On the face of things Android is killing it.

Two things will actually ‘kill’ it:

First the developer experience is awful. Technologically and ecosystem-wise it is a distant second to iOS. This has slowed development of quality apps for android, and injured the developers that have targeted the platform. Apple will continue to enjoy ever-increasing lock-in as people have a larger investment in apps that they want to bring forward onto new devices. You hear vehement arguments on both sides of whether or not Android suffers from fragmentation issues. From a dev standpoint, yes it does.

Second the platform itself will continue to fragment, and not just in different device form-factors. I think it is very likely when Amazon comes to the party they won’t even mention ‘Android’ anywhere. It’s just a color Kindle or whatever and that’s that. Want apps for it? Sure, we’ve got an app store, but it is going to be different enough from the get go and will start to drift rapidly from the Google version. Amazon is will see advantages in being their own beast, they don’t want or need compatible devices out there from other manufacturers. The original Kindle did just fine thank you and the next will do that much better thanks to expanded capabilities.

Chinese carriers are already making their own forks of Android as well. This will only accelerate. Carriers and manufacturers that are pursing the ‘old’ model of differentiation through small feature set differences between phones will continue to duke it out over ever small slices.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope Google figures out a way to herd the cats more efficiently, because Apple needs the competition, but I will happily predict that the tablet market is already lost to them. iOS owns it, and Microsoft will come in very strong with Win 8 devices that can play in their existing Office hegemony. Even Google knew to hedge their bets, Chrome OS laptops anyone?

Computer-in-your-pocket phones for the moment are iOS and everyone else. Microsoft is doing great work here but nobody knows it yet. RIM is RIP. Interesting times.

Would your Mom know if she had an Android? Would she care?

This was an interesting week, with the first “cloud failure” big enough that anyone with an Internet connection took notice. There has been much gnashing of teeth and hyperbole, and several embarrassing moments for a lot of teams, not least at Amazon. I think it is worth spending a few moments to take stock.

The specific cause of the failure is not actually important for lessons learned to anyone but Amazon. We’ll have to wait and see if AWS does the right thing and gives a detailed post-mortem as part of restoring trust. The explanation so far revolves around a cascading failure of EBS infrastructure, but still missing is an explanation as to why the failure crossed multiple “availability zones” (i.e. more than one physically separate data center… maybe). My best guess is EBS, which was already proving to be fragile, was pushed into a cascade failure by tenant applications trying to fail over to another AZ when the first failed. AWS better have as one of their lessons learned adequately communicating status to their customers.

The broader lesson learned, by those who needed to learn it yet, is that “The Cloud” is not a magical place populated by unicorns and data faeries. It is in fact data centers as (TK) noted, based on servers and databases as Larry Ellison is happy to explain.(TK)

The lesson all CEOs and CTOs need to take away is make sure your shit is architected properly. Stuff happens. Hopefully your boards don’t take away the wrong lessons¹.

A number of popular services were completely hamstrung by the outage, including Quora and Reddit. (After a five year relationship with Reddit I have to say it being down was probably worth several man-years of additional productivity around the world this week, but it is the one shining exception.)

Try not to take away lessons learned that are Amazon specific, i.e. Don’t trust EBS, or AZs don’t mean what you think they mean. Instead focus on redundancy, avoiding single points of failure, etc. Resiliency costs money, so make your trade-off between a few hours/days of uptime and increasing your costs by 50–100%.

The bottom line in resilient design is assume stuff will fail.

For the edification of anyone trying to bullet-proof their systems and my own future reference here is a round-up of lessons learned etc.:

Twilio was not impacted due to their design principles.² And there is also an old presentation that explains how they organize their virtual infrastructure on AWS.³ That Twilio did not go down is great news as the cascade failure would have taken out even more services, and it is solid proof of the importance of good engineering.

Sulia stayed up due to their doubly redundant infrastructure planning⁴.

Some design thoughts from Agile Sysadmin⁵

Pounding home the assume things will fail lesson, Netflix is AWS based and did not go down. They wrote a tool for themselves months ago that deliberately attacks their infrastructure called Chaos Monkey⁶. Note that this was posted five months ago. There is also a current discussion of their infrastructure resiliency at Hacker News⁷. And slides from a presentation given in March⁸

George Reese wrote a nice summary of design considerations⁹

Some load balancing and IP routing thoughts related to this from James Cohen¹⁰

Cloud services can be designed so that they don’t have single points of failure, and this virtualization is directly underneath your app rather than under your virtual OS. Unfortunately Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. do not yet have an architecture that can truly avoid the virtual infrastructure failures as they themselves were harmed by the AWS outage.

