Shabad Chawla's blog

I recently filled in a customer survey for SonicWALL. The form had a few multiple choice questions and some space to put in comments. I marked “unstatisfactory” or “very unsatisfactory” on pretty much all the questions. Here’s what I put in the comment box:

I hate lists. But as soon as I think of the reasons why it starts turning into a list. Things to do, stuff to buy, places to go, people to meet, movies to watch, books to read… the “list” goes on – so clearly there’s no escaping them. Which is why I like blist (www.blist.com) – if you’ve gotta have a list, make it the superhero variety that’ll publish to the web, manage projects and save the world at least once before breakfast. Try it  

This is an interesting article I came across http://blogs.bnet.com/bnet1/?p=1455&tag=nl.e713 that reminded me of the original which I’d read some time ago – the bnet article summarises it but doesn’t do it justice – I’d recommend the full article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.200-why-money-messes-with-your-mind.html?full=true for when you have a few minutes.

I recently found out about a new music service – and immediately thought I must make it a point to avoid this one. I’ve had it with music services, having tried everything from iTunes to MyCokeMusic, Napster, P2P apps, last.fm, pandora, rhapsody…. the list goes on… each one has bits that I like, and a whole load of bits that I don’t like. But Spotify (www.spotify.com) at first look seems like it might be quite good! It’s a free app (the free version is ad-supported) that lets you play any music you want. The nice thing is that unlike Napster, the application actually works. The music sounds pretty good, the installer is tiny & fast – the app loads quickly, music starts playing as soon as you click play – what else could you want??!?!?! Ok so I’d like to be able to play offline. I’d like to be able to play on my iPod or other MP3 player or phone. I’d like an EQ. That list goes on – but that will always happen because I’ll always want more. The point is that spotify is quick, small, light – and it works (apart from the name). So far so good!

Interesting little app I’ve just come across – am in the process of installing it but here’s the blurb and link in the meantime:

“This new, free application makes it simple to use your mobile phone to record
and retrieve voice notes. Recite can help you remember driving directions,
restaurant recommendations, exactly where you parked your car, and if you’re
quick enough, even promises from your spouse. After you record a note, finding
it is a snap: Press “Search,” say what you’d like to recall, and Recite will
retrieve your thoughts!”

Get it at http://recite.microsoft.com

Ok so just a very quick update on Live Mesh (which will no doubt lead into my rant) – I’ve been using it for a while now, particularly the remote desktop bit of it. I have to say that my impressions so far are that it’s a really good idea, but it falls over at the execution stage. Somewhat akin to a couple of other products that I could name (but won’t)… particularly in the two areas that I think Microsoft needs to focus on the most – performance & reliability. I’m not sure why, but most things I read about Windows (whether XP or Vista or the forthcoming-and-imaginatively-and-accurately-titled Windows 7) tend to focus on how pretty/unpretty it is, what features it has/lacks, how easy/hard it is to use, how secure/unsecure it is.

It’s probably at least in part due to Apple’s marketing – including the Mac vs PC adverts that Apple started a while ago that a lot of the comparisons of Windows and Mac OS is based almost on features. Which one has a better movie maker, music player, dumber (should I say more-user-friendly) interface, better online experience and so on. Most comparisons do pay at least lip service to security… which invariably ends up being based on (somewhat skewed) statistics about infection rates. Then there’s a bit about things that I find genuinely useful (shadow copies vs time machine), and about things that I guess others will find useful – like easy networking (Honestly, I personally don’t really care how easy something is – as long as I know how to do it and can do it quickly), file sharing, device setup etc. The initial Mac ads were genuinely clever – gimmicky, but clever. I think most of the new ones are no longer clever – just more of the same, and actually I loved the XPS vs Mac and Thinkpad vs MacBook Air ones J. So Macs were (are) cooler – Mac users are all hip, good looking & successful people with beach houses and Windows users are short, fat, balding middle-aged accountants. And some of the ads were maybe even a little true once in a while. But I’m not going to say which – because those ads were based around Mac OS vs XP, and it’s been so long since I had to use XP on a daily basis that I almost can’t even remember what it was like. Sure, the interface looked like it was designed for a 5 year old – hell, Macs have always had better design (I’m talking about interface design from an aesthetic point of view, not from a usability point of view or even hardware design – I wouldn’t trade my Latitude XT for any Mac) and they easily outclassed XP in a number of other areas like multimedia capability, quality of bundled apps etc. But I don’t use XP anymore and haven’t for over 2 years. So it’s not entirely relevant to me – which means I can safely ignore it J.

