The antigen to ozmosis

If you press the right mouse button in the game Max Payne, your on-screen persona (the aformentioned Max Payne) experiences what the manual describes as “bullet-time”: Time seems to slow down, allowing you and Max to do the impossible, such as dodge bullets and deal out semi-automatic vengeance at lightning speeds.

Did you ever feel like that while working? The sensation that time stands still, and when it is all over, a feeling of refreshment and accomplishment? Such is the concept behind Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Of course, in the book, they call it “flow”.

Curt Rosengren summarizes the book. The concept is pretty similar to the FISH! philosophy. Basically, by giving employees control and feedback, employees will be able to find meaning and value in what they’re doing. And when you understand that, you get flow.

I cannot count the times that I was working on some order that I knew would make the difference of clinching a major deal with a customer, but to the order department, I’m just order #3470931. They need to understand what is going on so that they care.

Another man’s utopia

“There isn’t much to watch on American TV now unless you are into violence and/or canned laughter. Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead? It seems appropriate.”

The Guardian interviews sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin. Sadly, my only exposure to Le Guin was a mini-series of her novel Lathe of Heaven on A&E, an American television network.

It was a good concept: a man whose dreams can alter reality, and his psychologist who finally decides to use this power to his advantage. In the interview, Ursula explains that Taoist philosophy was the primary inspiration.

Under the <table>

Richard McManus comments on the now legendary HTML tables vs. CSS layout debate. Web designers should use CSS layouts instead of hacking tables together. Sure, tables are easier to understand and set up, but CSS is easier to change, easier to migrate to new formats (think portable devices), and makes more logical sense.

TABLE is an ugly hack, back when there was no real way to display column layouts on the web. Their intuitive nature is probably why they replaced frames as the way to place content adjacent to each other.

So really, both camps are right. Either implementation is transparent to the user, so they shouldn’t care. But developers should care. CSS will make your jobs easier.

There are some reasons for sticking to tables, however:

  • support for Netscape 4.7: Sadly, it’s still around, especially inside companies.
  • workaround for IE’s multiple CSS bugs
  • you are too lazy/too busy to concentrate on laying out a CSS layout, and this web job is just a one-time deal.

Butterfly effect

I had the pleasure of participating in the Bell Sympatico/MSN Market Trial for the past four months. In a partnership with MS, Bell plans to integrate the MSN portal and MSN 8 software into Sympatico.ca and broadband services.

I got the impression that the MSN software is going to be an value-added service you have to pay extra for, like the current firewall and anti-virus add-on packages. I also got a free mousepad out of it. 🙂

MSN 8 is basically an Internet Explorer tarted up to look like AOL, although the Encarta.JPG result is much more pleasing to the eye. Menus have a translucent glass effect on them. The program actually greets you by your first name everytime you log in. The masterwork, however, is the MSN Dashboard, a vertical sidebar that displays the time, a photo slide show, Inbox, favourite links, stocks, etc. It’s a smart idea that will also appear in Longhorn, and the inspiration for the freeware program Codename: Dashboard.

One feature I do not like – the clumsy integration of MSN Messenger. It installs itself without permission. It sets itself to load on Windows startup, without permission. When I disable that option, it starts up with MSN 8 without my permission. It cannot be terminated while MSN 8 is in memory. While MSN 8 is on, it becomes redundant with contacts appearing in its own native window plus the MSN Dashboard.

Furthermore, when I exit MSN 8, it does not close down. I try not use MSN Messenger (admittedly, its audio and webcam features are nice) as I find its “in your face” nature not very pleasant.

Using the future to preserve the past

In partnership with IBM, The Supreme Council of Antiquities and Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage have unveiled their online multimedia masterpiece, Eternal Egypt. tbm.jpg The site is also available in wireless phone and PDA formats, features text-to-speech commentaries, and 3D views of famous monuments and sites, such as Giza and Luxor.

For budding Egyptologists, I also recommend the Theban Mapping Project, a Flash site developed by the American University in Cairo to map out the Valley of the Kings.

Eternal Egypt runs on DB2 over Linux. The TBM runs on Access over Windows 2000. However, both sites hope to preserve the past through technology.

The Google philosophy

The Google philosophy has 5 principles:

  • Work on things that matter,
  • Affect everyone in the world,
  • Solve problems with algorithms if possible (aka automate when possible to increase knowledge reuse),
  • Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom,
  • and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates echoes the fourth point. I recall his three ingredients for success were: smart people, small teams, and excellent tools.

