Martin @ Blog

I decided to update my weblog a little bit. Combined with the upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, I have introduced a new design of my weblog. I also cleaned up the content of the site a little bit and added some additional information.
The last few months I did not updated this site very regularly, which caused a massive amount of spam in the comments. I cleaned up most of it, but there is still a huge number of spam comments to be removed. Because there are some ‘real’ comments, it is not simply a matter of deleting everything from my comment table… I have to figure out a long-term solution for this problem, because sorting out 30.000 spam comments is not fun.

The new design of my site is implemented as a WordPress theme. I used the default WordPress theme as a starting point, and modified it according to my design. It turned out pretty easy to modify WordPress this way. In the past I had the intention to write my own weblog software, but due to experience, I learned that it take too much time to write a fully functional package myself. It is also not very smart, but it is way faster to modify existing software in order to include all the features you wish. I only need to find a good software package for publishing my photo’s on my website. Something which is easy to modify and is stable. I wrote in the past something which could work, but it will take a very great amount of time to finish it, and I don’t think I have the time for that (I can spend the time I save this way on improving other software).

Miguel de Icaza of Novell, pointed to a article of usability blogger Joel Spolsky. This article is about the overly complex shutdown/logoff/hibernate/.. feature in Windows Vista. While I don’t have Vista, I didn’t notice this before, but it seems it is a nice example of flawed usability (to many choices for a thing which doesn’t require choices at all). Interestingly, one of the developers at Microsoft who worked on this, wrote a reaction on this article. According to this article, the brokeness of this feature is caused by overly complex development processes and a large number of management layers which makes the development process more like a bureaucratic process of making compromises while it should have been based on the thing the user wanted and facts derrived from usertesting (after, of course, creating reasonable prototypes.
In the blogpost of de Icaza, he also mentioned that in usertests at Novell, they discovered that a search box in a start-menu (Novell has developed a Windows-like startmenu for Gnome) should be at the top of the menu instead of the bottom, because users won’t notice it when it is at the bottom. It makes one wonder (if this is true) why Microsoft decided they should put the search box at the bottom of the menu. But then, I realised that a large number of Windows usability aspects seems to be decided by engineers and not tested. For example, creating a cd is not very straight-forward in Windows (try to find the ‘burn’-button in the Explorer (no, it isn’t there, it is only visible when you open the ‘cdwriter’ from via My Computer)).

I think it is safe to conclude (again) that Microsoft simply has become to large to develop software efficiently. While this could already conducted by the fact that it took five years to develop a ‘new’ OS which almost adds nothing really new to the existing products, stories like this prove this. Maybe they can develop ‘good’ software when they fire 90% of its staff… Open source communities (like Gnome and KDE) prove that is possible to develop similar software with much lesser developers (KDE has approximately 3000 contributers, which are not all developers. I don’t know the numbers on Gnome, but I guess it is similar). Only on Vista worked 10.000 developers (according to Microsoft).

An Apple developer also describe the process of the shutdown/logoff feature.

Op 11 januari had ik een discussie in een besloten forum een korte discussie over de gebruiksvriendelijkheid van Windows. Met name de gebruikersinterface van het besturingssysteem vind ik op sommige punten echt slecht (overigens hebben ook Mac OS X en Linux dergelijke gebreken, maar daar ging het nu niet om). Ik gaf toen als voorbeeld het aansluiten van hardware op een Windows-systeem, en de hoeveelheid overbodige handelingen dit met zich meebrengt. Ik zal een relevant onderdeel van de discussie citeren (de cursieve tekst is van mij afkomstig, de rest van de tekst is van een ander):

quote:
Als je onder Mac OS X een printer aansluit, dan kun je deze gebruiken zonder dat er eerst allerlei ‘meldingen’ komen. Windows komt weer met allerlei pop-upjes die zeggen ‘nieuwe hardware gevonden’, ‘printer xxx gedetecteerd’, ‘uw printer is nu klaar voor gebruik’ (en als je pech hebt moet je ook nog een paar keer ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘next’ klikken). Die informatie is niet erg interessant,

Jij vindt die informatie niet interessant. Ik vind het wel zo handig als de printer niet print, ik tenminste wel weet dat Windows hem goed gedetecteerd heeft. Als ik dus een printer in een Apple-plug en het ding print niet, kan ik op zoek gaan of het nou aan de driver, de software, de kabel of de printer ligt, want ik weet niet eens of ie goed geïnstalleerd is [/gechargeerd] 😉

quote:
omdat het logisch is dat hij, zodra je hem aansluit, klaar voor gebruik is. Ze moeten alleen een melding geven als er een probleem is.

