Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

I was just reading Per Olesen’s blog entry about Adobe Flex and the fact that it’s closed source and proprietary, and it hit me that the reason I haven’t tried Flex is because the source isn’t available. I remember years ago at eBay when we were using C#/ASP.NET 1.1 for internal web app development and it was so frustrating because when an exception was thrown inside the framework, you’d hit the “no source wall”: the place where the stack trace leads you to code that you can’t look at. At least in the Java framework I can trace through the code and even set breakpoints in framework code so I could figure out if it was my code’s fault or a bug in the framework. Usually it was my code, but whereas in Java I could figure out what I was doing wrong by looking at the Java framework code, in ASP.NET I often just gave up and tried a completely different way of solving the problem (usually by tossing out the use of ADO.NET). Sometimes I even went to the Mono source to see what they’re doing and it did help when I was creating ASP widgets, but it’s not the same thing as having all of the source available with the ability to step into it in a debugger.

I haven’t followed .NET development much since I left eBay, but I’ve noticed that Microsoft has opened up some of the .NET framework source, which is definitely a move in the right direction.

So, I guess subconsciously I’ve been staying away from otherwise appealing frameworks if I can’t access the source code. And it doesn’t have to be “open source”, as in GPL, LGPL, etc., but I at least want the option of seeing it if I need to. I don’t mind proprietary, but without the source, I’m going to choose another framework, my time is too valuable to hit my head against the wall otherwise.

I generally don’t have much to say about TechCrunch. I read it pretty often to see where people are putting their attention (or at least what TechCrunch thinks is the case) since I’m not really in that audience — I don’t visit Facebook (let alone have a profile), I don’t Twitter, and I use my cell phone for making phone calls and the occasional (once a month?) text message. However, a recent post on TechCrunch ticked me off because of the way it plays with statistics. The post is here and it claims that GMail will catch Yahoo! Mail, in terms of unique visitors, sometime in 2010. In and of itself, such predictions are not a problem, the problem is the way this prediction was arrived at: current percentage growth rate from November 2006 to November 2007. That’s right, a single number over an arbitrary time period is used as the sole basis for the prediction, and I quote: “Yahoo showed 3.21% growth for the 12 months to November 2007 compared with Gmail’s 53.60%”. Even worse, this single statistic is used to create Chartjunk:

From http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/25/2007-in-numbers-more-people-using-yahoo-mail-this-christmas-than-gmail/

Why the 12-month time-period? Why not compare the growth since Gmail started? Or use projections from the same time-periods for each service, i.e., compare the first two years of Yahoo Mail to the first two years of Gmail? Or pretty much any kind of deeper analysis that takes more than 5 minutes of thought? Does anyone really think that Gmail will continue to grow over 50% every year for the next 3 years? Or that Yahoo! Mail will only grow a few percent every year for the next three years? What makes the past year so special?

Not to mention, does anyone really care? I think the real issue is how much money are the two companies making? And what about the OEM-like agreements that Google has been making, i.e., becoming the email service provider for universities, companies, etc.?

Ugh. I hate Chartjunk and the simplistic statistics that back them up.

Since I originally started this blog for my rants (and raves) about software (creating and using), I didn’t feel up to posting anything since my father-in-law’s death in June from an unexpected stroke. However, I am going to start a separate blog to post (mostly rants) about the medical and health insurance industrial complex. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, I’m getting back on my horse and will also start some reflecting on introducing agile methods into a development environment, namely the company where I work: Guidewire Software.

And, lest you think I’m not ranting about anything in this post, I’d like to rant about Blogsome — yes, that’s the site that hosts this blog. Generally, Blogsome has been just fine, except that I hadn’t logged in for several months and so not only did I not remember my password, I couldn’t remember how to log in to my account so I could post. My expectation was that somewhere on the Blogsome home page there would be a place to type my username or at least take me to a login page, but there was none. So I looked for a help page or a FAQ, but there wasn’t one. I went to the forums, but didn’t feel like sifting through the threads to find the answer. Finally, I searched through my emails and found the original “welcome” email and used the link contained therein.

It shouldn’t be this hard. I can maybe understand the lack of help pages if you have a nice-sized forum, but the use cases for help pages vs. forums are quite different. What I can’t understand is hiding the login page. And it’s not just Blogsome that does this, but many other sites seem to have home pages that are geared towards new users, making the login/sign-in area hard to find. For example, Jellyfish (one of my favorite “rebate” sites, and I especially enjoy their Smack Shopping reverse auctions) makes it hard to find the login button and instead has a bunch of “wasted” space:

Yeah, it’s not only tiny, but it’s in brackets (further deemphasizing it) and is next to the “Sign Up Now” text, so you might even miss it — I have. And what happens when you click on the tiny login link?

