Brain Lint

What are high stakes tests doing to our education system? This New York Times article has the disturbing answer: cutting out all subjects besides reading, math and gym. I presume gym is legally required.

Being able to read and do basic math are obviously prerequisites to any higher level learning, but what kind of job are we doing if we churn out young adults who can do only that? How can people who missed out on other imporant subjects like history, social studies have the critical-thinking skills required to make informed decisions in the future, whether at the voting booth or elsewhere?

Got my copy of the IBM annual report in the mail yesterday - as always, a beautiful piece of work - the cover is especially trippy this year. Anyone who opts to receive it electronically is really missing out. Anyways, paging through it I wondered “How is my old friend IBM Workplace doing in the marketplace?”. This paragraph indicates they doubled their revenue during the year:

Lotus software revenue increased as clients continue to demonstrate strong response to the Domino version 7 product line, as well as very high interest in Workplace software. Workplace software more than doubled its revenue in 2005 versus 2004. (page 30)

Well that sounds awesome! Doubling is good, right? That must mean Lotus revenue is through the roof! Lets see… Hmm, this is interesting: page 33 says Lotus revenue grew 1.6 percent and page 35 says Lotus software revenue increased 3 percent. I guess it needs to redouble a couple more times before we can say its setting the world on fire.

As an aside, I think its also interesting that mainframe shipments are measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second) growth year over year. I might just be grossly underinformed, but it seems to me the number of MIPS a contemporary computer can do is always growing at some double digit clip year to year, so even selling the same number of computers, assuming Moore’s law holds, you’ll have 100% MIPS growth every 18 months.

The spring restructuring actions, of which I was a lucky participant, cost the company a $65 million one-time charge.

Is there a name for the phenomenon described below?

1. One has a problem developing or building something for some long period of time.
2. In frustration makes a post to a newsgroup or other source of public support.
3. A very short period of time later figures it out on his or her own.

It can’t be murphy’s law, because something went right for once. Or is it just something going wrong in a twisted, different way?

I was working through some tutorials for Macromedia/Adobe flex today, and was having some strange problems with the second tutorial (build a calculator) and not more than 30 minutes after posting to a yahoo group “flexbuilders”, I find the faulty configuration responsible.

Last weekend my girlfriend Kristi, my roommate Phil and I ran the 5K in Davis Square, where I live in Somerville. It was the first race I’d run in since my terrible cross country days in high school. My time from the race (~25 minutes, since the results are gun-time, rather than chip-time and it took a while to get across the start line) was probably not much worse than my times in high school ( I sucked then though).

Having never run in a grown-up race like this, and one where I may actually be faster than some non-trivial percentage of the competitors, I was suprised how difficult it was to move from the back of the start pack to a spot where I could hit my stride- the first mile was like driving in traffic, looking for little gaps where one clump of people is slower than the rest and squeezing through, with the occasional foray onto the sidewalk.

It was fun. As fun as running 3.1 miles with the temperature hovering around 38 degrees can be anyways The free food and beer at Redbones afterwards helped too.

A fun race highlight was that when we were crossing a bridge over the train tracks, a passing Amtrak train tooted its horn at us.

After many false starts, I’ve finally knuckled down and completed my form N-400, application for naturalization. Its sitting here, ready to fire in the mail in the morning, coincidentally 3 days before our 18th aniversary of arriving here in the US.

Let the waiting begin

Update: Thanks to the wonders of certified mail, I just got an email indicating my application arrived at the processing center in Vermont today, poetically enough the 18th aniversary.

Are radio buttons going out of style? When I was using turbo tax recently, I saw several cases where two or more logically mutually exclusive choices were represented by checkboxes rather than radio buttons. Here’s one of them:

Although, as the expression goes, never attribute something to malice that could be just plain incompetence, it does seem that the designers at Intuit must surely have made a considered choice in not using radio buttons anywhere in Turbotax.

Is there a reason for that? I wonder if “today’s youth” even grow up having used a radio with buttons like that - I suppose you could get through your life using an iPod etc and never encounter controls like an old fashioned radio. I think even radios themselves muddy the waters on this: I recall the original radio in the 1987 Camry I used to drive had four or five radio channel buttons, but you could also use them in primitive chords: press two at the same time to select the virtual button between them.

UI affordances tend to have mirrored the world where possible, but perhaps on this front, the world is moving faster.

or- you know something is desperately wrong with your mail/calendar infrastructure when you see a note like this on a conference room door:

Reserved

8:30 - 9:30 a.m.
3/16/06

Outlook has been hanging, so
I wasn't able to submit an
electronic reservation

That’s the mark of a solid infrastructure. At least the printer worked.

Who knew when you’re embalmed they sew your anus closed and put little spikey plastic cups on your eyes to keep your eyelids closed?

I read this great book a couple of months ago - once I got started, I couldn’t put it down. Mary Roach has a hilarious stream of consciousness writing style; even while writing around a topic like death, all kinds of tangental asides are made. The book documents the history of how society had dealt with death and slowly learned about anatomy, and some of the strange things that happen to your body when you die (especially if you give your body to science).

Totally worth your time, and much funnier than Coal

I was wrong all this time - here I was thinking that problems were either intermittent or reproducible, but apparently some particularly talented people write software with problems that are both. Thank heavens this support tool lets people report this interesting class of problems!

You can’t make this stuff up!

Found a blog with some interesting comments today, so I figured I’d add my 2 cents.

Saw this comment about the ways in which UI design outside of the enterprise is vastly superior to that on the inside. How true is that? Mailbox storage limits, slow mail, poor mail/calendar integration. Arbitrary refusal of zip file attachments to email. This quote really did it for me:

If your Architecture Staff thinks that the answer to these problems is to write design standards that a committee spends 6 -18 months creating and then are put out on the corporate portal in a word document, you may need to look for a new job.

Hmmm

Moving on to a different topic, the lack of adoption of dynamic languages (python, ruby etc) by large coprorations. From my time at IBM, I feel that it’s not because of any technical reason so much as political. The big machine churns out Java tools and lots of Java developers, so its not politically savvy to try to get an application that doesn’t use Java supported in that environment. Which is a self-fulfilling prophesy. For better or worse (more likely worse) somehow Java has become the one true language.