The difference is shell apps come from the wrong mentality. They start from, “How do we reduce effort?” instead of “How do we deliver the best product?”

And then Steve Jobs decided to wage a war on Flash. And in a testament to how fast things can change in the IT world, Adobe suddenly looked to be in trouble: an aging software company that didn’t have a cloud solution, wasn’t doing anything for mobile media creation and didn’t have any out-of-the-box solutions for creating mobile apps. Everybody else seemed to be moving data to the cloud, writing mobile applications that were far more interactive than anything previously available and moving on from static web content on the desktop to richer desktop-like web applications.

For a while, Adobe seemed to flounder. Like any company faced with the innovator’s dilemma, it tried to double down on its roots and extend its older software in ways it had never been written to do. Around three years after Adobe promised to port Flash over to mobile devices, it finally had a version that worked “well enough”. But after harping on the “open” bandwagon for quite a bit (with partners who seemed to support it half-heartedly no less), somebody at Adobe finally took a long, hard look at the Steve Job’s letter in which he summarizes everything that’s wrong about Flash (and about Adobe).

And the new Adobe is awesome. It’s a company that has woken up to what it does best: create great tools for web (and mobile) developers. Dreamweaver 5.5 significantly improves HTML5 support, works with mobile browsers and supports jQuery out-of-the-box. Adobe picked up some nifty technologies along the way too: it acquired Nitobi, makers of the top-notch Phonegap application that gives it a great foothold in mobile webapp creation (which in a stroke of genius, it then promptly submitted to the Apache foundation and ensured proper stewardship and great continuity). A similar Typekit’s acquisition gave it a commanding position in the web type foundry world.

The turnaround point probably came with the announcement to ditch Flash for mobile devices. That took serious balls and it was from an Adobe coming to the realization that it had to give up the Flash empire. But John Nack puts it really well here:

“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”

And those acorns are starting to sprout. Adobe has great new HTML5 development tools in the works, a growing community around web standards, and software that’s looking great on the mobile, desktop and on the web.

But most importantly perhaps, with today’s Creative Cloud offering, Adobe has shrugged itself off its desktop software roots. A more accessible subscription model means that customers used to paying less than a buck for an app will find Adobe’s pricing much more palatable now. And it’s working to innovate on the cloud as well, offering a full suite of creation, storage, sharing and publishing tools.

Adobe is poised to do great stuff. Happy for them!

Here’s what it says:

This is your Life.

Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing the things you love.

Stop over analyzing, life is simple. All emotions are beautiful. When you eat, appreciate every last bite. Open your mind, arms, and heart to new things and people, we are united in our differences. Ask the next person you see what their passion is, and share your inspiring dream with them. Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.

Some opportunities only come once, seize them. Life is about the people you meet, and the things you create with them so go out and start creating.

Life is short. Live your dream and share your passion.

And it says this in beautiful old school typographic print. I ordered one, had it framed in classic black and it now hangs on my wall to be the first thing I see when I wake up.

Insert this in Appearance » Custom Design » CSS.

#wpadminbar {
	display:none;
}

This analysis uses static anthropometric data to find out inconsistencies of door measurements with the stature of the intended population and recommended positions of door artefacts such as push handles and see-through windows. It further uses dynamic anthropometry to find out if the restoring torque of the door is within recommended limits. The most common use case of a healthy adult is considered in detail as the target user group and the lack of wheelchair accessibility is also noted.

Figure 1: Approximate Measurement of doors

Static anthropometry does not reveal faults with the door width and height. According to data available, the width of the door at 93 cm (all measurements are described in detail in Figure 1) and height at 240 cm is adequately wide and high for the 95th percentile of the tallest man who at 180 cm tall (Pheasant 2003) serves as the limiting user. The recommendations for the door handle or push plate state that it should be 25-35 cm from the door edge and 100-150 cm above the floor (Chang & Drury 2007)—and we see that both the push plate and the door handle at 8 cm from the door has inadequate distance from the door edge. However, both have the requisite span since they are long vertical strips that have a length of 65 cm, making their total effective area close to 145 cm, well within the recommended space. Analysing the placement of the see-through door windows, a flaw is immediately obvious. In the case of a short woman as a limiting user (shorter than 140 cm), the window would be useless since it will not allow her to see an intended user on the other side. The major limitation of the static anthropometry method was that it did not consider the purpose of the door: i.e., it hypothesised a theoretical user and did not analyse the function of the door—to open and close and lead the user through.

We decided then to take a step back and use the doors ourselves and note down psychophysical observations. We also observed other people using the doors and noted down possible flaws in the door design. One problem was immediately obvious and unanimous: the doors were too heavy and couldn’t be pushed through easily. We noted an instance where a man walked in with a package, couldn’t use sufficient leverage to open the door with a single hand and instead kicked out with his leg to stabilise the door enough to move through. These observations made it evident that the heaviness of the door was a source of major ergonomic discomfort.

Taking into account Chang & Drury’s recommendations for restoring torque at 30 Nm, an analysis could be done after measuring the door width and the placement of the handle. However, the study was complicated by three factors: 1) the hinges on the door were badly in need of oiling, 2) the door had different resistances at different points in its axial opening and 3) the hinge was loose and at least a portion of the door was intersecting with the frame of the door causing added initial opening friction. Even ignoring these three factors, and calculating the torque of this door,

Moment = F r Sin a

Assuming a as 90 degrees, which means the user pushes the door at a right-angle,

Moment = F r

Since there was no way to measure the weight on the door, we assume a force ranging from 22 to 132 N as in Chang & Drury, moment at 22 N would then be: 22 N x 85 cm, which is 18.7 Nm. Assuming the upper limit of a 132 N force, moment would be 112.2 Nm.

