The value of over-the-counter service

My primary computer is a dual 2GHz PowerMac G5 until I can upgrade it with a Nehalem Mac Pro, most likely around the end of the year or early next year. I bought it in 2004, along with a 23" Apple Cinema HD (the old pinstripe plastic bezel kind with an ADC connector). Unfortunately, about a year ago the CCFL backlight on the monitor started turning pink from old age, and thus unusable in a properly color-managed photographic workflow.

I used that as an excuse to splurge on a humongous (and agoraphobia-inducing) HP LP3065 30 inch LCD monitor after reading the glowing reviews. The two features that sold me were the enhanced color gamut (the only way to improve that would be to get a $6000 Samsung XL30, something I am not quite prepared to do), and the fact it has 3 built-in DVI ports, so it can easily be shared by multiple computers (assuming they support dual-link DVI, which unfortunately my basic spec Sun Ultra 40 M2 does not). The fact it was 25% less expensive than the Apple 30" Cinema Display helped, of course.

About 6 months ago, I discovered there was a fine pink vertical line running across the entire height of the monitor, roughly 25 centimeters from the left. Since I primarily use that monitor for photo (the primary monitor for Mail, web browsing or terminals remains the Apple), at first I worried there was a defect with my camera. I managed to reproduce the problem with my MacBook Pro (they have dual-link DVI, unlike lesser laptops), and called HP support (the 3 year HP warranty was also an important consideration when I purchased).

My first support call in November 2007 went well, and the tech told me I would be contacted to arrange for an on-site exchange. This is a seriously heavy monitor and I did not relish the idea of lugging it back to FedEx, so getting premium support for a business-class monitor sounded an attractive proposition. Unfortunately, they never did call back, and as I had other pressing matters to attend to involving international travel, I just put it out of my mind (it is a very subtle flaw that is not even always visible).

I only got around to calling them back a few weeks ago. Unlike in November, I was given the run-around with various customer service reps in India until I was finally routed to a pleasant (and competent) tech in a suburb of Vancouver (the US dollar going in the direction it is, you have to wonder how much longer before HP outsources those call centers back to the US). The problem is not with Indian call centers, in any case, all but one of the CSRs were very polite (I suspect Indians learn more patience as they grow up than pampered Americans or Europeans would). The problem is poorly organized support processes and asinine scripts they are required to go through if they want to keep their jobs. In any case, the Canadian rep managed to find the FRU number and also told me someone would call to schedule an appointment. Someone did call this time, to let me know the part was back-ordered and they would call me when it becomes available.

This morning, as I was heading for the shower, my intercom buzzed. It was a DHL delivery man with the replacement monitor. I had to open the door to him in my bath robe. Naturally, nobody at HP bothered to notify me and had I left earlier, I would have missed him altogether.

One of the great things about Apple products is that if you live near an Apple store, you can just stop by their pretentiously-named Genius bars and get support for free (though not free repairs for out-of-warranty products, obviously). I now have a fully working HP monitor again, so I suppose I can't complain too loudly, but the Apple monitor with the sterling support looks like the true bargain in hindsight.

17:42 - permalink [IT, Macintosh, Soapbox]

Adobe "Creative" Suite 3, a mixed bag

I installed Adobe Creative Suite 3 on my home PowerMac and my MacBook (the license allows you to install it on two computers as long as they are not in simultaneous use). The only real reason I upgraded is to get a native Intel version. I have barely started using it already and I already have peeves:

• Bridge looks butt-ugly, is even slower than before and with a more amateurish interface than ever
• The install procedure is incredibly annoying and Windows-like. There is no justification for an install procedure that chokes if the beta was not uninstalled officially (although I have to give some brownie points due to the fact the cleanup script is written in Python).
• The icons are aesthetically bankrupt. What kind of credibility does Adobe think it has with creative people with such an astoundingly lackluster effort?
• Barely installed and already in need of software updates. The widespread availability of fast Internet connections is no excuse for shoddy release management or a "we'll patch it post-release" mentality. Speaking of which, the only proper time to interrupt users with a software update dialog is as they are quitting the application, not by getting in the way of whatever task they are trying to get done by starting up the app.
• Don't clutter my hard drive with legal drivel in twenty different languages. It's called "Creative Suite", not "Boilerplate Suite".
• All the tie-ins to paid add-on services like Adobe Stock Photos or Acrobat Conferencing are incredibly obnoxious, just like those for MSN or .Mac.
• JavaScript in Acrobat is a big security and privacy risk, and should be disabled by default.
• On the plus side, thanks for making a "Design Basic" edition without all the despicable Flash garbage in it. I would actually pay more for the Basic version than for the supposedly premium one infected with Flash and Dreamweaver.

Update (2008-01-01):

It seems Adobe has also crossed a serious ethical line by building in spyware to track on whenever a user starts a CS3 application.

As far as I am concerned, this is the last straw and I will actively start looking for substitutes for Adobe products as soon as I return from my vacation.

Update (2008-01-02):

It seems Adobe does not collect the serial number after all. The apps should nonetheless never call on the Internet except possibly to check for updates. For people like myself who have static IPs, the IP address itself could be used to correlate the analytics with personal information.

21:53 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

Is Vista a piece of unalloyed garbage?

As far as I can see, the answer is yes.

About a month ago, my two-year old Windows PC game machine started crashing every two minutes in NWN2. This proved the last straw, and I decided to upgrade. One of the games I have, but seldom play is Oblivion, which is graphically gorgeous, but chokes on anything but the most powerful hardware at ordinary resolutions, let alone my Apple Cinema Display HD's 1920x1200, and cutting-edge video cards are no longer available for the AGP bus in any case.

I looked around for packaged solutions from systems integrators, specialized gaming PC companies like AlienWare, and Dell. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is still much cheaper to build a PC from components than to buy one from a major vendor, $1500 vs. $2500 minimum. Part of the reason is that the vendors flag anyone wanting the absolute best video card as a "cost is no object" customer, add all sorts of expensive components that make no sense in a machine that will only ever be used for games, like fancy DVD burners or flash card readers to jack up the profit margins. As if anyone in his right mind would use a Windows computer for serious work like digital photography...

My configuration is the following: a relatively quiet Antec Sonata II case, an Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon x2 5200, 2GB of Kingston DDR-800 RAM, a humongous nVidia GeForce 8800GTX video card, a 500GB hard drive and a basic DVD-ROM drive.

