I swear this clockwork stock art is out to get me. It pops up everywhere, especially at work. Look at the following example. Does anything strike you as peculiar? Does anything about it maybe make your brain hurt?

If no, think like an engineer, and imagine which way the gears turn. Pick one gear and mentally spin it in an arbitrary direction. In which direction does the second one spin? In which direction does the third one spin? And consequently, …? Ohnoez, ze gear teethz, zey are breaking!!1 ;_;

When I point it out to a non-techie person, they stare at me blankly. When I point it out to a techie person, they sigh “Oh well. Just the PERFECT symbol for our work…” One would think that an image that symbolizes “deadlock” to the main target group ranked high on marketing’s “culturally sensitive symbolism” list. But, hey, guess developers are not that important… =-(

PS: Look at the “Rich Picture” example, it’s an old Sun Microsystems / NetBeans.org slide! <3

I was talking to a non-techie colleague once and tried to explain the point of view of developers to him… The gist I wanted to convey was that the developers’ decisions that he questioned were not made arbitrarily to annoy non-techie team members.

I recalled this strange idea that programming was like a mysterious ritual that will make sense after you have learned more about the foreign culture and value system it stems from… Like Zen monks who speak in riddles… now where did I get that mental image from?

Ah! I recalled a friend had sent me a link to a geeky page that does a great job to show up the parallels between profound developer talk and Koans. :-) The artwork is phantastic too (make sure you don’t miss the pretty navigation).

Here are excerpts of some stories that I liked:

At the top of the diving cliff, the eldest of the monks peered over the edge and shrank back. … With his staff Banzen prodded the youth forward towards the precipice. “Surely,” said the master, “you can solve that problem when you reach the bottom.”
Read Koan: The Backwards Monk

“I am afraid to touch anything, lest my ignorance prove my undoing.” — “Fear makes good armor but a poor blade,” nodded the Java master. “To defeat your fear, we must dispel your ignorance.”
Read Koan: Fear

If the search finds something (if!), you cannot easily tell in which context it occurs.

1. You assume the search result contains your search keywords — but in which context/sentence?
2. Maybe it lets you filter by doc type — might be useful some time, but in most cases, you don’t even know.
3. You get the last edited date — OK, you can skip really old docs; but it would be more useful to be able to access similar content from different dates (e.g. the series of a product’s design documents from each year).
4. You get the authors’ names — but are these persons relevant to your query? What were their roles when they wrote the documents? Which business units did they belong to?
5. Are we supposed to search each sub-site and each sub-wiki individually? — How do you exclude all the Accounting, Sales, and Marketing results when you’re searching for something in R&D, Support, and Services?

So employees complain, “Why can’t our intranet search be like Google, Google always finds something, it can’t be that hard…?” Well, actually, it can, since Google works in a completely different environment. Yes Google always finds “something”, anything — it knows that you have no means of knowing whether the result list is complete, or if it contains the most relevant answers. There is SO MUCH STUFF OUT THERE that any remotely related thing that Google pulls out of its data-center-sized sleeve is good enough. Only because you don’t know better, Google Search seems smart.

In your company intranet however, the situation is different. You know that you uploaded this design spec, and you know that your boss shared that spreadsheet. But where was it? If the search turns up empty, or you get 100 pages of vastly similar results, it’s frustrating. You are looking for one unique, most relevant, needle in the haystack, and all the other “99% relevant” needles don’t help you.

Most intranet sites have grown organically, locally, ad-hoc: “Let’s create a SharePoint for this cross-functional team!” “Let’s share a drive for product related materials!” “Let’s use a wiki to track this local group’s meeting minutes and schedules…” If you could get the whole company to use one centralized portal that would already be 90% of the solution I guess. But in real life, authors don’t know (and don’t care) in which context their content appears later. In the end, Joe from marketing unwittingly creates a personal directory on the busines unit level, and everyone wonders what business unit JOE is. Next door, the developers categorize their specs by product and release number, while the managers sort their planning files by fiscal years; turns out neither knows how fiscal years map to releases, so one group cannot navigate the other’s content.

