Resisting the temptation of web services

It's so appealing to move software to a web services remote hosting model.

I lived through that era in the 90s. Among other things, we discovered that the internet fell a few orders of magnitude sort of the optimistic predictions of 1990. (We were all supposed to have fiber to the desktop by 2000.)

Joel Spolsky (over 40,000 subscribers on Bloglines alone, millions of readers) reminds us why a new generation should think twice about abandoning installed software (emphases mine):

Where there's muck, there's brass - Joel on Software

... For us, the installable option gives us five times the sales. It costs us an extra salary or two (in tech support costs). It also means we have to use Wasabi, which has some serious disadvantages compared to off-the-shelf programming languages, but which we found to be the most cost-effective and efficient way, given our code base, to ship software that is installable on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Boy, I would love nothing more than to scrap installable FogBugz and run everything on our servers... we've got racks and racks of nice, well-managed Dell servers with plenty of capacity and our tech support costs for the hosted version are zero. Life would be much easier. But we'd be making so much less money we'd be out of business.

The one thing that so many of today's cute startups have in common is that all they have is a simple little Ruby-on-Rails Ajax site that has no barriers to entry and doesn't solve any gnarly problems. So many of these companies feel insubstantial and fluffy, because, out of necessity (the whole company is three kids and an iguana), they haven't solved anything difficult yet. Until they do, they won't be solving problems for people. People pay for solutions to their problems...

Actually, people often pay for dreams unrelated to their real problems, but that's another story. (Informed customers are a blessing, but in some domains they are rare.)

One day, the web services dream might work. In the meantime, my prior DSL service was unavailable at least once a week...

CIA Torture tapes destroyed

The CIA videotaped their torture sessions, now they've destroyed the tapes.

Evidently they are unsure that the GOP will win in 2008.

There's nothing to say, but I think we need to mark these events.

Indentured servitude in the modern world -- the noncompete

My employer can fire me at any time.

That's fine, I can also leave at any time.

Except, I theoretically can't work after I leave, but my employer can stay in business. I knowingly signed a non-compete ...

Techdirt: Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital

... Much of this discussion kicked off with AnnaLee Saxenian's 1994 book Regional Advantage that tries to understand why Silicon Valley developed into the high tech hub it is today, while Boston's Route 128 failed to follow the same path -- even though both were considered at about the same level in the 1970s. Saxenian finds that the single biggest difference in the two regions was the ability of employees to move from firm to firm in Silicon Valley. That factor, ahead of many others, caused Silicon Valley to take off, while the lack of mobility in Boston caused its tech companies to stagnate and make them unable to compete against more nimble Silicon Valley firms....

Ronald Gilson found this to be interesting, and followed it up with his own research suggesting that that it had much less to do with cultural reasons and much more to do with the legal differences between the two places, specifically: California does not enforce noncompetes, while Massachusetts does. Gilson looks at a few of the other possible explanations for the difference and shows how they're all lacking, leaving the difference in noncompetes as being the key difference between the two regions in terms of the flow of information and ideas leading to new innovations. He also explains the history of non-enforcement in California, showing that it was mostly an accident of history more than anything done on purpose...

I think that the single biggest thing Minnesota could do for its economy would be to limit non-compete agreements.

PS. In fact non-competes are rarely enforced, they're mostly about intimidation. The way to break them, I'm told, is to get a job in a state where they are not enforceable and to bring suit there.

The only kind of change management that works

At least outside of a tyranny:

Life as a Healthcare CIO: Leading Change

...My decade of experience executing change suggests that Kotter was right. Building a guiding coalition, broadly communicating the vision, and celebrating a series of short term successes really works. I've watched projects without vision, resources or communication cause pain and anxiety throughout the organization. The good news is that we now know how to execute change and it is the role of senior management to enforce Kotter's principles in every change project...

Excellent details in Halamka's full post.

I read this stuff and I think about how much it used to cost to get advice like this. There's a generation emerging that will be accustomed to finding and tracking freely available wisdom.

Freedom requires religion

So atheists can't be free, but Wiccans can?

Romney: President needs prayers of people of all faiths - CNN.com: "

... Romney said religion is essential to freedom, without pointing to any specific faith.

'Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone,' the GOP contender said.

On another front Huckabee, who's even more explicit than Bush that Creationism should be taught in science class, is emerging as a GOP front runner.

