Tuesday, July 29
I guess I should first admit I hate the show
Punk’d. I mean, here’s a guy who is famous for lying about his age so he seems hipper, telling us that his show’s purpose it to deflate the big egos on other stars, and show them what truly matters in life. So he sets up situations where anyone would get upset, and then laughs when he upsets people. I call *cough*bullshit*cough*. (Also *cough*jerkface*cough*.)
So I have to admit I’m not predisposed to like
The Mojave Experiment, where Microsoft took a bunch of “regular folks” XP users who were afraid of Vista, and told them Microsoft was going to show them a secret new operating system — which was actually Vista.
UNSURPRISINGLY, these people mostly said they liked Vista.
Now, if you read this blog, you know I pretty much hate Microsoft, because of their incredibly shady business practices (moreso in the early 1990s) and their shoddy products, most especially their operating systems, whose crappy user experience and programmer interfaces hold back the advance of technology. However, I’m not going to rail on Vista here. Seriously, I’m not.
What I
am going to rail on is this “experiment.” (I use that word advisedly.)
--
I
hate bad science. Hate it. Hate. So let’s look at not one, not two, but FOUR, yes FOUR (ah-ah-ah!) key flaws in this experiment, any single one of which would render its results meaningless:
•
The Placebo Effect: Every time I do a software release, no matter how minor, even if I just change one word, in French, to another French word, someone will send me mail or post on a forum, “Thanks, this release seems a lot faster!” Do I make fun of them? Or videotape them and put it on a blog? No. Because it’s just human nature. If we are told something is new-and-improved, we prime ourselves to believe it (c.f.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, which I’ll refer to again in a bit) and make it so in our minds.
This is why we have, for example, blind taste tests: because humans are proven to not be able make dispassionate judgments about subjects they already know about. So, if you say to someone, “Hey, I’m giving you a top-secret peek at a new operating system from Microsoft, you’re incredibly lucky and special, and I really value your opinion!” of COURSE they are going to like it. They almost can’t not like it.
•
The Pepsi Challenge Effect: “The Pepsi Challenge” was a blind taste test that Pepsi overwhelmingly won (again, from Blink). Yet, most people still drink Coke. Why? Gladwell’s thesis is that a
single sip of a soft drink is very different from drinking a
whole can, which is the smallest unit most people imbibe. Pepsi usually wins the challenge because it's a sweeter drink, and initially people respond to this extra sweetness. But after drinking a can, Pepsi becomes cloying.
So, here I am, sat down in front of Mojave-err-Vista, and all I've ever used is XP. Well, look, nobody is doubting the graphics are prettier in Vista. It looks nice compare to XP (it
should — they hired the guy who designed Aqua for Mac OS X).
I play with Mojave, and, yes, some system tasks are easier. Again, nobody doubts there are things that work much better. When I plug my iSight camera into Vista it shows up as a device and offers to let me take pictures in the Vista Explorer thingy. That’s kind of cool! Hey, I kind of like Mojave-nee-Vista!
Except,
those glossy features aren’t why people downgrade from Vista to XP. Those are
not the reason people hate on Vista!
Now, again, look — I don’t use Vista or XP for anything but games. I liked using Vista better, until the new UFO (X-Com) game that I had played great on XP, and wouldn’t launch at all on Vista. Then I bailed. That’s my story. There are apparently hundreds of others.
You, personally, may never have encountered a piece of hardware or an app that didn’t work on Vista, and you might be perfectly happy with it. I’m not going to try to argue you out of that happiness. My point is that
the problems that Vista has become famous for are not the kinds of problems you encounter in a few minutes of playing with it in a controlled environment.Vista is known for people initially
liking it, then after a while discovering it’s not working for them, and “downgrading” to XP. This study has told us exactly what we already knew: that,
initially, people like Vista. (
Initially, people like having sex without condoms, too... it’s simply not a very good criterion all by itself.)
•
The Perfectly Controlled Environment Effect: Microsoft set up the hardware. Microsoft brought the accessories. Microsoft picked the software. Microsoft sat people down with Vista experts driving the mouse, and walked people through Vista. What an INCREDIBLE SHOCKER that in this INCREDIBLY TIGHTLY CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT Vista performed OK!
Microsoft had set up an environment with a philosophy similar to Apple’s: “Look, we work well with this hardware and software, and too bad if you want something different.” Unfortunately, that’s NOT why people choose Windows. They hack together their own machines, and they want their software to still run.
Did
any of these customers bring in their favorite games and try to play them? Did they bring in their graphics tablets and discover they fail?
Did
any of the test machines ever say, “Oh, I’m sorry, Windows Genuine Advantage has determined that you may be running an invalid copy of Windows, so please jump through these hoops or we’ll disable some of your hardware”? I’m going to guess no. But I’ve seen this message a lot. And I own three valid licenses to Windows.
•
The Personal Tutor Effect: If you sit
anyone down with an expert in a particular program, and the expert walks them through the features and answers their every question, chances are good that person is going to report that she had a good experience with the program. Very good, indeed.
Personal training is so important to customer experience that Apple thinks of it as a key asset of its Apple Stores. But Microsoft doesn’t have Apple Stores in real life. Or any analog. It’s you and a box with a holographic sticker on it. Good luck!
