You Better Work

I've just got one thing to iMessage...

My problem with the idea of a world without PCs is that people still need to get work done.  Tablets and phones make nice consumption devices, but I’m not going to code or pen my first novel on one.  It’s not a matter of CPU speed, storage capacity, or network access; a current-day smart phone is more powerful and connected than a PC ten years ago.  You may remember we got work done back then on those quaintly obsolete big beige boxes and monstrously-heavy cathode-ray tubes.

Two things make the PC the place where work still gets done: screen real estate and rich input devices (i.e., keyboards and precise pointing devices). I’ve posted before on the mistaken assumption that one thing must replace another [Reports of Mouse’s Death Greatly Exaggerated].  There are appropriate contexts for smart phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs.  I often use two computers (1 desktop, 1 laptop) and my iPhone “simultaneously” exactly because it’s a physical way to define contexts for easy monitoring, switching, and sometimes ignoring.  Put in simple terms:  ”Right tool for the job” necessitates having more than one tool in your toolbox.

Don’t expect the PC to go away; just expect it to cost more.  People generating serious content and playing serious games will still need real workstations and top-of-the-line gaming rigs.  However, the general demand for such devices will go down since tablets and phones are already seen as good enough for daily tasks like email, chat, and web browsing along with their superiority in portability-related domains like music and eBooks.  Lower PC prices have been as much about demand as technological advances, and demand is shrinking enough that industry players like Dell are trying to abandon the consumer PC market that made them [Dell unveils new servers, says not a PC company | Reuters].  The logical consequence is flattening or rising prices as overall demand shrinks and the remaining demand is focused on higher-end devices.

New User Is Old Hat

Game Changer

The fact is we’ve been in the trans-PC world since 1997 when the PalmPilot debuted.  It wasn’t that people hadn’t tried to make palmtop computers before–we had a few wacky prototypes at Commodore in the early 90s.  The PalmPilot succeeded because it was the first device that didn’t try to be a PC itself; it was something that augmented your PC by sharing data (via cabled synchronization) and being mobile.  Unboxing my first PalmPilot was the moment where I really got the idea of the context a device brings to my data.  With everything living in the cloud, PCs aren’t the personal data overlords they once were.  They are one among many devices available for us to find, use, or create content in the most appropriate context at the moment.

First, my personal experience with being in the Social driver’s seat. Then, a case where I’ve seen Social in the Enterprise be the cure instead of the disease.

Back on the Chain Gang

My next Linkedin profile picture

Part of my community service for being between is serving as chair of my condominium association’s communications committee. In that role, I attended a breakfast seminar sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Condominium Managers Association (GPCMA) on social media awareness in January.  There were three speakers:  a lawyer raining down real-world worst-case scenarios who advocates making new residents sign online anti-defamation agreements; an insurance professional explaining that there haven’t been any real test cases so the industry has no benchmarks for insuring against social-media-related liabilities; a social media expert saying “it’s great, you have to do this” but not really explaining why.  The take-away for most people that day was “protect yourself” instead of “let’s make beautiful music together”.

Having worked in the realms of regulation and compliance, I’m conditioned to be cautious (ok, paranoid).  After that meeting, I’ve been reluctant to pull my building into the 21st Century for fear of demonstrable risks, no clear remedies when something bad happens, and a nebulous value proposition.  Some residents are part of a years-old Yahoo! Group already, and observing the level of discourse (ok, lurking) makes me doubly-reluctant.  Still, I feel the pressure from my “board” to do something because of the condominium Council’s broad, vague mandate to “have a website or something”.  So, here’s my plan so far:

Perform an owner/resident survey to assess the interests and capabilities of the community. Making decisions, especially ones that affect my building’s budget, is something I don’t like to do blind.  Also important is generating a participatory feeling: I’ve seen enough good-idea projects flounder because they failed to involve their target communities in the beginning.

Get building notifications to people electronically, via their preferred medium, to supplement the current memo-under-the-door method.  Push isn’t social per se, but it’s a step along the way to getting residents to think about the building as a place online as well as in real life.  Unlike a workplace, I have to deal with inconsistent tools and capabilities–we don’t have email addresses for all of our residents, and there are probably some who don’t even have email at all! I have to accomodate 80-year-old retirees who’ve lived in the building since it opened as well as 20-something professionals moving in tomorrow.  This is definitely a frog I need to boil slowly.