In Weston Solutions WIC Intranet Case Study: Part 10 of 10 the presenter points out that their intranet thrives due to trained site owners and admins who meet regularly to keep each other informed. The site relies on a very aggressive governance model where admins can move content and shut down communities that are not kept up-to-date. This is a lot of work but basically the only way to prevent “site creep”. I came to the same conclusion when I maintain wikis, you need an admin who’s got the big picture to keep the info flow going.

The problem starts when participants cannot see beyond their own data-sharing horizons. The sharing software itself needs to provide insight into what is already there, and how content stands next to other existing content. Often something as simple as a smart navigation and visualization gives employees the context the need. The Weston Solutions WIC Intranet Case Study: Part 9 of 10 video shows an example, where employees can view global company news by clicking symbols on a map. They also use heat maps in their community forums to visualize “heated discussions” (in something that looks like a calendar).

It helps to have “bread crumbs” or parent-child links as navigational help, but consider that some documents can be in several categories. Again, as in other cases, consistent metatagging solves many search/filter issues with categorization (e.g. author role, audience role, date, product/release, …). Similar to an online shop where you can filter clothing e.g. by size and color before you even start browsing details.

Here’s the case study video that inspired this blog article in part: Weston Solutions Case Study: Is this the world’s best intranet?

The posts give you an interesting take on a security, maths, or language problem -- but the maths is disguised in an everyday example that actually manages to capture my attention. His stories often make me wonder, why have I never asked that question? I like it when authors achieve that.

Here's an example: PIN number analysis. The post starts out with some jokes about a recent news story of leaked credit card PINs.

Email headline: “All credit card PIN numbers in the World leaked!”
The body of the message simply said “0000 0001 0002 0003 0004…”

Aha, we get the point: Four-digit numbers themselves are easily generated and well-known. Knowing which number belongs to whom is the catch!

The second joke is an XKCD comic (yay!) about a vandal who fools the police with a vanity license plate that reads “1I1 III1″. In the end however, the unique license plate is what the eye-witnesses remember him by, and the police identifies him easily. (The post misses the hidden tooltip punchline, that reveals that the vandal’s friend simply got a similar plate and committed several crimes — which are now blamed on him!)
This story, too, is about linking a number to a person. A green camouflage works, unless you are the only green thing in sight. Similarly, hiding behind the license plate backfired because it stood out as the most difficult one to read, which made it unique (and thus findable) among all the other numbers that had “more entropy”, more randomness.

Now the maths starts. He wonders out loud some PINs are more common than others, and if yes, how common, and why. In this particular case, I know why I never asked that question: My bank doesn’t let me change my PIN! I have to learn the random one by heart that they generated for me. Apparently, in other countries, you pick your own PIN. Unsurprisingly, an analysis of common leaked PINs shows that one quarter of all user-selected PINs are one of the same 20 easy-to-guess patterns (1234, 4321, 1111, 2222, etc). Over 10% of people choose 1234!

On the other hand, scrolling to the end of the list now and purposefully picking the least often used number is not recommended either. Crackers read security blogs too, and they adjust their strategies immediately.

What about the other quite common ones? The author finds proof that years (19xx, 20xx), dates, and sequences that form nice patterns on a numeric keypad, are significantly more common. Check out the article to see the awesome heat map visualization, and his interpretation of the striking patterns that occur. Approaches like these are what makes maths and statistics really interesting.

He also analyses common longer PINs, and finds that the chosen numeric patterns become less imaginative the longer the PIN is (123456, 3141592654 (Pi), 1357924680 (odd-even), etc). Clearly, people have a hard time making up, or remembering, complex passcodes. Forcing us to use “more secure” passcodes (longer numbers, or more complex passwords with special characters) is actually counterproductive, because humans then intuitively take the same shortcuts to decrease complexity, which makes the passcodes again easier to guess.

You can tell that we need to find a compromise between hard-to-crack by brute-force attack on one side, and easy to remember and type on the other.

The post ends with another fitting XKCD quote:

We have trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.

XKCD proposes a fun solution: using very long sentences as passphrases that are easy to type (dictionary words with no special characters), but they must be unique (i.e. not a quote) and nonsensically absurd, which as a side-effect also makes them more easily memorable. Unfortunately, most accounts (other than UNIX and old mainframe security systems) have quiet a low maximum password length and require special characters, which prevents you from actually following this advice in real life…

In any case, just one example to get you interested in DataGenetics, check it out!

