The iPad is an appliance not a computer & you should be happy about that

Picture this.





You've spent ten straight hours hunched over the laptop/desktop at work, hammering out code/composing a TPS report or whatever it is that you do at work that involves the use of a computer.





You've reached home. Now, you settle into the couch & want some relief. You pick up your home laptop/netbook to read a Dilbert comic strip to see the humor in your incredibly obtuse manager or the nefarious cost cutting.





Instead, you see the Virus Scanner reporting 3 new viruses found. Or that your disk has run out of space & needs defragmenting. Or, there are 16 new updates in the OS & you need to patch the OS. Now.





Tell me truthfully, do you look forward to this?





You maybe a Unix hacker by the day, but hey, this is entertainment! Do you tinker with the frequency bands in your TV everyday? Do you try to optimize the sound bitrate in your stereo? No? 





I've been using an iPod Touch since November 2009. I've been using a home desktop & an office laptop during the same period. When I want to play a racing game or quickly check my email on my iPod, I have yet to face a scenario like the one mentioned above.





And I'm glad about that, however much I may love tinkering with technology.





So, if the iPad is a 'dumb' device that doesn't allow installing software and isn't letting you hack away at it's internals, why bother? It's a radio, a TV, a car. Use it for a few hours and forget about it. 





Enough said.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) & why you need to be a House M.D. fan to 'get it'

Sherlock Holmes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/) is a re-imagining of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, played indelibly by Jeremy Brett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Brett) for the 4 Granada television series. Jeremy Brett to me is the quintessential Holmes. Perfect down to the last bone. I'm a confessed Sherlock Holmes fanboy and I've read no other detective series as exhaustively as I have read Holmes. 

Therefore, I figured it would be quite interesting to observe my reaction to Guy Ritchie's adaptation, given his fearsome reputation for making movies that resemble the blunt objects with which the characters murder each other. 

So I saw Sherlock Holmes. Once. Twice. And loved it! What's going on here? For anyone who is even a minor Sherlock Holmes fan would be horrified at Holmes' filthy appearance (not matching with Conan Doyle's description of Holmes' love for 'cat like cleanliness'), horrified that Holmes has had flings with Irene Adler (although Conan Doyle does say she was the only woman who 'mattered' to him). 

For one, Holmes fan or not, Sherlock Holmes (2009) is fun. Like Congo (1995) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112715/] is fun. 

The next thing is the casting. Robert Downey Jr. (RDJ) is on fire these days and I am a fan. Iron Man has grown on me & RDJ was hilarious in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0942385/). Jude Law plays Watson and looks Watson and is perfect.

But what's the hidden sauce here? It's House M.D. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/)believe it or not. House M.D. is based entirely on Sherlock Holmes. Only, House is not a detective, but a doctor. Watson is called Wilson. House even stays at 221B! And House M.D. reinvented Sherlock Holmes to me. After I had seen the last of the Jeremy Brett series and longed for more, House M.D. came in and filled the gap. But wait, this Holmes was different! He was still analytical, the 'grand templar of rationality' and so on. But he was also different. He stole Wilson's clothes, his money, played pranks and manipulated people. He had little flings and bickered with Wilson.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) is as influenced by House M.D. as Casino Royale was by the Bourne Series. In both cases, we have a new interpretation that brings colour to the franchise. When I was watching Sherlock Holmes, I felt like I was watching an extended episode of House, same as when I was watching Casino Royale, I felt I was watching Bourne. 

So, I like the new Holmes & Watson and their world. The purists might snort at the new beginnings  and say it 'cheapens' things, but I argue that this is Holmes for the twenty first century, even though the movie is set in a different era.

So, go watch it! And then, start watching House M.D. I started in November, 2004 & haven't been able to stop since! 

Why the iPad is for old people? (Not the diaper, the device)

Various tech pundits have said that, the newly released iPad is for 'older people'. http://gizmodo.com/5458855/the-apple-ipad-is-for-old-people.