Think a step ahead of the Council.  My mandate is a curious artifact of politics and years of “we should have a website” not leading to results.  The problem is I don’t think a traditional website makes sense anymore.  Leveraging public, cloud-based solutions when I don’t have an IT staff or dedicated community managers on hand is a more sustainable approach, and this is a case where I have no desire to reinvent the wheel with a local website developer.

I sympathize with executives who feel compelled to “do Social” from above and where expectations below come from the not-obviously-relevant personal realms of Facebook and Twitter.  It’s a 360 mismatch of expectation and reality, but there may be a larger problem with smaller networks: Part of Social’s value equation is Metcalfe’s Law, and a corollary would be that there’s some critical mass of active connections required for a social network to sustain itself.  Chat and dating sites (and now MMOs) need to have plenty of free participants in order to make their services worth it to their smaller base of paying customers.  A pure-paid chat site isn’t going to work, and the subscription-only MMO is becoming a rare thing only feasible for the biggest intellectual properties.

What if most companies aren’t big enough to have a self-sustaining network?  Without dedicated evangelists, there may not be enough regular traffic to keep people interested.  That’s one of my big concerns as chair: My building is large as buildings go with almost 600 units, but it’s microscopic from the Social perspective.

Hailing Frequencies Open

I always thought of myself as Spock, but...

Virginia references a Harvard Business Review blogger who seems to confuse collaboration with Social; they are different but not mutually exclusive things. Collaboration’s about projects, about people coming together to produce a result. Social doesn’t have a clearly-identifiable objective; e.g., sharing pictures isn’t an objective, it’s an activity.  On the consumption side, it’s more like discovery than development, and it may produce collaboration as a by-product. I recently saw the two dove-tail nicely.

A former client is switching from Lotus Notes to SharePoint.  They were a big Notes shop with a massive, highly-customized installation.  Despite its age, their Notes platform is still the best collaborative environment I’ve seen professionally, and I miss it when working at other clients with more COTS solutions.  SharePoint itself is a very different beast, and their implementation being COTS is generating lots of head scratching after years with such a custom-fitted solution

These are IT people in Pharma R&D, so it wasn’t surprising when some of the collaboration tool mavens started documenting hacks, work-arounds, and equivalents on their somewhat-informal wiki farm.  This kind of living documentation is a great way to manage the early adoption stage where understanding is low and the delivered functionality changes rapidly.  I love wikis for things like this; it works amazingly well in the world of poorly-documented, frequently-changing MMOs.

Social factored into the equation when people started posting questions and complaints to an internal Twitter-like tool.  Before, most people found those excellent wiki resources by the luck of their acquaintance with a maven or other person in the know.  Now, those “help me” posts would get “follow this link” replies.  I suspect another thing was going on here; the questions probably began shaping what was on the wiki, especially when a new release introduced new bugs or changed functionality.

The mechanism here may be that Social identifies the problem and collaboration solves it, both working much faster than traditional channels. I have to wonder how much the “semi-supported” status and informal, undirected tone of those services contributed to the positive outcome.  It requires a hands-off approach–and trust–from management that I can understand as an information professional.  But, can I embrace it as management in my role as committee chair?  That’s proving to be surprisingly difficult.

My profile URL [profiles.google.com/kominetz] now redirects to plus.google.com/{ugly-long-id}. I’m not sure I like the implication of this, because I use my profile for OpenID, and I’d like to use it as a homepage that links to everything so I can just tell people “go there, and you’ll find me anywhere I am on the Internet.” That URL going away would make me rather unhappy.

Buzz is still a tab there, but it seems totally disconnected from Google+. It might be good to have some separation between Buzz and Posts because they post/notification frequency on Buzz can be pretty high on a Google Reader catch-up day, but Buzz feels too disconnected–and somewhat redundant. Also, oddly, there’s no RSS feed on the Buzz, tab but there is on the Posts tab. I don’t pay attention to things on the web that don’t have feeds.