Here’s to sunnier skies…

Now that I know the solution this is head-slappingly obvious, but prior to that it was driving me nuts for most of a week so I am going to share this here for people searching for a solution.

The behavior I experienced was suddenly most, but not all, apps on the iPad had no sound and I couldn’t get it to come back. The volume rocker switch did not function in most apps. Apps that did work correctly included YouTube and other native apps.

I tried restoring it multiple different ways, no dice. Even restoring to default, like a new iPad, did not correct this problem. Stunning.

The cause (and suddenly obvious solution) is when you mute using the hardware switch, then go to settings and change the behavior of the switch to rotation lock without undoing the mute. You are now permanently muted, though apparently not in Apple built apps, just 3rd party. The simple solution is to change the switch behavior back to mute and toggle it.

It really amazes me that a full restore did not correct this problem, it suggests that there is a toggle for audio that is handled outside of iOS?

Thank you Cincinnati. Every time we are coming up on an Ignite event I worry about whether we can even pull it off, let alone meet or exceed the quality of the last one. Because every. single. time. you blow me away.

Our speakers are not typically professional speakers. Of the lineup any given event maybe one or two consider themselves comfortable on stage, one or two may have spoken at previous Ignites, and the rest range from little to no speaking experience, especially at the crowd size we’ve grown to. We don’t give them a bunch of material to use to prepare from, we don’t rehearse them and give notes. The speakers find inspiration and find a path to deliver what they do on stage. And amazingly it works.

The audience of people that come to Ignite is truly awesome. Two specific things I’ll point out from last night; when one speaker asked how many people had a passport damn near everyone in the room raised their hand (stats show ~1/3 of Americans have one). Secondly one of the bartenders complimented us on our choice of beers. The imports were outselling the domestics 4:1. I’m sure there is some deep meaning in these two things, ha ha.

If you were there I hope you had a great time, met some new people, and maybe even learned a thing or two that you will follow up on or dig into more deeply. I hope you will check out Elizabeth’s new book that she shared some research from. Be sure to give feedback on the airport situation that Jenny reported on. You can learn more about some of the sustainability issues Chuck talked about. And if you enjoyed getting a peek of Cincinnati’s surprising and cool history as the birthplace of iconic games and toys be sure to read Michelle’s articles.

We’ll announce the date for Ignite Cincinnati #6 soon. See you next time!

(Cross-posted from IgniteCincinnati)

A few half-assed predictions for 2011. Just for fun.

Feature phones start to die off. We’re seeing predictions of smartphones, particularly Android based ones, crossing under the $100 mark in the next year. One analyst has named a price of $85. This will happen, it is inevitable. It is therefore also inevitable that non-smart or ‘feature’ phones will be nearly (but never quite) extinct in 24 months.

That doesn’t mean everyone will be web browsing and app using, I think people who really want that have that already, and a surprisingly small proportion of the new adopters will see the value in another $25/month on their bill for the data.

Google will fuck something up big. This is not going out on a limb, and vague enough that any fortune teller could get that one right. It could be a major privacy breach or something really wrong about the Chrome OS. It could be that they were very wrong in pushing Android to manufacturers as a tablet OS for anything but reader-first tablets like the Nook.

Google will loose search market share.

There will be a lot of tablets introduced in 2011. Many of them next week at CES. And almost universally they will suck. Battery life will be bad, UI will be awkward, apps will be buggy and slow.

Facebook will peak. The kids have been moving away from Facebook for awhile already. They aren’t leaving it altogether, but it isn’t the center of their universe the way it is at the moment for a large portion of the Mommy set right now. So Facebook growth in user hours in the US will peak some time this year.

The iPad 2 will be a solid improvement, it may even rock your socks. My fervent wish is they double the screen resolution ‘retina’ style but I won’t bet on it. I don’t expect a mid-size tablet this year Jobs might call this a Reader, and it may not happen unless their bookstore gets more traction than it is getting so far).

Intel will do something offensive to the early adopter crowd related to hardware and security. This will be related to the McAfee acquisition and specific hardware features they are building into new devices. Consumers won’t care. About any of this.

Is this all obvious? Or too vague to matter?

All the current attention on Wikileaks is around the most recent data release, the poor response by the US government, and the misguided ‘info war’ we are watching unfold right now. I’d like to step back a moment and consider what the long term view may look like.

