Buhjillions

I’m running the Windows 7 Release Candidate, and pulled down Apple’s new iTunes 9, which debuted on last Wednesday.  I noticed a little added feature:

It seems iTunes 9 takes advantage of the Windows 7 taskbar enhancements and adds a back, play/pause, and forward button below the live preview.  It also adds a balloon above with current track info.  Nice!

This is the first non-Microsoft app that I’ve seen take advantage of the new taskbar.  Who says that Apple & Microsoft can’t play nicely?

In terms of our interaction, email used to be essentially snail mail that you could send and receive instantly.  But our interaction with email has moved far beyond this simple analogue of open mailbox, get messages.  The postman comes to my house once a day; whatever letters come, that’s all there is until tomorrow.  The mail is a daily ritual, a one-off thing.  Email is more like a constant trickle (or a constant stream or even a firehose).  I can check for messages as often as I like, and modern email programs have all kinds of features to allow incoming messages to announce themselves: some subtle, some not.  Mail messages are passive, but email messages have become active agents!  They flash notifications, make noise, or increase little red counters while vying for your (limited) attention.

The pull of email is very strong.  For me, when I know there are messages in my inbox, I’m incredibly tempted to deal with them, or at least read them, even if I’m working on something important.  A passive inbox creates more than enough temptation for me; email which asks for my attention is too much.

The daily ritual is effective for regular mail because delivery times are measured in days, and not too distracting because you take care of everything in one go.  Dealing with email as it comes in might be very effective, but because of the myth of multitasking, it torpedoes productivity on anything that requires careful thought.  Every time we change from one task to another, it takes a while to regain focus.  Some studies have suggested this is upwards of 15 minutes!  Even if the total time you spend on email is the same, the more you break it up throughout your day, the less other things you’ll get done.

Many popular email programs have these distracting message notifications turned on by default.  Here’s how to turn them off:

Microsoft Outlook 2003/2007
Tools > Options from the main menu, click Email Options on the Preferences tab.  Then click Advanced Email Options.  In this dialog box you can untick any (or all) of the options under When new items arrive in my Inbox

Mozilla Thunderbird
In Windows this is under Tools > Options > General > When a new message arrives.  For Linux, it’s under Edit > Preferences…,  on Mac OS X, it’s Thunderbird > Preferences…

Entourage
Entourage > Preferences > Notifications and untick all the unwanted notifications.

I also like getting my email on the iPhone.  It’s great to be able to read and sort messages while on the bus or waiting in line, but I’d go nuts with it constantly alerting me of incoming email.  You can disable these under Settings > Sounds…

So, I’ve decided to use my Saturday to geek-out and try some new computer stuff.  While Microsoft is making a somewhat lackluster presentation at CES compared to the likes of Sony, Palm, and Dell which have announced slick-looking gadgets, in terms of things to try right now, two Microsoft betas have caught my attention.  The first is Live Mesh, the subject of this post.  I’ll write something a little later about Windows 7.

I noticed that Microsoft’s Live Mesh service won a “Crunchie” from TechCrunch.com, so I decided to give it a try.  At its core, it’s a service for syncing files and folders among multiple computers.  But, in addition to updating your different machines, it includes a “Live Desktop,” which is a 5GB storage area in Microsoft’s cloud to allow you to get access to your most important files on any computer with an internet connection.  It also includes remote-access software, which is nothing new, but is accessible with just a click or two (at least in theory–my desktop crashed the first time I tried it).  It certainly seems much more sensible than the complicated setup one needs to do on both ends which is currently par for the course.  It also has some sharing features, but as far as I can tell, these require others to sign-up and sign-in, which will limit their usefulness severely (especially while the service is still in beta).

I’ve installed it on my home desktop and lappy, and will give it a go on my office computer when I get in on Monday.  I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed with the syncing so far from an interface perspective: the size totals for transfers don’t make a lot of sense, and my lappy started uploading even though I told it to sync a new folder taken from my desktop.  These may just be initial hiccups, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.  We’ll see how diligent it is at keeping the files up to date without intervention.

The Oxford Bodeian Library’s collection is one of the main tangible things that makes Oxford a world-class research institution.  The troves of primary sources, obscure titles, and first editions make it a mecca for historical and literary research.

