Comments (2)

By Krishna, February 28, 2009

I first came across the phrase “screen sucking” in Edward Hallowell’s “Crazy Busy”, an otherwise forgettable book. It is an apt term for how we spend hours online surfing without any end instead of getting on with our work. Not simply idling away in the office, but also at home, when we could be doing something more productive.

This kind of behavior existed before the Internet too. People would browse tabloids and magazines. They would sit glued to the television watching any show that happens to be on it. However, the Internet is different because the supply for your addiction is unlimited and easily available. It is like TV, but with hundreds of millions of channels to switch to, and a very convenient remote in the form of Google.

If you want to kill time, you can pick any topic you are interested in (sports, news, movies, politics, arts, stocks, etc.) and visit different sites to satisfy that interest. With RSS subscriptions and email newsletters, you can get them delivered to you: a slight productivity gain in not having to visit websites that is obliterated by the huge time loss in processing the delivered information. We are also seeing heavy increases in more rich information in audio podcasts and video streaming sites.

Let me be clear about one thing: This information overload is not because of noisy information. That is a problem in a different context, but here the problem is that there is too much GOOD information. Any average person has the tools and knowledge to differentiate between good and poor sources of information. People migrate towards sites that provide high quality, relevant, meaningful and authoritative content. The problem is that there are too many of those sites.

For example, if you are a conservative, liberal or moderate, you will find many tens or hundreds of political sites with highly competent writers providing commentary tuned to your views. You may not have enough time in the day to process all the information that they collectively produce every day. The average person’s reading speed is around 250 words per minute. Let’s assume 250 words is the average length of a blog post (this entire post is more than 750 words). You can perhaps read 60 blog posts every hour. Now add video content, podcast content, Twits, daily news on TV, etc. You just cannot catch them all.

Of course, few people set out to waste their time like this. But the quality of available information is high and people get drawn into spending more time than they had planned to. I talked about politics, but a similar case can be made for any subject, because almost every niche has websites and blogs on the Web. Some people may be spending time on content related to music or movies, others may be doing so for gardening or mystery novels.

How to get out of this kind of addiction. Some ideas.

1. Disconnect yourself from the network while using your computer for offline tasks. Shut down the TV and audio sources when you are working. It also saves energy and is good for the environment.
2. Use RSS effectively to get information sent to your reader (such as Google Reader) and only open it at a specific time during the day. Treat your feed reader as a 30-page newspaper. Just like you would never read the entire newspaper, you don’t have to read every single word you receive.
3. Online conversations can be useful, but understand your purpose and how much time and effort you can spend. If it is not worth it, stop using Instant Messaging and services like Twitter except in special circumstances. Display your status as offline in IM clients so that you don’t get interrupted.
4. If there are sites that you visit manually (such as your personal email or bank account), designate a specific time in the day or week for such activity. Stop continuously checking information on sites that you can do nothing about. An example would be checking on your stock portfolio every few seconds.
5. Close your email program and check it only at regular intervals. This is usually practical only at home, but even at work, try not to check non-urgent emails while you are working on your regular tasks.

Now that everyone is moving towards greater Internet use on the phone, some manifestations of screen sucking will come into existence for smartphone users. Wasting time is the same whether it is on a large monitor or a 2×3 inch phone display. Use your phone not only for consuming information, but for producing it.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 27, 2009

Microsoft’s neglect of Internet Explorer over the years has finally caught up to them. IE 8, while a significant improvement over IE 7, lags behind Google Chrome and now the latest Apple Safari browser. Here are some of the significant drawbacks to using IE 8:

1. Slower Launch Time: For a long time, IE’s main advantage was its launch speed. It has become so bloated that you could launch Chrome after IE, and Chrome would appear earlier. Opening a new tab is not only slow, but blocking, so that you have to wait. Compare that with the performance of Firefox. This may get better in future releases, but right now the way IE launches and handles a process for each tab is terrible.
2. Both an Address box and a Search box: Chrome has done away with the search box and allows you to search directly from the address box. It also shows you possible results for what you are typing. Having both the boxes is simply unnecessary. This would have been understandable in the previous IE release, but considering how much IE 8 does with both the address bar and the search box, Microsoft could have integrated them into a single object.
3. No Dashboard: Opera, Chrome and Safari allow you to have a home page from where you can launch your favorite sites. Chrome does this automatically by showing the sites you visit most frequently and allows you to search your navigation history. It also shows you the most recently closed tabs and lets you launch them again. The most appealing aspect of this feature is that the browser remembers your navigation history in that tab.
4. Still No Favorites Manager: Incredible as it seems, after all these years, there is no easy way to manage your favorites in Internet Explorer. Every other browser has a bookmark manager that allows you to easily add and delete bookmarks and folders. Microsoft boxed itself into a corner by saving IE favorites as individual files, but that is not really an excuse for providing a better way to manage favorites.