The objections to the latest release center around diplomacy; that it is a delicate game that often involves subterfuge, subtlety, discrete lies and saving face. This is part of a prevailing world view, philosophical view, that has been with us for thousands of years. It is bound up with treating life as a zero-sum game¹. A game where for me to win, you have to lose. A game where I gain advantage through having information that you do not.

Our financial markets, and many aspects of business operate this way as well. Even though we have theoretically put laws in place to prevent insider information from being an advantage in financial markets.

I believe we are witnessing the start of a shift. A shift toward playing the game of life as a game where the players have “perfect information”², i.e. where everyone can see all the pieces on the board. This will necessitate understanding that life is not by nature a zero-sum game at large scale.

For many people, perhaps for most, this will be a drastic change in thinking. I believe it is not only happening, but it is now inevitable. It is the next societal concept adjacent to the one we live in today. The technologies we have, the ease of access to information, the high levels of education we enjoy on average, make it inescapable.

Dig deep any any world problem and look at its roots, would things have been better, resolve quicker and with less damage, if all information about a situation were revealed? Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the Cold War… While “can’t we all just get along” is a naïve and not likely reality, having perfect information will force more rational decision making and negotiation. We do not fear that which we understand, and perfect information perhaps renders many forms of human conflict obsolete.

I am by no means saying the world will magically become a utopia over night. Nor that Wikileaks is the instrument of this change.³ In fact I think things are going to get very unpleasant⁴ for awhile. It may not happen in our lifetimes, and it certainly won’t be smooth. There are very powerful and monied interests who will do everything in their power to prevent these changes.

Once upon a time the idea of ‘Freedom’ was new and radical. It was not the natural state of things, slavery was a fundamental part of society. The cornerstone upon which of it was built. From our perspective today that can be hard to fully grasp. ‘Democracy’ was an insane experiment, unsustainable, impossible to have an educated enough populace to pull off (jury still out on that one)⁵.

Ideas are subject to natural selection the same as any living organism, but they tend not to die off completely, and compete for dominance in our mental space and in our organizations. On a long enough time scale ‘Progress’ really only goes in one direction. Once a new idea exists it is hard, perhaps impossible, for it to go away.

“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Most people are complacent. Sheep, even.

If you are not consciously examining your skills and deliberately improving on them regularly, you are a sheep, whether you know it or not.

For example, when I interview people that could be writing code for me, I am not primarily looking for what language they know, and what libraries they have experience with. I want to know two things or there is no point in further conversation; can you think? and what conscious action do you take to make yourself a better coder?

These principles apply to everyone though, regardless of what field you are in. A depressingly small number of people ever make it past the first of the four stages of competence¹ and thus never strive to improve themselves. They learn enough that they think they know what they are doing, and then bumble along for a few decades.

If a developer isn’t reading blogs, reading other people’s code, experimenting with new technology on side projects, extending their knowledge of ‘solved’ problems and known paradigms, then what profession are they in exactly? Would you be comfortable going to a physician if you learned they hadn’t read any new findings in years? Would you use a tax lawyer who didn’t know this years tax code?

This applies to people attempting to do startups, and VCs as well. The landscape for startups is changing constantly. The principles remain the same; new discoveries lead to ‘obvious’ adjacent discoveries that fuel the next space of interest. The new area of discovery opened up is arguably inevitable, someone else either has already or will shortly see the same new possibility. The specifics of how you implement the many different levels of going from awareness of opportunity to exploiting it as a money making business and are essentially infinite in variability from our limited vantage point.

A staggering number of ‘entrepreneurs’, the majority of what I run across on the web, are pursuing ‘startups’ that demonstrate they are either not really entrepreneurs or don’t really understand the meaning of a startup. Jolie O’dell skewered this rather nicely awhile back². Beyond her observations, too many people are either not actually putting the effort or risk out, or are pursuing an idea that won’t scale. This to me demonstrates a fundamental lack of awareness.

Similarly the VC game is shifting very rapidly right now. VCs are having to become more entrepreneurial. This is a very natural progression of things, it makes sense that things will not remain bankerly as fire-eating entrepreneurs become Angels and VCs later in life and apply their impatience with crap to that world. Technical and economic realities are shifting too. I’ve heard several very smart investors³ point out that the balance of power has now shifted to the entrepreneur, especially in the web/software side of the equation where you can iterate on an idea for almost no money.

If you are a designer you sure as heck better be aware how rapidly everything about your job is changing. The metaphors, the tool stack, the input to the process and the expected output. All different today than 24 months ago in my world.