This is a promise which I don’t think the Oxford Libraries live up to in practice, because the University has not invested enough in updating the tools people use to find what they’re looking for.  The ability to quickly and efficiently find information in Oxford’s catalogs is hampered by outdated and poorly designed interfaces, and incomplete records.  The experience is not worthy of the excellent collection and international reputation the Libraries have.

We live in a world of speedy full-text search of almost the entirety of the Web, accessible instantly from any computer and many mobile phones.  As a result, libraries have a tough act to follow to make finding printed materials as quick and cognitively intuitive.  The databases libraries maintained about their collections seemed monstrous in a time before Google, but they are now very limiting: title, author, some keywords, and a bewildering string of letters and numbers aren’t much data for smart search to chew on.  Web search engines also exploit links between different pages to form their results, but collections databases are relatively flat.  Full text search might be coming, but there’s truckloads of books to scan between now and then.

So no, I don’t expect the library website to be as good as Google, but I don’t think that complete and humane are unreasonable expectations.

By complete,  I mean that I expect all records from all collections in the Oxford University Library Services to be accessible by web-based search.  As it stands, for example, Oriel College Library’s catalog is only available via telnet.  Unless you were a nerd before 1995, (or use the libraries at Oxford) you might never have even heard of telnet.  Telnet is a text-only interface designed in 1969 as one of the very first internet standards.  It’s slow, clunky, unintuitive, and there’s no way to save anything you’re doing and come back to it.

I could go on for pages about what makes websites humane, but the redesigned SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online) interface is a big leap forward from the previous system.  Standard web-browser behaviors, like using the forward and back buttons or saving results as bookmarks don’t break it.  It has advanced search features like boolean operators and the ability to search particular libraries.  Unfortunately, if the material is not on the shelf (which it isn’t always clear about) it simply plunks you back into the old, ugly, inhumane system to request it from the stacks.

As a scientist, I don’t often research using books. I’m much more likely to look up journal articles, which unless they are old or obscure, are very likely to be online.  Every once in a while, though, I’ll want a paper which isn’t online, and it’s good to know that the library has my back (old and obscure is Oxford’s specialty).  I’ve noticed that when using search tools by Ex Libris, a little button appears beneath many results that says “Find It Oxford.”  Ex Libris know what stuff Oxford has in its catalog and clicking it takes me to an Oxford page.  Unfortunately, this is in the old, ugly interface, and it dead-ends: giving me information about the holding but not allowing me to do anything with the information, like request it from the stacks.  If I want to do any of that, it’s back to top level interface (but at least this time, title in hand).

So, things are looking up, but Oxford’s Library access is still sub-par.  Its number one priority, at this point, should be getting all books and all the libraries available to be searched via SOLO.  The first thing researchers care about is completeness.  They can’t trust a tool that they know won’t give them all the results.  Then, it should cut the last vestige of the old system away and build a humane system for stack requests.

The icing on the cake, for me, would be seeing the full text of every title they have whose copyrights have expired accessible via the internet.  They’re partnering with Google, starting in 2005 for book scanning, but, as far as I can tell, library users have yet to see any of the benefits.  The Oxford website claims this will take three years, but my opinion of “official” Oxford timelines sinks the longer I am here.

My iPhone was gimped, but not yet dead.  The problem was with the “home” button, and being the only button on the front face, you can imagine it gets used frequently.  It had lost the crisp, original clickyness and trying to press it was like using a sausage to play a snare drum.  Sometimes I’d press and get no response, sometimes a double click, whisking me away to the favorites list instead of the home screen.

After dealing with the pain that is Vodafone (my previous carrier)’s repair service, I was reluctant to go down that dark path, and just dealt with my limp iPhone for a couple weeks.  Remembering that my 1 year warranty would expire in November, I finally got around to making the call to get some reparations.

Fortunately, as I discovered, Apple’s customer service and repair arm is a class act, even in a country where the bar has been set pretty low.  The first phone call to Apple went well: short wait to talk to a rep with fluent language skills, and a competent sounding manner.  He issued me a repair ID and ordered a returns kit sent to my house.

Now, the story hits a few bumps in getting the returns kit delivered.  Of this I hold no malice against the rep I spoke to; it was a simple misunderstanding.  When he read the address they had on file, I assumed he left out the house number for brevity, but as it turns out, it just wasn’t there.  So UPS received an address with the correct street, but no house number.  As helpful as I have found the order tracking website in the past, once there was a problem the cryptic “delivery exception” messages were of little use in deciphering what the problem was.  Fast forward about a week, several phone calls to UPS, and several mornings wasted waiting up for the deliveryman who seemed to need a signature to deliver me what is essentially an empty box; I called Apple to have them deliver to my lab instead.  I had my kit the next day.  This time didn’t bother me too much, since the iPhone still worked OK, but if I had a dead phone, I’d have been pissed at UPS (and probably Apple for hiring them).