--
Microsoft has managed to prove that if you have a friendly expert on a controlled machine (with Vista pre-installed) showing a carefully selected subset of Vista features to an ignorant XP user for a few minutes, the XP user will often say he finds Vista acceptable. Wow.
This so-called experiment of Microsoft’s is an insult to science, and to our intelligence. And I am
dying to see the out-takes from their shoot. I mean, how many people do you suppose like being told, “Hey, this giant, unpopular monopolistic software company just made an ass out of you! Ha ha! Our leading scienticians just PROVED that you LOVE VISTA and WANT TO MARRY IT. You are TOTALLY GAY for Vista! Haaaaaaa HAAAAAAA!”
Vista may or may not be an upgrade in user experience for most Windows customers. I personally prefer the feel of Vista over XP when the former works as well as the latter, but Vista has failed me on several occasions, and I also don’t enjoy running games MORE slowly than XP.
I've got to imagine that the Microsoft customers who took all the damn time to upgrade their machines to Vista, determined it was unworkable, and then had to take all the time to go BACK to XP,
probably did so for a reason, possibly even a
valid reason, and not because they had been swayed by bad word-of-mouth. I further imagine that these customers are
completely livid at having Microsoft not say, “Oh, sorry, we’ll get right on those bugs,” but, instead, “You’re just stupidly following the crowd, and if you’d just free your mind up, you’ll discover you actually love Vista... hater.”
Is “Our Customers Are Stupid and Have No Idea What They Really Want” really Microsoft’s new mantra?
Again, wow.
Labels: business, mac community, stories
Monday, July 7
Last week, a customer reported a bug to me in
Delicious Library 2: when he first launched version two, his version one data would start to be imported, but after waiting for tens of minutes watching the annoying aqua progress bar creep along, his entire machine would crash. Every time.
His collection was so huge it took me two solid days to download his version one files onto my machine. When I ran Delicious Library 2 on my Air in debug mode, it converted his data for about thirty minutes, then crashed with an exception that said the database file was 'corrupt'. I tried to look where it had crashed, but XCode was reporting that
all my source code files were gone. In fact, so were my iTunes songs, and everything in my Documents folder. I opened Finder and Terminal, and verified that the directories were indeed empty. No error messages, no residual files. Just empty. Panic.
A minute or so later, all these files magically came back. Everything. As if nothing had happened.
After thinking about this overnight (while staying away from the computer), I changed one word in my source code, and the customer's file loaded perfectly, in only twenty minutes.
Part 1: TriageIn my personal pantheon of bugs, this report was triaged at the top. Roughly, my triage order is:
- Data-loss bugs
- Unavoidable crashers
- Functionality-blocking bugs
- Avoidable crashers
- Avoidable bugs
- Misfeatures
- Performance issues
- Feature suggestions
- UI feedback
This is, of course, a rough ordering: obviously if a customer is trying to publish a single item to her website and it's taking a half hour, then I'm obviously going to bump that up the list over someone whose app crashes when she leans on the "a" key for a three hours in the "Actors" field. (For the record, neither of those are real bugs.)
But, note that in the first case, the "performance" issue has made the feature essentially unusable, so it's really a functionality-blocking bug. Further, if publishing is synchronous, then this bug is blocking access to the application for an unacceptable amount of time, and could be considered a crasher of sorts.
Weighing the bug my real user reported, we see that it's The Perfect Storm, a trifecta that crashes the app (and the
machine!), every time (on launch!!), blocks all functionality, and, to add insult to injury, it takes a long time to do so. (
The food wasn't very good, and the portions were very small.)
This bug was suddenly at the top of my list.
Part 2: Machine CrashersHow can machines crash due to user programs? The machine-crashing bug is exceedingly rare in shipping applications; in my experience, there are two primary causes: some system resource gets used up by the program, or the program confuses the window server (the graphics system) and the machine's primary interface locks up.
As an operating system matures, it's usually harder and harder to confuse the window server (I haven't seen such a bug in OS X in a long time), but resource over-allocation problems remain.
One of the goals of the operating system's designers is to not allow programs running in user space to ever crash the entire machine. Some would say it's a primary goal, even. But in real life, most operating systems can be brought to their knees (if not fully knocked-out) by user code.
Consider a simple application that just allocates memory in a tight loop. As the operating system runs this application and starts running out of free physical RAM pages, it starts throwing away the pages used by other applications, in a process that goes kind of like this: oh, you haven't used mail in a few seconds, I'll throw that away for now, and, uh, also this web browser, and, uh, damn, the window server's backing store, and, uh, this essential system font server, and, uh...
Pretty soon you've effectively locked up the system, just because it's going to take so long to page in any particular resource
the windowing system needs to run that by the time it's loaded off the disk your rogue process has caused some
other vital page to be unloaded.
Now, the internet is full of flames about how this is completely unacceptable, and OS designers are 100% to blame and yadda yadda yadda. These are, in my opinion, probably from computer science PhD students who believe in a perfect world of provable programming and the Easter Bunny.
Here in the realm of actually making money, if running your program causes a user's computer to crash, she doesn't care if it's Apple's "fault" — she's going to post all over the interwebs that
your program sucks, and ask
you for her money back. Now, since you're
not a PhD student, you like money, so this is bad.
And, honestly, why blame the OS designer? Your app was written incorrectly. It was going to crash or be killed by the OS anyhow. This is a bug you need to fix either way. And the user would be pissed at you even if the OS catches your app and says, "Sorry, this application has gone crazy, we're killing it."
