Crushing souls for fun and profit

The BBC commemorates – I won’t say ‘celebrates’ – 25 years of PowerPoint.  And the statistics are alarming.

The average PowerPoint session, apparently, runs for 250 minutes.  More than four hours!  I still feel bad about a presentation that overran to an hour and a half.  I’d like to say I can’t imagine what it would be like to sit through an “average” 4-hour PowerPoint session, but I can.  All too clearly.

And the average PowerPoint slide shows 40 words.  Admittedly this figure is distorted by a former colleague, the splendid Jane Smith, whose average PowerPoint slide showed 265.4 words, but surely even Jane’s prodigious output can’t account for more than 0.07 of that average.

Anyway, the article does also offer a few basic tips on the dangers of PowerPoint and how to avoid them (plus, from the comments, the delightful coinage “PowerPoint karaoke,” which I am officially adding to my vocabulary), and I’ll throw in one anecdote of my own.

A few years back I did a “training the trainers” course.  Although this was well into the PowerPoint era, the lady who ran the course did all her slides on printed transparencies on an old-skool overhead projector, and made us do the same.  How strange, we thought: if you were projecting off a laptop you wouldn’t need to faff around taking one slide off, putting it carefully down, transferring the protective tissue paper to the other side and placing and adjusting the new slide on the projector.  You could get straight onto the next slide and completely avoid all that delay.  Ah, she explained, but the time between slides was an open space.  You, and your trainees, could and should use it to invite questions, discussion or just reflection.  The slow turnaround between slides wasn’t a bug.  It was a feature.

In that moment, I became enlightened.

Those years in marketing taught me nothing

Darryl is running a competition: “If you were talking to an Oracle DBA what would be the top five features of SQL Server that you’d point out to them that makes SQL Server compelling?”

This was my reaction:

If I were talking to an Oracle DBA, the five compelling features I would point out would be ease of use, ease of use, ease of use, ease of use and ease of use.

The Oracle DBA would then roll his eyes, sigh condescendingly and reply, “You see, what you don’t understand is that Oracle isn’t a toy database.”

I would then punch him in the mouth, yell “Not so fucking smug now, are you, you fucker?” and then run away.

This is why I will never win any of Darryl’s competitions.

(In the interests of fairness I should note that this is exactly how Access users perceive software developers, so we have a few planks to take out of our own eyes too.)

MONIAC: adventures in analogue computing

Thanks to the wily Kirk Jackson and the, er, New Zealand Association of Economists, I had the pleasure this afternoon of seeing an unusual piece of computing history in action.  MONIAC, the Monetary National Income Analogue Computer, also known as the Phillips Machine, was an analogue computer invented by Bill Phillips (he of curve fame) to model and simulate the relationships between various economic factors.  Nothing unusual about that, except that it was invented in the 1940s... and instead of processing 0s and 1s, it processed water.  The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has one of the few Phillips Machines still around and in working order, and as part of a lunchtime session for the NZAE conference they had cranked it up and were demonstrating it.

The machine works by circulating water around a network of tanks, taps, pumps and pipes.  Values are represented by the levels of water in various tanks, parameters by opening and closing taps or moving valves up and down, and the key readouts of income and interest rates are recorded by pens moving against graph paper.  Water, of course, represents money, though demonstrator Geoff Bertram was careful to refer to it at all times as "the circulating medium."  I have to be a bit vague about what sort of things the various tanks and taps and throttles represented: explanations of the various bits in terms of private sector liquidity requirements and endogenous money supply undoubtedly made sense to the mainly economist audience but I'm afraid I struggled. Still, I gathered it was a pretty accurate simulation of the economic theories of the 1940s and 1950s; according to the demonstrator it effectively shut down a major debate of the time by convincing both sides that their arguments were actually compatible.

Of course, not being programmable, MONIAC can't be updated to reflect new factors and new economic conditions (such as globalisation).  The demonstrator did, however, relate how one lecturer used to set up two MONIACs, one representing the US economy and one representing the UK, hook up the relevant bits of piping between the two machines, and challenge two sets of students to do the best for "their" economy, so within the constraints of the model there was a certain amount of flexibility.

On the other hand, MONIAC's analogue approach still rivals the digital approach in some ways.  "It's solving nine simultaneous differential equations," noted the demonstrator.  Given the sophistication of modern numerical techniques, and the effort that has undoubtedly been poured into economic simulation and prediction, it's no surprise that the Phillips Machine has been superseded, but I suspect that ultimately the digital equivalents are just badly simulating water flow, only more flexibly and a lot faster.  One member of the audience, noting that the Phillips Machines had been used largely for educational purposes, asked Dr Bertram how he would present the same ideas now.  "I'd draw a hydraulic diagram," he replied.