When it came to choosing the OS, after much trepidation I opted for Vista Home Premium because the 8800GTX is one of the few cards that support DirectX 10, which is a Vista-only feature. I knew Vista would embezzle half the processing power of one core in DRM code that is actually working against my interests, but then again nobody in his right mind would use DRM-ed formats, whether Microsoft or otherwise, to store their music library, so the damage would be limited. Also, Vista comes with "downgrade rights" which allow you to legally install the previous version of Windows.

Vista comes in an attractive copper-colored DVD that is actually quite elegant. Its color scheme is also far superior to the molten Play-Skool set monstrosity that is XP. When I started the Vista installer, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it dealt with hard drive formatting (the previous Windows I installed myself is Windows 2000, which will insist on a time-consuming full format instead of the quick format used by the XP or Vista installers). The good impression lasted for all of five minutes. After the inevitable restart to complete installation, the screen promptly dissolved into a scrambled red-and-white screen of doom (I did glimpse a blue screen of death shortly before it rebooted). The diagnostics were completely unhelpful, as could be expected. When the operating system cannot even install itself, you have got to wonder...

Dejectedly, I fished out a Windows XP install DVD. it would not accept the Vista serial number. So much for downgrade rights. Of course, since the package was now opened, no hope for a refund either. I ended up buying a copy of Windows XP, which installed without a hitch. Of course, I still had to install the video drivers, but it did not crash half-way through the install procedure. And Oblivion is now playable without agonizing stutters every two paces.

The 8800GTX is very recent hardware, which did not even have non-beta Vista drivers when I installed it, so I could understand the OS falling back to SVGA mode. There are no other really exotic components here, certainly nothing than XP SP2 could not deal with and therefore Vista should as well. The machine is also well within the recommended minimum configuration (although some experts now advise 4GB of RAM as a realistic minimum for Vista). Crashing during install, when a five year old OS like XP handles it just fine, is simply unacceptable in my book. Even Solaris 10 Update 3, an OS notorious for its limited hardware support, installed without a hitch. Despite the ten man-millennia Microsoft invested in this lemon, they apparently could not be bothered to test the installer.

Conclusion: unless you buy a computer with Vista pre-installed, avoid it like the plague until SP1 is out, just like Intel.

Post scriptum:

Actually, I would not even recommend a PC with Vista preinstalled, as it has terrible backward compatibility. It will not run Office 2000, which is what my company has, for instance. Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on how the new, bloatedly bureaucratic Microsoft lost its way by sacrificing backward compatibility on the altar of useless marketectures. Perhaps they are just trying to force-upgrade people to Office 2007. They should beware: unlike 2002, people have credible alternatives now.

Update (2007-08-30):

The paper about how Vista eats up CPU on DRM has been criticized by the generally reliable George You. My point about the inability to even install on a modern machine that XP has no problems with remains. In any case, having the operating system constantly eat up CPU on tasks I do not want it to, whether it is 7% or 100% of one core, is still morally no better than a parasitic botnet.

00:14 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

Not-so-pop cultural references

Cartoons can be the most subversive of genres. The Simpsons has been serving acerbic social commentary from deep within the bowels of the reactionary Fox network for over 10 years, yet they manage to stay fresh when other, more edgy shows like Family Guys struggle for relevance.

One of the main characters in Futurama, Matt Groening's other animated show, is named Turanga Leela, a transparent reference to Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphonie. The number of people who have even heard of this fairly esoteric work is quite limited, and those who actually like it (as opposed to professing admiration for it out of conformity) can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. Thus we have established that Groening or his staff are intimately familiar with 20th century classical music.

Last week's episode of The Simpsons featured the US Army showing a recruitment commercial at the Simpson kids' school. It starts with a rousing martial score. I have extracted a 4MB clip of the scene (Quicktime 7 required) for those who missed it.

The piece in question is from Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky cantata. The music was composed for the epnymous anti-german propaganda movie by Eisenstein (although, in a little known consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin made Eisenstein produce Wagner's Die Walküre for the Bolshoi in atonement for the newly inconvenient Nevsky). The lyrics heard can be translated in English as follows:

Arise, ye Russian people,
to glorious battle, to a battle to the death:
arise, ye free people,
to defend our beloved country!
All honour to the warriors who live,
and eternal glory to those slain!
For our native home, our Russian land,
arise, ye Russian people!

Needless to day, the delicious irony is unlikely to be mere coincidence.

00:47 - permalink [Soapbox]

Trimming the fat from JPEGs

I use Adobe Photoshop CS2 on my Mac as my primary photo editor. Adobe recently announced that the Intel native port of Photoshop would have to wait for the next release CS3, tentatively scheduled for Spring 2007. This ridiculously long delay is a serious sticking point for Photoshop users, specially those who jumped on the MacBook Pro to finally get an Apple laptop with decent performance, as Photoshop under Rosetta emulation will run at G4 speeds or lower on the new machines.

This nonchalance is not a very smart move on Adobe's part, as it will certainly drive many to explore Apple's Aperture as an alternative, or be more receptive to newcomers like LightZone. I know Aperture and Photoshop are not fully equivalent, but Aperture does take care of a significant proportion of a digital photographer's needs, and combined with Apple's recent $200 price reduction for release 1.1, and their liberal license terms (you can install it on multiple machines as long as you are the only user of those copies, so you only need to buy a single license even if like me you have both a desktop and a laptop).

There is a disaffection for Adobe among artists of late. Their anti-competitive merger with Macromedia is leading to complacency. Adobe's CEO, Bruce Chizen, is also emphasizing corporate customers for the bloatware that is Acrobat as the focus for Adobe, and the demotion of graphics apps shows. Recent releases of Photoshop have been rather ho-hum, and it is starting to accrete the same kind of cruft as Acrobat (to paraphrase Borges, each release of it makes you regret the previous one). Hopefully Thomas Knoll can staunch this worrisome trend.

Adobe is touting its XMP metadata platform. XMP is derived from the obnoxious RDF format, a solution in search of a problem if there ever was one. RDF files are as far from human-readable as a XML-based format can get, and introduce considerable bloat. If Atom people had not taken the RDF cruft out of their syndication format, I would refuse to use it.

I always scan slides and negatives at maximal bit depth and resolution, back up the raw scans to a 1TB external disk array, then apply tonal corrections and spot dust. One bizarre side-effect of XMP is that if I take a 16-bit TIFF straight from the slide scanner, then apply curves and reduce it to 8 bits, somewhere in the XMP metadata that Photoshop "helpfully" embedded in the TIFF the bit depth is not updated and Bridge incorrectly shows the file as being 16-bit. The only way to find out is to open it (Photoshop will show the correct bit depth in the title bar) or look at the file size.