You can see why OS designers don't spend all their time worrying about such issues. It's not as if a lot of real malware is written to crash machines — like biological viruses, successful software viruses don't
kill the host, they co-exist with the host and use a minimum of resources while replicating themselves. Viruses that kill the host go extinct very quickly.
Further, to allow programmers to get the most out of the hardware, OS designers
need to let us live right on the edge. The more blocks and checks they put between us and the hardware, the slower our programs are going to run. Imagine if the Apple said to programmers: "Ok, in order to not let you dominate the hardware, we will only let you use 50% of the CPU at any one time." Now imagine you're a user, running World of Warcraft on your brand-new $4,000 ultra-lux machine, and you're only getting half the framerate you
should be, and
would be under, say, Windows.
You'd be pissed. And Apple would lose a customer.
InterludeLook, I don't want to seem mean. I'm sure she's a very nice person in real life, and probably quite smart. And, she's a very handsome woman, I'm not denying that. But, honestly, Jessica Alba can't act. It's just not a skill she has.
It's OK. Not everyone was meant to be an actress. But you really have to admit your limitations to yourself. I know, for instance, I'll never be a supermodel. I'm OK with that. I'd make a lousy president, too. I accept it.
It's time to stop, Jessica. You're costing people money. And YOU would be happier doing something you know you're good at, that you could feel good about. There are LOTS of professions for preternaturally beautiful women out there. You could be one of my assistants, for instance.
Part 3: Diagnosis? Delicious!How do you even
begin to fix a bug where things are going great for a while, then your machine crashes and/or all your files disappear?
Remember that the very
first thing you do, when looking at any bug, before you even start thinking about it, and
long before you look at your code, is replicate it. You can't debug what you can't replicate, and user reports are usually lacking in some details that your trained eye will catch.
At this point, I'd already replicated the crash, and I'd seen a valuable clue the user hadn't seen: my files had disappeared. The key clue.
Next, in a case like this, you'd need to make sure you have a recent backup of your machine, because,
damn. I mean, I've been programming for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time, and I've never seen a bug like that.
Ever.
Ok: your machine is crashing, so you suspect that it's running out of some resource. Memory is the most common resource to run out of and the easiest to find and fix, so you run your program under Instruments, with the leak detection tool. You really should have done this before you released your application, but you were totally burnt-out and you'd been in beta for months and didn't seem to have any major issues, so you failed to do everything just right. Now you're paying.
Your code will run slow as hell under Instruments, but in the end, like that hot gypsy lady at the fair, she will magically tell you, "Hey, you leaked this object exactly here and at exactly this time, so cut it out." It's a small miracle, and the team who wrote this has two to go and they're saints, bitches.
Sadly, at this point I had also already run Instruments / leaks weeks before, and although it had found a major image leak in 2.0 (whoopsie!) which had kept some users from loading very large libraries, and released it in 2.0.1, this fix didn't help our guy. In fact, my virtual memory usage was holding steady at 1.26 GB as I loaded his collection, which is really not bad considering every process on my system right now has between 0.5 to 1.18 GB of VM right now, under no load.
Not memory. Hmm. Now you think. Think think think. I think better if I distract myself from the problem and let my hind-brain take over. So I went and played Assassin's Creed, and murdered some fools who had waged war on their fellow man, or made the mistake of calling me peasant, or gotten in my way, or looked funny, or stood around yelling too much about how Salem Ali is a strong man. Honestly, once you start stabbing people in the neck it's hard to stop.
All the while, I'm swishing ideas around in my mouth to see if they taste right. Graphics memory leak? Often a window server will have its own mini-memory manager: was I overloading it as I converted 40,000 cover images from version one? Maybe, but... Instruments had actually found my leak of graphics memory before, so I kind of trusted that it would have found any others I might have had.
Stab. Stab stab. Gurgle.Also, my
files had disappeared. That doesn't
seem like a graphics problem.
Stab. Man, I love jumping from a tall building and landing with my blade in someone's throat. I am so bad-ass.What resources are related to files? Honestly, I don't know a lot about modern file systems; they are kind of a black box to me. When I went to college, we had integers which represented files. And we liked it!
But Mach had introduced a new kind of I/O, called memory-mapped I/O, that I was using extensively. A possible culprit?
Part 4: Memories of Memory MappingBack when NeXTstep 0.8 was first unveiled, one of its key revolutions was it was based on not just plain UNIX, but Mach UNIX, which was a really damn fast and clever re-write of the lowest layers of UNIX, with some extra fun added in, including cheap and fast inter-process communication. Avie Tevanian had been working on Mach as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs recognized he was a star and hired him straight away. (Microsoft countered by hiring Avie's old advisor to work on NT, which is kind of like Microsoft hiring my mom because I'm a good programmer.)
One of the great things Mach gave us was a new way to read files, which process was
really slow by default under vanilla UNIX, for reasons I don't fully understand. Mach introduced the metaphor of
memory-mapped files, which used the virtual memory system to map a file on disk onto an address somewhere in VM, without actually loading anything from the disk at first. The cool thing was your program could access any byte in this special VM region, and the correct part of the file would be paged in
on-demand, using the exact same mechanism that the VM system used to extend applications' physical memory by mapping their virtual memory spaces to a large reserved area on the disk.
