Time Management and Other Interesting Thoughts

Human Solutions

Reviewing the progress of Ta-da List, Jason Fried talks about leaving flexibility for people to make what they will of the tool. I think this is a very important design approach. Too much software in the past has been feature-rich and usefulness-lite, in my opinion. This is why everyone has a favourite tool that they do most things in — the tool that allows them the most flexibility. If you just give your users room to manoeuvre, then they’ll do things you never imagined with the software you give them. And they’ll love you for letting them.

Oldish But Still Interesting

Craziness

I’m up for a South African Blog Award. Craziness

Web Publishing :: The Paradigm Shift

Deane has some interesting thoughts about companies new to online publishing that just don’t understand that it’s different to hardcopy. He particularly cites the reluctance to push content frequently, which I would agree is an issue for many organisations. I think there’s a much bigger underlying problem, though, revolving around the way that businesses think about the entire web.

Firstly, let’s get back to reality. Businesses aren’t monolithic juggernauts — they’re made up of people. So what I’m really saying is that a lot of people just don’t get the web. This is very difficult for those of us who live & breathe HTML, get jittery if email goes unchecked for more than half and hour and barely recognise sunlight when we occasionally see it (OK, I’m stereotyping a lot here, but it’s fun and I do get email withdrawal ;-)). We don’t really understand how other can not understand. The web is so massive, so intrinsic to our lives, that we just don’t understand anyone missing the enormity of its importance.

So, we try and explain it to people. And I’m not saying that we don’t explain well, that the arguments aren’t well-formed or that we aren’t enthusiastic about it. What I am saying is that however much people understand the rational argument, the web is something that you have to experience before you really get it. Before the true import sinks in.

Instead of trying to convince people to do things differently just based on rational understanding of what this emergent and disruptive technology can deliver, it might just be a better approach to try and help them experience the web, so that they can really understand it. Then the decisions about what information needs to go on the corporate website will become no-brainers.

Learning Through to Learnt Stupidity

Some Slightly Wordy Blogmarks

  • Rands describes his Nuke & Pave backup and reinstall approach. I think there’s a lot of value in this kind of discipline, which many of us (me especially!) just don’t have. That said, when I’m reinstalling an OS it’s often a crisis situation, so everything just gets backed up. I’m much better at Nuke & Pave in the real world — where it’s probably better described as Chuck Or Save.
  • There’s a great discussion over at WorldChanging about the dilemma of cheap computing power for the developing world. Especially interesting are the thoughts about taking modern cellphones and giving them more computing usefulness, rather than trying to furnish everyone with $100 laptops
  • In a Spolskyesque piece, Signal Vs Noise denounces Functional Specs. This kind of “heresy” is increasingly visible nowadays, as software development moves from a focus on process to a focus on product.
  • Lifehacker covers some cool Firefox extensions
  • Massive article on what makes a good games designer, from a programmer’s viewpoint — long, but interesting read; via Athena’s Legacy
  • Interesting article with the (female) lead designer on Playboy: The Mansion, including the fantastically apt comment:

    “If you’re going to animate breasts, animate them properly,” admonishes Brathwaite. “The breasts in the original Dark Alliance drove me nuts. If my breasts moved like that, I’d go to the doctor…or call an exorcist.”

  • Google’s 70-20-10 product formula. Interesting to see their “random experimentation” goal called out so explicitly as a percentage of total effort

Amazon Thinks I’m Psycho

This fantastic combination came up on my New Releases DVD Recommendations, over at Amazon.

Image showing recommendations that I buy titles Collateral, Bambi(!) and Auschwitz

In their defence, I don’t buy many DVDs, so perhaps the algorithms just don’t have a great deal to go on.

Debating to Getting a Job

An Epiphany Brought on by Powerpoint

Since I’m currently at university, twice a year I get to choose what courses to do. Yesterday, I learnt something about my learning style and how it meshes with various teaching styles that I wish I had known and used 3 years ago when I started the course. The epiphany was quite simple:

I distinctly prefer courses where the lecturer has written notes, rather than slides

There are various reasons for this. Key though, is the idea of structure. When there are notes, they tend to be structured properly — hierarchical headings to indicate sections and subsections. Slides, on the other hand, all look the same. It is very difficult to see what is part of something else, especially when you are seeing the content and being exposed to the ideas for the first time. Occasionally this is overcome by having “context” slides, that show you what is coming up and what is part of what. But even if these have preceded slide x, it is easy to get lost in the hierarchy.

