Open Software Development Process

by Steven Garrity

When you spend much of every day in front of a computer (which you probably do if you are reading this), you come to know the intricacies and quirks of your software much as a musician comes to know the feel of their favourite instrument. Sometimes the smallest bugs can become the biggest annoyance.

Internet Explorer is a program I use frequently. In general, it is a good program. However, it has quirks that drive me mad. Many of these quirks affect many users and could probably be fixed in a matter of hours. However, I don’t report these issues to Microsoft. Why is that?

I don’t think Microsoft will listen. I don’t think Microsoft is a bad company (you should be suspicious of anyone who claims it is). However, Microsoft is not a particularly open company, and they are enormous. Would my feature request or bug fix request ever get through to a person who would be able to evaluate it effectively? I doubt it. This isn’t necessarily Microsoft’s fault, though I’m sure they could improve both their responsiveness and my perception of their responsiveness. It may simply be that there are too many people like me with too much feedback to reasonably parse.

This is where smaller and more open software development processes can really shine. In the past few months, since Apple’s Safari web browser project was announced, there has been a lot of discussion and an enormous amount of feedback on the browser. I’m sure there was a lot of noise, but there has certainly been a lot of useful feedback.

Add to this an open and responsive developer, and things get interesting. David Hyatt was hired by Apple to work on the Safari project. He publishes a weblog on which he regularly posts progress, requests for input, and explanations of choices from the Safari project. Apple was brilliant to let him do this.

Take for example, a public exchange that took place between a Safari user (and web expert), Jeffrey Zeldman, and Safari developer David Hyatt. Zeldman posted a detailed comparison of his site on the Safari browser and the Mozilla/Gecko-based Chimera (now called Camino – good name choice, by the way). The next day, Hyatt posted a response explaining the reasoning behind the differences.

Hyatt was equally open and responsive to input when weblogger Mark Pilgrim posted his initial feedback on the Safari beta.

Hyatt is not alone in his process. Dave Winer (formerly) of Userland Software, Ben & Mena Trott of MoveableType, Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, and many others all communicate and collaborate with the users of their software.

It is important to note that none of these projects are open source. Some, like Apple’s Safari project work with open source projects (the KHTML rendering engine, in the case of Safari), but they are not open source themselves.

This openness makes me want to use their software. It makes me confident that my input will be considered and my problems with an application might disappear in an upcoming version. I’ve seen desire for openness in software development drive software choices in a corporate development environment as well.

This is obviously not a large concern for all users. My parents are not interested in communicating with the developer of their browser – they just want their Hotmail. However, there is a large community of wannabe experts like me that collectively bear significant influence on choice of software (my parents are using Mozilla, because I installed it for them).

I would love to see other key Microsoft and Apple developers blogging (let’s see some key Microsoft and Apple executives blogging while we’re at it).

 

When is enough quality, enough quality?

by Steven Garrity

When the MP3 format first appeared there were some who dismissed it because it was a step backwards in quality. This is true. Many MP3s are encoded at 128Kb/s at which certain slight differences can be discerned on a good pair of headphones.

Obviously, these people were wrong. The slight loss in quality was a small price to pay for the massive savings in file size. Taking a 30Mb WAV file and turning it into a 4Mb MP3 made it reasonable to move music across dial-up connections, and a breeze to move across higher-speed networks.

In the case of MP3s, the quality was enough. As storage and bandwidth becomes more available and affordable, this quality gap between CDs and MP3 will close (though higher-quality Mp3 encoding, and through new file formats).

What originally made me wonder about when enough quality is enough quality was a local phone call with a friend. We were having a quiet conversation and I listened to my friend’s voice through the tinny phone receiver speaker. It occurred to me that I had all of the equipment in front of me to do much higher quality audio communication. My PC has a 16-bit sound card and a net connection that can easily stream great sounding music. I have a great microphone too.

I want higher quality telephone audio. Why has our technology stopped at the current level? Perhaps it is a limitation of the infrastructure, but I doubt this (I’m downloading MP3s at 300Kb/s on my DSL connection on the same phone line). It’s certainly not the speaker and microphone technology that is limiting quality.

So, it’s not the technology, it’s us – the customers. We must not care enough to demand higher quality or pay for higher quality. Apparently, we are not willing to pay for it.

Note to telcos: I will pay for it (I’d gladly pay $100 for a new handset/receiver that gave higher fidelity audio).

HDTV is another example of meagre customer demand for higher quality. There are loads of factors that I don’t claim to understand (or even know about) that have stunted the adoption of HDTV. However, it seems to me that people don’t seem to care.

