suppose you're allowed to pay a bill from an account if it has enough money and either the account or the "account view" allows outbound transfers. That would be code like this:
However, that could also be written like this:
I claim that code is just as good or even better. It's better
because there's less of a chance of a typo leading to a bug
(writing The corresponding tables would be like this:
In this particular case, I left off the Example and Counterexample columns because they're obvious. I'd expect the fixture to fill them in form me. I didn't include a table about the balance being correct because I wouldn't think the programmers would need it, nor would others need it to believe the programmers understand it. One thing that worries me about this is that the table doesn't rub your nose in combinations. Such a table is more likely to force you to discover business rules you'd forgotten about, that you'd never known about, or that no one ever knew about. (Well, it does that for a while - until the tedium makes your mind glaze over.) In a way, this fixture makes things too easy. On the other hand, there's something to be said for protecting later readers from the process through which you convinced yourself you understood the problem. I'm tempted to launch into implementing this, but I have other things to work on first. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Melbourne, Sydney, London and Rotterdam ( Column Two ) |
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It's going to be a busy few weeks in terms of conferences, four in three weeks: Southern Currents (Melbourne) I'm going to be giving an extended presentation to a room full of legal librarians on the design and enhancement of... 2006-09-24T20:17:12+10:00
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Toomas Hendrik Ilves Elected President of Estonia ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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Toomas Hendrik Originally uploaded by MukiFuki. The first Estonian diplomat I ever met, Toomas has been elected President of Estonia. Back when I worked at the U.S.-Baltic Foundation and through when I worked for Lennart Meri, Toomas was the ambassador... 2006-09-23T19:32:52-07:00
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My Own Store On Amazon ( Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog ) |
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My Own Store On Amazon -- Something new. A storefront with items for both Focused Performance and Unfocused Pleasure. 2006-09-23T18:13:00Z
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Press! ( Column Two ) |
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Press! I have a 50mm macro lens for my camera, and it's a joy to work with. What I love the most is being able to make extraordinary photos out of the most mundane of situations, such as this... 2006-09-23T23:31:21+10:00
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The compelling business reason for a global intranet ( Column Two ) |
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Jane McConnell has written a piece on the compelling reason for a global intranet. To quote: I was recently asked to help a company define the compelling reasons they should have a global intranet. In other words, why not just... 2006-09-23T17:06:27+10:00
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The importance of user experience: the poster ( Column Two ) |
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Frank Spillers has posted details on the poster presenting the importance of user experience. To quote: Here's a poster that reflects some thoughts about user experience...all of the bottom row items (outcomes of positive user experiences) in the poster are... 2006-09-23T18:58:07+10:00
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A Question About Test Strategy ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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Maria writes:
A) Your presentation “Test Strategy: What is it? What does it look like?” applies to creating a test strategy for a specific application (I’ve also read Ingrid B. Ottevanger’s article on “A Risk-Based Test Strategy”). How can I apply the idea to an overall test strategy for the company that I’m working for? Is [...] Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:46:00 +0000
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Do good work ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff a zillion years ago. One passage hit me then, and it's stuck with me. The time is somewhere in the beginning of the Mercury program: Asking Gus [Grissom] to "just say a few words" was like handing him a knife and asking him to open a main vein. But hundreds of workers are gathered in the main auditorium of the Convair plant to see Gus and the other six, and they're beaming at them, and the Convair brass say a few words and then the astronauts are supposed to say a few words, and all at once Gus realizes it's his turn to say something, and he is petrified. He opens his mouth and out come the words: "Well... do good work!" It's an ironic remark, implying "... because it's my ass that'll be sitting on your freaking rocket." But the workers start cheering like mad. They started cheering as if they had just heard the most moving and inspiring message of their lives: Do good work! After all, it's little Gus's ass on top of our rocket! They stood there for an eternity and cheered their brains out while Gus gazed blankly on them from the Pope's balcony. Not only that, the workers—the workers, not the management but the workers!