I'm trying to hazard a guess as to why that is so.

You see I attended this talk recently. http://www.upabangalore.in/mwiki/mediawiki-1.15.1/index.php?title=Jan_2010_talk. One of the speakers outlined the concept of Personas in design. These are dummy people, with character & quirks & needs & wants that designers setup & then test against. 

Who is the Persona numero uno at Apple? One Mr.Steven P Jobs. It is anecdotal that Apple builds what 'Steve wakes up and wants looking at his mirror'. Any surprise then, that the iPad makes the oldies happier than the rest? Or is supposed to? 

Do I buy the fact that the iPad is for oldies? I'm not sure I do. But this seems to lend credence to the beliefs of those who do.

My take on the "User Experience research tools, IA case studies, and overview of London UX scene" @ Yahoo! Bangalore last week

As an aside, we had difficulty entering the conference room where the talk was on. This is so because the organizer(s) didn't mention a contact person name/venue details. You can't pick faults with free & interesting talks, but this would greatly improve the UX of any further talks :-)

To the talk now. The central point of the talk(s) were the cultural differences between European & Asian audiences & therefore the impact of these subtleties on UX design. UX is User eXperience, for the uninitiated.

What I picked from the talk - 

- Details of how designers design. HINT: They create Personas.

- Details on how large companies, e.g. Vodafone address cultural subtleties so their Product people, sitting in one geography can design products & services for everyone. 

Personas

Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás described how designers go about designing. They create Personas. They collect a great deal of information about people using their product. Then they gradually group all of this into a Persona, name that Persona & use a limited collection of Personas to design. This helps focusing the design to the needs to specific people rather than specific spreadsheets.

Ethnographic Research for UX

Vodafone picked three countries - Egypt, India & South Africa to gauge user behavior w.r.t to new services. 

They had two sets of people in mind. One, the top & middle of the pyramid. English speaking users with smartphones. The objective was to test user expectations for the use of social networking applications using mobile phones.

They had two types of tasks. One, where they had SMS's sent to the users with requests to respond immediately with information - Where are you? What do you see? How do you feel about that? 

The test users sent back responses either through SMS or through MMS (if the answer required a photo/video).

The other type of tasks were more deliberate & needed planning. 

One interesting thing they came up with, with this research is the concept of a map in the mind of the Indian user. It's more to do with a general lay of the land & a bunch of landmarks, rather than precise directions like you see in Google Maps.


Surprise, surprise. Google Maps this week released an update to Google Maps for India, based on this very concept! http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-maps-india-learns-to.html


The bottom-of-the-pyramid users were administered the tasks by local researchers, since many had not even heard of a mobile phone. 


Some interesting findings:

• When asked how they would create a profile for themselves, that other people could see, most came up with a design that looked like a Facebook profile! Complete with a photo at the top corner.
• A lot of people wanted a 'service' through which they could list the skills they had, so others could find them and give them work to do. There seems to be a gaping hole in the Rural Job Classifieds market!
• A lot of people indicated they would like some way to maintain bank accounts using mobile phones, given that it would be hard/impossible to do so in any other way.

So, all in all, this was a nice session with some key learning. Looking forward to more. Bravo! Yahoo! for doing this!

Top 10 English Movies of the Decade - Hashique's Take

Here are Hashique's picks.

• Gladiator
• Inglorious bastard
• Little miss sunshine
• Munich
• Memento
• Cinderalla man
• Ratatouile
• Departed
• Thank you for smoking
• A good year

Top 10 English Movies of the Decade - My take

How did I come upon this list? My focus was on impact. Which movies changed their genre, changed film making, told unique stories?


So, here are my top 10.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy


For redefining fantasy movies. Forever. In scale, in detail, the LOTR trilogy is a classic.


In the story telling section, my picks are:


Memento


For redefining how a story can be told to a film audience. Memento's reverse chronological timeline was incredibly bold. Memento has since been endlessly (and horribly) copied. 


