Monthly Archives: February 2011

Nadyne

snow in San Francisco?!

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, and thought that I was safe from the snow.  I’ve been mostly trying not to laugh too much at my East Coast friends who have had much more snow this season than is really necessary.  Now, the Bay Area is looking at getting its first snow at sea level in 35 years: Snowstorm picks up speed, bears down on the Bay Area.

When I lived in Atlanta, any hint of snow sent the locals racing out to the grocery store to pick up milk, bread, eggs, and Coke.  I wonder what Californians will think is necessary to weather the storm?

If you don’t hear from anyone in the state on Friday, know that we’re snowed in under a half-inch or so of snow and thus think that the end of the world is nigh.

VMware

another reason to love VMware

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Here’s another reason that I’m happy working at VMware: today’s a holiday.

I’m used to the list of holidays being: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving (+ day after), Christmas.  That gave me nearly six months between paid holidays.  But VMware is nicer than that, and so we get Presidents Day off.

Yay unexpected three-day weekend!

books, Nadyne

girl power, woman power, and being one of the boys

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I’ve been thinking a lot about software engineering for women lately.  In that earlier blog post, I referenced Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, a long research report that hits home for me since I am a software engineer with a degree in mathematics.

I’ve also been reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein.  I’m not finished yet, but so far, it’s a walk through a lot of research about our culture and how we raise our little girls, as seen through the lens of Orenstein raising her own little girl.  In one passage, she references Packaging Girlhood by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown1, and says this about female identity for girls:

She can be “for the boys” — dress for them, perform sexually for them, play the supportive friend or girlfriend.  Or she can be “one of the boys,” an outspoken, feisty girl who hangs with the guys and doesn’t take shit.  The latter starts out as the kindergarten girl who is “independent and can think for herself.” … The trouble is, Brown and Lamb say, being “one of the boys” is as constricting as the other option, in part because it discourages friendship with other girls: a girl who is “one of the boys” separates herself from her female peers, puts them down, is ashamed or scornful of anything associated with femininity.

Reading that, I recognise my own childhood.  I was one of the boys, and I’ve never been particularly good at forming friendships with women.  Today, most of my friends are male.  I’ve always written that off to being an engineer.  Most of my professional relationships are with men, and professional relationships occasionally become friendships.  But it’s not as though there aren’t other women around.  Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it’s simply that I’m an engineer.

  1. Which has now been added to my to-read queue. ↩
Nadyne

5 words/phrases that I’d like to see banned

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These are the five words/phrases that I’m entirely sick of right now, and that I’m seeing too much in the tech press and in my Twitter list.

  1. “Curate” and its variants.  People, please.  Selecting a few things doesn’t mean that you’re curating anything.  You’re making a list, let’s not pretend that it’s anything more than that.  Skip the pretension.  See this list right here?  It’s not curated.  It’s me being cranky.
  2. “Epic”.  The Odyssey is an epic.  The Loma Prieta earthquake probably qualifies as epic.  The dinner you had last night? Not epic.  It might have been good, or even great.  Let’s reserve “epic” for something that truly is awe-inspiring instead of devaluing it by using it on that’s even slightly good (or slightly bad).
  3. “Fail”.  This is so very overused, especially when it’s all in caps.  And when combined with the previous entry, it makes me think that you just have no grasp of what a failure actually is.  Your boyfriend didn’t buy you flowers for Valentine’s Day?  Not FAIL.  Comcast missed their window for appearing at your apartment?  This is so expected that it can’t even remotely be considered a failure.
  4. “Revolutionary”.  Egypt? Revolutionary. Your new iPhone app? Not revolutionary.
  5. “FML”.  You forgot paper towels at Target?  Your kid is having a tantrum?  Barely worthy of an obscenity, let alone a repudiation of your entire life (unless you’ve got the saddest life ever).
MWSF

upstairs, downstairs: thoughts on Macworld Expo

I checked out Macworld Expo this year.  I’ve gone every year since 20061, and I’ve always had a great time. But, speaking as someone who only got to check out the Expo and not the Conference, I just didn’t find Macworld to be a great event.  I was predisposed to loving it, and I couldn’t this year.  Based on some of the other articles I’ve read and conversations that I’ve had with others who attended this year, I think it’s an upstairs/downstairs issue.