I think the meta-information denoted by sections in notes or a book is what I miss most from slide-driven courses. I think there’s often an argument that the lecturer isn’t terribly clear on what the structure of the material is either, because they haven’t had to fit things into a hierarchy. After all, the cognitive style of powerpoint is quite different to that of a book or set of notes.

Out of interest, I looked back at my marks over the last few years — I have done consistently better in the “well-structured” courses. This is probably very much to do with the way I think, but I can’t believe that it escaped me until now!

Evidence of the Effect of Broadband

The best technological advances are those that become so ubiquitous that you don’t even notice their impact. Then suddenly someday you look around and go “hey, things have changed sooo much!”. I had one of these moments today when I found the Battle For America website, via Republic of T. My revelation wasn’t about politics and the internet, or even video streaming. It was about broadband:

Image showing links to download either a small (90MB!) or large (150MB!) version of a video

The fact that anyone could classify a 90MB (think about that in old speak for a second — that’s 63 stiffies worth!) download as “small” would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Things do change, don’t they?

Excitement Through To Lego iPods

Bright Green Living

WorldChanging is one of my regular reads and they cover a lot of fantastic initiatives (and some not-so-fantastic travesties), as well as having started up the Bright Green Living wiki. The latter I think is a great idea — a lot of people want to help make a difference and could do with a bit of a how-to. Personally, though, I think that environmental friendliness is analogous to software usability. If people have a reason to use some software, they’ll put in the effort to learn the little interface quirks, the shortcuts, etc, and get the best out of it. For the vast majority, however, the software needs to be intuitive and easy to use, else they just won’t bother.

I think that green living is at a similar stage to most software. To the “tree hugging hippies” ;-) out there, it is of course worth the effort to recycle, walk everywhere, build worm bins and grow vegetable gardens. However, the usability of green living isn’t good enough yet for the average person. This is why I disagree with barricading petrol stations — this just associates inconvenience with working to save the environment: surely not a winning solution?

Rather than arguing about the existence of global warming (or not), it might be more expedient to focus on the practical issues, rather than trying to convince everyone to take the moral high ground. If you make it easy enough to do something good, then less zealotry would be needed to make it happen. As an example, there’s a great kerbside recycling collection here in Bath. We park our big green recycling box in the kitchen and so the only extra effort is to wash bottles/cans/etc up and put them in the recycling box rather than chucking them in the bin. It’s EASY ENOUGH. And that’s what matters

Links for 10 Feb 05

A Feature I Would LOVE in Firefox

One of the things that I love about some of the new web apps (e.g. Gmail and even the editor in Wordpress) is that the Undo shortcut WORKS (Ctrl-Z in Windows/Linux). If I paste an URL into a post I’m writing, I can Ctrl-Z and it disappears again. Similar useful things in Gmail. I’ll admit I’m not sure whether this is new, or just something that the desktopness of the Gmail UI has led me to start trying. But I digress. The point is that I wish that Undo would work in Firefox. So often I get a bit twitchy over the old Ctrl-W (close tab) shortcut and suddenly remember that I wanted to check the referrer or to read the next entry or something, just as I close the tab I’ve been reading. I really wish that I could just undo this using Ctrl-Z, rather than having to go back, view History or give up completely (for instance, if I was interested in the referrer, opening from History isn’t going to help me).

Are there plugins for this? Or is there an easy way of just doing it? Anybody else got the same pet peeve but done more to sort it out? ;-)

Excel is to Business People as the Text Editor is to Geeks

Geeks/developers/programmers/whatever you want to call them love their text editors. Most learn one in a great deal of detail very early on and are forever committed. The skill level gets so high that productivity slows significantly whenever forced to use an alternative, however snazzier-looking the output. There is evidence that the most productive alpha geeks all use text editors to manage their todo lists and to achieve all sorts of other things that benefit from being seamlessly executed, without needing to think about the tool being used (think coding!).