Many of the new IE 8 features (such as private browsing) have been available in other browsers for some time now. However, I don’t want to suggest that IE 8 is entirely bad news. As I said, it improves upon IE 7 and comes closer to offerings by competitors. Some features such as accelerators and a better Find feature provide productivity gains. Overall though, IE 8 leaves you feeling unsatisfied.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 27, 2009

Two years ago, I posted about Raymond Chen’s posts, which Yuvi Panda had analyzed to find that 77% of them were posted at 7 am. Louis Gray also took up the issue, wondering if 7 am was the best time to post for optimal readership. One possibility I raised was that Raymond wrote his posts at other times and posted them at 7 am daily.

Well, I didn’t know exactly how early he wrote his posts. Today (well, actually NOT today – read on), Raymond provides the stunning answer, which seems to be anywhere from 12 months to 18 months. Amazing!

To give you an idea of how far in advance I write my blog entries, I wrote this particular entry on February 13, 2008. Generally, the articles are published in the order I wrote them; this particular entry ended up on February 27, 2009 because that was the next available open day. If the big news topic of February 27th, 2009 happens to be related to this entry, it’s just a coincidence. […]

Oh, and right now, the queue is full up through the beginning of June 2010.

And here I was thinking Raymond Chen probably wrote his posts once a week or so. This blogging behavior is obviously impossible to imitate for most blogs, especially if the blog author is expanding on the latest news item. Nor does it even sound human especially in the age of Twitter and real-time virtual conversations among masses.

It all seems so surreal. Taking an example from physics, it is like Raymond Chen is on a planet one light year away (and further receding from Earth) and he is posting an article right now. So he wrote his article one year ago, I respond today and if he ever reads this post and bothers to reply, it will take me at least 1.5 years to know if he cared. Spacetime in action in the blogosphere.

Because of this revelation, I don’t think Raymond considered readership as a criteria for his 7 am timing. If all your posts are evergreen topics not affected by current topics, there is hardly anything to be gained by a specific timing such as being the first person to show up in the blog reader.

As for my posts, I have never scheduled (never been able to schedule) anything more than 2 days in advance. When I get too much time to burn, I tend to write longer posts. So I can never write more than 3 posts at a stretch. Usually the first post would be posted immediately (as this will be) and the rest on the subsequent days. Windows Live Writer has made it much easier to schedule posts in recent releases.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 26, 2009

I recently drew up a picture to help someone understand what public key cryptography is about. In most situations, there are commercial and open-source products that do it for you. And it is not the only solution for secure communication between two applications. But it is useful to know the concept and understand how information can be transferred with both confidentiality and authentication maintained.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 22, 2009

It is Oscar time once again. This year’s favorite for the Best Picture of the Year is “Slumdog Millionaire”. Not that it necessarily means anything, but the best prediction expert in baseball and politics, Nate Silver, gives it a 99% chance of winning both Best Director and Best Picture.

“Slumdog” is a consummate entertainer, but although set in India, it will feel strange to Indian moviegoers. The typical Bollywood movie, i.e., movies made in Bombay (Mumbai), the film capital of India, is a musical drama/thriller/romance around 3 hours long, dumbed down with simple plots and melodramatic acting. There is nothing subtle about Indian movies: both hero and villain are larger than life and rarely show any complexity of character. The songs are extravagant, shot in exotic foreign locales. Sometimes, you get the feeling that if the typical Indian movie spent a tenth of the money of its songs on the plot, maybe they would be more watchable. (wistful sigh)

In comparison, “Slumdog Millionaire” finishes around the 2-hour mark and its only song comes during the credits. This is to be expected as the movie is a British production. The Indian elements come from the Cinderella story and from the filming locations in Mumbai, Agra (the location of the Taj Mahal) and innumerable other locations where the Indian Railways go.