—had a flag company make up a huge banner, and they strung it up high in the main work bay, and it said: DO GOOD WORK. That came to mind when I read this abstract: This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures. Since this is by no means the first report, I feel safe in saying Diebold is not DOING GOOD WORK. I wish people who could matter—that especially means you, Fourth Estate—cared. We're all on top of the freaking rocket. (Not just the US, since the size of our military and economy puts much or all of the world on the rocket too.) I'm sure there are people at Diebold who feel embarrassed or even humiliated by what their company is selling. If any one of them wants throw caution and good sense to the winds and hang up a DO GOOD WORK banner, I'll buy it for you. Seriously. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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RSS the Oprah Way ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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“So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m ‘Ready for Some Stories’. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. ” — RSS the Oprah Way See also: RSS Feeds in Movable Type, Blogger.com feeds deemed annoying, Introducing Feed Crier, Category feeds and Control Tagged as: explanation feeds howto rss Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:49:49 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Socialtext 2.0 ( Ross Mayfield's Weblog ) |
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This morning we announced Socialtext 2.0. Techcrunch has the story. This screencast gives an overview of the first major enhancement, the UI: Charlie Wood highlights the second part, Wiki Web Services.In addition to UI enhancements, SocialText 2.0 adds what the... 2006-09-21T12:07:44-07:00
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Followup on freezing MacBook Pro ( Joel on Software ) |
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Remember when I complained that my Mac kept freezing with bouncing beach balls? A lot of people suggested it might be a hardware problem, but the diagnostics on the setup disks didn't find anything. Well, Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater Software suggested that I look in the console app to see what was going wrong, and lo and behold, there were lots and lots of messages that said: Sep 19 22:56:39 joel-spolskys-computer lookupd[711]: NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local This totally corresponded to what I was seeing... suddenly any app that tried to do a DNS lookup of any sort would go into permanent beachball mode and never recover. Some Googling around led me to a page by John Bafford that said "Lookupd has a bug (rdar://3632865) in its cache cleanup code that causes it to randomly crash. CrashReporter, the system crash log agent, does not properly handle lookupd crashes, and as a result, when lookupd crashes, the process is not terminated. Since lookupd has not terminated, mach_init does not respawn lookupd. From this point, any application that attempts to access lookupd, either directly or indirectly, will hang." Hmmph. Kindly, John provides Unlockupd, a daemon that watches lookupd and restarts it if it gets jammed up. I'll try this for a while and see if it helps. In the meantime, if it's true, it's odd that Apple hasn't fixed this bug in over two years. If somebody inside Apple wants to peek into that bug (link only works inside Apple) and let me know what they see there, I'll update this article! |
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A survey results now available ( Column Two ) |
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Lou Rosenfeld has published the results of IA surveys conducted over the last few months. To quote: For the new edition of the polar bear book (almost done!), Peter Morville and I conducted five surveys of the information architecture community.... 2006-09-21T20:16:16+10:00
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Introduction to the Intranet Leadership Forum ( Column Two ) |
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As revealed a few days ago, we've embarked on a brand new initiative, the setting up of the Intranet Leadership Forum. We're still pulling together all the details, but I can provide a sneak peak into the structure of the... 2006-09-21T20:45:02+10:00
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Why people don't use collaboration tools ( Column Two ) |
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Shawn Callahan has posted an entry on why people don't use collaboration tools. To quote: David Pollard offered for anyone on the net to join him is a joint collaboration project using Writely. The topic: Why are conversation and collaboration... 2006-09-21T20:34:13+10:00
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Learning from you ( Exploration Through Example ) |
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I've been invited to the Software Practice Advancement Conference. The idea appeals: expense-paid trip to London, opportunity to rouse the rabble along some lines I'll be previewing here as I have time, and a conference that's said to be good (I've never been). On the other hand, I hate overseas flights because I can't sleep on planes, and Dawn almost certainly can't come with. Here's what would tip me over the edge. There are lots of people I could learn from in London. If there are teams there who do something really well (making small stories, writing FIT tests, release planning, etc. - anything), I would like to come work with you for several days. Not just visit and watch, but act as much like a team member as I can. Let me know. P.S. The idea of visiting practice is part of what I want to rouse the rabble to, something that lives in the same space as the MFA for Software, something that's part of my formal discussion of Jim Waldo's OOPSLA essay On System Design, which will be titled something like Surviving in a World of Ever-Looming Malignity: Or, Monasticism for the Married. (link) [ Exploration Through Example ] |
