A View from Elsewhere : Observations

Alas Poor Houseplant, We Knew Him

johnmont — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:30:50 GMT

My wife has had a houseplant for the past ten years. It's one of those plants with huge leaves that thrives on being ignored. Despite ridiculous underwatering and one notable experience where we left it in the sun for a couple of days and it started to turn brown and crispy, it has done exceptionally well.

Unfortunately, it had outgrown its pot. So over the weekend we bought a new, bigger pot, roughly large enough to serve as the cauldron the three witches use in the beginning of Macbeth. Last night I attempted the transplant. Today, though all the leaves are leafy and green, the plant is canted to one side much like a well-known tower in Italy.

Should I try to re-plant the plant, or leave it and see if it decides to straighten up?

Pandora and Classical Music

johnmont — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:03:26 GMT

When Pandora launched it garnered a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. I tried it then and found, as with most music sites, that its classical knowledge wasn't very good. I went back today, propelled by I don't know what, and found it much, much improved.

Just in case you were wondering.

Comcast Music Choice vs. XM Radio Web Sites

johnmont — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:33:00 GMT

When traveling, I often like to listen to music. Unfortunately my choice of music tends to be classical. Classical music listeners are a minority, and most places have at best one classical station and that will be filled with commercials. One of the reasons I love XM Radio in my car is I get two good classical stations (a station that plays "popular" classical (e.g. movements of symphonies) and one that plays full-length pieces that may be more complex). At home I have Comcast's Music Choice that has two similar stations. Because I have accounts with both, I get access to their web sites.

Now that I'm out of the office (and have headphones) I've spent a lot of time listening to both. I've come to the conclusion that, content-wise, Comcast and XM are about the same. The pops channels play the same assortment of Brandenburg concertos and movements from Tchaikovsky dances and the full classical channels play everything from Shostakovich string quartets to Ives to composers I've never heard of. Both music streams are of similar audio quality, at least on the $10 earphones I'm wearing (my Sennheiser headphones might show more difference but they're bulky to pack).

But I'm listening more to XM. Why? User interface. XM feels lighter-weight and puts my favorite channels at the fore. With Music Choice, it's many more mouse clicks to get to the UI where I tell it to switch to one of the two stations I want to listen to.

In any event, both Music Choice and XM are incomparably better than the local classical stations, sadly, especially since they have no commercials.

Surprising Family with Food

johnmont — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:22:59 GMT

Every time I'm out visiting my mom, I cook a few times. I'm not sure why, I just do. This time I made something that I thought was simple -- home made marinara sauce with grilled steak, fresh mozzarella cheese, and lightly-dressed arugula. To me this is a simple dish. To my sister, her husband, and my mom it was a complicated meal because I started the sauce last night. Though it was a basic meal (and only of fair quality since I chose a cut of meat that was, to be polite, filled with connective tissue) hey lauded it and me to no end.

And this is why I love my family.

RSS Bandit "Phoenix"

johnmont — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:36:07 GMT

I'm an RSS Bandit user. I have been for years -- before I knew it was written by Dare Obasanjo. He and his RSS Bandit team on Sourceforge have been working on it for years. It has one deficiency that I haven't liked: I read feeds on multiple computers and they would get out of sync. Read some at the office and then come home and I have to figure out where I left off in the unread items. But I love RSS Bandit. I've tried a host of other online and offline feed readers including all the big ones and I keep coming back to this simple desktop application.

With Phoenix, the team is working towards eliminating the one thing I haven't liked about the current product: synchronization. They're going to connect to online readers like Google Reader and enable you to synchronize through them.

So far, the alpha has treated me exceptionally well.

Technorati Tags: RSSBandit,newsreaders

"To Truly Understand What It Is to Be an American You Must Eat Wonder Bread"

johnmont — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:04:15 GMT

Earlier this week, two engineers from Microsoft in Germany (Sebastien Peray and Marcel Tilly) joined the Popfly team to work on adding a feature to Popfly. They invented a clever way to substitute one Popfly block for another a few months ago and were able to come out to Redmond to integrate the code this week.