We notice here that if the force on the door is beyond 35 N, we exceed the stated recommendations. The three subjective experiences noted above however, exceed any apparent weight of the door. The hinges of the door at the Malet Place end were so badly unmovable that they would not open beyond 70 degrees unless an exceedingly strong force was used. While any door is an interruption to the dynamic flow of walking of an individual, the successful doors try to stay out of the way by minimising resistance and being easy to open and close. The resistance of these doors makes even the strongest user take a cognitive break from his actions and use his will on the door to move through—this is especially evident when the user has his first experience since he does not expect the door mechanism to be so rusty.

Considering the operation of the door with normal users in mind, the biggest recommendation that can be made to ease the use of the door is to oil the hinges and position the door within the frame so that no part of the door impinges on the frame. The door could also be made lighter and conceivably transparent since it does not overlook into any sensitive areas. To ease wheelchair access, the door could be made powered. The placement of the door pads and the handle could be moved to be more conforming.

The doors would also probably require regular maintenance since they experience heavy traffic throughout the day. Because they connect two buildings with possibly separate and insulated heating systems, a heavier door might have been preferred, but the ergonomic cost add up after each use. Keeping in consideration cost requirements, an enclosed area between the two buildings could be constructed to serve the same purpose since the primary function of the door in this instance seems to be insulation.

While considering an evaluation of this nature, one thing that I thought could be done differently was to perform a contextual enquiry of people using the door—immediately after they went through the double doors. The users might be able to articulate what their material difficulty was, and provide clues to how to construct these doors better. The study could also have been better if it had more data to analyse: it would be relatively easy to set up video recording equipment and observe users interacting with the doors and analysing quantitative measures from the door as well, like the time it takes for a user to successfully complete the interaction. Perhaps grouped by gender, this can provide further insights.

(1047 words).

References:

Pheasant, Stephen (2003). Bodyspace. Anthropometry, Ergonomics and the Design of Work. Second Edition. p. 244.

Chang, Shih-Kai, Drury, Colin G. (2007) Task demands and human capabilities in door use. Journal of Applied Ergonomics Vol 38. pp. 325-355. 

Heuristics as an Aid to Training a Usability Evaluator’s Expertise

Vishnu Gopal

University College London

It is clear that heuristic evaluation as Nielsen envisioned it is a method meant for experts (Nielsen, 1992). Heuristics do not stand alone, and have to be moulded to fit any particular scenario: the general set of heuristics have been expanded into specific guidelines for different kinds of activities: accessibility, internationalization (Gonzalez, Granollers, Pascual, 2008), etc. are examples and these require evaluators who are trained and experienced in separate spheres. Experimental data also seems to suggest that the more experienced the evaluators, the more usability errors they find (Dumas and Redish, 2002). Given this scenario, I seek to explore if heuristics or other similar guidelines can serve as a tool to strengthen a beginning evaluator’s “experience”.

Without doubt, applying heuristics to usability evaluation gives a methodical structure to the task of analysing potential faults in a system. During a recent analysis of e-commerce websites, one major observation that I made was that without rules, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees—i.e. one might speculate on possible faults: for e.g. the links on the right hand side navigation bar was not prominent or relevant enough, or the visual design was not attractive; but fail to gather the data into meaningful coherent suggestions. The aim, after all, of a successful usability evaluation is to find ways to rectify potential faults. When pitted against an evaluators raw instincts then, following a set of guidelines acts both as a reasonably exhaustive search space and a framework for assessing faults that have been found. It can also be argued that using a set of guidelines methodically can sensitise an evaluator to common errors.

On the other hand, I also observed that there might be faults found more easily not from a strict adherence to guidelines, but from an evaluator’s own prior experience. During the usability evaluation activity, my companion who is a trained visual designer found that much of the website’s apparent clutter was due to it not following a coherent “grid system” (see Chang, Dooley, Tuovinen, 2002). While it might be easy to slot this into either guideline 4 (consistency) or 8 (aesthetic design), it doesn’t cleanly fit into the heuristic framework provided, but is a crucial criticism nevertheless. I suspect that a strict adherence to guidelines without a broader background might harm rather than help a beginning evaluator’s progress, but this requires detailed investigation. It could also be too easy to be trained to look into a series of specific and common problems rather than try to evaluate a system based on its intent.

This is further imperilled by the fact that the minutiae of specific guidelines change often. An example of this debate is how the specific recommendation relating to websites displaying content above the fold (the initial viewable area) changed from 1994 to 1997, a short span of three years (Nielsen 1997).

When compared to other methods of user testing, heuristics pale further in this regard. They remove a vital component from usability evaluation: the serendipity (Stoskopf 2008) that observing a user adds to training an evaluator’s instincts. This is especially important in a field like usability evaluation where observation of real users continues to be stressed (Petrelli, Hansen et. al. 2004), and rightly so, for HCI evaluation has its roots in cognitive psychology and that is a science yet to attain adulthood (Miller 2003).

It would also be instructive to observe how HCI (and accordingly usability evaluation) is taught in University courses worldwide. Saul Greenberg of the University of Calgary remarks that a “fundamental tenant of HCI is that end-users should play an integral role in the design process” and that “performing usability studies in class hammers home the relevance of evaluation”—indeed his course description (Greenberg 1996) is filled with references that directly involve users in class. Interestingly, the course is structured so that “Designing Without the User” is a later event: where lessons learnt from these evaluations are then integrated to try to formulate a theory of user behaviour.