Here’s another intriguing practice: Google requires that its engineers spend 20% of their time working on personal technology projects that have nothing to do with their primary objectives. Perhaps this is a way to prevent a narrow vision, a single-minded strive on sustaining their existing processes and technology, lest they fall prey to some disruptive technology barrelling in from left field.

Christensen said as much in an interview at the MIMC last month; only 80-85% of all R&D investments should be on sustaining innovation.

You can ping me for a date, any ol’ time

CSI is usually a show that takes delight in being as accurate as possible in its portrayal of forensic science, but the CSI:Miami episode I saw last night, “Big Brother”, had some awful flubs. Aside from the requisite cheesy Bejeweled-like graphical interface of “Grave Robber”, a fictitious file recovery program, and a bizarre looking command line ping program (that helpfully tells its user that an IP is spoofed with a blinking red “Forged” indicator), they also showed two malformed IP addresses.

The IP addresses went something like this: 301.101.28.1108. All valid network addresses must have their first octet between 0 and 223; “301” is way out of this range. As for “1108” at the end there, let’s just say only a number between 1 and 254 is valid.

But then they may have done this on purpose. In the same way that all fictitious phone numbers on TV have NPAs of 555, the producers felt they need fictitious IP addresses too.

Insert foot in mouth, echo internationally

Windows Calculator shouldn’t take seven seconds to load. Certainly not on a ThinkPad T30 with a Pentium 4 2GHz!

I’ve TweakUI‘ed and Cachman‘ed, Ad-aware‘d and X-Setupped, plus fiddled with virtual memory. I cleaned out the system tray, Registry and Startup for pesky TSRs. No dice. What could it possibly be??

I loaded up Disk Defragmenter and hit Analyze. File Fragmentation: 47%!

How could this be? This is a brand new laptop. And then it hit me. The laptop wasn’t installed from the ground up, but given the standard disk image by corporate IT. This is the same image the smarties in IT are giving to every laptop user in the company. Great.

(There’s an extra story of waste here: all ThinkPads come with Windows XP Home plus license preinstalled. When we get them, we format them and replace them with an image containing Windows 2000 Pro, also licensed. No wonder Microsoft is so rich.)

Sound bite

It was a rainy Spring afternoon when I got on the streetcar downtown. Rainy and dull. Wet and dark make gloomy companions. I think that if the TTC ever buy new Red Rockets, they should get ones with glass ceilings. Wouldn’t that be a treat?

I was interrupted from my reverie on sunroofs by a female voice.

“I’m the original office b!tch.”

She was a young woman, talking to her male friend. “This guy went up to me and said, ‘We’re going to have a working lunch, can you go out and get us food for eight?’ I’ve worked five years in this industry so that I can order people fvcking lunches?”

“I didn’t realize it until now,” she added. “But it was such a cushy job.”

At that point, my mind wandered away on the subject of lunch, and I thought of a toasted cheese and herb bagel with roasted red pepper and sundried tomato creamed cheese. Mmmm.

Moral of this story: Be a moving target.

Know what I mean, again

As a followup to my last entry on search, MIT Technology Review discusses a few more search algorithms currently being sported by new entrants in the search engine battles.

Teoma: Similar pageranking system to Google, but concentrates on links highlighted by related “community” sites as being the “authority” on the topic at hand.

Mooter: Displays groups or “clusters” of topics related to the user’s search request. That way, the user can drill down to more specific results. User modeling is used to personalize and calibrate future search requests.

Dipsie: Utilizes a more advanced spider that can navigate forms and database interfaces, giving it the ability to crawl documents otherwise inaccessible.

AskMSR: To bring more eyeballs to MSN, MS needs better search. AskMSR uses fuzzy logic to answer natural language questions. It searches the web to give a shortlist of hypothetical answers. (It reminds me of the “ask the audience” lifeline in “Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire”)

Stuff I’ve Seen: A tried and true (if monopolistic) MS tactic: integrate search into Windows. Will display all items off your hard drive and the Internet (Office documents, appointments, addressbook contacts, webpages) related to the current topic you are working on (replying to email, drafting a presentation, writing an essay).

John Battelle offers some remarks.

Silverstein has a pretty good point – the cost of switching from one search to another is nil. I started off liking WebCrawler, shortly by AltaVista (when DEC was still around! Time flies.). I switched to Infoseek in 1998 shortly after AltaVista banned all Geocities sites. I was an early adopter of Google, and am still using it to this day. With no barriers to entry, I’m guessing things will be very different in five years.