Monthly Archives: January 2013

Apple

Macworld: “Why I dread going to the Apple Store”

It appears that Macworld has finally caught up to what I’ve been saying for some time now: the Apple Store sucks, and here’s but one example of why.  I never did write up the horrific time that I’ve had getting service on the MacBook Pro provided by my employer, which has AppleCare but that AppleCare seems to have bought me nothing other than extra annoyance from their staff.

I can only hope that Apple firing John Browett, the head of its retail division, late last year can fix this issue.  Until I hear otherwise, I will continue to avoid the Apple Store unless absolutely forced to go in.

Mac

professional software != software used by professionals

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Adam Engst of TidBits got upset that an update to Apple Pages that impacted Engst’s workflow for creating EPUBs.  In short, Pages changed several behaviors that Engst relied on for creating EPUBs.  Engst, even though he knows that Apple’s release notes are not reliable indicators of what changes have gone into a product, accepted the new update to an essential application without testing it.  And when things broke, he found himself in a very difficult position that required a lot of time and effort to fix.  He says this about the experience:

That shows a profound lack of respect for customers on Apple’s part, and is particularly offensive when it comes to tools used by professionals. It’s bad enough when Apple causes normal users significant headaches, such as with the massive changes in iTunes 11, which cannot be downgraded to iTunes 10.7 (see “iTunes 11: The Features Apple Removed, and Alternatives,” 4 December 2012). But when Apple’s decision to conceal changes threatens one’s livelihood, it’s time to start looking at tools from companies who care about their customers.

The problem is, Engst missed many issues.  Any professional knows that you don’t update software that is essential to your business without testing it first.  You make sure that it works first, and you run it through several tests before updating everyone.  Engst also had unrealistic expectations about Apple updates: it’s already well-known by everyone who’s been using Macs for years (as Engst has) that Apple’s release notes are quite thin and rarely give information about all of the updates that are included in this.

But most importantly, “software used by professionals” is not the same as “professional software”.  Professional software does have higher expectations associated with it: higher expectations about how it’s tested, how it’s documented, how it’s supported.  In general, this means that professional software has a higher price tag associated with it.  Software that just happens to be used by professionals doesn’t have those expectations.  Apple has never claimed that Pages is professional software.  Basing your professional workflow around an application that is not professional software, and then not testing updates when you know that you cannot trust the release notes for this application, is not professional behavior.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think that Apple’s release notes should be so short.  Writing useful release notes isn’t difficult, and Apple should step up and do it.  That said, I think that expecting software used by professionals to be up to the bar set by professional software is unrealistic.  Use professional tools, get professional results.  Use tools that aren’t intended for professional results, and you might get lucky and get professional results, but you can’t rely on it.  Pages is $20.  You get what you pay for, and you did not pay for a professional application.

(Edited on January 28th, because I can’t type and got the price of Pages wrong.  It’s $20.)

development, software

college versus software engineering

There’s lots of things that you do as part of your job as a software engineer that you don’t learn in school.

When you’re first starting out as a software engineer, you probably don’t really know what it’s like to work on a team.  You might have had group projects in school, but their scope was limited to whatever you could accomplish in that semester, you’re working on it from the very beginning through to its completion, and everyone in your group had roughly the same amount of experience that you do.  This is very different than delivering real software.

In the industry, you usually start out working on a project that’s already in progress, and if it’s software that’s been available for more than a couple of years, it’s got a history that you know nothing about.  You have to learn where the project is today, you have to learn how to contribute to your project, and your deliverables or your deadlines1 are going to change at some point.  You’re virtually guaranteed that you’re not there for the beginning of the project, you’re coming in to complete the work that someone else has defined.

There’s often not an actual end of a software project.  You finish this version, you start working on the next version, and you have to go back and patch bugs from this version while you’re working on the next version.  At some point, you’re going to stop working on this project (either moving to a different project in your company, or moving to a different company altogether), and the project is going to continue on.  This means that you’re going to have to figure out how to help whoever is taking over your work understand where you are and what needs to be done next.

Your project team is probably bigger than the ones that you had in college, and there are more roles on it.  Your college project team probably had everyone contributing code.  Now you’ve got to figure out how test fits into your world, and program management, and documentation, and user experience, and then there’s this marketing person that suddenly appears and you don’t know what this means.  In addition to all of these specialized roles that you haven’t had to deal with before, you’re also working with a much higher degree of variance of experience.  In college, everyone probably had roughly the same level of experience.  When you’re delivering software, you’ve got everyone from fresh college grads all the way up to the person who’s been working on this software since it was first shipped N years ago.