By fake frosted glass I mean those stickers that are often applied to glass doors (or glass walls!) in offices. You want light from the window to shine through the meeting rooms into the hallways, but you don’t want the meeting to be fully in the open? Frosted glass stickers are your friend.

On the other hand, these stickers are a constant temptation for us to peek through the gaps… What magical things are happening in there? How’s that prestigeous project going? Which secrets are they discussing? *peek* If the Powerpoint heading is “fiscal year…” again, I don’t want to know. Can’t it be “raptosauric space laser robot, version 2″, just once?

So how do you make the frosting transparent to show the ones inside that they cannot keep any secrets from your genius? The solution is as easy as it is paradox, and readily available in any office: Clear, transparent adhesive tape.

You heard right: Stick some adhesive tape on top of the frosted sticker, and *bam*! For some strange reason it cancels out the blurriness… o_O

Don’t ask, just do it! :-)

Somehow we recently talked about space at work and a colleague said, floating in zero g must feel awesome. To which I spoil-sport of course replied that I always thought that astronauts in videos seem to move extremely controlled and cautiously, as if experience taught them that, “No, you do not want to bump into this wall, again.” ;-)

You can see what I mean in this video by Sunita Williams (nice hairstyle sista!) who gives us an excellent tour through the ISS. She’s been there for 6 months (?) and boy, she’s got navigating in zero g figured out perfectly.

It’s funny, after watching this, I begin to really appreciate “empty” surfaces –like walls or the ceiling or a street– because in the ISS, every last surface seems to be filled with all useful equipment that they could velco on there.

The custom “bench press” equipment she shows is cool too: As expected, you cannot lift “weights” in zero g, that’s why astronauts must exercise by pressing against the resistance of a vacuum cylinder. They attach the training equipment (such as a seatless bike – you can’t sit down anyway!) loosely and stabilize it with a gyroscope, because the vibrations made the station oscillate, including the solar panels…

In any case, very cool video — the only thing that might creep you out is how claustrophic the Soyus module is!

Usually the “team building” events in my office involve beer and outdoor sports, but since they try to appeal to everyone’s tastes, the winter team building event was a 24h battle of programming wits, free pizza and energy drinks included.

Nine teams with 3-4 members each signed up for this game that started on Thursday at 5pm and ended on Friday at 5pm. (Members of one team were pulled out for a P1 support issue, but they solved it within 2h, so they returned and their team got an extra hour, which is fair.) Every team had one meeting room reserved, and we were allowed to use the internet (including open-source software or public libraries). Every team got a shared drive, and had to upload the sources, executables, and final presentation, by 5pm to participate in the contest to win a prize (I’m not saying what the prize will be, but I’ll hint that it had a flat, rounded rectangle shape and its name started with a small “i”).

As in every team game, success and failure depends on the composition of your team. We got along perfectly personality-wise, but my team was a bit handicapped on the technical side: Many other teams had 4 developers, while mine was one developer, one QA, and a tech writer. The tech writer (that’s me) and the QA guy knew some basic Java, and the developer was a hardcore Python fanatic. Guess who had to learn Python in 24h? :-D

Luckily, Python is easy to learn if you know programming basics (like Perl and Java), and there are many code samples to be found. There were some coding tasks that even I could solve and implement (looping over a directory to read icon file names into a dictionary, or setting the window title of the app — small tasks like that). I spent most time taking non-coding tasks off the other guys’ hands, such as finding and integrating icon sets (creative commons), writing a tiny online help set, and writing a stylish PowerPoint presentation.

We had been discussing our options before the game started, and each of us already had made certain that we had the following installed:

1. the same version of Python
2. the same version of pyQt (a library for the user interface, in case we would need one)
3. the same version of git (for file version control)

Apart from that, each team member was free to use their favorite utilities. I chose NetBeans IDE and Cygwin. (The NetBeans plugins for git and Python do not support all features of the command line.)

None of us had prior experience with pyQt, but it was easy to learn and provided good documentation. It took over an hour to download and install everything and find our way around, so it was good we made this decision early and installed it before the contest started.

