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Tai

Tai

I'm a product person by trade. Doing VP-ish stuff around Toronto.

Ownership of what you write

I had the opportunity to read more blogs and listen to a few podcasts this past holiday. In particular I started listening to the B & B Podcast by Benjamin Brooks and Shawn Blanc and Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann.

When you start consuming one media form (e.g., a blog) you inevitably stumble upon their podcast.

Now all these guys seem to know each-other, and they tend to propagate similar world-views (e.g., minimalism, pro-apple, great design, great UX, care and craft, etc.). By in large, that isn’t too interesting to me (probably because I have the same mindset). It’s when they differ that their commentary and interaction (which is already very thoughtful) goes to the next level.

Daniel Jalkut wrote a piece called Learn to Code which posited that “high-order” scripting is the new literacy. No doubt that this is empowering. It’s definitely helpful for me (although I think if there is one thing a person should know, it is RegEx, because that shit has saved my bacon a dozen times over). You should read Mr. Jalkut’s post if you haven’t already.

Guy English had a different view:

I appreciate where they’re coming from. I can, from a certain perspective, agree with the argument. But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy1. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of. We don’t, as a society, need more people who have the mechanical knowledge to turn RSS feeds into Twitter spam. We don’t need anything more posted to Facebook, we don’t need anything we photograph to appear on Instagram and Flickr. If “scripting” is the new literacy then we’ve failed. We’ve become Mario drowning on a Water Level.

To be honest, I’m kind of appalled at the idea that there might be a day where societies are judged by the percentage of the population who can code (if you want to use that as the benchmark of literacy). Then again, I work at a company that sells eBooks and my livelihood is based on people buying books.

One of the things that I find interesting is that this type of interaction, at least when I first started blogging back in 2002, was done typically done via the comments feature that MovableType had.2 These people are writing really thoughtful responses and taking ownership of their words. You don’t have the anonymous troll or link spammer in the comment threads anymore.

One of the new things that I am noticing is the “No Comments” trend. Some people like John Gruber have been doing it from the beginning. The authors are encouraging people to twitter a response, email them directly or post a reply on their blog (if they have one). Matt Gemmell posted a 1-month update on his experience after turning off comments. There are two points that I wanted to call out:

  • I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.
  • I feel more positive, and I think the tone of my writing has evolved.

Bottom line, he feels it has been positive for him. I agree. I think comments are a barrier to the authoring experience. They require maintenance on the author’s part (although Disqus has a great admin interface for this), but more importantly, I’ve always felt that the directness of the feedback loop left me open to attack. Consequently, back in the early part of the 2000s, I felt that everything I needed to write about had to have some sort of gravitas. Exhaustion soon set in.

No comments makes me feel that I own this blog, versus me feeling like I manage some sort of BBS.

  1. Emphasis added by me. ↩
  2. I think because at the time, blogging was new, not many people had a voice and things like pingbacks hadn’t been implemented yet. ↩

Happy New Year

To the handful of readers out there who actually read this cubbyhole of a website, Happy New Year and best wishes to you, your family and the people (or pets) you love.

In the past, I’ve struggled with the end-of-year post. Is it a year-in-review post? Should I create a top 10 list?

In the end, it’s best to be thankful for all the things that have happened to me this past year. It has been a fantastic year for me personally and professionally. I can only hope that 2011 was like that for everyone else and that 2012 will be, at a minimal, as good if not better.

Happy New Year.

Finding time to write

I’ve been thinking of the Writer’s Process and I’ve been wondering how to best optimize my time so that I can write more.

Aside: It occurs to me that I really should just concentrate on writing rather than wasting time focused on things that don’t actually contribute to the content authored in this blog.

I wonder how professional bloggers like Shawn Blanc and John Gruber focus themselves to write. Do they set aside a specific time in the day to write?

I wonder what their typing speed is? Mine averages at 48 aWPM (or so says Mavis Beacon). A lot of the bloggers I read come from some sort of computer science background–they typically type very quickly.

For me, I find that I often have the itch to write at the end of the day; late into the evening. That’s when things are quiet enough.

What are the tools that they use? What type of keyboard do they use? I notice that I don’t type nearly as fast on my Macbook Pro than I do with an external keyboard. In fact, I hope to one day upgrade my Apple wireless keyboard to one of those pricey mechanical keyboards that feature those tactile CherryMX switches. (I type faster with the mechanical feedback).

I’m a bit obsessed as to how these writers interface with their profession (whether digital or with pen and paper). I’m a firm believer that having great paper and a great writing instrument help elicit great ideas. It helps me when I sketch.