Finally, I just noticed that the would-have-been convenient “Send an Email” button on my profiles/plus page only works if I’m signed into another Google account. That’s probably a spam avoidance tactic, but it’s still a let-down since I was hoping to use it as my About/Contact page that doesn’t expose my email address.

Reposted manually from Google+ since it can’t do that …

I’ve been clamoring for something better than the mouse for more than a decade. My ideal interface would unite action with result to eliminate the perceptual disconnect between moving my hand in one place and seeing the result in another. The iPhone was the first thing in all that time to feel like a real breakthrough along those lines, and I think there’s much personal computer interfaces can learn from touch on phones and tablets. That doesn’t mean copy them verbatim and proclaim previous paradigms completely invalid.

The second half of Erick Schonfeld’s TechCrunch article on Windows 8 [Windows 8 Is Gorgeous, But Is It More Than Just A Shell?] claims the mouse is dead. I beg to differ. Touch interfaces like this have their uses, but they also have limitations because they are content consumption oriented.  It’s not that we’re living in a post-mouse era: we’re living in a post-one-size-fits-all era, i.e., the Windows Everywhere Era.  Touch interfaces will not obliterate mice and trackpads for the following reasons.

IMPRECISION: The finger is an imprecise pointing device when pixels matter.  Although I don’t have fat fingers, it’s rather difficult for me to finger a single pixel on a good monitor with 100 pixels per inch–let alone the Retina Display’s 326 PPI. You can select an image that way, but you can’t draw one.  It’s not just being more precise; pointing devices can transform imprecise hand movements into a variety of precision levels on screen. I love mice that let me dial up the resolution for fine work or dial it down when flailing around in a game.

OBSTRUCTION: With touch interfaces, fingers block sight of a substantial number of pixels during touch activities, interfering with the realization of a realtime respond-where-you-act interface like touch. That’s not an issue when tapping a built-big tile to select something but it’s a big problem for precision movement or tracking.

INEFFICIENCY: Sometimes editing text requires switching between mouse and keyboard despite a keyboard jockey’s mastery of keyboard shortcuts. Current pointing devices live within the same range of motion as the keyboard so it’s a small, less disruptive gesture. Now imagine reaching from keyboard to the screen to drag-select or reposition a cursor; the gods of time-and-motion studies will not be pleased. Maybe laptops would fare better than desktops with Windows 8, but it also might add to the ergonomic train wreck they’ve become.

SMUDGINESS: People touching monitors is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’m a little more smudge tolerant with my iPhone, but I can’t imagine what my monitor would look like after just one working lunch on Windows 8. Just thinking about this makes me want to rush into the bathroom and wash my hands.

Touch technologies have existed for decades, and I think that the iPhone APIs ushered in this new era, not the hardware. Apple created a toolset to help developers deal with the strengths and weaknesses of touch that also provided a consistent experience for users across applications. Mac OS X Lion appears to learn from touch interfaces, not emulate them. Apple realizes that they need operating systems that match the devices they run on, perhaps a wisdom only earned by making both software and hardware. Microsoft should think very carefully about repeating their habitual strategic blunder of trying to make a one-size-fits-all Windows.

However, I’ve been coming around to V.’s way of thinking about ads in new media lately. I don’t mind as much because ads are at least loosely targeted to the topic-specific sites I frequent; sometimes I’m even grateful when I encounter something previously unknown and personally applicable.  That happens more when I’m willing to make Google privy to my electronic life or tell Hulu when ads are relevant. Old media pushes me further away while new media draws me into its less-adflated, more-relevant open arms.

So I came home from a MarkLogic event at The Palomar–ready to blog about some things they get that EMC is just starting to grasp–to find a new comment on an old post about the iPhone Clock app.  It was an ad (no surprise) but it was perfectly relevant to the post and even got me into iTunes to download the app (big surprise).  A few more things like this might even get cynical me to stop cringing whenever I see “please moderate” in my inbox.

The reward for that relevance is an extra plug.  I haven’t tried the app yet since there’s nothing to time at the moment, but I encourage you to take a look:

So, please do check out http://www.elapsedapp.com – you’ll find it to be a significant upgrade from the default Clock app. Oh, one last thing… its FREE!