Chan, et. al. exploring issues integrating HCI in master-level MIS programs also stresses the emphasis on users and “empirical testing” and recommends a curriculum that largely ignores heuristics. Faulkner and Culvin in “Integrating HCI and Software Engineering” condenses it well and also explains a crucial difference with software engineering:
“Some HCI practitioners seem to believe that if HCI can be reduced to guides and checklists that anyone can apply to anything, then all will be well. This is tantamount to designing HCI out of software engineering as it is providing rules to be followed without the requisite theoretical under-pinning. Students trained in this way will be chanting mantras and will be woefully unable to deal with problems that have not been solved elsewhere or are not covered by style guides and checklists. Software engineers on the other hand are either keen to embrace these checklists or are unwilling to accept that the age of users having to adapt themselves to systems has gone. Users want systems to work for them and not the other way round.” (Faulkner & Culvin, 2000)

Furthermore, in a study examining how guidelines and patterns might be effective in HCI teaching, Hvannberg et al. “found very little hard evidence” supporting the importance of using patterns or guidelines in HCI teaching. However, they also noted “a desperate need to conduct studies on a suitable scale on the use” of patterns and guidelines in teaching HCI concepts.

There is no doubt that Nielsen’s basic heuristics have stood the test of time as a way to find usability errors. However, as a tool to train a beginning evaluator, they should certainly be supplemented by other evaluation methods.
(1045 words).

References:

Chan, S.S, Wolfe, R. J., Fang, X. (2003), Issues and strategies for integrating HCI in masters level MIS and e-commerce programs, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 59, Issue 4, Zhang and Dillon Special Issue on HCI and MIS, October 2003, Pages 497-520, ISSN 1071-5819, DOI: 10.1016/S1071-5819(03)00110-1.(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WGR-4938JRM-1/2/498d2855a23d35c7524dd9c4201b5d4e)

Chang, D., Dooley, L. Tuovinen, L.E. (2002), Gestalt theory in visual screen design: a new look at an old subject, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 26 Proceedings of the Seventh world conference on computers in education conference on Computers in education: Australian topics – Volume 8

Dumas, J.S., Redish J. A Practical Guide to Usability Testing. (1999), Oregon. Intellect Books. pp 67.

Faulkner, X. Culwin F. (2000), Enter the Usability Engineer: Integrating HCI and Software Engineering, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin

González, M.P, Granollers, T., Pascual, A. (2008), Testing Website Usability in Spanish-Speaking Academia through Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthroughs, Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 14, no. 9.

Greenberg, S (1996), Teaching Human Computer Interaction to Programmers. Technical Report 96/582/02. University of Calgary.

Hvannberg, E.T., Read, J.C., Bannon, L. Kotzé, P. & Wong W. (2006), Patterns, anti-patterns and guidelines: Effective aids to teaching HCI principles? In, Inventivity: Teaching theory, design and innovation in HCI – Proceedings of HCIEd2006-1 (First Joint BCS/IFIP WG 13.1/ICS /EU CONVIVIO HCI Educators Workshop (pp. 115–120). Limerick, University of Limerick.

Miller, G. A. (2003), The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol.7 no.3.

Nielsen, J. (1992), Finding usability problems through heuristic evaluation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, California, United States, May 03 – 07, 1992). P. Bauersfeld, J. Bennett, and G. Lynch, Eds. CHI ‘92. ACM, New York, NY, 373-380. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/142750.142834

Nielsen, J. (1997), Scrolling Now Allowed. Blog post at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9712a.html

Petrelli, D., Hansen, P., Beaulieu, M., Sanderson, M., Demetriou, G. and Herring, P. (2004), Observing Users – Designing clarity a case study on the user-centred design of a cross-language information retrieval system. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (10). pp. 923-934.

Stoskopf, M. K. (2008), How Serendipity Provides the Building Blocks of Scientific Discovery. ILar Journal. vol. 46.

Cereal, Milk and Juice

So, the classic quickie breakfast, and wonder of wonders—it’s quite good after all. Supplement this with toasted bread with chocolate filling if you have a hungry morning. If you’ve got a hangover, orange juice helps!

Requirements: Pretty much nothing if all you’re having is cereal and milk. Remember to check the expiry date on the milk, keep it refrigerated and consume within a week.

The Ham/Pork Sandwich

Buy Ham and pork slices from Tesco. Both are delicious, but the pork ones especially so. The way I make them is: three slices of bread, with fillings alternating between: 2 slices of pork and one ham, and one spinach or lettuce half-handful. Combine this with the fish fillet below and it’s a nice lunch/dinner. Microwave then at 250W for 2 mins.

Requirements: Toaster for bread, pork, ham slices and either lettuce or spinach filling from Tesco (you buy them in a plastic bag).

The Tuna Sandwich

Pretty much the same as above, but the Tuna comes in a tin and can be bought at local stores so you might not have to find your way to a distant Tesco/Sainsbury’s. One tuna tin should last your for three sandwiches. Store the remaining tuna in an airtight container but don’t keep it in the fridge. Consume within a week.

Requirements: can opener (yeah without it it’s a pain to open).

Chicken (or Vegetable) Soup in a Tin

A quick “snack” or filler, these again come in a tin (but the ones you can just pull to open). Just put out in a small bowl and microwave, 250W for 4mins. One tin serves two servings. It’s pretty healthy too.

Paratha and Curry (any kind)

Buy a parathas packet (might be spelt porattas on it) at a local Indian shop. To make them, just buy some oil (olive oil is what I like) and pre-heat the pan: 5 on your indicator for around 5 mins. Each paratha will then take around 3-4 mins to make. Make sure you slightly burn both sides. Combine with curry—the vegetable ones are common and can be bought for a pound at any Indian shop, the non-veg ones are a bit rarer, but try hunting around. Mix with rice too for a full meal when you feel like it.

Requirements: parathas, a pan to cook, (olive) oil, some curry (or curd, or sugar).

Pizza to Bake

You can buy pizza again at pretty cheap prices at local shops or at mainstream stores. The instructions on the back will be pretty clear, but it involves you putting the pizza on an oven plate for around 15-20 minutes. Make sure you have it hot because pizzas are not good when had cold. When you put in the pizza into the oven and take it out, use oven gloves (or if you don’t have them—some kind of thick cloth). This is again a nice quick snack.

Requirements: Oven, pizza.