Opening up the returns box was almost like unboxing a new gadget from Apple.  Carefully laid out were all the things I’d need to ship my iPhone to Apple, right down to an included paper clip to open the SIM card tray on the iPhone.  Also included was a pre-paid envelope and address label to ship the iPhone to Apple.

Once it shipped, I could use my repair ID to track the status, but it turns out I needn’t have worried. Apple sent me an email once my iPhone arrived, and, 3 hours later, after they shipped a replacement.  That impressed me—3 hours after my gimped iPhone arrived at their repair center a replacement left destined for me. Unfortunately, this was on Friday afternoon, and the replacement didn’t arrive until Monday.  Since they picked up the entire tab including shipping both ways, I couldn’t begrudge them for not splurging on Saturday delivery.

The difference between this and Vodafone’s service, which they charge £7 per month for, is like night and day.  I knew where my iPhone was at any time via the web, even during transit using UPS tracking.  When Vodafone repaired my phone I gave it to a man in the store and just waited until the predetermined pickup day.  Several times (yes, I had several repairs) I returned on the appointed day to be simply told that it hadn’t returned yet and that I should come back tomorrow.  Apple took 3 business days (5 including the weekend) to return my iPhone, while Vodafone typically took a week.  Apple proactively informed me about the progress, while Vodafone didn’t even let me know when there was a delay.

Good customer service includes the tenet that a customer’s problem is your problem until it’s resolved, and it includes keeping the customer in the loop.  Good customer service is something Apple UK has, and Vodafone doesn’t.

“Unboxing” Photos of the Return Kit below:

Every new site that provides a personal service needs to authenticate you the next time you return.  They need to make sure you are able to access your account and others are denied.  The standard way to do this is to have you create a secret password to identify yourself when you return.  And there begin your troubles, noble websurfer.

Most people don’t just have one web-based service they use, they have between a few and a few dozen.  The safe thing to do, of course, is to create a unique password for every site you sign up for.  One for Gmail, one for Amazon, one for PayPal, one for your internet banking, one for… you get the idea.  Strong passwords are very random, with plenty of crazy symbols and odd capitalization.  Of course, the way the human brain works, the longer and more random the password, and therefore the stronger, the harder it is to remember!  If your mind is anything like mine (which is to say, human), you’ll know the futility in trying to create and remember unique, secure passwords for each site that requires one.

So, we cheat.  We create relatively weak passwords.  Or, we reuse them.  Or both (in college, every private multiplayer game we created was always secured by the password “spandex”).  Reusing passwords is particularly Bad News Bears because you can’t know what the site you’re sending it to will do with it.  Will they store it securely?  Will they sell it to criminals in Russia?  Are they criminals in Russia?  So if you currently use the same password for http://somerandomforum.tk as your bank or email account, you might want to reconsider.  As you might imagine, the extent to which I follow my own advice depends on the perceived risk of getting a password stolen, and the potential damage an attacker could do with that particular password.

And, there are other problems with passwords.  Even if we could all remember hundreds of complex passwords and the sites they belong to, they’re still vulnerable.  They can be captured by eavesdroppers if used over an unencrypted channel, or users can be fooled into giving them away in a phishing attack.

A recent (well, August. I’ve been busy) NY Times piece introduced me to an alternative to passwords.  It’s called an Information Card, and is in essence the digital equivalent to an ID card.  Under this system, the computer does the heavy lifting of creating a unique token for each site you visit, so a malicious site can’t use the information it gains to break into your other accounts.  It also will only transmit the information over a secured channel, so there’s essentially no way eavesdroppers can intercept your credentials.

However, there are still ways to attack this system, even if the author, Randall Stross, doesn’t seem to think so.  In one breath, he quotes Scott Kveton (of the OpenID foundation) as saying, “there is no silver bullet, and there never will be.”  Then, in the next, he goes on to talk about information cards as if they’re some kind of panacea.  They aren’t.