This turned out to be very fast, because it had none of the overhead of normal UNIX I/O, which usually involved reading a byte or so at a time using a UNIX function, which involved an expensive system trap and had a lot of overhead (checking to see if enough bytes have been read in from the disk and if not reading in some more) compared to just fetching a memory location. In the latter case, once a page was fetched in you can fetch all the other bytes on that page for free, no system calls at all, just a standard memory access. Big win.
NeXTstep 1.0 gave us to memory streams, which were awesome, and NeXTStep 2.0 (new capitalization) used memory mapped files by default when you read files using its fancy new NSData class, and all new applications ran a lot faster and life was good.
Well, mostly good. One problem with memory-mapped I/O is that if the user deletes or moves the file on the disk, the OS can't get to it any more, but the programmer never really knows when this might happen, so she don't know whether to just go ahead and make a copy of the entire file into memory or not. So it's not a good idea to keep memory-mapped files open for a long time.
Another, more recent, problem is that virtual memory on 32-bit systems is capped at 4GB, which means the largest file you can memory-map is a lot smaller than 4GB (since your app is going to use, like, at least 1GB of VM itself). Nowadays, it's not uncommon for users to have 6GB movie files in their iTunes. Oops.
So, for a while now, Apple has been moving gently away from memory-mapping I/O. For example, you have to set a flag (CSResourcesFileMapped) in your applications' Info.plist if you want to memory-map the resource files that the AppKit and Foundation frameworks load for you; otherwise they are read using different (unknown) techniques, which may or may not be slower (see below).
Fortuitously, however, I'd just been part of a discussion on a developer mailing list about optimized file system access, and learned an important fact, which gave me the solution.
Part 5: Everything New is Old AgainI have exalted memory-mapped I/O for exactly twenty years now, but just a week or so ago an Apple engineer told me that the latest tests show that Apple's new-fangled "uncached" access method had at least as good of performance as memory-mapped I/O, with neither of the two big drawbacks listed above. It was The New Way.
Here's a bit from the
NSData page:
NSMappedRead- A hint indicating the file should be mapped into virtual memory, if possible.
Available in Mac OS X v10.4 and later.
Declared in NSData.h
NSUncachedRead- A hint indicating the file should not be stored in the file-system caches.
For data being read once and discarded, this option can improve performance.
Available in Mac OS X v10.4 and later.
Declared in NSData.h
Sadly, there's not a lot of guidance there when you should or shouldn't use either option. Also, there's no hint if the options are mutually exclusive. Why would you use NSMappedRead, and why not? Who knows?
But now I'd heard the Word, and It Was Good. I resolved then and there to look over my code, and see when I did and didn't need NSMappedRead. But I didn't want to just naively trust that NSUncachedRead was
always better (APIs so rarely work like that), so I'd need to do timing tests. So, in fact, I was in the middle of these timing tests (on iTunes importing) when I got this new bug report, so I had some experience with memory-mapped vs. cached access.
Part 6: I Love It When a Plan Comes TogetherOk, I'm reading in 40,000 image files as part of the conversion, and storing them in my database. At some point the filesystem goes on vacation and says, to hell with you, I'm not reading any more damn files, even if they are just directories. Hrmmm. Hrmmmmmmmmmm.
"Oh, please, spare my li-- gurgle!"Maybe the problem was there was some huge bug in Apple's Mach, where if you open too many files in a short period of time, the filesystem tried to, like, cache the results, and the cache blew up, and as a result the filesystem incorrectly just would fail to open any more files, instead of flushing the cache. This made a
little sense, since the problem had gone away spontaneously after a minute or so, like a cache problem would when the cache auto-flushed.
One thing I knew, KNEW wasn't the problem was that I had too many file open simultaneously. Because the way my code worked, I'd open the files using NSData's dataWithContentsOfMappedFile:, do a little massaging on the image inside, and then the files would auto-close themselves when the NSData was autoreleased, which I would correctly do every 100 files I read in.
I
knew this. Knew! I've also been around long enough to know that whenever I
know the operating system must be bugged, since
my code is correct, I should take a damn close look at my code. The old adage (not mine) is that 99% of the time operating system bugs are actually bugs in your program, and the other 1% of the time they are still bugs in your program, so look harder, dammit.
So I traced through the steps. First I read the image file into the NSData. Right. It's auto-released, so I'm not leaking it. Then, I set the CoreData object's data field to point to the same NSData. Still no leak. Then, the NSData is autoreleased, correctly, and the system resources should be freed up.
Wait a minute. Wait. It's autoreleased, but that doesn't mean it's
deallocated. It just means the reference count is decremented. But someone else might still have a pointer to it... in fact, I had
just assigned the same NSData to the CoreData object. Knowing it was an immutable data, the CoreData object didn't make a
copy of my data, it just retained the
exact same NSData object. The one that had an open memory-map of the image file!
CoreData's objects persist in memory until you flush them explicitly, which means anything they are holding also persists. So, I was creating 40,000 memory-mapped files and not freeing any of them. That, uh... seemed fishy. Like, five-course-sushi-dinner fishy.
Now, I could flush these cover objects explicitly using CoreData; I'd have to read in a batch of old objects, convert them, save everything, then flush the covers, then read in another batch. In fact, I was already using batches (following
CoreData's best practice guidelines, see "Importing in Batches"), but flushing would add a layer of complexity. I'd have to keep track of the objects I created separately, and loop through and flush them.