This bug is incredibly annoying, and the only work-around I have found so far is to run ImageMagick's convert utility with the -strip option to remove the offending XMP metadata. I did not pay the princely price for the full version of Photoshop to be required to use open-source software as a stop-gap in my workflow.

Photoshop will embed XMP metadata and other cruft in JPEG files if you use the "Save As..." command. In Photoshop 7, all that extra baggage actually triggered a bug in IE that would break its ability to display images. You have to use the "Save for Web..." command (actually a part of ImageReady) to save files in a usable form. Another example of poor fit-and-finish in Adobe's software: "Save for Web" will not automatically convert images in AdobeRGB or other color profiles to the Web's implied sRGB, so if you forget to do that as a previous step, the colors in the resulting image will be off.

"Save for Web" will also strip EXIF tags that are unnecessary baggage for web graphics (and can actually be a privacy threat). While researching the Fotonotes image annotation scheme, I opened one of my "Save for Web" JPEGs under a hex editor, and I was surprised to see literal strings like "Ducky" and "Adobe" (apparently the ImageReady developers have an obsession with rubber duckies). Photoshop is clearly still embedding some useless metadata in these files, even though it is not supposed to. The overhead corresponds to about 1-2%, which in most cases doesn't require more disk space because files use entire disk blocks, whether they are fully filled or not, but this will lead to increased network bandwidth utilization because packets (which do not have the block size constraints of disks) will have to be bigger than necessary.

I wrote jpegstrip.c, a short C program to strip out Photoshop's unnecessary tags, and other optional JPEG "markers" from JPEG files, like the optional "restart" markers that allow a JPEG decoder to recover if the data was corrupted — it's not really a file format's job to mitigate corruption, more TCP's or the filesystem's. The Independent JPEG Group's jpegtran -copy none actually increased the size of the test file I gave it, so it wasn't going to cut it. jpegstrip is crude and probably breaks in a number of situations (it is the result of a couple of hours' hacking and reading the bare minimum of the JPEG specification required to get it working). The user interface is also pretty crude: it takes an input file over standard input, spits out the stripped JPEG over standard output and diagnostics on standard error (configurable at compile time).

ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test.jpg > test_strip.jpg
in=2822 bytes, skipped=35 bytes, out=2787 bytes, saved 1.24%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -copy none test.jpg > test_jpegtran.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>jpegtran -restart 1 test.jpg > test_restart.jpg
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>gcc -O3 -Wall -DDEBUG=2 -o jpegstrip jpegstrip.c
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>./jpegstrip < test_restart.jpg > test_restrip.jpg
skipped marker 0xffdd (4 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd1 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd2 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd3 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd4 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd5 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd6 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd7 (2 bytes)
skipped restart marker 0xffd0 (2 bytes)
in=3168 bytes, skipped=24 bytes, out=3144 bytes, saved 0.76%
ormag ~/Projects/jpegstrip>ls -l *.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2822 Apr 22 23:17 test.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3131 Apr 22 23:26 test_jpegtran.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3168 Apr 22 23:26 test_restart.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  3144 Apr 22 23:27 test_restrip.jpg
-rw-r--r--   1 majid  majid  2787 Apr 22 23:26 test_strip.jpg

Update (2006-04-24):

Reader "Kam" reports jhead offers JPEG stripping with the -purejpg option, and much much more. Jhead offers an option to strip mostly useless preview thumbnails, but it does not strip out restart markers.

23:36 - permalink [Macintosh, Photo, Soapbox]

Shun till done

One of the benefits of having written my own feed aggregator, Temboz, is that I get to implement the functionality I want to make my life more productive. The most essential one is filtering out articles in subjects I am not interested. One of the first companies to make the cut of those I shun entirely was SCO. I consider them so despicable I don't even want to hear about them, unlike the hyperventilating Slashdot crowd. Since then, a number of other companies have joined them, most recently Sony. And in the spirit of "a pox on both houses", I now tune out anything related to either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

That said, this form of shunning could fairly be described as passive-aggressive, not constructive. The fact I will no longer entertain the idea of buying a Playstation 3, and probably many others like me, will probably have some effect on Sony's sales, but their marketing people analyzing sales figures will almost certainly have no clue their contemptible attitude to DRM is costing them. Much of modern economics is grounded in information theory, specially how markets break down in the presence of asymmetric information. If you want your product choices to have real impact, you need to go further.

Corporations are not monolithic entities, all carefully tailored appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. That's why the New York Attorney-General, Eliot Spitzer is so effective against crooked Wall Street firms (like his predecessor Rudy Giuliani before him), corrupt record labels and the like. Even if a fine is small compared to a firm's profits, it has to come out of somebody's budget, and few careers survive that kind of blow. One fired employee, even a high-ranking one, is not much either compared to the typical large corporation's staffing, but it will have a disproportionate effect on the remaining employees' behavior. This has been very visible at IBM and now Microsoft after their anti-trust cases, even if in the latter case it seems to be more of a subconscious hesitancy to get anything done.

The average consumer does not have the punitive powers of a Spitzer at his disposal, but there is another way. Unless a corporation is terminally dysfunctional, it will have clear lines of accountability, all the way to the CEO reporting to the Board. The power we have is to dispel the cloud of obfuscation that some may use to to keep their upper management in the dark about the consequences of their actions.

Writing a letter to the CEO can be surprisingly effective. You have to keep in mind the average public company CEO works upwards of 70 hours per week. That lack of free time, combined with their affluence means they are usually out of touch with reality, and need to be reminded of it. This has to be a letter, preferably on good stationery, typewritten but hand-signed. Emails simply do not carry much weight in the worlds of politics or business, because they are so easily written and thus not evidence of commitment. Usually you want to skip flunkies and go straight to the top, but if the CEO is on record supporting the policies you object to, you will have to copy your letter to the president or the chairman of the Board.

Many companies have started monitoring blogs and forums for possible PR headaches (or subcontract this reputation monitoring work to specialized firms). Blogging about your experiences is another good way to get their attention.

There are limits to what an individual can accomplish. If a corporation is dead-set in its ways, collective action is required. In many ways, the American consumer movement has atrophied since the days of Ralph Nader's crusade against Detroit, whereas the opposite trend holds true in Europe. There are many fine organizations like the EFF that are fighting for your rights, and sometimes even public officials, local or national.