Deadlines are fixed in your college project.  You know exactly when the semester is going to end.  You might decide to change the scope of your project when you realize that you had planned more than you could actually fit into the semester, or when the person who said that they’d do this important piece of code never actually came through, but the deadline is immutable.  When you’re working on on a software project, you’ll learn very very quickly that your deadline can get changed without any notice.

Also, your project might change mid-course.  When you’re working on a project in a college course, you don’t have to worry about your competition changing, or about the market suddenly deciding that this new technology is an absolute must-have.  That list of features that you thought were going into the next release can change at any time, and it probably will.  Not only are you going to have to accept this change, but you’re going to have to accept that a feature that you were working on yesterday that was very important might not be important tomorrow.  In fact, you might stop working on it entirely so that you can work on something else that’s now more important.  That’s okay, it’s the nature of the business.

None of this is meant to say that group projects in college courses are useless.  You  learn a lot by having to work with other people to get your project done, and that does translate well to your first software engineering job.  What you learn in your group project in college is limited, and doesn’t give you the full story of what you’ll experience when you start working for a company on a software project.

  1. Note that this isn’t an XOR.  It’s actually most likely an AND, but I’m going for OR because OR doesn’t preclude AND. ↩
Mac

how to rip audio losslessly from a DVD?

4 Comments

Okay, I asked on Stack Exchange, but I’ll ask here too …

In Mountain Lion, how do I rip only the audio from a DVD as losslessly as possible? I have several concert DVDs that I would like to listen to on my iPod. I have an extensive music library1, which is mostly ripped from my own CDs in Apple Lossless format, so my best-case scenario is getting lossless audio off of the DVDs and converting it to ALAC.

I realize that the audio tracks on DVDs might already be lossy if they’re in AC3 format, but PCM is lossless. If there is PCM audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and convert that to ALAC. If there is AC3 audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and pretend that I’m not annoyed by a lossy resampling in the conversion of AC3 (which I can’t listen to on any device that I own) to AAC (or something else).

I know that Handbrake is great for ripping video, but its FAQ says that it doesn’t do audio only.  AudioHijackPro will record the audio, so that’s introducing an unnecessary layer of loss if the audio is PCM, and I’m not sure if resampling an AC3-to-AAC is less lossy than recording an AC3 track into MP3.

I’m willing to deal with a convoluted workflow to achieve my goal. I could also revert to Windows if necessary; I’ve got a Win7 VM readily available, and I have a Win2k8 server sitting under my desk for testing purposes.

  1. Currently around 40k tracks, and ever-growing; I purchased over 100 albums last year alone. ↩
women

booth babes at CES

I’m a part of the Systers mailing list, and we had a discussion about the booth babes at CES.  Systers doesn’t make its mailing list archives public, but does have a Best of Systers blog wherein someone will write a blog article and use (with permission) quotes from the discussion.  I was one of the quotes in Dear CES, Objectification is Calling:

I think it’s also important for us… who work for companies who have booths at conventions and conferences to remind our companies that we don’t want to be represented by booth babes.  If our companies sponsor their own conferences, I think that we should raise the concern about booth babes.  In this case, it’s not enough to just make sure that our showcase booths not have booth babes, we should also figure out how to keep vendors who have booths at our conferences from having booth babes.

One of the things that I have to admit that bothered me about my quote in that article is seeing it in context.  Of the five quotes there, I’m the only one who consented to have my full name used.  Two were completely anonymous.  I understand why someone would make the decision to either only use their first name1 or be fully anonymous.  I’m just sad that those Systers felt that they needed to be anonymous.

Thankfully, booth babes weren’t the only women at CES.  Meet the women of CES 2013, nary a booth babe in sight.

  1. Which isn’t really an option for me. My first name is unique enough that it’s trivial to trace it back to me. ↩
Nadyne

trying to despam my life, Wells Fargo edition

I have a bank account with Wells Fargo.  It has long annoyed me that I am often subjected to ads for additional Wells Fargo services when I login to my account.  I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of junk and spam in my life.  I whinged about it on Twitter, and ended up with the following exchange:

  • @nadyne: Dear @WellsFargo: I sincerely hate how you try to upsell me on something every time I login to my account.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Sorry for the inconvenience, Nadyne. To opt out these ads, please visit https://www.wellsfargo.com/help/faqs/privacy_faqs … for more info. Thanks, ^MD
  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – This addresses email, mail, and phone. It says nothing about ads on login to my account.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Please call our support team at (800) 956-4442 and we’ll submit your request to stop further interactive offers. Regards, ^MD
  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – The fact that I have to call you to get you to stop spamming me when I login to your site makes me want a new bank.
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne You can send a secured email with your request. After logging in, click on Contact us at the top then, Email us to the right. ^MD

So I did, and got the following response from “Porsche” (I’ve cut out a bunch of boilerplate):

If you would like to opt out of email solicitation, please reply to this email with your request or call us anytime

Thank you for missing my point.  So, back to Twitter:

  • @nadyne: @Ask_WellsFargo – I sent mail, and the response indicates the request is not understood. Why do I have to work so hard to not get spammed?
  • @Ask_WellsFargo: @nadyne Follow and DM us, Nadyne. We’ll have our support team try to help resolve this for you. Regards, ^MD

I did as requested, and they didn’t respond in any fashion, just in case you were curious.