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind


For telling the story of a man trying to save his memories. And for having the incredible creativity to actually show how someone's memories can be erased. Breathtakingly beautiful.


Hotel Rwanda


The Schindler's List of this decade. If you were not nauseous when Don Cheadle drives over thousands of dead bodies, you are definitely not human. 


On the fun side, here are three picks


Batman Begins


For portraying Batman as he should have always been portrayed. Darkly. The menace of Batman was never so apparent. Disclosure: I am a childhood Batman fanboy.


Bourne Ultimatum (and the series in general)


For reinventing action films. Remember the Waterloo scene. All other action movies will forever be compared with this gold standard.

Casino Royale

For reinventing 007 after he had become boring thanks to Mr.Brosnan. The raw energy & unbridled arrogance meant this was the 2nd best Bond (after Sean Connery, of course) and in it's own right, an excellent thriller.

Ratatouille


Pixar took story telling so many steps forward with their films this decade that it's astounding. To have the courage to follow through on the whimsical idea of a rat who loves gourmet food & cooking and offers deep philosophical advice is itself praiseworthy, but they also made this film that has a heart.


The Incredibles


Another one from the stables of Pixar. Again, a new take. This time on super heroes. The brilliant take of, what if super heroes were hiding amongst you trying to get on with their lives as gasp! insurance claims processors?! And how would you feel if you were slighted by one of them? Fresh take on super heroes. 

District 9


Well, notice there aren't ANY sci-fi films here at all. What a pathetic decade! Well there was Star Trek, and countless Star Wars movies but I'm not a trekkie. I would have picked Minority Report in the sci-fi section, but then came District 9. If anything, I loved it for it's contradictions. Alien movie where humans ghetto off aliens? Check. Highly advanced aliens who love to eat garbage? Check. Lurking sub plot of apartheid? Check. 


Honorable Mention:

Inglourious Basterds

For taking a WW-II movie, injecting the Wild West into it and producing an alternative reality for the end of the war. But in terms of impact on film, no where near QT's masterpiece - Pulp Fiction. 

Predictably Irrational in the electronics store

Two things happened that led me to write this blog post.
One, I've just read (heard actually, through an Audible Audiobook) Dan Ariely's excellent book - Predictably Irrational http://www.predictablyirrational.com/.

Two, newly sensitized by that book, particularly about Relativity (not the Einstein variety, the common variety), my recent visit to an electronics store (Reliance Digital) was a nice eye opener on what retailers do to convince, confuse & corrupt us into buying what they want us to buy, rather than what we want to buy.

As I walked to the DVD player section of Reliance Digital, I was greeted by shelves full of DVD players from every manufacturer imaginable. The Sony's & Samsung's rubbed shoulders with the Onida's & Mitashi's. I was looking for a particular combination of features and specifically a Phillips DVD player (probably because I have one myself. NOTE: That would be Anchoring in Ariely's book).

The sales person came forward, heard my desired features list - DivX compatible, USB reader capability & HDMI output - and took me to the shelve that had two DVD players.

"This is the Philips DVD ", he said. "DivX compatible, reads USB & has HDMI out." I asked him the price and he mentioned what was well within the budget I had in mind.

"But this", he said, pointing at the DVD player next to the one he was showing me all this while, "is the Phillips DVD . All the features of the other model PLUS the glossy exterior finish, a FREE HDMI cable and picture Upscaling".

At this point, he was joined by another sales person. He repeated the glorious features of the second model and I found upon asking, that this 'advanced' model was pricier by a whole 67% when compared to the first model.

Then came the killer blow, the one Dan Ariely warns us against in the book.

The first sales person said - "It's only XXX.XX more than the less advanced model. Go for it. It's the best!"

What is happening here?

According to the book, the cheaper, less functional DVD player is a decoy. It's there to make the feature rich & more expensive DVD player look better as well as create a price point in your mind, what Ariely calls Arbitrary Coherance.
If the less functional DVD player is 5000 rupees for e.g. you would expect naturally that with the 'advanced glossy finish & the FREE HDMI cable' the more functional DVD player would be some what pricier.