In any event, I found myself trying to think of things that they should do to get the American experience. I had a long list of fairly normal things -- places to see and so on. But food is a distinct part of any country's culture that always speaks to me and I began to riff on foodstuffs and wound up listing things that I grew up thinking nothing about but seem to amaze and confuse people coming in from other countries. To wit:

I have fond memories of all of these (except Spam). But this list gave way to the headline of this blog post.

Lord knows why I'm writing this.

Technorati Tags: Memories,Americana

Why Build a Game Creator?

johnmont — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:38:09 GMT

Several people have asked me, "Why would we do this?" They imply that there are so many better things to do. I typically speak about it in terms of increasing the potential universe of people who can create -- developers of a sort. And I've made the argument in the past that something like Popfly is competing for attention with things like TV or Xbox more than something like Visual Studio.

Courtesy Jon Udell, I found a much more articulate way of thinking about this: a blog post from Clay Shirkyon called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Yes, I do. If we can get even 1% of the casual-game-playing population to try to build a casual game -- to move from consumer to producer -- we've done a big thing.

Oh, and the other reason I love this post is that it defends Lolcats:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too."

I have a soft spot for Lolcats.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, social surplus, participation

Popfly on Moonlight

johnmont — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:51:24 GMT

I'll be darned. Daniele Muscetta has Popfly running on Moonlight.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Virtual Earth, Moonlight, Silverlight, Mashups

Turing

johnmont — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:12:35 GMT

And this is an interview question how?

The Art of the Demo

johnmont — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:24:13 GMT

A conversation on Twitter got me thinking. That's kind of rare. Thinking, I mean. At least for me.

In my time, I've given a lot of demos. I am not a demo god. Don Box is a demo god. Scott Guthrie simply exists on a separate plane. I mostly note what they do from the sidelines. I've picked up a few things of note. In the words of Michael Gartenberg, "Like most worthwhile things, good demos are hard to do, look easy from afar, require lots of practice to perfect."

So what have I observed the best demoers do (either explicitly or implicitly)? Seven things:

First, know your audience. Noobs? CEOs? Noob CEOs? Devs with more experience in the product than you'll ever have? Friendly? Hostile? Bored? Are you giving the post-lunch demo? Knowing the audience means that you'll have a higher likelihood of connecting with them. Or at least not insulting them.

Second, know your product. This is especially critical if a) there is the chance that an audience member will ask you a question or b) the product is in one of those awkward beta states where it may stick four paws in the air on you at any given moment. You can skimp here if you know this is a one-off, but it's not recommended.

Third, know what you're trying to get across to your audience. Is this demo an:

Introduction to a concept. Sometimes the hardest demos are the ones where you're introducing the audience to a new (and potentially abstract) concept. Imagine being the first person to ever demo object-relational mapping.
Introduction to a multi-product scenario. Second on the difficulty list: a demo involving multiple products in which you're introducing people to at least one of them for the first time.
Introduction to the product. These are kind of easy -- the audience knows you're demoing a phone, for example. Your job is just to make it look good. As Jonathan Yarmis pointed out: good products don't need great demoers.
Introduction to a feature. By the time you're introducing a feature, your audience knows the product. You can generally get pretty in-depth. These can be a lot of fun also.
Explanation of how to do something specific. How-to demos are a special case: demo as training tool. Rather than dazzling with BS, you're trying to train and inspire. Don Box rocks at these.

Fourth, know your themes. A demo, like any presentation, can push 1, 3, 5, or 7 themes. Don't ask why the odd numbers -- it's a marketing thing. Nobody in marketing ever makes 2 or 4 themes. I'd mock it further, but it works. Pick your themes carefully. The worst demos are the ones that try to make too many themes . Even a knowledgeable viewer will get lost. I've seen demos of my own products that have left me confused. Are you trying to hammer home that this product is incredibly simple to use, or are you demonstrating that the previously impossible is now merely hard? Are you trying to subtly point out that a competitor doesn't do what you do? Are you trying to convey cool and new or secure and enterprise-ready. Knowing your themes dictates the next step.