Als mijn usb-poort defect/niet geïnstalleerd is vind ik het heel sterk dat een OS op magische wijze een melding kan genereren dat je er wel iets ingeplugd hebt. Met Windows merk ik tenminste van ‘tiens, vreemd, geen popupje dat de printer geïnstalleerd is, er is iets mis’. Dat vind ik zelf een voordeel omdat ik het zo gewend ben.

Tot mijn verbazing ben ik niet de enige die dit vindt. Tjeerd Hoek, van oorsprong een Nederlandse Industrieel Ontwerper, tegenwoordig ‘Design Director’ bij Microsoft zei het volgende tijdens de Nederlandse lancering van Windows Vista:

Vooral het ‘device management’ is hem een doorn in het oog: het inpluggen, installeren en configureren van hardware moet veel duidelijker en eenvoudiger gemaakt worden. Daarnaast heeft de ontwerper nog wel enkele ideeën rond zogenaamde ‘notifications’: meldingen van het systeem of vragen die door het systeem gesteld worden. In het ideale geval moet het mogelijk worden om een soort van ‘interrupt rules’ zoals hij het noemt op te stellen, vergelijkbaar met regels in een mailbox. Zo zou de gebruiker kunnen bepalen welke vragen en meldingen voorgeschoteld mogen worden en op welke manier dat moet gebeuren.

Precies dus die dingen die ik in ook al als voorbeeld van zwakke punten van Windows aanvoerde. Ik snap alleen niet waarom dat pas in de toekomst kan worden gefixt. Dergelijke zaken zorgen er naar mijn mening juist voor dat een besturingssysteem wel of niet als ‘eenvoudig’ en gebruiksvriendelijk wordt beschouwd. Ik kan me niet voorstellen dat 10 van de 10.000 ontwikkelaars die aan Vista zouden hebben gewerkt hier niet een paar weken aan konden besteden…

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has posted an open letter on the site of its company. In the letter he claims that Apple will embrace DRM-free music if content providers will allow this. It is quite interesting, regarding the fact that Apple in fact made DRM-protected music popular by means of its iTunes Music Store. On the other hand, it takes some courage to state in public that he, as CEO of the largest online music store, thinks it would be better if digital music is available unprotected. Microsoft clearly doesn’t have this courage, regarding the fact that DRM is a very important part of Windows Vista and even makes it easier for record companies to keep using DRM, because it is harder to circumvent the protection and the common public is made ‘familiar’ with the concept. But Microsoft now has a fairly minimal market-share in digital music, while Apple hasn’t. The open letter of Jobs could also be seen as a publicity stunt (the publicity is obvious of importance in this case), because the critical part of the consumers (a part of the so-called ‘early adopters’ and people standing for ‘free information’), are loudly protesting against DRM. DRM-protected downloads is not the success some companies probably hoped, and it clearly is not a protection against piracy (as I pointed out earlier, and Steve Jobs also mentions in his letter). Because DRM-protected music is not popular, some companies are experimenting with unprotected music. This way, the music companies were the first a small step to make unprotected distribution of music, and it seems that Jobs sees this as a change to push the companies a little further. If he succeeds, he obviously gains more popularity amongst people who are against DRM….

Today, a new Linux-kernel is released. 2.6.20 does come with Playstation 3 support. Also, this is the first kernel with virtualization technologies integrated. KVM and support for hypervisors/paravirtualization are now included in the kernel. See a list of features here.