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Blogger.com feeds deemed annoying ( Adam Kalsey ) |
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If you use Blogger.com for your blog, you’ve just lost a subscriber. Sorry, I really liked your content, but the constant and random switches that Blogger makes between full and partial feeds has finally broken my will. Several times a day I end up with dozens of “new” items in my reader simply because the feed contents changed from a full to a partial feed or vice versa. For a while, I just told my reader not to re-display updated feed items, but it seemed that every time a feed was actually updated, Blogger decided to show a partial item. Blogger was a pioneer — even I used Blogger for a year shortly after starting this blog. But it seems that Google’s ignoring their acquisition. Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. See also: Blogger Pro, Introducing Feed Crier, Radio Blogger, Projects need leadership Tagged as: blogger bubblegeneration feed missrogue mitadlab Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:51:42 -0800(link) [ Adam Kalsey ] |
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Innovation survey: results summary ( Column Two ) |
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Scott Berkun has posted the results of an innovation survey that he conducted. To quote: Last month I ran an open survey on innovation to help with my book in progress. Nearly 100 people from scientists, to programers, to writers... 2006-09-20T10:19:10+10:00
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Transpective Dialogs for Learning ( James Bach's Blog ) |
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One of the techniques I use for my own technical education is to ask someone a question or present them with a problem, then think through the same issue while listening to them work it out. As it proceeds, I ask handfuls of Socratic questions. As I ask each question out loud, I answer it [...] Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:58:15 +0000
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Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint! ( Joel on Software ) |
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Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free. That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it. As it turns out, I had the opposite problem. The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much. So I’m going to review the dang phone anyway, even though if anybody from Sprint is paying attention they’re going to lose their lunch and some executive bonehead over there is going to go nuts and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t put an end to the entire free-phones-for-bloggers boondoggle, because I’d hate to get beaten up at Etech next year by all the other bloggers who would hate me for spoiling all the fun. Now, on to the review. I was pretty excited to try out this phone because I’ve been longing for one that could double as a decent MP3 player. Most days, I get to work via a combination of subway and walking, which takes about half an hour, and listening to podcasts makes the commute much more pleasant. So I’ve been carrying a phone (a Motorola RAZR) and an iPod (Nano) with me everywhere. Merging the two into one device would be great. When it finally arrived, the physical appearance of the phone was rather disappointing. If you’ve been spoiled by Motorola’s latest phones, or the seamless, screwless, elegant iPod, the LG Fusic will strike you as butt-ugly. Where a Motorola RAZR has a solid case made out of almost sensual matte-black steel that just feels great, the LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy. Where Motorola goes to great lengths to hide the screws, and minimize bumps and seams, the LG Fusic has dozens of ugly protuberances, gaps, holes, screws, seams, etc. Worst of all, the LG Fusic has no less than three of those evil, flimsy, rubbery plug-caps that are connected to the phone by the thinnest of filaments. You know, those stupid rubber plugs that you have to pull away to plug anything into the phone, and then they just dangle there like chicken wattles (when they’re not getting in the way of the thing you’re trying to plug in) for a couple of weeks until they finally tear off. The phone is almost twice as thick as a RAZR. It comes with a break-offable front plate which can be used to change the accent color of the very front of the phone. Your choices are Barbie Pink, Barbie Green, Barbie Blue, and Black which would be the only stylish choice, if only it didn’t clash so badly with the rest of the phone. (Believe me, it is hard to make black clash with anything, but LG did it.) Overall this phone seriously looks like a Fisher Price toy, not a top-of-the-line cell phone. OK, maybe you’re not so vain that appearances are a big deal. I tried to get over it. I really did. I promise I won’t talk about the style thing any more. I opened the clamshell and turned on the phone. The screen lit up instantly! Wow, something about this phone is nice. Oh, wait a minute. What’s going on there? The main screen shifts between pictures of Mount Fuji, the Eiffel Tower, etc. That’s charming. But what’s that bus? There’s a cheezy little black and white child’s drawing of a bus bouncing up and down in front of the cheezy tourist pictures. Again with the Fisher Price Toy theme. The first thing I try to do is find a better screen saver. Everything looks like some kid’s 6th grade BASIC graphics project. Oooh, look, colored squares flying around. Terrible