Many critics have praised the realistic portrayal of Indian poverty in “Slumdog Millionaire”, but I felt that it was compromised by the “rags-to-riches” plot. The first half of the movie is brutal in depicting the true nature of Mumbai slums, particular the cringe-inducing scenes at the open outhouses and the children blinded for a begging racket. But the movie quickly moves on to more optimistic territory and we quietly forget those horrific scenes.

The movie sends the message of a developing India where slums are being replaced by high-rise apartments. But that is belied by the reality that the movie was actually shot in a real slum in 2008. There are people today who are living in unimaginable conditions of poverty. Not a decade ago, but today. If you walk the streets of Mumbai, you will still see beggars on the streets. The rivers are still polluted and the air is getting more contaminated.

On the bright side, the liberalization of the last two decades has helped bring hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty and will continue to do so. The problem is that the growth is still slow, not because of freer markets, but because they are not free enough. India lags behind in several indicators of capitalism, such as enforcement of property rights and an efficient judicial system. Corruption is rampant in India, which ranks a sorry 85th in the world in transparency.

India has a long way to go to bring its people completely out of poverty. It has more work to do in reforming its institutions and improving the quality of its political discourse. Optimism is good, but it should not lead to complacency. Both India and China will also have to figure out how to deal with future challenges to their economy, such as global warming, water shortage, and rise of cheap African exports.

Some people closely watching the movie will notice that the protagonist is a Muslim and wonder, “I thought all Indians were Hindus.” Well, actually, India has the 3rd largest Muslim population in the world, almost equal to the number of Muslims in Pakistan. Next time you read the India-Pakistan conflict portrayed as a Hindu-Muslim conflict, think about that. And also the largest Muslim country by population is not Saudi Arabia, but the archipelagic South-East Asian country of Indonesia. Most people who start linking Muslims and terrorists probably don’t realize how few Muslims come from radicalized regions.

The use of the religious element is skin-deep. Example in point: We see religious riots where enraged Hindus raid the Muslim slums killing many innocents while the police stand nearby, doing nothing. Most non-Indians seeing the movie will not probably understand this scene. The history of conflicts between Hindu and Muslim communities is long and complex, dating from the origins of Islam in northern India to the Partition of India. The 1993 riots have much to do with the rise of Hindu nationalist parties in the late 1980’s and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. A more serious movie on the Mumbai riots is the aptly-named 1995 Tamil movie “Bombay”. None of this is even mentioned in “Slumdog Millionaire”.

The Islamic faith of Jamal, the hero, weakens the movie in one important respect. The host of the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” show in the movie mocks the profession of the hero, who serves tea at a call center. The mocking is not done in private, but publicly on live television with the audience joining in the laughter. This scene would have enormous potency if Jamal was a Hindu who belonged to a lower caste. Like religion, violence due to caste tensions is one of the biggest challenges that India faces today. But the movie sidesteps this issue and instead substitutes an economic conflict which may be meaningful to Western audiences, but ignores the reality of Indian fissures.

A throwaway scene involved Jamal’s brother, Salim, doing a Muslim prayer. What this was intended to mean, I have no clue. But the fact that Salim is a criminal suggests that Muslims are involved in gangster activities in Mumbai, which probably is true, but that could have be mentioned without linking devout Muslims and criminals.

As an artistic work, “Slumdog Millionaire” deserves kudos. As a depiction of the true India, it falls short.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 21, 2009

Most of software development favors left brained thinking. Programming, in particular, is all about logic and being objective. For the most part, it is a learnable skill, even if the time requirements for being an expert can vary from the industry for which you are programming. Testing, too, is largely an analytical process of identifying the main and alternate workflows of the system. Crash testing, while allowing for more creativity, can also be turned into a boring process through codification of steps to find common errors.

These ways of managing software development fail when it comes to graphics design for web projects. I am not necessarily talking about every aspect of user interfaces, because many elements of user interfaces can be distilled into general principles. In the case of desktop products, adhering to the UI standards of the particular operating system can avoid most usability problems.

