A Trifle Absurd

I Got a Job!

And not just any job: I’m working at Google. Google Kirkland, to be precise. I started with a week of training in Mountain View, and have just finished my first week at the Kirkland office.

(So, for the record, now that I have an employer: This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and not those of Google.)

I’m really excited to be working at Google, and I’ll be working on a great project… which I can’t talk about. But I should have enough non-Google material to start posting here regularly again.

I’m Still Here

I’ve been on an enforced vacation these last few weeks, much of it away from the computer. And on top of those goings-on, I’ve been launched into a reevaluation of my vocation and what the heck I’m doing with my life. So that’s why there hasn’t been anything here.

I hope to get back into the swing of geeky things soon and have something real to post. At the very least, I’ll write up my booklog for April.

Activity Invention

Don Norman (yes, that Don Norman) proposes a shift in attitude from Human-Centered Design to Activity-Centered Design. He contends that the basic tenet “adapt the technology to the person”, while noble-minded, ignores the simple fact that “people do adapt to technology”:

Learn the activity, and the tools are understood. That’s the mantra of the Human-Centered Design community. But this is actually a misleading statement, because for many activities, the tools define the activity. Maybe the reality is just the converse: Learn the tools, and the activity is understood.

This is most evident in the ineffable realm of software. Suppose someone wants to learn how to browse the Web; how are they going to learn the activity apart from learning the tool (the browser)? The browser’s capabilities and limitations define the activity of browsing the Web.

Great innovations don’t just improve a preexisting activity, they define a new activity. This ought to set software designers thinking: what new activity, what new category, what new mode of thought is hovering just on the edge of consciousness, waiting to be called into concrete existence? The limits aren’t inside the computer—they’re in our imaginations.

Having Fun

I’m really having fun with the computer these days—a happy confluence of switching to the Mac and having good projects to work on. (Upgrading my work habits to the point where I’m seeing continual, visible progress has helped a lot, too.) I’ve rediscovered the joy of programming, that spark that caught fire in my imagination years ago.

It’s odd to realize that I’ve been programming computers for more than twenty-two years. I dove into programming in third grade, learning Logo on my own on my school’s sole computer, an Apple IIe. A couple of years later, I came home from a piano lesson to find a new Commodore 64 waiting for me (tape drive and all!), and hacked happily on it all the way through high school. My post-college programming experiences haven’t evoked that same kind of feeling—until now.

There Is No Shelf

Clay Shirky states the case against ontology once more, with his usual good sense: “…if you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no filesystem. The links alone are enough.”

There is no shelf. We can organize the virtual world any way we please. Most metaphors we have now, though, are based on physical models. It’s time we got more creative, and started building interfaces that work in ways that physical reality cannot.

The files-and-folders (desktop) interface was based on a physical model to make it easier to learn. Will nonphysical models be harder? Not necessarily. Take the spreadsheet, the all-time success story of a new conceptual model. At a glance, it has the reassuring familiarity of a piece of lined paper, but type in one formula and you enter a new world. The real conceptual model of a spreadsheet has no physical analog at all — yet millions can and do use it.

Switching Machines: A Usability Nightmare

I just got back from a trip to Idaho, where I helped my parents switch to a new(er) computer. My parents are smart people, but they aren’t geeks, and I can’t imagine how they could have done this without geek assistance.

Take the simple(?) task of copying files from one machine to another. How would they have done it? Floppies? Nope, too many files are bigger than floppy-size these days, and no non-geek understands things like multi-volume zip files. CDs? Nope, the old machine is too old to have a CD burner. A simple two-machine network? Let’s see what that would involve: installing a network card in the old machine, procuring a crossover Ethernet cable to plug the two machines together, and rigging some simple network settings in each machine’s control panel. That’s what I actually did, and for me it was easy; for them, needless to say, it would have been impossible.

