Keep your Inbox at Zero

Google Video has a 1 hour video of Merlin Mann discussing the productivity concept of keeping your inbox to zero. I've been trying this out since the new year, and it has definitely helped me get my eMail monster under control.

Half Shaved Dog

I never know what I am going to find around the house when I get home from work. The only explanation I got for this, was "He got tired." Rest assured, you dog grooming purists, his haircut was eventually completed.

What's In a Name

Ever get tired of your name? Or maybe you just get tired out of giving it to every website that won't let you read it's content without turning over all sorts of personal data? Well, here is a cool tool that may help you out. It is the Fake Name Generator.

So just for today, I have decided that I will be a Hungarian living in Iceland. Feel free not to contact me at:

Borhala Forgács
Ránargata 62
670 Kópasker

Email Address: Borhala.Forgacs@dodgit.com

Phone: 470 2655

Also, don't bother trying to steal my fake identity with these even more fake personal attributes:

Mother's maiden name: László
Birthday: March 22, 1949

MasterCard: 5272 4097 7645 4400
Expires: 5/2009

Space - The Final Frontier

I know. I'm getting a little nuts about all the C. Alexander stuff. But it is so interesting. Anyway, I'm reading in Book 3 now (A Vision of a Living World). One of the concepts in that book is that the most intersting thing about buildings and other structures is the space they leave behind. It is the space that we humans actually inhabit and move through, and thus we belong in the space. The better the space the buildings leave behind, then the better we feel about the buildings.

This got me wondering. What exactly is the space in "cyberspace". Perhaps the links in a web application are the equivalent of the pedestrian space in and around buildings. It is nicer when you can walk easily from place to place in a neighborhood. An application with easy, convenient links is like that.

Another concept in Book 3 is the importance of "The Void", and "Simplicity and Inner Calm" in creating spaces for us humans to belong to. This made me think of www.google.com. If ever there was simplicity and inner calm, it is the Google site. The whole home page is the single text box that allows you to enter your search, a Google logo for ornamentation, and a few convenient links for "pedestrian" navigation to other parts of Google. The fact that the home page is stripped down to this simplicity also enables the "Echos" property to occur. That same simple text box is echoed on the Google Toolbar, and even at the top of this blog.

The space left on the home page is a visual reminder of the other spaces that the search box can fit into and therefore it enhances our feeling of belonging with that space because we can imagine it in other spaces we inhabit. The lack of other items on the page sparks creativity. It is like the difference of giving a child a crayon and a coloring book page or a crayon and a blank page. I think most children would prefer the blank page. I know I prefer the art work that comes from the blank page much more than the art work from the coloring book.

And it is all because of space.

Application Scaling the eBay Way

Just read a great post on the Dr. Dobbs site on the technique of staying as "transactionless" as possible in order to acheive scale. The author cites a presentation by eBay architect Dan Pritchett on the architecture of the eBay site. That presentation is a great read. In my experience, many enterprise applications suffer from data sprawl because of multiple siloed applications. What is interesting is that eBay has purposeful data sprawl in order to achieve concurrent scalability. However, it is accompanied by a rigorous control over application architecture into independent functional domains (buying, selling, billing, etc.). Typically I see applications built by broader "channels" - back office, customer self-service, etc. but these have broad functionality and they suffer from all-or-nothing fragility, in that if one function is down the whole site is down. Key concept: Break your enterprise architecture into functional domains to achieve maximum scalability and availability. This probably means a lot of rework for existing applications, but it may be the only choice to introduce scale.

15 Properties of Living Structure

Here are Christopher Alexander's 15 Properties of living structure. In future posts I may explore how they may possibly apply to software. All I could find on google was someone else's attempt at this here.

1. LEVELS OF SCALE
2. STRONG CENTERS
3. BOUNDARIES
4. ALTERNATING REPETITION
5. POSITIVE SPACE
6. GOOD SHAPE
7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES
8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY
9. CONTRAST
10. GRADIENTS
II. ROUGHNESS,
12. ECHOES
13. THE VOID
14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM,
15. NON-SEPARATENESS.

The Nature of Order

I just finished reading the first book in the The Nature Of Order series by Christopher Alexander, who is famous in the software world as being the building architect who first wrote about design patterns.

In this new series Alexander discusses how he has found 15 properties which he thinks can objectively define which structures have "more life" than other structues. These so-called living structures are those which are more wholesome and are a closer reflection of ourselves and the rest of nature, and are therfore more satisfying over the long run. In fact, he goes so far as to say that buildings with less "life" are actually stressful to the humans that must interact with it.

I wonder how this can be applied to the software architecture world. What gives software life? How can we not stress out the users of our software? Hmmm...

I'm Not Going

It's official. I'm not relocating to the Netherlands. So many people keep asking me "So are you going?" and "When will you know?" Well the limbo is over. Thanks to all of you for your support. Now those of you here in U.S. are stuck with me.

