= Design + Software + The Rest
All Posts about SoftwareThe last two nights, sometime in the middle of the night, Microsoft automatically updated my development computer and restarted it. The result of this was a much more secure computer (I’m sure) which no longer works. Something about the update has destroyed key development tools installed on my system. I finally got the system fixed yesterday by restoring the state of the computer using System Restore. I then had to reinstall some software, and voila, 4 hours later I was back in business. Imagine my dismay when I awoke to find that my system had again been updated automatically and equally as automatically destroyed.
I know the blame lies with the terrorists, but, here are some things I think Microsoft could do better:
If Microsoft would follow these two suggestions, they could at least make this customer happy. Even if they followed only one of the above, I would be happy. For now I’ll wait for System Restore to complete and hope that more diabolical schemes are not unleashed on my computer tonight while I am sleeping.
While I wait, I’ll take the opportunity to talk about “smart” systems. At least in the US, we seem to be enamored with the automatic. The “smarter” the system is, and by smarter I mean the more it can make decisions about what you as the master of the system would like accomplished, the better we deem the system to be. The plight I am currently in is an example of this sort of “smart” computing. The smart system thinks to itself, “The security patch is critical, therefore the master (me) would obviously want me to install it, therefore I will install it. Oh, the update wants to restart the computer, but master is still not here, I’m sure he’d want me to do it. Oh, master left some programs open and they won’t shut down automatically, but I need to shut down, I guess I better force quite them. Won’t master be proud of me.”
It all reminds me of the recent 30 Rock episode when Kenneth has to do double duty as Jack Donaghy’s assistant. Kenneth, however, has no idea how to determine what will be important to Mr. Donaghy and what will not. As a result, he constantly interrupts Jack and causes problems. In the end, Jack relieves him of his duties as assistant.
In my opinion, most smart computing (even the really smart stuff by Apple) tends to fall short just like poor Kenneth. If humans, who are much better at anticipating the desires and reading the intentions of other humans, have a hard time being “smart” servants of one another, why would we expect computers to do better? And, it seems, that the smarter we try to make the systems the more trouble they tend to cause. I think we ought to let the smart computing dream go (at least for now) and leave the important decisions to the ones who will have to clean up the mess (you and me).
CBS Sports has a really nice Silverlight player for this year’s NCAA March Madness On Demand service (TM © All Rights Reserved and all that).
If you go to http://mmod.ncaa.com you can watch every one of the NCAA Basketball Tournament games onilne for free. The video is good quality – I’ve got the LSU vs. Butler game playing full-screen on my 17″ Macbook and the HD video looks fantastic for a streaming service.
CBS also has a paid iPhone application ($4.99) that streams live video of every game (as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection). I guess this might be a good option for people stuck in airports or classrooms or meetings and just have to see for themselves if Radford can pull it off against UNC. The app looks like it is nicely designed and it is getting great reviews in the App Store.
As a developer, I am bombarded with propaganda from the tech-religious war machines. Read any newsgroup or forum that relates to technology, even remotely, and within five posts the rhetoric turns caustic. Often unprompted, a Windows lover will disparage their Mac-loving brother. Or, the PHP zealot will lambaste his ASP.NET sister. In almost every situation, one person preemptively bolsters his unfounded sense of technological superiority against another person’s similarly unfounded confidence by disparaging both technology and user. It is sad and absurd. And, it always leaves me wondering: Does the technology really matter?
As much as I want to be true to my favorite tools, I keep coming back to the conclusion that it doesn’t. How you build matters far more than what you build with. A poorly designed building made from steel may collapse in the same wind that causes no harm to a well designed straw hut. No matter how technology advances, it cannot change the fundamental truth that a tool will never exceed the skill of the one that wields it. Far more important than the technology to be used is the developer’s familiarity with it. Far more important than that is the developer’s understanding of the problem and ability to creatively address it.
Certainly, some technologies have more potential than others, but when it comes down to it, the skill and experience of the developer far outweigh questions of platform or language. So, next time you hear someone offering a given technology as a panacea, just know that they probably have some financial or emotional incentive to do so.
Over the weekend there was an update to Basecamp (the software we use to manage all of our projects) that included a feature we’ve been wanting for a long time: Reply to message via email.
In the past you had to log in to Basecamp in order to reply to a message. This caused problems for some of our clients who: constantly forgot their login info, were on very slow internet connections (and were reluctant to use Basecamp), or didn’t see the “A new message has been posted. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL” note at the top of Basecamp message notifications and replied via email anyway (we never got the email, they felt ignored).
This latest update lets you reply to a message via email, so no visit to Basecamp is required. When messages are posted for you on Basecamp, you are sent an email with the contents of the message. You’ll see this text at the top of each Basecamp message notification:
— Reply ABOVE THIS LINE to post a comment to the project —
Simply click “Reply” in your email program, type your comment above that line, and send the email. The only catch is that if you want to post a file with your comment you’ll need to do that the “old” way – by actually logging in to Basecamp and posting your comment there.
This feature will be nice for mobile users (on iPhones or Blackberrys or Treos) and others with slow internet connections.
Last week Apple unveiled the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). Over the weekend I finally had a chance to watch the video from the event on March 6. For you software-developer types, the video is worth watching. For the rest of you, here’s a summary…
iPhone will be to mobile devices as iPod is to MP3 players