2011

Around new years eve, Automattic’s Data team sends out an annual report — a summary of your blogging in the year that passed. It’s a verbosely written summary of which posts had the most traffic, which images had the most views and overall what happened to your blog. This year we bumped the design and featureset quite a bit and included lavish JavaScript & Canvas based fireworks (built, tweaked, made beautiful and open-sourced by Andy Skelton). We even managed to include Jetpack users this year (counting stats for as long as Jetpack has been installed and active).

A lot of hard work went in to making this happen, and as always it’s such a pleasure to watch my co-workers make magic happen. I invite you to see this blogs 2011 annual report:

Annual report: Noscope 2011 in blogging

Pills

While listening to my favorite podcast the other day, one host casually threw out this statement, which is all it takes to infuriate me:

I don’t believe in pills

Well good for you. And real fucking good you don’t have allergies. Or Pneumonia.

In all fairness, this is a statement that I hear all the time from all sorts of people. It’s also a statement that probably shouldn’t be taken at face value; I’m sure the host in question was referring to plain headache pills or even vitamin pills. While I’m at it, let me clarify that I harbor a tremendous respect for this particular host, and he does believe in vaccines so he’s not a moron. So let’s not make this about him. Which is why, in the interest of putting myself in the opposing viewpoint, there are many reasons why you might want to avoid some pills. Multi-vitamin pills may or may not work, and if you eat right: fish, vegetables, meat or chickpeas, you’re probably better off without ‘em. Also, make sure you get lots of sunlight so you can skip the D-vitamins. It’s probably also better to search for the root cause of your headache (did you remember to hydrate?) than to eat a painkiller. Finally, there’s a lingering concern that some pills, especially pills involving hormones, have serious side-effects we might not know about until the next generation.

That’s all good and well. But the statement still kills me. “I don’t believe in pills”. Well fuck you: pills can save lives. Pills can cure you. Pills can relieve your pain. Pills can give you a decent life despite chronic illnesses or even ease the passage of someone with a terminal disease. Sure, some of those pills have side-effects, but sometimes you’d rather experience the side-effects than the effects of the illness for which you’re eating the pills in the first place. I personally prefer to eat antihistamines and be just a little bit tired all the time over not being able to breathe. In fact, I really love those pills, despite their side-effects, and I sure as hell believe in those pills. Because those pills work.

I’m not out to lambast anyone for this particular brand of ignorance; everyone is entitled to a modicum of stupidity. But I want to shine a light on the fact that saying “I don’t believe in pills” makes you sound like a dumb douchebag. It’s a simplistic view of life and you could at the very least augment your opinion by clarifying that you prefer not to eat pills if there’s a readily available alternative to your particular needs.

Or do you just want me to grind up your pills and put them in some OJ, sport?

Redesigned

Felt an urge to redecorate the other day, and so I threw some new paint on this old thing. I trimmed a lot of fat, went all HTML5, completely ignored Internet Explorer, threw in a Google web-font and made the site all responsive and scaling to smartphones. It was liberating. If you’re reading this in a feed-reader, I invite you to jump out of it for a brief gander.

For a while I’ve been working on the be-all end-all WordPress theme, a parent theme framework with all sorts of other buzzwords not including synergy. For this theme, however, I simply threw it all out and started with a mix of TwentyEleven (excellent HTML5 base) and the deprecated fallback theme you’re not actually supposed to use (turns out the fallback comments form was much to my liking; don’t worry, I copied the files to my theme directory).

I also deactivated a bunch of plugins. I’ve been a tremendous fan of Subscribe To Comments ever since I switched from Movable Type almost a decade ago (how time flies), but since the introduction of email subscriptions in Jetpack, that plugin is more-so a must-have for me (not to mention the fact that the stats module is now some of my bread and a lot of my butter). I have a bunch of to-do’s still, mostly related to finding a decent way to make my photos section interesting again.

Then of course, I’ve turned down the lights, something you either love or hate. I’ve found myself reading a lot on my smartphone, and somehow it works for me when the little device emits less light in my face. Black will do that to you, and I’m told it’s always a good choice. Plus, I’m a big fan of feed-readers (not so much Google Reader anymore), so if you prefer a white background you may go right back to your reader of choice and I will harbor no ill will towards you.

Part of my urge to redesign has been my want of going long-form. This blog has gone through a lot of iterations based on my whim at the time. Currently, this quote by Brent Simmons appeals to me:

Twitter and Facebook are great for organizing a revolution. Blogs are for explaining why we need one.

I’m not looking to start a revolution, and the truth is I may blog way less these days now that I’m juggling a toddler and a fantastic job. But what I do write, I want to keep, store, cross-reference and archive.

Hitch

All my heroes are dead now.

