Adblockers

I have used AdBlock for about 6 months now.

I have no intention to deprive publishers of revenue, far from it, but I don't feel I have a choice. Some sites have so many intrusive (and sometimes downright offensive) ads that the viewing experience is miserable if you include ads.

If a publisher asks me to turn the blocker off on their site, I will for a day or so. If the ads aren't intrusive and are useful, I will leave it like that. If they are intrusive, I will turn it back on again or simply not visit that site again.

The worst sort of ads are Pop ups of any kind and any that play sound or video; Pop ups that are difficult to close are the worst sort of ads and I won't come back to these sites. For example Forbes has great content but its almost impossible to read it sometimes and therefore I don't bother.  My local news paper (The Argus - Brighton and Hove) often uses sound and occasionally uses advertiser images as a kind of watermark on the entire page with artifacts that don't scroll. It’s a miserable experience.

Sites that aren't optimised to display on tablets or mobile phones are surprisingly common, there is simply no excuse for this at all.

It's an impossible task for many publishers these days, keeping a revenue stream thats reliable and large enough to keep paying contributors. Making the site difficult to use with ads just cuts off part of that revenue stream.

I'm happy to pay for content if the price is right. I use Spotify, Netflix, pay for a Times subscription etc but there is a limit to my budget, I can't, and won't, subscribe to everything. We need a good micropayments service; one that allows you to set a monthly budget or limit (say £10) and a per article cost limit, I wouldn't want publishers charging 9 payments for 9 views or 9 payments for a multi-page article. Maybe sites could charge for a well formatted Pocket or Instapaper version of the article?

The music industry suffered from copyright theft for years, they developed a new model (around concerts, merchandising and Spotify/iTunes) that is starting to pay off. Magazine and newspapers need to do something similar. I don't just want to read one paper and pay 10 quid a month, I want to read parts of all of them. I don't care about the Property or Food sections but I do read the News, Books and Music sections and I want to read those from many papers.

Another revenue stream would be to collect articles into e-books and sell these via Amazon. I've bought quite a few of these and they are a great way to read.

Publishers have to find a better way to get their content out there and get people to pay for it, ads are not going to work on their own, there are too many talented developers who will beat them.

Apple - Over designed?

I wrote the original post (at the bottom) about a year ago but forgot to post it. I now have the Retina iMac, it's fully loaded with the better graphics card, the 3TB Hybrid drive and 24G of RAM. The maximum ram is supposed to be 32G but people report that it will take 64. If the cost of 16GB SIMMS ever drops to an affordable cost I will load it up (I want to play with in memory databases)

I went for the Hybrid drive because I have a lot of stuff. I do have a NAS but still like the bigger drive and the Apple Hybrid has 128GB SSD on board, with it's clever caching it's fast enough for me. 

I ordered it with the wired keyboard (rather than the toy they show in stores) and I ordered with the regular touch mouse but immediately switched to a £10 cheap wireless mouse from Amazon. I couldn't get on with the Apple Mouse, it's too shiny and right-clicking feels awkward.

So what do I think?

The cost was high, I paid about £2100, but the lack of a main system unit saves valuable space in my study. Buying a screen and system of equal quality would have been slightly cheaper but only by £2-300, for something I use every day and will have for 5-6 years, that's not a lot of money. I still have my original Intel 20" iMac I bought in 2006 and it's still a workable computer for surfing. 

The speed of the 27" is truly amazing - no matter what screen mode it's in. The Retina display is extremely comfortable to use even for long periods.

I tend to run in the highest resolution when I'm developing, I'm not a fan of multi monitors these days. I'd rather have one large screen that allows to me focus on one task. When I'm in my office I prefer 3 monitors because I'm on the phone a lot and heavily multi tasking, but at home I'm normally writing or reviewing code and that's where the iMac shines. 

The lack of a DVD or Blu Ray drive is irritating, I ended up buying an external drive and that takes up one of the USB slots. 

The slowest (and worst) thing about the iMac is still iTunes! The whole system seems to slow down when it has to do more than one thing. I know that moving from legacy code is hard (and isn't something that the average user can appreciate) but this hasn't been a problem for one, two or even three years, it's been a problem for the best part of 10 years. Apple could and should fix this. 

I was quite excited when I got it because of the Thunderbolt ports, at last I thought, super fast copying to my iPhone and iPad. Nope. Still have to use USB. Nuts. 

From 2015

I went in an Apple Store the other day and, as usual, it was packed, people were buying stuff like crazy, everyone looked shiny and happy, and the hardware on offer looked modern and sleek.

I was there to take a look at the new 27" Retina iMac, I have a 2010 27" iMac and it's simply the best computer I have ever owned. The screen (even on the old model) is wonderful, the wired keyboard is so good, I can type all day and never have a problem.

My old iMac feels a bit long in the tooth for development and needs an upgrade, mind you it's still more than good enough for all the other things we use it for, Office, iTunes, surfing etc.

The new Retina screen and the sleek design of the unit is something I want and will almost certainly buy as soon as I have the money. However, I was left with a sense of disappointment.

I hate the tiny keyboard for all sorts of reasons: the arrow keys are squashed in, the unit is too small, there is no number pad (which my wife uses all the time). It also looks the wrong size for the unit - if looks matter.

I hate the trackpad thing, a few uses of it and my wrist and arm hurt. I've used computers for over 35 years and I have never had RSI or any issues.

I don't really care about the thinner form factor. I want a DVD drive!

Wright's Laws

I joke with my team that there are three fundamental laws they should take heed of:

1. Every NoSQL solution will eventually add a SQL interface.
2. Every dynamic language will eventually introduce types for reasons of speed or for better developer support.
3. Every object transfer protocol will eventually look something like CORBA.

