Tag: professor

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Deadprogrammer’s Hierarchy of Web Needs

I recently received a phone call from a recruiter. He wanted to lure me away to some “big company” that still had “small company feel” to participate in a “redesign of a major website”. He felt like all of these things, as well as “a well stocked kitchen” were big selling points.

I am a veteran of many website redesigns, major and minor. I’ve come to dread the word “redesign” because very frequently it meant taking a perfectly good website and making it significantly worse, and then through major struggles making it marginally beter. In the past I wrote a rather bloated article titled “The Russian Tea Room Syndrome” about this. Today I would like to write a bit more about this, as this topic rarely leaves my mind and my life.

Earlier in my career, I had very little influence over the redesign process, but this is changing. This is the primary reason why my job title has the shameful word “Architect” in it: I write code and configure servers, but I want my say in strategery as well.

So, Michael, you might ask, what is the problem with redesigns? Aren’t redesigns about making websites better? Well, many redesigns suffer from not following IBM’s famous motto.

IBM has one of the best corporate mottos ever: CRUSH and DESTROY. Uh, I mean THINK. They even give out props with the word “THINK” on it and publish THINK magazine.

Many redesigns happen simply as a knee jerk reaction: oh, look company X is doing Y and using Z. When you sit in a meeting and somebody is describing a redesign purely in terms of things other people do, you are likely in trouble. No thinking is involved at all.

But sometimes it’s the type of thinking that is going on that is the problem. You have to think about the relative importance of things.

I have a picture by famous graffitti artist Banksy hanging on my wall. It is a metaphor about true and false importance.

In 1943 a Brooklyn College professor Abraham Maslow outlined what is now known as Maslow’s Hierarchy: a pyramid that ranks human needs. It looks like prior to him nobody really gave a lot of thought to relative importance of pooping and morality. Well, maybe a little – there’s a Russian idiom for a person of untrustworthy nature that originated during WWI when soldiers relieved themselves in rows, next to specially dug trenches: “I would not take a dump next to this person”. Also see “I hope they serve beer in hell”

Here’s Maslow’s pyramid in all of its glory:

I decided I’d come up with the hierarchy of web needs:

standard adherence: strict XHTML, CSS, etc

choice of technology: language, CMS, OS, cloud/servers, etc

other features: widgets, games, microformats

multimedia: video, podcasts, interactive flash

design: graphical elements, typography, pleasing layout

semantic web: metadata, tagging

usability: text size, image size, logical layout, uncluttered interface, site name/urls, browser support

community features: comments, ratings, feeds

googliness: search, speed, security

content qualities: usefulness, interest, freshness, uniqueness

content: text, images, links

In my opinion unsuccesful redesigns happen when people start from the wrong end of the pyramid (always skipping the first step: I’m yet to meet anybody with power who thinks about these things are important).

I will expand on this in my next post.

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The Ancient Art of MetrocardTM Puppetry

It seems like humans will try to fold and rearrange just about anything. Paper, money, postcards. Some people make a living folding their members in a surprising manner. Others fold dollar bills. What chance did humble MetrocardTM stand from being turned into an art material?

A couple of days ago I found this MetrocardTM triacontahedron sitting abandoned on a subway staircase. I’ve seen these around in token clerk booths, but never up close before.

I managed to take it apart and put it together again, and the construction is rather ingenious. I’ll try making a few of these together and post the instructions then.

Of course, other people have been doing this for a long time. Here’s a guy who created purses, boxes, stars and pencil holders out of them. An entertainer that goes by the moniker Professor Puter has a whole load of tricks, such as metrocard shooter, star, bug etc. Here’s a fine specimen of MetrocardTM art too. If you want to annoy your cubicle-mates even more than you already do – MetrocardTM clicker is the right project for you.

Ad:

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News in Underpeople Research

CNN : “In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells.
…
Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.”

Colonel P.M.A Linebarger might have been a little bit off with predicting the timing of Underpeople creation.


(part of the cover design for “Best of Cordwainer Smith” by Darrell Sweet)

To quote professor Farnsworth: “You were all for preserving Hitler’s brain, but putting it inside a shark’s body – all of a sudden that’s going too far!!”

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Morning Deadwood

People were filthy and smelly in the olden days. And HBO capitalizes on amazingly good historical dramas teeming with filthy, period authentic characters. First there’s Carnivale, a mystical drama set at the turns of the Century. It has everything : carnies, okies, tarot cards, old cars, Art Deco and Craftsman interiors, mysteries, psychics, telekinesis, Knights Templar, evil preacher played by brilliant Clancy Brown aka Mr. Eugene Krabs from Spongebob and a lot of filthy people. And absolute tivo-worthy show.

