Vincent Gable’s Blog

February 12, 2009

The Values of Science

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― Vincent Gable on February 12, 2009

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

…It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Dennis Overbye

February 11, 2009

Asking Nicely Works

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes | ,
― Vincent Gable on February 11, 2009

Panic did some experimentation … a little over a year ago, when they released Candy Bar 3.1 They have a phone-home system for serial numbers — not for any sort of Adobe- or Microsoft-style “activation” scheme, but simply to check whether a serial number is valid or known to be circulating on bootleg message boards and forums. They experimented with different dialog boxes that appeared when a user entered a known-to-be-pirated serial number. One message was staid and serious (“Microsoft-style”, in Cabel Sasser’s words), along the lines of “It appears someone gave you an invalid serial number…”; the other two messages were more personal, along the lines of “Please don’t pirate Candy Bar. We’re a small company making software for you, and software sales are what keep our company going.

They got better results with the more personal messages — about 10 percent of would-be-bootleggers presented with those dialogs clicked the button and immediately bought a legitimate license for the app. But even the staid, impersonal message had a 5 percent sell-through rate — far higher than Panic expected.

John Gruber

February 10, 2009

Good engineering is necessary, but good design has a more direct impact on helping people do amazing things with computers

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 10, 2009

…the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart’s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn’t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system’s powerful, language-size command structure? It’s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.

Buzz Andersen, summarizing John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, a history of the early personal computer industry

The title this post is something I’ve been saying as part of my personal statement on hirevincent.com for years.

February 9, 2009

No Ducking Way!

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Uncategorized | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

I’ve finally found an example of, someone intentionally typing “ducking” on their iPhone,

Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.

Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?

Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).

But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)

Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

More Terms = More Specific (Assume AND, not OR)

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.

Bruce Tognazzini

February 5, 2009

If You Don’t Know How to Help, You Can Still Do Good by Getting Out of the Way

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 5, 2009

Learning happens when attention is focused. …
If you don’t have a good theory of learning, then you can still get it to happen by helping the person focus. One of the ways you can help a person focus is by removing interference.

–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.

Point Of View is 80 IQ Points

Filed under: Design,Quotes | ,
― Vincent Gable on February 5, 2009

Point of view is worth 80 IQ points … it’s not logic that is powerful. Logic is actually a weak method because it depends on fragile chains of inference. And people have used logic throughout history but mostly in inappropriate context.

There’s nothing illogical about the way the alchemists did things, it was that they were in a context where there logic couldn’t do much. so it’s this notion that the context is powerful, and if you want to be able to be good at solving problems and acting much smarter then you are then you have to find the context that will do the thinking for you.

Most computer scientists know this because it goes under another heading “choose the appropriate data structure before you start tinkering around with the algorithm”. If you choose the right data structure it will have most of the result computed almost automatically as part of its inherent structure.

–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.

There are many related anecdotes about solving the right problem.

February 1, 2009

“I Deployed More Scheme Runtimes Than Anybody Else on the Planet”

Filed under: Programming,Quotes | , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 1, 2009

From an Interview with an Adware Author,

Sherri Davidoff
You wrote adware. You bastard.

Matt Knox: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtimes than anybody else on the planet.

So are most scheme programs in the wild used for evil? That’s a depressing thought.

January 29, 2009

Social Epidemics Take Time

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― Vincent Gable on January 29, 2009

The best viral content on the internet won’t reach its audience in a single week. It might sit on YouTube for weeks or even months before it gets noticed and distributed. There’s just so much content out there to compete with. My guess is, viral marketing is pretty hit and miss, but if you’re going to try to do it, give it time to happen. If you’d like to promote an event next year, start writing about it on your blog or MySpace page now.

Jobe Roberts

This reminds me of one of Steve Yegge’s anecdotes,

… long before we had company internal blogs (at Amazon.com), Jacob Gabrielson wrote and circulated a brilliant essay called Zero Config. At least that’s what people call it nowadays. The actual title is longer, but famous essays tend to get shortened, like the way Dick Gabriel’s The Rise of “Worse is Better” became widely known as the “Worse is Better” essay.