clip art of a “DJ”. One of the screen savers is called “Funny.” You get a silhouette of a lizard climbing around on a pink background. Bwa ha ha! That is funny. TO TWO YEAR OLDS. OK, ok, I promised I’d stop talking about style. On to UI design. The main menu was really, really confusing. The first thing you see when you click on the Menu button is that you missed some alerts: Although, it turns out, you didn’t, that's just the name of the menu item that comes up first. You can’t see all the icons at once because someone had the bright idea of using a weird 3-D perspective, and the currently selected icon comes zooming out in front, covering up some of the other icons. All the unselected icons are shown in silhouette, so at first they just look like a background. It took me quite a while to figure out just what the menu was and how to find things I wanted from the main menu. But don’t worry… there are random bits of sparkle that fly around on the screen. That’s the important part. The random bits of sparkle, again, a 6th grader’s BASIC graphics project. Now, on to the whole reason I wanted this phone: the MP3 player. There’s no desktop integration, no ITunes integration, no feature for subscribing to Podcasts, nothing like that. When you plug the phone into your computer using the supplied USB cable, it thinks you want to use the phone as a modem. Yes, one day I might want to do that, that’s true, but for now I just wanted to get MP3s onto the thing. Somehow, somewhere, I managed to stumble on a menu that made the phone act like a USB hard drive. Tada! The phone pops up on my computer looking like a hard drive. And then there was already a MUSIC folder there, and I could drag MP3 files in. Yay! I downloaded TWiT episode 69 manually and headed off to the subway to listen to it. Wait… I need headphones. Ahh, here they are. Wait a minute. The headphone cord is only about 8 inches long. Am I supposed to hold the phone up to my chin to listen to music? Oh, I see, there are two cords. You have to plug the headphone cord into the microphone cord and plug that into the phone. Now it’s long enough. OK, it’s awkward, but I can live with that. To listen to the MP3s you’ve downloaded: All right. TWiT is more than an hour long, and I only listened to half of the episode by the time I got home. Luckily, there’s a handy PAUSE button on the outside of the clamshell. Unluckily, it doesn’t work. Pressing it once informs you that the buttons are locked, and you have to press and hold the pause button to unlock. So you do that, and the key guard goes off, and you press the pause button again, and nothing happens, so you press it again, and finally you’ve paused the music. In the meantime, if, say, hypothetically, you were pausing because you live in a country where the police brutalize people, and a policeman was brutalizing you, and you wanted to stop the music so you could try to figure out what the policeman wanted and perhaps there was some way if you could just hear him that you could get him to stop beating you with a riot bat, you’re already DEAD by the time you figure out how to make the pause button actually pause. While the MP3 player is paused, the backlight on the external display just won’t go off. So inadvertently, the phone almost completely runs down its battery overnight staying in “Pause” mode. Why not turn the phone off overnight? Well, because then I’d have to listen to the first half of TWiT all over again. Can’t you fast forward? No. Doesn’t it remember where you’re up to like an iPod? No. Pause is your only hope. The next morning, with a single bar of battery juice left, I got into the subway and resumed listening to the podcast, and I’m a wise guy, so I decided to see what the battery looked like, and of course, the phone lost power, oops, lost my place in the Podcast. Put back the battery. Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s! OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing. A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature. I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player. OK, onward. Yes, you can watch movies on this phone. For example, for $5.95 a month, you can get something called mFLIX. Until you pay the money, there’s no way to find out what mFLIX is or what it is you’re getting for your $5.95. I’ll tell you what you get: a bunch of garbage film-student videos that nobody would ever vote up on YouTube, in a tiny blurry window that reminds you of QuickTime 1.0 (“look! It’s on a computer but it’s moving!”). That was disappointing. I thought this thing was supposed to have full length movies somewhere. Ah yes, how about “MSpot Movies?” It says I’m going to get “Full-length Hollywood movies.” Only $6.95 a month. Yes. Buy buy buy. (Thankfully Uncle Sprint is paying for this). Oh look… you can preview before you commit to spending! Clicking Preview brings up a page that says PREVIEW with a “Done” button. That’s it. OK, maybe they don’t want me to preview. Fine. After you click Buy, you’re thrown back to a main menu somewhere and then you have to remember what the hell you bought and go find it again. Annoying UI, again. OK, MSpot Movies. A menu comes up with a bunch of folders: I don’t understand. Are these movie titles? Not movie titles I’ve ever heard of. Yep, it’s true. What you get for $7/month is about 10 movies that seem to be in the public domain. Literally nothing worth watching, least of all on a smudgy 1 5/8” (diagonal), pixelated screen. I did, actually, as a part of my sacred duty as a reviewer, try to watch a whole movie. I could only stand about the first 1/3rd of it, and the battery was dying, and the phone was getting too hot to hold. I cannot imagine anybody finding any value in MSpot Movies. If Sprint makes any money off of them, it’s probably