I’ve seen HDTV at the local FutureShop. It looks great – obviously a far greater picture than plain-old NTSC. Joe public, with his 19” TV watching Good Morning Regis & Stupid doesn’t need anymore quality. Regis looks just fine with XXX lines.

48 bit color? Not unless you are scanning for the cover of National Geographic. 32 bit audio – does it even exist? When is enough quality, enough quality?

 

Counting the dead in real time

by Steven Garrity

In a world with over 6 billion people, there is bound to be a few thousand in the throes of some disaster (natural or otherwise) at any given time. Since news agencies thrive on breaking disaster news, it’s not uncommon to hear and see numbers of dead flying around like a stock ticker.

This week, three horrible events were covered extensively in the Canadian and American news: the ‘stampede’ in a Chicago nightclub, the subway fire in South Korea, and the plane crash in Iran. As each of these events unfolded, the number of dead reported on various websites, including CBC, MSNBC, CNN, and BBC, was contradictory. In some cases, the variations were quite significant.

For example, at around 8:30 PM Atlantic time, I took a screenshot of a Google News search for Iran air crash. See a screenshot of the results with the casualty estimates highlighted.

During the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, the immediate speculation varies from a staggering 50,000 to (an also staggering) 5,000 (now somewhere between 3,000-4,000).

However, these were not reported as concrete numbers – nobody knew what was going on and we all knew it. Many of the numbers being reported in the screenshot above are not qualified as unconfirmed.

Is this kind of inaccuracy understandable? Is news being delivered before it is ‘ready’ (able to be confirmed), or is it better for news agencies to share what they know, when they know it?

 

Wacky Videogame Crossover

by rob

An article from Salon has a the headline: “Man steals six cars during chase“.

Now, I haven’t played Grand Theft Auto since the original, years ago. But anybody who’s had a taste of that game must have thought for a second, “Man, that guy’s living the dream”.

Except for the prison-part.

 

AoV’s Roving Reporter on Google/Blogger

by Steven Garrity

Not wanting to be left out when something interesting happens, I emailed Google’s Press Center about their acquisition of Pyra (the company behind Blogger). I received a sparse, but prompt and polite reply from the Director of Corporate Communications including this statement:

“Google recently acquired Pyra Labs, developers of Blogger — a self-service weblog publishing tool used by more than one million people. We’re thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies. Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation. In the coming weeks, we will report additional details. Blogger users can expect to see no immediate changes to the service.”

Often when webloggers are covering a developing news story, there is the tendency to wait for the commercial media outlets to get the official story. Why wait? Pick up the phone and call. You’ll probably just get the company line (like in this case), but it’s worth a shot.

Also, what took News.com a day and a half to catch up on this story? I still don’t see it on Salon.

 

Best Webcam Shot of the Year

by Steven Garrity

When it gets this cold (-40 with the windchill in Charlottetown today), you have to talk about the weather.

From the IslandCam in downtown Charlottetown today:

today: boxers AND briefs

 

Universal Access to All Human Knowledge

by Steven Garrity

Brewster Kahle speaking at the Library of CongressA link found from Matt Haughey’s a.wholelottanothing.org lead me to a talk by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. His organization is working a variety of projects to make public domain content available in an “internet library”. Among these projects is the WayBack Machine, which archives the web.

The talk is part of a series at the Library of Congress and runs 1 hour and 26 minutes in RealVideo format. It is worth watching: Brewster Kahle: Public Access to Digital Materials (1hr 26min RealVideo).

Kahle’s basic idea is universal access to all human knowledge. Every book, speech, TV show, website, concert, etc. should be available to all of us. He looks at three main questions:

  • Should we? Yes!
  • Can we? Is it logistically possible from a technical and financial perspective? His answer: Yes.
  • May we? Will we be allowed to make all knowledge available under law? His answer: Yes.
  • Will we? He leaves this as an open question.

His numbers on the cost to digitize (scanning, etc.), store (disk space), and make available (bandwidth) all human knowledge are fascinating. According to Kahle, the hardware and labour costs required to make all book and all television and all music ever created available are not that difficult (within the hundreds of millions of dollars).

Taking books for example:

  • There are roughly 100,000,000 books ever created
  • The Library of Congress has about 26,000,000 books (I was impressed and amazed that the Library of Congress has 26% of all books ever created)
  • A book costs between $10 and $100 to acquire and digitize
  • A book takes up about 1Mb of space
  • 26,000,000 books would take 26 TeraBytes.
  • 1 TeraByte costs about $60,000
  • The entire Library of Congress could be stored for about $1.5 million dollars
  • Books can be printed, cut, and bound for $1/book from a mobile book printer (~$15,000)

If anyone has the right to make these claims – it would be Kahle – who’s organization is storing massive amounts of data as part of their WayBack project and other projects.