Similarly, we practiced using git before the contest started. I had prior experience with Subversion, which is quite intuitive: You “svn update” to receive changes from others, then you “svn merge”, and then you “svn commit” to send your changes to the central repo. Git however is decentralized (similar to Mercurial). If you try to use the SVN approach and “git push” your changes to your colleagues, git gets all whiney about write permissions.

An easier approach is that each member has their own local repository where they commit their changes. Place each local repo into a shared (that is, team readable) directory. Instead of pushing your changes to your colleagues, you “git pull” their (publicly readable) changes into your repository. Then you merge and commit again. This requires more discipline than a central repo, since you mustn’t forget to pull from everyone, but we were only three so it worked well to remind each other “hey pull from me”.

With the tools being settled, we still didn’t know what actual task they would assign to us. The organizers had made a big fuss about revealing this year’s (the first ever) theme.

The site manager stood there ceremoniously with 10 envelopes in his hand.

He called one member from each team to step up to the front.

Then he suddenly announced that the first envelope drawn would define the theme for all teams. O…K…? So the first guy reads out the lot he drew and it basically said, write software that is useful and have fun doing it! (And yes, all envelopes had the same content.) Duh. ;-)

Next step was to come up with a spec for our team’s project. It must be something “useful”, a complete application with reasonable features, but at the same time, it cannot be too complex, because the team must be able to implement it in 24h — despite being tired.

I’m really curious what the other teams created — expecially since one of them asked how many GBs they could use to upload their disk image… o_o My team’s desktop app was, like, 10MB… But well, we have colleagues who work on mainframe applications, or distributed cloud software, etc, so they likely wrote something work related. We considered writing a work-related utility (I’m not saying what it is so we can use this idea next year), but our (inofficial) team lead politely asked to have his idea implemented — a Quad Paper Simulator.

Yes. I mean a desktop application that simulates quad paper. X-)

I was the one writing the documentation and the final presentation for it, and I needed some “motivation” or “unique selling point” for this app. “Easy,” said the colleague who suggested this idea: “Clearly, Paint is a simulation of drawing paper, and Word is a simulation of writing paper. What we need, though, is a simulation of quad paper! Excel just doesn’t cut it — it’s lacking an easily customizable icon palette.”

What would one use simulated quad paper for? He gave me some examples: You can plan chess gambits without having to erase stuff or drawing arrows. You can draw a map for D&D, Minecraft, or Nethack (any game with a tile-based map). You can take notes of Minecraft crafting recipes. You can use it to solve logic grid puzzles.

I came up with another example: A friend of mine likes to knit, and she carries with her photocopied quad paper to keep track of her current knitting pattern. She highlights the boxes in a color to track how far she got. Each printout can only be used once – if she had our fabulous Quad Paper Simulator, she could reset the color and reuse the pattern, or she could even adjust the pattern on the fly!

Admittedly, Quad Paper doesn’t bring about world peace, but it was a feasible project that we could tackle in 24h (and it was a sufficiently amusing idea, too, as opposed to writing a fully work related app). Again, I don’t know what great things the other teams produced. (Did I mention that our app opens a really useful CHM help when you press F1?? And our PowerPoint is really convincing and all?? Surely we deserve extra points for that!!) We may not “win” first place, but I’d say we did the best that a 1DEV/1QA/1TW team can achieve in 24h.

They focus on games that offer a free-to-play version with optional in-app purchases and paid upgrades. And of course it will also run other apps than games. The Ouya has a USB port, so I guess players could attach a keyboard, but by default, it comes with a game controller as input device.

Contact Ouya if you plan to port your Android app or write a new one from scratch — or if you have a nice idea how to hack the whole thing and turn it into something awesome that brings the Age of Aquarius upon us before the world ends in 2012, that’s fine too. :-D I don’t know, I’m seeing some potential for a learning platform (educational games) or some smart map-based local services here.

Of course you will need to order the actual hardware for testing (the deliver internationally, but it’s expensive). They met their kickstarter pledges goal, and are in the process of making a deal to support Minecraft, so up to now they are looking good. Keep an eye on them!