20:12 - permalink [Soapbox]

Interesting factoids

Harper's Magazine, a left-leaning (by American standards) literary gazette, is fairly insipid, but it publishes amusing tidbits in each issue known as Harper's Index. In a similar vein, here are some surprising bits I have read recently.

• All 9 members of China's Politburo are engineers. Source: IEEE Spectrum
• Western Europe has a population and GDP comparable to the United States, but it has 42% of the world's WiFi hotspots, compared to 26% in the US. Source: Informa Telecoms and Media.
• Medical Doctors' median income in the US is $200,000. Often maligned, median malpractice insurance premiums are only $11,000. Source: Paul von Hippel, Ohio State University.
• "Administrative costs" represent 19% to 24% of the cost of health care in the US, compared to about 10% in most OECD countries. Source: University of Maine.
• The French universal medical coverage, despite being rife with abuse and fraud by people who would flunk the means-test for state coverage, costs about 1.4 billion euros per year, slightly under 0.1% of GDP, with approximately 5 million people covered, and health care in general represents about 9% of GDP. Of course, as health insurance is mandatory for all salaried workers, only the unemployed lack coverage in the first place, so the cost of universal coverage in the US would be higher as a proportion of GDP. The French medical system was rated first in the world for general health care by the WHO's last survey in 2000, so it is not a question of skimping on the quality of care as in the UK.
• The US spends 15% of its GDP on health care, if that were lowered by 10%, by bringing administrative costs in line with Europe or Canada, the savings would easily cover universal insurance for all Americans.
• The Philippines and India are respectively ranked No. 4 and 5 destinations for international telephone calls from the US. India hardly registered in 1991. Source: Telegeography.

19:09 - permalink [Soapbox]

The real story behind the WSIS

There has been much speculation recently about a possible rift in Internet governance. Essentially, many countries resent the US government's control over the Internet's policy oversight. They advocate the transfer of those responsibilities to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a more multilateral venue. The big news is that the European Union, which previously sat on the fence, came out strongly in favor of this proposal. Unsurprisingly, the US government is hostile to it. More surprisingly, I agree with their unilateralist impulse, obviously for very different reasons. I was planning on writing up a technical explanation as most of the IT press has it completely wrong, as usual, but Eric Rescorla has beaten me to the punch with an excellent summary.

Many commentators have made much hay of the fact the ITU is under the umbrella of the United Nations. The Bush administration is clearly reticent, to say the least, towards the UN, but that is a fairly widespread sentiment among the American policy establishment, by no means limited to Republicans. For some reason, many Americans harbor the absurd fear that somehow the UN is plotting against US sovereignty. Of course, the reality is the UN cannot afford its parking tickets, let alone black helicopters. American hostility towards the UN is curious, as it was the brainchild of a US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, its charter was signed in San Francisco (at Herbst Theatre, less than a mile from where I live), and it is headquartered in New York.

The UN is ineffective and corrupt, but that is because the powers on the Security Council want it that way. The UN does not have its own army and depends on its member nations, specially those on the Security Council to perform its missions. It is hardly fair to lay the blame for failure in Somalia on the UN's doorstep. As for corruption, mostly in the form of patronage, it was the way the US and the USSR greased the wheels of diplomacy during the Cold War, buying the votes of tin-pot nations by granting cushy UN jobs to the nephews of their kleptocrats.

A more damning condemnation of the UN is the fact the body does not embody any kind of global democratic representation. The principle is one country, one vote. Just as residents of Wyoming have 60 times more power per capita in the US Senate than Californians, India's billion inhabitants have as many votes in the General Assembly as those of the tiny Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein. The real action is in the Security Council anyways, but they are not fully represented there either. Had Americans not had a soft spot for Chiang Kai-Shek, China, with its own billion souls, would not have a seat at that table either. That said, the Internet population is spread unevenly across the globe, and the Security Council is probably more representative of it.

In any case, the ITU was established in 1865, long before the UN, and its institutional memory is much different. It is also based in Geneva, like most international organizations, geographically and culturally a world away from New York. In other words, even though it is formally an arm of the UN, the ITU is in practice completely autonomous. The members of the Security Council do not enjoy veto rights in the ITU, and the appointment of its secretary general, while a relatively technocratic and unpoliticized affair, is not subject to US approval, or at least acquiescence, the way the UN secretary-general's is, or that of more sensitive organizations like the IAEA.

My primary objections to the ITU are not about its political structure, governance or democratic legitimacy, but about its competence, or more precisely the lack of it. The ITU is basically the forum where government PTT monopolies meet incumbent telcos to devise big standards and blow big amounts of hot air. Well into the nineties, they were pushing for a bloated network architecture called OSI, as an alternative to the Internet's elegant TCP/IP protocol suite. I was not surprised — I used to work at France Télécom's R&D labs, and had plenty of opportunity to gauge the "caliber" of the incompetent parasites who would go on ITU junkets. Truth be said, those people's chief competency is bureaucratic wrangling, and like rats leaving a ship, they have since decamped to the greener pastures of the IETF, whose immune system could not prevent a dramatic drop in the quality of its output. The ITU's institutional bias is towards complex solutions that enshrine the role of legacy telcos, managed scarcity and self-proclaimed intelligent networks that are architected to prevent disruptive change by users on the edge.

When people hyperventilate about Internet governance, they tend to focus on the Domain Name System, even though the real scandal is IPv4 address allocation, like the fact Stanford and MIT each have more IP addresses allocated to them than all of China. Many other hot-button items like the fight against child pornography or pedophiles more properly belongs in criminal-justice organizations like Interpol. But let us humor the pundits and focus on the DNS.

First of all, the country-specific top-level domains like .fr, .cn or the new kid on the block, .eu, are for all practical purposes already under decentralized control. Any government that is afraid the US might tamper with its own country domain (for some reason Brazil is often mentioned in this context) can easily take measures to prevent disruption of domestic traffic by requiring its ISPs to point their DNS servers to authoritative servers under its control for that zone. Thus, the area of contention is really the international generic top-level domains (gTLDs), chief of all .com, the only one that really matters.