I suppose the same would be with how I write this weblog. What text editor do they use?1 BBedit? jEdit? Textmate? Sublime Edit? Do they use an external monitor? What environmental factors do they share (solitude, music, temperature), or are they like me? (I type this stuff on the dining room table of my home until my wrists hurt…then I move downstairs into the office and type until my feet get numb from the cold).

Perhaps I’ll just email them.

  1.  I don’t know why I obsess over these kinds of things. On text editors alone, I’ve spent over $150 USD in 2011 for BBedit, Espresso 2, and Sublime Edit 2. They are all wonderful editors. If I do straight up HTML authoring, Espresso is just more focused. Anything else I bounce around between BBedit and Sublime Edit 2. BBedit is quite amazing, but there is something about that doesn’t gel with me. I think its because it doesn’t have some keybindings that I would expect it to have. ↩

Siri, where are you?

When I was on the plane from San Fran to Toronto, I managed to watch a Nova episode called “The Smartest Machine on Earth” about the development of Watson, IBM’s computer that bested Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the 3-day Jeopardy challenge.

It documented the challenges of computationally interpreting the English language. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, contestants are confronted with a factual statement. They must correctly provide the question (e.g., For $200, a contestant will see “This device lightly burns slices of bread.” The contestant must answer, “What is a toaster?””).

It immediately reminded me of the challenges that Apple has gone through in the development of Siri and why Siri is in “Beta”. It’s not the voice recognition algorithms, it’s all about machine learning and the gathering of voice data.

Generally, I have a hard time using any type of voice recognition software. I attribute it to my rather monotone and low-pitch voice. It just doesn’t register. Everytime I have to go through a voice controlled menu, I cringe. It just doesn’t work.

The only success I’ve ever had is with Google Android’s voice transcription. Similar to Siri, it uses a data connection to process the sound in the Google cloud. The reason why this is so accurate is Google has a huge corpus of voice data collected through a short-lived mobile service called Google 411:

GOOG-411 (or Google Voice Local Search) was a telephone service launched by Google in 2007, that provided a speech-recognition-based business directory search, and placed a call to the resulting number in the United States or Canada. The service was accessible via a toll-free telephone number. It was an alternative to 4-1-1, an often-expensive service provided by local and long-distance phone companies, and was therefore commonly known as Google 411. This service was discontinued on November 12, 2010.

Similarly, it allowed for Google to:

…build a large phoneme database from users’ voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching.

So I’m sure when Siri comes out of beta, Apple will have built a similar phoneme based on all the people using the service right now. It will only get better and I am sure that this is the next interface revolution coming in to mobile.

Flying

On globetrotting

I don’t know how Mike does it, or any of the executives that I know. Travelling across the world on a plane, even in business class just ruins the body. I suppose you get use to it after a time.

Anyways, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris (with about 24-hours notice), France to present the Kobo Touch and be judged for the prestigious Janus de L’industrie award at the Instutut Français du Design.

This is the first award nomination for the Kobo Touch. It kind of validates our approach at building “frictionless technology” and my personal goal at making a better book.

I’ll just say that all presentations were suppose to be 20-minutes plus a 10-minute Q & A session.

We were there for 2 hours

I couldn’t have done this myself, I have such an amazing team at Kobo.

How did it end off?

Well, I’m just going to say that I can add “award winning designer” to my CV now.

Idle time on the flight

I really need to install games on the laptop. Sometimes you need a break from writing. I started the migration while on the return flight to Toronto. Figure I could get the lion’s share done.

It occurred to me that the best way to create the markup for the blog was to create a Textpattern template that outputted each post with the right YAML file header. Then I realized that the bulk of my posts are in MovableType! Conversely, all I need to do is fix the hard-links and upload the static files to the site and Bam…old versions available. That’s pretty amazing and probably the fastest way to do that.

This means I only need to move about 30 articles from my Drupal install as well as a few dozen that existed at ttohinteractive.com (That’s a blog I started incognito–I still use the URL, mostly to VNC into my Hackintosh).

One of the things that fascinate me is reading old posts that I used to write. I’m amazed with the openness that I used to write with. Right now, everything is a bit start-and-stop. I certainly don’t feel like things are flowing out of me, but I suppose it is just about practice. The former GM always said that, “Practice is the heart of excellence.”

Poor Hackintosh

I’ve been trying to diagnose the constant kernel panicking on the Hackintosh. I installed Lion on it 2-3 months ago and it was running great. I even managed to install the 10.7.2 update without a hitch. Then about 3 weeks the machine started kernel panicking all the time.