Fish Fillet to Microwave

Fish fillets can be bought at all mainstream stores. I love the ones at Waitrose, but Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s’ are good too. Find the one you like. You can either oven this or microwave, but I prefer the latter. Just do a 540W for 6 mins and it’s done! Eat after it cools down a bit.

Rice and Curry (of any kind)

So, rice is insanely easy to make. Instead of me telling you how, I’ll point you to where I learnt it from: WikiHow—the video at the bottom is almost exactly how I did it the first time. Rice is also easy to buy at all local stores and it’s very satisfying to have combined with some form of curry (see curry above).

So one thing that you should’ve noticed: I didn’t exactly write these for expert cooks. This is for people like me who are absolute beginners in the kitchen. But this way works, trust me—when you’re really busy you don’t have time to cook much anyways.

I’m leaving for London tomorrow. It seems like a good juncture in my life to look back at good moments in my life. So in no particular order, some good moments from my life, with a bit of commentary. This is also to some extent an exercise in narcissism, so am begging for advance forgiveness right here.

Me, Sony, Andrews and Sanj, 25 Oct, 2007. This was one of the few times Sanj Andews and me got together after college. Sanj & me have the beginnings of bald hair here, and Andrews as usual is the glamour boy

This is at Vivek’s cousin sis’s engagement. A whole lot of us turned up that day. I remember hiding the drink when his mom came calling. 30 Jun 2007.

Me and Sherin. 9 Dec 2008. At Coffee Beanz, Kochi. One of my favourite places, and one of my favourite people.

MobME (then Torque)—the old office. This is after I came back from Delhi but before we moved into better offices in Kochi. This photo also has my beloved mac. 10 Jul 2007

Aks and me when I went to Blore on one of my many trips. I remember lots of other people turned up that day, but it was after a long time that I got to see him. 5 Nov 2007.

Nandu, Vivek and me, in a pub. This is a landmark photo coz this is how Nandu started drinking. 5 Nov 2007.

15 Mar 2008. DP, Prema and me, Loungevity. So I have the unique distinction of being one of two people to get DP into a pub. She wouldn’t let me drink tho!

DP and me, Fort Kochi. 3 May 2008. I love this photo. I remember all of us (the other people being Sanj and Prema) were very happy that day.

28 Dec 2008. Me at the Taj. With Sanj, but I’ve decided this is the photo I like best and he just happened to be the one taking it

29 Aug 2007. Me after getting on a Vallam, traveling from Malakkara to Aranmula and back. With Mom.

24 Nov 2007. Me at the first Barcamp Kerala. What we started off then is now really active and doing good. Great stuff!

(22 Feb 2009). Prema girl and me in the boat to Fort Kochi. We did this trip many times and often by sitting on the edge of the boat like this. And then Kashis for coffee, and sometimes Dal Roti for dinner. Good times!

Me and Meera—we have a lot of photos and it’s hard to pick one, but I like this. Muthoot Plaza, 18 Jun 2007.

First off, Snow Leopard (as of today, 26th August) has not been officially released yet. It’s easy enough to download it off a torrent tho. The magic letters are “10A432″. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject.

Installation

• First off, backup everything important. Not doing this is stupid and besides, this guide is oriented towards a fresh installation and not an upgrade.
• There’s a better way to get it installed than from the Install DVD (or burning one). If you’ve got a portable HD lying around, partition the drive (using Disk Utility) into 2, a small 8G Snow Leopard Installation partition and a bigger Data partition. Make sure that under Options, you select a GUID partition table, otherwise you won’t be able to boot from the drive.
• Once you’ve done that, click the Snow Leopard partition, click Restore and drag your downloaded .dmg into Source, and the partition into Destination. Make sure Erase is checked and click Restore.
• If you’ve got that running (after the restore is complete, the “Snow Leopard Install DVD” will be mounted but don’t do anything yet) go to System Preferences -> Startup Disk, select the new partition as the Startup Disk and then Restart.
• Install Snow Leopard as you will once the computer restarts, but if it’s a downloaded build, you’ll have to start from scratch with a Fresh Install. If the installation program doesn’t recognize your drive (or has an exclamation mark next to it) it’s because you didn’t format it properly. Just select Utilities->Disk Utility and reformat any partitions as Mac OSX Extended (Journalled).
• As far as I can see, there’s no Upgrade from Leopard option. This is a good thing in my books though since things work much better with a Fresh Install.

Post-Installation Steps

• Install iWork and iLife if you have and need them.
• Start up Software Update and let it do its thing. It’ll take a while so you can do other useful things in between!
• Restore your data from your backups.

Optional Post-Installation Steps

These are oriented mostly towards coders. If you aren’t one, feel free to skip.

• First off, install Xcode. It’s a must for a lot of things. Note: you’ll have to use the build that comes with Snow Leopard under the Optional Installs folder. Xcode downloaded off Apple’s websites won’t work with Snow Leopard.

• Install MacPorts. You’ll have to do this from source since the available installation package doesn’t work with Snow Leopard. It’s easy though. Follow these steps in a Terminal:

  $ cd
  $ mkdir Applications
  $ cd Applications
  $ svn co http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/branches/release_1_8/base ./MacPorts
  $ cd MacPorts
  $ ./configure --enable-readline
  $ make
  $ sudo make install
  

• Create a file named .profile in your home directory (~) and add these two lines to it and save:

  export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
  export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH
  

• Now close the Terminal you have and open a new one.

• To test our MacPorts, we’re going to install a pretty useful utility—wget. You can choose to install something else.

  $ sudo port -vd sync
  $ sudo port -v install wget
  

  This’ll take some time, so you’re free to do something else.

• Install TextMate and register it.

Well that’s pretty much it!

1. Fix The Fucking Problem (hereafter FTFP)

   When you’re faced with a bug, a calamity, a loss of limb, you solve the problem. Don’t worry about its causes, its probable antecedents, which commit broke your painfully arranged view of the multiverse or whether you’ll earn a PeeEtchDee by writing a paper about good software engineering practices. Instead, you FTFP.