What is the threat model for a country that is distrustful of US intentions? The possibility that the US government might delete or redirect a domain it does not like, say, al-qaeda.org? Actually, this happens all the time, not due to the malevolence of the US government, but to the active incompetence of Network Solutions (NSI). You may recall NSI, now a division of Verisign, is the entrenched monopoly that manages the .com top-level domain, and which has so far successfully browbeaten ICANN into prolonging its monopoly, one of its most outrageous claims being that it has intellectual property rights to the .com database. Their security measures, on the other hand, owe more to Keystone Kops, and they routinely allow domain names like sex.com to be hijacked. Breaking the NSI monopoly would be a worthwhile policy objective, but it does not require a change in governance, just the political will to confront Verisign (which, granted, may be more easily found outside the US).

This leads me to believe the root cause for all the hue and cry, apart from the ITU angling for relevance, may well be the question of how the proceeds from domain registration fees are apportioned. Many of the policy decisions concerning the domain name system pertain to the creation of new TLDs like .museum or, more controversially, .xxx. The fact is, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night thinking: "I wish there were a top-level domain .aero so I could reserve a name under it instead of my lame .com domain!". All these alternative TLDs are at best poor substitutes for .com. Registrars, on the other hand, who provide most of the funding for ICANN, have a vested interest in the proliferation of TLDs, as that gives them more opportunities to collect registration fees.

00:56 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

The resistible ascension of the smartphone

I bought a Nokia 6682 phone a couple of weeks ago, as an upgrade for my Nokia 6230. Actually, I have my parents signed up on my service plan, and I was planning on sending them the 6230 to replace an older phone they lost, and taking advantage of this as an excuse to upgrade... The 6682 is a Symbian "smartphone" sporting Nokia's Series 60 UI, and I was influenced by rave reviews like Russell Beattie's. In recent years, Nokia has been churning out phones with crackpot designs and dubious usability for coolness' sake. There must have been a customer backlash, as their recent phones like the 6682 have a much more reasonable, reassuringly boring but functional design. Another reason is that Apple's iSync only works with Nokia's Series 60 phones, and it will sync photos from the OS X address book.

I returned the phone for a refund last Friday, because the ergonomics are simply atrocious, and from a usability point of view it was actually an unacceptable downgrade from the Series 40 (non-Symbian) Nokia 6230. The low-res 176x208 screen has significantly lower information density than the 320x480 or 640x480 screens now standard on most PDAs, and makes web browsing almost useless. The only thing it has going for it is a semi-decent camera.

Even basic functionality like the address book is poorly implemented. When you scroll down your contacts list, you can select one to decide whether you want to reach them on their home or mobile number. The problem is, the next time you want to make a call and access the address book, you do not start afresh, but still in the list of contacts for the previous contact, making you back out. Let's not even mention the ridiculously complex key sequence required to record a voice memo.

I have to contrast this with my Palm Tungsten T3, in my book still the best PDA ever (specially compared to the underwhelming, plasticky T5 or the boat-anchor and RAM-starved Lifedrive). Recording a voice memo merely requires pressing and holding a dedicated button, something that can be done one-handed by touch alone. Palm's address book quick look up scrolling algorithm is a model of efficiency yet to be matched on any phone I have ever used. PalmOS might be getting long in the tooth, specially as regards multitasking, and its future is cloudy, but it still has a serious edge in usability. This is not by accident — Palm paid as much attention to the user interface as Apple did in its day, as this anecdote by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue illustrates:

I once visited Palm Computing in its heyday. One guy I met there introduced himself as tap counter. It was his job to make sure that no task on the PalmPilot required more than three taps of the stylus on the screen. More than three steps, and the feature had to be redesigned. Electronics should save time, not waste it.

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by the 6682's poor ergonomics, they were readily apparent from day one. The device is neither a good phone, nor an even halfway acceptable PDA. I decided to give it a chance, thinking it could just be a question of settling into an unfamiliar user interface. I did not have as long an adaptation period when moving from my old T68i to the 6230, and after two weeks my dim initial opinion of the Series 60 had if anything deteriorated further. Russell Beattie can dish it, but he can't take it. In hindsight, Beattie's defensiveness about smart people preferring dumb phones over jack-of-all-trades devices was not a good sign.

Pundits have been predicting the demise of the PDA at the hands of the smartphone for many years. Phones certainly outsell PDAs by a handy margin, but a small minority of them are smartphones, and I suspect most people get them for the improved cameras and disregard the unusable advanced functionality. I tend to agree with this old but still valid assessment — the best option is to have a decent PDA in hand, connected to the cell phone in your pocket via Bluetooth.

I suspect the smartphones' ergonomic shortcomings are structural, not just due to lack of usability skills on the manufacturers' part. Nokia knows how to design good user interfaces, like Navi or Series 40, but the situation with Series 60 is not going to be rectified anytime soon. The reason for this is that most people buy their cell phones with a subsidy that is paid back over the duration of a 1 or 2 year minimum duration contract. This control over distribution allows the mobile operators ultimate say over the feature set. This is most visible in branding elements like Cingular's "Media store" icon that flogs overpriced garbage like downloadable ring tones.

To add injury to insult, deleting those "features" is disabled, so they keep hogging scarce memory and screen real estate. Carriers also disable features that would allow people to use their phones without being nickel-and-dimed for expensive intelligent network services like MMS, like some Bluetooth functionality or the ability to send photos over email rather than MMS. It is highly likely carriers will fight tooth-and-nail against the logical inclusion of WiFi and VoIP in future handsets. This conflict of interest between carriers and users won't be resolved until regulators compel them to discontinue what is in effect a forced bundling practice.

Mobile carriers, like their Telco forebears, seem to believe if they piss on something, it improves the flavor... This is also the reason why I think mobile operator cluelessness about mobile data services is terminal — they keep pushing their failed walled-garden model of WAP services using phones, and gouge for the privilege of using a PDA or laptop to access the real Internet via Bluetooth, while at the same time not deigning to provide any support. WiFi may not be an ideal technology, specially in terms of ubiquity, but as long as carriers make us unwashed users jump through hoops to be allowed access to their data networks, low-hassle WiFi access using a PDA will be the superior, if intermittent alternative to a data-enabled phone. As for the aborted phone upgrade, I guess I will just wait for the Nokia 6270 to hit these blighted shores.

02:49 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

Here, take my money. Please. Pretty please?

Eighty percent of success is showing up. — Woody Allen

My company, Kefta, helps its clients, usually Fortune 500 companies with e-commerce operations, improve their online conversion rates. We typically increase sales by 10–20%. This is not rocket science, more akin to Retail 101, simple things like modifying pages to stop showing offers for products we know the user has already purchased, or making offers more relevant when we know the prospect is interested in a specific product (e.g. because they come from Google after searching for that keyword).