Rambling around, my point is that even when a prominent IT consultant / journalist like Jon Honeyball set out a wishlist for Windows 7 (and Jon is also a Mac user) it seems very different to mine. I don’t disagree with Jon’s list, but it doesn’t seem to have the two things that I would top of the list – performance & reliability. Performance is my main complaint with Vista – it’s able to do most things just fine, and I generally have about 15 icons in my notification area and about 10 apps running. 10 apps isn’t hard – Outlook (of course), a couple of browsers (only because I can’t find one that does everything I want), maybe three (Chrome for general use, Firefox – which used to be my daily use browser but got too slow, and IE for sites that refuse to run on anything else like an SSL VPN or certain Microsoft sites), Word, Excel, OneNote, a few folders and a music player will always be running on my main computer simultaneously. Then add in Adobe Reader, occasionally Photoshop or Picasa or Windows Photo Gallery, eWallet, a VPN client, a couple of remote desktops, one or two Virtual PCs – you get the idea. So Vista hosts other apps just fine – but whenever I happen to sit at a well specced XP computer I’m always jealous of the snappy user experience – there just isn’t the lag of Vista when doing anything on XP. Things are instant – click Start and the menu appears. Double-click a folder and it opens right up. Windows+E and explorer’s right there. Even Office 2007 feels faster on XP. I have to say, I like the Aero glass interface – I know I can turn it off and get a bit of an improvement, but why should I have to? I want a pretty UI – but I want it to be fast. Out of the box. And stay fast. Not just when I turn things like Aero off. This is another strange problem with being me – I would rather that Microsoft give me a fast OS than Aero, but given the choice to turn Aero off to gain a bit of speed – I won’t. I refuse to give up the gloss and sparkle – why should I have to? I’d rather drill down and turn off every superfluous service, stop things running at startup (particularly iTunes / iPod / QuickTime crap) and just generally get my machine as lean as possible. But in my mind I shouldn’t have to turn off Aero – so I won’t. And why does my Core2Duo rig with 4Gb of memory and nice quick drives take this long to startup and shutdown? Why when I press Windows+L does it pause before locking the screen, or think about Windows+D for a second before it shows me my desktop. Why do I ever see the pretty blue circular hourglass replacement when I do some of these things? This will in part explain why my desktops are never turned off. Gasp. Shock. Horror. I know, I’m likely to be solely responsible for the premature end of the world, it’s terribly irresponsible and how can I do this. I know.

This also explains why my laptop is never shut down either – I close the lid and it goes into standby. If the battery is going to die, it quietly hibernates. I like that – a lot. Which brings me to the reliability aspect. I open the lid on my laptop and it’s reliably awake in less than 2 seconds. Actually it used to be but now I’ve got pre-boot authentication on it so I normally forget to swipe when I open the lid and turn away, only to turn back in a bit and find it’s still waiting for my fingerprint J.  It wasn’t always like that though – my last laptop, the XPS m1330 was always reliable resuming from standby so I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why this new XT wasn’t. Until I poked and prodded and disallowed the N-Trig HID Tablet Digitizer from waking up the computer, at which point I had reliable resumes on this laptop too (I’m guessing that the laptop screen / something would shift while it was in my bag and semi-wake or wake the laptop which would then get confused and fall over… needing to be hard reset to get it going again)… but that’s still not the kind of reliability that I want – I want it to be 10 foot tall, bulletproof and invisible. I don’t want to have to know that if I open and close the lid quickly it’ll probably confuse it into a state of unresponsiveness. I don’t want to have to check the power management settings on the digitzer. Right now the reliability is good – when I open Word, Vista displays the Word window and  starts out saying “not responding”. But it’s lying – this is not a reliability issue (which an app hang would be), rather a performance one (it’s just being a bit slow to start) and a minor annoyance at most (that the OS doesn’t know to just say “Loading…” rather than “Not Responding”). But I really don’t want good reliability – I want it to be GREAT. Rock-solid. Bulletproof. Invisible. You know the rest.