But when it comes to web applications, the user interface has many different aspects to it. Color combinations, fonts, font sizes, heading sizes, text alignment, dynamic styles, animation, 3-D effects, images/photos, ad placement, and a million other things. On top of this, the designer has to consider the changes in people’s tastes over time. So a design that was cutting edge 2 years ago is probably bland or, worse, outdated today.

When it comes to building web user interfaces, programmers are at a loss. Having a good eye for graphics design requires a different type of mental approach, i.e., using more of the right brain. Here is an interesting test to check if you are left-brained or right-brained. As the article explains, here are some of the differences between the 2 brain functions:

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language can comprehend order/pattern perception reality based

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling “big picture” oriented imagination rules symbols and images can “get it” (i.e. meaning) spatial perception fantasy based

This fundamental difference in thinking makes it very difficult for programmers to come up with good graphics layouts. They may even find it hard to distinguish between a good and bad design, often using comparisons with other popular designs to justify their reasoning instead of having an absolute taste for good design. In addition, programmers have little experience with the tools used by graphics designers, such as Photoshop or Flash, nor are they aware of the latest trends through reading graphics-related material and news.

What can a programmer do if they cannot or do not want to pay for a graphics designer? One strategy is to use a minimalist design. No graphics at all, a principle which is in harmony with low-bandwidth requirements of websites. Many popular websites, like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, etc. are graphics-light. Yahoo, for a long time, was very sparse in using images during its initial success as an Internet directory.

Facebook does not even have a proper logo. The application name is imposed as plain white text on a blue background. When you consider how many companies spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for creating brand names and images, this is astonishing for a website that is now a household name.

So, one answer for programmers without graphics helpers is to eschew graphics as much as possible, and instead organize and present text using user interface principles such as those espoused by practitioners such as Jakob Nielsen who has deliberately used few graphics on his site since he started it in 1995, even though it serves 250 thousand visitors a month.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 19, 2009

During his efforts to cement his pariah status in conservative circles during the last election, Andrew Sullivan took a break to write a thoughtful article on blogging (emphasis mine):

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in. […]

Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.

If there is a risk of error with blogging, imagine the risk of micro-blogging, perhaps a hundred times in magnitude. Those innocuous-looking 140-character fields, while useful in many contexts, provide you enough and some more rope to hang yourself with if you succumb to broadcasting every single expression of your emotions, especially those made while in anger or inebriated.

The problem with leaving traces of your in-the-moment feelings on the Internet is that they can be (and frequently are) taken out of context. The author is able to follow the development of a coherent argument from the initial reaction to the final opinion of an event, simply because they are the author and know what they did. But readers frequently land on one of those expressions, especially if they come from a search engine, and see only a part of the story.

The proliferation of blogs and the success of Twitter has increased information overload. This means that traditional methods of having your information consumed by readers (such as using a blog reader) will gradually decrease in significance to people hitting websites randomly or through search engines. Everyone cannot be Robert Scoble and read thousands of posts daily.

So there is a limit to how many blogs (that pump several posts a day) you can read. So for many sites, you will have to control the information you pull through information filters, or you simply visit them on a daily/weekly basis and pick and choose what you read. Just like you would read a newspaper or magazine, you would not read every single page, but choose those articles that capture your attention.

Therefore, although new writing mediums allow you to write more frequently, it doesn’t mean you should go down that route. To avoid readers misunderstand what you say, perhaps this is what you should do:

1. Provide the proper context for any opinion.
2. If your opinion has evolved, then provide links back to previous opinions.
3. Delete opinions that you no longer hold to, or update those posts to reflect your current feelings about the topic.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to do if you are a prolific author. There is no way you can remember all the posts that you wrote about a specific topic. Blogging software may help you categorize and tag your posts, but it is too ineffective to be useful with a high volume of posts. One workaround is to update a single post about the same topic, but that has several problems of its own, such as loss of readability and lack of clarity about the evolution of thoughts. Some authors have also tried appending UPDATE sections to posts, which perhaps is the best solution under the circumstances.

Of course, the really corrected solution may be to avoid knee-jerk reactions, understand the situation better, do some research, gather facts and then provide a well thought-out opinion. That may be under-utilizing the power of the platform, but it is better in the long run to maintain credibility and consistency.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 18, 2009

It may be convenient to have a “Print” button on a screen where a record is displayed, but if the screen also allows the user to edit the record, then you may have a problem. If the user edits the record on screen, hits “Print” and then does not save the record, you have an on-paper representation of the record that was never materialized to the database. Worse, if your screen does not do input validation (perhaps leaving it to the backend), the printout may contain information that was never validated by the system.

