Advanced users don't customize

I was scanning an old post of Joel Spolsky's and found this quote really rung true for me:

"But wait!" you say. "It's important to have options for advanced users who want to tweak their environments!" In reality, it's not as important as you think. ... Most advanced users use several computers regularly; they upgrade their computer every couple of years, they reinstall their operating system every three weeks. It's true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren't the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things. I've asked a lot of my "power user" friends about this; hardly any of them do any customization other than the bare minimum necessary to make their system behave reasonably.

It kind of surprised me that it was true, though: I used to be an obsessive preference tweaker but that animal urge seems to have died out along with the desire to immerse myself in video games until 5:00am. I still troll the preference dialogs of any new application, looking for options with as much clout as the Turbo button on old 386 machines, but I can usually close these dialogs without saving.

There are a few customizations I do any time I have a new computer (like deleting useless icons from the Dock or its equivalent). There are even customizations (like setting the refresh rate of the monitor higher than 60Hz so it doesn't hurt my eyes!) I do on every machine I touch. Firefox settings come with me whenever I copy my profile onto a new computer (I want my bookmarks). Other than that, if I can't share the customizations between computers (with an NFS-mounted .bashrc for example), I try to keep them to a minimum.

Of course, with Linux this issue is much less of a problem. I once had a system that I had to expand by putting in a second hard drive. As a result, I ended up with /home on its own drive. The next time I re-installed the operating system I was delighted to find my desktop and all my application settings exactly as I had left them.

Book: The Long Tail

I found myself in a bookstore the other day and the limited selection of English books made it seem like time to check out The Long Tail (note the link is not to the same edition that I read).

The thesis is interesting: that consumer behaviour is changing due to increased selection, decreased distribution costs, better filtering and recommendation tools, and expanding access by amateurs to creative tools. The idea is that selling a few each of a million different things can now constitute a sizable and legitimate market. The history of mail order and consumerism in the United States also held my attention and there were pearls of interesting information about particular industries and companies thrown in.

Those were the good parts. But man do you have to wade through an enormous heaping pile of repetition to find them! I mean, I complained about the repetitiveness of Don't Think of an Elephant but The Long Tail makes that slender tome look like a particularly succinct haiku.

Anyone near me while I was reading will be able to confirm my level of frustration: every chapter or so I would snap, get up, and complain to whoever was nearest at the time (sorry!). Right down to the last chapter, we were still being treated—in every subsection!—to a paragraph-long definition of "long-tail economics" and its effects on commerce and consumers. Yes! Ok! We get it already!! The book should ha... I said we GET IT!!! The book should have been called The Long Read[1].

Basically The Long Tail should have just been an essay. In fact, it was just an essay so I wouldn't waste your money on the book. And if the original essay leaves you wanting, you can always try Wikipedia.

Don't Think of an Elephant also came out of a collection of essays so maybe this is a lesson for me (though it ought to be a lesson for authors). I bought Freakonomics at the same time as The Long Tail and I see it is also a collection of essays; so that doesn't thrill me with enthusiasm. Can anyone give me any comfort on that one? At this point even boring would be ok as long as it isn't repetitive...

[1] Credit for the title goes to Andy Stote. ;)

Seaside 3: Server Adaptors

This is the next in a series of posts looking at changes in the upcoming Seaside release. Check out the other posts on partial continuations and exception handling.

The upcoming release of Seaside will feature some changes to the now-familiar WAKom. The existence of various subclasses like WAKomEncoded and WAKomEncoded39 was beginning to point at a usability problem and we wanted to facilitate running Seaside on multiple ports out of the same image.

First of all, we have introduced an abstract class, WAServerAdaptor. Server Adaptors provide an interface between Seaside and a particular server or connector (e.g. Comanche, Swazoo, AJP) and are able to start and stop server instances on the correct ports. Most importantly, they are also responsible for translating between Seaside's WAResponse and WARequest objects and the native requests and responses required by each server.

Server Adaptors are configured with a port number and a Request Handler. They are also configured with a Codec, which specifies the character conversion that should be performed when converting the requests and responses. Character encoding issues are complex, however, and we are still playing with those interfaces so I will leave that discussion for another time. Server Adaptors get registered with an instance of WAServerManager (currently a singleton) when they are created and the Server Manager coordinates starting and stopping the servers.

To create and start a new Comanche adaptor, you could simply execute:

adaptor := WAComancheAdaptor port: 8080.
adaptor start.

Alternatively, you can use the new Control Panel (implemented with OmniBrowser) to create and configure your adaptors. You can now create and run multiple adaptors of the same type. You can even configure multiple adaptors on the same port (perhaps to facilitate testing different servers or codecs) though only one can actually be running at any time.

