Damian Brady’s Blog

So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded the version of WordPress.  This blog is now running the brand spanking shiny new version 2.5!

I’ve gotta say, the upgrade went really, really smoothly! Literally about 10 minutes from thinking about doing it to now (including download time)

While it’s far from a one-click upgrade solution, it is very straightforward.

Having said all that though, I’m dreading the upgrade of the QUT Volleyball Website.  The most dangerous thing about these upgrades is apparently the plugins - and the QUT Volleyball Website is filled with them.  Videos, Polls, etc.

I’ll let you know how that one goes when I finally get the courage!

Damo

I was doing some blog-hopping the other day and came across an old post called “The Scott Adams Meltdown: Anatomy of a Disaster” on the Ask Tog site.

Basically, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert comics) had an incident in early 2006 where he accidentally (permanently) deleted a post as well as 500 comments that were attached to it.

Tog identifies a “misleading metaphor” as one of the issues and highlights the importance of using appropriate metaphors when designing software and educating users on how to use it.

Several articles in his site talk about other misleading and confusing metaphors and how they contributed to bugs or problems, and it got me thinking about the use of metaphors a bit more.

Now, I’m a big fan of metaphors - I use them constantly, particularly when I’m talking about anything IT to a “layperson”. Communication between “nerds and normal people” is something that is typically not handled well. Frequently the nerd doing the explaining gets frustrated at the user’s lack of understanding and the user gets frustrated at the jargon and poor explanations. Metaphors can help, but only if they’re used properly. Similarly, when writing software, user-interface metaphors are frequently used. Think of the recycle bin in Windows or the Home button in your browser. These are (usually) effective metaphors.

My sister is fairly heavily involved in AFL. She was talking the other day about how coaches teach young kids the correct techniques for handballing and marking. They tell the kids to imagine the ball as a spaceship and the little valve in the middle of the laces as the spaceman. When you’re kicking, the spaceship should be pointing up, and the spaceman should be pointing to where you want to kick it.

The problem with this is that the intended behaviour doesn’t match the metaphor terribly well. A spaceship should point where it needs to go, right? In fact, the spaceman should probably point in that direction as well. Essentially, you’re telling kids to imagine the ball as a spaceship, but a spaceship that doesn’t really mimic the behaviour of a spaceship. It’s misleading.

It gets worse though. When they teach the kids to handball, they tell them to hold the spaceship in one hand with the spaceman at the top up and the spaceship pointing in the direction it needs to go. Ok, not bad so far. Then, they tell the kids to imagine there’s an icecream in their other hand. To handball correctly, they should smash the icecream into the back of the spaceship. What?

I don’t think I need to point out the problems with that one.

This, to me, is a series of very poorly thought-out metaphors. A metaphor should be something that someone can relate to to help them understand the concept in question. The properties and behaviour of the metaphor should closely resemble the model you’re trying to present. This is why metaphors like “bookmarks” in browsers and “address books” in email programs work reasonably well, and others like “Clippy” (Word’s abandoned instructional paperclip) confused many users.

Damo

Joel on Software has an absolutely magnificent article explaining the difficult situation Microsoft is in with Internet Explorer 8.

Essentially, he explains how and why the web browser is in a no-win situation. Microsoft can enforce “standards” and allow existing web pages to break if they don’t meet the standards (something no browser has done before) or they can continue to be backwards compatible and support all those workarounds people have been putting in for years to make-it-work-for-browser-X.

If they choose the first option, which is their current plan, they’ll have a hard time convincing the developers of all those existing websites (if they’re around any more) to update their sites to conform to the HTML4 and CSS1 standards amongst others. If not, all those webpages will work, but what’s the point of standards if they’re not enforced?

It’s a longish article, but it’s very well written and it provides great insight if you’re a web developer.

Damo

Let’s be honest, wireless connectivity is awesome. It’s fairly easy to set up, and it basically means you can roam all over the place while on the Internet.

I have a secure wireless LAN set up at home, another one at work and even another one accessible to me at uni. In case that isn’t enough, my mobile phone has a wireless broadband plan and I have a Vodafone USB modem from work for mobile broadband as well. Occasionally, if I’m sitting at my desk at work, I’ll plug my laptop in just to get that little bit more speed.

It’s convenient that I have so many wireless connections available to me, but it’s not as convenient as it could be. And that’s what technology is all about, right?

My laptop can connect to one of three WiFi networks, and they usually connect pretty transparently if they’re available. I turn the computer on, it finds a known wireless network and connects. The uni connection is the only exception and that’s just due to the security they’ve got in place. If need be, my laptop can also connect to one of two mobile broadband connections - one through my mobile phone via Bluetooth, and one via the USB modem. In these cases, I have to tell it to connect and provide the credentials every time.

Wouldn’t it be good if I could just set up all of these connections once and let my laptop decide what connection it wanted to use? I’d happily provide credentials to use for each connection and I’ll even order them in terms of preference.

I’m no network engineer, but I’m sure it can’t be too difficult to write some software to handle all of this for me? Identify which connections are available, use the one with the highest preference, and fail-over relatively silently to an alternative if it becomes unavailable. If it becomes available again, then reconnect and start using it.

Has anyone encountered a system that can do this nicely?

Damo

A couple of things today prompted me to write about this. The first and main one was an article on Coding Horror about actual vs perceived performance.

The premise of the article and the study it references is that a user’s perception of the speed of an operation is often more important than the actual speed of the operation.

This all harks back to a core software designer rule - effective feedback.

In short, if a user can see that something is happening, they’re less concerned with the time it takes. This realisation no doubt led to the plethora of spinning images around the web that let you know an asynchronous request is happening. Does the rotating wheel indicate how long it will take or whether it’s actually doing anything at all? No, of course not, but it is effective feedback and it inspires confidence from the user.

