Embracing Chaos

Here’s a little hacker tid-bit for those of you with phones running WM5.  It’s the closest thing to task manager that I’ve found without installing a 3rd party app.  If you want to get a list of running tasks and actually stop one as opposed to push it into the background, follow these steps:

• Press Start
• Select Settings
• Choose the System tab
• Run Memory
• Choose the Running Programs tab

Happy terminating!

At Foo Camp this past weekend, I took notes using three different technologies.  The results have led me to some interesting conclusions.  Here’s what I used:

• Day 1: I took notes on my Treo
• Day 2: I carried around my MacBook
• Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook

My notes from the first day are brief, but useful.  They are generally just names and short phrases.  They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on.  I used the notepad function in my PDA.  It was pretty easy to pop it open and jot something down.  Windows crashed on me of course, which prevented me from capturing a few things.  But overall it was pretty handy.

My notes from the second day are very sparse.  I have a few blog entries that are 5% written and an e-mail draft.  There isn’t a lot here.  I carried my laptop around because I was presenting that day, and wanted to be able to practice and tweak my slides.  I also saw some other people engaging in really high-bandwidth communication with the net using laptops and thought I could too.  The real thing that got in the way was startup time.  Even though OS X is really pretty good at this, the several seconds it takes to turn on and connect to the net got in the way of capturing ideas.  I think another problem was my own fault — I tried to put information in the form that it would be ultimately used rather than just quickly jot down reminders.  Having the ability to author the content in the format it would be ultimately used tempted me to do so, but it wasn’t the best choice in retrospect.  It’s also somewhat anti-social.

My notes from the third day are fabulous.  I have many names and URLs and ideas and drawings and numbers.  The paper notebook took no time to boot up, to load a writing app, a contact management app, a drawing app — they’re all instantly available.  It never crashed.  Switching contexts in it was as easy as flipping a page.

My conclusion is that for this kind of fast-paced environment, reducing barriers to capturing ideas is critical.  A critical measure is the latency from deciding to record something to being done recording it.  By this measure, the paper notebook was the hands-down winner.  As Tim noted, fewer people were carrying laptops, maybe for this reason.

Digression into personal projects…

This problem is what inspired me to build Offbrain, which allows you to record ideas in the cloud using a cellphone for later retrieval.  I’ve seen people using Twitter for this, which I think is a great application.  I might switch to that technique, but it requires looking at twitter in a slightly different light, since very few of my friends want to be plugged into my random-idea-stream that closely, and I often want to capture ideas that I don’t want to disclose publicly. 

I’m re-inspired to finish the SMS gateway for Offbrain.  Since we always have our cell phones and we’ve co-evolved (with our handsets) the ability to quickly jam out li’l notes very fast, SMS offers a great low-latency way to capture ideas for a lot of people.  I think I’m going to borrow Gina Trapani’s command-line interface for task tracking as an SMS command language for Offbrain.  (Thanks, Gina!)  I was impressed with her talk about it — this UI has clearly evolved through a lot of iterations to become a simple, effective, powerful way to record and categorize action items.  Offering a todo.txt export should be an easy and useful hack too.  The obvious follow-ups are hosted todo.txt in the sky with multiple access methods including web, web services, SMS, etc.  Beginning to sound more and more like twitter.  Hmmm…

Thanks to Steve Garfield for the picture.  Yay for CC saving me the trouble of taking my own.

I just got back from foo camp, a small unconference-style event held on the Sebastopol campus of O’Reilly.  FOO stands for Friends Of O‘Reilly.  (The name came out of a joke about having a "foo bar" at a conference.  This bar served me too much wine over the course of the weekend.)  Tim O’Reilly likes the conference because it helps him spot upcoming
trends early, which is an important part of O’Reilly’s business both as
a publisher of technology books, and as an organizer of large public
conferences.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

I’m writing this post from an OLPC.  It’s on wifi here at Foo camp running a gecko based browser. First impressions -it’s hard to type on. I’m switching to 2 finger mode.

The browser is a bit slow but runs ajaxy  sites well.

Hardware looks good. Screen is nice.

A number of folks in our discussion group led by Ian Bicking wants to send a bunch of these prototypes to burningman to see how they hold up in a harsh physical environment.

More later on a better keyboard…

So Apple is releasing the Safari browser for Windows.  My first reaction is "great, just what we need — another minority browser."  It’s a funny move for Apple because IE will probably remain the #1 browser for quite a while just because of inertia, even as Firefox gains shares based on markedly superior features.  So realistically the best Apple can hope for is #3, which really isn’t their style.  Their claims about speed just aren’t going to win over users because application performance just isn’t that important for browsers on full-sized computers.  On small computers with limited CPU people generally don’t have a choice of browsers.  That could win over embedded platform developers if Apple were to allow the source to be ported (unlikely IMHO).

