Simple Pleasures Are the Best

Years ago, when my dad was in his seventies, I tried to teach him how to use a computer.  He was overwhelmed by what was for him a serious challenge.  This was long-enough ago that there were still dedicated "word processors," units which looked like a computer keyboard and monitor, but which had only one function — to create documents.  Learning how to use them was far easier than learning to use a computer and all it's distracting features, even in those days when they operated in a relatively limited field of effort.

My father tried, but a word processor was not for him.

I realized that the only technology my father might appreciate, even master, would be the closest technology to the manual typewriter he'd been using his entire adult life, a machine which would mimic his old Royal's features.  I was happy to show him how to work an electric typewriter, and he took to it like a fish to water.

I believe that one should consider before racing to adopt the latest technology, particularly if you are efficient using the technology you're used to using.  You should account for the expense, time to adjust, retrain, and even the loss of some aspect of your current process that you might come to wish you had retained, for whatever reason.

I posted about whether or not to agree to software updates years ago.

Be at ease with your own expert notion of what's comfortable for you.

Always use the simplest effective technology.

The Best Prescription

It may be better for your own mental health to ascribe human qualities to your computer’s performance.  For example, saying, “My computer’s in a funk today, not getting much done,” suggests that you should just be patient, perhaps try tomorrow when the machine’s feeling better.  While on the other hand, treating your computer’s performance as a technical issue—which of course it is—may have you spend the rest of your day trying to solve a problem which might just go away on its own after the computer has had a good night’s sleep—technically, a reboot.

If It's Fixed, Do We Care What Went Wrong?

Today my scanner would not respond, saying another program had the scanner in use, reporting this to me in an error message.  I closed every program I thought might use the scanner, no change.  The error message still maintained that the scanner was in use, and advised I reboot my computer.  It occurred to me I might just reboot the scanner, and when I did, the error went away and I was once again able to use it.

This is an example of countless times we know how to make a problem go away without actually knowing what the problem is.  I often think that most computer problems have very specific causes, like the old cartoon about the mainframe dying every night at a particular hour, confounding technicians, simply because the cleaning lady unplugs it to plug in the vacuum.

It seems likely to me that my scanner was not in use at all, but that some data bit had tripped to give the appearance that it was.  Some technicians delight in tracing such errors down, and are often paid handsomely for their efforts.  Still I wonder why application code doesn’t report errors more reliably and with greater accuracy.

In the old days, technicians poured over “stack overflow” reports which left a trail of… well, everything a computer was experiencing at the time of a system crash.  No one has time for that anymore, so we rely more heavily on error messages to tell us what went wrong.

I feel there’s a lot of room for improvement in error messaging, and it might be interesting to actually know what’s happening when things go wrong.  

Of course, our software applications and operating systems are vastly more complicated than they once were.  Perhaps there’s no time to test every conceivable interruption, and to neatly alert us what’s wrong.  But if each step in a software program verified what it was doing, in theory, when it was not able to perform that step, it could throw report an error that would state clearly what it was unable to do.  It might even suggest the cause of its problem, identify a key antecedent to it’s action, or other programs that were interfering with its operation.

Persons more interested in all this have addressed everything I just mentioned.  But I sense that error reporting — and recovery from error — could be much more robust than it is.  

Perhaps the reason error recovery isn't more robust is that it’s just easier to restart the program.

Nothing Is a Closed System

I find the intentions of "open systems" compared to "closed systems" fascinating.  Proprietary Apple is airtight compared to Windows which is locked-down compared to free-ranging Linux and others.  I was recently struck by an article by acting coach Anthony Meindl.  It made me think of computer code from a fresh angle:

If you look at your life, the tremendous amount of effort you had to exert to overcome obstacles and get to where you are today speaks of the possibility of your spirit. But it also shows that nothing is a closed system. Nothing. To think otherwise is to limit something that is limitless. That is—you.

Next time we run up against the limits of proprietary code, we might appreciate our strengths, and leverage our creativity to triumph over closed-mindedness.  Not encouraging hacking here, just resourcefulness.

Why Is Software So Slow?

The title of this post is the title of an article in September 2013 The Atlantic.

Hardware generally meets its potential, providing faster processing and more space in more and more confined areas.  Software, Charles Simonyi claims in an interview with James Fallows, has a way to go before it similarly meets its potential, that new or better-leveraged coding paradigms must be discovered and used to speed-up everything and to remove all the repetitive tasks we still are required to complete that computers are so well suited to address.