MS Windows Cardspace, an implementation of information cards

Essentially, you are trading keeping a secured secret in your head (a password) for a secured secret on your computer (an information card).  This means that if an attacker gains access to your computer, they can steal your cards.  And, since the cards are simply bits of data, they can be copied, meaning they can be stolen without you ever noticing they’re gone—that is until you notice accounts being compromised.  A PIN is no defense; attackers might design viruses or worms to steal them after you’ve entered your pin, then silently delete themselves, removing any evidence you’ve been compromised.

Still, relying on keeping your computer secure does seem like a safer bet than passwords, at least for the time being.  If the movement gains momentum, it might do some good.  Also, smart-card readers of various sorts are becoming relatively standard on business laptops.  In the future, an information card could be embedded on one of these smart-cards, this would make them hard to steal and very hard to duplicate.

I’d be tempted to try it out on spikecurtis.com, but its designed to work only with SSL-encrypted connections, which I don’t have the credentials for.  The only site I know of that uses them now is Microsoft’s Live ID, only in beta, and only with IE 7 (there is a Firefox plug-in, but it doesn’t work with Firefox 3).

Maybe Microsoft should move its headquarters to 1 Infinite Loop.

This morning, while trying to send out some mail in Microsoft’s Outlook 2007, I noticed that after nearly 10 minutes, the message I tried to send was still sitting in my Outbox.  When I clicked “Send/Receive,” like ya do, Outlook decided to get stuck in an infinite loop of trying to send, failing, and then trying again without any kind of warning, I racked up dozens of sendmail tasks in the “Send/Recieve Details” dialog in a few seconds.  I had to kill Outlook from the taskbar.  This was no ordinary glitch: I tried restarting Outlook, switching back and forth from Offline Mode, and sending from a different account, to no avail.

Creating a new message, readdressing, and copying and pasting my email contents into the new message seemed to work.  Although, I can’t help but wonder if several of my friends got multiple (hopefully not dozens!) of copies of the email.

Then later, it happened again!

Long story short, after some furious google searching, I found some hints of explanation.  It seems that sometimes (perhaps due to ActiveSync tomfoolery) the Address Book in Outlook gets corrupted, and some display names are orphaned, no longer associated with an email address.  When you address an email to one of these orphaned names and click send, it sets Outlook into this infinite loop.

This is a pretty huge failwhale on Microsoft’s part on several levels.

Firstly, the Address Book, “what about it?” you ask.  “Isn’t that just your Contacts folder?”  As far as I can tell, no.  The Address Book is some vestigal part of Outlook code which is what is actually invoked to translate names into email addresses, rather than just using the Contacts database directly.  No one ever opens their Address Book, so far as I can tell (although there is a shortcut for it: Ctrl+Shift+B).  Everyone manages their contacts and email addresses in the contacts folder, and behind the scenes Outlook relies on some software scorcery to keep the two in synch.  Obviously, this breaks from time-to-time.  From a humane computing perspective, this is particularly cruel—creating two places to keep email addresses when one would do. Then, allowing the synchronization break without any warning until it causes a problem like:

The Infinite Loop: Seriously, Microsoft, when a display name pulls up a null from the Address Book, the best you can think to do is just try the whole send-mail process over again?  No error message, no looking to the Contacts folder for the address, no prompting the user for how to handle this, just keep banging your head into the wall.

And not only that, but the most information I can find about it on Microsoft’s site is from a post in October 2007 to Microsoft’s forums.  This means that this bug has been burning people for nearly a year with no visible action on Microsoft.  No Knowledge Base article explaining a work around, just some forum posts to wade through to try and pick the most appropriate solution.

For those who came via google or elsewhere looking for a solution, I’ll explain what I did to (hopefully) clear it up.  Basically, we’re going to manually clean up the Address Book.  This will be fine if there are only a few entries that need cleaning; I had about 2 dozen, If there are lots that are b0rked on yours, you might want to try some ideas listed in this thread.

1. Go to Offline mode (File -> Work Offline), and delete any offending messages from the Outbox.  Save the text first, so you can resend, by copying and pasting into Notepad or similar.
2. Open the Address Book (note: this is not the same as the Contacts folder).  Tools -> Address Book, or Ctrl+Shift+B.
3. You should see a list of names, display names, and email addresses.  Corrupt entries will be any that have the email field left blank.  Note that any Contacts you have which don’t have email addresses saved should not appear on this list at all, so anything with a blank email address is a corrupted entry.
4. Find a corrupted name, and then close the Address Book, go to your Contacts and open the entry for the name you found.  You’re going to copy the email address to the clipboard (Ctrl+C), clear the email field, then save the contact without an email address.  Then reopen the contact and paste the email address back in place (Ctrl+V), and save again.  This should recreate the entry in the Address Book with the correct email address.
5. Rinse, repeat until all corrupt entries are fixed.  (You can ignore Distribution Lists, they won’t have an email address listed.)

