Category: Techie

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I me a River

iPod, iPod, iPod, yada yada. They’re shiny and all, but until they come with an FM radio, experience shows that if I had one, it would just end up gathering dust in its cradle.

iRiver H340 portable music playerThe new iRiver H340, now… that’s a different question. 40GB of hard disk joy. FM radio, and the ability to record radio broadcasts. Built-in MP3 encoder, so you can record from other line-in sources, too. 16 Hours of battery life. 2″ Colour screen, and it also acts as a picture viewer. Nifty.

Okay, so it doesn’t integrate with iTunes, and it doesn’t support AAC, but my music collection is MP3 all the way, baby. And seeing as it plugs into my PC as an external hard drive, how hard can it be to knock together a little app to rip through my iTunes config files and recreate my playlists in Winamp playlist format?

Have I mentioned recently that my birthday and Christmas are just round the corner?

(It would have been fun to have been the first to come up with the “I me a River” title, but Ed Hawco beat me to it by a good year and a half.)

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DVD players

Our DVD player, an old Panasonic A160 from 1999, is dying. It has always had a habit of intermittently refusing to play discs for no apparent reason, but it is now rejecting more discs than it is willing to play. And the usual trick of eject/reinsert no longer works. Very annoying, and using the PS2 as a fallback player is less than satisfactory.

So, any suggestions for a replacement? Our requirements are modest:

  • It must be multi-region, with built-in NTSC to PAL conversion. (Our TV doesn’t handle NTSC signals)
  • Quieter than a PS2. (Shouldn’t be hard)
  • Cheap (sub-£100).

We don’t care about surround sound and home cinema hookups right now. Our living room isn’t set up for extensive speaker setups, and that’s not going to change any time soon. We don’t care about fancy features like zoom, picture-in-picture, or bookmarking. Amazon has several players in the price range I am thinking of (£30-£40). Does anyone know if they’re any good? (Although at that price, it’s pretty hard to go wrong.)

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A9 search

Amazon has been pumping up its A9 search engine this week. It’s been getting stacks of press, and I even noticed this evening that an A9 search box has replaced the standard Google search box over at IMDB. (Probably not surprising, since Amazon owns IMDB, too.)

I remember taking a look at A9 when they soft-launched the beta earlier this year, and thinking, “meh.” Looking at it now, though, they’ve really thrown some coals on the fire. Multiple lists of search results on a single page make it a power searcher’s dream. It makes heavy use of personalisation, automatically keeping track of your search history. And if you install the A9 toolbar, it will even provide the “Personal Search” functionality I was so interested in having back in February:

“With the A9 Toolbar all your web browsing history will be stored, allowing you (and only you!) to retrieve it at any time and even search it”

The only problem is, now that it’s here, I feel somewhat reluctant to actually use it.

Amazon are quite up-front about what they’re going to do with people’s A9 browser history: they’re going to correlate it with their Amazon customer history to improve the customer experience they provide. Their privacy policy says pretty unambigiously:

“PLEASE NOTE THAT A9.COM IS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF AMAZON.COM, INC. IF YOU HAVE AN ACCOUNT ON AMAZON.COM AND AN AMAZON.COM COOKIE, INFORMATION GATHERED BY A9.COM, AS DESCRIBED IN THIS PRIVACY NOTICE, MAY BE CORRELATED WITH ANY PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION THAT AMAZON.COM HAS AND USED BY A9.COM AND AMAZON.COM TO IMPROVE THE SERVICES WE OFFER.”

I was a little bit freaked out when I visited A9 earlier in the week and found the “Hello Mr Martin Sutherland” welcome message at the top of the screen. I didn’t remember ever signing up with A9, and a quick look through my password safe showed that I didn’t have a separate user name for it. But because A9 is an Amazon subsidiary, they share their cookies, and so they can use my Amazon login to identify me.

Cross-domain cookie sharing is often considered a bad thing, because it indicates information leakage. How happy are you if Company X decides to suddenly share your private information with Company Y without notifying you–even if you had previously agreed to their privacy policy? (Though probably without reading it.)

A9 is a wholly owned Amazon subsidiary, so technically they are the same company. Also, I like, trust and respect Amazon as a company. (Heck, I applied to–and still want to–work for them.) Put together, these two statements should generate a nice bit of syllogistic synergy to give me warm fuzzies about A9. But they don’t. There’s something about the relationship, and the sharing of personal information that makes me feel…icky.

