The Fishbowl

Weeks One-Three:

• Receive notifications of impending review
• Ignore email and hope it will go away

Week Four:

• Receive reminder of imminent deadline
• Skim instructions and open review form
• Stare blankly at form for ten minutes
• Feel the weight of all your co-workers surrounding you
• Swallow down wave of nausea and panic
• Close review form

Week Four (Friday deadline):

• Inform employer you will be late in to the office
• Open review form
• Try, unsuccessfully, to think of a single worthwhile thing you have accomplished this year
• Try, unsuccessfully, to think of a single worthwhile thing you have accomplished since you came equal-first in the school piano competition in year 8
• Swallow down wave of nausea and panic
• Grab a soothing beer from the fridge
• Go to first Nine Inch Nails song in iTunes.
• Press play

Week Four (Friday deadline, 3pm):

• Bow down before the one you serve.
• You’re going to get what you deserve.
• Bow down before the one you serve.
• You’re going to get what you deserve.
• HEAD LIKE A HOLE! BLACK AS YOUR SOUL!
• I'D RATHER DIE THAN GIVE YOU CONTROL!

Week Four (Friday deadline, 6pm):

• Count empty bottles
• Stare at still-blank form
• Feel deep hatred of all those people who don't spend their days in a black pit of self-loathing, and curse their ability to say nice things about themselves seemingly at will
• Text significant other and ask her to grab more beer on the way home
• Make a note to file the day as Annual Leave

Week Five:

• Receive reminder that deadline has passed
• Worry that the fact you always miss these deadlines will count against you in your review

Week Five (later…):

• Receive second reminder that deadline has passed
• Find an empty room in the office where nobody is within looming distance
• Open form
• Swallow down wave of nausea and panic
• Find some way to write “I did OKish… I guess?” in as many words/numbers/slider widgets as is required by the process
• Hit submit
• Count down the minutes until it is socially acceptable to have a drink

Week Six:

• Receive notification that feedback is now available
• Ignore email and hope it will go away

Week Six (Review Day):

• Realise that calling in sick isn't going to help anything.
• Swallow down wave of nausea and panic
• Open feedback document
• For any negative feedback, take as an affirmation of your worst fears
• For any positive feedback, dismiss it because, you know, the process forces people say at least one nice thing about you
• Go into face-to-face review
• Reiterate “I did OKish… I guess?” in as much time as is required by the process
• Buy more beer on way home

Each little bottle of shampoo and conditioner in this hotel bears a brief homily on how to live a better life.

Each individually wrapped homily on each individual serving of scented detergent is individually trademarked™.

At what point do I find out Brad Pitt was me all along?

David Pogue, writing about the new Samsung/Google Chromebook:

Furthermore, Google says that its Chrome operating system is supersecure. But these days, every week brings another story of a hacker attack on a major corporation, and more of our private data stolen: Sony, Citibank and so on. In March, someone hacked a marketing company and gained access to the mailing lists of Best Buy, Wal-Mart, TiVo, CapitalOne, Marriott, the College Board, Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, US Bank, Chase Bank, Kroger, Barclays and many others.

Is “the cloud” really where you want to keep the only copies of your most private, most important files?

BBC News, 2004:

The US net provider EarthLink said it uncovered an average of 28 spyware programs on each PC scanned during the first three months of the year.

It’s easy to forget just how exciting and revolutionary ICQ was. Almost overnight it took two of the most powerful features of the walled-garden online services—being able to see when your friends were online and message them in real time—and brought them to the Internet. People signed up in their millions, and for good reason.

Unfortunately, while everyone loved the service, it only took a couple of upgrades before the client software was universally loathed.

The problem was there was only one company making ICQ clients. Thus there was no competitive pressure to improve the core experience of sending and receiving messages from your friends, but boy was there pressure to add just one more advertisement panel, or yet another button to pump sponsored newsfeeds and stock quotes to millions of entirely uninterested college students.

Normally there's an outcry when a fresh exciting company sells out to an evil corporate behemoth, but by the time ICQ sold out to AOL the reception was just a collective “Meh, merge it with AOL Instant Messenger already.”

Which brings us to today’s announcement from Twitter directed to its third-party developers, saying in essence:

1. If you are thinking of writing a new Twitter client, don’t
2. If you have already written a Twitter client and it strays too far from the way the official client works, your application will be blocked from using the service

Twitter has always grown on the back of outside innovation. Features like #hashtags, @username links and retweeting were all things that users came up with on their own to help manage the flow of information. Third-party clients and services built features on top of these conventions, and eventually they were folded into the core of the product.