This night, Christopher Hitchens passed. He’d been struggling with cancer for a couple of years, yet he’d kept going despite knowing exactly what was in store for him.

A passing always hits a special part of your body, an organ you did not know was there. It’s like losing part of what helped keep your balance. It’s going to take some time to find a new balance in absence of that support.

When Arthur C. Clarke passed, he’d lived a lifetime and written more than one lifetimes worth of work. Knowing that, it was somewhat more easy to celebrate his life and work, knowing he’d more than fulfilled his promise. Douglas Adams life, on the other hand, was cut short like now Hitchens was. Surely both Adams and Hitchens have achieved more in their lives than many of us can ever hope to, but it still makes this no less tragic.

Hitch had a profound impact on me. Through his writing and speaking he logically approached the difficulty of the human condition. In no uncertain terms, Hitch managed to make actual sense of what might not have any sense in the first place. Not believing in God is not as easy as it sounds. The notion that this is it and even if you live a life unfulfilled in the end you’ll return to the void, that is a hard pill to swallow. Somehow it puts the injustice of the world in an even starker contrast.

Through this, Hitch taught me that what I need to strive for in life is to have more good days than bad days. He taught me what I want for my own deathbed; to have made some impact in the lives of the people I spent it with, to hopefully have been an invisible support to give balance. You were that support to me, Hitch, and like walking a staircase missing a step, I expect to stumble in your absence. I will do my best to find a new balance and help others do so. And I will tell my daughter about you.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it
– Thucydides

Quick thoughts on the new Google-Bar

When Larry Page took over the reins from Eric Schmidt, apparently one of his first decrees was that all of Googles properties were to look prettier. A team of designers came up with the new design, featuring greys, curry reds, whites and a black top-bar which featured sharing options and notifications. Now the black bar is being rid of, in favor of a more minimal Google Bar:

This is what it looks like in my Gmail (by the way, if you haven’t received this bar yet, here’s how you can get it now):

Collapsing the black bar certainly gives some much welcome extra room (especially welcome in Maps and Reader). Also, I personally never used the plethora of links that sat right at the top of the page starting from left, so the collapsing of those into a dropdown menu makes some sort of sense.

The new bar is now without weirdness, though. First of all, in the implementation I’ve tried (by using the cookie hack linked earlier), the Google logo dropdown menu invokes on both hover and click. I’m personally a fan of click, since hover always feels slow to me, but it gets weird if you’re used to the Google logo taking you to the homepage. Take Gmail, for example, clicking the Gmail logo (which by the way is gone now), you’d be taken to your inbox. To get to your inbox now, you have to click the left-arrow that sits on top of your email.

It’s also a bit wierd that the Google.com homepage features a different Google-bar:

… it’s obvious when you think about it, of course: you can’t have two colorful logos and two searchboxes competing on the same page. Oh by the way, that black dropdown shown in the screenshot above is not invoked by yours truly, it’s now shown by default when you visit the Google homepage. But at least they killed off the horrific white fade they had a while back.

It’s clear Google is in a state of flux at the moment. Some products are killed off, others are mutilated. At the same time, Google is prettier and more consistent than ever. Here’s hoping the dust settles at some point, and what made Google cool gets reintroduced.

Sync

For years my lunatic Apple friends have asked me: “when are you going to get a Mac?”. When I finally did, they started asking me: “when are you going to get an iPhone?”. As iOS is growing increasingly more useful with good notifications and over-the-air updates, my answer has been trimmed down to when it has a Gmail app that’s as good as the Android one. “Gmail with IMAP works great” is the usual knee-jerk reaction and “what’s so special about the Gmail app?” the followup question. I’m thinking perhaps it’s time I change my stock answer. I think my new response will be: sync.

This morning on my way to work I was listening to Macbreak Weekly. A bunch of my heroes, including John Gruber, were talking about iCloud sync and the problems some of them were experiencing. Tonya had factory reset her iPhone several times trying to get contacts to sync properly. Andy jokingly suggested the merging of contacts was painful and would sometimes merge 17 different versions of the same contact into a lean 12. Chris suggested it was a good idea to make sure you had a backup of the contacts, calendar and email setup you considered “canonical”, before embarking on your iCloud adventure. When the team started talking about the supposed iOS 5 battery drain, iCloud was almost universally assumed responsible for this.

Grubers level-headed approach was that, while he apparently had no problems himself, he did believe Apples iCloud transition was going to be monumentally difficult and compared it to stepping from solid ground on to a boat while carrying valuable trinkets. Transitioning MobileMe customers to a new free setup, making sure not only calendars, email and contacts sync, but also documents, was bound to generate some headaches, but they’ll pass in time, he suggested. I agree, I’m sure things’ll improve once Apple is on the boat.