   Only after you’ve FTFP, shall you think about anything ancillary. Only afterwords shall you blog or tweet about it or submit it to our humorous overlords. Capish?

2. Next, FTFP as if your ass is on fire.

   Downtime sucks. If a marginally large system used by a non-trivial number of users (by which I refer not to your blog which your mom and your imaginary girlfriend reads) goes down the rabbithole, a lot of people will complain. If you work for Initech, Lumbergh will cluck his tongue and hand you a pink slip if you mess up too often. Forget nine-nines of reliability, if you manage a month with just 5 mins downtime, it’s great.

   I’ll also extrapolate this from TDD: “Write a test, write the minimum amount of code for the test to pass, refactor, write more tests.” becomes “Figure out the problem, write the minimum amount of code that fixes
   the problem, refactor, find more problems.”

3. Log. Write logs to Disk. Backup & rotate Logs.

   In any after-action report, you’ll want to figure out why the Problem happened. What went wrong. For this you need logs from when it happened. Often you’ll notice that it’s a periodic bug which slowly got worse as your system added in more users, so you’ll want to figure out exactly when it happened, and when the issue escalated. For this you’ll need to log properly and backup those gzipped logs. Thumb rule: for the first nine months of any production system, logging should be enabled with the maximum possible verbosity. This includes connected systems, like for example, Database Logging.

4. Use Git already, nitwit!

   It’s pretty much what everybody should use. Easy, quick code commits and can even serve as a quick and dirty deployer too. Git allows you to hotchpotch solutions in case of emergencies. There will be instances when you want to short-circuit every code review check and just deploy the thing goddammit and nothing beats Git, for now.

5. Use an automatic deployment tool.

   Your deploy should be just one command, or a click of the button. Hooking up before-commit hooks is okay as long as it doesn’t take an eternity.

6. Make pretty downtime notices so people know you are at least trying.

   Being apathetic sucks. Giving an impression of being apathetic when you are working hard to save your application sucks harder because of stupidity. So don’t be stupid. Communicate. Make twitter work for you or for the old-fashioned, have a mailing list or an RSS feed. Your blog shouldn’t go down at the same time as your site so keep it on a different server—wtf are you doing writing a blog app anyways—outsource that to people who know better.

7. Learn the ins and outs of your deploy OS of choice

   It’s not enough to be a Gee Whiz programmer. Learn your OS inside out. If you’re on *nix (like real men) then this involves figuring out what to do when your load average goes through the roof, your SQL engine hogs CPU, your hard-disk fills up or your webserver restarts. Learn about commands like: top, iftop, iotop, uptime and the entire /proc magic filesystem. It’ll help you diagnose code and issues. For blacker magic, learn about strace and dtrace and how to debug difficult issues. All this comes later though—remember the golden rule: FTFP, so the first take should always be to Google your error.

8. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

   Do trust in Murphy, he’s eternally right. Things will fuck up. Instead of preventing it, plan for contingencies and try to recover from them fast. Have scenarios where bad things happen to your application. Have a load balanced implementation the first thing for chrissake! Have a DB in a master-slave configuration the instant you can afford it. Have a system where provisioning servers doesn’t take days. Move as much infrastructure as you can to the cloud where you don’t have to maintain it directly.

9. Delegate the Debugging

   This might be harder to do because you’ve got to pump up your adrenalin and stay in the zone to figure out problems and implement quicker solutions, but often, three or four helping hands work much better at solving problems—especially when other people can help you cross-reference data to try to come up with probable cause. Remember, speed is key.

   Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you too. That helps to negate your stupidity. Own up to mistakes and implement solutions fast.

10. Have a Staging Server (or Replicate Production as closely as possible)

    The worst problems are those that happen only on production systems and can never be replicated in development. Remember: OSX is not Linux, minor version differences often introduce incompatible interfaces (I’m looking at you, Rubygems and PHP) and stuff breaks when you add something new without testing it on your deployment OS of choice.

    If you are making any drastic changes to the architecture, test in on a staging server (or if you can’t afford it, a password-protected subdomain) in live conditions before switching, it’ll save you loads of trouble.

11. Prevention is better than Cure

    Do TDD or have a good test suite. Stuff will break far less often then. Educate your coders to have decent S/W engineering practices. Indent code and name variables uniformly. Raise exceptions and use assertions within your code. Use transactions too so when stuff breaks it doesn’t affect a lot of other important elements. Learn how to use a Queue and how important that is in modern production systems. Don’t abuse an RDMS for tasks it wasn’t meant for. Learn about newer key-value storage DBs. Beware of caching—it introduces subtle errors and problems, but learn to love it too, without it, you’ll never scale. Write readable code and document it both within and separately.


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/07/17/the-art-of-fixing-code/feed/ 2 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/20/meeras-blog/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/20/meeras-blog/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:18:03 +0000 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/?p=1183 ]]> Meera’s new blog is here: meerarnair.wordpress.com. (She also has a twitter account btw @meeranair).

]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/20/meeras-blog/feed/ 0 vishnugopal Meera's Blog http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/women-diversity-discrimination/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/women-diversity-discrimination/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:32:59 +0000 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/?p=1178 ]]> Background: Presentations that include female nudity and references to porn in professional presentations. The first incident occurred at GoGaRuCo the Ruby conference in April, the second and far more blatant one at the Flashbelt conference just two days ago.

This is my take on the issue, and my personal experiences with these kinds of incidents.

Incident one: I had gone to the Bangalore FOSS.in conference about two years ago. An extremely attractive lady from linuxchix came up on stage to speak on The Black Art of Makefiles. As has happened many a time before to many a speaker’s laptop, hers refused to play nice with the on-screen projector and the slides just wouldn’t come up. Yes, probably a screen resolution mixup. What was unusual though was the ten guys who rushed up on stage and started working on her laptop. They tried for a minute or two to fix the problem (without success) before the lady eloquently managed a few keystrokes in. And voila, the slides came up and the crowd dispersed, sheepishly. Yes, the lady knew best—it was her laptop after all.

