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Year: 2009

Debugging software for laymen

Published November 28, 2009

Brent Simmons provides what is possibly the best description for laymen of the joy/agony of debugging software that I’ve ever seen:

If it took 10 minutes to reduce memory usage by 96MB, then — were there a linear relationship — it should take under half a minute, less than 30 seconds, to go the rest of the way.

That’s the way things work in the real world, after all. If you have 100 bags of leaves to carry out to the curb, each bag will take about the same amount of time as the others.

Instead, it will probably take me about two hours, maybe more, to get rid of that last 4MB.

It’s almost as if you carried out 96 bags of leaves easily and quickly, then realized you can’t get those last four bags, even though they’re exactly the same as all the others, without pouring a new driveway first.

Which is crazy, right? If the real world operated like that all the time, we’d go completely nuts.

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O @comcastcares, hear my plea

Published June 5, 2009

As of this evening the TV Guide channel is not displaying the scrolling list of program information — just the mindless “American Idol Rewind” and other programming at the top of the screen. You can usually see an empty space at the bottom where the program listing would fall.

When we called the customer support 800 number, the representative was completely clueless and apparently unable to understand our description of the problem. First she told us to unplug our cable-ready TV set from the cable and plug it back in (we’re still analog here and have no cable box). Predictably that had no effect. After my wife and I tried to explain the problem again, she finally decided that the problem was with the network — that is, the TV Guide Network had chosen to stop sending us program listings. She suggested we contacted the network to complain about the change.

As a result, we have no source of program listings from Comcast. The “Channel Lineup” page on comcast.com has had the message “We are currently working to provide channel lineup information for your area” for at least a year. (Our town straddles multiple counties and has its own cable franchise. Last summer Comcast decided to move everyone in town to the same system, which means that we’re now on the “other” system.)

The CSR dutifully ended the call with “Thank you for choosing Comcast”, which is a joke since our original system (Adelphia) was bought out by Comcast. Oddly we had no problems with Adelphia, but the major impact of Comcast (beside shifting our system) was to repeatedly raise our rates while moving channels from the analog tier to the digital tier.

I personally watch very little television and would ditch cable for over-the-air (and over-the-Internet), but my wife enjoys having the TV on while working in the kitchen, and the kids watch Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, etc. Frankly, Verizon can’t bring FIOS to our town fast enough for me. (Sadly there’s no evidence that they’re even considering this, although they’re hooking up an adjacent county.)

[The six loyal readers of my blog probably couldn’t care less about this issue; this post is really just to have something to point Frank Elias (@comcastcares on twitter) toward.]

Edit: In the interest of full disclosure, I got two responses on Twitter the same evening; apparently it was a known issue (involving the digital transition?) and cleared up in a few days.

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Where have you gone, Fake Steve Jobs?

Published April 5, 2009

As Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons made a terrific anonymous satirist. As Newsweek’s technology columnist, he leaves something to be desired.

Pass over the Microsoft marketer’s crack about Macs being “washed with unicorn tears” pass by, because, really, that just makes him look like a dick. Move on to Lyons’ observation that Apple is declining to build cheap netbooks and instead, “in January … rolled out that 17-inch laptop with a $2,800 price tag. Talk about tone-deaf.”

Yes, how terribly tone-deaf to introduce a long awaited upgrade to a machine in high demand among Apple’s customer base, on which Apple can continue to make a comfortable profit margin in a difficult economic environment by selling customers with ready money just the machine they want. What could they have possibly been thinking?

Meanwhile, PC manufacturers race to the bottom and wring the last bits of profit from cheaper and cheaper machines. But that’s no skin off Microsoft’s nose, because they (presumably) get the same profit putting Windows on netbooks as they do on high-end workstations.

In fact, Microsoft probably makes more off netbooks, because they typically ship with Windows XP, for which the bulk of Microsoft’s R&D costs have long since been paid.) No wonder they’re “turning the corner.”

Meanwhile, Apple has consistently declined to compete in the low-end market, and yet has continued to flourish financially, to the bewilderment of analysts everywhere. Presumably, unlike doctors, financial analysts are not taught about Willie Sutton.

As for me, I’m looking towards Apple’s next set of financial results, due out on the 22nd of April. I’m also (speculatively) waiting for the day when Apple announces its next low-cost portable computing device, which I predict will (a) not be a “netbook” as we think of one today, (b) cost significantly more than $300, and (c) sell like hotcakes.

I’ll come back to Dan Lyons’ “commentary” then.

(Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball.)

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