Alan’s blog

Like some Biblical locust swarm, every attempt to do anything is thwarted by the dead weight of innumerable bugs! This time I was trying … and failing … to upload a Word file into Google docs. I uploaded the docx file and it said the file was unreadable, tried saving it as .doc, and when that failed created an rtf file. Amazingly from a 1 Meg word file the rtf was 66 Meg, but very very slowly Google docs did upload the file and when it was eventually all uploaded …

To be fair the same document imports pretty badly into Pages (all the headings disappear).  I think this is because it is originally a 2003 Word file and gets corrupted when the new Word reads it.

Now I have griped before about backward compatibility issues for Word, and in general about lack of robustness in many leading products, and to add to my woes, for the last month or so (I guess after a software update) Word has decided not to show its formatting menus on an opened document unless I first hide them, then show them, and then maximise the window. Mostly these things are annoying, sometimes really block work, and always waste time and destroy the flow of work.

However, rather than grousing once again (well I already have a bit), I am trying to make sense of this.  For some time it has become apparent that software is fundamentally breaking down, in that with every new version there is minimal new useful functionality, but more bugs.  This may be simply issues of scale, of the training of programmers, or of the nature of development processes.  Indeed in the talk I gave a bit over a  year ago to PPIG, “as we may code“, I noted that coding in th 21st Century seems to be radically different, more about finding tricks and community know-how and less about problem solving.

Whatever the reason, I don’t think the Biblical plague of bugs is simply due to laziness or indifference on the part of large vendors such as  Microsoft and Adobe, but is symptomatic of a deeper crisis in software development, certainly where there is a significant user interface.

Maybe this is simply an inevitable consequence of scale, but more optimistically I wonder if there are new ways of coding, new paradigms or new architectural models.  Can 2010 be the decade when software is reborn?

Just scanning a few Google Tech Talks on YouTube.  I don’t visit it often, but followed a link from Rob Style’s twitter.  I find the video’s a bit slow, so tend to flick through with the sound off, really wishing they had fast forward buttons like a DVD as quite hard to pull the little slider back and forth.

One talk was by Stuart Hameroff on A New Marriage of Brain and Computer.  He is the guy that works with Penrose on the possibility that quantum effects in microtubules may be the source of consciousness.  I notice that he used calculations for computational capacity based on traditional neuron-based models that are very similar to my own calculations some years ago in “the brain and the web” when I worked out that the memory and computational capacity of a single human brain is very similar to those of the entire web. Hameroff then went on to say that there are an order of magnitude more microtubules (sub-cellular structures, with many per neuron), so the traditional calculations do not hold!

Microtubules are fascinating things, they are like little mechano sets inside each cell.  It is these microtubules that during cell division stretch out straight the chromosomes, which are normally tangled up the nucleus.  Even stranger those fluid  movements of amoeba gradually pushing out pseudopodia, are actually made by mechanical structures composed of microtubules, only looking so organic because of the cell membrane – rather like a robot covered in latex.

The main reason for going to the text talks was one by Steve Souders “Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code” that has lots of tips for on speeding up web pages including allowing Javascript files to download in parallel.  I was particularly impressed by the quantification of costs of delays on web pages down to 100ms!

This is great.  Partly because of my long interest in time and delays in HCI. Partly because I want my own web scripts to be faster and I’ve already downloaded the Yahoo! YSlow plugin for FireFox that helps diagnose causes of slow pages.  And partly  because I get so frustrated waiting for things to happen, both on the web and on the desktop … and why oh why does it take a good minute to get a WiFi connection ….  and why doesn’t YouTube introduce better controls for skimming videos.

… and finally, because I’d already spent too much time skimming the tech talks, I looked at one last talk: David Levy, “No Time To Think” … how we are all so rushed that we have no time to really think about problems, not to mention life¹.  At least that’s what I think it said, because I skimmed it rather fast.

1. see also my own discussion of Slow Time [back]

For years I have heard anecdotal stories of how users are increasingly unaware of the URL itself (and certainly the term,  ‘web address’ is sometimes better).  I recall having a conversation at a university meeting (non-computing) and it soon became obvious that  the term ‘browser’ was also not one they were familiar with even though they of course used it daily.  I guess like the mechanics of the car engine, the mechanics of the web are invisible.

I came across the Google Zeitgeist 2008 page that analyses the popular and the rising search terms of 2008.  The rising ones reveal things in the media “sarah palin” way in there above “obama” in the global stats.  … if Google searches were votes!  However, the ‘most popular’ searches reveal longer term habits.  For the UK the 10 most popular searches are:

1. facebook
2. bbc
3. youtube
4. ebay
5. games
6. news
7. hotmail
8. bebo
9. yahoo
10. jobs

Some of these terms ‘games’, ‘news’, and ‘jobs’ (no Steve, not you) are generic categories … and suggests that people approach these from the search box, not a portal.  However, of these top 10, seven of them are simply domain names of popular sites.  Instead of typing this into the address bar (which certainly on Firefox autocompletes if I type any I’ve visited before), many users just Google it (and I’m sure the same is true for LiveSearch and others).