The other thing that happens is that you compare the prices with each other, not individually. So, rather than think that you are about to spend 7000 rupees on a DVD player, you think you are going to spend "just 2000 rupees more than the less attractive mode". This allows you to rationalize the decision to pick the more expensive item.

So next time you are out shopping, consider how the items have been laid out before you. Try & pick the decoys and avoid buying something just because it has been placed next to a somewhat inferior version of itself and has smooth talking salesmen/saleswomen showing you just how little more you'd end up spending to get a 'superior' version!

Happy Shopping! :-)

Google Chrome OS - All the links you could possibly want

• Introducing Google Chrome OS [Official Google Blog]
• What does Google Chrome OS look like? [Youtube, official Google Chrome Channel]
• 5 Things Google Chrome OS will do, for your netbook [Wired Magazine]
• Will Google Chrome OS kill Windows? [Mashable]
• What Google Chrome OS means for netbooks, and why M$FT needs to be scared?[Crunchgear]
• Try Google Chrome OS yourself. Now. [Techcrunch]
• Google Chrome OS - The VMWare Image [gdgt]
• Gizmodo weigns in on Google Chrome OS [Gizmodo]
• Engadget weighs in on Google Chrome OS [Engadget]
• Ditch your hard drive, the future is the web [Wired Magazine]

Commute to Embassy Golf Links (EGL) from North Bangalore

View Larger Map


That took me over an hour to do. The stretch from Indiranagar BDA Complex to the turning to Indiranagar 80 feet road is full of potholes & pillars under construction for Namma Metro. The part from the end of 80 feet road where you turn right to get to 100 Feet Road is also time consuming, owing to heavy traffic through narrow, winding lanes.


Not a good strategy to follow at all. My commute time was 0905 - 1010 hrs. That is, by 1010 hrs, I was parked within EGL.


Here's what I did, on a whim, on the way back.






View Larger Map


This took much much lesser time. Starting at around 1745 hrs, I was home by around 1830 hrs.


Will be taking this route home from now on. If you live somewhere in North Bangalore or have to go that way one day, take this route. It's pretty nice, good roads.

The Long Tail of iPhone Apps

I recently read this article on how there are too many Apps in the iTunes App store and most of them are Crap.


This particular article is arguing that the actual barrier to entry for other smartphone App Marketplaces is much lower than Apple advertises it to be (some 100,000 apps in the iTunes App Store). This might be true, but I think the argument on which that conclusion is based, that is, their lament about most of the apps being crap, is not so sound.


Yes there are a lot of fart apps. Yes there are other apps that you or I may not find useful.
But lets not forget, what makes eBay auctions tick, what makes the iTunes Music Store tick, what makes (illegally, no doubt) peer-to-peer music downloads tick and what makes the Web in general tick is millions of people adding content that they think will be useful to others in their 'tribe'. 


Given that the content is digital, there is a low barrier to entry and consumers have infinite choice (as per The Long Tail of Marketing, Chris Anderson), so platforms that support this mass of niches are the ones that win.


Do you read all of the several million Google text ads? What makes you think they are all relevant to you? Does that mean, except for the ones that are relevant to you, all the rest are crap? :-) This simple analogy, when applied to Apps will show how the argument, that there's a lot of 'crap' in a marketplace is equal to that marketplace being doomed or useless, is flawed.


That even a control freak company like Apple has realized this in two markets - Music & Smartphone Apps is sure enough pointer that this is a way to keep from being relegated to the museum of technology. After all, Apple could have decreed, like they do in so many other areas that twenty Apps, all written by Apple would suffice for any user. They didn't. 


I don't know if we'll ever see this or not, but a graph of The number of apps sold/downloaded versus their unique rank in the iTunes App Store would make for fascinating analysis. I suspect that graph would look like a ... long tail.