Ohhh, that’s what the “wasted” space is for! Well why isn’t that just there the whole time? My guess: it would ruin the “design”. Form over function wins and the users lose. And lest you think that it’s just some random site that might not have the money for someone dedicated to usability, Washington Mutual Bank recently redesigned their site and now it suffers from the same problem:

Again, the web site is treating the customers it already has as second-class citizens by forcing us to spend extra mental effort trying to find the login area. The fact that it’s clearly labeled doesn’t help, since we’re programmed to look for a pair of input fields that signify a login area, a visual clue that’s missing here. So what happens when you hover over the little plus sign next to the Log in link?

There, that’s better. Just like Jellyfish, why couldn’t this be open all the time? There’s even less of an excuse here, not just because it’s a bank web site, but there’s no “design” to be ruined here, it’s all blank whitespace.

Remember, just because we can now do fancy things with Ajax, doesn’t mean we should sacrifice usability for “cool” designs.

The only thing worse than content-free error messages such as "Error 0" (see The $4,000 Error Message) are those that mislead: telling you that X is wrong when it’s really Y that’s the cause of the problem. At least with "Error 0", you’ll look at everything and think about all of the possible things that could be wrong and either see your mistake or give up and try something completely different.

The evil misleading error message, however, causes you to spend your time and effort on fixing X, until you finally realize (after much cursing and coffee drinking) that there’s no problem with X, X is just fine and works exactly as expected. Only then do you see that Y is the real problem and, even worse, it takes only two seconds to fix it.

This is why programmers should never write error messages. Just like they should never write help text, button labels, menu items, or pretty much any text that the end-user is going to read. That’s the job of the usability/documentation folks: they know how to write. This is also why QA should pay close attention to the error messages (they are testing the error cases, right?) and ensure that they are correct.

Of course, the best solution is to prevent the error conditions in the first place, but that’s another rant. 

This should probably be filed under "coolest words I’ve heard/read today", but I can’t think of a catchy yet pithy name for the category, so I’ll just file this generally.

Existential Ω-Entailment is not explosive

At least according to Michael Kassoff, et. al., in PrediCalc: A Logical Spreadsheet Management System.

Why, you might ask, am I reading this? I saw the reference in ACM’s thrice-weekly TechNews about logical spreadsheets (sort of a spreadsheet-based interactive constraint satisfaction problem solver) out of Stanford and figured I’d read more. Alas, I’ve been out of college too long to really understand the paper, but it looks cool.

I’m amazed at the number of web sites that are selling software (web- or desktop-based) where the screenshots are JPEGs (this rant is courtesy of an interesting requirements gathering product at http://www.gatherspace.com). Screenshots of the software in action are a great way to demonstrate various features and can work as a summary of the features, with the details left for a Flash-based demo. However, when the screenshots are converted to JPEGs, by definition you lose quality (that’s why JPEG is called "lossy"). Viewing screenshots as blurry JPEGs gives a bad impression. PNGs are widely supported these days and the PNG format is lossless, meaning that it still compresses the file, but doesn’t change one pixel from the original.

I’ve been getting much better at reading the blogs that interest me (see the Blogroll on the lower-left here) using Bloglines. I find that I’m much happier reading the blogs in a consistent format and I’m able to read through many of them on a regular basis. What I don’t like are blogs that only put excerpts or just the first sentence into their feed — which is all that I see when reading their blog in a system like Bloglines.  It means that I have to click on their blog link in order to read their posting, forcing me to visit their site. I can understand, maybe, sites where the feed is for the articles from the site, such as The Motley Fool, and not from a blog, so they want you to visit the site to get the "context" of the article. But for blogs, I don’t quite understand it.

Perhaps they want you to visit the site to be exposed to their ads, but Engadget’s blog doesn’t treat me this way — it puts the full blog entries (including pics) into the feed. Sure, they put some ads in between (or at the bottom of) posts, but they’re pretty inocuous (and if I was at all interested in buying a Ford, I might even click on one of them). So if they can do it, why can’t you? If your post is interesting enough to me, I’ll probably visit the site to see what else I’ve missed and/or read (or post to) the comments area.

Sorry Bloglines, I love you as a feed reader, but as a blog host you have quite a bit of catching up to do. Yeah, I started my blogging (really, re-re-re-re-re-started my blogging) using Bloglines since I’ve been using it as my new feed reader (no, I don’t care for Google Reader as much and I’ll talk about that some other time), and it was pretty convenient. Alas, it is an extremely basic blog without even comments (let alone drafts, and other editing niceties), so here I am.

Since I have a couple of blog entries on Bloglines, I’m just going to pull them over here and edit the timestamp (but not the content) to make it seem like I’ve been doing it here all along.

Yeah, well, work with me here, ok?  

OK, trying this again.

Hello and welcome to my 6th blog. Where are the other 5? Oh, they’re floating around somewhere with like one or two entries each. So what am I doing here? Well, I’ve started using Bloglines more heavily and it’s reached the tipping point where it has most of what I monitor/read every day: from blogs to deals to news items.

I was going to just have this be where my BlogRoll is, but since I’m on Bloglines a few times a day, I figured it’d be a good reminder for me to write an entry. Let’s see how that goes.

And a hello to my Guidewire Software peers…