Incident two: One of my friends is studying for her MBA at a good institute where companies come up to place people for summer internships. An interesting statistic: 80% of people who got placed in high-profile companies were girls, and a reputed technical MNC only gave out internships to girls. I theorize that this is because as a rule, girls sell products much better than guys.

Fact: There are subtle (and not) gender differences in the technical community that’s visible every day. While most often this is genuine discrimination, sometimes (as in incident two) it’s biased towards women too.

Fact two: Not all discrimination is deliberate. I’m pretty sure the Ruby presenter was just trying to be “edgy” (Ruby is much more conducive towards such non-mainstream behavior) but ended up offending the women in the audience. I’m not sure many women realize this, but men do not have an internal radar on the things that offend women – this is a general extension of the “cluelessness” that is often attributed to us, albeit with more serious consequences in this case.

---

Whatever the case may be, there’s one solid fact. We genuinely need diversity in the technical community – a broader opinion and insight on every topic just leads to a better community and this is true however cutting-edge it might pretend to be. Most of the people do want to encourage this diversity too and not make women uncomfortable at formal presentations and in a crowd which is >80% men.

One suggestion. I know women are not confrontational, but early intervention will help – if you feel uncomfortable, speak out, and the earlier the better. If you are in a mailing list and there’s a sexist troll, speak out and say you are not happy. Some men do listen (and those men are usually the ones who are in charge).

I’ve got to admit the blog posts and news coverage have made me think on what is appropriate behavior in public. Some people want to portray conforming behavior as a dampener to creativity but that’s hardly the case – you always follow some sort of rules (for e.g. imagine a guy taking off his clothes on stage – I’m certain the 80% won’t be amused). Creativity within constraints is a challenge and if you want a discerning minority to listen in and come up with suggestions, make sure your slides do not offend too.

One more thing—As many women have pointed out in the Flashbelt incident comments, it’s not the bawdy humor that’s the problem—it’s the context. If you want an analogy, imagine yourself as the only person in a crowd of women all laughing at a joke about how size does matter after all.


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/women-diversity-discrimination/feed/ 1 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/identity-changes/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/identity-changes/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:40:44 +0000 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/?p=1170 ]]> So I was a very early Internet user. Not so early as Tim Berners Lee, but early enough to see Internet access begin in India – those dialup modems were excruciating: they promised much but delivered little. I remember a service early enough in the Web 1.0 era that allowed people to register domains for free (yes, without paying a buck). These guys (I’ve forgotten the name) made money by framing the site contents and delivering flash and scroll ads up top. Needless to say, they quickly went out of business. But I remember I had a vishnugopal.com registered with them way back then.

Since I’ve been “alive” on the net for close to ten years now, I’ve left traces under many different identities. Very early on, it was uncheckedramblings, which was the name of a blog that I made at blogspot.com – vysnu.com evolved from those humble beginnings. Concurrently, my primary identity on the web was thehitchhiker and the necessary variants that had numerical prefixes, suffixes and substitutions to it. My Yahoo ID until a couple of years ago was thehitchhiker_123. I had another alias during this time created for shady purposes. I used q— to write unconventional stories. Then (in a fit of originality) I combined that ID with thehitchhiker to create QHitcH (often spelled all lowercase as qhitch). That is still my Skype ID.

So just to recap, until now I’ve had four identities on the web. Till recently, I maintained my portfolio site at vish.in, my blog at vysnu.com and my twitter account was named vishmaker.

While it’s nice to be creative, it’s also nice (and SEO sensible) to be consistent. And what better name to brand than your real name? So it’s vishnugopal everywhere from now on.

Inspiration: The excellent Securing Your Online Identity article, an extract below:

Ideally you should implement one consistent online name that can be used across many different platforms. It's best if your online name is the same as your offline name, but you may find it necessary to make them different for certain reasons. You may also decide to use a different name for your business presence and your personal communications. Generally the higher the consistency you can achieve the better.

via Securing your online identity | creativebits.

Aside: It’s a sad fact of the web that none of those early avatars are visible now. It’d have been nice if HTTP behaved more like source control – web.archive.org didn’t consider any of my sites important enough to store.


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/06/13/identity-changes/feed/ 1 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/05/05/peep-into-pi/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/05/05/peep-into-pi/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 10:16:39 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1161 ]]> My talk for this time’s Barcamp was a distributed computing project that I worked on called Peepapp. Here are the slides:

The slides should be self-explanatory, but some notes from my talk:

• The USP for this application is the fact that it’s really easy to become a worker. You just connect to the job using a browser and everything else is transparent.
• We change the MapCalculateReduce architecture of a system like BOINC a little bit by separating out the concerns of the coordinator and the master node. The server (peepapp.com) is just responsible for coordinating actions and as such, it’s just a message queue.
• The coordinator itself is written in Sinatra running on Ruby Enterprise Edition, and fronted by Nginx and passenger running on Ubuntu Jaunty on a Slicehost 512 VPS. Around 20-30 people connected to the job during my talk with negligible load on the server.
• The map bit of the code I haven’t implemented yet. That, and a system to make creating jobs easier. Once that’s done, I plan to opensource a lot of the codebase – it isn’t much anyways, less than 200 sloc.

One thing which I’ve realized during the course of this talk is that the concept is sound and there’s some interest too. I’ll continue work on this!


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/05/05/peep-into-pi/feed/ 1 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/18/pluggable-php/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/18/pluggable-php/#comments Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:18:37 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1148 ]]> So I’ve been meaning to do this for some time: create a PHP plugin system. I saw the concept (hooks) first inside Drupal, and it’s the same technique I’ve used to implement plugins here.