Sometimes I wonder if what we are doing is not too sophisticated by far, when I see particularly boneheaded practices at places that really should know better. Dell is often touted as a model of logistical and operational excellence, and for being a web-centric company. My experience is that many products they carry are not listed on the web site and can only be ordered by phone. You also have to phone to get a discount.

Despite being a telecoms engineer by training, I loathe phones. Phones are great for keeping an emotional connection with friends and family, but are a staggeringly inefficient form of communication for business purposes. They do not leave an audit trail, and even when they do (my voice mail system automatically forwards them to me by email as a MIME-encoded WAV attachment), they hog disk space and are not searchable. You can scan an email in a few seconds, but are forced to listen to voice mail at whatever pace it was dictated. Well, at least with WAV attachments, I can skip back to write down a phone number without having to replay the whole message.

Coming back to Dell, I recently needed to buy a Gigabit Ethernet switch from them. I sent an email to my rep, which he promptly ignored. I tried calling, at least 4 or 5 times, but my only option was voice-mail jail. In the end, I passed the buck to a junior colleague, who tried to leave voice mail and discovered he couldn't because it was full. With persistence, he managed to get Dell to condescend to taking our order. No customer should have to go through so many hoops just so the vendor can take their money.

I am ragging on Dell, but most IT vendors do as poorly. I can understand expensive support calls receiving lower priority and resources than sales calls — after all, the company already has your money. Not having their act together for the simple matter of order-taking simply boggles the mind. Workflow systems, automatic call distributors and other technologies designed to prevent this have been available for many years. It looks like nobody has bothered to go through the user experience, even though these bugs (and many other glaring deficiencies like session timeouts) could be caught by the most cursory of inspections.

Dell sends an automated satisfaction survey after a sale. Unlike the order-taking process, the survey follows up if you do not respond... That said, it is the usual worthless multiple-choice question format asking me to answer irrelevant questions on a scale of 1 to 10. I don't recall if the form had a box for free-form comments, but even if it did, the survey design is not-so-subtly signaling that no human is ever going to read what you type there, and thus it is not worth the effort to fill it. The numeric answers are probably going to be collated by an automated report nobody pays any attention to anymore, because garbage-in, garbage-out.

If you are serious about customer feedback, make it open and free-form, and make sure each and every feedback is read by a human (they come quite cheap in the Midwest and the developing world). They should be acknowledged personally (not with an automated reply) and followed through until the issue is either resolved or a decision is taken not to implement the changes suggested (because they are too expensive, impractical or whatever other reason). In both cases, inform the user who bothered to give feedback — most large companies pay a fortune in market research while at the same time ignoring the free (and usually very valuable) insights submitted by their customers. Granted, you cannot always resolve every complaint by unreasonable customers, but feedback on process issues should always be taken into consideration.

Sometimes dropped orders are due to active incompetence rather than careless neglect. While implementing a campaign for one of our clients, we realized there was a bug in one of their ordering forms that would cause them to drop an order. Our software sits on top of the client's website and monitors it precisely for exception cases like these, and we told them we could, at no extra charge for them, send the dropped order details to an email address of their choosing so the order could be re-entered manually. They declined our offer for various reasons related to internal politics and trade union issues, essentially they were refusing to bend down and pick up money lying on the floor (our estimate was they were losing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of customer lifetime value every month due to inaction).

You don't have to endure a multi-million dollar ERP or CRM implementation to improve follow-through. Where there is a will, there is a way, and a little creative thinking will usually find a work-around that can get the job done until a more robust solution can be deployed. One of our clients, a major bank, was in the early stages of developing their e-commerce, and simultaneously in the throes of a Siebel implementation. Their online forms would simply send an email to a branch office for manual processing. We were implementing a satisfaction survey for them, and offered to send an email automatically to a supervisor if the customer's order had not been processed, at least until Siebel came on-line. Poor man's workflow, but email workflows are often quite effective, specially for remedial situations like these.

As I mentioned, sometimes I think I am in the wrong business, and should instead start a consultancy to teach some clue to large companies that have grown complacent. But then again, that is assuming somebody cares, beyond paying lip service to Customer Relationship Management. There is no point in setting up complex systems to build a lifelong relationship with repeat customers if you can't even take their orders in the first place.

12:32 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

Free association

When I first heard Microsoft chose "Vista" as the official name for the much-delayed Longhorn release of Windows, I immediately thought of this (Quicktime, 657KB). Does this mean I am a bad person?

00:48 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

One reason why I am proud to be French

France is the most generous donor in the G-8, contributing 0.42 percent of national income, followed by Britain at 0.34 percent, Germany at 0.28 percent and Canada at 0.26 percent. France has said it will meet the 0.7 percent goal by 2012 and the U.K. by 2013.
Oxfam quoted by Bloomberg

The unfolding Indian Ocean tsunami disaster is a great opportunity to set this right. You can donate to Doctors without Borders as I have, or to one of the many other relief agencies working to bring aid to the displaced survivors and stave off the spread of disease. When I was younger and shopping around for English dictionaries, my litmus test for a good dictionary was whether it included the word "tsunami". Now I wish it had not reached this sudden notoriety...

16:48 - permalink [Soapbox]

Pay for the razor, pay for the blades

King Gillette is famous for his invention of the disposable-blade razor, and the associated business model, "give away the razor, sell the blades". This strategy was widely imitated, but it seems marketers have struck an even better one: why give away the razor when you can make the chumps pay for it?

There are a number of products, some high-tech and some not where you actually pay handsomely for a device that is a doorstop without proprietary refills or service. Some examples:

• In the US, most cell phones are either hard-wired to a specific service provider (CDMA) or SIM-locked (GSM). A consumers' group is fighting in court to ban or at least limit in time the practice, which is either outlawed or strictly regulated in most other countries.

  Sure, the carrier is subsidizing the handset, but that is offset by extra profit margins in the contract. Once the contract's minimum term is over, there is no justification whatsoever for maintaining the SIM lock. AT&T was one of the most egregious offenders, it is not clear if their policy will change after their takeover by Cingular.

  I suspect one of the big reasons for SIM lock is so carriers can charge extortionate international roaming charges, since without SIM lock, it would be cheaper to just pop in a prepaid SIM card in the country you are visiting. Actually, roaming charges are so overpriced that it is cheaper to just buy a new phone for the prepaid card and toss it away afterwards.