Proclamations of the 'end of the religious right' appear to have been a bit premature.

Predictions of a rationalist victory, or at least a Democrat as president, are equally premature. The nation that reelected George W Bush has not changed radically in the past three years.

The thirty five year slowdown

In the past 35 years America has become vastly more wealthy.

Krugman, DeLong and Reich tell us that wealth has not gone to the middle class:

Robert Reich's Blog: It's the Economy, Stupid -- But Not Just the Slowdown

... middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they've used for over three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Male wages today are actually lower than they were then; the income of a young man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.

The first coping mechanism was moving more women into paid work. The percent of working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 -- from 38 percent to about 70 percent. Some parents are now even doing 24-hour shifts, one on child duty while the other works...

When families couldn't paddle any harder, we started paddling longer. The typical American now works two weeks more each year than 30 years ago...

As the tide of economic necessity continued to rise, we turned to the third coping mechanism. We began taking equity out of our homes, big time....

...The fact is, most Americans are still not prospering in the high-tech, global economy that emerged three decades ago. Almost all the benefits of economic growth since then have gone to a relatively small number of people at the very top. The candidate who acknowledges this and comes up with ways to truly spread prosperity will have a good chance of winning over America's large and largely-anxious middle class.

The polls I know of don't show any sign that America's middle class recognizes their dilemma. Until I see that I can't share Reich's faith that there's a winning progressive political strategy in their discontent.

Software comments: quality and metaphor

My paternal grandfather was a railway man. In those days lots of people were. He must have had opinions about how to run a train, but he didn't have a blog.

Today software is the latest railway, but we have blogs. So people like Joel Spolsky, who has about a million or so readers, tell us some very interesting things:

Hitting the High Notes - Joel on Software

.... the conventional wisdom in the world of copycat business journalists and large companies who rely on overpaid management consultants to think for them, chew their food, etc., seems to be that the most important thing is reducing the cost of programmers.

In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they'd have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up.

So, why isn't there room in the software industry for a low cost provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan is working.)

Here's why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.

Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost...

I've read similar arguments in discussions about artists and entertainers -- such as professional baseball players). A hundred journeyman players can't deliver anywhere near the value of one superstar. The incremental cost of sending signal to a few more antennae is very, very small.

I hadn't, however, though about how well this applies to software as well. The incremental cost of creating another CD is very, very small.

In most industries quality doesn't scale all that well. In software, it can. It makes sense to pay enough to hire the very best designers and coders, and to give them working conditions that make them happy and productive. That's what Spolsky has done (See the "in house" software description.) I hope the meme is contagious.

So let's accept that producing software is still very hard and it takes really good and expensive people to create good software.

By why is it so hard to create good software, and why do so many products never fulfill their early promise?

I think I can add something from my own experience here.

I think we have trouble creating and nurturing great software because it's a very long process with a thousand different paths to an premature end. You can get a lot of things right, have a few good years of growth, then fumble a critical transition and see your work die a slow and ugly death.

We commonly use metaphors from architecture, literature, or music to describe the software creation process. I think they all add value, but I think they miss the organic aspect of how software grows and evolves. Maybe a better metaphor is building a company, creating a formal garden, or, perhaps, raising a particularly challenging child.

There's no perfect metaphor, but the common ones have a trap. They imply that there's a point that a product is "done" and the "A team" can move on. I'm sure that's sometimes true, but even then process may take 10 years. In many instances complex software remains a very demanding beast, requiring a lot of skill and ingenuity to keep it health and adaptive. Often that skill has moved on and the software can enter a spiral of every increasing entropy.

I think the long life cycle of software, and the easily underestimated costs of keeping a complex software beast "healthy", help explain why truly excellent software is unusual.

Google Street View in Saint Paul, Minnesota?

This is odd.

Google Street View (more here) is Google's amazing and controversial photographic reconstruction of street level details. It's enabled for San Francisco and a few select other cities.

And Saint Paul, Minnesota?!

My traffic map today has a 'street view' button. Clicking it merely toggles an icon of a standing biped, currently located in an obscure parking lot by an unremarkable intersection about one mile north of my home in Saint Paul.

The icon, which I recognize from other Street Views, is inactive, though s/he does have a context menu (center, zoom, etc).

So is it a glitch, or are we really going to see Street View in the twin cities? Who the heck picked that spot and why?

