Some nights, my two older kids – Gabrielle, 8, and Ethan, 4 – beg me to make up and tell them a story. I used to quite often spontaneously make up and tell a new story, but I haven’t done it for a long time. Tonight I did, and this is the tale that I told.
(Or, at least, this is what I remember of it!)
Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo was the saddest boy in the whole world. No one would ever talk to him.
No one in his family ever said anything to him. No one in his class ever said anything to him. And even no one at his church said anything to him.
The problem was his name. It was just too long.
No one wanted to say: “Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo, can you please pass me the salt?” No one wanted to say “Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo, come play soccer with us.” And no one ever wanted to say “Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo come help me quickly!”
Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo’s name was so long that people forgot it. And sometimes when they remembered the beginning of it and might have thought about starting to say something to Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo, they forgot the ending of it.
Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo was so sad, he cried in his room for a night and day and another night and another day and yet another night and yet another day, and by the end of all this, his room was absolutely swimming in salt water and Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo could float right out of his own bed.
But at the end of 4 nights and days, Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo had an idea.
He needed a new name. And Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo knew how he was going to get it: a naming contest.
Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo decided he would hold a naming contest, and the prize would be a million dollars. The only problem was that Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo didn’t have a million dollars. He didn’t even have a thousand dollars. In fact, he didn’t even have a hundred dollars. The solution, Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo decided, was that the grand prize would be a million and one thank-you’s.
So the very next day, Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo told everyone in his family, and everyone at school, and everyone at church, that he was having a naming contest – for himself. And that the winner would win a million thanks from – - whatever his new name would be.
The contest was successful beyond Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo’s wildest dreams. In all, one thousand and one people sent him their ideas for his new name.
Some of them were very bad or silly – some mean people sent in names like Nosepicker or Smellysocks. Some of them were just very strange, and (if were possible) maybe even worse than the name he already had. Those were names that Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo could barely read or even say: Blagarodnew and Kishagreenoldovian and Weegishlynoving. And some of them were just not right – names like Susan or Sarah.
Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo felt quite sure that if those names were the only options, he’d stay with what he had, thank you very much.
But many people sent in good names, names that Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo thought long and and hard about. Names like Bruce and Geoffrey and John and Levi.
Finally, Inkachoo Pinkachoo Sinkachoo Tinkachoo found one that he liked more than all the others. He thought about it for a day and a night, and then announced to his family and the whole world that his new name would be Alexander.
It was good because it was easy to say, could be shorter if he needed it to be, started with the first letter of the alphabet, and … best of all … everyone knew exactly how to spell it.
Alexander lived happily ever after, had many friends and was never lonely again, and now his name actually fit on all the papers that he had to write it on at school.
There was only one problem. Alexander had to spend the whole next year saying thank you one million (and one) times!
Music industry? Movie industry?
Are you listening?
Adapt or die.
Schemasoft, the Vancouver data translation company that Apple just acquired, cancelled a multi-million dollar deal with Microsoft just the day after the acquisition closed.
I spent the evening at Vancouver Enterprise Forum and talked to someone close to the company.
Apparently, although Apple has been Schemasoft’s biggest client for some time now, Microsoft was also a client. Schemasoft, as I reported here used to do a lot of work with clients who needed document translation capabilities. The work Microsoft was asking Schemasoft to do involved document translation for mobile technologies. I don’t have any further details on that. As a side note, all of Schemasoft’s other clients are now being served by another company.
It is interesting to note that as soon as Philip Mansfield, the former CEO of Schemasoft, told Microsoft that he could no longer pursue the deal they had been working on, he was told to immediately destroy all documents that Microsoft had sent Schemasoft during the course of the project.
Some other interesting sidebars:
– All quality assurance activity has been transferred to Apple HQ … primarily to minimize chance of information leaks on new products.
– As soon as the deal closed, Schemasoft employees received all new hardware and software from Apple. According to my source, this included, for each employee, the following:
– Apple G5 tower computer
– Cinema display (not sure which size)
– PowerBook
Why the PowerBook and tower I have no idea, but yes, I’m envious!
Aidan turned two today.
He had a “Bob the Builder” birthday, which he says as “Bob a Do-Do.” Very cute.
Two years of joy, two years of laughter, two years of love … all times three for all our kids. It’s hard to believe.
Wow – what a blessing. Undeserved, but not unappreciated.
This is the first (and maybe the last) in a series that I am planning to write on that most horrible, boring, awful, and necessary (but black) art: project management.
(Actually, here’s the second sin.)
First Cardinal Sin
Starting before you are ready.
