Year: 2008

Montréal in August

Sum­mer would­n’t be sum­mer without a sum­mer con­fer­ence or two. There’s some­thing about walk­ing the streets or sit­ting in cafes, talk­ing about tech­no­logy, in balmy weath­er (well, when it does­n’t rain like it did at last year’s CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford). This year I’m off to Mon­tréal for Bal­is­age in the middle of August. Even if the weath­er decides to be nasty, and the streets are too unpleas­ant to stroll, there will be lots of inter­est­ing people to talk tech­no­logy with and cafes near the con­fer­ence hotel to fre­quent. If you missed the dead­line to speak, there’s no need to pan­ic just yet. There is still room on the sched­ule for late-break­ing talks as long as you get your pro­pos­al in by June 13. I was one of the review­ers of the main batch of talks so I got a sneak peek at some of the sub­mis­sions. There is thought-pro­vok­ing stuff on the pro­gram and I expect lots of hefty dis­cus­sion, at the talks and in the cafes after­wards. Warm weath­er, inter­est­ing people, good food — I guess I should brush up on my French a little for those restaurants.

Twitter Musings

Tim recently pos­ted about Twit­ter, and it got me think­ing I should blog some of my own thoughts on the sub­ject of Twit­ter (and related ser­vices such as Jaiku). Tim’s not the only per­son to move from tweet­ing a bal­anced mix that includes appar­ently super­fi­cial trivia to mainly, or even only, tweet­ing work or busi­ness-related stuff. From my point of view, that’s regret­table. I fol­low only a few people, mostly people I know in per­son, because I want to know what they’re up to and main­tain some sort of con­tact with them as people, not because I see them as sources of busi­ness inform­a­tion. I’ve watched people’s blogs go from per­son­al-with-some-work to mostly-work, now I’m watch­ing people’s twit­ter feeds go through the same trans­form­a­tion, and for me there’s a feel­ing of loss, a feel­ing that I’m just watch­ing more masks (think­ing back to Julie Leun­g’s talk at North­ern Voice) being put in place. 

I guess it’s inev­it­able than any new mode of broad­cast com­mu­nic­a­tion be coopted in this way. I’ve had the same feel­ing at North­ern­Voice of being a King Canute in seek­ing to emphas­ize the per­son­al com­mu­nic­a­tions aspect of blog­ging and social media; the addi­tion­al prob­lem there of course is that people happy to blog at a per­son­al level appar­ently see no need to attend a blog­ging conference.

Many people whose recom­mend­a­tions I would value don’t blog much any more. They put the links to art­icles they’ve read, or books they liked, in their Twit­ter feeds. If I’m not read­ing Twit­ter at that time, I miss those links. No, I don’t like blogs that are solely link feeds, there does have to be a bal­ance, but if something’s worth recom­mend­ing, why not recom­mend it some­where it might live longer than a couple of hours? And some­where I have a hope of find­ing again if I have a men­tal book­mark that you wrote about some­thing inter­est­ing while I was busy doing some­thing else?

Company Websites 101

I’m not in mar­ket­ing, so I’m not going to pon­ti­fic­ate on how com­pan­ies should design the look and feel of their web­sites, nor on what they should say on their web­sites. But there are some really basic things that com­pan­ies should do to make their web­sites more usable, at least to a first degree. 

Item 1: don’t make your cus­tom­ers tell you where they live until they need to, nor what sort of ser­vices they’re inter­ested in. Case study: Rogers, a pur­vey­or of wire­less phones and oth­er tele­com ser­vices. The first screen you see at rogers.com makes you choose between res­id­en­tial and busi­ness ser­vices. If you click busi­ness, it assumes you live in Ontario. If you click res­id­en­tial, you then have to tell it which province you live in. Every time I pay my wire­less bill online, I have to go through the same rig­mar­ole. Can­’t they fig­ure out some way of giv­ing people the basic inform­a­tion and then let­ting them choose which sub­set of the site they want? Telus (anoth­er telco) does the same thing, you have to tell them which province you live in before being allowed into the site. Bell Canada (a com­pet­it­or) does this bet­ter. Not per­fect, they have this weird dia­log box float­ing in space, but it’s bet­ter. The login for people with accounts who want to pay them quickly is right there on the first page, unlike for Telus or Rogers. Maybe they should spend five minutes some time and fig­ure out who uses their sites? Or make their exec­ut­ives try to pay their own phone bills online?

