Not particularly...

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox.  I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually.  That way, my potential down-side is limited.  If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account.  If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken.  Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

1. Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
2. They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
3. The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you.  I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it.  Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case.  Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop.  But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Droid Razr Touch Screen Noise

Last month I got a new cell phone to replace my first generation Motorola Droid.  I decided to get the Droid Razr, another Motorola product, and I've been generally happy with it.  Some of the features just seem nuts to have in a cell phone, like HDMI output, and yet I've used it to watch a movie on a hotel TV.

One interesting sensitivity that I noticed today was that the touch screen keyboard became almost unusable while I had the Razr plugged into a wall charger.  I have been using the "Swype" mode, which allows you to enter entire words as a smooth sweeping gesture around the keyboard.  This time, though, it was detecting finger-lifts when I was still touching the screen, and the path it showed as where I was moving my finger looked like I'd had way too much caffeine.

Now admittedly, I was not using the charger that came with the phone, but it was the Motorola charger from my first Droid.  That's the charger that I usually have in my backpack, and I have actually had occasion to look at the 5V coming out of it with an oscilloscope.  It very clean and well regulated, even under load, especially compared to many other third-party chargers.  On a hunch, though, I unplugged the charger, and suddenly the keyboard worked fine again.  This may merit some further laboratory investigation, and it might provide good justification for building a controllable noise injection circuit...

How To Post To Blogger Via E-Mail

If you have a blogger.com hosted blog account that you want to post to via e-mail, just log into your dashboard, and click on the "Settings" tab.  Then go to the "Email & Mobile" sub-tab underneath that.  Under "Posting Options" (the third major item down) you will find "Email Posting Address."  Fill in the box, and then select whether you want e-mailed posts to be posted immediately or saved as drafts.  Voila!

Then, once you're done with that, you might want to e-mail a test posting.  Something brief, perhaps, like quick instructions on how to post via e-mail...

China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline.  I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal.  The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip.  Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts.  “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China.  From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work.  Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all.  One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall.  Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed.  From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN.  There are a few problems with this solution.  The first is speed and bandwidth.  If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of  my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed.  There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN.  All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice.  This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues.  If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN.  For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks.  It is also used to renew that address when it expires.  If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies.  These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you.  That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested.  There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy.  Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing.  This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive.  And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address.  Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall?  I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic.  It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous.  Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors.  Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked.  I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.


On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance.  But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.

Serving Size and Calorie Counting

When you want to lose body fat, the only way to do it is to burn more calories than you consume.  If you burn approximately 3500 calories more than you eat, your body will metabolize about 1 pound of fat to make up the difference.  Now this has some interesting implications...  Can you lose weight eating only Krispy Kreme donuts?  Well, yes.  You just need to eat less calories worth than you consume.  Of course, an all-Krispy-Kreme diet would almost certainly lead to other nutritional complications.  You would also probably be hungry most of the time because eating few enough donuts to lose weight would probably not be very satisfying.  But it could be done.

If you are keeping track of you calorie intake, it is important to know what your actual calorie count is.  Small errors add up over time.  An extra 10 calories a day, which is less than one teaspoon of sugar, adds up to 3650 calories over a year; that's more than a pound of fat!  Fortunately, there are standard nutrition facts labels on virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States, like this one on tortilla chips:

So, according to this label, the serving size is 28 grams, which is 140 calories.  The FDA has rounding rules that allow manufacturers to round to the nearest 10 calorie increment for values >50 calories, so that means the real value is somewhere between 135.0 and 144.9 calories per 28 gram serving.  Also, most people don't have or regularly use a food scale, so the label often helpfully provides a translation of the serving size into pieces.  Here that is "About 13 chips."  So when I was making nachos the other day I wondered "how close is 'about?'"  The answer was, not too close:

Counting out 13 of the most uniform chips I could find onto a scale (yes, I zeroed out the paper plate), I measured 34.7g, which is 6.7g, or 24% more than the 28g serving size.  That means that if I count out 13 chips and think I'm eating 140 calories, I would really be getting closer to 174 calories.  To get the 28g serving size, I should really eat about 10.5 chips.

To be really precise, I should note that the primary measure for the serving size is given as 1 ounce, which is really closer to 28.35 grams.  But that .35 grams is an error of only 1.25%, which is dwarfed by the 24% error above.  There is also some normal chip-to-chip variation, which I didn't measure.  And often a "chip" is actually broken and missing part.  But ultimately, if you want to confirm serving size, the best way to do it is by weighing your food.

Do you ever keep track of your calorie intake?  Leave a comment below!

Post-A-Week Goal

A bit over a year ago, I set a goal to write a blog entry every day for a month.  I managed to carry through on it, even though it wasn't particularly easy to hold to the commitment every day.  I did not, however, take the next step from that goal, and continue making regular progress on other writing projects, or even here.  So I'm setting another blogging goal.  The goal this time is to write at least one posting here each week for the next year. If I pull it off, that means that I will write over 50 posts in the next year.  Seeing that cumulative progress is, I think, a useful step toward getting myself revved up to do other, larger scale writing projects.

Of course, one of the problems with a "Post-A-Week" is that at least one day each week I'll have to actually finish something and click the "Publish Post" button.  When I get toward the end of any given week, it then becomes a post-a-day goal, for that one day.  So I should try to make sure that I write early in the week, and not late, to keep ahead of the curve.  If my daughter ever reads this, she'll recognize this strategy from the last 5 years of me prodding her about starting her homework early.

For the purposes of this goal, I'll say that the week extends from Sunday through Saturday.  And as it is currently 12:20 AM on Sunday, November 13, 2011, this entry will fulfill my obligation for the week of the 13th - 19th!  Of course, I can write MORE than one a week if time and motivation allow, and I'll certainly try.  But at least this week I'm finishing over 167 hours ahead of my deadline!

I've got dozens of ideas jotted down, and about 25 partially written posts already stock-piled.  Time to start working through the backlog, polishing things up, and get them out into the world.  And then come up with more!

How about you?  What are you planning to do over the course of the next year?  Leave a comment below and tell me!