On the client side across mobile and desktop platforms, Twitter mostly stayed out of the way and, as John Gruber noted two years ago, third-party Twitter clients were a locus of innovation in mobile application UI design.

One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go. It's possible for anyone to write a Twitter client nowadays and have the opportunity to completely blow everyone else out of the water. It's very exciting. Very democratic. And it certainly seems like everyone and their mother is trying to do just that. I'm just happy to be part of it, I know the developers of other clients and I can say definitively that competition is making all of us write better apps.

That quote is from Loren Brichter, developer of Tweetie, in an interview with Macworld. Brichter now works for Twitter. Tweetie was rebranded as the official Twitter client for Mac OS and iOS.

Saying that the time for competition and innovation in Twitter clients is now over, and that all the platform now needs is “A Consistent User Experience” strikes me as akin to the apocryphal story of the man who quit the Patent Office in 1899 because everything had already been invented. And with two of the banner features of the latest Twitter client update being the addition of a tremendously unpopular overlay for (often-sponsored) trending topics and a lock-in to Twitter’s URL-shortening service, the direction is worrying.

It's a silly battle that's been fought before. Instant Messaging services spent the good part of a decade attempting to lock out third-party clients and losing because you just can't fight the demand for something you can't deliver yourself.

Official clients have a massive advantage in exposure, user inertia and immediate access to new features. Twitter admits as much in the announcement, pointing out that 90% of Twitter users already regularly use the official client. If a third-party client becomes so popular that it is causing a noticeable impact on market-share, there is something very, very wrong with the direction of in-house development.

Third-party clients have more freedom to experiment and innovate, and can serve niche markets saving the official client from having to be a one-size-fits-nobody pastiche of conflicting requirements. And even if those clients do not give the service any direct revenue, Metcalfe’s Law ensures that the people behind the screen make the service more valuable for everybody else.

Found via Daring Fireball, it seems Goldman Sachs is trying to find a way to give Facebook an insanely high valuation while avoiding all of the accounting rules that would require them to justify it publicly:

In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a “special purpose vehicle” to allow its high-net-worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman’s proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients. (The New York Times)

Also worth a read, The Rolling Stone’s April 2010 article on Goldman Sachs as “The Great Bubble Machine”

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts.

…

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

More…

About twelve hours from now Apple is set to make a big announcement, and the smart money is on it being the Beatles catalogue appearing in the iTunes music store.

Five years ago, this would have been breakthrough news. Legal digital downloading was still struggling to prove itself and each big name that signed on further legitimised the idea of buying music without its plastic box and liner notes. One by one those big names came on board, sometimes reluctantly, and the Beatles went from being the must-have property to being a curious hold-out against the inevitable.

What's being proved today? It's two years since iTunes overtook Walmart as the number one music retailer in the USA, physical or digital. Apple, Amazon and their competitors don't need anybody to reassure them that they're "it", they know already. The Beatles signing up with iTunes might be a personal milestone for Steve Jobs, but outside Apple, even for a huge fan of the group such as myself, it's a bit meh.

1. You don't get to choose which of your posts get linked from reddit three years after you write them
2. They're never the ones you expect

Infographics are graphical works used to illustrate some set of data.

According to the handy dictionary that ships with OS X, the word illustrate originated in “early 16th cent. (in the sense [illuminate, shed light on] ): from Latin illustrat– ‘lit up,’ from the verb illustrare, from in– ‘upon’ +lustrare ‘illuminate.’

So a good infographic, or any good illustration is one that ‘sheds light on’ the words that accompany it.

If you are in the business of making infographics and think that the word illustrate means “to draw pictures around”, stop now. In your own little way, you are hurting the world of knowledge.

What is Net Neutrality?

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet access should be treated as a utility, like electricity and water supply.

On a ‘neutral’ Internet, your service provider sells you a level of service for access to the Internet but does not alter your service based on what you might use that access for. Your fees, connection speed and quality does not change whether you're using a Mac or a PC, whether you're accessing YouTube or YouPorn.

Following the electicity analogy, you pay your power company for a supply of electricity, but they do not care whether you use it to power a hair dryer, television or a kettle. On a non-neutral electrical grid, your power company would be able to tell you that your water would take twice as long to boil unless you used a Kambrook brand kettle.