Safari does have some innovative UI features which will win them some
fans.  Without IP protection I’m guessing it won’t take long for the
Mozilla kids to replicate them.  (If there’s one thing open source is
good at it’s building a project to match somebody else’s spec.)  I
really doubt Apple will be able to keep innovating useful features fast
enough to keep a meaningful lead for long.

The real reason they’re doing this is of course to make it a more attractive platform for people to write applications for the iPhone.  It’s a close analogy to how Microsoft supported IE for Mac — the only reason is to have a reasonable cross platform story.  This is another sign that Apple’s betting big on the iPhone.  The fact that it won’t be easy to text while driving will limit its usefulness for some people.  It’s a symptom of the phenomenon that even with a great touch-screen like the iPhone has, generic UI’s aren’t as good as single-purpose UI’s.

Attracting web developers is really what Apple needs to do.  Listening to my coworkers, they’ve got an uphill battle ahead of them.  Safari claims to be based on standards, but I hear it’s a hassle to get things to work properly in it.  Right now, the subtle HTML/CSS rendering differences aren’t nearly as important as differences in javascript behavior.  For a long time Safari has been missing some a few key XML parsing APIs for AJAX.  In the near future, the key differentiator for browsers is going to be the availability of good libraries for off-line web applications, like Google Gears.  Unless they talk Google into release Gears for Safari, I predict this isn’t going to go very well for them.  I hope we don’t see too much industry fragmentation here.

I recently started using Outlook 2007 for corporate e-mail as a POP3 client.  Since "upgrading" whenever I receive e-mail, the whole system locks up for about 3-15 seconds.  Doing something.  Who knows what.  Task Manager says Outlook has the CPU, but it’s got it with a high enough priority thread that basically nothing else can run.  No other office apps.  Even Firefox is non-responsive.

Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest.  But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic.  What takes so long I have no idea.  After a bit of wrestling I managed to disable the on-anything virus scanner, so I know it’s not that.  Indexing the messages for searching is my best guess.  If I could figure out how to uninstall the MS/Live Desktop Search App I would, but it conveniently forgot to add itself to the add/remove programs list.

I’m sorely tempted to switch to gmail for my corporate e-mail interface.  I admit I haven’t yet made it past the first step of the 3 standard Microsoft troubleshooting techniques.  But I know others who are having similar problems so I suspect it wouldn’t help.  Overall Office 2007 is a pretty nice product once you get used to the menu shuffling.  But it runs painfully slowly.  I guess this is the trend for MS software which supports their symbiosis with Intel — code for the next generation of hardware to encourage upgrades.  The idea being that more CPU power supports a more compelling user experience.  Personally, I haven’t been convinced that the upgrade is worth it yet.  I’m more often impressed with a good web UI than a new flashy aero-glass UI.

A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software.  They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively.  Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net.  They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

My girlfriend has an auto-immune skin condition called psoriasis that gives her rashes.  For some people the condition gets serious enough that patients and MD’s turn to drugs that suppress T-cells, the part of the immune system which causes the inflammation.  Turning down the volume level on your immune system has all sorts of easily predictable side-effects, but for people whose immune systems are just a little too enthusiastic it can be the right choice.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

A fair bit has been written about a security fix for IE that Microsoft pushed out about a month ago — the now infamous KB931768 fix.  This security fix has a bad habit of making IE unusable for a lot of people, particularly Vista users, because of problems opening the "navcancl" file.  A couple of coworkers and I have had a slightly different problem.  For us, as soon as we open IE, we get a file download dialog asking what to do with the HTML file that it should be displaying, and IE shuts itself down instantly upon answering the dialog.

This variation of the problem isn’t covered by Microsoft’s KB article on how to workaround the KB931768 problems.  I had good luck uninstalling the hotfix.  (Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Check "Show Updates" -> Windows Internet Explorer -> Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer 7 (KB931768) -> Remove )

[Update 6/12: I spoke too soon.  Last night, Windows installed the hotfix again and IE is back to broken.  My IT department advises shutting off auto-update.  Nice.]

One of my co-workers who was having the same problem went through the MS tech support stack and was told to re-install Windows.  I love it.  MS has 3 ways of dealing with any software problem, and having been spending the last couple of weeks wrestling with Earthlink’s attrocious customer support I’m imagining 3 tiers of support staff to deliver this message:

Tier 1 support: Reboot your computer.  Did that fix your problem?  Okay, let me transfer you.  Please hold.

Tier 2 support: Re-install the application in question.  Did that fix your problem?  No?  I’m very sorry.  Please hold while I transfer you.

Tier 3 support: Re-install your operating system.

The last one is pretty much guaranteed to work since by the time you re-install the OS and all your apps, the computer looks nothing like what you had before.  Because of this, very few people are willing to go through with it.

In an attempt to focus this blog on business and technology trends, this article has been federated to Safety Fourth, a blog about biking and other outdoor activities.