Boston Flex Group

...and if you're wondering why I bothered putting in a Flash/Flex announcement, well here's the other shoe. There's now a Boston Flex User Group:

FIRST MEETING: Tuesday April 8, 2008 7 pm, at Adobe's Newton Office
The Boston Flex User Group's first event will be held on the evening of Tues, April 8, 2008 at Adobe Systems' Newton office at 7 pm. Developer Peter Farland of Adobe Systems will be giving us the inside scoop on the new Open Source Flex SDK, which not only includes the Flex 3.0 Framework but also the entire set of SDK tools, exposing a lot of source code and internal tooling that has never been publicly released before. Did you ever want to change the Flex Framework and rebuild your own distribution? Do you ever wonder what the Flex compiler is up to when it's chugging away? Are you just plain curious? Please join us!

No, I'm not involved with the group, though I hope to get along to the meeting. Maybe there will be giveaways..

It seems like only a few years ago I was being - reluctantly - dragged from being a Director developer to a Flash one, and now - out of no where - everyone wants me to be using Flex. Sigh Change is the thing. The world keeps changing. Change with it, or be flattened by it.

Flash Player security update coming...

If you're using Flash or Flex, then you should be aware of an upcoming update to the Flash player that Adobe says will prevent Flash player apps being used to launch attacks against consumers, but could also break some apps.

Adobe's own announcement says that if the following situations apply to your Flash/Flex app then you might be impacted:

1. You use sockets or XMLSockets, regardless of the domain to which you are connecting


2. You use addRequestHeader or URLRequest.requestHeaders in any network API call when sending or loading data cross-domain
   
   OR


3. You provide access to content on remote domains as a web service provider


4. You have SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 (SWF7) or earlier that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means


5. You use "javascript:" through network APIs to communicate outside a SWF

You can read the article in detail here.

Careful what you blog about...

....cause the screens have eyes...

Cisco's legal trouble stems from a Blogspot-hosted blog called Patent Troll Tracker, which Rick Frenkel, who directs the company's intellectual property department, launched last May. His posts focused on patents and patent litigation--an issue that Cisco has pressed Congress to address by overhauling what it views as a broken U.S. patent system.

A few weeks ago, Frenkel revealed his identity, and two patent attorneys in Texas filed suit, accusing him of tarnishing their good names and disparaging a patent case their client had filed against Cisco--all the while allegedly concealing his affiliation with the company.

As a result of the suit, Cisco has added a rule to it's Internet Postings Policy (which it has evidently had for three years.) The addition reads:

"If you comment on any aspect of the company's business or any policy issue the company is involved in where you have responsibility for Cisco's engagement, you must clearly identify yourself as a Cisco employee in your postings or blog site(s) and include a disclaimer that the views are your own and not those of Cisco."

Cisco's policy makes good sense to me, but I wonder how many companies will simply issue edicts against employees blogging about anything to do with their work life - or even anything at all?

Profiling Customers

A year or so ago I heard from a Best Buy employee how Best Buy was categorizing it's shoppers into different demographic types. He said that they were setting up the stores to appeal to these segments.

Now Consumerist has posted "Best Buy's Internal Customer Profiling Document" which lists all these types, who they are, and what drives them. It's an interesting read, though you have to wonder what the average sales associate makes of this information. Can they really tell - just by looking at someone - which group they fall into? Is that middle-aged woman with a 10 year-old really married and living on a budget?


This blog entry Best Buy vs Circuit City:Customer Centric spilled the beans back in April 2007 about the different Best Buy segments and notes:

It empowered employees to focus on their angels ( high potential customers) so that they spend more and increase their share of wallet (SOW).

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson is quoted as saying:

"In our world the way you win the game isn't the price of the TV - which is about the same for all retailers - but the experience you give customers once they are in our stores"

Maybe I'm not in any of the target demo's but neither Circuit City or Best Buy offer me a more compelling experience. Best Buy stores I'd rate slightly higher based on variety and quality of merchandise, though that might just be a perception based on the colors in the store. Frankly, I compare on price first, then convenience (oh, and I have a Best Buy card, which factors in when they have those interest free offers.)

Certainly, past experience dealing with sales associates wouldn't have me pick one over the other.

It's official; I'm an addict

News.com: MD says Net addiction really is a mental illness

[...] online fixation can be serious a problem--a compulsive-impulsive disorder whose sufferers endure gadget cravings, broadband-deprivation withdrawal, increasing tolerance for spending extraordinary amounts of time online, and no apparent embarrassment when they wake up in the morning with a keyboard imprint on their face.

...though no face imprints yet.

Paul Krugman tells it like it is...