Neil McBride, a principal lecturer in the School of Computing at De Montfort University, has an interesting article about the feature of computer science at universities. He claims that the current CS-courses are disconnected from the reality. IT-workers hardly develop new systems from scratch, but has to cope with existing systems and are doing less technical work, but more social and business related work. This is mainly caused by the fact that computers are not mysterious anymore. A few decades ago, only at universities computers were common and it was a true art to get a computer doing something useful. Today, an eight-year-old can design and use a robot without programming. On the other hand, in countries such as India and China are full with graduated programmers working for a much lower salary than ‘western’ programmers.
He claims that coming years CS-courses, like the one currently existing, have to change. He doesn’t come with a prefixed solution, but points out some ideas. At his university, the CS-degree does not assume programming as an essential skill, other skills are more important for a computer scientist. I’m not sure if I agree with this, because I think an understanding of the fundamentals of programming are relevant in order to understand computer related problems and to think of sensible solutions. I think it is important for current CS-students not to focus on the technical part only, and to develop a broad skillset. It is important to understand businesses, a little bit of psychology and market developments. During my study I saw a large number of students thinking that it is sufficient to have knowledge of systems which are currently used (mostly the Microsoft productline, consisting of Windows, Visual Studio and Office). However, it is not very likely that in about ten years, this is the same. When you asked them questions about open source projects, they turned it down with statements like ‘it is to difficult’ or ‘… doesn’t run on Linux’. They clearly doesn’t have any knowledge on this part of the IT-market. In my opinion it is deadly for a CS-graduated to be this narrow sighted.

Last Thursday, I went to a talk organized by the OSBC about how to use open source software in a business. The talk was given by Sebastian Kuegler, one of the members of the KDE Marketing group. The talk was very interesting and the questions asked by the audience were also very interesting. I think there is definitely a growing interest in open source in common (small) businesses, which is a good thing. However, there are certainly some gaps in the total product open source can offer. Especially in the marketing department there is a lot of work to be done. It seems to me that KDE is a little bit more ready for adoption in businesses than Gnome is. They seems to have a better message prepared for the public, with clear solutions for independent software vendors.

Migual de Icaza wrote a lengthy article on the Open Document Format vs. OpenXML discussion. One of his points is that the size of the OpenXML specification is not a problem, because ODF lacks essential parts in the specification of the spreadsheet document format, which makes it impossible to implement a spreadsheet solely based on the ODF specification (the specification on formulas is missing). OpenXML will probably by sufficient to implement an office application ‘from scratch’. I think this is a reasonable observation, and therefor I think the OpenXML specification isn’t that bad after all. Another point he makes is that first everybody was complaining about the fact that MS did not disclose the specification of its file formats, and now the company does, people are complaining it is ‘too much’. De Icaza: “If anything, if I was trying to interoperate with Microsoft products, I would request more, not less.”. I think he has more knowledge about these issues than I have, because he was one of the developers on the Gnumeric spreadsheet, which was one of the first non-Microsoft applications fully compatible with Microsoft Excel’s document format.
Another issue he mentions is that ODF is not perfect, and that a standardization of OpenXML is not a real problem for the success of open source software. He points out that open standards in general are a Good Thing and that OpenOffice.org has that point as clear advantage over Microsoft Office (which uses closed standards until the release of Office 2007). This made it a little bit easier to get governmental organizations using OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office. Now that this advantage is not there anymore, open source software should compete on technical grounds instead of political grounds.

Jono Bacon, community manager of Ubuntu, calls everybody to protest against the standardisation of Microsoft’s OpenXML format as an ECMA standard and European ISO/IEC standard. While I’m not very involved in the discussion of the various word processing document formats, I think it is better that everybody uses one common standard. Because OpenDocument was the first of this kind of formats to become an international standard, I think it is reasonable that everybody uses this standard. I think it is not a good idea to let Microsoft again decide about the standards for the document formats used in word processors (and other office software), because the prove in the past that they do not like to let others use their format and seems to be incapable to define a decent standard.
According to Jono Bacon, the OpenXML standard is 6000 pages, but Microsoft is trying to make it a standard using a ‘fast track’ procedure.

Today, I read a paper (PDF) written by the founders of Google about the first versions of their search engines. Probably, this is already noted by a large number of other webloggers, but I came across the following quote about ‘other commercial search engines’:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of
the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For
example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of
Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and
risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because
of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on
the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
consumers.

Considering the fact that Google generates most of its revenues by putting advertisements in its search results, it makes one wonder whether Google did not made the same mistakes as its predecessors. In the current version of Google, a search on Cellular phone does return only information about where one can buy the cheapest cell phones, but no results about a study on the dangers of using cell phones while driving a car. I think it is at least interesting, and maybe even an example of the risk of ‘allowing’ advertisements everywhere (of course, Google may decide for itself if it put advertisements in its search results). I also wonder how Page and Brin (the authors of the paper, but also the fouders of Google and now both billionairs) currently think about this topic. I guess they have a different vision on it now, then they had nine years ago…