Sure, that's easy code to write. But I'm making a 2.0.2 release, and in x.x.y releases, I want to change as little code as possible to fix the bug, because my beta testers weren't going to be excited about testing a release that adds no features. I will test it myself, of course, and I'd ask anyone who reported the bug to test it, but doing something as heavy-duty as suddenly flushing a bunch of objects
could have side effects, and I wouldn't have enough people to test for those. Yes, in theory flushing
shouldn't have side-effects, but in that same world, no code should ever have bugs and communism is a really nifty idea.
But, I'd been told that NSUncachedRead was as good as NSMappedRead, without as many drawbacks. Would it also not tie up the same system resources? Certainly the word "uncached" seemed promising. I'd try it.
I kind of exaggerated on the "one word" in my preamble — it
would have been a one word change, but I'd used the older interface on NSData:
| NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfMappedFile:fullImagePath]; |
I replaced it with this line (which would say NSMappedRead instead of NSUncachedRead to be equivalent to the above):
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:fullImagePath
options:NSUncachedRead error:&error]; |
Thus removing the memory-mapping.
Importing the large collection worked perfectly. The problem was solved, and now I could upgrade truly HUGE collections.
Part 7: Where Did We Go Wrong?We had tested Delicious Library 2 with importing an enormous sample file of 10,000 Delicious Library 1 items. However, it took so long to build up such a library in version 1 that we ended up building the sample library using a custom program, and as a result that test file didn't have any images in it. But beta testers were enrolled specifically because they had collections of thousands of items, and we had the largest closed beta of any program I've worked on. We also tested with our friends' Delicious Library 1 files, of about 3,300 items.
But this customer had over 4,400 items in Delicious Library 1. That, it turned out, was a few over a limit we had no idea existed. Damn it.
It's a bug we should have caught. We should have spent the time to get the images in the 10,000 item file. I messed up.
Software is written by humans. Humans get tired. Humans become discouraged. They aren't perfect beings. As developers, we want to pretend this isn't so, that our software springs from our head whole and immaculate like the goddess Athena. Customers don't want to hear us admit that we fail.
The measure of a man cannot be whether he ever makes mistakes, because he
will make mistakes. It's what he does in response to his mistakes. The same is true of companies.
We have to apologize, we have to fix the problem, and we have to learn from our mistakes.
Unfortunately, Delicious Monster has so much mail from releasing version 2, we're failing at responding to customers right now. We are a tiny company, and had one support person, and although we're bringing a second up to speed, it takes time to teach someone how to solve our users' problems. Our backlog of mail messages is finally going down — as of today, we're at 1,300, down from 3,000 a week or so after our release. We still get several hundred messages a day, though, and it takes time just to sort through and see which ones are bugs and which ones are customers needing help and which ones are people just saying, "Hey, that's cool, you know what else would be cool?"
When this customer finally got through to me, I apologized to him for the bug and the crummy response time, and elevated his bug to the top. I let him know what I was doing to fix it, and got the fix done in a couple days. I also gave him a free license to Delicious Library 2, since he'd been unable to buy it yet.
I had already known that when I launched 2.0, I couldn't immediately go on vacation; that I'd have to jump in to the 2.0.1 release for any urgent bugs that customers found. What I didn't realize was how much support e-mail would spike. That's the lesson I learned: I need to have extra people ready to do support when I do a major release. I'm not sure how to do this and not be paying people to twiddle their thumbs the rest of the time, but that's something I'll have to figure out. And I apologize to my customers for this screw-up.
The beta for 2.0.2 is out now, at
http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/Delicious%20Library%202%20Beta/DeliciousLibrary2.zip.
It'll load a ton of items.
Saturday, June 21
Ok, well, actually
Delicious Library 2 shipped like four weeks ago. Sorry I didn't tell you. It's not because I don't care. Honestly, I tried to tell the press, but I think they're pretty sick of me, so there wasn't much of a splash on the news sites.
Sales have been great, though, so I can't complain.
But, hey, enough about me... what's up with your life? (Use blank space provided.)
_______ ______ _______ _____ _____ _____ ____
Really? Wow. Well, you know, stuff changes. I think it'll work out.
Oh, also, I launched a new company down at WWDC last week, called
Golden % Braeburn. I'm going to license out the store I wrote to sell Delicious Library, since it was a huge pain in the tush to write, and I actually would have licensed a store from someone else if there'd been a decent option back when we launched Delicious Monster.
I know, it seems kind of pretentious for one guy to have two companies. Even *I* blush a little at it. But, it kind of makes sense — Golden % Braeburn's only going to have customers in the dozens, and they'll all be Mac developers. I didn't want to confuse my Delicious Monster customers by saying, "Oh, hey, now that you've bought Delicious Library, would you maybe be interested in buying a store to sell software on the internet?" That doesn't pass the "mom" test. (Incidentally, as my mom gets battier I'm finding it harder and harder to write software that passes the "mom" test. I'll have to go back to using Matas' mom as the eponymous mom from the test.)
You can see how it kind of de-focuses my message, yes?
---
A lot of people have been asking about Pimp My Code... No, it's not dead, it's just that those entries take approximately a day to write, and when I was in the final months (and months and months) of Delicious Library 2 I really felt like I owed it more to my customers to actually write my dang software than to publish my vanity blog. (I know, I wrote about my cat and girls and stuff — those entries take like half an hour. I don't have to fact-check them or anything.)