Item 2: assume that some people will be lazy, and not want to type the “www.” all the time. Case study: Shop­pers Drug Mart, a Cana­dian drugstore/pharmacy. If you go to www.shoppersdrugmart.com, you get to the site. If you type shoppersdrugmart.com into your browser, you get “Unable to con­nect” as the serv­er rejects the con­nec­tion. This strikes me as bizarre and lazy; it’s not that hard to set up a serv­er to accept both types of address, and user-unfriendly to not do so.

Item 3: if you run a store, set­ting up a web site, advert­ising it, and then put­ting no con­tent on it is a waste of time. If you can­’t think of any­thing else to put on your web site, put your phone num­ber, your loc­a­tion, and your open­ing hours. A few words about products and/or ser­vices you provide would­n’t hurt either. Case study: too many, and they all make me won­der why they bothered.

Norm’s Leaving

Norm’s leav­ing Sun. I’ve nev­er worked with Norm on a Sun-intern­al pro­ject, as his pro­jects did­n’t over­lap with mine, but I’ve worked with him on oth­ers, most par­tic­u­larly the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion TC. He was also one of the review­ers and ses­sion chairs I could most rely on when I was chair­ing the XML conference.

Norm was one of the reas­ons I was happy to join Sun; I’ve always thought his intel­li­gence and integ­rity, along with his depth of know­ledge and good humour, reflec­ted well on any com­pany that employed him. Norm, I wish you all the best at Mark Logic, they’re lucky to have con­vinced you to join them.

More Asus

As inten­ded, I did take the Asus eee pc along on my trip to Maui last month. It was cer­tainly a lot light­er in the back­pack than the usu­al laptop. I even used it a bit (it has a fairly decent sudoku game on it). The wire­less con­nec­tion was a little flaky; I could some­times nom­in­ally con­nect to some wire­less net­work but no bits would actu­ally flow down the pipes. The error mes­sages were use­less, but then there often isn’t a lot to do when the wire­less does­n’t work. Even­tu­ally I found a net­work that did let me con­nect prop­erly, so I could check email and the odd web site.

If I were to use the Asus a lot, I’d need to fig­ure out a few dif­fer­ent applic­a­tions; for a few days while trav­el­ling or oth­er­wise not work­ing I can cope with check­ing feeds through browser-based applic­a­tions (after all, that’s how many people actu­ally do check feeds, if my log files are to be believed) and fun­nel­ling my per­son­al email through GMail, but even­tu­ally I’d want some­thing bet­ter. Learn­ing the key­board short­cuts does help, so maybe it would just be a mat­ter of get­ting used to those less-rich inter­faces. Or maybe they’d get more annoy­ing over time?

I’d also want to tweak beha­viour (move icons around in the tabbed win­dows), and add use­ful exten­sions. For example, I use the CoLT exten­sion on Fire­fox to copy the link and text, which is really handy on the small key­board. And I’d need to learn more usab­il­ity tips from sites such as the eee user for­um, such as the one about mov­ing big dia­log boxes around by keep­ing the Alt key pressed while drag­ging from inside the win­dow, so you can get to the but­tons. I’d prob­ably want to tweak my blo­g’s stylesheet as well; in fact I’m think­ing about how to do that any­way, hav­ing seen what it looks like on the small screen.