This pathetic platitude is amazingly often ignored by smart people who should know better (yes, that includes me).
Why? Human nature. We want to feel progress. We want to get going. We want to see some visible results. As Paul Graham says:
In fact, this is a constant problem when you’re painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you’re so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you’re kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it’s too late.
(source)
In fact, the first parts of a project should not show any visible progress at all. The first parts of a project should be spent on painful, tedious, and critical steps: project definition, specifications, details, outcomes.
Typically, the first answers that you come to when doing the pre-work for a project are the wrong ones.
- - First, you don’t know enough yet to get the right answers.
- - Second, you’re asking the wrong questions.
- - Third, you’re not really trying to find the answers, you’re trying to put an X in some checkboxes, so you’re just going through the motions.
- - Fourth, you keep thinking about how great it’s going to be to work on the project, and what it’ll be when it’s finished, and those rose-tinted glasses are impairing your vision.
So. Get away from the keyboard.
Start thinking. Sketch it. Put it away. Re-think it. Draw it again. Iterate until you have a breakthrough.
Now you’re getting somewhere.
Ten years ago I was an English major in university, thinking about a career in journalism. Then I realized that at any given time, there are more people in school to become journalists than there are jobs as journalists.
So much for the journalism thing.
But I might have given it up for entirely different reasons if I had only known more about public relations. Because, of course, half of those who can’t actually get a job as a bona fide journalist suck up to the corporate teat and join the PR party.
There is an absolutely great article about modern PR … and excellent ways of tracking its effects … Paul Graham’s blog … errr … website.
Sick. As. A. Dog.
[Update - April 25]
No more sushi. Ever. And that’s the last I have to say on that subject.
Never underestimate the power of the internet to surprise you. Or, rather, never underestimate the amazing, odd, weird, and wonderful things people actually invest time and energy and money into.
I just noticed Blogshares, the “Fantasy Blog Share Market.” Apparently, my blog is currently trading at around $3300 US, and trending upwards. Unfortunately, I currently only have 0.000078313 % market share.
Nowhere to go but up!
Should usernames be case sensitive or insensitive?
I just got bitten by this question on a site recently. The usernames were case sensitive; users were trying to log in; they kept getting rejected by the system; and support people who tried with the users’ own information were getting in just fine.
I haven’t found a real concensus online. CVS appears to have case sensitive usernames. Vonage, on the other hand, does not. Hotsyncing a Palm seems to rely on case sensitive usernames. Yachting and Boating World is also case sensitive. And, .htaccess directory protection on Unix systems is case sensitive. However, GMail does not employ case sensitive usernames – probably largely because your GMail username is an email address, and email addresses are case insensitive by nature.
So what’s the right way to do it?
There’s no question that case sensitive usernames are more secure than case insensitive. Plus, you’re going to be able to offer more usernames for your clients (goodgirl and goodGirl, plus all the possible variations) which is good for a well-trafficked website. Ever tried getting the username you wanted for a Yahoo! or GMail account?
But there’s also no question in my mind that it’s much more user-UNfriendly. People don’t always remember the exact case they used when they first logged in. Worse, this can be a really tough problem to diagnose. Support staff can be taking the username out of a database, ensuring that they have exactly what the website wants, and everything works fine … and then users try their fUnky cAse uSerName, and it doesn’t. Unless support asks the right questions, the problem is inexplicable.
(And of course you have the higher-level problem that users have called support in the first place – in the perfect world, with a great web app, they should never need to.)
On the other hand, for applications where extremely high security is necessary, implementing case-sensitive usernames (as well as passwords) is probably something you’re willing to endure some usability pain for. Administration interfaces for e-commerce sites, content management areas etc., should probably use case-sensitive usernames.
The biggest problem is when you mix cases, or, more accurately, forget exactly what case you should be checking for. In fact, that’s similar to the problem that I recently had.
The moral of the story for me? Case insensitive, all the way, for all websites from now on … unless I have a really, really, really good reason to do it otherwise. That will save a lot of support headaches.
Wow.
While not quite on the level of a four-leaf clover, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or a dodo bird, I did find something extemely unusual today: an Apple employee blogger.
I found this rare species Macintoshus bloggoria while researching this post about Safari. And this guy actually says right up front that he works for Apple. Amazingly, he hasn’t been fired in something like two years. Steve must be having a bad week.
He’s Dave Hyatt, he blogs here, and introduces himself here.
Other than that, the Apple blogosphere is really, really thin.