Perhaps there is something to be said about Apples approach to sync. As much as they tout that “the truth is in the cloud” — as Yogi Berra would say: that’s only true when it’s true. It’s no secret Apple loves native apps. Native apps run faster, smoother, nicer than web-apps. You’ll hear many chant this, they might even use allegories such as “being closer to the metal” when describing why a web-app can never be as good as a native app. Let me tell you this: Yogi Berra doesn’t care. If it works, it works. If the app is good, it’s good. If things sync, things sync. And if they don’t sync properly, they don’t sync properly.

Googles overarching approach to sync is to not sync. Push the changes immediately. When you add a bookmark to your Chrome browser, a teensy signal is immediately sent to Googles bookmark sync server pushing the change. When you finish typing a word in Google Docs, changes are saved. There is no sync, because there are not copies of files anywhere. There is only one file. There is only one email. There is only one contact. You’ll never have to worry about whether your Android phone, tablet, or Macbook has the most recently edited version of your document, or which one has the most complete contact, or which calendar you added an event to. Because everything is always in sync. It just works.

You’d think it would get muddy if you scratched the surface and peeked underneath. If you do, you’ll find that Android sync is actually asynchronous, and that if you use Google Docs’ offline editing capabilities, you’ll actually end up with some of the same sync challenges that Apple is facing: which version is the right version? Somehow I’ve never once had a problem with this, though. I don’t know if it’s because Google started with the web-apps and built native apps and offline sync at a later time, but I have no trust issues with Google getting my sync right. I know that if I visit google.com/contacts and edit a contact, my changes will propogate to all my devices seamlessly. I never have to worry about losing contacts, losing appointments, losing emails, getting corrupt data, or even backing up. While these words may smell like famous last words, I wouldn’t even think of backing things up. I expect it to work, I trust that it will work, and has done so far.

Compared to the flaming hoops I had to jump through to get just calendars, contacts and Gmail to sync on my wifes iPhone, using an Android device is just a relief.

The Assassination of Google Reader by the Coward Google+

I’m pretty excited about the visual shakeup that’s going on at Google these days. Gmail and Calendar are prettier than ever, and it looks like there’s even some cues that align with Android now. Google Reader was one of the last properties to get the overhaul, and I was rather nervous about the announced Google+ integration.

I was totally unprepared for the scorched earth tactic Google employed, though. It appears that Google, after applying the new look, systematically uprooted every pretty little flower that made Reader what it was. Google then ground up all the flowers into mulch, burned the mulch, and salted the ground.

What made Reader so great? The social stuff. For every feed item you could click “Share”, and other Reader users who followed you would then get a customized RSS feed with your shares. You could even add a small comment to the top of the shared feed item. This spurned quite a lot of discussion, some of which I’ve archived here. From a “simplify your product line, focus on fewer products”, I completely understand why Google did this. Google+ already supports sharing and commenting, so why not share directly to Google+ instead of to a dedicated RSS feed? Unfortunately, that’s whiteboard philosophy at its best, and it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of why Readers social ecosystem worked so well. Ironic, because Google+ is Googles social initiative. It’s really quite embarrasing.

I started writing a long blog post about how Google could fix reader and keep the Google+ integration. I thought long and hard about solutions to every problem introduced by the massacre. In the end, the frankenbuild that would have resulted from my advice would have been terrible. I even went in to detail as to what exactly was massacred, but most of what I had to say has already been said elsewhere.

There’s a saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Let me be clear, I loathe that saying. It’s shortsigthed, backwards and reactionary. It stands in the way of progress, and indicates the previous iteration of whatever is being referred to, “ain’t broke”. Let me tell you a secret it took me half a lifetime to learn: nothing is ever perfect, and everything can be improved upon. The notion of “perfect” is silly and highly philosophical. Reader wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Finding people to follow was a ridiculous hassle, and advertising the fact that you were sharing on Reader was nigh impossible. But once you did follow someone in Reader, once you did start sharing and commenting on shared feed items, the experience was easy to follow, highly intimate and very enjoyable.

What remains is a good feed-reader, but everything social about it has been scrubbed. Good feed-readers are a dime a dozen, and the sharing features while really well-implemented, are not that hard to copy. It is not unlikely that someone will eat the lunch Google left on the table here. Perhaps Google is fine with that. Or perhaps they’ll listen to sense:

Dear Google,

Reader is about reading RSS feeds, so please make shared items show up in an RSS feed again. +1 buttons are fine, but “Share” and “Note” should append to your shared feed and nothing else. Google+ is also a fine way to advertise that you’re curating an RSS feed. A theoretical integration with the circles might even make sense. But keep discussions, feed items and shares in Reader — where it belongs.

Ode to Microwave Oatmeal

It’s the simple things, once in a while. Mix 1 cup rolled oats with 2,5 cups of water and microwave at 800 watts for 4 minutes. It’s a good thing.

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