06.10.08
Posted in day jobs at 7:42 pm by DMZ
Discussing a problem today, we tossed around some solutions that involved generating a lot of transactions on the back end, and I stopped and said “You know, we’re casually discussing an option that requires more computing power than existed in the world in like… 1985.” And the people I was talking to all cracked huge grins.
I’m not actually sure that’s true, after trying for a while to figure out what the world’s computing power was in 1985 and how many processor instructions a web request actually generates, I believe that may not have been that far off. 1982, maybe. I should ask this as an interview question for a program manager and see what they come up with.
I started out my tech career for real working on a web=based telesales application for inbound call center agents for AT&T Wireless, and we had to deal with a couple hundred people placing orders slowly, moving screen-to-screen as they talked to the customer or helped them pick an option.
And while that had its own set of challenges, they aren’t remotely as cool as the ones I get at Expedia.
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Posted in Movies at 7:25 pm by DMZ
From Sneakers:
Dick Gordon: National Security Agency.
Martin Bishop: Ah. You’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Dick Gordon: No, that’s the FBI. We’re not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Martin Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Dick Gordon: No, that’s the CIA. We protect our government’s communications, we try to break the other fella’s codes. We’re the good guys, Marty.
Martin Bishop: Gee, I can’t tell you what a relief that is… Dick.
Sneakers, for being a two.five-star moderately entertaining flick at the time, surprisingly aged pretty well over the last 16 years, and it makes me feel really old to write that. The clunky stuff is funnier, Mother still isn’t funny to me, but it’s gotten dated-funny, and not dated-boring.
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06.09.08
Posted in Ranting at 5:00 pm by DMZ
On the way in to work today, I had to fish out cash because I didn’t have my bus pass, and I realized that with gas this high, even my extremely short trip to work starts to makes economic sense just on the gas. It’s only ~4 miles each way, but it’s all sitting at stop signs and long stop lights. Seriously, from my house to work, it’s eight stops one-way. My 14-year-old Volvo gets well under 20mpg running back and forth (in fact, it might be sub-15, which is totally embarrassing and why I don’t drive to work). I’d always looked at bus fares and figured it to be a wash, but that’s not the case at all.
At $5/gallon for the premium the 1994 Volvo 850’s owners manual tells me it needs, I’m looking at $1.25/trip over four miles, and Metro’s only $.50 more than that.
Atrios mentioned something similar today:
At $4.50 per gallon in many places I guess that changes. If you’re getting 20 mpg, a 50 mile round trip commute will cost you $11.25. The 13.2 mile trip from downtown Minneapolis to the airport, which you can do on the train for $1.50, costs 3 bucks by car.
The point I’m trying to make is that when gas was cheap, people thought in terms of the cost of filling the tank rather than the cost of making a trip. People didn’t really make a marginal cost/benefit calculation because they didn’t really perceive the cost for short trips. That’s changing.
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06.06.08
Posted in Ranting at 9:35 pm by DMZ
It’s been a while since I ranted about politics, this, from Elenanor Clift, doing a post-mortem on the Clinton campaign:
She did run an extraordinarily close race, and if the Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as the Republicans, she’d be the nominee. If Obama hadn’t outorganized her in small caucus states like Idaho, which the Democrats have no hope of winning in November, he wouldn’t be the nominee.
This may all be true, but it’s first unknowable and second condescending and manages to miss the point at once.
They both attempted to win the nomination under the rules set at the start (mostly, since Clinton later attempted to change them when it favored her). It’s like watching a baseball game and then saying “if the winner was determined by stolen bases, the Brewers would have won.”
Well, sure, had nothing else about the game changed. But if the winner was determined by stolen bases, both teams would have spent a ton of money on speedy baserunners instead of good fielders, they would have fielded only left-handed pitchers who could deter the runner on first, and they’d have devoted their farm systems to producing cannon-armed catchers who could throw out anyone.
Obama and his campaign showed an absolutely amazing ability to organize without the support of existing party structures, they raised astonishing amounts of money, and they worked the rules to their maximum advantage, and they won and won and won.
Who’s to say that if the rules were different, and both teams played on a different field, under different rules, that they couldn’t have won then as well?
The best we can say is that Obama won the contest at hand, and the rest is unknowable. And it’s okay to leave it at that.
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06.03.08
Posted in scifi at 5:35 pm by DMZ
Little Brother, TOR, available at fine retailers or online for free (!), Cory Doctorow.
For starters, I’m reviewing as an adult science-fiction reader. It’s being sold as a young adult book, but genre classification’s always a bit of a joke, and to deal with that point right off the bat: it’s a good read as an adult science-fiction reader.
When I was at Clarion West, I was talking to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the supremely awesome Tor editor, about free books and some other good stuff and he gave me the pitch for this book, and I said “I’d buy that” after the first sentence. The one sentence pitch is: “It’s a group of teenagers who are in San Francisco when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and every chapter revolves around a different type of security vulnerability.”