Advertising? Media? Publishing? Yea, wake up.

There are many other people in your field. Anywhere from dozens to millions depending upon your level of expertise and specialization. And they’re all out to eat your lunch. They’re also all adding to the common pool of knowledge. If you aren’t actively seeking out what they are discovering, iterating on and improving, you are wasting your fucking time.

What are you doing to learn more about your field?

What are you doing to learn something random that will spark a discovery that will benefit you, your field and progress in general?

Update 12/5/2010: Yes, this is a bit harsh. It is a rant, written at midnight at the end of a long week at the end of a long year. What brings me to want to rant is that as various commenters pointed out this is not rocket science, it is ‘obvious’, it has been understood for thousands of years. This should be something every child is taught by 8th grade and a fundamental part of our cultural zeitgeist, and that it is not was pissing me off. It was cathartic for me, and I’m glad to have sparked some thought and discussion.

TinEye¹ is the coolest ‘new’ web app I’ve seen in ages (been around a couple years actually, but recently much improved). In concept it is simple, you provide it an image, it shows you if it can find the same image anywhere out on the Internet. In principle it sounds very simple, and it is, but the implications are huge.

Here are a few of the ways I’ve found to use it:

Fraud detection. Found something cool for sale on eBay or Craig’s list? Complete with picture? Take that picture and search for other copies of it. If it is a real sale you shouldn’t find any more, if it is fraud they may have taken the image from somewhere else and re-used it. Not finding the image is no guarantee it isn’t fraud, but at least you can improve your odds.

Find a better copy. Got a cool image but it is too low of resolution for your purposes? Maybe the place you found it had already degraded the size or quality, see if you can find a higher resolution copy. TinEye will manage to find very different versions of the same image.

Image Rights. Found a cool image for use in your presentation or blog post but unsure of the provenance and rights? Track down the original by looking for a photo sharing site or image bureau with the same picture.

Clean copy. Lots of times you see a cool image that has already been modified with LOL style captions that cover part of it. Recently I needed a clean copy of the 3-panel dialog² using stills from Inception, found a nice copy of it in a snap this way.

Find your pictures. Look and see if pictures you’ve taken (or your company logo) are showing up anywhere.

By the way… if you are a Chrome user (and if you aren’t you should be) there is an extension which allows you to search for an image by just right clicking on it and picking the search option. There are also extensions for Firefox and Safari.

Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist, neurologist, psychologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, philosopher, or guru. Nor do I consider myself enlightened or with all the answers. But anyone who knows me knows that has never been cause for me to keep my opinions to myself. I am merely sharing things I’ve found to be interesting and of value. I do not claim to have internalized all this information or to live my life by it. This is not hypocrisy, it is merely the reality of being human; we can ‘know’ the right thing to do but not be able to access it at the exact moment we need it, let alone recognize the moment as we experience it.

This series of articles is the result of research I did for my own purposes this year to address problems I perceived in my own life and head. It involved a lot of time and effort, and while I can’t save others all of that effort (some of the effort is the entire point) I can share resources and conclusions and hopefully pave the way to improving your brain, mind, life, well being and productivity.

I tried to give a quick summary of what people should consider about their brain and mind as an Ignite talk titled “Your Brain Didn’t Come with a User Manual”. I think that talk was limited in a number of ways, not least because I blew the delivery of what I intended to hit thanks to being distressed and distracted for reasons I’ve explained previously¹.

There is a lot I could say, and a lot to cover. So I am breaking it down into a series of articles so I can spread out writing them. My interest in taking time to write about this will be directly fueled by interest from others. So if you want me to have incentive to write and you want to be notified as each piece arrives be sure to subscribe².

1. Your Brain & Mind (the Hardware, evolution, the Software, what it is, how it forms)
2. Limits (how easily we are fooled/distracted, what our chemicals do to us)
3. Cognitive Bias and Logic (know it or be a tool)
4. The Limits of Knowledge (incompetence, knowing what you know)
5. Information Overload (why your phone is making you stupid)
6. Basic Maintenance (keeping the hardware healthy)
7. Exercise the Mind (ways to improve the mind and attention)
8. Recommended Reading

As you can see it is a lot, and I don’t have time to write a book in addition to the two I’m already working on so it will have to be spread out over a few weeks. I appreciate your attention and patience.