by mistake. This service is literally as much of a scam as those X-Ray glasses they used to advertise in comic books to steal a few bucks from some little kids. The only kind of content you might really want to watch on this device is the stuff you find on YouTube, or video podcasts like The Show with zefrank. But that’s not what Sprint gives you. Instead they give you $7/month, ripoff, non-previewable scammy garbage. A long time ago, I was working on MSN 1.0, and there was a long line of content providers working to make deals with Microsoft to put their content on the Microsoft Network, but in those days, it wasn’t clear exactly who should be paying who, so hardly any deals got made. In the meantime, the whole Web thing happened, where anybody could provide content without signing a deal with a Microsoft executive, and there was tons of content, and some of it was garbage, yes, but some of it was good, and we found the good stuff, and it floated to the top, and all was well, but Sprint doesn’t get this. They relish their ability to serve as the gatekeeper to what they hope will become a new medium, because the gatekeeper gets to charge tolls. And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks. And now suddenly someone at Sprint read some book by Scoble and then they read Malcolm Gladwell’s theories of tipping points in the airport and Hey Presto! Maybe we can make this work by finding the tipping point people! You know, the bloggers! And all the bloggers get free cell phones, and Sprint gets tons of publicity, but frankly all the publicity in the world is not going to help them foist on us a product that is utterly pathetic. The phones they send us are so lame there is literally no area you can go into without being disappointed and shocked at just how shoddy everything is and how much it costs and what a rip off scam they’re trying to run here with the music that costs too much and the movies that you don’t want to watch on the screen that makes them unwatchable and you just KNOW that if you call to cancel the extra $7/month, their customer service department is going to give you the phone menu runaround and then put you on hold for an hour and then you’ll get some cancellation specialist with an incomprehensible accent who will spend 15 minutes trying to talk you out of canceling the useless service until you just give up and let them have the goddamned $7 a month. No amount of pampering bloggers and calling them Ambassadors is going to get around the fact that you’re sending us plastic junk phones that look like bath toys. (Hey, does it float?) All the “tipping point” theories in the world won’t protect Sprint from the basic truth that the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do. Wait a minute. Wait just one minute. Maybe I completely missed the point. Maybe this phone is for four year olds! It all makes sense now! The nonsensical menus don’t matter—four year olds can’t read! The toy-like appearance—duh! The ripoff movies—who cares, as long as the kids press BUY by mistake and the parents keep paying the bills! Now I get it. So really the only stupid thing that Sprint did is to send this phone to a bunch of know-it-all, hipster-wannabe, pretentious early-adopter engadget-reading 41-year-old bloggers, with our pretentious black iPods and our sleek gun metal RAZRs and our MacBook Pros and our so-called “Podcast” listening habits, watching zefrank tell potty jokes about The Decider. No no no no no. This phone is for 4 year olds, albeit spoiled 4 year olds with rich parents. They’ll love the colors, the plastic, the impossible UI, they can watch the one 1936 movie that inadvertently fell into the public domain in class when the teacher is getting boring, and they sure as heck aren’t going on a subway with that thing. Ohhhhhhhhh kay. I gave the phone to a friend’s 4-year-old. NEVER MIND! |
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Getting MarkDown and SmartyPants working with EditPad Pro ( Joel on Software ) |
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MarkDown is a simple processor that converts text to HTML. For example, it converts &42;text surrounded by asterisks&42; to italics. SmartyPants replaces "straight quotes" with “curly quotes” and makes a few other typographic improvements. EditPad Pro is a very respectable text editor for Windows. It’s fast and contains scrillions of useful features. It’s not the fanciest thing in the world, but if you’re still using Notepad for the occasional bits of text, it’s a fine drop-in replacement. Here’s what it takes to get them all working together on a typical Windows setup: |
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Final Days to Register for CITCON London 2006 ( Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ) |
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CITCON London registration will be closing this week, it is just hard to know if we will hit the deadline of Friday September 22nd or the cap of 120 people first! At last count we have 85 people signed up and if history is a guide the remaining spots will go fast. For those who aren't aware CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, a free open spaces (or unconference) event on continuous integration and the testing that goes with it. Given the open spaces format it is impossible to predict what the exact session topics will be but a sampling of the topics (and notes) from the CITCON Chicago event from earlier this year is available on the wiki. Also available are some photos, feedback, links to related blog entries and more... More than enough to be convinced that you should sign up today! 2006-09-18T17:26:49-08:00(link) [ Developer Testing (RSS 1.0) ] |
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Enterprise fears ( Adam Kalsey ) |