In general, GW2 is geared towards cooperative play and griefer-unfriendliness: There is no friendly fire (your attack skills only affect enemies, your buffing skills only affect allies). You cannot “die” (you simply return to a waypoint if you are not revived by a fellow player) and the penalty is minimal. You cannot push or trap others (there is simply no collision detection between players). You cannot attack, steal from, or loot your fellow players.

[As an aside: Not even Thieves can steal from players, when they try to, all they get is a temporary copy of one of the victim's skills -- now that's a fun game mechanic! :-) Once my Engineer stood next to a Thief while I was sorting through my inventory. Suddenly, the Thief was "dressed up as a golem", and ostensively paraded up and down in front of my avatar. My first thought was, "Did that thief steal my golem!?!" In his defense -- he didn't. He had drunk a prank tonic that gave him a random skin for a minute, it turns your toon into anything from animal to robot.] :)

As in any RPG, PvE is where you level and train your character by choosing traits (e.g. you can invest in strength, vitality, or power) and skills (attack and defense actions). The large PvE map offers many different types of quests that win you gold, experience points, or loot. GW2 just doesn’t call them quests, but stories, events, or challenges.

1. For players who like elaborate background stories, the main overall quest is called Your Personal Story. Characters complete their education (in-game tutorial), leave their village and visit the big city, from where they are sent on various missions to find allies, learn from NPC-heroes, join an order, and fight the end boss. You can make choices in some chapters, but (I assume) all players get the same outcome. You can never “lose” the Personal Story (if you do, the chapter just restarts).
2. Outside the personal story, you can join solo or group events. NPCs will constantly nag you to fetch things for them, to escort their convoy, to defend their settlements from invading enemy NPCs, to test something they invented, etc. If you like role playing, you can listen to the funny, sad, or nonsensical background stories that the NPCs tell you (“A plan that involves raptors is by definition fool-proof!”). You can fail in these events, but you can play it again every time the event comes around.
3. You should also complete Skill Challenges to unlock more skills: NPCs will either challenge you to a 1:1 fight, or you need to explore a wondrous, hard-to-reach location (“commune with this place”). Each challenge can be completed only once, but you can retry if you lose.
4. There are also dungeons — I haven’t tried them yet. You need to team up with other players, and complete a series of battles in a separate PvE instance. You can make different runs in the same dungeon map, to gain special loot and special equipment (I don’t know any details yet). Dungeons are more targeted towards high-level players (>L40) I think.
5. If you are fed up with fighting, you can also go exploring: You gain points simply for “map completion” and for spotting locations with stunning views (vistas). And if you get fed up with everything RPG, you can always do platformer-style jump puzzles — with treasure waiting at the end. (I suck at jump puzzles… I play RPGs because I want my character to be dexterous and strong and skillful, so I don’t have to be!!) :-P

In the WvW (World versus World) areas, you fight for your home server and are paired up against players of two other GW2 servers. Everyone is promoted to “level 80, all skills unlocked”. On the map, the three parties are represented as “red/blue/green team”, and player names are anonymized as “Servername Defender” or “Servername Attacker”. The map is full of transport routes, keeps, and castles, and supplies to build siege weapons. Every once in a while, the WvW score is tallied up (i.e. which teams occupy which percentage of the map), and everyone on the winning server gets a bonus! So if you are playing PvE, and you find more magic items than usual, or certain attacks are more powerful than usual, then this is a side effect of your fellow players’ winning in WvW. A nice game-within-the-game, even for people who don’t typically play PvP. I only looked at it once and I don’t get how to build all this siege stuff, but I’ll find out. ;)

In the PvP (Player versus Player) arenas, again, everyone is promoted to “level 80, all skills unlocked”. I wasn’t there yet, but I guess you… fight other players? =-) They also say PvP is a nice way for beginners to test different combinations of equipment and skills before they unlock them for their PvE character.

In short, GW2 is doing a good job to be the MMORPG that has “something for everyone”. Nearly all of these sub-games are optional. If you happen to hate elaborate background stories, or jump puzzles, or dungeons — then just don’t do them, and stick with the rest. There is also an interesting mixture of steampunk, magic, and fantasy. Cf screenshot above: So, let’s see… Mechanical robots are cleaning up radioactive magic over here, while some fire elementals want to duell behind the reactor… Sure … Right … Happens all the time! :-)