Proponents of net neutrality say that it opens up the Internet to innovation. If YouTube had needed to strike individual deals with major Internet providers, putting money in the pockets of each to guarantee its videos were delivered without interruption, there would probably be no YouTube. Critics say that it is an unwarranted interference in the major Internet providers right to do business as they see fit, and that major backbones such as the big US Telcos have the right to charge extra for companies like YouTube who consume significant amounts of their bandwidth.

We don't have net neutrality in Australia: ISPs often offer “sweeteners” in the form of exempting certain sites such as the iTunes store from your monthly bandwidth cap. This is a bad thing (i.e. anyone who might want to compete with iTunes must strike a similar sweetheart deal with ISPs) but because we're a small market where most consumers have several internet providers to choose from, its not as big a deal as it happening in the USA.

Why is this announcement a big deal?

Up until now, the net neutrality fight in the USA has seen the major telecommunications companies who control the major Internet backbones and also monopolise large areas of consumer Internet access in the United States on one side. Opposite them has been the Internet industry represented largely by its 800lb gorilla, Google. In the middle has been the Federal Communications Commission which, because neither side has been able to reach agreement, has been forced to take a role in regulating the industry.

Through this deal the two biggest antagonists in the fight are now working together to write a joint policy proposal on net neutrality. It is very likely that their agreement will be the new status quo for the enforcement of net neutrality in the USA. More, the provision specifically takes the FCC out of the role of regulator, and turns them into a simple ombudsman, overseeing the rules the industry sets for itself.

What does the announcement entail?

In broad strokes, Google and Verizon agree that net neutrality is a good thing. They ask that the FCC be allowed to enforce that everyone with an Internet connection should be provided equal and fair access to all of the services that the Internet provides, except in the case of:

• access to illegal content
• “additional, differentiated online services” offered by the providers themselves
• wireless and mobile services

Why should you be worried about the exceptions?

Illegal Content

Internet censorship is a thorny issue, the solution to which sadly does not fit into the margin of a blog post. Why on earth would Verizon want to explicitly take on the role of Internet Cop? Who would want the thankless task of deciding what is or isn't legal and regulating service as a result? Why not leave that job to the courts, policemen and lawyers?

The short answer: BitTorrent.

File-sharing, most of it illegal, consumes a not insignificant chunk of the Internet's available bandwidth. Verizon has led the charge in throttling its users use of BitTorrent, the most popular file-sharing protocol. ISPs make money from the disparity between the bandwidth they sell to consumers and the amount the consumers actually use, so throttling back the largest user of that bandwidth in the name of protecting copyright makes good business sense.

So the proviso that neutrality only extends to “legal content” is short-hand for “We will continue to assume that BitTorrent is illegal traffic and throttle it accordingly. Oh, and fuck you Pirate Bay”.

BitTorrent is also the only way for people without access to the big, expensive content distribution networks to distribute large amounts of data without crippling bandwidth costs. Independent film-makers and musicians are using BitTorrent today to bypass traditional distribution systems and get their work in front of viewers and listeners. This sort of collateral damage is irrelevant to the ISP.

Differentiated Services

On one hand, the idea that some services may be sufficiently “differentiated”, a word only defined in terms of itself and a grab bag of unrelated and increasingly ill-defined examples, to be exempt from neutrality provisions is a loophole wide enough to run a truck through. In a world where more and more data is sent using Internet protocols, the boundary of the Internet itself is less and less well-defined. How does one say what lies on the other side of that line?

Some commenters have gone as far as suggesting the provision is a forerunner to the backbone providers simply stopping adding capacity to the Internet itself in favour of an alternative, closed network that they can control.

Wireless Exemption

The statement justifies the exemption of mobile services from neutrality provisions ‘because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly’.

This makes no sense. The wired Internet was not hampered in its competition or rate of change by the assumption of net neutrality. On the contrary, the low barrier to entry of the open Internet was what made most of the giants we know today–the Amazons, eBays and even the Googles—possible.

Of all the provisions in the Verizon/Google statement, this is the most blatant land-grab by two companies that are currently close partners in providing mobile services. It is the telephone company saying ‘We will not lose control of the mobile networks in the same way we lost control of our wired networks. We will not give up our position as the keepers of the gates and constructors of the toll roads.‘ and it is Google saying ‘Thankyou for selling a lot of Android handsets. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’

Over the weekend, I discovered the High Voltage SID Collection, and as a result have had the tunes from half-remembered Commodore 64 games stuck in my head for the last twenty-four hours.