 

JetsGo Frustration

by rob

Canadians, especially those of us who live in Charlottetown, have been excited about JetsGo lately. It’s a new airline which will hopefully provide less expensive airfare intra-Canadian (and a few US) locations.

Their website, lets you shop around for flights by feeding it an origin, destination, and preferred departure time. This is great to. I like being able to get quotes right away and enjoy shopping around a bit.

But my frustration comes from a single part of the interface that could easily be fixed. If there is no flight available the day you picked it will say as much, then offer two buttons “One Day Before” and “One Day Further”. Now, with bigger cities, this works great, because there is always a flight coming in or out (apparently) on any given day. Toronto to Montreal for example has a few on each day. But try Charlottetown to anywhere. It’s a wasteland of emptiness! And you can only iterate through day by day. It takes forever!

It would be great if there were “Skip ahead to next flight” buttons. And I doubt it would be difficult to implement.

 

Cereal Impostors

by Steven Garrity

Generic-brand cereal names observed at the grocery store:

  • Oatie-O’s
  • Frosted Oatie-O’s
  • Neon Crunch (or in French, Croquant Fluon)
  • Fruity Hoops (right next to the Fruit Loops)
  • Lickety Split-O’s
 

Writing semantic markup: Robots to the rescue!

by Steven Garrity

Some very smart people think that the next big leap in web technology will be on the foundation of the Semantic Web. However, some other very smart people are raising concerns that this semantic utopia may be unattainable.

Matthew Thomas is an interface designer from New Zealand. Yesterday on his website, he posted a summary of a few of these smart people’s concerns about the move towards semantic markup on the web. The biggest problem is that people just don’t care about the semantic web. It takes an essay just to explain what the semantic web is – but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile idea.

I’m sympathetic to Thomas’ points here. I’ve been working to move a web-based system to the XHTML standard. On top of the usual CSS struggles (my mind still thinks in [table] tags, but I’m slowly learning to love CSS), I’m running into a difficult problem. On this particular web system (and on many, if not most, web systems), the users generate most of the content.

First of all, the web is a crappy medium for writing. It’s good for publishing what you write, but it is terrible at the actual writing stage. Spell checking, periodic backup, saving drafts, etc. – all features we’ve grown accustomed to in word processing – are sitting there, in the next window, just a few pixels away from our arcane DOS-esque text-only [textarea] form input box. Lame.

First, we need the browser makers to put better text-editing tools at our disposal. However, here’s where it gets a little complicated. You’ve probably heard hot-shot web developers scoffing at WYSIWYG web-editors before. This is mostly because they product messy and convoluted code. There is, a deeper problem though. The web is not a WYSIWYG medium. The whole idea of XHTML and CSS technologies are that you can separate design from content – style from meaning. WYSI-not-WYG.

A simple (inane) example: I recently posted a reply to a post on the Signal vs. Noise weblog. I included a quote in my reply. I used the [blockquote] tag to indicate which part of my reply was a quote. When I submitted the post, I was pleasantly surprised to see that our friends at Signal vs. Noise had included some nice formatting for the blockquote tag in their stylesheet. As a result, my quote was nicely formatted to fit in their style and layout.

There is a powerful idea behind this simple example. When I used the [blockquote] tag, I wasn’t ‘formatting’ my post. I was adding meaning to the text – I was using machine-readable language to tell web browsers that the next few words are a quote. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like. (Note: there are better ways to cite a quote, but this example makes the point)

I’m not sure we can expect everyone to make this distinction. I do think, however, that people can produce writing with semantic markup if the software does the hard work.

We need a semantic-friendly-WYIWYG text editor for the web. Here are some proposed features:

  • Hide the code from the writer (but make it accessible to those who want it – as many current editors do).
  • Provide only semantic tools: lists, blockquotes, citations, links, emphasis, strong, etc.
  • Not quite WYSIWYG: show the text in real time in a typically styled format – perhaps even adopting the style of the destination website.
  • Automate the creation of meaningful markup. For example, when a link is created, prompt the author for a descriptive link title.

By the way, someone has come up with an apt name for what I’m doing here. It’s called the LazyWeb – when smart-asses like me rant and rave, but don’t do anything about it. The hope is that through the LazyWeb, people willing to write code and implement can meet up with the idea (read: lazy) people.