On her way out of the house in the morning, my wife said: “Please remember to close all the windows. The gardener is coming today.”

“Yes honey.”

“I just cleaned the house. If you forget, the house will be full of grass dust when I come back.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Please write a note to remind yourself.”

I have a history of forgetting to do things around the house, I can’t blame her for insisting. So I wrote a note.

When Air France flight 447 was reported missing, news reports blamed storms over the Atlantic. As a frequent traveler, this didn’t make sense to me. Then reports started coming out blaming the pitot tubes that measure an airplane’s speed. It turns out that both Airbus and Air France already knew of problems with the pitot tubes and were in the process of replacing them.

My outrage is this: why wasn’t GPS technology used to determine the airspeed? The on-board computer could have compared a calculated speed using GPS data to the speed readings from the pitot tubes, and automatically warned the pilot. The Airbus A330 has state of the art avionics including GPS according to their site. If free or really inexpensive iPhone apps like V-Cockpit GPS and MotionX-GPS can tell Jane and Joe how fast they are going, why can’t Airbus do so?

Further, why hasn’t America’s FAA or Europe’s EASA aviation authorities required that GPS information be used as a backup to pitot tubes? Commercial airplanes have several pitot tubes for redundancy. But if one stops working due to freezing weather over the Atlantic, then all of them are likely to stop working for the same reason. An airplane would need an alternate method of measuring speed, not more tubes. It is a crying shame that a proven technology like GPS was not used.

We programmers are used to being blamed for failures. Sometimes the blame is well deserved, like the spectacular explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket (see video). Other times, the fault is with management, like the failure of the FBI’s $170 million Virtual Case File (VCF) project. In this case, our profession could have easily saved 228 lives and hundreds of millions of euros.

I was very excited when I read David Pogue’s May 6 review in the New York Times about a new “personal, portable […] wireless hot spot” that I could take with me anywhere. The Verizon MiFi was released about 10 days later. With three planned trips coming up and hotels charging $10 to $15 a day for Internet access, buying one was an easy decision.

What Is It?

The MiFi is a stylishly designed credit card-sized device. It connects to the cellular network much like laptop cellular cards, with a difference: the MiFi is wireless, and a router. Simply turn it on, wait about 15 seconds, and you are online. That simple. And being a router too, you can have up to five devices (laptops, iPhone, etc.) online at the same time.

The subscription cost is $40/month for up to 250MB of data or $60/month for a generous 5GB/month quota.

My Experience

The installation requires that you connect it to a computer via the supplied Micro-USB cable, resulting in a disk appearing in the Finder or Windows Explorer. The disk contains all the needed software. In my case, I had to unplug and re-plug the MiFi a couple of times before the Mac could see it (Engadget had to try a different Mac, see their review). Once installed, you’re done. Running the VZAccess Manager afterwards is optional.

The MiFi worked largely as advertised. Speeds are decent, and once installed, using it is trivial — just turn it on. I have used it in two hotels and two airports so far without a hitch. I’ve also used it with my iPhone in an area where there was no AT&T EDGE data signal.

Sleepless Nights

Once upon a time, turning a device off did what you thought it should do: cut off power so that not a single milliamp continues to flow. Not so anymore: turning a device off or on these days is like submitting a request and asking it to please, kindly do so. It may or may not. And the MiFi flat out refuses to honor your request if it’s connected to anything.

I had the MiFi connected to my MacBook to keep it charged then I closed the MacBook to get some sleep. But I kept hearing the CD-ROM spinning briefly every minute or so, indicating that the MacBook was starting up. I waited to see how long this would go on and gave up after some time. I got up, unplugged the MiFi from the MacBook and plugged it into the wall charger. The power LED light turned on. I tried to turn it off, to no avail; it kept turning on again! The MiFi will only sleep if it’s running on battery.

Another thing, really minor: I found the two green LEDs to be too bright. I mention this because reducing the unnecessary brightness is also an easy way to increase battery life.

Overall, if you are on the road for any significant length of time, the MiFi is well worth the subscription cost.

[This article was posted using the MiFi]

What if the folder’s icon gave you an idea of how often you use it? In real life, a wrinkle here and a scratch there lets you know that the folder wasn’t just purchased, but on our virtual desktops, they all look spiffy. Keith Lang takes a stab at this and a pretty good one too:

The icons provide nice visual clues but without adding color and other distracting elements like a badge. In other words, just about right. See the full article here.

Yes, I know. I know. The original Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984. Which, by the way, happens to be one day after this immigrant landed at JFK. I have always wondered how Steve knew about it and very much appreciate that he waited for my arrival. Very sweet! But I digress.

When It All Started

Today marks the 25th birthday of my very own Macintosh 128K. Yes sirree, after seeing a Mac for the first time, it was love at first sight. The Mac was a quantum leap and made the IBM PC look like a tiny incremental upgrade over the Superbrain computer that I had access to back home. Heck, the IBM PC even had just one processor whereas the Superbrain had two (two, I tell ya!) zippy Zilog Z80 microprocessors!