Read the article for all of its salient points.  All I want to say is that it’s all accurate, regarding the way things are and the way things have been from the beginning of computer programming.  We have yet to harness software's potential to be our amazingly talented and intuitive administrative assistant.

I was particularly impressed with what I thought was Simonyi's key observation, simply stated:  We can do things like send email “because the knowledge of how to do it has been encoded in software.”  This is how all software is applied, really.  But if you consider anything you do repetitively at a computer, aren't tasks left which could be “encoded in software”?  Of course there are.

Software features are often derisively referred to as “bells and whistles,” but some can be actually time saving.  Most of us likely don't use the shortcuts available to us, don’t leverage software within MS Office, for example, which eliminates repetitive tasks.  "Slow software" is a human problem also. We often don’t bother to use features because there’s a certain ramp-up learning period that initially lengthens the time it takes to complete something.  But anything we find ourselves doing over and over again we should investigate to see if there’s a feature that would speed the process.

For example, I don’t think most of us use macros enough.  They are available in many programs, the ability to “record” successive keystrokes as a one-click event to avoid typing so much.  Also, the notion of templates is a favorite of mine, that for anything you've ever done there may be a model for it that could be tweaked rather than starting all over again from scratch.

In the article cited, Simonyi complains about TV controllers and similar “remotes.”  It’s certainly imaginable that any of them might record macros to allow one-button pushes to guide a user down a well-worn path.  This is what “Guide” and “Menu” buttons do, but why not something more personalized?  If I always want to see the HBO documentaries, I ought to be able to get there in one click.

To get the most out of your applications, discover what they can do for you.

Internet Filtering Is More Useful Than Insidious

There’s a book out this week—which I haven’t read—entitled, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. But I did watch a ten-minute talk given by its author, Eli Pariser, and I found his thesis somewhat self-evident and at the same time alarmist.

I hope all of us already effectively deal with the filtering Pariser is talking about. For example, the filtering of friends on Facebook example he cites is a simple options setting, and the moment it was introduced, people felt it and let each other know about it, which is the way the internet deals with unwanted filtering.

If you go to a wide variety of sites, and create intelligent, drill-down searches, unwanted filtering is not going to be a factor. You should also “search” using a variety of search engines and employ other tools as well. I often search on Amazon, as just one example, to find what’s been written, when, and who wrote it.

Filtering can only successfully direct you to choices if your choices are directed. The more you cast about in many directions for distinctly different, unrelated items, the less unwanted filtering has any relevance at all, while each new search you make creates filtering you’ve actively chosen.

Pariser says human editors have been replaced by algorithmic gatekeepers. Algorithms are necessary for the internet to function—and they don’t have the last word. Editors and journalists always and will forever serve a function, whether the model is the past where the power was vested in a trusted few, or today on the internet where we all have more gate-keeping options. Most of us would still rather trust a professional whose job it is to keep the gate than to rely solely on our own vetting of everything—of course we trust sources. The fact that we can choose among many more sources, and even find obscure bits of information ourselves, is surely a good thing—provided we are responsible enough to make some effort to discover the truths we need to know. It’s still far easier in our filtered internet universe in which the filters are easily removed or bypassed than in the old world in which they were opaque and unavoidable.

The internet is like Wikipedia, astonishingly self-correcting. We have far more power to get the straight story than any generation before ours. Filters, understood properly, are useful tools, not blinders.

False Advertising

A person should be absolutely satisfied that a web site or an email or any social media posting is completely legitimate before responding to it in any way. This is because the purveyors of spam have become sophisticated enough to fool even an intelligent casual observer.

For example, I recently got an email describing an interesting job opportunity. It was from a person I didn't know—but there are many in my network I don't know yet and if they have work for me, I want to hear from them. The language of the email was only slightly off-beat—call it a yellow flag, not a red one.

When I went out on the internet I couldn't find the company. Okay, that's almost certainly a red flag—except it meant I didn't find any bad reviews. Could the company simply be new or obscure? Does every business have a web site? Well, probably, yeah, so it was a red flag. Still, I wanted to believe it was a legitimate opportunity and wasn't yet ready to hit "delete."

But the indisputable red flag was that the email appeared not to have been sent to anything resembling my email address, nor was it from any business. These days, all of the email header information can be faked, so if it isn't from a legitimate enterprise—and certainly if it appears it wasn't sent to you—it’s garbage.

I saved myself further trouble, but wasted my time in the bargain.