This is a significant problem from a legal standpoint, especially in highly regulated industries such as medicine, insurance and finance. I am not a lawyer, but there is the possibility that printouts taken from an application could be used as evidence in a court case, especially if the printout contains the company logo and is mistakenly approved by a company official, who as always trusts the system.

To avoid this situation:

1. Only place the “Print” button in a screen that is not editable. It can even be banished permanently to a reporting module that does not do any data entry or modification.
2. Enable the “Print” button only if there are no pending changes in the screen. This is tricky and can be error-prone, especially when the system undergoes changes.
3. Force a “Save” whenever the “Print” button is clicked. This ensures that the data is first validated and then flushed to the database, and the “Print” functionality only displays saved data or nothing at all.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 18, 2009

The most fascinating professions, in my opinion, are the ones where you make money by preaching what you practice, and where the preaching is the practice. If that is confusing, here are some examples:

1. Blogging about blogging: Every blogger does this to some extent by talking about their experiences with setting up their blog and writing posts, but some make it into a living.
2. Presentations about presentations: How can you explain about giving great presentations? Simple, give a great presentation about it.
3. Speaking about public speaking: Toastmasters is now a worldwide organization and many of its “graduates” are paid for delivering speeches for helping with public speaking. Scott Berkun seems to be going that route too.
4. Writing about writing books: Why struggle with plots and characters when you can teach people how to write stories and get published?

Is writing a compiler/interpreter for a programming language in the same language a recursive profession? Or is that only applicable for creators of programming languages?

Comments (0)

By Krishna, February 16, 2009

Self-help techniques often ask you to come up with a schedule that works for you. Go to the gym “x” times a week. Set apart 1 hour daily for some self-improvement activity. Only spend so many hours on this and only so many hours on that.

In my experience, such strict scheduling only works for tasks that you like doing. If there is an unpleasant task, using a schedule might get you started. But when unforeseen events upset your schedule, then the first things that get cancelled or postponed are the tasks that you don’t like doing or you are not used to doing regularly.

To give an example, let’s say that you don’t find time for reading books. So, instead you try reading 1 chapter every day, so that you can complete two books in a month or so. But let’s say some guests come over and you miss your reading for the day. Suddenly you are under pressure to read 2 chapters to catch up what you missed. And if you miss it again, then you have 3 chapters pending. And suddenly, it becomes a huge burden.

In such cases, it may be more useful to get rid of the schedule and instead set goals tied to a longer time period. For example, you can attempt to read 20 books this year and not set weekly or monthly goals. So perhaps one month, you may get more time and finish off 5 books. And another month, you don’t do anything because you are still on track.

What this does is allow you to balance many different goals at the same time. So, maybe you start the year by making a few resolutions like losing 10 pounds this year, writing that book you have been thinking of, blogging regularly, etc. If you make a schedule that requires you to do some task for each of these resolutions frequently, then it becomes a chore and chances are that you will fall off the bandwagon pretty quickly. Of course, if you are the type of determined person who will always stick to their resolutions, then more power to you, but most people I have seen exhibit initial excitement, then quit within short time.

So, instead of a schedule, just focus on your resolutions and use idle time and unscheduled time to catch up on them. You could catch up on your reading through different means: audio books in a CD or on an iPod, e-books delivered to your Kindle, the paper version while on the can or trying to fall asleep. You could get some exercise while watching TV, or walking or cycling instead of driving. You could write some code for your forthcoming game whenever you feel like it.

I know this doesn’t seem like a very “professional” time management technique, but practically it seems to work for me for some activities. Instead of being under pressure to adhere to a strict deadline, I manage to make some progress on a variety of tasks and, over time, they get completed. Although the work is not being done on a regular basis, this method does result in both minor and major accomplishments.

This is obviously not a technique for every single thing you do in life, but sometimes I wonder whether it can apply to work too. It is kind of ridiculous to expect that people, especially knowledge workers, work exactly 8 hours every day in the same manner. Sometimes, it may be more useful for them to work 10-12 hours at a stretch when they are in the “zone”, and, at other times, they are better off not working than producing substandard products.