And that’s just one aspect of switching machines. Take another problem I ran into: the new machine would dial up to the net just fine, but then hang up after a couple of minutes. The solution involved the modem initialization string; right there, you’ve lost 95% of folks, not because they’re not smart, but because they aren’t versed in computer arcana, and don’t want to be.

After years of talk about usability, we still manage to make the most basic tasks inaccessible to the normal user. Get a clue, folks: there are a lot more computer users like my parents than there are like us.

Radial and Cartesian Thinking

Clay Shirky has found a new way to classify people into two groups, radial and Cartesian:

Radial people tend to think more about change than end state, and more about local maxima (are things getting better?) than about a global maximum (are things as good as they could be?). Cartesian people think more about end state than change, and more about global than local maxima.

It’s not that new, though; it’s more of a different way to look at Richard Gabriel’s dichotomy between Worse Is Better and The Right Thing. Only Richard isn’t into classifying people so much as development styles, while Clay blithely tosses people into categories, putting Richard into the radial/worse-is-better camp even though, as the above link demonstrates, Richard has flip-flopped several times.

I think Richard is closer to the mark: the point isn’t to classify people, it’s to recognize two different ways of thinking, so you can choose the best method for a given situation. Sometimes it’s better to tackle a problem by envisioning the smallest possible change that would solve it, while other times it’s better to rethink the whole picture. The trick is knowing when to do which.

Adjusting to Abundance

Today, apt-get informed me that the libraries-and-headers package I was installing would take up 28 MB. Twenty-eight megs! That’s HUGE–oh, wait, I have eighty gigs of storage, even on this not-so-current machine. Twenty-eight megs is a drop in the bucket.

I’m still adjusting my mindset to match the abundance of resources on today’s machines, relative to ten or twenty years ago. Maybe I should post an affirmation above my monitor to recite five times a day: “I have plenty of disk space and can afford to waste it”.

And it’s not just disk space: processor cycles, memory, bandwidth, all of it is exploding. “So what?” you say. “It’s just Moore’s Law in action.” I wonder how many of us have internalized it, though. I know I haven’t: too often I think of shaving off a few bytes here, saving a handful of instructions there. That’s the scarcity mindset, but for personal-level (as opposed to enterprise-level) applications, we live in a world of abundance.

Wiki Wishes

Since I started using the Getting Things Done system, I’ve been keeping my various lists in text files. It’s worked surprisingly well, but I keep wanting more, so as an intermediate step (towards Trifle) I’ve switched to using a wiki.

The wiki is a definite improvement over plain text — it’s much easier to split things out into their own pages, since (of course) you have hyperlinks. With text files I was always tempted to stuff project support stuff into the master projects list, just so I wouldn’t have to bother creating yet another file I’d have to remember to look at.

The downside of a wiki is the modal separation of viewing and editing. IE and Mozilla both have live WYSIWYG editing these days–why not put that to use for a wiki-style personal web editor? A few simple searches fail to turn up anything, but surely someone out there has already done this…

Happy New Year!

I’m back from a bit of vacation (from blogging and from life in general), and ready to plunge into the new year. Geek-wise, there’s not much to tell about the last few weeks, except that I’ve finally made the leap to using Ubuntu Linux as my day-to-day OS.

My experience so far with Ubuntu has mirrored that of Bryn Keller: “The results have been, unsurprisingly, mixed.” Not everything has Just Worked, sad to say, and some of the fixes have been hard to come by. (The Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide has helped, though.) The latest problem, which I have yet to solve, is that I can’t play audio CDs–I can rip them, and listen to the MP3s, but I can’t play audio CDs directly. One thing I will say for Linux, though: once you get something working, it keeps working.

Using Ubuntu has been a good experience, overall. Still, it leaves me pining for Mac OS X. Maybe it’s just greener-grass syndrome, but I think there’s a lot to be said for a snazzy and (relatively) consistent UI, all the basic stuff that just works, and a Unix core deep down inside. Linux is heading that direction, but Mac OS X is already there.