So, we'll have some code pimping here soon... coming up first is the on-the-fly localization code that's part of what I'll be sharing with all Golden % Braeburn customers (one of the advantages of licensing the store is you also get all my helper code), and also the system I'm trying to get Apple to switch to. You can evaluate for yourself whether it's better than AppleGlot or FoobleBlot or whatever you are using.
---
On a personal note, recently my shrink said to me, "Hey, Wil, why don't you drop the pimp act? Nobody actually looks at show-offs and thinks, 'Oooh, I like him.' In fact, everyone resents them."
This made a lot of sense, so I'm officially renouncing my phony pimpitude. Honestly, I'm just a geek who stays up late and plays GTA and makes clumsy passes at pretty girls and tries to write software. That's me.
Labels: business, stories
Saturday, April 12
In 1987 I was a senior in high school and my mother was in the hospital with leukemia; a long, very painful experimental treatment would either cure her (but leave her changed for life) or she would die.
With the profits I'd made from my summer job, I had bought a $400 Technics portable CD player, one of the very first ones ever made. It was solid metal and heavy as hell, and the rechargeable battery pack was as big as the CD player itself and weighed twice again as much. It still plays perfectly to this day.
I was left with her lame car and a giant house to myself and not much supervision. It would have been many a teen's dream, but not mine, since I was truly alone; after I moved back to the States for the eleventh and twelfth grades I never once had a friend over after school, or went over to a friend's house, or went to a party, or a dance; I worked in my little computer lab from when I got home to when I went to sleep. I graduated with honors but didn't show up. I was programming at the time.
Some nights I would take my mom's (new-model) Chevy Nova out and just drive around the waterfront, listening to my little CD player. There were two discs in particular for when I felt most alone: Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life" and Peter Gabriel's "So". Both artists were consummate musicians, at the height of their craft -- neither would ever make another album as successful. Both created incredibly rich soundscapes, and both talked about loss, and longing.
I don't share either album with people very often, these days, because I've discovered I am incredibly upset if my guests are anything below astounded by them. I require rapt attention, possibly sighs, if you hear the Blessed Two. I feel as if I am physically cutting away my skin and pulling it aside with tongs to show my viscera, the actual core of my being, and if my listeners are all, "Can we put on some GOOD music after this?" I just want to smite them.
To this day if I hear "Don't Give Up" I will cry. I may not bawl, but you can see little tears in my eyes. I can see the park on Lake Washington I would drive to. I can feel the slight cold of the wind through my not-at-all-fashionable windbreaker. I can see the giant CD player on its huge strap around my neck. And I feel the hurting, of wanting to not be alone. Of waiting it to be over.
--
The happiest and saddest part, I think, of liking someone of the opposite sex... really liking, as in, really admiring the person, thinking that she is, in fact, a really good person, a decent person, a person whose morals and smarts and sense of humor and accomplishments you actually think are amazing -- not just, like, "Damn, she got pretty tummy," which latter sentiment I have also fallen prey to -- the happiest and saddest part is that you become someone different when you feel this way.
I don't want to, and won't, use the stupid cliché from the stupid movie. But it's true. You make yourself into a better person, not to trick them into liking you, but because _they deserve it_, and _you want to be a person that deserves them_. The difference is everything.
It's the saddest part because when you lose the hope, the dream, the focus -- well, you want to hold on to that you, that better you, that you that you liked so much, the you that you were with her. It's inside you. Were you faking? No. You have it. Just continue being it. Just don't stop. Be more patient with people you see. Smile at them. Let tiny things go, ignore any little slight, be generous with praise. Be that person. You can still do it. Hold on to him.
--
An interesting, if bizarre, factoid about me is that I cry if I see kids under the age of 10. I also cry if I see child's toy aimed at under-10-year-olds. And, finally, I can remember only two or three scenes from my life from before I was 10: My dad reading "One Fish, Two Fish" to me to teach me what words looked like. (Read to your kids! It's more important than you think.) My parents in bed on a lazy Sunday and the kids coming in and hassling them. Running to get one of the Big Wheels in recess in kindergarden, because there were only a couple and if you didn't get one recess was lame. The other kids wanting to build a boat out of toy cardboard bricks, and me, the quiet kid who never spoke up, finally saying something: I have a plan. I can build a boat. Show us, show us, and I did, and for that one day, for that afternoon, I was the hero.
The rest of my childhood is gone. I don't know where that person is. He's very sad, though.
Yes, I'm in therapy, thanks for checking.
--
I listen to Steve Winwood again, on my expensive studio monitor speakers, the likes of which I couldn't dream of when I was 18. His album still sounds great to me, after all these years.There's a part of me that's conscious of all the time that's passed: that the rich, full sound I loved is now considered cheesy and overproduced, that nobody has heard of Steve Winwood in twenty years, Peter Gabriel is just another dude at TED, and that schmaltzy emotions are for angsty teenagers with zits and five-year-long erections.
But there is a little kid who has felt alone all his life, and he wants it to end. When will it be over? Will I die first? Why are you so old? What have we done with our life? Why are we alone? How did you manage to fail in this, the one thing that mattered.
Labels: stories
Monday, March 24
There is a moment when you are touching a woman, innocently, you say, innocently, she says, but you are massaging her back, stroking her hair, running your fingers lightly over her face.