Here’s what example.php looks like:

<?php
require_once("pluggable.php");
pluggable_init();

function hello() {
  pluggable_serve("before_welcome_message");

  $message = NULL;
  pluggable_serve("replace_welcome_message", $message);
  echo non_null_of($message, "Hello World");
  echo "\n";
}

hello();

… and here’s what an example plugin looks like:

<?php
/**
 * Singh is King
 * @package pluggable
 * @author Vishnu Gopal
 * @pluggable_hook before_welcome_message @with in_vish_singh_is_king
 */

/**
 * Just prints a preface to the Hello World message
 * @return string Singh is King
 * Notice the plugin three_two_one is also using the same hook.
 * Plugins are called in unspecified order.
 */
function in_vish_singh_is_king() {
  echo "Singh is King!\n";
}
</pre>

The code is up here on github – the pluggable-php project – it’s a pretty concise at less than 100 sloc. Take a look at plugins/ for the examples and then fork away and do something useful with it!


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/18/pluggable-php/feed/ 0 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/05/the-indian-states/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/05/the-indian-states/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:54:54 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1145 ]]> Train travel to Mangalore teaches you one thing: the clearcut definition of states that we see on an Indian map is both arbitrary, and a fallacy.

Just the fact that Mangalore has three commonly used names is evidence. The official one now because of Kannadigization is Mangalooru. The British Mangalore is still used more frequently, but for Keralites, it’s Mangalapuram. It’s kind of funny actually – from the starting end, the train is Thiruvananthapuram Mangalapuram Express, when it reaches, it’s Trivandrum Mangalooru Express

This doesn’t mean the separation of states via language is a bad idea or that everybody in Mangalore is bilingual (I would guess far from it), but everybody there does understand a smattering of Malayalam, and many speak both.

Separating states based on language was a great idea – a brilliant stroke of post-independence diplomacy. How else could you preserve the vast differences between people that make India unique, remove old allegiances to territorial rulers, ensure cohesive growth and representation, and direct an emergence of a new, valid and distinct identity – all at the same time? It’s like a zillion birds with one stone. For the people responsible, see States Reorganisation Act on Wikipedia.

However, the recent creation of new states (Uttarakhand, Jharkhand) based on the existence of a tribal majority is I believe a mistake. What made sense 50 years ago hardly does so now. Isn’t it time we strongly instill the idea of Indianess as opposed to regional or communal identity? (part of what makes U.S. and China so strong is their sense of national fervor) Add to this, there’s the danger that Maoist separatists bring to the country. They’ve already toppled the leadership of one nation (arguably a good thing), and are fast becoming a distinct danger to Federal rule in India. No need to exacerbate that by splitting the country further. Thoughts?


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/05/the-indian-states/feed/ 3 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/03/ubuntu-on-the-eee-pc-901-a-screenshot/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/03/ubuntu-on-the-eee-pc-901-a-screenshot/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:35:42 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1141 ]]> Just a screenshot on how I’ve configured Ubuntu on my Eee PC. As you can see, I’m not done yet.



I’ve become increasingly impressed by Ubuntu since I’ve been introduced to it and I look forward to the day it can replace OSX as my OS of choice. It needs a bit of configuring to be usable still, but for a person who knows *nix and who doesn’t want to spend a lot of money, Ubuntu is a no-brainer decision even now.


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/04/03/ubuntu-on-the-eee-pc-901-a-screenshot/feed/ 4 vishnugopal Screenshot of Ubuntu on my Eee PC 901 http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/30/in-the-mood-for-love-a-mini-review/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/30/in-the-mood-for-love-a-mini-review/#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:15:42 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1135 ]]> Saw In the Mood for Love [2] today morning. I really liked the movie, especially the tone, atmosphere and music of the film. This is an attempt at a mini review, spoilers follow.



There’s something to be said about the color tone of the movie before I delve into the story. It’s not quite technicolor, not quite sepia, but it’s quite close to all these and somehow gives off the feeling of being “oriental” – the British Oriental/Hong Kong look. This, which is slightly exaggerated in the poster above, but nevertheless true, along with the Chinese dialogue, makes the movie feel otherwordly.

The movie is about Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, whose families we see moving in as neighbors when the film starts. The initial scenes (and indeed much of the later ones) are deployed as cutscenes, so action never flows but in fits and starts. In one fragment we see the confusion of the move, in another a polite exchange between the couple, in another a conversation between Mr. Chow and the Mrs. Chan’s landlady, and so forth. I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s confusing – not really, but it feels like we jump directly into the meat of the tale, there’s no background or backstory.

A particularly poignant moment in the initial scenes is the depiction of a card game where both the families (and their flat owners) meet in a social setting. Accompanied to the lovely music which has the same name as the movie (I’m in the Mood for Love), we see the relationships between the people in the room move around like drift currents in the sea, changing subtly when they interact through a game. Mrs. Chow seems to linger around Mr. Chan (and gets in between Mrs. Chan and her husband) when she makes her way to her table, and Mr. Chow bows slightly to Mrs. Chan as he leaves his table – the whole scene is amazingly well woven with the tenor of the music.

Another thing to note, and this is ingenuous and crafted cleverly: never in the whole movie are the couple’s counterparts shown, we only hear their voices. This lends itself to a make-believe that Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are the only two people of importance around, but of course their actions revolve around what happens between their spouses. This is readily supported again by Mrs. Chow’s and Mr. Chan’s frequent absences – they often go on long trips, traveling as part of their work.

What does happen is that their spouses start an affair. This is not immediately apparent and is revealed slowly, but as the movie progresses into the first half, it becomes depressingly obvious. What happens next is what sets the movie apart – Mr. Chow invites Mrs. Chan to dinner and asks casually about her new purse. In turn, Mrs. Chan asks him about his tie. It seems their spouses have a carbon-copy of the items mentioned. A depressing silence follows and they admit to each other that their husband and wife are having an affair. What we see next is them walking back to the flat and Mr. Chow making an outrageous advance. Instead of slapping him (or as we might think, accepting it), she shrinks away and says, “My husband would never have done that!” The next flash scene shows her trying to make a coquettish advance but failing miserably. “You don’t know your wife well!” she says, and walks away from him.