Here’s the good stuff —
- It’s funny
- It’s fast
- It’s well-paced
- It’s interesting and technically sound
- It’s at times brutal and heart-rending
- It’s entirely too plausible
- There’s an immense amount of really-well done throwaway detail that I just loved. Really, if you read this while paying attention, you’re well-rewarded.
There were times, as I rushed through reading it (and I burned through this one) that I wanted to punch something, or start crying. I felt a lot of the frustration, anger, and terror I’ve felt watching my country in trouble these last few years, and it wasn’t pleasant having those emotions stirred up.
The bad:
- I read the ending and was immensely dissatisfied with the resolution of… some things.
- I’m not sure if this is me versus the YA aspect or what, but I pretty much figured out every character arc and twist in the initial subtle hint. You may see what I mean when you read it. This didn’t at all distract from my enjoyment of it, and it also means you’re ahead of some of the characters sometimes, but… I’m having trouble expressing this well. The characters and their motivations are entirely plausible, but the impact of some developments is lessened when you know with absolute certainty they’re coming and at a certain point in the book you know your predictions are always going to be right. I kept expecting a second level of complexity, if you will, and it never came.
- There are a couple scenes, especially towards the end, that don’t reallllly make sense if you think through what everyone’s doing from their point of view, and that didn’t stop me from reading, but it did detract from the plausibility the book had earned up to those points.
- It is at times a little too obviously exploratory, to the point where a character could in the middle of dialogue, say “And if you want to know more about this and other great topics, head to your local library!” and it wouldn’t be jarring. That… I love my dialogue, and this kind of pained me.
To circle back around, though:
I’m a choosy sci-fi reader, and I read it straight through, enjoyed it immensely. “Rollicking” would be a fine adjective to use. I would want to buy it for my kids, were they teens. I love this kind of openly social, political sci-fi, where we can talk about how technology affects us for the better and worse, how it can free and constrain us, and I loved the book.
I’d say if you’re an adult and you haven’t gotten into Doctorow’s stuff, I might recommend “Eastern Standard Tribe” for the same kind of really-fast-paced excellent writing with a higher reading level, but even that doesn’t have the politics I hunger for. “Little Brother” rocks out.
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05.31.08
Posted in day jobs at 10:16 am by DMZ
Most of my software career I’ve worked on stuff I can’t show off, which is why today’s particularly fun for me. Led by Marcos Guerrero, who I fully endorse as a business customer and Elena Camerini, the senior program manager on this project, Expedia just deployed a whole new set of pages… across nearly every point of sale. I obviously shouldn’t talk about the why, but they’re live, so I’m free to link to them.
Here’s one for Hotels In London on Expedia.co.uk
Or Hotels In Barcelona Stadtregion on Expedia.de, our German site
Things I touched there: I wrote the spec for the filters on the left-hand side, the list of hotel results down the middle, and the map widget on the right hand side.
I’m quite proud of the team.
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05.30.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:01 am by DMZ
When I was growing up, there was a huge status thing around Levi’s. Anything else was a huge step down in terms of respect. Wranglers? Get out of here. Lord forbid you should wear Toughskins or something. As a result, I made a royal pain in the ass of myself pestering my mom when we went back-to-school shopping, and as a result she’d watch the papers until someone ran a sale, and I’d get two pairs.
The thing I loved about them at the time beyond lowering my social visibility was that theose things were well-nigh indestructible. I spent a lot of my time running around in the woods, clambering down stream beds, and generally beating those things up, and I’d often outgrow them before they came apart (the knees, generally, or the cuffs.
As I grew older and I had to start paying for my clothes, I stopped buying them, because I wasn’t the ad-watcher my mom was, and the social acceptance went way down. But if I ever came across some ridiculous discount, I’d pounce. Better to pay more for a quality pair that lasts than burn through six pairs of cheapo brand.
Then I broke with the brand entirely when they went the Walmart route. Levi’s started to produce a down-brand crappy jean they could sell for less at Walmart, and to me, it destroyed the company: they went from being a high-quality, high-cost item I aspired to to competing with the cheap-o crap-quality clothes I didn’t like at all. Soon, they stopped producing any clothes in the US, and Levi’s became something else entirely — just the tag, and a tag that carried a significant price premium. The one time I bought them, the quality was terrible, and they were toast within months.
I stopped caring for years. I bought my jeans wherever and didn’t care. I’m unwilling to pay big money for designer jeans, I can’t find a decent source for oragnic cotton/hemp jeans or anything interesting, and my uniform for a good chunk of the year is Boring Suburban Dad:
- khaki shorts
- dark-colored T-shirt
Which, and this is another topic entirely, really annoys me. I don’t like looking lame, but I don’t know any better. I want to wear shorts in the summer, I’m sorry. How do I do that and not look like I’m about to mow the lawn or start complaining about kids today with their text messaging and their blogging?