Fifth, know yourself. Are you serious? Funny? Boring? Quick-talking? Earnest? Cynical? Whatever you are, it'll probably come out in front of the audience. Plan for it, and accept it.

Sixth, know your story. Once you know all that, spend a minute and mentally script the story, taking into consideration especially how point #5 will affect it. Actually, for big demos (like the big multi-product keynote demos) it's more than a minute. Often there's a huge amount of custom development and tweaking to get the demo right. Getting the story -- the actual words-on-the-left-demo-actions-on-the-right script -- written can be critical. But remember: be true to yourself. If you're by nature cynical and caustic, invite the audience into that world (preferably with humor) rather than trying to be an earnest do-gooder.

Sevent, practice. Especially if anything in the chain is new to you, at least one run through to ensure that the system is set up right and that you know where it's likely to fail is key. Many is the time I've not done a run through only to have that awful, "Boy, it's never done that before" moment.

And oddly, there's no eighth point. Must be all that marketing training. Or the fact that my wrists hurt now.

Technorati Tags: Demos

It's About the Data

johnmont — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:18:04 GMT

Popfly, a mashup tool, depends on three things: data that is simple to access programmatically, interesting, and available under terms that enable users to work with it. As with most software endeavors, you can pick two.

The government has a huge amount of interesting data that's available under really great terms. Weather? Check out http://www.noaa.gov. Financial information? Start with http://www.sec.gov. Crime statistics? Dig around in http://www.usdoj.gov/. But how much of this is programmatically accessible? Very little, as it turns out. I'll pick on NOAA for a little bit. They have great weather information at http://www.weather.gov -- enough that you can find out whether the weather this weekend is going to be good at the local fishing holes and whether the fish will be biting. But, despite the RSS feeds, the really interesting data (the forecast and the information about water conditions) is locked up in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and GIFs. If you play with EDGAR (for information on SEC filings), you'll find a confusing array of HTML, static XML, and .txt files.

Yes, you can program your way out of these, but it's far too hard. Entire organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation are trying to change this, and Lawrence Lessig has proposed what he calls the Open Government Data Principles. And that's great. But it's not enough, because it's not just the government.

I'll take another example. Let's say that you want to create an application that will check your favorite online bookstore for the books it might recommend you purchase next, and submit that list to your local library to see which books are in and maybe even offer you the ability to put one on reserve. This is an example that Jon Udell outlined something like six years ago. Unfortunately, when you think about it, the bookseller really doesn't want you to use the local library: they want you to buy books from them. So it would be a logical extension to look at the terms of use for the booksellers APIs and see indications that scenarios that take you away from their site will be frowned upon. Of course, this makes sense to me since they're a business, but it's a case that the data is interesting and available, but the terms are restrictive for the scenario I'd like to build.

Oh, it's not just the booksellers who have terms like that. Any site that makes money off of advertising, for example, is going to have holdbacks in its API terms -- limits on how many calls you can make to the APIs in a given time period or how many results can be returned, or how their brand has to be shown in the resulting mashup, and so on.

As I read a Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse blog post about how much time each candidate spends talking about different issues, I thought, "There's an interesting mashup that I would have loved to build." But the information to create that mashup isn't easily accessible to tools.

Why must good data be so hard to find?

Technorati Tags: Popfly, mashups, Silverlight, Lessig, Sunlight Foundation

What Happened at the Beginning of 2006?

johnmont — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:27:52 GMT

I got hooked on plugging sites into Alexa a couple of nights ago, and started to see some patterns. Mostly, I saw that a lot of large-volume sites saw their peak at the beginning of 2006 and have been tapering off since, but a few others have grown ridiculously. Notably, Amazon and eBay, and digg and Slashdot follow this pattern. Blogger and Wordpress are growing I guess due to splogs, and myspace and Facebook went up until mid/late last year when they started declining. I can understand much of this intellectually (well, not the decrease in Amazon, which seems still a very useful site), but is there some underlying pattern?