  There are real externality costs to society due to distortions in consumer behavior from carrier policies. Many people throw away their old cell phones when they change service or renew a contract, as the subsidy is only applicable towards a new phone purchase, never granted as a rebate to people opting to keep their older but perfectly serviceable phone. In California alone, 44,650 cell phones are discarded each day, usually ending up in landfill, at tremendous cost to the environment.

• MP3.com founder Michael Robertson is suing Vonage for trying to extend the same despicable lock-in model to VoIP, with what he claims is deceptive advertising. Most commentators have rushed to Vonage's defense — apparently, for many geeks the company can do no wrong, like Google. I have no such compunctions, as I have in the past received completely unsolicited spam from them, and thus as far as I am concerned, they fit in the "scum" category.

• In a great illustration of the power of cognitive dissonance, TiVo is another company with rabid and uncritical fans. Originally, TiVo PVRs would remain somewhat functional even without the TiVo service. Sure, you would have to program shows manually, but that is no worse than most VCRs. Over successive software updates, TiVo have reduced their PVRs' autonomy until they are now effectively useless without the service.

• Inkjet printer manufacturers use all sorts of tricks to protect their racket, including putting in microchips designed to foil refilling or the use of third-party cartridges. Lexmark even tried to abuse the DMCA to prevent a competitor from selling reverse-engineered cartridge chips. All this so inkjet ink can remain the most expensive liquid, at significantly higher cost per milliliter than Chanel No. 5 or vintage Dom Perignon.

As in most cases the utility of the machine without the overpriced refills or service is nil, the fair market price for it should be zero. The Vonage/Linksys situation is a special case as the wireless router remains partially usable, albeit without VoIP features if you switch providers. But marketers will keep trying to have it both ways until consumers push back by implementing a zero-tolerance policy, akin to the "broken-window" theory of policing. Do not accept to pay for a cell phone from a carrier that refuses to unlock it after a reasonable amount of time. Refuse to purchase digital devices that require service from a specific vendor to function.

17:48 - permalink [Soapbox]

The only good DRM is dead DRM

As is his wont, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer put his foot in his mouth when he accused iPod owners of being thieves. Actually, the journalists' reports are not entirely accurate - while he used the iPod as an example, what he was really implying is that any music format that is not encumbered with mandatory digital rights management (DRM) restrictions induces "theft".

Copyright infringement is certainly illegal, and should remain so, but merely repeating the mantra that copyright infringement is tantamount to theft does not make it so. This is beyond the point. Many stores have to deal with shoplifting, which is indeed theft. What if a store you were in accused you of shoplifting and performed a strip search? You would feel humiliated and enraged, certainly stop patronizing them and almost certainly sue them for false imprisonment. DRM is no different.

There is no acceptable form of digital rights management, period. And yes, that includes the iTunes Music Store's AAC/Fairplay.

12:28 - permalink [Soapbox]

Annals of idiotic California legislation

Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on Wednesday a bill to ban the production and sale of foie gras in California in 2012. The bill was pushed by his outgoing horse-trading partner, Democratic state senator John Burton. The highly dubious rationale is that the force-feeding of ducks or geese to produce foie gras is "cruel". I can think of many culinary preparations that would qualify, such as lobsters or crabs boiled alive. Then again, many more people eat crustaceans than foie gras, thus they are not as safe a target for a grandstanding politician who has no compunctions about trying to stuff his unwanted offspring down San Francisco voters' throats.

I think the last thing San Francisco's stricken economy needs is another coup de grâce to its' restaurants, one of the few local industries that can (just barely) survive its business-hostile climate (our restaurateur mayor Gavin Newsom seems to agree). In the meantime, better to make your reservations at the French Laundry while you still can. In seven years' time, the only place you will be able to get your fix will be from shady characters in the dark alleys of the Tenderloin, if its gentrification is not complete by then. If you think foie gras is expensive today...

21:59 - permalink [Food, San Francisco, Soapbox]

Attack of the London taxis

London-style taxis (also known as "Hackney carriages) are becoming a common sight in San Francisco, which is apparently one of the first cities in the US to get them. It is amusing, really, when most observers in London expected them to disappear a few years ago. The antiquated look of the London taxi endears it to Londoners, but more importantly, they are very roomy for passengers, and easy to get in and out of, even when you are carrying an umbrella...

One (regular) taxi driver complained to me the London taxis are under-powered and do not go fast enough for him to zip to the other side of the city to pick a ride. Anyone who has seen taxicabs drive in this city knows this is a feature, not a bug, in the interests of public safety. Not that taxi drivers are worse than others - I have never been in another city where drivers violate red lights as casually as in San Francisco, even though I have lived in Paris and Amsterdam.

Taxis, along with docks, are one of the few domains in everyday life where byzantine nineteenth century work arrangements still prevail in defiance of the free market. Most cities arbitrarily limit the number of taxis that can ply the streets, a system that usually benefits taxi companies more than taxi drivers, who often end up in a position similar to sharecroppers. The quotas are seldom updated to reflect demand, due to lobbying by entrenched taxi companies, and cities like Paris or San Francisco often face severe taxi shortages. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy (PDF) related how ministers would fear the wrath of taxi strikers and chicken out of raising numbers.

In San Francisco, proposition K, passed in 1978, limits the number of taxi medallions to 1300. The measure was designed to let genuine taxi drivers, not companies, own the medallions, by requiring a nominal number of driving hours to retain the medallion. The lucky few who hold medallions lease them for $20,000-30,000 a year to taxi companies for when they are not driving themselves. Most actual taxi drivers do not have medallions and lease them for $100 a day or so from taxi companies (sharecroppers on plantations were not required to pay for the privilege of employment).

Of course, the people profiting from this cozy arrangement are never content - the permit holders want to drive less so they can enjoy the rent they are collecting from the coveted medallions. One attempted ploy was to reduce the driving hours requirement for disabled workers. Needless to say, had the measure been passed, overnight many permit holders would have found themselves mysteriously incapacitated. Taxi companies would like to grab medallions for themselves and cut off permit holders from the trough.

The right solution would be to abolish the medallion system altogether, or grant one to all working as opposed to rent-collecting drivers. But of course that is the one solution all vested interests are adamantly opposed to, as it would upset their apple cart. Given the abysmally dysfunctional state of San Francisco municipal politics, the situation is unlikely to improve. No amount of window-dressing with London style cabs is going to change that.

12:38 - permalink [San Francisco, Soapbox]

Are Americans becoming second-class consumers?

