Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

This quick rant is about Amazon.com. Before proceeding further let me assure you that I’m a big fan, having been an Amazon.com customer for over a decade. I’ve also successfully tested their A-to-Z coverage, with my shopping history including phones, camera lenses, lawnmowers (yes, several), as well as books. Yes, they’re great!

In an older post I pointed out that Amazon’s recommendation technology didn’t allow one to specify whenever they’re purchasing gifts for others. Consequently any such purchase used to throw it off, adding noise to otherwise useful recommendations. That got fixed since then, though it took longer than I thought.

These days I’m longing for another obvious yet missing feature: the ability to sort/filter by location. I purchase used books/music/videos quite frequently, and the default sort by price (increasing in the following screenshot) no longer does it for me:

All online stores offer the above experience; nowadays it is the norm. If my shopping experience is any indication, an improved experience is within close reach, involving information that is already available, yet for the moment is blindly pushed from the seller database(s) onto the glass.

Personally I prefer local (or close-by) sellers vs equally (or even slightly lower) priced, but far-away ones. For the items that I buy used the shipping charges tend to be the same. Consequently, in the above example, assuming the item’s cost doesn’t vary wildly, I’d pick a seller from WA over one in CA, over one in TX, over one in MN, over one in NY. To begin with, the delivery time will be shorter. Then, assuming you care about your carbon footprint, the shorter distance translates into a lower environmental impact. However, although Amazon (or other commerce sites for that matter–this experience reflects today’s common practices) has this information readily available, it doesn’t allow me to pivot by location. Consequently I have to do it through visual inspection. Let’s see how long it takes until the location pivot becomes an integral part of the shopping experience!

It’s been a few years since my last vacation overseas. Since then I acquired several e-dependencies on services such as Pandora (see my older post on feature extraction) and Hulu, a service I learned about from my colleague Adam Sheppard (you may have read about Adam on Live Labs’ web site). I discovered that these services don’t work from outside the US:

This is surprising because in both instances the providers know my permanent location from the ZIP code provided when I set up the accounts.

Luckily Pandora and Hulu are not my only options. I am also a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber, and unlike with the previous accounts that is a paid subscription. Their service did not complain about my accessing it from outside the US. While this finding hasn’t sunk in completely it resonates with what I’m reading in Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop it) about reducing generativity.

I’ve been a slashdot reader since the end of 1997, when I discovered it over the dial-up connection I had at the University of Illinois. While back then I visited /. almost daily, nowadays my visits are much less frequent. During this time the slashdot community expanded and changed (if nothing else we’re all 10 years older). Consequently I no longer have a good grip on how objective and well-researched the typical slashdot post is.

This changed last night, when the slashdot story Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias covered one of the projects I’m involved with (i.e., Blews). The coverage provided some interesting insight about /.

First, in spite of the “news for nerds” tag line, slashdot stories are not necessarily new. Over a week before the /. coverage Matt Hurst blogged about the mainstream media picking up Blews in their TechFest coverage; I also had a similar post. So if you’re looking for fresh nerdy news you’d be better off going elsewhere.

Second, the /. comments cover a wide spectrum: some are objective. Others are amusing. Others make me wonder whether a sequel to Mel Gibson’s 1997 Conspiracy Theory is in the works. Yet they are far from being evenly distributed–on the contrary. So if you’re after a reasonable S/N you’d also be better off seeking that elsewhere. (BTW if Blews resonates with you consider attending ICSWM 2008; several folks from the Blews team as well as myself will be there.)

So with old news and poor S/N what are those coming to /. after?

Last weekend I caught a Taiko performance in Seattle’s Japanese Garden. I have never seen Taiko live; the mix of percussion and choreography was quite impressive. Here’s one of the snapshots I caught. If you’d like to see the dynamics of a similar performance this YouTube video should give you an approximate idea.

A few weeks ago I attended Lang.NET Symposium. Charles Torre asked me to participate in a conversation with Miguel de Icaza, who was among the attendees. (While nowadays most people associate Miguel with Mono, our paths crossed–virtually–many years ago, when Tudor Hulubei and Andrei Pitis were working on GIT.) Charles Torre was our host, and we talked about open source, Mono, Moonlight, and various other bits. Our session is now available as a Channel 9 video. (Note: cross-posted from my work blog.)

Disc-less… and the competition is coming over your high-speed Internet connection. Netflix lives up to its name; Jaman, Apple TV and VUDU are also doing it. With Jaman, Apple and VUDU entering the world of HD, the incentive of buying plastic seems low.

That aside, I find it puzzling that shipping 12-cm disks via gas-guzzling trucks is still more economical than pushing bits through the wire. Sure, there’s also the carbon footprint, but that’s not factored in the price. At the beginning of the year I heard on a show on the BBC World Service that “being green” is going to be fashionable in 2008. The show also warned that typically this would be just a fashion statement because under the current rules of the game it’s extremely hard to do it while staying competitive. So far they seem right on both counts.

Just a few days into the new year is a great time to look back at 2007 and reflect about what book influenced me the most. Pip Coburn’s The Change Function–recommended by my friend and colleague Erik Meijer–stands out as the clear winner.

Pip shares his insight about assessing the success of high-tech products. He boils it down to the ratio between the current customer pain (P) and the total perceived pain of adoption (TPPA) for a new technology. From Chapter 5 on the book contains case studies and projections for various products, including DEC’s Alpha chip, ISDN, TiVo, flat panel TV, and satellite radio. The probing questions from Chapter 11 are great!

Going through this book influenced the way I think about technology products in general, and software projects in particular. I got to enjoy the mental exercise of understanding and articulating the customer pain, and then the total perceived pain of adopting the solution(s).

On the last day of 2007 an email inquiry about Kindle reminded me of the Change Function–perfect timing for a reminder to reflect about the year’s most influential book. Answer the following questions to compute its Change Function:

• What is the crisis ?
• Is the crisis the supplier’s or the consumers’ ?
• What is the perceived pain of adopting the solution ?

I decided to give WordPress a try and migrated my entire site from Drupal. Among other visible (and not so visible) changes now I can use Live Writer for WYSIWYG blog-editing. I’m sure I broke a few things in the process so do let me know if you have problems with the content/links.

A few months ago a CNN crew visited paterns & practices on the Redmond campus. They shot a few videos in our offices built from the ground up for agile development.Their feature on the future workspace has been available for a while now as a 3-part series: the Google Plex, Microsoft Workplace Advantage, and the Perfect Office Chair. The footage from patterns & practices is in part 2, mixed with other Microsoft clips.

Many useful URLs are way too long to memorize or even type. I’ve known and used TinyURL for many years to compress long URLs. A recent conversation reminded me of this service. It turns out that several other options are available. I’d like to see more people use these services to trim long URLs, particularly when they’re printed on paper. Can you imagine typing something like http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blogs/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!2085.entry? This is in fact an example from a real printed book. Why not http://tinyurl.com/2jjl2f instead?