A Little Revamp

Hoping to return to the blogging habit and so I started out with a simplification of the template. Hopefully this is more readable.

OpenSocial In The Enterprise

This is a short post on some very long discussions that we(me & Rajvel) had on how OpenSocial fits in the Enterprise world.

First, here are the resources we referred to -

The OpenSocial specification

http://www.opensocial.org/Technical-Resources/opensocial-spec-v09/OpenSocial-Specification.html

The OpenSocial Gadgets specification

http://www.opensocial.org/Technical-Resources/opensocial-spec-v09/Gadgets-API-Specification.html

To start with I'd like to debunk the 'Portability of Gadgets across containers' concept for OpenSocial containers in the Enterprise world.

Assertion: Outside of pure social networking, portability of Open Social Widgets has no meaning. Portability only comes into play when using Open Social Javascript API's to get People, Friends, etc. This ensures a social networking widget written using OpenSocial features of the container will run on any other OpenSocial container & more importantly work in the context of that container without any code change.

In the enterprise world, where it is more likely that each provider will create non-standard extensions/features to the container to solve their business case, portability has no meaning at all. We're not after OpenSocial API's. We're mostly after a platform to enable widget developers.

Packaging: The Hidden Benefit?

Moving on, according to us, one of the hidden benefits of the use of an OpenSocial container in the enterprise is - Packaging.

As per the OpenSocial Gadget specification, there are two distinct delivery mechanisms for a OpenSocial gadget. The more often used one, where the gadget is defined in the of the Gadget XML & is processed by the container.

The other where one provides a URL to the content (HTML + CSS + Javascript) somewhere. In this case interestingly, the responsibility of packaging & hosting the application/gadget is one that the Gadget Developer must take on. The container simply uses the content from the URL, wraps it in an IFRAME and passes it on.

Constrast this with the pure OpenSocial Gadget case where the Gadget Developer knows the target container & it's (probably proprietary features). He develops & tests his gadget against this container in his test setup. Thereafter, he simply shares with the world one XML file and everything else is gloriously managed by the container! How do you like that for convenience? :-)

This also brings in a counter-argument to our assertion of Portability of Gadgets across containers being nonsensical in the enterprise context. But we would like to point out that, while the Gadget Developer relies on the portability of his gadget & therefore is comfortable in publishing the XML confident that it will run on a container that is similar to his, the gadget is NOT portable across ANY OpenSocial container in the way that true social gadgets using the core OpenSocial API's are.

You may want to think of the analogy of a Java programmer who develops an application on an X86 machine, confident (at least reasonably) that this same program will run just fine on a Mainframe that has a Java VM.

Exposing Jazz Services as Javascript API's

This is perhaps the obvious next step in the thought process. Think of a Jazz Open Social container, that has implemented a Jazz Foundation feature that exposes all of the JFS services as Javascript API's.

Is that a good idea? Or worthwhile?

Or would it be better to just ask gadgets/widgets to simply use the existing REST API's?

I can only argue that it would be convenient for widget developers if all the complexity of making the REST requests were abstracted away.

This would be like the Jazz Java SDK that is available today that does this on the server side.

The question of why we should not just provide this as a simple Javascript library comes up again. Let the widget developer use the library in whatever way they seem fit & deal with the packaging.

But then you miss out on the benefits of the pure HTML deliver of OpenSocial, as argued above. So we think this is a good idea too. It would enable rapid development of widgets for the Jazz platform, using the power of the Jazz services to any one using the JTS (which would probably have a OpenSocial container bundled in & have special features implemented).

PonderPoint #2: ExRel with OSLC

This is a rather technical one. My thoughts on how ExRel's as they exist in Webtop could be done using basic OSLC (Open Services For Lifecycle Collaboration) concepts.

My first argument is that ExRel's in Webtop are essentially a correlation mechanism. The idea is to say some object, say a Model Element, is related to another object, say a Work Item. The intention is never to understand the underlying data at the other end of a link.