Looking at the session list for the Conference portion of Macworld, it was awesome.  The Conference is broken into several tracks.  The Users Conference has fantastic sessions.  There were 6 Mac tracks and 2 iOS tracks.  The Mac part includes sessions, both beginner and advanced, across productivity, photography, and business.  The MacIT track is my favourite, but then I’m a geek.  That part of Macworld 2011 looked like it was just as great as it’s always been.

The Conference is, both literally and figuratively, upstairs.  This year, it was held on the second and third floors of Moscone West.  By all accounts, it was spacious and comfortable.  There was plenty of seating for the all-important hallway discussions.  Contrast that to the downstairs of the Expo.

The Expo is totally different now that Apple has left the building.  There are fewer companies represented there.  While some people have been joking for several years that the Expo had just been about iPod/iPhone cases, there were still lots of Mac developers there.  Even better, the booths were usually staffed by their technical team, so spending time in their booth was very productive.  As someone from an application team working in a booth myself, I really appreciated the opportunity to talk to the users of my applications, get feedback from them, and help them out with problems.  As a Mac user myself, I loved being able to talk to the developers of some of my favourite applications.  Sometimes this was giving them feedback, sometimes it was to request a feature, and sometimes it was simply to tell them that I love their apps.

With Apple being gone and many of the big players deciding to sit this one out, it left room for a lot of small players.  And a lot of these small players were in iOS development and accessories.  It was weird to see Thinkpads and Vaios on the show floor.  I’m an iPhone and iPad user too, but it’s still called Macworld.  I wanted much more Mac and much less iOS.

There were lots of tiny booths.  This meant that it was a good opportunity to meet some of the smaller vendors (albeit with the caveat that many of them were iOS vendors that I wasn’t as interested in), but it created a traffic jam in the aisles.  Moving through the aisles was bloody well nearly impossible.  Since the vast majority of booths were very small booths, no-one other than the booth workers could actually be in the booth.  To stop and see what was going on in a booth required that you stop in the aisle, which blocked everyone else from moving past.  This was even worse in the teensy four-sided kiosks that took up one corner of the show floor.  There were things in there that I wanted to check out, but the teeming crowds in that section made it too much of a hassle to go in and talk to developers.

Adding to the problems on the show floor was that there wasn’t anywhere to hang out with friends for those of us who were only downstairs.  A large part of Macworld, for me, is the networking aspect of it — that so-called hallway track.  At previous Macworlds, I got to see lots of my existing Macworld friends and make more of them.  This year, there were only a handful of tables at the back of the hall, which were generally taken up by people eating.  With the aisles full, there was no place to move to the side and talk.  The lobby only had a few chairs near the coffee cart.  There was no place to hang out, and no place to stand within a booth.  As a result, I lost most of the serendipity of meeting someone new.  I also didn’t run into old friends unless I had arranged something ahead of time, which further cut the networking aspect of it.

This year as someone who only got to spend time on the Expo floor, Macworld just felt like a non-event to me.  I know that part of it is that I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I have in the past2, but I also think that part of it is how the show evolved this year.

There’s a disconnect between the Expo and the Conference.  The Conference upstairs still is Macworld.  Having some iOS tracks in there makes sense, but the focus is on the Mac.  The Expo downstairs isn’t Macworld any longer.  The Expo is Appleworld — and I’m only calling it Appleworld because iOSworld sounds pretty lame.  There were still a few Mac developers on the floor, but even most of those were often showing off their latest iOS applications in addition to their Mac offerings.  The rest is all about iOS.

I can see why most of the Mac developers chose not to get floor space this year3  With an Expo that has become increasingly focused on iOS in previous years, taking part in the Expo is a big cost that has a questionable payoff.  There’s the cost associated with the booth: renting the floor space on the show floor, as well as putting together the booth.  These things are Not Cheap, especially for a big professional booth.  More importantly, there’s the cost to the engineering team.  As I mentioned above, most developers sent members of their technical team.  As a result, those developers lost a week of productivity.  This is worthwhile if there’s a benefit to the developer as well as to the community.  But without a critical mass of Mac users who are interested in discussing Mac software, there’s a much smaller benefit to the development team, not to mention only a small benefit to the Mac community.

I think that the disconnect between the Conference and the Expo has to be addressed.  I’m not sure what the best way is to accomplish this.  I hope that it can be done.