That ties in to what happened a couple months ago: the last time I was shopping, I happened across some 501s on a huge discount — as cheap as anything else at the store. And they were the Mexican Levi’s, too. I bought a couple pairs and went through the ardous process of getting them to fit properly.
They look great. They fit, they’re comfortable, they look good — people actually compliment me on my jeans. And how I look generally on days I wear them. Even I look at myself before I go and think “Huh, I do look significantly better than normal.” This is unheard of, as I have no fashion sense at all (see above).
I maybe have five, six pieces of clothes that I’d say make me look nice, and now three of them are pairs of jeans. I’m a little disturbed.
I don’t know what to do. I have mixed feelings about the whole things, and I’m spending a lot of time pondering questions that never occurred to me not that long ago:
- Has the non-US build quality of Levi’s improved that much over the years?
- Is it worth spending a little more to get jeans I like?
- Are there even better options that don’t cost $300 a pair?
- If some well-fitting jeans make that big of a difference, are there other similar upgrades available?
- Really? I should spend some more time on how I dress?
- I can appreciably improve my appearance through clothing choices?
- How do I learn to do that?
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05.23.08
Posted in Gaming at 11:09 pm by DMZ
“Double Mild Weak Sauce”
If you understand why that’s really funny, it’s the game for you.
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05.10.08
Posted in Ranting at 10:42 am by DMZ
I’ve had an eye out for a hybrid for a while — Mrs. Zumsteg in particular has an extremely short commute on city streets, and her car is going to need replacement at some point here.
Anyway, I saw this in a Prius ad:
Mileage is around 91k right now, which is considered pretty low for a hybrid.
What does that even mean? Are hybrids supposed to have high miles? And who considers that low? My insurance company figures that ~10k/year is normal. This thing isn’t far out off that pace, but that’s not low.
The really interesting thing to me is that someone composed that sentence thinking it was a selling point or even a mitigation strategy. Now, if it was highway miles, you might go “okay, well, that’s not 91k of stop and go, at least” but the author of this ad thought something like “I’ll disclose the miles… jeez, that seems high now that I’ve written it down. I should say something. Um, ‘At least it’s not 100k?’ No, that just reminds them it’s close. What do I do?”
And eventually settled on this bizarre nonseqiutor. What were the rejected second halves of this sentence?
Mileage is around 91k right now…
- later it’ll be around 81 if I can figure out how to reset this stupid tamper-proof odometer. Heck, 71.
- and 91 was a pretty good year, if you think about it, am I right?
- but that includes the time I went to the store for chips but they were all out and that shouldn’t count
- and I’m going to rack it up even faster after placing this ad
- most of it from driving back and forth to your mom’s house
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05.05.08
Posted in Ranting at 10:22 pm by DMZ
You can come to emusic in two states:
- logged in
- not logged in
If you’re not logged in, it could be because you’re a member or not.
So let’s say you’re not a member. You’ll look around as much as possible (emusic hasn’t historically made it easy to browse their selection, which I don’t understand) and either decide to sign up or leave.
If you’re a member and you’re not logged in, you may well hit the “login” button.
No one who is not a member, logically, would hit that button. If you were designing the next step, you should assume that your audience is members who are not currently logged in.
Right? So here’s their page.
I don’t mind so much that I’m taken to a login page. But it’s one of the worst examples of poor design I’ve ever seen on something this simple. A login screen should ask for
1. Username/email/whatever the ID is
2. Password
That’s it. Here, you’ve expressed an intention to login, and you get a radio button defaulted to “I am not a member”. Why would you be there if you weren’t a member?
Every time an emusic customer - someone who is subscribing to their service, handing over money every month - goes to login, that button is defaulted to no, and they have to click it to “Yes I have a password”. Every one of them.
Why would anyone who is not a member fill in their email and then hit “submit” on a login page? There’s no indication at all of what could happen next. If they do, by some miracle, they’re taken to the registration process.
Why? Why would a new customer go to “login” then fill in their email address as if they had an account, then hit submit?
Clearly, this page serves two masters: they want to let people log in, and then someone decided that they needed to let people register there as well. But if people wanted to subscribe, there’s a “sign up” button on the front page (!!!). If you were going to subscribe, that’s where you’d go.
It takes you to the registration page, the same as if you’d gone into the login page and blundered past the registration. That makes sense.
I don’t understand why they deliberately designed a page that annoys its intended audience every time it’s used. “I enjoy giving you money each month.” “Hang on, let me poke you in the eye real quick.”
I sent emusic a note about this as a user, where I said “please, if you’re not going to fix the page, could you at least default the button to ‘yes’?” and they said they’d pass the comment along.
It’s a line of HTML. It would take someone five, ten seconds to fix that default and then I don’t know how long to propagate it out. They haven’t done it.
When I work on user interface stuff, I always try and remember examples like this. What’s the user thinking when they come to the page? Are there rough edges we can smooth? If this page can’t easily serve two purposes, can we break it out?
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