I’ve fantasized for years about replacing dm_sysobject with something light weight and implementing things like folder location and versioning as interfaces applied to that type as needed. Pie might not have had hair pulling to do if dm_folder wasn’t bringing along all of dm_sysobject’s baggage.  It’s another example of the junk DNA rife through Documentum’s API and schema.

Documentum did add lightweight objects a few years ago, but they fell far short of my fantasy.  They turned out to be a hack to deal with bulk object creation instead of a fundamental refactoring of the object schema. I wasn’t surprised; implementing something like my fantasy would be an upgrade/compatibility nightmare; every single sysobject would have to be folded, spindled, and mutilated in the process. Just the database part of that upgrade could take days on big docbases, and those upgrades could fail in spectacular ways noticeable only long after the fact. Oh well.

It’s a lesson to inform the creators of new systems like Documentum. Of course there are scaling problems at the database level if those interface abstractions result in lots of separate tables and joins at the concrete level assuming a relational database infrastructure. I think that’s still a safe assumption since object databases haven’t gotten that much better and NoSQL databases don’t seem to be a good fit to this problem space on first blush. I wonder: Did Alfresco learn any of these lessons? Maybe I’ll go take a look under its hood and see.

Related:

• The Cake Folder is a Lie
• DFC has Junk (DNA) in the Trunk

Other languages have always had separate commands to display strings with or without newlines at the end.  Embedding escape codes like \n or using Perl’s smarts around concatenating and contextualizing work fine, so a separate command isn’t necessary like in some of those other languages with print and println or write and writeln.  ”So why now?” I asked.

Some of the semi-glib responses to my follow-up touched on the venerated trait of laziness among Perl programmers and joking about doing more with less (i.e., two less characters from print to say). I say semi-glib because both of these comments hold kernels of truth about Perl that originally drew me to the language and explain my continued frustration with the “newer” languages that I now have to call bread and butter.

Perl has always been a programming language for the lazy, proud, and impatient.  From personal experience, I’m more likely to use print with a “\n” than without, so that little extra work spread out over the thousands and thousands of print “…” does add up. There is some sense in having a command whose default mode includes a linefeed.

Perl has also always been a language about packing–functionally and semantically. That’s earned it a reputation of being hackish or too clever for itself, but anything taken to an extreme can be bad.  My experience supports the perlish idea that less code written is less code to debug or relearn later.  Some languages, especially those fond of methods on literal strings instead of operators, provide flexibility at the cost of verbosity and ugliness.  The idea of packing more capability into two less characters is very, very Perl.

There’s talk of trying to reinvigorate the Perl base and recover some of the mindshare (and subsequent marketshare) that Perl’s lost over the last decade.  I don’t think say will convince legions of .Net or Java programmers to switch, but I’ll definitely use it my next script.

From the Perldocs on say:

• say FILEHANDLE LIST
• say LIST
• say

Just like print, but implicitly appends a newline. say LIST is simply an abbreviation for { local $\ ="\n"; print LIST } .

This keyword is available only when the “say” feature is enabled: see feature.

Here are my thoughts on Brilliant Leap’s latest post about EMC dropping Web Content Manager [Brilliant Leap: Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye].

I remember when Documentum turned its back on their Big Pharma customers to chase the web content management dream during the tech bubble. So now they’re backing away from WCM after dropping DSM? Hmm. Then there’s EMC’s “we’re not worthy” submissive stance regarding Sharepoint. Hmm.

Will users five years from now actually know what Documentum is? EMC will have to wage a “Documentum Inside” campaign like Intel’s to keep any kind of mind share with customers. They still have Captiva, but does anybody really want to be *known* for scanning, the lowest form of document management?

An optimist would claim that they’re focusing on core technologies, and we’ll see long-needed improvements at the server and in the data model. A pessimist would argue this is another sign of EMC parasitizing Documentum. Think “zombie wasp” from the RadioLab episode on Parasites.

I am not exactly known for being an optimist, but this may be good news for alternatives like Drupal and Alfresco as businesses starting reaching for a can of Raid.

At home, I only use Windows on my gaming machine. XP after all these years is running (mostly) smoothly and quickly. The newest game I’m running said yesterday that Win7 is not officially supported despite the developer having a very close relationship with Microsoft. Games are particularly sensitive to change, especially in graphics drivers, audio drivers, and memory management. There’s no benefit under Win7 with any of the games I play (e.g., no DirectX 10 games), only risk.