Then there’s Deadwood, set during the gold rush. A high quality historical show, Deadwood writers try to stay as authentic as possible, hygiene and all. Famous hacker JWZ is not a fan: “It’s like watching paint dry. Dirty, foul-mouthed paint, but paint nonetheless.” I guess he is just not used to “Milch-speak“, a very peculiar style of dialogue that the show’s creator and writer, David Milch uses for his characters.

Familiar to fans of NYPD Blue, Milch-speak is a rather weird . I real life I encountered Milch-speak being used by often smart people with difficult and important jobs, who although lacking formal education, try to sound educated. It’s rather hard to explain, but I’ll try. First of all, milch-speakers use a lot of long words, meanining of which they more often know than not. They often mispronounce them though. The sentence structure is strange and tortured. It’s almost overly formal, Victorian in nature, and at the same time involves elements of Brooklyn Yiddish. It’s like as if listening to a very profane Victorian Yoda from Brooklyn. The sentence structure often resembles programmer-speak, so many logical twists and turns it has. There’s also lot’s of irony and slang.

Here’s a quote from recent episode: “Bad news or tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so let’s by all means plant poles across the land and festoon the c*cksuckers with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive.”

The character who spoke that line, appropriately named saloon owner and master criminal Al Swearengen, according to Entrepreneur magazineinspired David Tufte, a professor at Southern Utah University’s business school to use Deadwood as a source for his students.

Here’s Al staring at me from an ad inside special Deadwood themed subway train:

Subway seats wrapped in special plastic to resemble old-timey leather chairs. Add a lot of filthy passengers and you’ll get a full Deadwood experience.

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Armonk Blue

Speaking of the color. Here’s a magazine that was thrown out by some professor at my college:

IBM Systems Journal Volume 21 #4 1982:
“With the use of the computer as the art tool, our cover symbolizes the interaction between man and machine. Two of the papers in this issue discuss usability considerations for the design and development of interactive systems”.

There is no credit for the cover art, but my guess that it would be attributed to J.F. Musgrave who is listed as Art Director.

Screen closeup:

I like a lot of things about this picture. The sleeveless white shirt, the ugly tie, the beer gut, the coffee mug, the expression on the headcount’s face. The ASCII art on the screen. The eery transition effect in the background.

Don’t you think that “Armonk Blue” would be a good name for a Benjamin Moore paint?

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Disturbing Weekend Update With Deadprogrammer

The most useful thing I did this weekend was organizing my papers. It’s kind of like therapy for me. The amount of paper crap that accumulates on my desk is amazing. Junk mail, bills, magazines. Well, I’ll describe my organizational system for you. It consists of three stages.

1) Intake: basically heaps of paper on all flat and not flat surfaces in my apartment. Care must be taken to hide paper receipts from Tilde the cat, or she’ll file them in her stomach. Receipts are a delicacy for Tilde.

2) Stage one: a stack of three milk crates with folders inside. There are these special bound folders books that I bought at Staples that have partitions for various bills and documents. There is a special folder where I file stuff for the Tax Man throughout the year.

3) Stage three: big plastic boxes where I file away older stuff.

Among other things I found an old box that held Christmas cards and tip envelopes from my job as a doorman. Among them was a card from Professor Samuels. Disturbing, huh?

Also disturbing is the fact that I learned about the particular Staples where I usually go on office supply buying binges. In the past it used to be a Waldbaums supermarket that burned down in the seventies. 20 firefighters were standing on the roof dousing the fire when it collapsed. The ones that fell in the aisles mostly made it, but 6 that landed on the shelves (yes, yes, those gondola shelves) died (I don’t really understand why, but that’s what I’ve read in Bay News).

Disturbed enough? No? Well, I recently learned that Bryant Park used to be a cemetery. There.

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My Money and My Sanity Went To Miskatonic University

Visited good old Miskatonic U (also known as Brooklyn College) today. I needed to beg for a stupid requirement waiver. I hate organized education.

Some professor at the CS department threw out a bunch of old computer books from the departmental library. I picked up some, among them “System/360-370 Assembler Language (DOS)” by Kevin McQuillen. Among other coolness, every chapter in the book was illuminated by a photograph of a programmer or a group of programmers.

See, in 1978 programmers always looked cool.

Even just repairing perforated tape, Tom Jennings’ favorite medium.

Or sitting at a terminal and not even looking at the blinkenlights.