Is it the Hardware?

I immediately suspected the overclock (from 2.8 GHz to 3.4 GHz) was the problem, but putting the machine back to its original defaults did not help. I then turned my attention to the RAM, but testing using memtest86 seems to indicate that the ram and the bus seem to be in good shape. I’ve moved most of my data to other drive, so should protect a harddrive crash.

Is it Software?

I’ve been troubleshooting for about 2 weeks and I’ve just about given up and am considering doing a full-reinstall. That sounds unreasonable, I’m sure, but in the realm of reality when you’re dealing with Hackintoshes.

I certainly hope it fixes it.

Going public

One of the cool things with Octopress is that it has a built-in integration with GitHub. I’m not too familiar with distributed versioning systems, but this is cool. I used to do this with my other sites HTML templates using Subversion (I had a remote Gentoo server at one point).

GitHub has a free account status–you’re given 5 public repositories.

Public? Yes, I was wondering if that was a wise thing, I mean, anyone could download my blog and replicate. Then again, you can do that right now with very little effort.

Tai

First post in a long time

I spent about 30 minutes talking to my wife about how excited I was to do this. It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited to write online again.

When I first started writing online, it was 2002. I was between jobs (what was the beginning of a 6-month hiatus from the employed world) and I was poking around OS X. I remember reading this article on O’Reilly about serving Web pages using the built-in apache Web server in Mac OS X 10.1. At the end of the article was a suggestion to install this thing called Movable Type. It was my first foray into blogs. I soon got it running on my iBook G3 and eventually set up a site at Blacksun. I blogged consistently for about 3 years. Late in 2004, licensing decisions by SixApart forced me to re-evaluate my use of MovableType. I chose Dean Allen’s TextPattern.

In retrospect, the move was unwarranted, most of the licensing stuff with MovableType were resolved in the 3.2 point-release. The only thing that changing systems really did was interrupt my writing.

Since TextPattern, I’ve used WordPress, ExpressionEngine and finally found some consistent success with Drupal. I have found things to like on all platforms.

However, I wrote less and less–and when I did, I was usually angry at something (in Drupal’s case, it was Drupal itself). In actuality, I fiddled with code more and more. It was enjoyable, but code never provided the same voice and outlet for me as keeping an online journal.

Enter Baked Goodness

One of the cool things about MovableType was that your site was statically generated each time you made a post. The Perl script would create a multitude of HTML files, write hundreds hyper-linking and cross-linking and comment management every time you hit the publish button. One great thing is that I have all my posts in HTML. It’s very easy to keep the same URLS when all you need to do is point to static HTML.

I suppose this became passé with the drive to database driven websites.

One of the emerging trends that I am seeing is a more back-to-basics approach using scripting languages to publish static content. For a simple blog, it is more than enough.

I looked at several systems:

  • Jekyll – Ruby-based, good documentation and large community.
  • Hyde – Python-based, horrible documentation, but good community.
  • Blogofile– Kind of like Hyde, also written in Python.
  • Stacey – A PHP version that requires you scaffold your site using your file system.

I ended up going with Jekyll as the community have really tried hard to put together comprehensive documentation.

Tai

In “The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” Steve Denning writes about Roger Martin’s new book “Fixing the Game“:

“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Martin. “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”

Emphasis added by me. Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Looks like I picked the right profession to be in. Fuck yeah.

The migration begins

How do I migrate posts dating back from 2002?

Probably best to write a script, I guess. Most of these posts exist in a local textpattern install that I have working in VM, so I guess, the easiest thing for me would be to create an article template that mirrored the Octopress text format.

It would be trivial to parse this into static files.

Tai

Here’s the thing. Apple’s been here before. Jobs missed most of 2009, and when he returned, it was a while before he got back to full time. The product cycle continued. Existing products were improved. New products were released. Future products progressed in development. Was it the same without him? No, of course not. Did the company function just fine? Yes.

from John Gruber regarding Steve Job’s recently announced leave of absence

Best wishes to a true visionary.

I am hopeful that he makes a full recovery. Apple is in the strongest position on so many fronts (music, mobile, high-margin PCs). There is no better time to leave, but I wouldn’t want that. He has a few more years in him I think. Steve Jobs has really pushed my industry, User Experience, I am thankful that he has such great taste.

Should the worse happen, Apple will be fine for the next 2-years. The product development cycle is about 18-months; after that, we’ll see the true test of Apple as a company, culture, and icon.

 

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A blog by Tai Toh

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