TaoSpace

The burden of choice

Professor Barry Schwartz has written a book called The Paradox of Choice, arguing that too much choice is bad. And I agree with him.

The article above lists a range of choices available at common stores. I can add my own story to this. Although super-markets in Europe are much the same as in the US, the restaurants are generally very different. Almost every time I go restaurant or company cafeteria in the US I am presented with a mindboggling amount of choice. Just getting a sandwhich or roll needs you to be a chef. Do I want Turkey, Chicken, Roast, Vegetables, Lettuce, Tomatoes? On Rye, Sourdough, Whole grain, Bagel? Do I require Reduced Sodium, Reduced Sugar or Yeast-free? Do I want mayonaise, hollandaise, ketchup or sauce-of-the-day?
Would I like a side-order of fries, salad, rice, etc. etc. etc. Don't even get me started on ordering a hamburger and just getting a halved roll and a piece of meat and having to find out that you have to build the burger yourself at the condiments-bar. "Is this your first time in the US sir?", "I guess you aren't used to the kind of choice you get in a free country Sir...".

Since I'm usually in the US for business-meetings I am tired, washed out and more then likely jet-lagged by the time I get to a food-joint. The last thing I want to do is decide the exact ingredients, their quality and quantity and their arrangement in my meal. There are people who study this exact thing for years on end. They are called "chefs". And using a sophisticated distributed information technology called "a menu" they inform people of what to their expert opinion tastes good.

But of course chefs are expensive. So what this whole "choice is good" thing boils down to is that you can train any monkey to slam a set of ingredients together in the way some customer says. Making it taste good and creating a combination that makes the whole better then the sum of its parts is another matter entirely.

Lost in translation

As usual I'm late in seeing good movies. This one has been running for a while now and I only saw it last weekend. It is however truly excellent!

I've always liked Bill Murray and felt that, given the right part, he could do far better then he did on his 80s comedies (Stripes, Ghost Busters, etc.). Who would have thought that waiting for this "right part" would take some 20-odd years? Playing a jetlagged, fading actor with a lousy marriage and a midlife crisis seems to come natural to him. Although the utterly aliens atmosphere of Tokyo helps to make his "lost-ness" feel even more real it really isn't needed all that much. It could have just as easily been Paris or Stockholm.

Next to him Scarlett Johansson plays a vibrant young woman crushed by a life she doesn't yet know what to do with. I've seen her play in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" recently but I have to say that where she was "good" in that one, in "Lost" she is excellent.

If you don't mind movies that don't feature loads of violence and explosions or juvenile humor you should go and see this one.

End of the world as we didn't know it

So you thought you had a good grasp of "end of the world" scenarios? Think again! This Wired article by (who else?) Bruce Sterling, is bound to contain a few you haven't thought of before.

To me the "global dimming" scenario seems most scary, but overall the fact that continues to surprise me is how little we know about about our planet and the universe it inhabits...

Impressive

A certain upcoming Macromedia technology is incredibly impressive...
I'm not going to say any more at the moment, not even why I can't.

Taxes

That time of the year again. Income-tax time.

Every year I manage to ignore it until it is too late. (Un)fortunately my girl reminded me in time and insisted on being on time. So we filled in the forms to get an electronic signature (just a 5 digit code that you tell the tax-man about) and started filling the electronic form.

It turned out to be only a 30 minute job this year. Probably because this is the first time my little enterpreneurial expedition of yonder years wasn't in the way.
Since my girlfriend and me share our incoming tax duties because we've lived together longer then 3 years at the same address eventhough we aren't married and she worked part-time for a salary that barely reaches disc three last year we even managed to wipe out almost all of the taxes I owe for driving a lease-car without cutting too much into her public-transport deduction based on her travelling more then 10KM but less then 40KM a day.

The point of this little post? Well: If you thought that last sentence made perfect sense, you are either an accountant or you have the wrong job.

New Camera

This is slightly sick. No not the camera itself of course but the fact that the only way I can make a picture of a 5 megapixel, 7x zoom, high-end digital camera is by using the twopenny camera on my mobile phone!