There is nothing magical about this date, February 27, 1984, except that after my encounter with a Mac two weeks earlier, this is how long it took me to borrow the money from my uncle and have it transferred from the UAE. Paid full retail price, $2,495. There was a waiting list but the sales guy, Brett Latzko, was happy to let me have the one that was on his desk. He also threw in free issues of these new magazines called Macworld and St. Mac. The latter went to magazine heaven after only a few issues.

(BTW, it’s funny how memory works. I remember the name of the sales rep but not the name of the Washington, DC store where I bought my Mac.)

Epilogue

Nine months later, my Mac and I travelled to the UAE to spend Christmas with my parents. Mom worked at Total ABK, the local operation of the French oil company. Macs in Abu Dhabi were considerably more expensive than in the U.S., so the head of Total ABK (bonjour Monsieur Naylies!) was happy to pay me full price, $2,495.

Twenty five years later, I am typing this post on a Mac.

I just finished reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. The book describes Mitch Kapor’s valiant effort at creating Chandler, a software product that was supposed to be the mother of all PIMs. Scott was there from the start and describes the various mistakes made, such as not having a finalized user interface more than two years into development, switching from peer-to-peer to a CalDAV-based approach late in the game, and so forth.

Mitch is the guy who invented Lotus 1-2-3; he’s been around the block once or twice. The book is a worthwhile read for anyone involved in a team software development effort, or about to embark on one.

Dreaming in Code was a Christmas gift from a colleague, and I suspect that her choice of books is not coincidental. See, we’re starting work on this major new software project. I am not at liberty to disclose much about it, so I’ll call it Project Luceen for now, after my daughter’s middle name. We haven’t starting coding yet — the developers are wrapping up work on another project and I am finalizing the user interface and writing the specs. But while reading the book, the following passage on page 260 caught my attention:

“Success is a by-product of iron-willed restraint — a choice firmly made and vociferously reasserted at every challenge to limit a project’s scope. Where you find software success stories, you invariably find people who are good at saying no. [,,,] the successful programmer thrives because of, not in spite of, constraints.”

Most people think of featuritis as the constant adding of new features, from the meaningful to the superfluous. Kind of like the artist who does not know when to stop working on a painting. But it’s more than that: featuritis is not having a solidly defined set of features before development starts. This is partly what dogged SuperLab 4.0’s development. In the case of Chandler, the feature set was a moving target.

After reading the book, I went back to the specs document and swapped items 1 and 2! The screen snapshot below is of the top of the very first page — yes, even before the table of contents.

Last week, Windows 7 became available for public download and beta testing. Paul Thurrott reports on a new feature called Aero Shake:

“Simply click and hold on the grabbable area of any floating (non-maximized) window and shake your hand left and right vigorously. When you do so the first time, all other open windows are minimized. Repeat the action, and those minimized windows will be restored to their prior state.”

Nice. What’s more, Paul provides a link to a utility that makes the feature available on Windows XP and Vista.

In my earlier post about iWork 09 icons, I didn’t mean to imply that all Macworld folks are now middle aged! Here is a picture of what must be Macworld’s youngest exhibitors, Forest Fang and Steve Abbagnaro:

Fresh out of high school, they have developed tooble, a nifty utility for capturing YouTube movies and saving them on your Mac. You can then download the movies to your iPhone via iTunes.

Sebastiaan de With provides a nice roundup of the UI design changes in iWork 09, newly released by Apple.

Size Does Matter

The icon changes in particular caught my attention. But where young Sebastiaan sees “all sorts of nice UI changes and icons”, this middle aged man sees (no pun intended) a welcome relief to my eyes: the icon dimensions are bigger, and the icons themselves are larger within the frame. Here are four examples:

The new ones are on the bottom row. Notice how the Skip icon fills more of the available area. In the new Comment icon, I can now actually see the X close icon. And in the new Bigger and Smaller icons, the up and down triangles are much easier on the eye.

I am happy that Apple is paying attention to its older customers. They are everywhere. While at Macworld Expo this week, I noticed how many participants were middle age and older folks, and not just attendees — even programmers.

Another reason to applaud this revamping of icons is the higher density of displays. While the previous icons looked good on the 1200 x 1920 pixels of a 24″ monitor, they looked tiny on the same 1200 x 1920 pixels of a 17″ MacBook Pro with a high density display.

Not Just iWork

These changes are not limited to iWork. The following two screen snapshots are from Apple’s Texas Hold’em game for iPhone, versions 1.0 and 1.1 respectively. In 1.1, the cards are vastly more readable.

Prepare For The Future

Apple has made it clear that it is seeking resolution independence on its displays. I will not be surprised the least bit to find out that, once resolution independence is fully implemented in software, the company will start manufacturing displays of higher and higher density. Inappropriately designed icons will start looing smaller and smaller.

I wish a Happy New Year to all my family near or far, friends everywhere, and the fantastic team that we currently have in place at Cedrus.