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Yagi Decorated


You know, most New Yorkers don’t look up much. No matter how cool everything is around them, they don’t want to look like tourists. But I am secure enough in my New Yorkedness to walk around looking at skyscrapers and taking pictures with my touristy looking camera.

This hideous yagi antenna is on a top of one of the old art deco buildings on 46th street. By the way, it turns out that it named “after Hidetsugu Yagi (1886-1976), Japanese electrical engineer” and not baba Yaga as I thought. Actually it should be called “Yagi-Uda” because he invented it with the help of Dr. Shintaro Uta.

Looks like nobody cared much for Dr. Yagi’s work in Japan at the time. Of course, they regretted it after they discovered that it was used by the Allies as a radar antenna. This reminded me about how Pyotr Ufimtsev’s dense paper titled “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction”, which was completely ignored by the Soviet military scientists, gave Denys Overholser, a Skunk Works radar specialist, all the theory needed to build F117 stealth fighter.

Indeed, yagis are very useful. You can extend the range of wi-fi networks with a yagi made out of Pringles can (gotta build one) and I’ve heard of a guy that made a yagi for his cell phone, so that he could access weak cell networks while biking across America. They may not look very good, but they have a kajillion uses in radio and tv.

Too bad there is no book about Dr. Yagi on Amazon, but here is a rather interesting site about Japanese inventors. Here’s Dr. Yagi’s statue and here’s an iteresting quote that I’ve found: “US War Crimes Commission witnessed that Professor Hidetsugu Yagi was the first Japanese “to speak proudly of his work instead of denying it all.”

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Oral Picard on a Spiral Staircase or Otterby dAttabroth

I’ve started what I am hoping to be my last semester at Brooklyn College. I am taking a speech course and a database management course.

The speech course is taught by an professor from NYU who looks very much like Captain Picard. He repeats himself a lot, tells cheesy stories and does not like my comments. The syllabus says that we “will be graded on oral performance”. Yeah, huh. I guess if I don’t miss too many classes and don’t piss him off too badly I should pass. Oh, and the class starts at 9 AM on Sunday. And there are no places where I can get an espresso. Arrrgh.

The professor who teaches the second class annoys me in oh so many ways. First of all he always smiles. Literally, says every word with a smile. Secondly, he teaches by example rather than by explaining. In the speech class we talked about non-verbal communication, and the professor didn’t much like my comment about a test for engineering thinking , which goes like this: you ask a person to quickly define a spiral staircase.


A person who thinks like an engineer will explain verbally , for instance, that a spiral staircase is a staircase that was bent into a spiral. A non-engineering type will try to explain with gestures : “you know, it’s a staircase like [whistles and makes spiraling gestures]” or examples – “ya know – like that staicase at Bill’s house”

How did you do?

Well, instead of explaining, this database professor gives examples. And spends lots and lots of time writing example tables and data on the blackboard (when he could have just given everybody xeroxed examples from his notes).

His accent is pretty heavy. I’ll write phonetic spelling of some of his pronunciations, and you try to guess what it means:

“Otterby” – “order by “
“sIkkle” – “single “
“valU” – “value”
“noW” (this is a tricky one) – “NULL”
“dAttabroth” – “\date of birth”

That’s not too hard to get used to though.

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Testing. Testing. 1. 2. 3?

When programmers test their code, the need to come up with some kind of test data. And most programmers are not very creative (just as everybody else). Very often you can log into various websites with the login “test@test.com” and password “test”. I am afraid to even think about what test@test.com’s inbox contains. It’s a real email address you know, the emails don’t bounce.

Here are some interesting test strings:

Of course, everyone knows the famous “Hello, World” test string. I’ve heard that for the first time it appeared in the bible, but I am not sure.

The other most famous test strings are “foo” and “bar”, which apparently come from foobar, which is derived from WWII slang. FUBAR is a relative of SNAFU.

A professor that taught VB in college told us, that about the time he was developing a database application for a hospital. His favorite test person was James T. Kirk and his mates, and during testing the poor captain got every imaginable sort of ailment. With funny comments.

When I worked at iXL, our tech lead, a German by the name of Lothar, liked to use a string “4711” as most people use “foo”. Once, in a meeting he asked if anyone new why he was using “4711”. He was pretty surprised that I new what “4711” was. “4711” is what some of you may know as Koeln Water, which was the first commercially produced perfume. That’s where the term “cologne” came from. And “4711” is the number of the building where Koeln Water was produced.

I use “1729” for my testing needs sometimes.