So back in email, I responded that it’s not email solicitation that I’m concerned about (I’ve already opted out of those), it’s the ads when I login, and I got this email reply from “Ashley” (again, cutting the boilerplate):

The messages you see at the top of your Online Banking session screens are designed to let our customers know about new products, services, and special offers. These messages are only used for Wells Fargo products and we limit the number that a customer sees in any one Online Banking session.

I responded that I didn’t want these ads, and since Wells Fargo is either unwilling or unable to stop spamming me, it’s time for me to to some research and find a non-spamming institution for my mortgage and chequing account.  Somehow this netted yet another response, this time from “Lashia”:

I have noted your preference to no longer receive full-page offers in your online banking session. Please be aware that it may take up to 60 days for your preferences to take effect. I appreciate your patience during this time and apologize for any inconvenience.

I also apologize for the misinformation provided in our previous correspondence.

It’s amazing how Wells Fargo can start spamming me in an instant, but somehow it takes 60 days to stop getting spammed.  Of course, it’s also amazing that it took me two days of complaining about their spam and a threat to move my account to potentially get rid of this.

Yes, in fact, I do have a new reminder on my calendar to email them again in 60 days if they’re still spamming me every time I login.

Apple

a rare look inside Apple

1 Comment

Don Melton, an ex-Apple engineering director, has given a little bit of insight into the secretiveness of his former employer.  He’s written a great blog post about how he was tasked with building Safari and keeping it a secret.

I think that the most interesting thing about this is that he hired David Hyatt, who had worked on Mozilla and Netscape, and that little tidbit made it to Macrumors at the time. He even blogged about it, although didn’t say what he was working on.

Apple, Microsoft

herp derp

2 Comments

Oh, the herp derp of this story, courtesy of a “staff writer” at 9-5 Mac: No Microsoft products were reported stolen.  Yeah, yeah, tee-hee, someone broke into a Microsoft office and stole some iPads.  Tee-hee, Microsoft has iPads, tee-hee they didn’t steal any MS products.

Except, of course, you could bother to take advantage of the knowledge that SVC Building 5 is where the Apple Productivity Experiences team (that is, the team formerly known as the Macintosh Business Unit, my former team) lives.  And presuming that this was just a theft of opportunity, Building 5 is a good one for opportunity.  Its main entrance faces US-101, and doesn’t have a single external door that’s visible from La Avenida (which is its street address).  It’s immediately next to the VTA bus depot.  According to the article, the theft occurred during the holiday week, and that campus was probably all but deserted that week.  There’s no signs of a break-in, which means that it was probably either someone who has physical access to the building (anyone with a current MS badge, which includes employees, contractors, security guards, the catering staff, etc), or someone who tailgated someone with a badge.  So someone got into the building, saw small items that are very easy to walk off with, and did so.

In other words: if you’re gonna make Microsoft jokes, at least make sure that they’re not lame ones.  Breaking into a Microsoft building and having Apple products stolen is an easy joke to make, which means that it’s just lame.  Stop being lame, people.  Herp derp.

Nadyne

killing voicemail

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Author John Scalzi has decided that he is killing his voice mail.  I’m completely on his side in this, and I think that perhaps it’s time to make it official.

I have three voice mailboxes: my personal cell phone, my office line, and my home line.  On my personal cell, if the voicemail is left by someone I know, I almost never listen to it.    I look at the number and decide when I’m going to call them back (or communicate in some other way, usually text or email).  If it’s not left by someone I know, there’s maybe a 50/50 chance of me listening to it.  Maybe.

On my home line, voicemail is this vast wasteland of nothingness.  I can’t tell you the last time that I listened to it.  I check its caller list to see who’s called lately, but that’s it.

My office voicemail is one that I actively hate.  It’s a hassle to use.  I have to remember my PIN, and then navigate an idiotic menu system (“press 1 to listen to your voicemail”, “press 1 to listen to your messages” why?!), and then listen to the message.  If I miss the important information in the message (like a telephone number), I have to listen to the whole bloody message again.  And, possibly, again.  And then I can delete it.  Once I’ve listened to and deleted all of my messages, my voicemail starts playing me my deleted messages automatically.  I have utterly no idea why.

I think it’s time to officially put this policy into play.  This means figuring out how to record a message on my work voicemail.