I got bit last night, hard, by an astounding bug in Windows Live Mesh 2011. This bug put me in the position of having to cut together (again) a PowerPoint slide deck of 430+ slides from 20 disparate sources, including Keynote, while 18 speakers and a crowd of nearly 400 people waited.

It could have been even worse…

Flashback: I have been a cheerleader for Mesh¹ right up until now. Through the past three years of interminable beta, apparent lack of resources from the Mesh team and/or indifference from management at Microsoft. The complete failure to push forward a product that had huge promise to keep Windows machines relevant and show the superior usability of computers that are kept seamlessly in sync has and continues to mystify me.

I’ve used Mesh to keep a laptop, work computer and home computer in sync and it is an ideal situation. I’ve been using it this year to keep my two desktop machines, one at a normal desk with a chair where I can chill and the other at a standing desk where I work the majority of my time. I have different project folders and have been using Mesh to keep them the same across the two computers. This way I don’t have to think about which computer I’m at, the apps and data are the same. And I don’t have to incur any performance hit from the files being across the network; even at megabit speeds you don’t want compiles or video editing going across a wire.

So it was with my Ignite² data. Everything I need to manage Ignite is in one place, including the material for the next event. I had my overall ‘Master’ deck here, along with the material from each speaker that needed to be integrated in. (If you aren’t familiar with the Ignite format; presenters each have 5 minutes to speak against 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, 19 speakers x 20 slides plus intro/extro/intermission = 435 slides).

On Tuesday night before the event I started the big integration. I had my base master deck from previous events, cut away old stuff and started integrating new talks. I got through the first four and then went to bed. The next morning I got up early and completed the deck integration, as well as refined my opening remarks and put in slides to support things I wanted to be sure we covered at the intermission and after the last speaker. There are a lot of moving parts to an Ignite event, and you can’t keep them all in your head or wing it and come out ok. On top of all the things I had to worry about for the overall evening I was giving a talk of my own.

So the deck was ready, at 435 slides. I saved it, did a bunch of other stuff to get ready for the evening. When I took a lunch break I decided to switch to the sitting computer for awhile and powered it on. I had no idea at the time but this is when the fateful Mesh error occurred. I did some other work, sent off a copy of the deck to the production company that handles filming Ignite, then started packing the car with all the gear needed, including the computer I had used in the morning to finalize the deck.

Setup went pretty well. There was some frustration that I couldn’t get Windows to manage the three-monitor setup I had planned to use (operator, projector, stage) which really bummed me out as I had wanted to have a downstage monitor for speakers to see their slides on so they wouldn’t have to turn to look behind them for timing. But otherwise things seemed pretty good.

At 6:05, with about 20 minutes to go before I’d need to be ready to hit the stage, Chenney from Plum St. Productions³ leaned over and asked me when she could have the full deck.

Wha?

“I’ve only got 140 slides, like the first five speakers or so.”

“That can’t be right, there are over 400 slides.”

I looked at the deck, sure enough, it wasn’t all there. Freaking out with the clock ticking and over 300 people in the theater below me already I reloaded the deck, double checked I was taking it from the right place. Then it hit me, the deck I was looking at was exactly what I had when I went to bed the night before. Somehow the final deck had been replaced. And I knew right then how; when I turned on the other computer, which had not been on since the night before, Mesh synchronized in the wrong direction. How on earth could it think that writing over a newer file with an older file made sense I do not know, but there it is. And here I was, totally fucked.

I then began the most frantic PowerPoint editing session in history. Very fortunately one of the last things I had done before I went to bed was export every presenter’s slides as JPEG files to make integrating them simpler (and preserve their exact appearance which tends to change when you cut/paste slides from disparate decks). It was still the worst of circumstances, I should have been mingling with the crowd, having my first beer and loosening up, thinking about the introduction, before I hit the stage. Instead I was doing the office drone equivalent of extreme ironing.

This threw off my whole evening. Hopefully it didn’t detract from everyone else enjoying the evening. The other speakers were unaffected. I feel bad for missing a lot of material I intended to cover during the intro and restart from intermission.

There are definitely some lessons learned here; First is that Mesh is toast. I had one other time earlier this year where I noticed some files were missing completely, on all three machines and thought I had just made an error, but now I know it was Mesh.

Second is have multiple copies of the deck; on the computer, on a flash drive, and uploaded to a server in case all else fails. This is obvious, like all back-up disaster stories are in retrospect.

How could it have been worse? Imagine Chenney didn’t ask about the deck, and we started on time and got half way through the first set and found we didn’t have any more content slides…