Which (approaching the end of this crazy-long rant) brings me back to Live Mesh. The Remote Desktop app is slow at best and flaky and hang/crash-prone at worst. I know it’s only a beta, but so is Chrome (and Chrome works reliably and quickly almost 100% of the time. It’s far from perfect – the JavaScript implementation is fast but not flawless. I often have issues with sites like YouTube and Facebook. They seem to be working ok right now so maybe I was imagining it – but I wasn’t, I promise). Technically so is Gmail but that’s been in beta from day one, which was what – over 4 years ago? I know the folks at Google are constantly innovating and all that but shouldn’t they at some point declare a “stable version” and stop with the permanent beta? I don’t mean stop developing it, but just call something version 1 and let people stay at that level if they want to. I find calling something a beta a bit meaningless after being used by the public for this long. Besides, Google offer paid-for services around Gmail – isn’t there something somewhere that says that you shouldn’t pay for beta software? But then again, why call it a final version and give people the choice to not try the newer features? As this article mentions, “The “we’re still in beta” excuse is a smart one, implying eventual quality without actually having to deliver it”. And it also gives Google tens of millions of beta testers for free. No, not for free – the users actually generate rather substantial revenues instead of costing money. Gotta love that business model – clever Google monkeys.

So, back to Live Mesh – I mentioned I’ve been using it for a while. I lied. I’ve had it installed for a while. I set up some folders to sync and I used it a couple of times to access a computer remotely. Then it sucked and then I switched back to using RDP over the SSL-VPN. Oh and I uninstalled it from my laptop. I’ve still got it running on 3 machines but I seem to have forgotten why J.

Phew.

This is pretty exciting stuff… I’ve often lamented not being easily able to share a “screen” with a friend or a colleague… you can send links to web pages, but I want to do more than that – share whatever’s on my screen – web page, app, video, picture, mouse pointer whatever… and if I “send” a web page, I actually want to be able to transfer my session state as well. I may have selected certain options, I may be signed in to my account etc – why can’t I just transfer the whole session state and all its content to someone else?

Having used a bunch of different collab tools – from MSN app sharing, Windows Meeting Space, Groove I still haven’t found one that’s anywhere close to perfect. I remember being thrilled when I first started using Groove – it was the perfect solution to a bunch of things I wanted to do. But it’s not perfect. I use OneNote on 3 different PCs and use Groove to sync my notebooks. It worked fine for a bit but every once in a while I notice that a change I made at home wasn’t on my work desktop. So I remote into the home machine, pause & restart Groove Sync and then I get multiple copies of sections in a notebook (each one is stored as a file) – which presumably was caused by a sync conflict somewhere. Why wasn’t I asked what to do with the conflict? Why didn’t I get both on my screen side by side with the conflicting pages highlighted so that I could decide what to do? I just got a section called Jobs, another called Jobs (Shabad Chawla’s copy), another called Jobs (Shabad Chawla’s copy) (Shabad Chawla’s copy), and Jobs (Shabad Chawla’s copy) (Shabad Chawla’s copy) (Shabad Chawla’s copy) and so on. To manually sort these out was a pain but I did it. Until it happened again. Now Groove isn’t the killer app I wanted… I don’t trust it any more, plain and simple. Something that was supposed to simplify things for me has just complicated them immensely. I can keep track of my changes myself by following a system. I can use paper and type things up later. I now remote into my work machine to get to OneNote if I have an internet connection (thankfully the SonicWALL SSL-VPN still works, and using the ActiveX or Java based remote desktop client from a browser is pretty painless – unless you have a crappy connection) or I use a separate notebook that only exists because I have to manually “Groove” my notes together. That sucks… I know there are other ways of solving this issue, including web-based apps that I can access from my computers, public computers, my phone etc… but that’s not the point. Groove should work – and when it gets confused it should ask me what to do – even though I’m losing brain cells, I am reasonably sure I am still able to resolve simple sync conflicts if they’re presented in a sensible way (anyone listening?)…