My current client is still on Windows XP. While I expect they will move to Windows 7 eventually, it won’t be anytime soon: The upgrade inertia of a company with tens of thousands of computers, many of which don’t have the horsepower to make Win7 a good experience, is a frightening thing to behold. Especially if you make your living by selling shrink-wrapped upgrades to companies like them.

Win7 is in a bind; Vista’s problems weren’t entirely technical and may reflect the mature nature of the computer market more than mistakes made at the software level. People upgrade Windows when they buy new computers, not to get new features. The economic downturn means fewer computer sales. Some analysts think Win7 will drive more hardware sales,but that’s a cart-before-the-horse argument to me.

People use applications, not hardware or operating systems. Until those applications require new hardware or Win7, people won’t upgrade. It’s cost without benefit. Microsoft is trying to include useful software with Win7, something they (sometimes unfairly) get into trouble for, but people with Windows right now already have 3rd party software for those things. While I’ve come to doubt that people are rational actors in the economic sense, the cost/benefit equation is just too obvious here, especially when money is tight.

On my Mac, I upgrade more frequently because Apple provides functional improvements to applications I use in daily life as well as new/cool stuff.  There are more applications shipped with the OS that I use regularly, so I am more interested in what an OS upgrade includes. It also helps that Mac OS X upgrades are more frequent and lower impact. Although I’ve wanted to do a clean install, I haven’t *had* to do one and therefore haven’t done it.

27 inches of Sexy

The most likely thing to get me to buy Win7 right now is if I get one of the new iMacs to act as both gaming and desktop computer. 27 inches, video in, and nice horsepower in the CPU/GPU on the high end have me interested. And it’s lickably sexy. My gaming rig is a few years old (another reason I’m hesitant to push it to Win7 even though I have a Gig of memory XP can’t address) but a new iMac would have plenty of cycles to spare for Win7.

Microsoft sticking to a release date is nice to see, but it’s not without risk. My final hesitation (on almost any 1.0 product) is how rushed it was to get out the door on time. How far into the future is SP1 going to be?

For no real benefit, Win7 would only bring me risk and cost, so I don’t do Windows upgrades–for now.

Google Docs Adds Shared Folders — Mashable.com

Mashable claims that Google’s new shared folders work just like they should. I beg to differ. Google doesn’t really have folders under the hood, just like some other document management system I used to talk about. Things get tricky when a document can be in more than one place. Google’s full of smart people, so I decided to hope for the best and kick the tires: Create a few folders, create a few documents, and then permission and move things around to see what happens.

The first no-big-surprise was Google Docs has trouble with state. Web applications are still inferior to stand-alone clients (or operating systems) when managing state. Most of the time a refresh would solve the inconsistencies around location or permissions, but sometimes a logout/login was needed. State issues aside, let’s look at the behavior.

Google walks a tightrope with its “folders” because they really aren’t folders; they’re tags. The behavior you get depends on the context: If you’re in a folder, you get the “move” menu item which works as advertised; something is in one place, then it’s in another–or nowhere since documents don’t have to be in folders. Use the folders menu item and you get the “tag” behavior because you’re directly selecting zero or more items from a taxonomy of tags that happen to have folder icons next to them.

Hacking around, I discovered that Google’s “how it should work” is a most permissive model; it seems to just gather the list of every sharing option on the shared folders. This isn’t horrible; however, the metaphorical mismatch it creates will undoubtedly cross the line into “too permissive”. Most people will assume that the permissions on the “last” folder they put something into will determine the permissions. To Google’s credit, they display a permissions summary next to each document. Maybe that’s good enough to prevent mistakes. And maybe everybody reads EULAs before clicking “I agree”, too.

The shame here is that Google really broke ground with ideas like conversations in GMail. Seeing your replies in the thread of a conversation is obviously the right thing to do; segregating part of the conversation to the Sent “folder” is a broken model that requires people to quote the entire previous conversation with each response. Horrible! Google’s always on the verge of freeing people from the tyranny of folders but never fully commits to a pure tag and search approach, so they won’t be overthrowing The Folder Hierarchy with this feature.