One of the first bits of code I wrote when I arrived at my current job was a function in an ASP.Net application that retrieved a credit report for a client. Its efficiency relied 100% on the efficiency of a server somewhere in New Zealand (there’s now an Australian server). I didn’t (and still don’t) know before request time whether it will be available or how long the request will take if it is. I know very little about the service apart from the message it expects and the response it will hopefully give me.

At first, there were a few complaints about how long the function took. Unlike everything else in the system, it didn’t respond straight away. On average, it only really took a few seconds, but it was long enough that some users wondered what was happening. Predictably, when I added a small chunk of javascript that showed a “Retrieving credit file” message and a pretty rotating circle, the complaints stopped. Because something was happening while they were waiting, albeit a simple animated gif, people were less concerned with the time it took.

I did say there were two things that prompted this post didn’t I? The second was a discussion I was having with a mate about efficient methods of storing, retrieving, and sorting data. It made me think that even if you refactored your code to cut down your search from say, O(n²) to O(n log n), would your users be any happier than if you added some javascript to distract them? It’s often worth investigating I think.

Damo

If you’re sick of constantly hearing predictions of what technology is going to be able to do in the future only to get there (to the future) and find yourself wanting, check this out:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/475/1/

Yeah, that’s right - it’s a peripheral for a computer that READS YOUR MIND!!

Now where’s my flying car?

Damo

I’ve been trying to get into Ruby on Rails so I’ve been looking for good tutorials and introductions to the ruby language and the whole RoR framework. I’ve found a few, and I think I’m getting a decent grasp on it now.

One I’m reading why’s (poignant) guide to ruby and it’s seriously like getting great training from a mental patient. The tutorial bits and examples are great, but there’s a ton of insanity thrown in.

Take this quote for example:

Back, back, way back before speedboats, I owned a prize race horse who took a stumble on the track. She did ten front flips and crashed into a guy who was carrying a full jar of mayonnaisse. We had blood and mayonnaisse [sic] up and down the track. Needless to say, she was a disaster.

Wow. And this kind of stuff is scattered throughout. The example immediately after this little story demonstrates methods by showing an example that catches a falling star and uses a rachet to connect it to a captive monkey to make a “starmonkey”.

Well worth a read. You’ll actually probably accidentally learn Ruby too.

Damo

So you’re all probably aware of those ads we’re seeing from the government designed to scare parents into monitoring or preventing their child’s Internet use. Apparently, they have been spin-doctored in a big way.

Via Gizmodo Australia, I discovered an article on the Sydney Morning Herald website with a fairly critical analysis of this government campaign.
The advertisements are costing about $22 million, and are part of a $189 million NetAlert program designed to “save our children”. The SMH claims that this money is being spent to “whip up fear about the largely non-existent threat of online sexual predators”. When you read on, you can see that their criticism is legitimate.

Here are some anomalies with the campaign as reported by SMH:

• The number of people who have been charged and convicted for approaching minors online with a view to paedophilia (called grooming) in the last two years in NSW is one. Yes, one person in two years.
• The ads claim that more than half of Australian children have been contacted by a “stranger” online. It appears that the definition of “stranger” includes friends of friends. So if you’re a child, and a friend from school introduces you to a friend of theirs, then you contribute to this statistic.
• If the previous point wasn’t bad enough, it seems that contact from a “stranger” also refers to unsolicited email; i.e. spam. Yes, that’s right, more than half of Australia children have received spam; a statistic that has nothing to do with paedophilia at all, and frankly seems a bit low to me.
• Only 8 percent of children even mentioned the possibility of talking to “bad people” when asked about concerns with the Internet. Their major concerns appeared to be popup ads and speed issues.

In the Sydney Morning Herald article, there’s almost no mention of misleading statistics regarding pornography or inappropriate content. That’s fair enough; the research that this campaign is based on shows that more than half of Australian children have done something online that their parents wouldn’t approve of. But what about offline? What do you think the response would have been if the same children had been asked whether they had done something in real life that their parents wouldn’t approve of? And what constitutes these acts that parents “wouldn’t approve of”? I can imagine that talking to friends after 11pm might fit that description, as would playing games when they were supposed to be studying.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge that material on the Internet that is inappropriate for children is far too easy to find. There should be technologies and mechanisms available to allow parents to monitor and restrict their child’s access to such content. And that is what the government has tried to do with their free Internet filter. The one that was cracked in 30 minutes by a kid in grade 10 at school. As an IT guy, I can appreciate that it is a very hard problem, but with $189 million dollars to spend and the ability to write legislation, you’d think a reasonable solution might be forthcoming. At least one that would last longer than half an hour. Why not require that ISPs implement a filter at their end that can be turned on and off by the account holder? The filter can’t be cracked by your 15 year old if he can’t see it.

I appreciate that the government is taking the danger of the Internet seriously, really I do. But using misleading and essentially false statistics to implant fear into the minds of parents is a horrible solution.

Some parents go seriously overboard when it comes to “protecting” their children. I know parents who have prevented their child from seeing their friends outside school hours for more than a year because the child skipped school one day. I know parents who have forbidden their 16 year-old daughter from watching the Austin Powers movie because it had a character called “Alotta Fagina”. What would be the response of parents like this if they saw an ad suggesting that over half of Australian children have been approached by a paedophile online? I have little doubt that the children would be prevented from accessing the Internet at all, or at the very least, restricted to Internet usage with a parent sitting next to them. Maybe the latter is not so bad, but God forbid if the kid accidentally stumbled upon a search result that contained inappropriate material.