This being a computer demo, of course, things did not go quite to plan; but this being an analogue computer demo, they went not to plan not through the usual syntax errors and unhandled exceptions, but instead because the bit of plastic representing the level of imports had fallen off and had to be stuck back on with blu-tack, and the export doohickey had become stuck against its housing.  Kernel fans will also be pleased to know that the Phillips Machine's ultimate failure mode is also described as "dumping," except in this case you end up with wet shoes and a massive carpet cleaning bill instead of just a nice convenient file.  "Now it sits in this bath here, and we've fitted a drain through to the outside," noted Dr Bertram ruefully.

(Incidentally, Bill Phillips was a New Zealander: connoisseurs of Kiwiana will therefore note that the use of blu-tack to hold the level of imports steady counts as Kiwi ingenuity, while the failure mode of spewing the "circulating medium," i.e. the national economy, all over the floor represents classic Kiwi ingenuity, or possibly Rogernomics.)

This highlights another interesting feature of the analogue approach: its unpredictability.  When the demonstrator was showing us "fiscal shocks" and "monetary shocks," he commented on how long the simulated economy took to react to stimuli such as suddenly injecting government investment or restricting lending.  "Sometimes they take 30 seconds, sometimes they take five minutes," depending on the mood of the machine.  Given the unpredictability of real economies, this in some ways seems like an attraction of the analogue approach. The downside? "Sometimes you'll be standing there talking about how things eventually come back to equilibrium, and everything's crashing and burning behind you."  At least when my demos tank they don't take national economies with them.

Due to short notice, I don't have any pictures, but Wikipedia does (as does NZIER at the link above), and if you're in Australia or the UK, I gather there are also kinda-maybe-working machines at Melbourne University and at the Science Museum.  There is also apparently one lost in Guatemalan jungle, so any budding Indiana Joneses of computing, now's your chance.

Five steps to WPF data visualisation

I've posted a breakdown of my "Quake" WPF data binding demo over at MindBlog.  This illustrates, step by step, how to evolve a user interface from a plain and traditional textual presentation to a basic but effective graphical design, paying only for what you use at each step.

Also, for mainlanders and Wellingtonians looking for slides and demos from the WPF talk, see immediately below.

Usability and the early typewriters

Riveting article about typewriters, the usability issues and trade-offs of the early designs, and how manufacturers used usability as a competitive edge.

On an unrelated note, "riveting article about typewriters" joins my list of Things I Would Have Bet Money I Would Never Say, hard on the heels of "life-changing book about town planning" and "turn left just after the emu farm."

RFID cat flaps

I'm about to move house and would like to fit a cat flap in my new place, but I'd prefer not to have an "always open" one, and I definitely don't want the cats to have to wear collars.

Since the cats are already chipped, it struck me that the obvious solution was a cat flap with a RFID scanner.

Unfortunately, the only reference I've found to such a thing says they only sell within Europe.  Does anybody know whether anyone imports them in New Zealand?

Adobe Update: a study in understanding usage patterns

I just fired up Acrobat Reader -- I beg your pardon, Adobe Reader -- and it decided it was time to install some updates.  When I said that was okay, it told me it was going to have to shut down Acrobat in order to do so.

As a techie, I understand why Acrobat feels this way, but as a user, I feel Acrobat has completely misjudged the moment.

I bring up Acrobat when, and only when, I want to read a document.  Usually, as soon as Acrobat has launched, I start reading.  Given that it takes Acrobat a little while to download the updates, by the time the restart-or-cancel prompt appears, the chances are better than 95% that I am right now in the middle of reading that document.  If I have a choice between continuing to read or shutting down the application and having to find my way back again later, I'll stick with continuing to read, thanks.

A better approach would be for Acrobat to install the updates as it shuts down, or the next time it starts.  In the former case, I have clearly finished reading, and it can beaver away in the background without bothering me.  In the latter case, although I clearly want to read something right now, I'm only going to be a bit delayed getting started, rather than losing my context to a shutdown-restart cycle.  The only wrong time for Acrobat to require a restart is when I am in the middle of a document; and yet this is exactly the time it chooses by default.

Anti-interaction interaction design

Bret Victor: "Today, a Perl programmer needs just four letters to invoke decades of research into filesystems and physical media: 'open.' A finely-tuned mergesort is available with the word 'sort,' and even more finely-tuned hashing algorithms require just a pair of brackets. Until machine learning is as accessible and effortless as typing the word 'learn,' it will never become widespread."

Reminds me of Joel Spolsky's observation of the different levels of abstraction of Microsoft and Google.

Visualisation methods

Visual Literacy: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. The "periodic table" metaphor is a bit stretched, and some of the entries feel like visualisations of specific data rather than adaptable methods, but it's a cool way to... uh... visualise all these different techniques.

In praise of jargon

Kathy Sierra: "Dinner conversations around my house often are about one of those two things--programming or horses--and most non-horse, non-developer folks might wonder if we're just making s*** up. But if you took away our jargon, the conversations would not just be slower, they'd be dumber."