Particularly: Wizball, Marble Madness, Commando and the much less well-known “Dragons Den” which came on a cartridge with the computer itself and was, for quite a while, the only game we owned that we hadn't typed in ourselves from a book.

I also learned that my earliest memories of home-computer sampled sound were the result of a bug in the C64’s sound chip being exploited by clever programmers:

Due to imperfect manufacturing technologies of the time and poor separation between the analog and digital parts of the chip, the 6581's output (before the amplifier stage) was always slightly biased from the zero level. By adjusting the amplifier's gain through the main 4-bit volume register, this bias could be modulated as PCM, resulting in a "virtual" fourth channel allowing 4-bit digital sample playback. The glitch was known and used from an early point on, first by Electronic Speech Systems to produce sampled speech in games such as Impossible Mission (1983, Epyx) and Ghostbusters (1984, Activision). – MOS Technology SID, Wikipedia

So there’s your totally useless information for Monday.

Every Googler I spoke to (OK, both of them) about the now cancelled Google Wave, I asked when it was going to be incorporated into GMail.

There was some very interesting technology in Wave and some really compelling ideas on how to facilitate rich real-time online conversation. There were also some usability issues, but those are the sorts of things that can be, and were being sorted out. The big hurdle was always convincing people that using Wave was a better idea than sending an email, pinging someone on IM, writing a note on Facebook or any of the thousand other ways people communicate over the Internet these days.

As a writer of collaboration software, the “How do I get people to use it?” question comes up a lot. To get people to use your application you need to give them a compelling reason to visit the site: not just once to see what it’s like, but every day to check what's new. For social software you need to get over the Catch-22 hurdle: you need content to bring people to the site, and you need to bring people to the site to generate content.

You need a circuit-breaker: a path from the old way of doing things to the new.

Wave was supposed to be an email killer, but there was never any migration path. Google Talk and Buzz both benefit from a presence in the GMail UI: I wouldn't even know Buzz existed if it wasn't reminding me from my Inbox. Integrating Wave with GMail seemed to me like the logical next step, allowing GMail/Talk users to enhance conversations amongst themselves while somehow keeping non-Waved participants in the loop.

Sticking Wave in a quiet corner and not letting it play with the other children just seemed like a bit of a waste.

I have a theory about Apple. Like all good Apple theories it superficially fits the facts, is an entertaining mental exercise but is probably wrong.

Apple does not believe in mice.

For a company that excels at hardware design, the mice they’ve released since the return of Steve Jobs stick out in their catalogue like sore thumbs.

The hockey puck mouse from the original iMac was clunky and uncomfortable. The Pro Mouse was smooth and comfortable if bare-bones and uninspiring, but every first-time user had to have the “it’s all one button” design explained to them. Every feature of the Mighty Mouse (accidental-squeeze-buttons, gungy trackball, easily confused click-surface) was broken. The Magic Mouse felt like a promising tech demo that escaped the lab too early. And now Apple have released a multi-touch trackpad.

I’m sure I’m not alone in that the first thing I do when I buy a new desktop Mac is replace the mouse, although my current choice in pointing device may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

My theory is that someone high up in Apple’s hardware design pecking order, maybe Jobs, maybe Ive, maybe their whole hardware brains trust, does not believe in the mouse. Sure it works, but it’s not the right way to solve the problem of manipulating things on-screen. It’s indirect and unintuitive. It tends to sprout more and more buttons. It’s just... wrong!

You could hear it in Jobs’ voice when he introduced the iPad, extolling the joys of having the web “at your fingertips”. There’s no place in Apple's world view for clumsy intermediaries like mice or styluses. There must be a better way! But for the life of them, these visionaries, designers and engineers can’t work out what that better way is for your desktop PC.

Typically when Apple find themselves in this situation, they sit on the problem until they have a solution. That’s why we waited so long for the iPhone and iPad and why we were so blown away when they were finally released. With pointing devices, they don’t have the luxury of procrastination.

You can’t make a great product if you don't believe in it, but you can’t sell a computer without a mouse.

This morning, Blizzard (publishers of the popular Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo game franchises) announced plans to require contributors to their online forums to post under their real names. Predictably, this caused the forums to go nuclear.