They start a casual, more platonic than not acquaintance, the purpose of which is initially a mystery, until we suddenly remember the title. And yet, this is not a classic revenge-sex story, where a neglected wife has her pump primed by a neglected husband. Much later in the movie, Mr. Chow’s comments are revelatory. “I just wanted to find out how it could have started,” he says. An odd way certainly, but one in which they drift closer.

Initially they meet on the pretense of working together on a comic, and then absurd rehearsals of how their spouses might react when confronted. For Mrs. Chan, Mr. Chow becomes a shoulder to cry on, and they soon realize that what initially was just two helpless people reaching out to each other have bloomed to become love.

There are so many scenes in this movie that I remember that it’s impossible to describe them all. The couple intersecting in a crowded corridor, in a narrow alley, in the rain, together with that oh-so-impossible music – it makes for a heady experience. Noir comes to mind, but it’s more than that, sweetly-sick romantic too.

And oh the music – from the haunting title theme to the clever and bouncy Quizás, Quizás, Quizás (which reminds me of “Baabuji Dhire Chalna, Pyaar Mein Zara Sambhalna” [Aar Paar) it fits the movie perfectly in a way I’ve seen few other soundtracks do. Awesome!

The ending is bittersweet, but not entirely unexpected. There’s the cliche “Oh it could have happened another way” moment, but it’s overshadowed by the poignancy of Mrs. Chow’s heartbroken tears in the rehearsal of their parting. Wikipedia tells me this is part two of an informal trilogy. I do hope to see the other ones some time.

One quick word of appreciation to the Cochin Film Society and to @binnyva and @fsiyavud, who gives me company for these movies. A salute to kindred souls!


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/30/in-the-mood-for-love-a-mini-review/feed/ 0 vishnugopal In the Mood for Love http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/26/msafaribooksonlinecom-drm-vulnerability/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/26/msafaribooksonlinecom-drm-vulnerability/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:28:42 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/log/2009/03/26/msafaribooksonlinecom-drm-vulnerability.html ]]> There’s a bit of a DRM vulnerability in how the new m.safaribooksonline.com is implemented. Disable javascript and set your user agent to MobileSafari (very easy to do in Safari once you get the Develop menu enabled) and you can copy blocks of text from the books on your shelf. They do go to reasonable lengths to convince you not to do this though: first there’s a user agent check and second there’s a decent javascript check which measures screen width and height.

]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/26/msafaribooksonlinecom-drm-vulnerability/feed/ 0 vishnugopal http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/25/the-way-home-a-mini-review/ http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/25/the-way-home-a-mini-review/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:02:49 +0000 vishnugopal http://vysnu.com/?p=1129 ]]> I saw The Way Home last Sunday (again thanks to Binny), and it was a really good movie. This is an attempt at a review, and what I found most interesting.

The movie is paced slow, but I usually love slower (and good) movies, so I found it no trouble watching through it all. The slowness of the pace is however, very deliberate and seems like it serves a definite purpose – every time the grandma is shown, the movie slows down. But I’m getting ahead of myself! (As usual, spoilers ahead, so do not read if you are planning to watch!)

The Way Home is about a grandma and her grandson. Sang-woo’s mom is out of a job and she leaves her son at her grandma’s for a few months until she can return and pick him up. The kid is from the city and he finds it really difficult to adjust to his new situation. The grandmom (who cannot speak) tries her best to help. Simple premise, but extremely good execution.



The initial scenes of the movie where Sang-woo is intentionally cruel would’ve been tragic and hard to watch if it had come from a grown son. But somehow we immediately forgive him for he is a kid and does not understand what he’s doing. He continues in this vein, ignoring his grandmother’s efforts to please him, eating food he brought from home, abusing her at every opportunity, and not caring at all about the lengths she goes to care for him. The grandmother’s hardship is subtle and not really emphasized in this part of the movie, perhaps correlating with how Sang-woo views the scene.

Sang-woo’s belligerence and aloofness extends to the other kids too. He looks down upon them and plays a joke on an elder kid that results in him getting hurt.

The turning point comes about when he goes on a trip to buy batteries for his depleted game machine and then gets lost. A neighbor brings him home, but he’s crying, has realized that he’s helpless without an adult, and somehow starts to understand his grandmother more.

She takes him to the city to buy his favorite food in a restaurant and he watches as she spends almost her entire earnings to buy him just a single meal. She saves up money to buy him batteries, goes on a long trip in the rain (and then falls sick) to cook him “Kentucky Chicken”, makes an outhouse so that he can go to the loo without her watching, and slowly he starts to understand her sacrifices and comes to love her.

The most interesting bit of the movie for me was the point when he finally understands what his grandmother is trying to say when she rubs her hands over her chest – a frequent action during the earlier parts of the movie. She was trying to say “I’m sorry” and this releases a burst of shame in Sang-woo that culminates in him loving her a lot.

Towards the end, Sang-woo is desperate to remain in contact with his grandmom. She can’t write, so he tries to teach her to write two sentences: “I miss you” and “I’m sick”. She doesn’t seem to be able to form words, so he converts his drawing pad into endless repetitions of these two words with his address printed on the back. “Just post these”, he says and I’ll come see you.

The ending is bittersweet. We realize that Sang-woo’s experience has changed him a lot, but he still cannot hug his grandmother for fear of crying. He refuses to stare at her as his mom comes to pick him up and the bus starts up, but we see him towards the end rubbing his hand over his chest.


]]> http://blog.vishnugopal.com/2009/03/25/the-way-home-a-mini-review/feed/ 0 vishnugopal The Way Home