A good analogy can often be useful to explain intricate technical details. In an earlier article, “Wrong Fish Food”, I related an analogy that I used to describe a technical issue to a non-technical audience. This article shares an analogy I created for a technical audience, because sometimes even techies need an analogy to grasp an unfamiliar technology.
Continue reading ‘Olympic Note Passing’ »
ShareDear web-design people,
Please don’t design sites that look like this:
Waste of space!
Rather, please design sites that look like this:
This uses space more effectively.
I’m not knocking Herb Sutter, here. I’m pretty sure he’s just using a stock template, but templates that don’t flow to fit the browser width really puzzle me. Is there a good reason for them that I’m just not aware of?
ShareIf you’re reading this site, you’ve probably already determined that I’m a geek. A hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool, walks-into-trees-because-he’s-thinking-about-computers kind of geek.
My wife and daughters, bless them, are not. Well, my daughters are somewhat nerdy, in a hip kind of way, meaning that they can quote large portions of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but they can also put together an attractive ensemble to wear out on the weekends. They aren’t as hopeless as their father.
Some days when I come home and sit down to dinner, I want to tell the family about some really silly thing that happened to me at work, but I don’t want to have to explain the intricacies of programming to set up every story. Instead, on the drive home I’ll try to come up with an analogy. Here’s the story that I came up with for something that actually happened to me last week. See if you can figure out what the actual technical issue was.
E-mail #1: “Paul, I just fed a batch of fish food to the fish, and the fish are dying. A chemical analysis showed that the batch contained hydrogenated frobulaxis. What’s wrong?”
Reply to e-mail #1: “Our fish are allergic to hydrogenated frobulaxis. Mix up a batch of food that doesn’t include that ingredient, and then the fish won’t die.”
E-mail #2: “Paul, I’m confused. Mix what up? I used a batch that I found in the supply cabinet. Why are the fish dying now?”
Reply to e-mail #2: “Either someone put the wrong batch in the cabinet, or someone used the wrong recipe to make the batch that’s supposed to be in the supply cabinet. See if you can track down the recipe that was used for those batches.”
E-mail #3: “Instead, I gave the fish some medicine that keeps them from dying when they consume hydrogenated frobulaxis. Easier.”
Reply to E-mail #3: “The problem is, that’s still wrong. There shouldn’t be any hydrogenated frobulaxis in the batches that are fed to the fish. If that’s being added to the production batches, that’s bad.”
Of course, I never got an e-mail #4. The fish were alive (barely), and nobody had to do the nasty work of mixing up a new batch of food, because that would be icky. All I could do was just pound my head on the desk.
Sigh.
ShareI hate to follow one rant with another one, but I’ve got to get this off my chest. Look at these pictures:
This is a high-school student.
This is a high school student.
See the difference? The first picture is of a high-school student (my elder daughter, Madeline). The second picture is of a high school student (Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High). That’s the difference a hyphen can make in the meaning of a sentence. The first picture depicts a typical 16-year-old girl; the second picture shows the kind of guy she won’t be allowed to date.
American English is really lenient about the use of hyphens in compound adjectives, but I’m seeing a lot more sentences lately where the missing hyphen makes a difference in the meaning of the sentence.
(I’m pretty sure there are some grammar mistakes in this post. Fire away!)
Share(I’ve also posted this same article on Code Project.)
Before I launch into the body of this essay, let me say that I think meetings are wonderful things. I’ll even go so far as to say that people in my field, software development, probably don’t have enough meetings. I have to qualify these opinions, however, by saying that they only apply to the right kinds of meetings. Regularly scheduled project status meetings that involve an entire team are definitely the wrong kind of meeting. They provide very little useful communication, and they kill productivity. There are better ways to accomplish the purpose of status meetings without actually having them.
Continue reading ‘Please Stop Holding Project Status Meetings’ »
ShareI’ve been hearing this a lot lately (you know who you are), so rather than pull all of you aside privately and give this lecture, I thought I’d do it once, publicly. You’re not running a DOS prompt.
When you click on that shortcut that says, “Command Prompt” in Windows XP, or you run cmd.exe from the “Run” box, you’re not starting a “DOS prompt.” What you are starting is a command line interface, or just “command line” if you prefer. If you haven’t actually run COMMAND.COM, it’s not DOS!.
So, please, next time don’t tell me to run your favorite utility “at the DOS prompt.” Let DOS rest in peace.
The first person to call Powershell a DOS prompt will get the lecture in real time.
ShareLarry Osterman talked about Windows 7 user interface changes in a post today, and it generated a minor comment storm, in which I participated. He talked about some buttons that used to be obvious buttons in Windows Vista, but which were made “flat” in Windows 7 so that they’re no longer obviously buttons until the user hovers over them with a mouse.
I gave my opinion a couple of times, coming down on the side of non-flat buttons. The whole discussion, though, reminded me of a couple of passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy that describe the design of the ship The Heart of Gold.
The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn’t perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners of the cabin were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable.
That sounds like everything I dislike about UI design these days, particularly in Flash and Silverlight apps where designers feel compelled to recreate UI widgets that behave almost, but not quite, entirely unlike standard widgets.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive — you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
That sounds a lot like where flat buttons are headed. In fact, it sounds strikingly like an iPod.
ShareI guess I would never make it as the CEO of some electronic gadget company, because I would never dream of loading down every gadget with a web browser and a picture viewer. I love my Nintendo Wii; I’ve spent hours playing Mario Kart or bowling with the kids. I even got Wii Fit, though I use the Balance Board more for Shaun White Snowboarding (and get a better workout doing it). But I’ve never looked at pictures on my Wii. I’ve only browsed the web just to see what it looks like, and whether a couple of my sites were readable (not very).
So, I’m dying to know why gadget companies feel that it’s necessary to load down every product with useless stuff like this? If a professional geek like me doesn’t even bother to use these features, then who is using them?
I’d much rather see gadget makers spend some time and resources on the core functionality of their gadgets (do you hear me, phone people?) than on browsing, social networking, or photo viewing.
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