FeedMe

Knol

New from Google is the "Knol." Interesting idea. They've made it extremely easy for anyone to write an article on anything. For instance, I posted an article on how to make lemon sorbet (the same article appears here, in the FeedMe blog).

Google's company mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." They have noted that the entire Internet contains a fraction of a percent of the world's knowledge. The vast majority is in people's heads. (Yahoo has talked about the same idea.) This is a way to soak up some of what's in our brains.

A lot of press on Knol is calling it a Wikipedia competitor but frankly, I think they are missing the point. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol is not collaborative: only the author controls the content. They have very few rules or editorial controls. There are no rules requiring a neutral point of view or restricting conflict of interest. Multiple articles on the same topic can be posted. They are trusting that their search product will properly prioritize all this, along with the rest of the web.

This seems like a significant marketing opportunity. Is there a "first-in" advantage? Should we rush in to write about technical topics that benefit our companies, with links to our company websites?

Not sure, but for now, I am sharing my sorbet recipe.

(You can see all my articles -- just three so far -- by starting at my own knol page.)

(P.S. The knol system is a bit buggy. It sometimes won't load and with Firefox, it is currently not letting me sign in, though it works with Safari. Earlier today, it worked with Firefox. Its search is presently not finding any of my articles, even though they are in the system. I expect it will settle down over the next few days. Google has a motto: "Release early and often." Good think Boeing doesn't follow that philosophy.)

Walk, Drive, Bus...

Google Maps has added walking directions. They already had public transit in some areas. They include a lot of helpful information, in addition to the router.

 For instance, I can drive the 3.5 miles from work to home in 8 minutes. On foot, the route is quite different but the distance is that same. Google thinks it would take 1 hour, 11 minutes (obviously, they don't take into account any ice cream stores en route).

By bus, they tell me it will take 58 minutes — and cost $1.75. They also tell me it would be $2.05 to drive. Again, no ice cream is factored in.

Nicely done. Though it's in beta, the walking route matches what I would choose.

I love the fact that Google keeps improving their systems. By the way, if you didn't know — one of the coolest features of Google maps is that you can click and drag to change a route. If their directions send you up 101 but you prefer to take 280, drag the route line over to 280 and a new route will be drawn, using the points you request.

This is too cool. The "Tilted Twister" is a robot, built from Legos, that solves Rubik's cube, with no external PC. It was built with standard Lego Mindstorms NXT kit.

You need to see it in action to appreciate it. First, it scans all the sizes and determines the colors the cube has. Then it begins twisting sides:

More info on the Tilted Twister page to the video.

From: Tilted Twister, via Hackzine.

Microsoft

Why do I dislike Microsoft? They're really a great company, with smart people, and have contributed a great deal. As much as people dislike Bill Gates, I never did. I really admire his charitable work which is precisely what he said he was going to do a decade ago. Their trade practices haven't been pristine but for the most part in recent years, it's been legal and mostly ethical. They're ruthless competitors but that's not, in itself, evil.

I also credit them for fixing the Macintosh! If Microsoft hadn't launched Windows, the Mac would totally suck.

And yet, Microsoft makes me nuts.

Standards

This is their biggest offense, in my book. Microsoft pretends to follow industry standards and common practices, while really co-opting, or even sabotaging, them. Under the guise of enhancement, they add "features" in a way that damages competing products. The best example is their web browser. Generation after generation sought to derail web standards, adding elements (such as ActiveX controls) designed to get web developers to write sites that would not work well on other browsers. It is a pleasure now to see them outfoxed.

Another example: Their Exchange mail server uses a Microsoft-proprietary format for attachments and text formatting. Non-Outlook e-mail programs can't read them. There are standard methods for doing this, but Microsoft does not adhere to them. You can configure the server to not do this, but you should not have to.

One more: SharePoint is the most popular collaboration system for companies. It works pretty well if the user has Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Other browsers and systems are supposed to work but it's a hair-pulling experience. As far as I can see, everything they're doing could be done in an industry-standard way that works universally. I can't tell if the Explorer-dependence is deliberate sabotage or incompetence.

It makes me crazy because it is arrogant, anti-user, and predatory. It's one area where they exploit their leadership in a way that damages the community.

Taste

Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft that they "have no taste." Say what you will about Jobs and his arrogance (I would not argue) but he is right. They are successful — and Jobs does not begrudge that, a least in this video — even if their products and strategies are artless. He says, "they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture to their product."

It's obvious to me that engineers design their interfaces and graphics. I recently saw the new release of MS Office 2008 for the Mac. It was demonstrated for me by a Microsoft program manager, who proudly showed me 3D charts in PowerPoint. I was horrified by the amaterish 3D. They had added shadows and highlights that were blocky and unrealistic. The colors were Crayola basic. Labels were improperly centered on shapes. To many business users, I am sure these look fine, but any top-tier company would have them redrawn before using them in any material that goes outside the company.

There is nothing evil or badly intentioned about this: I think it's because they're unaware, like the engineer who dresses in plaid and dots and is honestly befuddled when it's pointed out.