Turns out that computer scientists in the 20th Century knew what they were doing. Who knew?

Doing the right thing

GitHub just announced that they now have a single developer plan for private developers. 

https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-repositories

That's great news. I paid for the basic account because I wanted to support them, it's an awesome service and they deserve to make money out of it. The 3 private repos plan felt a bit stingy and I was reluctant to use up my private repos. As a result I didn't use them at all and that's a bit pointless really. I suspect a lot of people felt the same way and maybe that's why they changed.  

Now they have unlimited repos I will put everything I do on GitHub. It makes total sense to do this, I'll never lose anything. Bash scripts, odd bits of Python, spreadsheets etc, everything!

I previously said I don't like Git. I still don't. It's way too complex for my needs, I just use baby-git. That's the smallest subset I can get away with, I crave simplicity and git isn't. 

I do love GitHub though, their tooling is outrageously good and it's clear that GitHub is now a service much like broadband is; it's ubiquitous and taken for granted. 

Crapware

One of the reasons that I bought my first Mac was because of crapware.

I bought a Dell that came with so much awful software (buggy, time limited and invasive) that I had to reinstall the OS.

That's a waste of my time. 

Manufacturers argue that margins are so thin that they need the extra revenue. Fair point. 

But if they have to vet the crapware before installing (and they should) and they have to deal with complaints via customer service from people and they have to deal with the fallout from PR disasters such as Lenovo.. that must erode those margins.

Offering customers the option to buy a crapware free PC must be a viable option. Even if many people don't take them up on it, they should offer it to those of us who do care.

Every few years I think about buying a new Windows machine (for the kids to play games) but this puts me off. Having to deal with the rubbish (and it's always rubbish) that they install is simply depressing and I just put off the decision. I have two Dells that are 9 and 7 years old respectively. I've put new disks in, maxxed out the memory and put new Graphics cards in to extend their life.

So Dell lost two sales from me and that far outweighs any additional revenue from the crapware they would have installed.

I am pretty sure I would never buy a Lenovo now (unless it came as a Signature edition). How could I trust them? I mean, installing software that could bypass my Bank's certificates? Who thought that was acceptable just so that they could inject ads (that no-one ever wants) into a secure shopping experience? That's just greed and stupidity in one indivisible package.

I bought a Macbook for myself and installed Windows in a VM. Lovely experience. The VM starts up quick (and VirtualBox with Windows 10 on a recent Macbook Pro is a wonderful experience).

Microsoft can help manufacturers by reducing the margin on OEM Windows installed without crapware. 

Apple are far from a perfect software company (I have a long list of gripes about OSX, iOS and their own software) but they understand what makes a great user experience.

Why can't other manufacturers learn from this experience? 

And in the Orange Corner

I'm slightly obsessed by keeping systems up to date. Latest browsers, latest JDK, patches etc. Generally - its good practice.

OS X makes life easy when you download things from the App Store, everything is in one place and you don't have to hunt around.

This isn't the case for Chrome and FireFox though and you still have to do the update dance once a month, across all your computers and virtual machines. It's about 15 times in my household.

And what have I discovered? FireFox absolutely kicks Chromes butt. Its quick and oh so slick.

The problem starts with Chrome wanting to launch the Google Updater from within the browser; this rarely works and I end up downloading the Chrome install again. By the time I have done this - Firefox installed itself about 2 minutes ago.

In addition to this it wants to put some stupid notification bar (that I don't want) on the OS X menu bar.

Net result - at home I am slowly but surely migrating my way back to Firefox - I have already done it at work. FireFox feels much much quicker. I also like the way it prompts me for a master password before I auto fill passwords.

So.. is there anything wrong with Chrome itself? Not really. It does a fantastic job of switching users, saving bookmarks etc. Its quick enough (but not as fast as FireFox).

It's the install experience, its the toolbar install (yuk) and the general nagging that gets to me.

I'll do anything for you but I won't estimate that.

There's a proposal that we rewrite a big part of the system I work on. We'd take advantage of a new risk engine that scales up much better than the old one we use. We'd use a better source of trade notifications. Everything really would be better.

So what's my problem?

They want estimates. 

Oh boy.

Now, I've been doing this software writing thingie for 30 years. I've got better every year at every aspect of my job, learning new languages, new techniques, improving domain knowledge, recruiting, training and retaining staff, keeping customers very happy, reducing delivery times (2 week schedule at the moment). In short, doing everything I can do to stay top of my game.

So what's the problem?

I can't estimate. 

I see Dead Projects (apologies to Bruce Willis and the Sixth Sense)

I know exactly how many people it will take and for how long, I have my own sixth sense about that. But I also know how many people it will take to go to the meetings, to update JIRA, to write User Stories, to build a Confluence site.

I know how many people we will need to add inprocess monitoring, testing, metrics collection. To create the batch jobs, to create and maintain the SQL, to convert that old Ant build to Maven/Gradle. 

I know how much of my time it will take to train new people, to pass on my domain knowledge, to put the new guys in touch with the right people.

I mean, writing software can be the easiest thing in the world: think, code, test, deploy. How hard can it be?

Well, building something that will run for 10 years with barely any change ( like the last rewrite) is really hard. It's like Brain Surgery on roller skates.

I know how many people it will take to do this, I guess I am not so good at telling people the bad news. 

I can't estimate reliably how long all the above will take if priorities change. Or people move around.  Or we suddenly have to do some regression testing.. Or upgrade Apis.  

So I suppose.. I should say; I can estimate, but I won't. Not unless the world stops moving and changing. 

(Apologies to Meatloaf and Jim Steinman for the title.)