HCI User Advocate

Viking Dishwasher Problems

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:17:00 +0000

My colleague, Ben Shneiderman, recently moved into a new apartment with a fancy dishwasher (that had been installed before he had any say) with a real interface blooper.

The Viking Design Series dishwasher has a feature to emit a short beeping signal to indicate that the washing is done. You might think it logical to have a toggle switch or button to set this signal on/off as well as indicate its current state. However, the complex steps and lack of feedback of state are described in the user manual:

Activating the End-of-Program Signal

The unit can be programmed to emit a short signal when the program is finished. To program this feature, follow the steps below:

1. Turn off the power to the machine.
2. Press and hold down the Delay Start button as you turn on the power of the machine. The Delay Start button will flash.
3. Release the button.
4. Press the Program button. The Pots/Pans button will glow to indicate the end-of-program signal is activated.
5. Press the start/stop button to store the settings.

To deactivate the signal, repeat the steps above. The Pots/Pans button will go out to indicate the signal is off.

Incredibly enough, to activate the program done signal, you have to deal with five buttons: Power, Delay Start, Program, Pots/Pans, and Start/Stop in a manner that completely overrides the buttons labeled usage. This is an expensive dishwasher so saving manufacturing costs was not a serious concern for the designers, but obviously neither was their concern for users.

The fight for usability continues...

International Children's Digital Library now available on iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:17:00 +0000

One of my largest research efforts at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), which continues to grow in stature and global recognition. We have recently added several hundred books and deployed two HCIL innovations that taken together allow book text to be clearly displayed even when surrounded by deep colors and lush illustrations, which we find so often in the ICDL's children's picture books. And this is not all. This work also allows us to manipulate the text to varying degrees, which in turn allows us to offer beautiful, well placed translations, on the page. The exemplary books of the ICDL have never been more readable.

And now, we have taken the ICDL mobile.

In support of the library's vision of making as many books available to as many children as possible, the ICDL is now open on a variety of mobile devices. You can already visit the Library from the small and wondrous devices made available to children around the world by the One Laptop Per Child organization and on Intel's ClassmatePC educational laptop. And now, as of this week, you can tap your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch to get the free ICDL for iPhone app and read all about the six Mongolia brothers in search of knowledge, the gray peacemaker cat that does something most unusual to the other cat's ears, or a version of the Three Little Pigs that you surely have never heard before. The initial four books will be updated over time as we offer more books from our much larger collection.

FolderShare, Live Sync, Live Mesh???

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:07:00 +0000

Ok, it is has been two years since Microsoft bought ByteTaxi's FolderShare and rebranded it as Microsoft FolderShare. Aside from keeping it running, putting the Mac version on life support, and killing off the fee-based "pro" version, they haven't done much. But today I received the email below from their team.

WTF? How could MS be pushing Live Sync and Live Mesh at the same time when the products are nearly indistinguishable??? And with each not mentioning the other and without any indication of how users should decide which product to use. Does Microsoft know that they are investing in two very similar and competing products?

And to abandon their existing customers with no automatic transition path, and to warn them they will probably not even be able to get in, and that they should manually copy the names of their folders and sharers onto what, paper? Plus, I'll make a bet that the reason for this is so that they can abandon mac support without ever saying so.

FolderShare runs on the mac - but the encryption is totally broken so you have to run it without encryption, and it is an old pre-Intel binary so it runs only in the emulator and hogs a huge amount of processor time.

Live Mesh, which theoretically runs on the mac has a bug so it works great - as long as you only want to share folders on your desktop. I can't get it to share any other folders. (Yes, I have reported this, but to no avail).

And there still is no paid "pro" service - which is probably the one MS service I *would* pay for.

Oh, and it is still "beta" after two years of buying ByteTaxi and being version 2.0.

Sigh...

Change

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the hardest ones to have. Who could imagine in our recent political climate that the executive branch of our government would open the floodgates to ask the entire world for their advise on how to set up the government? The thinking of the status quo might think that is a sign of weakness - but of course the "new" model interprets this as a sign of strength. To ask for other's opinions shows that you are sure in what you know, and that you don't know everything. Yesterday, the Obama office of the President-Elect announced www.change.gov, a site asking for advise and ideas on every policy issue.

That is, interestingly enough, the essence of the approach of interface designers. Designers are experts. They are confident in balancing the many conflicting requirements of what it takes to solve hard problems. They also know that they don't know everything - and thus the work with their users through particpatory design and a million other approaches for learning from the broadest set of stakeholders.

It looks like our new government is thinking the same way that us HCI'ers have for decades.

Design for Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:40:00 +0000

For election day, I want to point to some fantastic work exploring how to improve the design of voting ballots and other material related to elections. Marcia Lausen's book, "Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design", part of the related AIGA Design for Democracy project does the job. She presents case studies, showing problematic designs and very clear and simple redesigns that addresses their problems. The lead example is to look at the infamous butterfly ballot of 2000, and she makes the case very clearly that while the constraints inherent in these problems make for a hard design problem, it is still possible to have a clear solution. She then goes further to express general design principles that can be applied to a broad range of specific situations. And she goes beyond just ballots, looking at voter registration, election administration, and more general election design issues.

Unfortunately, the reality of our voting landscape makes it so that the vendors don't act like they care much about these issues, and the politicians that manage elections don't seem to have the skills or resources to implement good solutions. But hopefully, the clear direction and advice that comes with this book will help.

Why I returned my Apple TV

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:58:00 +0000

In my continuing quest to make my life easier, I thought I'd try Apple TV to avoid driving to the video store (which is long past being tolerable to me), and to get some actual HD content for my year-old HDTV.

Like many things Apple, it is brilliant in so many ways, while falling flat in others. In this case, the problems, interestingly, are interface and content. They nailed the core issues (which is why I bought it in the first place), which are ease of access and integration. You can browse the store on your TV (without having to use your computer), download stuff - and automatically sync with your computer and iPhone so all your stuff is wherever you want it, and all automatically backed up. But this is where the magic ends.

The interface, while glossy, lush and beautiful, is hugely harmed by that puny little remote control. After using the Tivo for a year, and enjoying the world's best remote control, Apple's was just too pathetic to use. It is so small that it was at huge risk of being lost, and we had to institute strict family rules about its placement. The buttons are so hard to press, that I actually started to get AppleTV-thumb and had to switch fingers to press it. And the interface is totally image based - there is no way to link through metadata. You can't find an interesting movie, and look for others with the same actor, etc.

As for content, well at first glance it looks good, but it just isn't very deep. I knew the numbers were low compared to other options, but I didn't realize that the HD content is almost nonexistent. And given that my tastes don't seem to run in the same direction as Apple's very mainstream content, I could only find a handful of HD movies that I actually wanted to watch.

Then, just as I began to realize that these were going to be very high priced movies for which I would also have to endure a pained thumb, Netflix announced their upcoming distribution for 12,000 shows on Tivo. I had one day left to return my Apple TV, and so I did.

Steve Jobs has been calling Apple TV his "hobby", to avoid the criticism about it's lackluster performance. I should have listened to him.

PPTPlex - Zoomable presentations not quite yet for the masses

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:00:00 +0000

Figuring out the clearest and most engaging way to communicate ideas is fundamentally important. The world seems to have settled on just a few key approaches: Text, video, and computer presentations along the lines of PowerPoint (or Keynote). The latter, as we all know, are valuable for their ease of creation, and ubiquity of authoring tools. However, they also tend to be boring, and in presentations of any length, the audience can get lost and not know where they are.

I created a PowerPoint plugin called CounterPoint back in 2001 with then grad student Lance Good. It offered a pretty sophisticated mechanism to create zoomable presentations consisting of PowerPoint slides. But the authoring tool was pretty clunky, and its dependency on Java made deployment pretty difficult.

So, I was delighted to see that Microsoft Labs recently put out PPTPlex, which is remarkably similar in spirit to CounterPoint. They created a plugin for PowerPoint which makes a reasonable trade-off of much, much more accessible and simpler authoring tools - and much less creative flexibilty. Still, this is probably the right move to consider commercializing this kind of approach. I was delighted to try it out, and sure enough, the authoring was simple enough that I was able to create a 70 slide "vision" talk on the future of HCI (with Allison Druin) using it quite readily.

Sadly, I wasn't able to use PPTPlex for my presentation because the technology was just not up to it. It seems to rasterize every slide - which not only takes a long time, but uses a *huge* amount of memory. My presentation actually used over a Gigabyte of RAM! And then PowerPoint (with PPTPlex) crashed. So, instead, I tried something else.

I was able to duplicate most of the visual feel that PPTPlex offered entirely with plain vanilla PowerPoint animations. I suffered by performing unnatural acts with PowerPoint to build the animations I wanted - but my PowerPoint ninja buddy John SanGiovanni had taught me the art, so I created the following presentation which I presented with Allison Druin at CMU last month. Take a look - and be sure to look at the PowerPoint presentation (15 MB) in Show mode to see the full transitions.

What do you think?

The wonder of single tasking

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:09:00 +0000

The NY Times has yet another article on the inherent human limitations of multitasking (some previous ones here, here, and here). While we all love to do several things at once, the reality is that we can't do so effectively, and there is more and more research that supports this.

This is one of those issues where we all know this essential truth, but just don't follow it. And the nature of innovation means that we will have more and more communication and information technologies (think historically: phone, email, web, IM, texting, social networks, etc.) And there are plenty of researchers trying to figure how the best way to interrupt you to deliver more information.

So, at the moment, this means people actually have to take responsibility for themselves while we interface designers figure out how to bring these disparate information sources together in a way that increases, not decreases focus. I've discussed this before and just wrote a new essay relating these issues to how children read online.

AT&T still nasty about service plans

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:25:00 +0000

So, you thought you remembered reading about how the cell phone carriers were going to be getting friendlier to their customers about their service contract cancellation policies? Ha!

I am as loyal an AT&T customer as you are likely to find. I have a $200 monthly bill with three lines. My 3rd line is for software development, and I brought my own phone to the plan - that is, I did not use a carrier subsidy to discount the price of the phone. So, imagine my suprise (ok, not really) when I called to cancel this third line. I was told that not only would they charge me a cancellation fee of $175, but that despite the news recently of them prorating these cancellation fees, they would not prorate my cancellation fee. Why? Because I had a pre-existing contract, and they were only pro-rating new contracts. (And how can they justify a two-year contract when they didn't provide a subsidy? Because they can.)

To make matters worse, when I asked to speak with a manager, they said that "no manager was available", and that they had a policy of not calling customers back - but I was free to try to call again later.

Boy is AT&T lucky they have an exclusive deal with Apple. I sure hope that Google's efforts to make a more competitive marketplace for communications services gets some traction.

For the record, here are the details of my call:

"no manager available" - Wed at 9:30am EST. Wouldn't call back when one was available.
My service is for 3 lines, $200/month, 3rd line for 1 yr 4 mo
The line I was trying to cancel was with my own phone and had no carrier subsidy
They still would charge a $175 cancellation charge that wasn't pro-rated - this policy started in last three months and isn't applied retroactively.
I spoke with "Hela"

A Tale of 2 Dead Disks - Why Macs Make People Happy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:50:00 +0000

I got back last night from a week in Seattle to see that my MacPro was dead - wouldn't boot, and I could hear the disk doing a repetitive not-happy-kind-of noise. I had another disk in the computer I had used for random backups, and a remote Time Capsule disk that theoretically had been making continuous backups - so this is what I did:

Rebooted off Leopard DVD
Selected restore from Time Capsule to restore to that second disk
Went to bed

Total time: 10 minutes
This morning I have a Happy Mac.

Holy crap - when my wife's disk died on her laptop last month, I had the worst possible combination of all eventualities, and it took me about 10 hours to fix!

If only Macs had good office software, they would so rule.

Google owns your name with Picasa name tagging

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:33:00 +0000

The new Picasa Web Albums have initial support for a fantastic name-tagging feature. The idea is to ease the process of identifying who is in each picture by combining human and computer efforts. It is very well done, and makes tagging fun and accurate in a way never done before commercially (but see SAPHARI for a surprisingly similar earlier research effort by my grad student).

BUT - it is a crime that this feature not does not offer a way to sync the tags you create online with the full resolution photos you own on your own computer. That's right. The only way to use this feature is to upload your photos to Google's servers, tag them via their website, and then lose that data forever. You can search your photos on Google's servers, but you can't export that tagged information. And the Picasa 3 "syncing" feature doesn't sync the name tags back down to the original photo. And the face-based annotation feature doesn't exist on the desktop version.

And even if the data does eventually come back down to your source photos (which I pray it eventually does), it still is not very friendly of Google to force you to upload your thousands of photos to the web for this extremely important feature. Of course, this is very likely Picasa's business model. Give away the free desktop version, offer a teaser bit of free storage on the web, and then charge a huge amount ($75 a year for the 40 GB of storage I would need to store all my photos online). I would much rather just pay a reasonable price for the desktop version to unlock crucial features - such as face-based annotation.

Web apps are fine - but people should own their data - not Google. And people should get to choose when they want to do something on the computers and disks they own, and when they choose to use someone elses on the web. Anything less is no better than the desktop-based lock-in that Google and others have complained about for so long.

Missing Chrome keyboard shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:48:00 +0000

Chrome (Google's browser that was released yesterday) is all the rage, and as I've said for years (i.e., flow [pdf], notelens), user interface speed and responsiveness is crucial and a fundamental part of not getting in the way of tasks users are trying to do.

So, I hope it is an oversight and not design that led Google to leave out two crucial keyboard.

Their "omnibar" works fine - except for a one thing. When you start typing and the list of suggestions pops up underneath, you have to move your fingers off the home position of the keyboard to the arrow keys in order to select them. This may be the "standard" way of doing things, but Firefox already showed it isn't the best. In this special case, override the tab key to move focus to the popup list. Fingers stay in the home position, and a touch typist can do a search and execute it in a fraction of a second.
It is great that chrome supports incremental search - but considering that they learned from Firefox, I wish they had gotten it right. Instead of a single key to start search ('/' in Firefox), you need two (Ctrl-F). And if you search to a link and want to follow that link, there is no way to do so with the keyboard. Pressing the 'Enter' key in Firefox while search has highlighted a link follows that link. Chrome should do the same thing.

These issues may seem minor, but they are activities that people, literally, do hundreds of times per day. Multiple a hundred million people by a hundred annoyances a day, and that is a lot of distraction, and slowing people down. Considering that there is also no cost for doing so (i.e., it doesn't hurt the user experience in any way), let's hope Google continues to polish their chrome, and adds these shortcuts.

While they're at it, they should be thinking about the next (lower priority) feature which is to add a rich mechanism for people to customize chrome to speed up their own idiosyncratic tasks. How many times do I do repetitive tasks on websites that I can't automate or shortcut for various reasons? A lot. Example: one website requires three clicks to get where I'm going *after* I log in - meaning I can't shortcut to that page. I could use third party software such as Quickkeys to automate this, but the browser should have a built-in mechanism to do so.

Anyway, Chrome looks promising - let's just hope they go from great to perfect.

Good customer service

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:54:00 +0000

My 3 year old was happy to be in the car the other day with her older sister's MacBook watching a DVD. Then, unbeknownst to us, she decided to watch another one and inserted a DVD by herself. The only problem is that she didn't take the first one out first. I immediately knew where this was heading.

A trip to the Apple store showed how clever I was to predict that we very likely lost both DVDs and the drive. At least they were very friendly and apologetic that it wasn't covered under warranty - which I could hardly complain about. So I agreed to the $300 estimated repair cost, and was told it would be ready in about 2 days. And here is where it gets interesting.

After 7 days, I called the store to find that they still hadn't fixed it. They were super friendly, and promised to call right back when they could tell me more. I figured it would be another week before I even got through to them. But 10 minutes later, they called me back, apologized again, and promised it would be ready later that afternoon. Again, I figured that meant I might see it in a week. But an hour later, they called me back saying it was done and I could pick it up. I was already pretty happy that they recognized the mistake in their delayed repair and bumped it to the top of the queue so easily.

So, imagine my surprise when they called me back a *third* time, not 10 minutes later. They said they hadn't realized this wasn't under warranty and that I was paying for it. Given the extent of their delay, they said they wouldn't charge me, and have a nice day.

I was flabbergasted. I am a completely regular customer. I didn't pull rank (as if I had any), or promise to expose them. In fact, I wasn't even that concerned by the delay in the first place. And completely on their own, they not only took complete responsibility and gave an actual apology (rather than the all-too-common non-apology), and gave me a $361.56 credit without my asking for it.

I am already about 60% switched from Windows, but if using Apple means I can get customer service like that instead of Dell's or Lenovo's, I'm up to 70%.

on Randy Pausch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:29:00 +0000

Allison Druin wrote her thoughts about Randy Pausch's death better than I ever could, so here they are:

-----------------------

Last night I tried to write this email, but the words never came. All I could do was spend time with YouTube and Google, watching, reading, and thinking about Randy Pausch who died that day. As most of the world now knows, Randy was much more than a computer science/HCI/VR professor at CMU. He gave a talk last Fall, something most of us academics do day-in-and-day-out. But instead of enjoying the moment with a few students and perhaps some interested colleagues, the moment ultimately was shared with the world.

The video

Randy did something few of us could do-- he shared his thoughts, energies, and talents even as he was dying of cancer.

Ben B. and I were blessed with knowing Randy as a colleague and early mentor. Our first year at the HCIL, Randy attended the Annual Symposium

-- and it was then we first spent time with him, giving us advice that was a wonderful mix of dry wit, bold honesty, and endless energy. This may be the only way I can describe Randy last Fall in Pittsburgh, as we sat in the audience listening to Randy's last lecture. We cried, we laughed, we learned, and we felt honored to be there. After the lecture we were able to give Randy a big hug and tell him that he was our hero.

So after a long week at the HCIL filled with police, frustration, and sadness-- two bits of advice from Randy seem good to remember:

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."

For more words about Randy and his passing:

Oh yes, and my favorite Randy-isms: "... remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people...Don't bail. The best of the gold's at the bottom of barrels..."

"...be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity."

Allison

==========================================

Dr. Allison Druin
Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Associate Professor University of Maryland College of Information Studies and
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

Cell phones: Technology User Frustrations

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:17:00 +0000

We all know that computers and technology can be frustrating. But we also know that it can be exciting, and not only enhance our productivity, but significantly increase what we are capable of doing. Just as with other good tools, when technology works well, it can expand human capabilities. That is why I spend my life dealing with the reality of what sometimes seems like endless frustration – in an effort to make our lives with technology better. So, this is a time to look at what works and what doesn’t with technology. Let’s understand where your frustrations lie, and let’s also be sure to talk about what works well. Together, we can send a message to technology creators about the importance of addressing the “user experience”. This isn’t a helpdesk to solve particular problems, nor an advocacy center to get that vendor to deal with your lost data. But by bringing together our heads on where the problems lie, we can bring our voices together and push the industry forward.

Today's Topic: Cell Phones
What simple tasks on cell phones are harder than they should be?

Comment here, and I'll also post the concerns raised on today's Tech Tuesday radio show on WAMU.

FreeRice - charity or profit center?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:52:00 +0000

Many people have discovered FreeRice, the fun little website where you test your vocabulary, see some advertising, and have some rice donated to the world's hungry - paid for with a fraction of the funds taken from the advertising revenue.

It is definitely innovative, and at first cut, sounds like a good idea. But is it legitimate? I'm not talking about whether the rice actually gets donated. There is no proof given, but even assuming that it does get donated as promised, is this site moral - or is it a personal profit center based on deceit and greedy taking of the public's good will and time? There has been a bit of discussion on this topic, but not very much considering how much traffic this site is seeing (10's of million's of pageviews per day).

So what is the issue? The problem is that the actual value of the daily donation is tiny and the potential revenue is huge. I've seen estimates on the web that show profits ranging from about $10K to $150K. Mine put it at about $100K (see below). But the main point here is not legal, it is ethical and social.

If the sole premise of a site's existence is to do charitable work, then it must do so honestly. As with other charities and organizations that manage other people's resources, it should disclose what percentage of income is actually given as charity, how much is administrative overhead, and how much is profit. It doesn't matter that the source of the funds doesn't come from the customer's cash. It still comes from the customers - just through their time and attention rather than their dollars. And the ethical requirements of charitable work are different than pure business.

The standard bar for understanding ethical behavior is full disclosure. If the site said what was really going on, and people continue to choose to participate, then the site has cleared the bar and will reap the world's good will. But without saying what is really going on, we have to assume there are nefarious purposes, and significant personal benefit taken from the charity of others. That kind of behavior may thrive for a while, but can't last as charitable work that is honest will take over - and it can't happen soon enough.

My estimate:
200,000,000 approx donated grains (Nov 15, 2007)
25,000 grains per pound
8,000 donated pounds
$5,600 donated dollars (assuming $0.70 per pound)

$5 assumed CPM (thousand ad impressions)
20,000,000 Impressions
20,000 thousands of impressions
$100,000 revenue

ICDL Going to Mongolia

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:55:00 +0000

I'm going back to Mongolia next week to finish the job I started last year. The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL - www.childrenslibrary.org), which I am the technical director of, is working with the Mongolia Ministry of Education, Culture and Science on a World Bank-funded project to help improve literacy, and a culture of reading for pleasure.

While the larger project is centered around traditional paper books, there is a surprisingly foresightful effort looking at digital technology. Last trip, I set up an ICDL server in Ulaan Baatar - available at www.read.mn. This time, I'm going to set up some servers in rural schools and to do teacher training (with graduate student Sheri Massey) to explore how technology can be used in places far off the grid.

While Mongolia is slowly wiring up the country, a significant number of soums (i.e., towns) may have electricity, but have no internet. We decided that since we know the internet is coming (eventually), and they were buying computers anyway, we would set up the ICDL on a server in each school, and use the local network to provide access to the 200 new books (plus many of the existing ICDL books) to the children in these schools.

I'm afraid that as crazy as it seems, the only way to set this kind of thing up is to go out there with software (and many, many backups) in hand, and set things up myself. We've got our system configured to now also run on Windows servers with standard distributions of Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. And we've got things set up so it all starts up nicely when the computer starts. And we can even update the library by sending a disk out there, and having someone press a special button (or so we hope).

Installing this software without recurse to help if things go wrong is a bit daunting. Especially because these schools are all 1-2 days drive on cold dirt roads from the Capital and each other. I'm really, really hoping I don't have a bad technology week.

And, of course, I won't be able to blog about the trip until afterwards since I'll have no connectivity - but I'll be sure to have lots of stories when I come back on November 12th.

A Great Computer Scientist - Randy Pausch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:00:00 +0000

You may not know Randy Pausch, but you should. He is truly a great computer scientist - but unfortunately, one who is dying. He was scheduled to give a CS Distinguished Seminar at UMD last year, but had to cancel on account of his illness.

On Tuesday, he gave his "last lecture" at CMU which Allison & I attended. Given that he is brilliant, a wonderful showman, and forthright - and expecting to die before long with advanced pancreatic cancer, it was a talk that is hard to describe the gravitas of - whether you know Randy or not.

While the audience (an overflowing room of 500 or so), was obviously distraught - Randy focused on the lessons of his life. What he was proud of, what was difficult - focusing on what it took to achieve his childhood dreams. And he talked a lot about the satisfaction he has taken in focusing on undergraduate education and broadening the students interested in computer science (through Alice, his very popular 3D system that offers an introduction to programming) among other things.

You may not have the pleasure of getting to know Randy in person, but I promise that you will not be disappointed if you spend the 1.5 hours to watch his talk. Here is a wall street journal article about it.. The weird thing is that the hyperbole in this article is actually understated. The talk was far beyond anything I've heard before.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024238402033039.html

The full video of his talk is here:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/global_news/?q=node/42

Randy's personal page and treatment blog is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

FolderShare in slow motion

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:31:00 +0000

More than any other software in recent history, FolderShare has changed my work habits, dramatically improving my mobility and the reliability of my data. It is simple file synchronization software that makes all the files (and subfolders) in a folder stay the same across machines across the internet. Adding, removing, moving, or changing a file in one machine results in a near-instantaneous matching change on all synced computers. And it even works on Macintosh (sort of).

FolderShare is amazing because it enables me to go back and forth between my desktop computer at work, my laptop, and desktop at home. (I also use it to collaborate on important shared projects with other people). And by replicating my files across multiple computers, it is a free and simple backup solution. It even gives me the ability to remotely delete files were my laptop to get stolen.

FolderShare was created by ByteTaxi, a startup a few years back, and acquired by Microsoft November 2005. And sadly, Microsoft has not done one single thing since then. The website has not changed. The product has not changed. Actually, that's not true - it got a bit worse. When Apple upgraded their OS some months back, encryption to Mac stopped working, and now the only way you can sync to Macs is to completely disable encryption on all synced computers - pathetic.

Well, they did add a newsgroup, but they don't respond to users. Has Microsoft learned anything about Web 2.0? About the speed of the Web? About being innovative? They acquired an awesome product, and are slowly smothering it to death. Yes, there are rumors that it will re-emerge as a new Live service, but when I saw how pathetic Live's new SkyDrive service is, I came close to losing my last bit of hope. If FolderShare wasn't the best solution of this kind out there, I would have given up on it (and probably Microsoft) long ago, but it is still great (modulo the Mac encryption problem).

So, Microsoft, please, please - be more responsive. Yes, you're a big company - but do you really think sitting on a great innovation for coming on 2 years without any communication to your users is the caring for your users? Has your confidence eroded all awareness of the impact of your actions on people's perceptions and feelings about Microsoft as an entity?

I won't be that surprised if Live does come out with something good here eventually, but I'm afraid that even if the product is revived, my opinion of Microsoft has suffered.

iPhone design trade-offs

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:54:00 +0000

There is plenty to like about iPhone - and we all already know about that. And there are some obvious challenges (i.e., slow network, lack of physical keyboard, no OTA syncing of calendar & contacts). But a lot of important, yet more subtle challenges have not yet been reported widely yet. These are largely due to trade-offs given the lack of not only the keyboard, but also D-Pad, Home and Back buttons, and soft keys that are so common on just about every other phone. So, how does this impact usability? Let's take a look by comparing to some other comparable devices for a variety of tasks.

Make a call to a contact:
- BlackBerry 8800 (~2 secs): Start typing from the home screen, scroll down to filtered item and press action. I have 992 contacts. I can get to just about anyone in 4 or 5 keys, a scroll, and a click. Windows Mobile is also about the same as this, but it responds a lot more slowly.
- iPhone (~4 secs): Press Phone. Press Contacts. Press the first letter of the last name on the right side of the contacts. But since these letters are tiny, you usually have to drag up or down a few times to get to the right letter. Now flick up or down to visually search for the person you are looking for. Press the person. Press the # you want to call. iPhone is not only slow, but painfully distracting.
Look at photos:
- iPod: Flipping through a lot of full-screen photos is unbelievably fast. As you spin the wheel, photos fly by. I can probably scan 20 per second. It is also physically easy and doesn't require much attention. Just fling you finger around the wheel. I can do this to look at tons of photos.
- iPhone: Looking at photos on the iPhone is undeniably beautiful and pleasing - but to flip between full-screen photos requires a flick for each one. The fastest I could manager was about 4 per second, and that required a lot of finger movement. I wouldn't want to do this for more than about 20 photos.
Read text on the web: Much has been made of reading web pages on the iPhone. Everything that is advertised is true - but they forget to mention one thing. If your eyesight isn't terrific, you'll have to take advantage of the beautiful two-finger zooming-in feature - even after you've zoomed in to an article. But if you do that, then you'll have to horizontally scroll back and forth to read each line. This is an unimaginably bad experience. In other mobile browses, content is laid out vertically. They certainly have their own problems, but once you get to reading an article, you can set the font size, and just press the space bar or down arrow to scroll down one page at a time. On the iPhone, if you can't read the natural size, you are just going to have a really lousy experience.
Things to do: Part of the fun of computing is that there is just so much darned stuff to do - from little flash games, to java downloads, to rich apps that you pay to download. And the wonder of "widgets" is that the public makes them, so there are lots of options to choose among (i.e., see what's coming soon from ZenZui). But with the iPhone's closed platform, no Flash and no Java - you're pretty much stuck with what Apple gives you. Sure you can watch a few YouTube videos. But there are about half dozen I know of and actually searched for - whoops, those weren't available. They nicely give you a bunch of Web bookmarks to all kinds of sites – so I visited some kids sites with my 8 year old daughter. Whoops, all the ones she cares about use Flash, and they don't work. So I can read on the Web, and do iTunesy stuff. Don't get me wrong, that's pretty great - but not great enough. For the iPhone to be truly great, they have to open the platform.
Finding an email: Amazingly enough, there is no way to search for email.
Finding some music: Amazingly enough, there is no way to search for music. Hierarchies and tags are great - but sometimes you know what you are looking for, and the fastest and cognitively easiest way to get it is just to type a unique word in the title. Oh well, you're out of luck.

Now if it weren't for the fact that Apple has Spotlight on the desktop, I might think they hadn't learned about search yet. Instead, it's almost as if Apple has tacitly agreed that typing on the iPhone really is so bad that they don't want to frustrate users by having them search for stuff. Or maybe they really want you to think of this as an entertainment device, so efficiency shouldn't be that important - and the act of forced browsing will help you discover stuff you didn't know you had on your device. Or maybe they just didn't get to that yet, and we'll see it in an update before long. Cross your fingers.

Plaxo Makes Me Scared

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:32:00 +0000

Web services that offload the burdon of tedious repetitive tasks offer a wonderful promise. And things like having to update your address book every time any one of your contacts changes something just seems like one of those things that the modern Web ought to solve. And in fact, it does. Plaxo offloads this burdon to each individual to maintain their own contact information – rather than the hundreds of individuals that know that person.

Seems like a good thing, right? Well, almost – except for the details:

It puts the burdon of maintaining your understanding of someone else's address on that other person. Plaxo sends me a reminder email to "check" if I've updated my information every now and then – even if I never change anything, and even if I don't use Plaxo. This looks like a convenience feature for you, but I see it as actually being Plaxo's excuse to send advertising to everyone in your address book at your request with your credibility and (literally) your face. Do you really want to be supporting their advertising?
Plaxo says they will maintain great privacy of my contact information, but should I believe that? From their privacy policy, "Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties, unless required by law or in accordance with your instructions." In other words, because you want to maintain a personal database of information about me, the government now has instant access to all of my personal information immediately.
If Plaxo's servers get broken into, all of my contact information is available to the world.
You should be aware that Plaxo explicitly maintains the right to spam you. From their privacy policy, they maintain the right: "To provide you with information about Plaxo products, services, news and events through the Software, the Site or e-mail;"
Plaxo can change their policy at any time – and instantly start selling all of everyone's information at will. If they are sold, for example, there is no reason to expect that a buyer wouldn't do so if it was profitable.

Plaxo is not unique – there are lots of places that centralize personal information (think Google). But this one worries more than others because they focus on personal information, and the relationship between individuals, and have an explicit business model and policy of actively and repeatedly soliciting non-customers. They also are unique in shifting the burdon from the user of information to someone else – without their permission.

In defense of Challenge-Response spam detection systems

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:04:00 +0000

Like a lot of people, I get a lot of spam. And in the past months, it has gotten a lot worse. On average, I get well over 1,000 spam a day, and that is after spamassassin has already processed it and deleted what it detects without me ever even seeing that. Of those that get through, Outlook puts most in the Junk E-email folder, leaving me about 100 a day to delete - intermixed with my 50 or so legitimate emails a day.

In terms of actual time lost, it is not great. Maybe 2 seconds per email to delete or 2*100=~3 minutes plus a couple of minutes to look through the junked email to salvage good ones (of which I typically find about 1 per day) for a total of maybe 5 minutes a day.

But in terms of mind share and detraction, this is huge. It means that I am continuously distracted all day long by the dregs of society - pornography, rampant commercialism, and fraud. This is the worst kind of distraction, not only taking my mind away from my flow of concentration, but doing so in a way that I do my best to avoid in every other aspect of my life, and that I would not even consider letting my 7 year old daughter have access to.

So, after giving up on all the standard solutions to spam, I signed up for SpamArrest, a commercial "challenge-response" spam detection system. This works by requiring everyone that wants to send you email to first follow a link to a website and prove they are human by reading a word in a warped image and typing it (i.e., a CAPTCHA). The reason this approach works is that:

Each sender only has to do this once for me. The system remembers that person for the future.
I can preload the system with all of my contacts and anyone I've sent email to in the past so that everyone I already communicate with won't have to validate themselves, and won't know I am using this system.
New people that send me email have to use this system once, and legitmate senders are usually willing to go through this step.
I can authenticate senders unlikely to do this (like various large e-commerce sites).
I can let email lists through by setting them up indivdually.
Spammers that send me email are almost never willing to go through this step, and so I never see their email. The reason that spammers aren't willing to do that is because they are computer software and can't, or because they are human and don't want to spend the time. In fact, most spam is sent by "spambots" which are other people's computers hijacked for the sole purpose of sending spam. This email is sent with forged email return addresses, so they never even receive the request for validation.

So, if this is such a panacea, why isn't everyone using it? Well for one thing, you have to pay for it (about $3/month). But lots of people think this approach is a bad idea in principle, and have been arguing against it. However, while I agree that it does have problems, it is better than any current alternative, and I'm not going to wait around suffering while I wait for better solutions. So, let me respond to one complaint about challenge-response systems. I'll summarize the complaints and respond here.

Concern #1. Spammers will forge mail to me with someone else's return address thus sending my challenge to the poor forgee's email box.

Looking at the actual spam I receive, the vast, vast majority has false return addresses. And of the legitimate ones, most of those very likely come from spambots running on machines that have been infected. The owner of those machines have a lot more serious problems than deleting my challenge to them. In fact, it may tip them off to the fact that they are infected. And of the few third party legitimate emailers who get my unwanted challenges, I apologize. But that is still a tiny, tiny fraction of the total spam in the world. I'll gladly stop when there are better solutions. And I won't get mad if I occasionally get unwanted challenges from others (which I do, and which is a tiny, tiny minority of the total spam I receive).

Concern #2. If a challenge-response person emails me, then both our systems will challenge each other, generating even more email traffic.

So what. We each accept each other's challenges and we're done. We only have to do this once per person. And again, this one-time extra 2 emails is so tiny in the wide world of spam, that it is a totally irrelevant argument.

Concern #3. Challenge-response systems are easy to defeat since all someone has to do is forge the From address as someone that I already trust.

This is the easiest to respond to. Yes, in theory this is true, but in practice, spammers don't know who I trust. And in the past 4 days, I have received 4,491 emails of which 165 have been classified as good. Of those, about 30 were spam, but all of those spam were sent through mailing lists that I trust, not from forged From addresses. This does bring up a legitimate problem which is that popular mailing lists may become targetted as spoofed return addresses. But again, in practice, this has not happened yet. So I'm not going to avoid using a system because it theoretically might not work at some point in the future.

The bottom line is that challenge-response systems are not perfect, and probably won't work as well if everyone uses them. But for now, they work much, much better than anything else short of a human spam deleter (now there's a good business opportunity!). And if they stop working better than alternatives, then I'll switch to whatever works better.

Kojo Nnamdi "Computer Guy" answers questions

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:06:00 +0000

I had the pleasure of being a "Computer Guy" on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show along with Allison Druin and John Gilroy. We got to answer a number of email questions on the air, but here are some other ones with my answers.

It is of course, good to see answers, but I do this also to point out the sorry state of affairs of the computer industry as this is just way too many problems for every day computer users to have.

How do I print a listing of the files in a directory?

Alternatively, you can still do it from the command line with the following steps. Run the command shell by pressing Windows-R, and entering "cmd" in the popup dialog and click ok. Change to the directory you want to list with the "cd" command (i.e., do something like "cd c:\video"). List the directory and send the output to a text file with the command "dir > listing.txt". This runs the "dir" command and sends the output to the specified text file. Then go back to Windows Explorer, open the newly created "listing.txt" file in notepad or Word or any other text editing program and print from there.

Subject: question for the Computer Guys

I have Verizon DSL service. When I open Internet Explorer to my home page washingtonpost.com, I get all of these popup boxes saying "Runtime Error." The boxes contain information such as "Object Expected" or "Null Object." and asks if I want to want to debug. Three questions - what causes Runtime Errors? Does debugging fill your computer with spyware? And why is only IE affected by such errors?

If this happens occasionally, it could be due to a temporary problem with the website in question. But if it happens frequently, then it is probably due to some broken plugin for Internet Explorer. That is, you may have installed some software that modified Internet Explorer and did so in a bad way. For IE 7, try Tools->Manage Add-ons->Enable or Disable add-ons, and try disabling stuff. If you are using IE6, try updating to IE7 with Microsoft Update.

Subject: Vista

Hi Guys!

I am one of the few people left on the planet who is still running Windows ME, and have been looking forward to getting a new computer when Vista comes out. Should I buy it right away, or wait to see how it performs?

Thanks,

In general, unless you enjoy living on the "bleeding edge", and the excitement and inevitable problems that go along with it, I recommend waiting a few months after any major technical product is launched. In this case, it probably means waiting until after SP1 (Service Pack 1) comes out to fix the first round of bugs, probably late spring.

Subject: wireless internet security

My home wireless router indicates that I have "security-enabled wireless network (WPA). What's the difference between WPA and WEP wireless security? Is one better/stronger? Is it safe to buy and bank on-line with WPA? Thanks.

WPA is the newer one, and I recommend it over WEP whenever you have the chance.

Subject: Shared Outlook Contact and Calendar Files

Hi, I've paid for a Dell server to be set up running Microsoft Small Business Server software for my small, home-based business. Despite many calls (and lots of paid invoices), cannot share either Contacts or Calendar files from within Outlook. They tried to set up a separate outlook folder, but the server won't default to it, they say, unless we wipe the server and I pay to set the whole thing up all over again. Any advice on how to get these programs to share over a small network of 2-3 desktops, please?

Many thanks,

I'm afraid I don't know how to help you here - but it sounds like whoever you paid to set up the system for you did not do their job properly. If you've tried to get them finish the job and can't get them to do so, then don't pay them and pay someone else to start over. If you already have paid them, then ask for your money back. If they won't, then you've learned a hard lesson about not paying for services before they are completed. Sorry.

Subject: Computer Guys Question

I got a virus on my desktop PC. It was cleaned out but in the process it lost its IP address and now I cant get onto the internet without that, is there a way to restore it? Thanks

I'd start by turning off your cable modem and computer and any other hardware and then turning it all on again (starting with the modem and router and powering up your computer last). If you still can't get it to work, try calling your internet service provider.

Subject: computer guys question

Is there a side-by-side comparison of processors available ... a chart, etc? How do AMD, Pentium HT, and dual processors stack-up? What direction do I go with my next purchase keeping Vista in mind, and knowing that I am now doing more photo and home video work.

There are loads of comparisons out there, but I'm not familiar with any one that I can suggest. Try googling "processor comparison" to get started.

Subject: Transfer audio tape cassette music to PC

Is there an easy way to transfer my old audio tapes to my Windows XP PC so I can hear my music on CD's?

David Pogue discussed this very issue recently, so I suggest reading his description.

Subject: older computers and external hard drives

Help! We have a 6-year old Sony Vaio PC, 60 GB, Pentium 4 processor. We use it for basic applications like word processing, Internet surfing and email. Since we began storing picture and music files the computer has slowed dramatically and now constantly tells us it has no room left on the C drive. I say we need to just buy a new computer so that we can store and manipulate all our digital images and music. Thrifty Hubby says we just need to buy an external hard drive and move our picture and music files there. Please help advise! Our happy marriage may depend on it!

You are both right (how's that for marriage counseling). Buying a new hard drive probably will delay the inevitable, and improve the situation. But using a 6 year old computer for today's pictures and music probably just isn't up to the task. I sure hope you are backing up those valuable pictures and music. Every day. Automatically.

Subject: Firefox

I switched to Firefox because of a corrupted IE6, that wouldn't even start. Tried any number of fixes, including the oxymoronic "Microsoft Help". Downloaded IE7 but the problem lives on. I love Firefox, however now I can't get Windows updates, because surprise, surprise, Updates
will only download thru Internet Explorer. Am I missing a tool feature or preference in Firefox, that will allow a it to talk to Microsoft?

This sounds bad. Your only solution may be to reinstall Windows (and then reinstall your applications). You can do so without affecting your personal data. But definitely back up first to be safe.

Wii @ Home

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:37:00 +0000

After all the hype and violence surrounding XBox 360 and PS3 with graphics to die for and matching games, I was thrilled to finally get my hands on the family friendly Wii.

And impressively, it is essentially all it is cracked up to be. The easy-to-learn controller really is easy to learn. Some games, like tennis don't use any buttons at all. The full body motion really does get kids moving and interacting like never before with a video game. But most importantly, it engages the whole family. I can promise you I have never before heard the words "maybe we should get one" from wife before anywhere near the words "video game".

But it isn't all roses. The games seem to use very limited information about body movement. So, in tennis, you can't move the player from side to side - and there seems to be only a single bit of speed. I'm afraid this just won't stay fun for that long. But that's ok as the free intro game - as long as others go deeper.

And the family friendliness is sometimes pretty superficial. "Rayman Raving Rabbids", for instance, is a first-person shooter that trains kids for the worst in videogames - dressed up as cute rabbits with shooting plungers.

And the risk of whacking your sister in the head with a wiimote is real. I caught it happen on video in the first 10 minutes of use. (Fortunately, no one was hurt.)

(Thanks to colleague Bill Pugh and family for hosting the wiiParty.)

Adobe and Apple give me no respect

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bederson) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:46:00 +0000

Somehow I would have thought it would be obvious by now, but major software vendors still abuse their privileges when installing their software on my machine. This comes in various forms, but often includes adding buttons in the top part of my Start menu, in my quick launch area, system tray, on my desktop, and even embedding themselves in other applications - all without warning, and sometimes without the ability to undo their actions. Two recent offenders are Adobe and Apple.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 on Windows XP is the worst offender. Given the nature of the product, it is reasonable to integrate with some other programs, and I am happy to be able to generate PDFs directly from Word. And the fact that they chose to offer that capability by adding a button to my Outlook toolbar is reasonable. However what is not reasonable is that there is no way to disable that feature. They configured their button to be always on, no matter what. When you try to configure the toolbar to remove the button, it is the only one greyed out - meaning that they think converting to PDF is more important than actually sending an email!

The reason I care so much is that because it is an always-on button, if you make the toolbar small (like I do to avoid having toolbars take over my screen), then it is the one that stays visible, and the buttons I actually want (Send and Accounts) disappear. The only solution I found is to edit the registry to disable the PDF plugin to Outlook. So Adobe has forced me to disable their product so it doesn't drive me crazy. Nice job Adobe - now I can be mad at you every single time I send an email.

The second offender is Apple. They nicely make it easy to offer an update to QuickTime and iTunes, but every time they update, they re-add buttons to my desktop and to my QuickLaunch bar. Do they really think that since I removed them the first time, I'll want them the second time? And do they really think that a minor security update should give them the opportunity to get in my face? Nice job Apple - now I can be mad at you too every time you offer me an update.