Note that WAKom and its subclasses still exist for backwards compatibility in this release and will start an appropriately-configured instance of WAComancheAdaptor. These classes, however, only support running a single adaptor instance at a time and will be removed in a later release. Once created with WAKom, the adaptor will be visible in the Control Panel and can be manipulated there just like any other adaptor.

I mentioned that Server Adaptors can also be configured with a Request Handler. Why would you want to do that? By default, all Server Adaptors dispatch incoming requests to the same default Dispatcher. But perhaps you have an admin interface that you want to run on a different port so it can be firewalled to an internal network. Perhaps you want to make Seaside's web config tool available through an SSH tunnel. Or perhaps you have an XML-RPC interface or a status page for integration with a service monitoring tool. Maybe you just want to transition your application behind a load balancer to a new instance with different configuration options. Whatever the case, if you just want to configure a new Dispatcher using the web interface, the Control Panel has a context menu option called "Use new dispatcher" which will give you a new blank starting point on that Server Adaptor. If you have an existing Request Handler somewhere you can tell the Server Adaptor to use it like this:

adaptor requestHandler: myRequestHandler

Using a Dispatcher at the root will allow you to configure multiple Request Handlers at different subpaths but you could just as easily use an instance of WAApplication, RRRSSHandler, or any custom Request Handler subclass (more on this in a future post) if you want all requests to be handled in one place.

Seaside on Industry Misinterpretations

I spent some time this afternoon talking to James Robertson and Michael Lucas-Smith of Cincom for the Industry Interpretations podcast (episode 125). We talked a bit about the history of Seaside, partial continuations, the goals for the next release of Seaside, and some of the challenges (like getting debugging working). And probably some other things I've forgotten.

In fact, I know for certain that when we finished recording there was something I wished I had mentioned. I figured I'd blog about it when I posted about the podcast but, of course, now I have no idea what it was...

Update: The thing I forgot to mention on the podcast was another difference between a partial continuation and a full continuation. Evaluating a full continuation replaces the entire stack of the running process; a partial continuation can be evaluated—much like a block—so that, on completion, it returns to the context where it was evaluated.

On an unrelated note: I'm toying with the idea of making the trek to Potsdam for the German Squeak users meeting. Any other Seasiders planning to attend or have any idea how much someone with only elementary German would get out of it? :)

Fasnacht

I wanted to share a couple of photos from Fasnacht here in Konstanz this weekend. This is one festival that southern Germans take seriously. I'm not sure how well the costumes come across in the photos: when I saw individual people dressed up they seemed kind of silly; when I saw a few people hanging around in the same costume it felt corny; but when you get roving ganges of 30 or 40 of these guys ambling down the streets, only their eyes visible, it starts to have a serious impact on your psyche.

This traditional festival marks a transition from winter into spring. There are evil spirits (witches, goblins, etc.) and jester-like figures that taunt the evil spirits and frighten them away. And in the best tradition of human nature, even the clowns are creepy. At least I think they're clowns... or maybe they're evil characters too? Unfortunately my girlfriend was not with me to translate the culture.

This guy was cracking a 5m-long bullwhip on a crowded street. In North America, the good spirits could have frightened him off with threats of lawsuits!

The parade was actually a lot of fun. I particularly like the characters who sneak down behind the rows of spectators and surprise them with confetti or handfuls of straw rubbed in their hair. And my absolute favourite trick was seeing a huge furry monster looming menacingly over someone only to suddenly proffer a candy held delicately between thumb and index finger. This certainly beats Halloween for entertainment value, though I can't quite figure out why something called Fasnacht goes on for a whole week. Maybe I'll figure it out next year...

The crack of The Naughties

First of all, I apologize for the title: I was exposed to this name—so awful it's almost good—for our current decade only last week and felt compelled to throw it in. And yes, I realize I'm a bit late coming to this party.

Paul Graham's latest post talks about the challenges of maintaining the culture of his Hacker News site [link withheld to protect the innocent - you should be able to find it]. What I found interesting, though, was this almost offhand comment right at the end:

I feel like the addictiveness of games and social applications is still a mostly unsolved problem. The situation now is like it was with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, and we haven't yet evolved ways to protect ourselves from them. We will eventually, and that's one of the problems I hope to focus on next.

A way to protect ourselves from the crack that is the internet... Wikipedia safe injection sites? What do you have in mind, Paul?

Zug Sprint

Last weekend we ran a successful Seaside sprint in Zug, Switzerland, hosted by Michael Davies.

With two days of solid work, we managed to close around 25 issues and were only occasionally distracted by LEGO Indiana Jones on the Wii. We also submitted a couple of fixes upstream for Comanche and Swazoo. We have nearly all the inter-package dependencies teased out now and the level of churn seems to be starting to ease a bit, which is quite exciting.

We have a very satisfying little centre of Seaside activity in this corner of the world right now.