Are you talking to your PC?

So my friend Nick is on a quest to 'trick out' his desktop. The lastest go around of this, was he turned on the speech recognition software and chose the "Michelle" voice. Then it became very easy to pick on him.

First of all, Nick and Michelle had an fairly illicit relationship. So as not to disturb his nearby office mates, Nick has to speak to Michelle in hushed tones. This made me laugh at what she must be saying back to him:

"Why are you always whispering to me? Don't you want anyone to know about me? You're ashamed of me aren't you?"

Then, whenever I would go over to his desk, he had to mute the microphone so she wouldn't hear him:

"Why do you keep muting me when Dan comes over? What are you saying to him that you can't say in front of me?"

Then, as it turned out, Michelle was finally driven to betray Nick. Scott walked up and said "Delete! Delete! Delete!"....and Michelle did.

Cut The Strings

What do you get when you cross one of my favorite bands, They Might Be Giants with a heavy metal protest song, with quantum theory? A cool little music video called "Cut the Strings".

Christmas Wishlist

Just in case you are wondering what to get me for Christmas, here are a few ideas.

The Crab

The Crab
by Annie (age 8)

The crab is sad because he has no brain.
The crab is sad no matter what.
I have a crab that is sad no matter what.
No tears, no fears,
Just a sad face on the crab face.

The End

Who Needs Katie Couric

Some grad students at Northwestern University have put together this great web site where by a program scans news sites and blogs for text, images, and videos all having a common topic. Then they run the text thru a text-to-speech engine and have an machinima news anchor read it off, while the images and videos play over her shoulder. Way cool. Link

I wish I would have thought of that

This guy has a much more entertaining way to document his travel photos. He superimposes souveniers over the actual attraction for a nice kitchy effect.
Link to Flickr Slide show

Of Course There Are Highways

In response to the reader comment from anonymous, of course there are highways there(as demonstrated by this out of focus terrible picture). I got caught in some pretty heavy duty traffic jams around Amsterdam. But one good thing is you can go 70 in a construction zone!

Bike Lanes

Bikes are first class vehicles on the roads in the Netherlands, and not just in the city. Compare this bike lane in the extremely busy Dam Square area of downtown Amsterdam to this quiet suburban bike lane in a small town nearby.

Wagon Bike

Amsterdam has every kind of bike you can imagine. This is my favorite model. Very popular with the families. I saw many of these "station wagon" style bikes tooling down the road loaded up with kids and packages.

What I like about this photo is the way the wheels on the bike seem to be glowing with some sort of nuclear energy.

See what I mean about the URLs?

Mac House

Another thing I noticed is that the Dutch love to give their buildings names, and if they are stuck for a name, they just call it "[something] House", or "[something] Huis" (in Dutch). Here is an Apple store aptly named: "MacHouse".

The other thing about this picture which is hard to tell, is that the pedestrian crossing signals had this great user interface feature whereby when the red signal was on, the lower signal had a count down timer displaying how many seconds remained until the light turned green. It worked on me. Anytime I was at one of those cross walks I didn't feel the usual urge to dart across the street. I just sat and watched the countdown timer....3....2....1....go!

Nobody home at the palace

My hotel was across from the royal palace, which actually the former royal palace and is now only used for decoration, or state functions or something. Anyway, I couldn't go inside, but was greeted by this very informative sign letting me know the palace was "Closed due to circumstances".

Oh yeah, the other thing this picture reminds me of is apparently there must be some rule that every single sign in the Netherlands should have a web site URL on it.

Tolland To Holland

I made it across the big pond to Amsterdam. Not a bad trip really. Here are a few things I noticed along the way.

I never was at the international terminal at Philadelphia airport, but of course I was there this time. It was very strange. You walk around the rest of the airport and the C and B concourses look the same. Then you turn down the A terminal and it is a whole different airport. First of all it was dark. In fact I could sum it up by saying it was a dark concrete tunnel, with florescent lighting and bus station style black seats. Very strange. There were also these kiosk machines there that foreigners leaving the U.S. had to line up to use. At the machine, they had to give their left and right fingerprints and smile for a nice digital photo. Uncle Sam is watching you people. I wonder why they do it on the way out though?

Here's another thing. Flying business class is sweet. Big reclining seats. Food and drinks. Even your own personal television. There were a few movies on. I watched most of The Da Vinci Code, but it was a dumb movie and I turned it off towards the end so I could get some sleep.

I got here around 9a.m Amsterdam time. Not much happens in this town on a Sunday morning, but now it is hopping. I spent the day walking around the center of town here and doing some souvenier shopping. Although, it was a little strange seeing the head shops, "coffee" shops, and sex shops at first, the novelty wears off fast and becomes pretty boring. Now my legs are tired so I'm glad to be in this internet cafe sitting down for a change.