Back to what this post was about . Aurora looks like a great concept… some of the interaction looks a bit fiddly, like the flowering “radio menu”, some bits seem somewhat unlikely to work overly well on a wide bunch of sites (the presentation object) – wouldn’t it be nice if everything was “any valid dataset” and the frame and the “spatial view” cloud both seem weird to navigate – unless I’m just resisting it because it’s too new…. I do like unstructured interfaces but I think a more “traditionally” structured cluster layout may work better for my traditionally structured brain. But all you need is a search function that’s fast and intelligent – beats sorting systems of any kind, I think. Microsoft’s whole “search, don’t sort” philosophy with Vista / Office 2007 / WDS / Instant Search really does work for me in specific areas – like Outlook & folders with hundreds / thousands of files / subfolders. But that “specific areas” limitation isn’t really because search isn’t right for other areas… it’s just because it’s slow and not 100% reliable. I have come to rely heavily on Instant Search in Outlook (I haven’t stopped sorting… I still have a pretty complex folder tree with chronologically named folders and subfolders where I put important emails, but I use search for most emails unless I know that it’s one of those that I would have sorted into a specific folder – again probably because search would be slower than going directly to the folder) – and then one day it fell over. It showed no matches for “s”. Considering that my name & email address starts with that letter, I found it just a little bit hard to believe that none of the emails in my entire mailbox contain an “s”. So I rebuilt the search index in Vista and it took all night but it now works again. Phew. But I don’t use search from the start menu. Or Orb menu or round-button menu or whatever it’s called. It is just too slow. I still regularly use WinKey+R (at least 40 or 50 times a day) to launch things, because it’s much quicker. The only thing I can think of that I actually use the start search for is to get to my printers folder, because it’s a little bit quicker than going through the control panel… which brings me back to the eternal central issue – that my poor little computer is wheezing all the time, running my usual session. It’s a C2D 2.something with 2Gb of memory – which (the last time I looked) is double the required amount of memory for Vista. And it’s painfully slow. Ok so I run a heavy session – I have two screens and my taskbar is lined up vertically on the right side of my left hand screen – so even when I have 10 windows open it only looks half-full. maybe this is why I have so many apps running – or maybe it’s because I need them / want them / should be able to run them! I don’t run any Virtual Machines on this PC anymore, all I’ve got right now is… Outlook, Firefox (2 windows, about 15 tabs total), OneNote, a couple of emails I’m typing & reading (so Word), a couple of remote desktops, a VPN client, a couple of folders, media player and then a few bits that live in the tray – Live Mesh, WMDC, the Sidebar, Groove (yup, I still have it) & AntiVirus. So I’m not the average 1-explorer window kind of user but I’m not exactly killing it either. So why is search performance from the start menu completely crap? I’d investigate, but I have to go back to shooting gangsters in the flash-game that someone just sent me embedded in an Excel spreadsheet

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing the Concept Series; Call for Participation

An interesting bit of research / propaganda / anti-propaganda (beats the hell out of the now stale Mac vs PC ads), it’s sneaky but fun
The “Mojave Experiment”

Apart from the content itself, I really like the presentation style – something about these random responsive “water-bed/bouncy castle) interfaces that let you decide what you want to look at – without any real logical path or conscious reasoning behind what you click on is so much nicer than the usual “here’s a bullet list of all our testimonials”. It would be pretty interesting to track the clicks on this kind of interface and analyse usage patterns to see how people interact with it.

Another nice interface I came across recently was the Hard Rock memorabilia site, which lets you zoom into hundreds of different bits of memorabilia from signed photos to guitars. The detail level (at full zoom) is pretty underwhelming since I was led there by an article that was talking about the incredible detail availble in Silverlight.. but fun to play with anyway… http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ (you’ll need the Silverlight player from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx)

After a couple of decidedly dodgy decisions about what to release as “critical” updates, it looks like the folks at Redmon are still at it … Here’s an entry from my list of available updates…

I didn’t realise that Hold ‘Em Poker was that important to the welfare of my computer. Oh well, I’ll just have to install it then

p.s. This comes under the Ultimate Extras category – so non Vista Ultimate users may not see it – what a shame