Update: Each time I access maps the little icon moves around the metro area. So I assume it's being placed randomly. I think Google is picking on me, but my new hat should protect me from Googlation ...

Pay phones join tape reels and broadcast TV

I'm surprised there are still a million pay phones around:

Pay phones? Yeah, I’ve seen them in old movies : Good Morning Silicon Valley:

...AT&T announced today that it will pull out of the pay-phone business by the end of next year, selling off its remaining 65,000 installations in a 13-state area. The company said it wanted to get out before the business became unprofitable, surprising many who figured that with everyone walking around with a phone in their pocket, the coin-op sector had been moribund for a while now. Indeed, it’s a lot tougher to find a public phone than it used to be. In 1998, there were 2.6 million of them scattered about; now it’s down to about a million....

The number of phones probably varies by state and climate. I bought my first cell phone at least 8 years ago because it was getting harder to find a pay phone in the Twin Cities metro area.

Another bit of culture our children will find odd when they see old movies.

By the way, dial phones and vinyl records, aren't yet one of those odd things. They still show up as toys or working devices -- at least in preschool. Carbon paper, rust, broadcast television, typewriters, telegrams, tape reels, punch cards, slide rules and family motels will probably be forgotten first.

Gmail feature request: the ability to edit subject lines

I added this feature request to Gmail suggestions today:

Gmail Suggestion

Ability to edit subject lines.

One of the most powerful features of Outlook is the ability to revise the subject line.

Why is this so powerful?

Because of search. Editing subject lines allows one to both add terms important in search, and increases the value of search results. Since results always display subject lines, good subject lines make search returns more useful.

I depend on this feature in my use of Outlook. I very much miss it in Gmail.

Gmail suggestions allows one to vote on new features that are being considered. It's worth a visit, though I suspect if one enters the same email address too frequently the votes are discounted.

I wonder if Google ranks feedback based on the reputation associated with the email address provided?

Google Docs has no clothes

My earliest posts on Google Docs (nee Writely), written in 2006, are here and here. Back then I thought we'd see Writely technology move into Blogger and Page Creator, and that Google Docs would become impressive.

Hasn't happened yet.

Since then I've used Google Docs fairly often, always with the latest versions of Firefox. It's a miserable word processor.

Sorry. It's true. Maybe it's better with IE, but I haven't tried it there.

If you do anything beyond simple text manipulation, the editing behaviors become increasingly unpredictable. Odd spaces open up that can't be removed. The HTML view doesn't explain the funky editing behavior, but it's a tag mess anyway.

Don't try inserting images and moving them around. You'll have to revert to a prior version as the document becomes irreparable.

I knew MacWrite. Google Docs is no MacWrite. It's arguably superior to WordStar, but I haven't tried any long documents in it. WordStar, however, was obsolete 20 years ago.

Google Spreadsheet is more useful; I haven't bothered with Google's presentation software.

I think we're a lot further from moving everything to the network than most pundits imagine ...

Google Sites to Launch Next Year

Very good news from Google Operating System. It's been obvious for over a year that Google's Page Creator was in maintenance mode. Just about anything else will be an improvement.

Google Sites to Launch Next Year

... JotSpot will replace Google Page Creator. "Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration." The service will also allow you to upload any file formats. You can already see a gallery of applications that use JotSpot.

As expected, most Google services will become Gears-enabled and will start to work even when you're offline. "Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott's answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar."

Another service that will become a part of Google Apps is GrandCentral, but the integration is not expected to be available very soon...

Jotspot is usually described as a Wiki service.

I use GrandCentral, it would be more appealing if they would add a fax receive service, perhaps for an additional fee.

Also expected in 2008 is Google's file sharing and backup service.

Preventing anorexia: are these traits predictive?

A very small, and possibly completely misleading study, suggests some personality traits associated with anorexia - and probably with success in medical school ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Anorexia visible with brain scans

... While the brain region for emotional responses - the anterior ventral striatum - showed strong differences for winning and losing the game in the healthy women, women with a past history of anorexia showed little difference between winning and losing...

...Another brain area, called the caudate, which is involved in linking actions to outcome and planning, was far more active in the women with a history of anorexia compared to the control group.

The anorexia group tended to have exaggerated and obsessive worry about the consequences of their behaviours, looked for rules where there were none and were overly concerned about making mistakes, said Dr Kaye.