Normal people, on the other hand, don’t spend years indoors, in darkened rooms, learning to get productive with your average text editor. They have lives, play sports and find that the majority of their friends exist in the real world ;-) They are also quite likely to not use a computer with any great intensity until they go to work and become business people. But when they do, they discover Excel.

Excel is the text editor of normal business people. In the same way that your average geek will choose their favourite text editor as the easy tool-to-hand for any job, you find business people doing all sorts of things with Excel. Some geeks do the same. For many business people, it is simply the tool with which they are best acquainted, that provides the interface of least resistance. Some people really do seem to think in Excel. Just the same way all the geeks see their text editors as extensions of themselves.

Maybe we’re not all so different underneath after all. Well, with the exception of those Powerpoint freaks. That’s just not natural

Everyone’s Talking About…

Everyone appears to be talking about passwords at the moment. There’s a great illustration of why the human element of security is of major importance on an old blog entry of Simon’s (incidentally, ten minutes googling helped me find this when I had no idea anymore of where I’d seen it — now that’s the point of searchable information sources!). There are some interesting techniques put forward, first by Eric Meyer and then also by Matt Haughey. I have a similar tiering scheme for passwords — things that require similar security levels will have variants of the same password. Arguably I don’t change these enough and only have properly weird passwords (constructed using a technique similar to Matt’s) for things like root passwords for my machines or websites. Still, it’s good that this kind of advice is percolating.

Personally I think that password management is something that should be taught to everyone who ever has to use a computer — before they’re allowed to own one even. Which, admittedly, is right up there with my belief that effectiveness in an average company would go way up if everyone was sent on a) a speed-reading course and b) a typing course as a first step. Most people think faster than they can read or type — if we just fixed that then people would have more time in their day and less stress. At the end of the day though, none of these seem to happen. But when consultants start raking in the cash by advising companies to do this, remember, you heard it here first folks ;-)

A Matter of Scale

It makes me sad that some people still don’t realise that there are disasters currently going on everyday in the world that are orders of magnitude greater in importance/death toll than the occasional “big” disaster that everyone is aware of and working to raise funds for.

A case in point: one of my housemates, upon seeing something on television encouraging people to raise funds for charities to deal with the AIDS disaster in Africa, asked “Do you think they’ll give some money to the Tsunami victims as well? There’s so many of them”.

My gut reaction was that she had things the wrong way round, so I looked it up. Although of course the Tsunami death toll of almost 300 000 is not negligible and these people need their wounds tending to, their dead burying, their countries rebuilding and their coastlines guarded against future killer waves, the fact that 2.3 million Sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS in 2004 leads me to think that this is a larger scale disaster. Almost 5 people died of AIDS every minute in Africa. That has to matter, if we can continue to claim any concept of humanity.

How to keep the everyday tragedies on people’s agendas, I don’t know. Perhaps the big news providers should have an incremental update on the state of Africa every day, in the same way they did for the Iraq war. But I think people would probably just get desensitized and ignore it even more. Perhaps we must just accept that the only people who will care are the ones directly affected, except in the big bang disasters that get so much coverage.

Somehow, it still seems wrong, though.

UPDATE: Seems I’m not the only one that thinks so

Strange Search Stuff

I don’t know quite why, but Google appear to have blacklisted this site. Not coming up on any of the regular searches. I had thought that the drop was due to the problems with comment spam, since it was visible until I found time to despam with MT, but since now Wordpress tends to quarantine most comments until I can get around to despamming, that problem should have been minimised.

Any other ideas on what might be going on? Not a massive fan of my Debian Installer bug reports being higher up on a search for my name than this blog! ;-)

Backing Up

I really need to set up a proper backup system. There are quite honestly some really good excuses for why I haven’t done so already, but at the end of the day none of those are going to help if a harddrive crashes and I lose every bit of work I’ve done so far this academic year. Moving my main “home” machine to running Debian back in September, should have made it a bit easier to do this, since I imagine that rsync is going to be the answer to all my worries.

In true procrastinatory style, I went and had a look around the web a bit and found a few links. I’ve now had the realisation that I really need to revise Agents now as the exam is tomorrow, so I’m going to put this off again, but as a reminder to myself and potentially a help to anyone else also needing to set up a proper backup system, here are some links: