Category Archives: Ephemera

Miscellaneous items.

Running Java on the Lion operating system

Ephemera, Technology

Having gotten a new Mac laptop that came packaged with Apple’s newer Lion operating system, and having successfully moved all files from an older laptop running Snow Leopard, we learned the hard way that Lion doesn’t come with Java bundled in by default!

The problem surfaced when we tried to run the Kerika server software on our new laptop: since we wrote all of the backend/server code in Java, we can run the entire Kerika software on pretty much any computer. So, with our new laptop all set up, apparently configured with everything we need once we got our SuperDuper backup restored, we tried to build the Kerika source code using Maven.

That’s when things went in a surprising direction: running “mvn -install” generated error messages about Java not being found. We followed the symbolic links for the Java executables, which had been copied over to the new laptop along with everything else from the SuperDuper backup, and found that there was nothing there: no Java to be found on the machine.

OK, so we need to get Java installed. No problem, we will just run the Mac Software Update: maybe something got missed along the way.

No good: Mac’s Software Update didn’t pull in Java.

Finally, we talked to Apple and found out that they deliberately don’t include Java (or Flash) with Lion. The ostensible reason is that Java programs (and Flash programs) take up too much battery power. This argument sounds rather dubious: Flash’s excessive power consumption is well known, but Java…?

We think a truer explanation might be that Apple views Java programs as a long-term competitive threat to their App Store, and are therefore starting to subtly discourage its use without actually banning it – which would create a huge stink.

If this sounds like Microsoft’s deliberately crippled support of Java on Windows XP, Apple should perhaps pause and consider how well that strategy worked out for Microsoft…

Meanwhile, here’s the download link to get Java for Lion!

Not so smart money: how to produce a Web page with just 15% content

Ephemera, Usability

Smartmoney.com, the personal finance website that is owned by Dow Jones (i.e. by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) offers a singular example of how one can design a website so that chrome, fluff and advertising overwhelms the content.

Here are some screenshots from a single page of a SmartMoney article today: we needed 6 screenshots to show you the page because it is around 3,900 pixels in height.

Screen captures of a single Smartmoney.com page
Screen captures of a single Smartmoney.com page

One might assume that a page that long would be filled with content, but in fact, it is filled with advertising, page design elements (also known as “chrome”), links to various News Corp services and other pages (i.e. “fluff”), and even just blank screen space.

To get a better idea of just how much crap there is on this screen, consider this color coding of the page, with purple denoting advertising, yellow denoting chrome or other fluff, and white indicating blank screen space:

The same Smartmoney.com page, color-coded to show what it contains
The same Smartmoney.com page, color-coded to show what it contains

You can see at a glance just how little of the page is actually devoted to the article. In fact, by counting pixels we figured that just 15% of the page is devoted to the article:

Pie chart showing composition of Smarmoney.com article
What's on this single Smartmoney.com page

This is not entirely accidental, of course: Smartmoney.com relies upon advertising, so it will try to stretch out an article over multiple pages so that it can show you more advertising as you plow through page after page.

(This particular article has been stretched over 6 separate Smartmoney.com pages, each of which contains the same pitiful 15%, or even less, of pixels devoted to actual content.)

Yet, even if advertising is the laudable goal here, one simply can’t overlook the bad page design: the largest component of this page (54%) is either page decoration or other fluff – a desperate attempt to get people to stay on the site. And considering that more than half of the crap is “below the fold”, why would Smartmoney.com even expect users to wade through it?

Murder, “lessons learned”, and Service Level Agreements

Ephemera

“We really look at the service delivery with the case. Was there anything we can learn about what happened? It’s not necessary to see what went wrong, but how were services delivered. Is there something we can learn?” said Sharon Gilbert, deputy director for field operations at Children’s Administration, which is part of DSHS.

No, let’s not.

Let’s not view the horrific murder of two children as a SLA problem with a contracted vendor. Too much blood has been spilled to take such a bloodless view of “lessons learned” about “service deliveries”.

Yummy cookies: how many can you eat? (And why is Google such a Cookie Monster?)

Ephemera, Technology

If you visit this blog, you get a total of 8 cookies placed on your computer from blog.kerika.com – unless, of course, you block all cookies, in which case you probably aren’t a Kerika user. Of these, just 2 are of any use to us: they help us with Google Analytics.

The other 6 are placed there because we use the WordPress software to publish this blog. We haven’t any use for them, but haven’t gotten around to turning the off because that would require us to fiddle with various PHP files.

And if you use the Kerika software, you get a total of 6 cookies from kerika.com. Of these:

  • 2 are from Google Analytics. They help us understand which of the nearly 80 pages that currently comprise kerika.com are of real interest to people. These cookies are called _utma and _utmz.
  • 1 comes from the fact that we use CometD, an open source implementation of the Bayeaux protocol, for our real-time communications. We haven’t any use for this cookie, but haven’t gotten around to turning it off. This one is called BAYEUX_BROWSER.
  • 1 is related to our use of Jetty, an open-source, Java-based Web server. We haven’t any use for this cookies either, but, as with CometD, we haven’t gotten around to turning these off either.

And, finally, we get to the two cookies that are of practical use to us:

  • The claimedID cookie helps us identify you as a registered Kerika user, and
  • The tabs cookie helps us bring you back to the projects you had open when you were last using Kerika.

Sorry about all those useless cookies.

That’s the problem with using third-party software like WordPress, CometD and Jetty: each comes with its own platter of cookies, and to turn them off requires one to dig into the code for each of these systems. Frankly, it doesn’t seem worthwhile, at least in comparison to fixing bugs and delivering new features, which is where all of our energy goes!

But, in comparison to other software vendors, our use of cookies is far from excessive, and that’s because we are not in the advertising business. Google, on the other hand, is very much in the advertising business, and taking a look at the Chrome browser cookies on one of our development machines, here’s the very impressive count we found for the original Cookie Monster:

google.com 43 cookies
accounts.google.com 5 cookies
apis.google.com 1 cookie
checkout.google.com 4 cookies
chrome.google.com 2 cookies
code.google.com 3 cookies
docs.google.com 12 cookies
groups.google.com 4 cookies
mail.google.com 29 cookies
plus.google.com 2 cookies
plusone.google.com 2 cookies
profiles.google.com 2 cookies
sandbox.google.com 2 cookies
support.google.com 8 cookies
talkgadget.google.com 1 cookie
tools.google.com 1 cookie
www.google.com 19 cookies
www.googleadservice.com 1 cookie
translate.googleapis.com 1 cookie
deployment.googleapis.com 2 cookies
fastflip.googlelabs.com 1 cookie
igoogle-skins.googleusercontent.com 1 cookie

That’s a total of 144 cookies! And when it comes to local storage, Google has a fairly big footprint:

clients6.google.com Local storage
mail.google.com Database storage, Local storage
news.google.com Local storage
plus.google.com Local storage
www.google.com Database storage, Local storage

There’s a lot of controversy about Google’s announcement that they will merge data collected from their various services to provide more targeted advertisements. If that means they have figured out how to consolidate information gathered by 144 cookies from 22 different services – well, one can’t help but be impressed at the technical challenge they have taken on!

The “S” stands for Siri, for speech.

Ephemera, Technology, Usability

Apple just announced a new platform and nobody noticed.

Far too much of the commentary from Wall Street about the launch of the iPhone 4S has been superficial, focusing on the fact that it is a “4S” and not a “5”. Why, oh why, wail the analysts, couldn’t Apple just have called it the iPhone 5 and made everyone happy?

This misses a rather big point about the iPhone 4S: the “S” may ostensibly stand for “speed”, since the new phones have a faster processor, but in our opinion the “S” really stands for Siri, as in “speech”.

OK, so we don’t have our hands on a real iPhone either, which means we are guessing, too, and using the very limited collection of videos and demos that are publicly available for our guesswork/analysis, the most extensive of which is Apple’s own promotional video.

This promo video, however, does provide a very good indicator of the vast potential of the new speech platform that Apple has just launched. Yes, there’s a whole new platform for personal computing out there now, thanks to Siri, and it’s not just limited to iPhones.

Siri is more than speech processing: it is an impressive attempt to bring interactive voice response (IVR) to the masses in a way that does not immediately induce rage against the machine. There are two major innovations with Siri, only one of which has gotten any real attention:

  • There is the AI needed to understand the user’s speech and translate the nouns, verbs and indirect references (like “this weekend”) into API calls, and here Siri promises to be a considerable leap forward from the kind of hugely annoying systems we all accustomed to dealing with when we call our bank or insurance company.
    There is also the AI needed to generate voice output from the system, and here Siri looks like it could do with some work, particularly if it is to sound less synthetic.
  • The far more impressive work is the Siri’s integration with the calendar, email, Google Maps and iTunes programs, as well as external web services like weather.com. This is the new platform that just got launched: the integration of a speech interface to all personal computing devices: not just phones, but also tablets, laptops and TVs.

The iPhone 4S will debut with Siri working seamlessly with mail, calendar, Google Maps, SMS, weather, and basic Web searches. But this is just the start: what Siri does today is similar to what the iPhone 1 did on the day it launched, when it came with a handful of standard applications for email, calendar, SMS, weather and basic Web searches. (Hmm… sound familiar?)

If the iPhone 1 was impressive right out the box, before hundreds of thousands of applications had been written for it, imagine what the Siri platform will be like when there are hundreds of thousands of existing applications and software packages that support a speech interface.

Apple has launched what they hope with be the speech platform for personal computing. Sooner than we developers would like, we will have to start supporting a speech interface to our personal computing applications, and it will have to be a much smarter interface than anything that came before.

If Apple succeeds in making the Siri interface a de facto standard, they will own a fundamental platform technology that would make Bill Gates envious.

Nice discussion here.

Ephemera

What’s your best guess about the following? Was it written by a computer, written by a human in a different language and then poorly translated into English, or written by a steering committee with representatives from all the relevant business units and impacted stakeholders?

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