This is phase two in a deliberate campaign. Phase one was the deployment of Real ID, a feature that allowed players of their games to exchange messages and online status, but only if they also shared their real names and email addresses. There was no technical reason why this had to be the case—no other popular Instant Messaging service requires such disclosure—the messaging and presence features were bait on the “Real Names, Please” hook.

Responding to user feedback, a Blizzard poster on the forums added (emphasis mine):

We put a lot of thought into this change and have a long-term vision for the Real ID service and wanted to make sure that we communicated ahead of time and very clearly as to what will be changing and how.

Neither of the imminent releases of Starcraft II or World of Warcraft: Cataclysm are “long-term” by any stretch of the word. This isn’t the end of the plan to expand the reach of Real ID in Blizzard's online services. It is a grand ongoing experiment, and a big gamble at that. The evils of anonymity in gaming communities are well-documented. Blizzard are aiming, as far as I can tell, to use a series of small but ever-encroaching incentives to make their Battle.net service the first such community where anonymity is the exception instead of the rule.

A few years ago I'd have said this was impossible. A person’s right to keep their online existence separate to their “real life” was not questioned, and in many cases considered a necessary defence against real-life enemies like draconian hiring managers who don't understand that weird Internet thing. Nowadays the overwhelming success of Facebook suggests that the bulk of Internet denizens don't care if their their real names are splashed across The Googles, and don't care that their on– and offline lives are hopelessly intertwingled.

It's a generational change, and while I don’t doubt Blizzard have called it right, perhaps they might have called it a little too early.

For the past couple of months my blog has been stuck in a wait() loop, pending the completion of my promised iPad reviews. Which I never wrote, because in the week or so between promising to write them and actually having an opportunity to do so, pretty much everything I wanted to say had already been said by others.

At some point you've just got to give in to the inevitable.

Normal service will now resume.

A couple of weeks ago, Donna and I were trapped in Dulles airport waiting for a delayed connecting flight to LA. Passing a booth selling software that promised to teach you a second language elicited the following conversation:

So yes, cards on the table, I'm an Apple fanboy and you can clearly dismiss anything I might have to say about the iPad as the deluded ravings thereof.

Another point of view would be to say that if you look at the string of wildly successful products Apple has produced since the original iMac, the way they turned from resigned “When are they going to die?” to breathless “What are they going to do next?” in the course of a decade, anyone who doesn’t at least have a grudging appreciation of the company and its products deserves to have their judgement questioned.

Edit: I originally promised further reviews here, but pretty much everything I wanted to say about the iPad has already been said by others, if not better than I planned to then at least close enough that I can't be bothered making the effort. Management apologises for the inconvenience.

Quoted verbatim from the World of Warcraft official forums:

If you think the balance of trees will be better than it has in the past 5 years then your diluted.

One side-effect of the rise of the Internet has been the birth of a post-literate generation.

In my un-networked youth, writing was something you did for teachers and families. You wrote school projects, stories and essays. You wrote postcards, thank-you notes for presents and the occasional paragraph at the end of a letter. When you did so you made as sure as you could that you got all the words right because an adult was watching, and would usually correct you if you got it wrong.

With the popularity of text-messaging, email, blogging, Internet message-boards, everyone has become a voracious correspondent all at once. The recipients of the messages are peers, not superiors. The feedback loop is broken and anyone who objects is a grammar nazi. When in doubt, it is far more efficient to transliterate what you would say out loud and hope the letters line up than it would be to check if it is correct or not.

Of course we rail against it and hope that by the time people enter serious study or the workforce they are able to write in a way that doesn't embarrass. On the other hand spelling, like pronunciation, has always undergone seismic shifts despite the efforts of purists and dictionary-worshippers to capture the language and encase it in amber.

In short, it might be time to end my almost two-decades-long battle against the confusion of ‘lose’ and ‘loose’.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. – Stephen Fry

Some poor sod at Westpac (with whom I've banked since 1992) demonstrates why it's a bad idea to post to both your personal and corporate Twitter accounts from the same client:

The tweet was deleted about 40 minutes after it was posted, which was even more silly than posting it in the first place. If you screw up in public, you recover in public. Don't just try to pretend it didn’t happen.

I've always used this story to illustrate why we shouldn't assume that ‘real people’ understand or care about website URLs. Unfortunately the story is ten years old and it's easy for people who disagree with me to try to explain how much has changed in the last decade, and how web users are so much more sophisticated now.

ORLY?