Shame on you, Microsoft, for wasting over an hour of my time diagnosing and repairing Outlook from a bug that should have been fixed months ago.

If you don’t have access to a Windows installation, this post is not for you (yet, Microsoft claims to be working on a Mac version), sorry!

Photosynth is really cool.  It’s a tool from Microsoft to visualize spatial environments using overlapping photos. It really is something else—way better than a static slideshow, it manages to give you an idea of space and volume by stitching together an environment from different views.

It makes me want to go out and take some photos of Oxford. If I have a chance tomorrow, maybe I’ll shoot a couple dozen views of Oriel’s quad, and then see how easy it is to put together a visualization. In the meantime, enjoy the Taj Mahal as seen by National Geographic photographers.

Microsoft’s Office Labs has posted a tool for launching programs called SpeedLaunch.  Now, there are a lot of launchers out there, as the creators of SpeedLaunch point out on their blog.  What seems unique about theirs, they say, is the drag-n-drop functionality for creating shortcuts: you get a big ‘ole target in the corner of your screen, right above the taskbar.

On the whole, SpeedLaunch seems much less powerful that something like Enso, which automatically scans your startmenu for programs, instead of making you add them manually, and includes commands far, far beyond just launching programs.  SpeedLaunch’s use of a mouse-driven, modal interface will also make it considerably slower that Enso, which becomes almost second nature in a few weeks of use.

Still, if you haven’t yet tried Enso because the text-based input puts you off, (and, you’re on Windows) give SpeedLaunch a go.

Uniform Resource Locators, commonly known as URLs are the address system for finding things on the internet.  Unfortunately, they’re often not very humane.  Can you imagine having to type this lovely example into your browser (much less trying to remember it!)

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000100000020200502000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Yikes! (This, by the way, is the URL of our new physics paper) Getabs? Servlet? prog=normal?  WTF?

This blog, powered by WordPress, does a little better:

http://buhjillions.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/inhumane-urls-and-why-oxford-university-fails-again/

The blog’s domain, followed by the year, month, and date of the post, and finally the title.  Not bad for something generated by a computer each time I sit down and write a new post.  Wordpress also gives me the option of writing the URL myself, but I never bother.  Why?  Because people have designed systems to deal with this problem, or have otherwise learned to cope.  People create bookmarks for places they want to get back to, or remember instead of the URL, the path that they took to get there from other websites, or enough keywords that they locate it again via Google.

Still, the one part of a URL which people actually do try to remember is the domain name, the something.whatsit.com.  It is the part which is often spoken aloud, in conversation or in radio and TV adverts.  People remember the domain names, and good ones are worth a lot of money.

Which is why doing inhumane things with your domains is an inexcusable offense.  Consider the difference between typing ox.ac.uk and www.ox.ac.uk in your browser bar.  That’s right, one dumps you to an ‘address not found’ failwhale, and the other gets you to the University of Oxford’s homepage.  Why doesn’t ox.ac.uk redirect to www.ox.ac.uk just like every other website on the internet?

Fail Whale.

I requested this ‘feature’ on a feedback form from the OUCS website (located at www.oucs.ox.ac.uk).  The response?

“I’m afraid that this isn’t possible in the Oxford environment.”

That’s right folks.  Whatever crazy hosting technologies we’re packing here at the 2nd best university in the world (12th best in technology), they aren’t capable of issuing an HTTP redirect.  What kind of shady bub’s business are we running here? I’m not sure if I should be reassured that it isn’t just OUCS being too lazy to set up the redirect.

Oxford, I’m not sure how you’ve managed to rest on your laurels for this long and not drop completely off the top 100 list, but it’s high time that you get your shit together.

(Postscript: Although I mention OUCS in this post, I’m not necessisarily pointing the finger of blame directly at them.  Maybe OUCS needs to sober up to what it really takes to run a world-class information technology department, or maybe the University governanace needs to actually give them the resources they need.  How high up the org chart this issue goes, I don’t really know.)