The Asus may not quite be what Roger­’s talk­ing about in his mani­festo for the walkaround-web tab­let, but it does fill a def­in­ite niche.

And I haven’t seen too many bugs, although I’ll close with the amus­ing pic­ture I snapped after leav­ing it in sus­pend mode for a while…

Asus eee pc screen after suspend

BPA — Who’s Prepared?

Bisphenol‑A, a chem­ic­al found in many of those hard plastic water bottles (look for polycar­bon­ates with the recyc­ling num­ber 7, although not all of those have BPA in them) has been in the news recently, cul­min­at­ing in today’s announce­ment of a ban of baby bottles con­tain­ing BPA by Health Canada. This con­tin­ues a trend from a US Nation­al Tox­ic­o­logy Pro­gram report that expressed con­cern, although it stopped short of call­ing BPA dan­ger­ous. Since, like many house­holds, we have quite a few of these bottles around, and since the chem­ic­al is sup­posed to be par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous to infants, I figured I should see which of the many plastic bottles and baby bottles we have might be safe. The polycar­bon­ate bottles are deservedly pop­u­lar; they don’t have the “plastic” taste that bottles made of #5 plastics do (although those are said to be com­pletely safe since they don’t leach), and they are unbreak­able, unlike glass.

Look­ing at vari­ous man­u­fac­turer­’s web sites shows you who’s pre­pared and who’s stick­ing their heads in the sand hop­ing it will all blow over. In the pre­pared cat­egory, Rub­ber­maid gets full marks for hav­ing a clear page list­ing all the products with and without BPA. Nal­gene (made fam­ous in Van­couver when MEC, a major loc­al store took all the bottles off its shelves because of BPA) states they’re phas­ing out BPA and prom­ises to have new non-BPA products using trit­an instead of polycar­bon­ate in the stores start­ing next month. I don’t have any of their bottles, but I know a lot of people do. Camel­bak points out on their web site’s front page that not all #7 plastics con­tain BPA (true), but ignores the fact that there’s no way a con­sumer can tell which ones do. They’re also intro­du­cing a line that uses non-BPA trit­an. I gave a friend one of the Camel­bak bottles for Christ­mas and will replace it once the trit­an ver­sions come out.

In the middle, since they don’t use BPA, but don’t tell people that on the web site are Medela, who make vari­ous breast­feed­ing pumps and accessor­ies, includ­ing bottles. The Brita water fil­ter com­pany has a hor­rible flash web site with no search but­ton any­where. The pitch­er does­n’t look to me like it’s made out of polycar­bon­ate and that was con­firmed from this post. It would make sense for Brita to add that inform­a­tion to their FAQ.

On the unpre­pared side, Ger­ber loses points for not even men­tion­ing the issue any­where on their site; the baby bottles I have from them are num­ber 7 and oth­er sources say they have BPA, so out they go. Tom­mee Tip­pee (a U.K. brand for baby bottles ad sipyy cups) has a page from Janu­ary 2007 in which they say BPA is per­fectly safe and that they use it in some products, without men­tion­ing which, so I’m not sure what to do about the ages-old hard plastic sippy cup I have from them. It isn’t polycar­bon­ate, but does it have BPA in it? No idea. Avent is anoth­er baby bottle man­u­fac­turer that admits they use BPA and say it’s safe. Tom­mee Tip­pee isn’t avail­able in Canada any­way, but I guess the oth­er two are going to have some prob­lems in the next little while, as are the retail­ers that stock them.

There are lots of blogs out there with list­ings of products that have or do not have BPA (e.g., this one). As with many health issues it’s hard to know how to far to go without going over­board, par­tic­u­larly with vari­ous health admin­is­tra­tions seem­ingly dif­fer­ing in their views of what the risk really is. I find it iron­ic, how­ever, that the man­u­fac­tur­ers of products mostly used by adults, where the risk is smal­ler, seem to be more respons­ive than those of products used by the infants who are most susceptible.