Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Posted on by

Microsoft never met any problem they couldn’t make more complicated. You can see this in nearly everything they do, from relatively simple things like the Zune — way, way, way more fiddly than the iPod — to their mess of a mobile platform (really? a “Start” menu on my phone? Are you high?) to how they manage server settings for tools like IIS and SQL Server to, well, even Word and Excel these days. Trapped my increasing commoditization, they keep shoveling more and more features into tools into which almost no one dives deep — my bet is that 95% of all Word users have no idea what 95% of the features do. And yet they add and add and add, and Word gets slower and slower and slower.

Complication is sin in computing. Simple tools are better. This is a bit of a religious position, but my 20+ years in computing has left me with the strong opinion that a whole bunch of flexible, small, generalized tools is a way better solution that an proliferating patchwork of giant, inflexible programs dedicated to single tasks.

My current proof of this is Team Foundation Server, MSFT’s current offering in the source-control-and-work/bug-tracking world. It is, of course, the path of least resistance for the MSFT developing hordes (while the rest of the dev world uses tools like Subversion). I’m not writing code on this project, so I can’t speak to that side of the tool, but as a product manager I do know something about the bug-and-issue-tracking side of the thing. And it’s a friggin’ joke. Everything takes ninety more steps than it ought to. The only way to interact with it, really, is to install and use VISUAL STUDIO — there is a web client, but it sucks balls even from IE8. If you’ve used more lightweight, flexible tools like Bugzilla, working with backlog of items in TFS feels like assembling a ship in a bottle with a broken pair of tweezers.

Of course, TFS does come with a rich set of templating features, and is skinnable and has workflow features and is all kinds of customizable. It’ll talk to Excel for bulk entry, even!

And yet, here’s the rub: none of that shit really matters for 99% of the people who need an issue tracker. It’s a pretty simple use case, which is why so many of the popular tools are simple web apps with little in the way of system requirements: Management uses the list to figure out what needs doing; they set priorities, and assign items to developers. Developers use the list of things assigned to them to know what to work on, and in what order. Dialog ensues on each work item as required. Everything should be simple and straightforward. Nothing gets lost in the shuffle, because the universe of items is fairly simple and easy to see.

Not in the land of TFS, though. You’ve got a boatload of work item types to sort out (bug? enhancement? product backlog item? sprint backlog item? task? there’s MORE!), and there’s no way to change the type post-creation, which is an EXCELLENT way to ensure some double-entry and/or the loss of an item because it’s in the wrong type. It’s thick-client dependent, but even that interface looks like something from the Land that UX Forget (constant scrolling, e.g.). It just took me 10 minutes to find the “jump to item #” feature, for crying out loud.

Who comes UP with this shit? Are they fired yet? Christ.

Today’s Most Interesting Headling

Posted on by

Calif. School Team’s Success Linked to Snoop Dogg.

Apparently, Snoopp (real name: Calvin Broadus) has created a youth football league in urban LA. And it’s a success.

Broadus, 38, launched the league in 2005 with $1 million of his own money after noticing that much of urban Los Angeles had no football for boys ages 5 to 13. He’s since invested about $300,000, Wadood said. The league now has 2,500 kids enrolled.

Dept. of Overwhelming Notificiations

Posted on by

For various reasons, today I have my calendar up on:

  • My Mac’s iCal
  • Outlook inside VMWare
  • OWA on my client laptop
  • Outlook on my corporate laptop
  • My iPhone

Just now, all 5 of them began noisily alerting me to my first meeting today.

The Onion Scores Again

Posted on by

Christ Turns Down 3-Year, Multimillion Dollar Deal To Coach Notre Dame:

SOUTH BEND, IN—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Savior of All Mankind, and current defensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee State, said Monday that He would not accept Notre Dame’s 3-year, $5.6 million offer to coach the Fighting Irish. “I love Notre Dame and respect their football legacy, but no matter what you’ve accomplished before coaching there, once you’re a Golden Domer, the expectations, frankly, are unrealistic,” said Christ, whose family has been involved with the university since its founding. “I’ve had people turn on Me before, and it really put Me through hell. But even more importantly, I’ve made a commitment to stay with the Blue Raiders through 2015.” Christ denied asking Notre Dame to remove His likeness from the building overlooking their stadium, saying He liked a good joke as much as anybody.

Dept. of GAAAAAA

Posted on by

250px-Krampus.pngIn parts of Europe, Santa is accompanied by [Krampus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus), which is deeply, deeply fucked up if you ask me.

It’s like they know right where I live

Posted on by

Space: 1970: “This blog is dedicated to the science fiction films and television series of the 1970s – and very early 80s – including such nostalgic favorites as Star Wars, Space: 1999, UFO, Space Academy, the original Battlestar Galactica, Jason of Star Command, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Logan’s Run and many others.”

His coverage of Ark II is particularly fine. I hadn’t realized that the jetpack they used was an actual, working Bell prototype.

Oh, Microsoft. Do you EVER stop failing?

Posted on by

I had a little free time tonight, so I thought I’d (finally) download the expansion to Fallout 3 (which, by the way, isn’t available any other way). Turns out, I don’t have enough Microsoft magic script to do so, I I tried to buy more, both on the XBox itself and on the XBox Live web site.

Cryptic error messages ensued, followed by a frustrating call with idiot tech support people with a tenuous at best grasp of English. The links are true. It’s some goofball, poorly implemented halfwit “fraud prevention” thing. What’s absurd, btw, is that you can only get this information from Google; the web site gave no error message at all (“try again later”), and the XBox itself gave only a bit more data: “Can’t retrieve information from Xbox LIVE. Please try again later. Status code: 80169d94.”