My second argument is that this fits with the Level 1 definition of OSLC where you can link objects simply by using URL's given that each resource/object has a URL.

My third argument is that each side of the ExRel must store the URL of the other side. Now that brings up a question of who stores all these mappings of objects -> related object URL's?

My argument here is that given that we're trying to enable Collaborative ALM here, and avoid brittle point to point integrations, we cannot ask tools to store this data. 

The counter argument that just occurred to me when typing this out, is that if each tool were to store objects -> related object URL's mapping then we could have ALM without really using any Jazz services simply relying on REST. That's really a Level 1 kind of idea.

The other way, which I find more appropriate is this. Given that we're speaking of solving ALM, we're definitely talking about more than one tool. So if we're linking objects it must be from the context of a new application (such as RTC/Webtop). Therefore, the objects -> related object URL's mapping storage and maintenance should be done by that application using several Jazz Foundation Services. 

We'd obviously store mappings both ways to enable navigation to related objects both ways given that ExRel's are not directional.

Classifying Twitter

I mean to expand on this later. But I was wondering how to 'label' Twitter?

I was hearing the TWiT podcast (http://twit.tv/twit)

which is an excellent podcast by the way and as is customary, there's a social media update from Leo Laporte.

Here's the first update. Lance Armstrong, avid twitterer, refused to speak to the press and instead updated his Twitter and initmated fans about a broken arm. Is this bypassing of conventional media? Is Twitter the ultimate ether, where anyone with a radio station can broadcast news? And your twitter account is exactly a mechanism to do that?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hqaYvaKXPG6ygYt1V_VSjpj5xz1w

Here's the second story, about corporate use of Twitter.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/21/twares/

An airline bypassing all conventional media for advertising vis-a-vis : radio, tv, print media, the traditional internet web ad's and going straight to the users.

PonderPoint #1 : The Losers of Tennis

We know the winner and the first runner up in a tournament of tennis gets prize money. Ever wonder what happens to the hundreds who are not one of those two fortunate ones? They still have to buy racquets, hire coaches, travel to tournaments. How do they sustain themselves?

Thinking....

PonderPoints

What are those? They are things that I'm pondering about. My next post would be the start. Watch out.

I return

I return. 

I don't know why.

Perhaps I still have something to say?

2008 In Books

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve just finished hearing this book by Malcolm Gladwell. I say ‘hearing’ because I managed to get hold of the audio book. After sitting through seven hours (1 hour per chapter) of Malcolm Gladwell’s narration, here are the things that I found interesting and useful.



- 10,000 Hours. That’s the minimum time required to achieve mastery of pretty much anything.
- Talent will not get you to the top. It will get you in through the door. You still have to work insanely hard to make something useful out of your talent.
- Outliers, or those that achieve far more success than normal, work much much harder than normal people. They are driven. They are able to work that hard because they are driven.
- Just working hard however is not enough. To be wildly successful, you must be in the right place, at the right time. You must get good opportunities.
- Where you come from makes affects chances of your success. Your culture, your family, the work that your parents do, all of this is directly correlated to your success.
- Hoffstede’s Cultural Dimensions: The result of a 20 year long study by a Dutch researcher. Classifies people of different countries based on 4 dimensions, thereby describing their behavior.

The End : Or shall I say, The Beginning?

After slogging through the weekend and using the services of WinAmp and two marvellous plug-in's : LoopMaster and Pacemaker, I have managed to decode the first few lines of this, very favourite of songs.

It remains to be verified by the Master. But it sounds really close. In any case, if it is wrong, I'll make corrections here.

My bet is that the song is in D-Major and the pitch is D, 3rd String, 7th Fret.
The song itself is in D Major.

The song goes like this:

[Notation: small letters mean flat notes. Underscores imply lower octave. / imples slide]

(4th String open) , S , N_/S P_ || X 2
S , N_ S S/R R/g/R S , S S S/N_/S S
P_ N_ S R G m G/m/G R