Technorati Tags: Web Traffic

Taking Down Christmas Decorations

johnmont — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:13:22 GMT

When is the right time to take down Christmas decorations? Growing up, my parents typically did it just after New Years. My wife and I had our tree up until this past weekend (more as a result of laziness than any statement we were trying to make) and I still have the lights on the tree in front of our house on. What is the Emily Post regulation on lighting takedown?

Flexible Priorities

johnmont — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:03:38 GMT

I start every day with a list of things I need to do. Generally, this lists comprises a collection of email messages, Outlook Tasks, meetings and calendar items, TFS work items (oops, better check those), things that are just in my head that I haven't noted down anywhere, and things my wife asks me to do (typically starting the sentence with, "We really need to..." where by "we" she means "you").

Typically I get through each day having accomplished something. Sometimes I accomplish all of what I set out to do. More frequently, I accomplish some of it, and wind up wasting time on other things (like reading lolcats). Infrequently I accomplish nothing on the list, but something else gets done. And rarely I accomplish nothing at all (days like this usually involve television).Yesterday was a case study in how that third bucket: getting things done, none of which were on my list.

You see, when yesterday started I had plans: I was going to read The Economist and contemplate cleaning the house and maybe heading to the dump. A full day, as anyone can see. But somehow my wife and I wound up spending three hours running errands (Target, Home Depot, and Whole Foods -- any one of which I can lose myself in for an hour; I think I spent 20 minutes just contemplating whether I wanted loose-leaf tea (lower cost) or tea in bags (greater convenience)) and another three hours reorganizing everything in the kitchen cabinets (no, I really don't need that bread machine that I've used a dozen times in as many years). At the end of the day, the kitchen was reorganized, my parents' birthday gifts were acquired, and we'd gotten snacks for that evening's get-together.

This leads me to my observation: if priority and severity are equal, setting the order of execution for a set of tasks is an exercise in social dynamics. I had no intention of reorganizing the kitchen when Saturday started. Yes, it needed to be done, but reading the Economist and cleaning the house were about as important. But my wife had her independent task list. When compared, there was overlap, but the social dynamics were such that it was more expedient to execute the tasks she suggested first.

I find the same thing at work all the time. I set out with one to-do list, and find something of equal priority to what I was doing, then wind up working on that other problem. Progress is made, just not necessarily in the expected direction.

Change of Plans

johnmont — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:24:09 GMT

After many ruminations and a second drive of the Mazda3, I changed my mind, but not for a reason I was expecting. You see, last Saturday my wife and I went to the Mazda dealership to buy a Mazda3. We had everything ready. We just needed one last test drive. So I took the car out and onto I5 northbound. Now there's this interesting thing about I5 here in Seattle: most of it is concrete, and much of it is in pretty bad condition, which makes for a loud ride at the best of times. But in the Mazda3, it was outrageously loud on the stretch between 65th and 85th -- so loud we were shouting at each other to be heard. Even though it was the exception, if I wanted to shout in a car to be heard, I'd get a Miata. So we went back to test drive the Acura TSX and again, it was a fine car and thus were our plans changed.

The bidding process was interesting. I had done my research on Edmunds.com and on kbb.com and on consumerreports.org. I had a pretty good idea what the car was worth, and what my used car was worth. So I used the web sites of the three dealerships to get bids. Interestingly, two of them answered in minutes with good, low, competitive bids. The most convenient dealership, however, took over a day and wouldn't give a quote by email (or fax). A few phone calls later, I had a price that no dealer was willing to undercut, and by 3:30PM yesterday afternoon I was in signing paperwork. A surprisingly pain-free process.

Of course the new car has more electronics than an Xbox, so I'll be happily immersed in software for the next two weeks.

Technorati Tags: Acura, Mazda