  1. Which makes me a relative noob, I know. ↩
  2. Such as for the Office 2008 launch, where I got a hotel room at the W for the entire week instead of making the long trek home to Mountain View every night ↩
  3. It must be said that I have no inside knowledge of why either my current or my former employer didn’t have a booth at Macworld this year.  This is only my opinion, not a representation of anyone’s decision-making process. ↩
iPhone, Mac

iTunes wishlist

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I think it’s safe to say that I put iTunes through its paces more than most people do.  As of this writing, I have more than 27,000 tracks in iTunes.  That’s not a complete representation of my music collection.  I’ve got another 40 or so CDs that I’ve acquired in the past month which will get ripped, and I’m in the process of re-ripping my existing CD collection to ensure that everything’s in ALAC.  I mostly like iTunes, but there are some things that I wish would change.

Over-the-air podcasts

Once I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my iPhone, I’d like to be able to update that podcast to get the next podcast in the queue.  I feel this pain most acutely on the weekends, when I’ve run out of podcasts on my iPhone but I can’t update since I sync my iPhone with my work Mac.  I know that there are apps like Podcaster, but they require that I only listen to podcasts on my iPhone.

Device-independent podcasts

Related to the previous point, the only reason that I sync my iPhone to my work Mac is podcasts.  I have some podcasts that I like listening to on my Mac while I’m working, such as the All Songs Considered live concert podcast.  I shouldn’t have to think about where I’m going to listen to a podcast and decide which of my Macs/iPhones/iPods will be with me when I am going to be there.

Better auto-complete

Since I have a massive iTunes library, there’s a lot for auto-complete to draw from.  But auto-complete also gets in the way.

This is most noticeable when capitalisation between what it’s trying to auto-complete and what I’m actually typing differ.  Once I get past the point where iTunes gives up on auto-complete because my new entry isn’t in its database, it keeps the capitalisation that it already had.  For example, I was entering the band name ALO today.  I typed A, and it came up with Al Franken.  Then I typed L, so it kept Mr Franken, but changed my upper-case L to a lower-case l.  And then I typed O, but it still had the lower-case l there.  In other words, I entered that information, don’t lose it.

Another potential improvement for auto-complete would be to match the composers field with the artist field.  If I’m in the composers field and start to type the first letter of the artist’s name, don’t give me the first entry that matches that alphabetically.  Give me that artist; if I keep on typing more, then maybe the song’s composer isn’t the artist.  But it usually is, so save me a little bit of typing.

Improved ability to update an album

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going through my CD collection.  Since I’ve been using digital music for years and years, my music is in a variety of formats.  As I re-rip my discs, I delete the old version.  I’d love to be able to select the old version and tell iTunes that I’m updating this album, and thus keep its tags and metadata.  I know that I can do this if I’ve kept all of its tags the same as what’s in the CDDB, but I correct the tags on my files when there’s incorrect or incomplete information in them.  I don’t want to lose the metadata because the CDDB is wrong.

Better handling of the “composers” field

Today, the composers field is just treated as a single text-entry box.  But modern music usually has multiple composers.  I’d like them to implement some kind of delineator (slash or semicolon would work well).  Then I could have auto-complete work on the individual composers of a song, instead of the whole list of composers of a song.  For example, Michael Stipe’s sister Lynda has writing credits on a song on Fables of the Reconstruction, so I’d love to be able to type “Bill Berry; Peter Buck; Mike Mills; Lynda Stipe; Michael Stipe” for that song and save myself a little bit of typing since everyone but Ms Stipe is a composer on another song in my library.

Carriage returns in comments

I love the comments field.  It makes my geeky little heart sing with joy.  I’d love to keep more information in the comments field, but it’s hard to do so because I can’t use a carriage return to provide visual separation.  I don’t want to write a novel in the comments field.  For example, I have a smart playlist for “covers”, which looks through the comments field for that string.  I also use the comment field for live songs, to note when and where they were recorded.  Without a carriage return, a song which has both of these pieces of information is messy.  It’s keeping me from using the comments field for other smart playlists, too.

What improvements would you like to see in iTunes?

Nadyne, VMware

annual self-assessment

I wondered if this would happen.  VMware’s review cycle is the calendar year.  I joined on November 8.  This means that I’ve been here for long enough to get reviewed.  Given that how little time I’ve actually worked here as a result of  the vacations I took in November and December, I’m not sure what I’ll write for a self-assessment.  Here are some of my highlights so far:

  • Successfully found the bathroom
  • Can book a conference room in under an hour
  • Remembers most of the names of other members of the user experience team