I'm not decided on whether this is simply ironic or indicative of something fundamentally wrong with the world at large.

Anyway...the short, short review of it:
The good:

• Ergonomic design
  
• Excellent lens
  
• Full manual control of zoom and focus
  
• Tons of useability features, like digital zoom during manual focus to ensure correct focus.
  
• Bright, sharp display and EVF.
  
• Very good battery-life!
  
• Anti-shake system.
  
• Very fast auto-focus.
  
• Every setting, knob, twiddle, etc. you can think of is there.
  

The not so good:

• Although the design is ergonomic the hand-sensors in the grip don't always detect you hand if you hold it in the most comfortable way (this might be different from person to person).
  
• Images a bit more noisy in JPEG format then needed (RAW mode is fine, strangely enough)
  
• Comes with a 16 MB Compact Flash card. Since the camera is 5MP this is just a joke!
  

All in all this is an unbeatable package, especially now the A2 (same thing, only 8MP) is out, which should drive the price of the A1 down further. Although the Nikon 5700 and the Fuji S7000 are theoretically competitors the A1 simply has more functionality and (especially compared to the Nikon) is available for less (in Europe that is).

iPhoto upgrades woes

Just upgraded iPhoto to 4.0.1. Turns out it wants to "upgrade" by thumbnails, promising better performance. Of course the "upgrade" process hangs half-way.

• Retry, same deal.
• Retry, same deal.
• Reinstall on top of the old, same deal.
• Reinstall from scratch, same deal.
• Remove all photos, reinstall, reimport photos, crash!
• Reinstall, restart, crash!

I give up. Anybody know any other photo management tools?

Headhunted

Just got off the phone with a headhunter looking to recruit me. It's like the .com era all over again. Maybe the economy is improving...

Better then any gadget!

Cats rock!

Ad-hoc workflow

By accident I ran into Zaplets again today. Back in the .com days this was one of the many "lets spice up email" plays. No idea they were still around. A lot has changed in the mean time though. From being able to send one of a series of prerolled forms via email you can now facilitate entire workflows by snapping building-blocks together and drawing a workflow diagram. It seems you can do this more or less on an ad-hoc basis.

It works by embedding a small Java applet in an email that handles the display of the form as well as the actual interaction between the form and a server where the form's data is stored. This means that every time you open the email, the applet will load and display whatever the latest data on the server is.

Ad-hoc workflow is going to be big in cubicle land and this might just be the ticket to have that all work in a simple way.

A quick intro into ad-hoc workflow and why it matters then:
Traditional workflow systems are large, relatively unwieldy beasts. They take workflow definitions, usually created in something like Visio or iGrafx and follow them to the letter. It does this by integrating with other business apps (usually) or by providing its own user-interface (not that common). Such an approach works well for strict, complex processes in relatively tradional businesses. Take an ERP solution (like SAP) for instance. It uses this kind of workflow in the background, to make sure for instance a manufacturing process works like the quality manual says it should.

This approach provides repeatability, manageability, accountability, regulatory compliance and tons of enterprise information to feed into fancy graph-producing tools.

It however does not work in environments were any form of grey matter is used regularly. This is simply because you can't formalize every possible eventuality in such an environment into a process diagram. Or if you could you'd end up with such a monstruous system that you'd have all your employees flee in panic or your decision making process would become so slow even the most dim-witted competitor would sail right by you. Yet the advantages of workflow would be great to have in such an environment all the same.

Enter ad-hoc workflow. Instead of defining one big mega-process or zillions of possible processes you do what every self-respecting business should do: Treat employees like adults. They know how to do what needs to get done. They were hired because of that. Have them create (mini-)workflows to match the situation. Feel unsure if you should send an important offer to a client; create a review-workflow that send the offer to several of your peers for comments and afterwards have it send the document to your boss for a simple yes or no answer. All workflows executed will still be logged, the actions taken recorded, the results acted upon and the CEO satisfied.

Have your cake and eat it too.