[ update April 28 ]
Mike in our office here just found this case of WYSIWYG editing in Safari. VERY cool! Unfortunately, everything works just slightly differently than in IE or Firefox … the triggering mechanism for the B, I, and U (and other) buttons is a little different. But it’s a step in the right direction.
Something I’ve been waiting for for a long, long time is rich-text editing (RTE) in Safari. Others have been waiting, too.
Rich-text editing is becoming increasingly important in a world where the web browser is becoming more and more central to our experience of a computer. Content mangers use it to allow non-technical people to update web content in a WYSIWYG interface. Webmail apps use it to give users more and better options for customizing their emails. And in the department that I lead, we want to use it to allow non-technical clients to send us data with boldfacing, italics, and underlining.
Rich text editing in a browser depends on support for document.designMode. It was supposed to arrive, according to some, including those who should know, in Safari 1.3.
But I updated to Mac OS X 10.3.9 this morning (~50 MB, yikes!), and sure enough, although Safari was updated to 1.3 (v312), RTE functionality was not available.
Now, it’s a little tough to tell, sometimes, because most sites that employ rich editing employ some form of browser detection that says, OK, if you’re Safari, I’m not giving you the RTE, I’m giving you a standard textarea box. But the guys at the office did some playing around, and took out some browser detection-code from an RTE solution we’ve put up in-house … and no dice.
So … either document.designMode was pulled from Safari 1.3, or it wasn’t actually planned, or it must be called in some manner differently than for Explorer or Firefox.
Bah. Humbug.
If you haven’t seen Threadless yet, you’re missing something.
This is an incredibly cool company – the motto is “nude no more” – that has outsourced product development to …. you. Unbelievable, and incredible (which are two words that, when you think about it, actually mean the same thing).
You want to design a T-shirt? No problem!
Grab a template. Submit it. T-shirt designers just like you all over the whole world will score it. And then Threadless just might actually make it … and you just might score some cash and a store credit. Is that cool or what?
And the designs are incredible – as you might well expect, this company having opened to doors to let all the talent in the world participate.
Check out Lemuria. Or Blame it on your TV. Or this one, this one, or this one.
Very, very, very cool.
This company could not exist without the internet … 15, 20 years ago this company was probably inconceivable, not just impossible.
It makes me wonder what else has become possible right now that we are not doing simply because our blinders are on and we are lacking the Eureka moment to see the blindingly obvious (after someone else has done it) new opportunities.
I recently re-read all the 7 books that comprise the chronicles of Narnia. And my daughter Gabrielle is just finishing up The Last Battle, the last of the series. It’s her second time reading the series – she read it through at the age of 6 for the first time (she’s 8 now) – and probably my fifth or sixth.
The mark of a great book, or series of books, is that many people of differing ages can read it and get something out of it – and they may or may not get the same thing out of it.
If you do get a chance, pick up the series and check it out – for the first time or again. You’ll not be disappointed. The books include:
– The Magician’s Nephew
– The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
– The Horse and His Boy
– Prince Caspian
– The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
– The Silver Chair
– The Last Battle
All are worth reading, and a a movie of the second book will be released fairly soon now.
OK, I’m at a complete and utter loss.
Has the advertising industry totally and completely lost any remants of any vestige of creativity? Apparently it has – at least the portion of it that works at or for CNN.com.
What’s wrong with the picture below? (It’s a screen capture from CNN.com, taken April 12, 2005.)
Technorati is the self-proclaimed finger on the pulse of the rapidly-growing blogosphere.
Anyone who’s anyone knows Technorati, in spite of the proliferation of me-to sites and services all over the place (to a greater or lesser extent these include: Daypop, Popdex, Feedster, Blogwise). And the info Technorati provides (or could be mined for) is great valuable stuff (examples: 1, 2, and 3).
There’s only one problem: Technorati is dead slow!
That’s a bigger problem that it appears when you consider that the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months or so. Which means that this is no ordinary scaling challenge where you build out infrastructure to handle known stable or slightly growing demand. The blogosphere is exploding, and Technorati is already slow – catching up to existing demand will be hard, and getting ahead of a very steep curve will be double plus un-easy … even with a really, really, really good new ops sysadmin.
I have no information whatsoever about any impending takeovers, but I’d have to imagine that Google could technically manage the challenges of enormous scaling problems better than anyone else on the planet. And you’d have to think that the kinds of things Technorati indexes, and the way they do it, would be of interest to Google.
I wonder if there will be a marriage of convenience in the offing at some point?
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