Even if you only have a cursory interest in economic thinking you've probably heard of Paul Krugman. Krugman is an economist, author, and writes a regular Op-Ed for The New York Times and in an interview in Fortune, he gave the following answer to the question: Why [is this not going to be like] the Great Depression?

[...]I think we know more than we did then, and just the fact that we have a big federal government is a stabilizing factor. But the current problem is still pretty awesome.

the current problem is still pretty awesome

I don't know about you, but having become familiar with "pretty awesome" used to indicate something that's really good, I had a hard time wrapping my head around that sentence.

Pi Day

Pi Day: 3/14

Busking Sign

Requests: $1 per song, $2 to stop

Unexpected Search Results

I always forget what B&H Photo's web address is - or seem to get it wrong - so today I did a quick Google for 'b & h photo' and the first thing I get back is a photo of a B-52!!

User Interface: figuring it out

In reviewing part of the interface for the design of a testing program, the client designed a function for the system-administrator that looked like this:


The left hand link opens a window that displays the test, while the right hand link assigns (or unassigns) the test to all of the users. Clicking “Assign” releases the test to all users, and changes the state of the item to “Unassign”

First things first, a link that opens another window seems fine, but having a link that actually changes the state of data in the system seems counter-intuitive. Especially when these items are side by side.

When you get into the actual functionality of this item, things gets even hairier.

What does that thing do?
Remember that this is a system-admin function that assigns tests to other users. Now the system-admin can go in and individually choose to assign these tests to the other users (through another screen), but this function is supposed to assign the test to everyone. And once you’ve assigned the test to everyone, it can then be used to unassign the test as well.

This immediately provoked questions like:

1. What happens if you assign the test individually to several users, and want to unassign everyone that’s so far been assigned the test? Do you click once to assign it, and then click again to unassign it?

2. If a student is half way through a test and you unassign it, is data lost?

3. What if you assign the test to all users (the item changes to unassign) and then several more users are added? Can you use the function to assign the test to those users?

The answer to 2 is most important, because it became apparent that the data shouldn’t be lost (just the users access temporarily disabled.)


First redesign
My first thought was to change the test so that there was an Auto Assign mode, and if it was on, then users could access the test, and if it was off, they couldn’t.


That certainly looked prettier than the first design, and a little more obvious what was going on too. But, it turned out to not really offer the functionality that was wanted any more than the first design.


Second redesign
The second redesign seems to get closer to the desired functionality. It splits the function into two options; one that turns the testing mode on and off (i.e. you don’t unassign things, you disable the testing) and an Assign All button.


Note that the Assign All button does not change to an Unassign All button; it remains an Assign All button after you use it.

This design solves all but one problem: what if you actually want to disable the test rather than just turn it off? We could add a third button “Unassign” – and for the sake of completeness, maybe we should – but it comes down to: how are system admins going to use the system? In most cases, they aren’t going to want to unassign everyone. But they may want to turn off the testing temporarily, and they could want to assign everything to all the users. Leaving the unassignment function a manual process (i.e. you use the separate function for individually assigning and unassigning tests) simplifies the UI, but shouldn’t actually cause most users any more work.

R U using txt abbreviations?

While New Zealand allows students to use "Text-Speak" in exams, it seems that Australians have gone one better and are now using common texting errors in baby names!

LOL.

I wonder if this is only a transitory effect, and five years from now we'll all be looking back at the 90's and 10's as that funny time when odd abbreviations popped up, only to be washed away as technology improves and solves some of these self imposed limitations.

I know I tend to type full words on the QWERTY keyboard of the iPod touch more than I do on a cell-phone's numeric keypad.

Informational Cascade and the Digital Hordes

One of many issues that you face when dealing with the Digital Horde is Informational Cascade. Put simply; when someone states a fact or answers a question, those that follow can skew their answers towards that answer even though they originally had a different answer.

This is less true of expressions of opinion, but it can play a part.

There's an interesting example of informational cascade in this article: Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus which explains how medicine was almost hoodwinked into believing that fatty foods shorten lifespan based on dubious assumptions and data.

While the article - and the example - are interesting, the following statistic is the takeaway:

[...] groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Perhaps my favorite example of Informational Cascade is highlighted in a clever letter written to the radio show Car Talk that pointed out how the hosts had engaged in mad speculation about a topic that they new nothing about:

I am writing to offer profound thanks to you for resolving an important philosophical question that has been heatedly debated for the last twenty years. [...] Do two people who don't know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about?
...
One person will only go so far out on a limb in his construction of deeply hypothetical structures, and will often end with a shrug or a raising of hands to indicate the dismissability of his particular take on a subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes, the wherefores and why-nots, can become a veritable pas-de-deux of breathtaking speculation, interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary.

In the final analysis, Informational Cascade confirms that results are more accurate if the respondents don't know how previous respondents have answered a question.