Jacob’s essay clearly articulated an acute pain we’d all been feeling, but which nobody had elevated to the status of First-Class Pain. That is, configuration was a huge problem, but it hadn’t made it onto anyone’s radar as an official problem to which we should dedicate company resources.

Sure, everyone had been bitching and whining about it, but we bitch and whine about everything around here, so it wasn’t a problem that was readily discernable in all the noise.

Jacob’s paper was brilliant on several levels. He was able to distinguish configuration as a first-class problem, worthy of a paper — and this was back when there was almost no precedent for writing and circulating papers within Amazon. He made his point in an amusing and memorable way, writing with considerable style and intellectual force. And he articulated a long-term vision for fixing the problem. His goal wasn’t to solve it, but simply to increase general awareness of the problem. It was a little masterpiece.

And nobody read it.

I read it, although not immediately; as I recall, it may have been a few days before I got around to it. But it was relatively soon after he’d circulated it. When I finally did read it, I was very excited, and thought everyone ought to read it immediately. I started asking around, and found that only a few of the people on the circulation list had read it. I felt rather deflated: the company was missing out on an important insight, one that could help steer us in the direction of faster development, more stability, and less pain. I’m sure Jacob felt pretty bummed about having wasted all that time on the essay.

I didn’t give Jacob’s essay much thought after that, although I’d of course internalized his core ideas, which helped me steer my own teams’ work occasionally. About eight months went by, and then the most remarkable thing happened: suddenly all the VPs were talking about the “config problem”. They were citing Jacob’s paper, and from the way they were talking about it, it was obviously considered a well-known and long-standing problem: in other words, in 8 months it had gone from a relatively unknown issue to one that had permeated our corporate consciousness.

It didn’t happen overnight, either. I started hearing references to the paper in meetings about 4 months after he published it, and the frequency gradually went up, until the config problem finally emerged on various strategic planning agendas almost a year after Jacob had written about it.

I was surprised at the time that it took so long, but now it makes sense. People will only read something as meaty as an essay when the time is right. The right time isn’t going to coincide for everyone.

Like anything else, word of mouth drives adoption for essays. Only a few people will read it at first: friends, and a few people who just stumble across it and think it looks potentially interesting. If the essay isn’t relevant enough, then people will just forget about it and move on. No big deal.

But if your essay strikes the right chord with enough people, it will eventually reach critical mass, and you’ll have effected change in the organization. It may not be a huge change, but think about it: getting an idea through to a thousand people, in such a way that they all remember it and more or less agree with you — this is no easy feat. You can’t do it with a single email, unless it’s a really controversial one, and then you’ll just be infamous. You can’t do it with a single public speech: only the folks in the room are likely to remember it. Trying to do it with hallway conversations doesn’t scale.

Jacob’s Zero Config article demonstrated that essays are the best way to change minds on a large scale, maybe the only way, and even then, it often takes months for the message to sink in via mass osmosis.

For Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror fame, popularity took years

I started this blog in 2004, and it took a solid three years of writing 3 to 5 times per week before it achieved anything resembling popularity within the software development community.

Flash Hate

Filed under: Quotes | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on January 29, 2009

I don’t like Flash because it is responsible for the overwhelming majority of my browser crashes. I don’t like it because it consumes memory and (especially) CPU resources on my computer for almost the sole purpose of showing me advertisements, which also translates directly to reduced battery life on my laptop.

But it’s interesting to note that it’s quite a technical and ethical challenge to run a browser without Flash.

Steven Frank

I’ve written before about how important it is to optimize CPU usage of your website for the mobile world. And this is yet another reason for anyone who is add-supported. People will tolerate advertisements that are just there. But when they kill their work time, or are otherwise malignant, then they will take active steps to stop them. And that means no more advertising revenue.

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