That opaque message is the money shot. Apparently, my account is locked now because the info on my XBox live account itself — entered long ago on a free trial — did not match the information provided on my credit card (which was accurate and complete). That’s all well and good (though, I note, they had no difficulty automatically renewing my membership back in October); calling them ought to make this right.

Oh no. No, no, no.

As the Google search told me, they’re not actually able to fix this on the phone. They have a “process” and require “escalation.” Someone will call me within 72 hours, and after that it’ll take 5 to 10 business days to process the unlock.

Whatever, boneheads. I think I’ll watch something on my AppleTV instead. 100% FAIL.

Birthers? 9/11 Truthers? Positively sane compared to…

Posted on by

Middle Ages Denialists. I shit you not:

The Phantom time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß) in 1991. It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

Wow. (Via Nix over on Facebook.)

Exits

Posted on by

I’m surprised it’s taken them this long, but Charlie Weis has been fired at Notre Dame. Contrary to ESPN’s Forde, though, I don’t think they’re one good coaching hire away from national relevance again. Their clear inability to recognize what’s working (n.b. that it was the fired Willingham’s recruits that buoyed Weis’ early years; when they graduated, Weis tanked) will lead them to many more years in the wilderness, and probably more expensive buyouts.

I watched this happen with Alabama in the pre-Saban, post-Stallings era, and it wasn’t pretty; I think it’s likely to get uglier in South Bend given their perhaps even more unrealistic expectations. And, from the Alabama perspective, I’m sorry they’re firing him. He’s clearly not head coach material, but keeping him around would ensure the Irish continue to spiral the drain in perpetuity. Oh well.

In other news, there are also sources saying that Bobby Bowden is reitiring at FSU, which is a long time coming, but there are conflicting reports on other sites. This is something he should’ve done a while ago, but it creates another hot-seat job opening that is probably far, far more appealing than the Notre Dame job. Whups.

Well, how about dat.

Posted on by

The Saints are now 11-0 after Brees and the rest put thirty freakin’ eight points on New England tonight with a dominant, blowout performance on either side of the ball. Final score: 38 to 17.

Bonus: In the process, Brees posted a perfect passer rating of 158.3; doing so puts him in the company of such gridiron luminaries as Doug Flutie, Kurt Warner, the Manning brothers, Ben Roethlisberger, and his opponent tonight, Tom Brady.

We’re still evil.

Posted on by

Or, at least, evil is still being perpetuated in our name. We can tell, because government hacks are still insisting that they can’t be held accountable for kidnapping an innocent Canadian and ending him to Syria for torture:

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” — despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.

[…] [T]he U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves “state secrets” and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved.

Just so we’re clear: This is the “there are no checks and balances,” imperial executive POV. They get to do what they want, and nobody gets to second-guess them. Down this path lies all sorts of abuses, and it absolutely must be stopped. Mr. Arar cannot be alone; he’s the unlikely guy who escaped the nightmare of extraordinary (and illegal) rendition. Someone needs to go to jail over this, but it’s increasingly likely that no one will.

And that’s very, very bad.

More from Mullins

Posted on by

Aimee Mullins’ guest columns at Gizmodo continue with an excellent discussion of the use of prosthetics in competition.

Basically, she points out that it was totally kosher for people like Oscar Pistorius and herself to compete in regular track-and-field events — right up to the point where they might win, at which point they were DQ’d for having an unfair advantage despite the fact that even advanced prosthetics pale in comparison to the real thing. So far.

Mullins also points out where we may be going: What if paralympic sprinter times are lower than regular, able-bodies sprinter times?

Here’s something you don’t see every day

Posted on by

A review of the $2.1 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport. This is a vehicle that generates over a thousand horsepower from an 8-liter, 16-cylinder engine, and uses it to get to 60 in under three seconds.

The author’s takeaway? It turns out not to be nearly as much fun as you’d expect:

The car comes with a great cocktail-party boast: if your Veyron, at rest, were passed by a $500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR doing 100 m.p.h., you could floor the accelerator and still reach 200 m.p.h. before the Mercedes could match its speed.

That kind of physics-textbook problem is where my issues begin. At speeds where cars from a $40,000 Nissan 370Z to a $90,000 Porsche 911 become your wingmen, delivering pure blasts of driving joy, the Bugatti feels bored to death. The artillery-shell acceleration is diverting, but the Bugatti leaves you nowhere else to go, except directly to jail.

Yeah, you read that right. The official sports car of Heathen Central costs less than 5% of the Bugatti.

Many Bugatti buyers surely have access to racetracks, yet I’m equally sure that 90-some percent of them won’t have nearly enough driving talent to exercise this car. Mostly, I picture Euro-poseurs needing valet assistance to back up the Bugatti in Monaco, while jaws drop and the owner barks orders into his diamond-encrusted cellphone. When your car makes a Lamborghini seem tasteful, there’s a problem.

As with the New York Yankees or most Picasso paintings, I respect the Bugatti as an engineering exercise and a conglomeration of overpriced talent. Yet I might argue that any $2 million car should be powered by hydrogen, electricity — even nuclear fusion — not a gas engine blown up to overkill proportions. The Bugatti isn’t the future of the fast car; it’s the past writ in extra-large type.

[…]

For half the Bugatti’s price, one could buy four genuine exotics that I find better looking and more rewarding: the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Audi R8 V-10 and Aston Martin DBS. That would still leave $1 million for a 10-car garage filled with classics like a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette Sting Ray fuelie.

Update from the comments: I thought my old climbing buddy Joe was making a joke when he said “If you want to pick one up cheap, someone parked one in Galveston bay,” but it turns out someone really did put a Veyron in the marsh this week. Whups!