There is a moment when you think to yourself, "I want to kiss her, I should kiss, I am going to kiss her."
And you know that if you are wrong, you will feel stupid. And she will leave. And you will apologize. And everything will be spoiled.
But the kiss is still hanging there. Evolution is stronger than you. It doesn't care if you feel stupid. Kiss the neck, it says. She smells wonderful, and you should kiss. Necks were created to be kissed. They crave it. They are empty without it.
There is only one thing worse than her rejecting you, and that is if you do NOT kiss her neck, in this moment, right now. You have lived your whole life for this. You dream of this moment every day.
There is a moment when you kiss her, lightly, on the neck, and instead of leaving, instead of being outraged, she breathes. You hear her breath, you feel her breath. And you have lived your whole life for that moment.
Labels: stories
Friday, February 29
I am back, after a fashion. The night before TED, my new MacBook Air was stolen out of the lobby of the Portola Plaza hotel, leaving me in the dark for days, feeling incredibly violated.
My old, now kind of stinky-seeming MacBook Pro has been shipped to me, so at least I can connect to the sweet mother intertron, whose warm nectar I crave daily. Also, I can now track down the frakker who took my Air, so you better hope you wipe that disk good
and don't ever connect to the net again. Or sell it to anyone who, like, has heard of me.
[My MacBook Air serial number was W880311W12G and the "MAC" or Airport ID was "001EC2B605B9". If you see this machine it is stolen and you should call the Monterey police at 831.646.3830 and reference case number 08-1077. Intertron powers activate!]
--
I should start with a story which sounds like bragging, but you will quickly discover, is actually me fulfilling my duties as a gentleman.
Last night at Crown and Pig and Whistle and Anchor bar I was talking with an attractive you woman TEDster, who, after I convinced her I was
not gay (there had been a HI-larious
Three's Company style mixup that's not actually particularly funny so I won't recount it here) she proceeded to lean over and whisper in my ear for five minutes about who she actually WAS attracted to (said list not including me, if that needs to be made explicit).
After a few moments of this, I pointed out the irony that everyone else at the table, including my new rival Jonathan Hodgman, thought that she was leaning over and whispering to me because she was into me, not because I had become her new eunuch confidant. (Speaking of Hodgman, who KNEW he was such a ladies' man? He was surrounded by pretty girls the whole time. Of course, being the perfect family man, he acted the gracious gentleman -- you thought I was going to get him in trouble with his wife, didn't you? That's not how I roll. I've never even posted my really juicy ultimate cock-block story about LP from a few years ago, and he wasn't married then.)
So, being informed that it looked as though we were flirting, and her being a game sort with a wicked streak, she was all, "oooooh!" and turned fully towards me and put her hand on my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear, so her lips just brushed its tiny hairs with every word as she spoke, sending a little involuntary tingle up my spine with every warm, wet breath as she seductively whispered, "So, should I pretend I like you, like this?"
Then she bit my ear.
No, no, sorry, I'm lying: the hairs on my ears aren't "tiny" any more. They are stark white and surprisingly sturdy and grow to be, like, four feet long. I'm like fucking Yoda. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother clipping them; I see my body as some kind of bizarre science experiment as it deteriorates and I'm actually curious to see how long any given hair in any given spot will get. A week ago I had an eyebrow hair that was, no shit, two inches long -- Mike tried to pluck it for me and I got protective of it, like it was my tomagotchi. Sometimes I have races between the hairs on my left ear and the ones on the right.
Anyhow, the point is, for anyone in the bar that night, I shall protect the young lady's honor by giving up the game -- she was, in fact, just making a scandal for scandal's sake; trying to help my pimp cred... an act of charity from a kind stranger. I'm not not not saying I didn't not not enjoy it -- any bone looks like top sirloin to a hobo, and it's been a too long since I've been thrown a bone.
Labels: stories
Sunday, February 17
Lots of people have asked for my impressions, so I thought I'd post a more sober (literally) look at life with my little MacBook Air. With no cussing!
• It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.
• It is super-solid. It feels way more structurally solid than any laptop I've ever owned. I don't know if this like a synesthetic illusion because it is so beautiful, or because it has curved surfaces (== less flex!), or because it's just so darn light that there's not a lot of mass to flex.
• The prominent feet and rigity make the machine seem wobbly on anything but a 100% level surface. The antique wood tables at Zoka are not that perfect, so every time I type the machine rocks like a shopping cart at K-mart. Mushier feet, maybe? I dunno, you guys are the geniuses, you figure it out. But, seriously, wobbling things make me nuts. I'm going to start stuffing napkins under the corners of the machine, and that's not good advertising. [UPDATE: John Siracusa provided a great suggestion for this: the MacBook Air should have only three feet; three points always form a plane.]
• I love how the port door on the right opens and closes; it's a very solid-feeling mechanism, and very natural. Also, I feel like I'm in Star Trek (the new one).
• I don't run on battery much, but I've noticed it seems to take a billion years to charge it if it gets discharged, at least the first couple times. Odd.
• I got the 64GB SSD. It seems pretty awesome, but I can't fit my (legal) iTunes collection on it, even without movies, after I put my iPhoto collection on it and my source code and just a couple apps (Acorn, Twitterific, Zuma, iWork so far, MarsEdit coming).