Interface

Then there are the user interfaces. Microsoft has some of the most advanced user interface labs in the world and a large UI staff. Yet, their interfaces are consistently confusing and convoluted.

MS Office is a case in point. It has tons of functionality, but finding and performing a function is often painful. The worst part is that with each revision, it becomes more painful! Why? Because their UI labs are very good at identifying user complaints, very poor at fixing them. When they find a function people can't do, such as mail merge, they never seen to think that the user interface is fundamentally in need of ground-up redesign. Almost invariably, they think the answer is to add something. They added a mail merge palette. A help system. Then that paper clip animation. Then a wizard. Then a "ribbon." A sequential palette. Now they have a bar thing that has no name that brings up a series of icons that, um, does something. Like a wizard. But they can't call it that because the wizards, um, didn't help.

They seem to toss solutions at the problem, never quite figuring out that the problem is underneath all these wizardly layers.

The project manager who demonstrated Office 2008 for me showed me the wizard-like bar thing they had added for special user operations, like mail merge and templates. It takes up about an inch-high row of the document window. I asked if it could be made vertical. "We thought about that," he said. "Especially with displays tending to be wider. But no, it's horizontal only."

Duh. Even when they know they're making a mistake (and they usually don't), they proceed and make the mistake.

Code

And then, there is the underlying stuff: The code. It's bloated. It's buggy. Year after year, release after release, many bugs remain. It's slow and inefficient. The new Office 2008 for the Mac takes longer to load (a lot longer) and is not noticeably faster than the six-year-old, two-revs-ago version I had.

Someone did an interesting comparison between the open-source web server, Apache, and Microsoft's server, IIS. These "call graphs" hint at the underlying structure and you don't need to be an expert to see the difference.(thanks to Paul Rako's Anablog — which presents his own case against Microsoft — for showing me these.)

Is this typical? Meaningful? I wouldn't know, but I would bet it is.

I Don't Hate Microsoft

I don't hate Microsoft. I certainly don't hate their people. I don't even hate their products or what they have done for the industry. But I hate using their products, I hate being slave to their manipulations and incompetence.

Most of all, I hate it when I have no alternative.

Debakey Dies

Dr. Michael Debakey (pictured at right, at age 85) died today, at age 99. He invented the coronary bypass. He performed one on my father. This is the story of how that came to be.

Dad's second heart attack occurred while he was getting an arteriogram, as part of the one-year followup, after his first attack. If you're going to have a heart attack, NYU's cardiac care hospital is a pretty good place to do it.

The doctors wanted to do a bypass. My mother, noting that insurance allows a second opinion, asked a cousin who was in medical school who was that best cardiac surgeon in the country. "The doctor who wrote my text book is pretty good," said my cousin. It was Dr. Michael Debakey.

Most people would seek a local doctor for a second opinion. We weren't rich or famous or well connected, but I don't suppose Mom thought twice about seeking the top name.

Mom wrote two letters: One to Debakey and one to his then-rival and former partner Denton Cooley. A few days later, the phone rang. It was Dr. Debakey. "Will you consult on my husband's case?" she asked. He would. She had them NYU send the records. 

A few days later, he called again and advised a triple bypass. I don't suppose she thought twice before she asked, "Will you do it?" He would. They talked for a while and he asked if she had any questions. She said no, and he said, "That's because you don't know what questions to ask," and he answered all the questions she did not know she had. They were on the phone for an hour and a half.

A few days later, we were in Houston. It was July or August, as I recall. Not a good time to be in Houston. Hot, very hot, and shirt-wringingly humid. I remember that spending hours waiting in a hospital was not so bad, since it was air conditioned.

Debakey put my Mom in the hospital. He was talking to her in his office and noted she did not look healthy. She is allergic to tobacco smoke and was suffering from days in the waiting room, with the families of Debakey's 60 patients. He had her admitted for treatment.

Debakey was 69 when he did my Dad's surgery. His patients filled a floor of the hospital. My mom recalls he did 21 operations that day. He did about 100 a week. His team prepared and closed each patient. By 1992, he had done 50,000 surgeries. "Man was born to work hard," he said.

He also played hard. I recall someone pointing out a blue Mercedes in the parking lot. It had a baby seat in the back. "That's Dr. Debakey's car." His wife was 34.

My Dad, shown here at a much younger age, also believed man was born to work hard. He survived another eight years, one of many thousands who benefit from Debakey's work. Debakey's patients included at least three U.S. presidents and dozens of celebrities and world leaders. Celebrities were no different to him: "Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very similar," he once said.

And one of the great men Dr. Bakey worked on was Harry Rubenzahl. Because my mother didn't hesitate to think that the doctor who took care of presidents would be the perfect choice to take care of her husband.

Pistachios are Good for You

"Add pistachios to the list of heart-healthy nuts," says Consumer Reports on Health. A small study (funded by the pistachio people, of course) found an increase in HDL (the "good" cholesterol") of 6%. Two Harvard studies have linked eating nuts with reduced heart attacks.

Sounds like good news to me. Now, we just have to get the Bacon Council to fund some studies.