I was told some years ago that AOL browsers swapped the relative sizes (and locations I think) of the built-in search box and address bar on the assumption that their users rarelt tyoed in URLs (although I knew of AOL users who accidentally typed URLs into the search box).  Also recalling the company that used to sell net keywords that were used by Netscape (and possibly others) if you entered terms rather than a URL into the adders bar.

… of course if I try that now … FireFox  redirects me through Google “I feel lucky” … of course

Incidentally I came to this as I was trailing back the source of the, now shown to be incorrect, Sunday Times news story that said two Google seaches used the same electricity as boiling an electric kettle.  This got challenged in a TechCrunch blog, refuted by Google, and was effectively (but not explcitly) retracted in subsequent Times online item.  The source turns out to be a junior Harvard physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, whose own source was a blog by Rolf Kersten, one of the Sun Green Team (Sun the computer manufacturer not Sun the newspaper!), so actually not an unreasonable basis.

In fact Rolf Kersten’s estimate, which was prepared for a talk in 2007, seemed to be based on sensible calculations, although he has recently posted a blog saying the figure was out by a factor of 35 … yes it actually takes 70 Google searches to boil that kettle.  Looking deeper the cause of the discrepancy appears to be the figure he used for the number of Google searches per day.  He took 2005 data about the size of the Google server farm and used a figure of 40 million searches per day.  Although Google did not publish their full workings in their response, it is clearly this figure of 40 million hits that was way too low for 2005 as a Feb 2001 Google press release quoted 60 million searches per day in 2000.  Actually with a moment’s reflection it is clear that 40 million hits per day (500 per second) would hardly have justified a major server farm and the figure is clearly in the billions.  However, it is surprisingly difficult to find the true figure and if you Google “google searches per day” you simply find lots of people asking the same question.  In fact, it was through looking for further Google press releases to find a more up-to-date figure that got me to the Zeitgeist page!

A Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog nicely lays out the timeline of this story and sees it as a triumph of the power of media consumers to challenge the authority of the press due to what Jay Rosen refers to as  ‘audience atomization‘.   Fitzgerald also sees the paradox that the story itself was sourced from the somewhat broken sources on the internet; in the past the press would have perhaps used more authoritative sources … and as I noted couple of years ago at a Memories for Life panel at the British Library, the move from BBC to YouTube could be read as mass democratisation … or simply signal the end of history.

There is another lesson though, one that I picked up in a blog “keeping track of history” not long after the Memories for Life meeting, just how hard it is to find pretty straightforward information on the web.  At that point I was after Tony Blair’s statement about the execution of Saddam Husssein, in this case trying to find out the number of Google search hits.  Neither are secret, propriety or obscure, but both difficult to track down.

… but we still trust that single hit of a search button

Yesterday morning I was on my way into Lancaster and listening to the Today programme. Google’s ‘internet evangelist’ Vint Cerf was being interviewed by John Humphrys and the topic was ’should the internet be regulated like other media’.¹

Not surprisingly Vint Cerf thought not, but I was surprised how well he avoided actually saying so. John Humphrys is experienced and politicians fear him in these early morning interviews, but to be honest he was completely outclassed by Vint Cerf who sidestepped, avoided and generally never addressed the question.

Web 2.0 was the heart of the issue. With end-user content now dominating the internet do service providers such as YouTube (of course owned by Google) have any responsibility for the kinds of material hosted?

This was in the context of videos of ‘happy slappers’ and other violent attacks being posted, but more generally that whereas TV in many countries is limited in the kinds of material it can show, particularly early in the evening when children are more likely to be watching, is limited by a mixture of voluntary and satutory codes. Why not the internet?

Vint Cerf repeatedly re-iterated the same message “Google is law abiding” if content is not legal it is removed. Implicitly the message was “if it is not illegal it is OK”, but as I said he carefully avoided saying so.

The closest point to actually addressing the question was when John Humphrys suggested that technologies could be misused like research for atomic power being used for nuclear weapons (strange I thought it went the other way round?). Vent Cerf’s response was, the standard neutrality of technology stance, that the makers of roads were not responsible for car deaths, strip development … the same argument used by arms dealers, manufacturers of gas guzzling cars, and scientists in every repressive regime in recent history.

According to Cerf if you are a worried parent you need to buy good filtering software; the solution is at the edges of the net … and of course does not involve the likes of Google … who it appears from the context is at the centre?
Now there are very good arguments against regulation both ethical (freedom of expression) and practical (volume of material, international access). The disappointing, and worrying, aspect of this interview was that Google’s key public face was unwilling or unable to constructively enter the debate at all.

1. ”The 0810 Interview: Godfather of the Internet”, BBC4, Today Programme, Wednesday, 29th August 2007 [back]