• I'm moving over my old stuff as I need it. Copying stuff over AirPort is super-slow, but the ethernet adaptor is pretty decent. I tried to copy World of Warcraft from a friend's PowerBook (I have a legal copy, don't worry) and it was scheduled to take five hours, since she doesn't have 802.11n, even. Using the ethernet adaptor it was, like, five minutes. No surprises here, but the take-away message is, ethernet adaptor is a good idea.
• I don't try to access CDs or DVDs from my machine -- my previous machine didn't even have a working drive -- so I don't really care that it doesn't have one built-in. The external one is a thing of beauty and I almost want to buy it just
because, but it doesn't work with other machines so that kind of stinks.
• The screen is so very, very bright compared to the (1st-gen) MacBook Pro. Games look much better. It's not something you realize you want until you get it -- you think increases in resolution or color depth are cool, but when you get a brightness upgrade this dramatic you realize AH! THIS is what I really wanted! Who needs
more pixels when each of my pixels now shines so very, very brightly? ("I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe...")
• I think the machine's smallness is tearing up my neck. I'm sitting 8-10 hours a day working on this thing, and I end up looking DOWN at it more than my 15" MacBook Pro. I've had neck cramps since I got it, but I'm still adjusting, and I'm also in crunch mode with Delicious Library 2.
• It compiled Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1'59". The 2.33GHz MacBookPro takes 2'04". SSD's LOVE compilations.
• SSD's love context switching, as well. Having an SSD is a lot like having 64GB of RAM in your machine. Sure, I'm going to lose in a Photoshop filter race with your machine, but I'm going to crush you switching between the 15 applications I have open right now. Again, it's not a surprise to say that if video editing or cutting-edge video games is your primary purpose, you'll probably find the MacBook Pro faster. But if you're writing software or just snurfing the web and running lots of apps, this machine is faster.
• Bizarrely, it still has a sudden motion sensor in it. Think about that for a minute.
• More bizarrely, if I drop the Air a foot (onto a soft, fluffy pillow on my bed -- I'm not an idiot) the sudden motion sensor will still shut down the SSD (tell it to park its heads?) and stop processing for a second. I think that's pretty funny. Hey, hardware guys: "SSD stands for SOLID-STATE DISK."
• I admit there could still be problems I don't know about with dropping SSDs, and I'm just being snide. I'm sorry, hardware guys. Still friends? Buy you a drink? Hug it out?
• I like using the "pinch" gesture. That's the only one I've really used. So far, it works great in Finder (icon mode) and iPhoto and Safari (just feels bizarre there, honestly) and two places Delicious Library 2 (shhh!). It's the right solution.
• The "swipe" gesture should have been mapped to "start scrolling and then after I stop the swipe keep scrolling slower and slower until you stop naturally or I stop you" like scrolling works on the iPhone. The Air team didn't ask me, but they should have. This would have been trivial to add to Cocoa (we added it experimentally once to DL2, may put it back). Sure I could file a RADAR bug on this, but isn't it more fun to complain on my blog like a prima donna? (Yes. Yes it is.)
• Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I'd be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the "I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side" market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.
• The Air runs World of Warcraft pretty damn well. Sure, I don't have, uh, specular water reflective anti-aliased spectroscopic quadrophonic roto-tilling turned on. But, you know, I can, like, heal things and run around and pick liferoot and run around some more. (PHEAR MY HEALING, EVIL-DOERS OF AZEROTH!)
• The Air's main performance limitation is heat, and mainly from the GPU. When it starts doing graphical things, it gets hot. When it gets hot, it starts venting out the bottom-back. If there's not enough clear vents (like, if you are in bed, and it's resting in your lap so the bottom vents are perfectly pressed into the fluffy down comforter) then it underclocks the GPU and you go into slide-show mode. This will happen in Zuma if you try hard enough, or if you're watching Hulu.com, even, but it's pretty easy to get it in World of Warcraft. Throwing off your comforter and getting nakeder with your Air is the only solution at this point, and also, it feels... so deliciously wrong.
• Note to hardware guys: don't put vents there, bokay? Laptops are for bed. Don't put vents right where the laptop touches my leg. (Aw, come on back, hardware guys! I still love you! Look, sometimes I just get a little angry, and when I've been drinking, well, you know my temper...)
• On the other hand, if this baby is plugged in and sitting on a flat surface, I can play Teh WoWz all day and it's great. (Not great for shipping DL2, so I don't do it, but I
could. It's nice to know it's there, like a beautiful ex who still wants to have sex with you.)
--
This isn't a machine for everyone, nor should it be. Just as there should be
three types of spaghetti sauce, you and I should not HAVE to agree on what we want in a machine. The machine should, instead, be designed to agree with us.
I admit my last post was a bit over-the-top; my point was supposed to be: "Look, this machine may not be for you, personally, but please acknowledge that there are people for whom it is perfect." For instance, Gabe told me he wants a new MacBook Pro, and I didn't try to push the Air on him (...much). He's an artist and a gamer. He wants pixels, and lots of them, and FAST. The MacBook Pro is going to run his Windows games faster than pretty much every laptop.
I
will try to steer him towards the biggest MacBook Pro that has the LED backlight, because it's just SO DARN PRETTY. And if anyone offered a 128GB SSD, I'd be recommending that to all my friends who have cash to burn. Because it's the future, baby, and it's beautiful.
-W
Labels: mac community
Delicious Monster