I keep noticing with dismay that many of the gadgets I consider for purchase are deliberately crippled in their US versions. It used to be only European consumers had to suffer from inflated prices and reduced functionality, usually self-inflicted due to bureaucratic EU mandates like the DV-In fiasco (most DV camcorders in Europe have digital IEEE1394/Firewire/iLink video out but not digital video in, as otherwise they would be classified as VCRs and be subject to various protectionist customs duties).

• Sony's PEG-TH55 PDA has integrated WiFi and Bluetooth worldwide, except in the US where Bluetooth is omitted. This is incredibly annoying and rules the device out for me (unless I import one from the UK or Germany), as I have discovered from practical experience with my PEG-UX50 that WiFi access points are seldom available when you need them, and I often have to fall back to GPRS via Bluetooth. We are already saddled with the industrialized world's worst mobile telephone operators and clunkiest phones, why add injury to insult?
• Canon's new Digital Rebel DSLR is available in a kit with a 18-55mm lens. The lens has the smooth and fast USM ultrasonic motor in Japan, but uses the inferior AFD micro-motor in the US. Perhaps they believe US customers are too clueless to notice the difference.
• Many ultra-slim laptops available in Japan are never introduced in the US (this has created a market opportunity for parallel importers like Dynamism. Once again, the gaijin must lack the refined aesthetic sensibility to appreciate models like the Sony Vaio X505 and are probably content to lug their boat anchor laptops in their gas-guzzling SUVs. Nor is this attitude limited to Japanese companies - until recently IBM had an entire line of ultra-compact notebook computers available only in Japan.
• Epson's Stylus Photo 2200, probably the favorite printer of professional photographers, does not include in the US the gray balancer, special software and calibration sheets used to improve the neutrality of black and white prints. Michael Reichmann puts it best when he calls this "The software that Epson North America thinks its customers are too dumb to use".

The US is the world's single largest market for consumer goods. Why is it treated with such disregard?

Update (2004-05-12):

Sony is relenting and will officially release the Vaio X505 in the US, albeit for the princely sum of $3000.

07:03 - permalink [Soapbox]

Misremembering the Alamo

Starting tomorrow, the silver screens will be afflicted with a Disney mega-production on the Alamo. Presumably, jingoism will be slathered in the tasteful way one can expect from Michael Eisner's firm. In an apparent bow to political correctness, however, the Tejanos (the original Mexican settlers of Texas) will be shown supporting the rebels (an act they still rue to this day, as they were later driven out of their lands by the Anglo settlers).

The Alamo is an illustration of the starkly diverging memories of Anglo and Hispanic Texans. The Senegalese poet (and later president) Leopold Sédar Senghor's ironic poem "Nos ancêtres les Gaulois" relates how French colonial schools in his country tried to teach African schoolchildren they were descended from Celtic Gauls, and beyond that the intrinsic absurdity of the colonial project. It seems Texas is not far behind, and I would be interested in knowing how many people cheer for Santa Ana's army when the movie screens.

In what may be a coincidence, the supposedly respectable academic and media darling Samuel Huntington penned a viciously anti-Hispanic screed that just drips with the smug contempt of the self-described Anglo-Protestant. In his opinion, Mexican immigrants are not assimilating and are a future fifth column that threatens the integrity of the country. Other know-nothing demagogues said much the same thing about earlier waves of German or Irish immigration. I am not sure which regrettable trait of Mexican-Americans Professor Huntington finds most loathsome, the fact they are not Anglo or that they are not Protestants...

For all the brouhaha, one thing is seldom mentioned. According to one of my Texan cousins, the Texas War of Rebellion (1835-1836) was primarily waged to defend slavery, as Santa Ana had just extended, in a dictatorial act of oppression, the Mexican ban on slavery to Texas. One can only conclude the mythology surrounding the Alamo is merely a successful version of what Southern revisionists are trying to achieve, i.e. transmogrifying slavers into noble defenders of freedom.

14:15 - permalink [Soapbox]

The megapixel myth, a pixel too far?

I wrote an article on how questionable digital camera marketing has pushed megapixels to the forefront, to the exclusion of everything else, and how this "megapixel myth" leads to counterproductive design decisions. More than 1200 people read this article in the first few days it was made available, so I promoted it to the "Longer Articles" section.

Click here for the full article

16:36 - permalink [Photo, Soapbox]

Sessions must die

Many e-commerce sites have session timeouts. Dawdle too long between the moment you enter the site and the moment you actually want to buy something, and you will be presented with an unpleasant message. The words "session timeout" will be there, drowned in a sea of technobabble, and you will have to restart from scratch. Using a bookmark will often have the same effect.

At this point, you may well be tempted to go shop elsewhere; indeed, it is the only principled response to such blatant contempt for customers. You will notice that successful sites like Amazon.com do not make their customers suffer such hassles - once you're in, you are in, whether you have to take a lunch break or not. I don't buy the security argument either - there is nothing sensitive about the contents of a cart, security belongs at checkout time, not browse time.

The reason why such crimes against usability are perpetrated is that business requirements too often take a back seat to technical expediency, paradoxically most often due to lack of technical competence. Many web development environments keep track of what you do on a website, the contents of your cart, and so on, in "sessions", portions of memory that are set aside for this book-keeping purpose. They cannot be set aside forever, and must be purged to make room for new customers.

The tyro programmer will leave the default policy in place, which is to dump the session altogether and place the burden of recovering state on the customer. More experienced programmers will implement the session mechanism in a database so it can be kept almost indefinitely. In an era where disk space costs a dollar or two per gigabyte, and a desktop computer has enough processing power to crunch tens of thousands of transactions per minute, there is no justification for not doing so.

22:50 - permalink [IT, Soapbox]

Homo trium literarum

Homo trium literarum (man of three letters) is a synonym for thief in the 1922 edition of Roget's thesaurus. The latin word for thief is fur, hence the pedantic periphrase. The only record I find of it being used was by Wedderburn, the British Solicitor-General against Benjamin Franklin, in front of the Privy Council:

I hope, my Lords, he exclaimed, with thundering voice and vehement beating of his fist on the cushion before him - I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, of Europe, and of mankind... He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoirs. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters; homo trium literarum (i.e., fur, thief!).

Franklin had made public letters from the governor of Massachusetts, urging the British government to take draconian measures against the colonists.

That said, with so many CEOs and CFOs implicated in corporate embezzlement, this quaint expression might be overdue for a revival...

23:21 - permalink [Soapbox]