It’s hard to quantify exactly where the Ick Factor starts. I’m happy enough to leave Amazon in custody of all my book, music, and DVD browsing and shopping information. I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I want them to use it to improve my shopping experience.

But also giving them access to all my search history, and potentially all my browsing history? Um, no.

I think that A9 recognizes this. In addition to their fully personalised site, they also offer generic.a9.com, an anonymous version of the search engine. You still get the multiple search panels, but they don’t tie your searching back to a specific identity.

But is the non-personalised search really that much better than, say, raw Google? I think it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” case. Without personalisation, A9 is only an evolutionary step in terms of search; but with personalisation they go too far.

So why don’t I have the same icky feeling about Google, which I’ve been using almost exclusively for several years now, and which also has the ability to track its users’ search history? Well, I kind of do when it comes to Orkut, their social networking service. And this is, I think, the crux of the matter: I am happy enough entrusting specific chunks of my on-line life to specific companies. It’s when they start clubbing together to aggregate my personal information that it all becomes icky.

And then we’re back at national identity cards. Sigh.

We’re only a decade or so into the Internet Age, and there’s still a long way to go in terms of clarifying mores and defining a social contract between individuals and collective entities. This is all going to be really big and important over the next ten years, isn’t it?

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Progressive disclosure, social networking, yada yada

Gah… I’d been talking to a colleague about the idea of progressive disclosure just last week, but I had forgotten the term for it. The concept had somehow stuck in my head as “progressive obligation,” and when I googled for the term I was coming up with zilch. (Or at least, nothing related to HCI and usability.)

I bumped into the correct term this morning while I was reading the article Progressive Trust on Christopher Allen’s A Life With Alacrity blog. I had got to Christopher’s blog index page from his entries on Orkut from earlier this year ([1], [2], [3]), which I had found while I was googling around for some information about Orkut and email.

And the reason for that was that I got my first invitation to Orkut last month. Or maybe it was just the first one to make it through my spam filter. When I signed up, there were two other people who had listed me as friends already. Normally, when you add a friend who isn’t a member of Orkut, the system should send them an email inviting them to join.

But now I’m wondering if the invitation I received was the first one Orkut had sent me at all, because in the last month or so I’ve discovered that its email delivery mechanism is almost entirely random. Will it send a notification 12 hours, 24 hours, or even three days after the fact? Who can tell…with the Mail Server of Mystery!

Speed, or the lack of it, is the main issue I have with Orkut. I have been using it mostly in the evenings (UK time), and the page response times I get are rarely less than half a minute. Guys, even ten seconds is too slow for a usable web interface. Thirty is rubbish, and it’s decidedly un-Google-like. (Like I have the patience to wait around half a minute for a bulletin board posting. Hello NADD! I’ve joined a few Orkut groups, but mostly with the goal of painting my profile with personal interest metadata, rather than for actually participating in the communities.)

The authentication system they use is also flaky. Far too regularly it dumps me out to the “You haven’t used the system for thirty minutes, so we’ve timed out your session; it’s for your own good, you know” screen, even when my last page hit was about two minutes before. That’s usually the point at which I give up.

Because of these factors, for me Orkut is reduced to a collection of glorified home pages. Sure, I can see how all of these people are connected to me, but only within the context of Orkut itself. Friendster, LinkedIn, and all the others are dark to me. It’s like the bad old days when proprietary networks like Compuserve and AOL allowed their members to send email to each other, but not to the outside world. Or like when you couldn’t use MSN Messenger to send a message to someone on AIM. Oh wait…that would be now.

This whole social networking thing is going to be big, but it’s not going to explode until the various services find a way of interoperating. Metcalfe’s Law is in the house, homies, and it’s party time. Your social network shouldn’t be a function of your service provider. You can make people work that way for a while, but eventually the network is going to win.

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MCSD.NET

Achieved.

I passed 70-316 this morning, the last one in the series for my MCSD (.NET) certification. Woo! With a certain amount of Yay!

I didn’t find 70-316 a difficult exam, but then I’ve been coding Windows Forms since Visual Basic 4 back in 1997. It may be a C# exam, but forms are forms, and a familiarity with the “Microsoft way of doing things” works wonders. ADO.NET was the other big part of this exam–probably about 25% of the questions related to data access in some for or other. So really, if you know your C#, WinForms, and ADO.NET, this ought to be a breeze.

Of course, then along comes Scott Hanselman with a bubble-bursting set of ASP.NET interview questions that show that MCSD.NET is only the beginning of professional expertise….