He said: "There are some positive aspects to this kind of temperament. Paying attention to detail and making sure things are done as correctly as possible are constructive traits in careers such as medicine or engineering."

I haven't been following anorexia research, but I assume they were watching for these traits based on prior studies. I agree these are great traits for many medical careers. Equanimity about winning or losing, combined with a passion for meeting expectations and following rules, works well in many modern careers.

Now if you have a young daughter who doesn't seem to care about winning or losing, but who is happiest with expectations and rules in all settings, should you worry about anorexia?

It would depend on the positive predictive value of those traits. To simplify, they might turn out be required but not sufficient; they might be universal in anorexics, but also common in non-anorexics.

It would be nice to know the predictive power though. If they turned out to predictive traits, then parents could try avoid reinforcing some traits, while encouraging others. At the very least, one could keep a watchful eye on food behaviors ...

Children of the roaring 20s

Crooked Timber sent me to a 1957 article in the Atlantic monthly by Nora Johnson, who's book was later turned into an early Peter Sellers movie. A quick search didn't turn up a bio, but I assume she was born around 1935 -- a bit younger than my mother. She's 72 now, and likely living still.

I wonder what she makes of the old article.

The part that caught my eye was reflections on having parents who'd led wild and crazy lives. No, not in the 1960s. In the 1920s...

Sex and the College Girl

...Our parents kicked over so many traces that there are practically none left for us. That is not to say, of course, that all of our parents were behaving like the Fitzgeralds. Undoubtedly most of them weren't. But the twenties have come down to us as the Jazz Age, the era described by Time as having "one abiding faith—that something would happen in the next twenty minutes that would utterly change one's life," and this is what will go on the record. The people living more quietly didn't make themselves so eloquent. And this gay irresponsibility is our heritage. There is very little that is positive beneath it, and there is one clearly negative result—so many of our parents are divorced. This is something many of us have felt and want to avoid ourselves (though we have not been very successful). But if we blame our parents for their way of life, I suspect we envy them even more. They seemed so free of our worries, our self-doubts, and our search for what is usually called security—a dreary goal. I think that we bewilder our parents with our sensible ideas, which look, on the surface, like maturity...

Reads like Young Republicans of the Reagan eara.

SETI: find one of nine galactic civilizations

Damn Interesting has a very nice Drake Equation/SETI review today. Allan Bellow's even touches lightly on the Fermi Paradox, though he doesn't get into the various paradox resolutions.

The highlight of the article is an interactive Drake Equation calculator. Users start with various presets, including the 'rare earth' and the 'Drake 2004' options, then add their own biases. Two of the "terms" of the Drake Equation are now relatively accepted, below I show them and 3 variations on the rest: Drake 2004, rare earth, and me.

Common assumptions
New Milky Way stars per year = 6.00
Proportion of stars which have planets = 50.00%

Drake 2004
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 2.00
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 100.00%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 20.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 100.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 10000.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 10,000

Rare Earth
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 0.000001
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 33.00%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 1.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 1.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 10000.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 0

Me
Average number of life-compatible satellites = 0.10
Percentage of planets where life does appear = 87.50%
Percentage where intelligent life evolves = 20.00%
Percentage of civilizations which send signals into space = 90.00%
Average years that civilizations will send signals = 200.00
Average civilizations in our galaxy = 9.5

So Rare Earth ends up with zero civilizations, though I think this might be a bug. The first time I ran the calculations they had 1 civilization, presumably us.

Drake has 10,000 current civilizations that send signals for 10,000 years. This definitely runs into Fermi Paradox territory. If there are so many, and they endure for so long, then over galactic time scales at least one ought to have infested the stars.

I end up with 10 civilizations, of which we are 1. I get that by assuming an upper limit of 200 years of radio signals. We started radiating significantly around 1960, and if our civilization endures I don't think we'll be doing much wasteful radiating by 2160. I suspect we (or our inheritors) will be utterly incomprehensible, and perhaps uninterested in the merely physical universe.

This is a very small number of civilizations across a galaxy. Ssuch a low number makes it very unlikely that one of them will choose to aim a high intensity radio beam directly at us -- and that's all we can detect with today's technology.

We'd need to build a receptor the size of the solar system to pick up accidental signaling. I'm sure we could do that by 2160, but of course that takes us into the realm of the unimaginable.

So SETI won't find much.

Damn.

Update 12/31/09: I think we can rule out "rare earth". Also, another take on the Drake Equation.