Commentary Rant

I broke down and ordered a Amazon Kindle a couple days ago. It is definitely a first generation device: not only does it look state-of-the art 1980’s, but it’s main mode of interaction is through a marginally clever hack to get around eInks slow refresh rate. However, the idea of being able to have all five books I’m always invariable a third of the way through, plus an always-on calendar (via it’s browser function and mobile Google calendar), always-on email, always-on maps, always-on Wikipedia, makes it (possibly) worth the price.

So late the other night, when my rationality had been worn down by a days debugging, my “buy” impulse beat out my fiscally responsible genes. I took out my credit card and purchased. Because I’m a previous Amazon customer I entered my email (which I haven’t bothered to update to my new address) and my password, clicked the buy button. It was done.

The next day, I checked up on the order. When was my new toy going to arrive? I logged in and… the order wasn’t there! I frantically clicked on every button I could find to no avail. Had I only imagined ordering the Kindle? I hadn’t been that tired. I checked my bank account and indeed the money had been deducted from my account. So where had my order gone?

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Rant

Open source software is generally painful to setup and maintain. And it’s likely to stay that way because it’s open source.

Of course, I could hire someone to set it up for me. That’s what the service-oriented market is all about. I can get my software for free, try it out, and pay someone for support when I run into trouble. But there’s something nagging… setting up sendmail (or qmail, or any of the half-dozen email solutions I’ve tried) shouldn’t be as hard as it is. Why, over the numerous years–as it’s been worked on by a brilliant body of hackers–has it remained so obtuse?

There is a huge pool of open source software that is impossible to reliably obtain, install, set up, configure, operate, maintain, and upgrade unless you have years of experience. And there is a large pool of people and companies for hire who have the required years of experience to get something done. And we ask ourselves: who made the unusable software?

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Rant

Firefox introduced tabbed-browsing to the masses. And it was good. It took Microsoft years to catch-up.

Why are tabs good? Frankly, because the standard windowing model is bad. It’s much easier to scan through a horizontal list of tab names then it is to wade through alt-tab’s textless, iconic grid. One of the benefits of tabs is that they are always linearly arranged in a fixed order. To find your tab, you simply have to run your eyes from left to right; once you get to the end, you’re done. With windows, however, your eyes have to rove around the screen looking for the one you want and you might never find it because windows can hide behind other windows. And unlike tabs, unless you’re very careful, windows will not stay in a consistent place because they are constantly being shuffled to accommodate limited screen real-estate. The net result is that finding a particular window is like playing whack-a-mole blind-folded, whilst finding a particular tab is like fishing for fish in a barrel with dynamite.

In short, tabs are better than windows because they don’t conceal as much information.*

In Firefox 2.0 a “feature” was introduced that dealt with the edge-case where there were many tabs in a new way. It takes a giant step backward by actively concealing information.

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Commentary Rant

Humanized is currently fighting a battle against spam on the comments section of this weblog. Automated spambots have been posting hundreds of “comments” a day, which are content-free posts under fake names containing links to dubious merchandise. They are often obscene and sometimes more offensive than dead-baby jokes.

There are four strategies we could use to keep spam comments off of our page.

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Rant

I often get asked about the future of interfaces: “Wouldn’t it be great”, people say, “if we could just talk to our computers like in Star Trek? Aren’t voice recognition and talking computers the interface of the future?” A lot of people seem to think that all interface problems can be solved via voice. But I have a one word answer: Voicemail.

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