When marketing designs the UI

Posted by mitch on November 28, 2011
software

I resisted writing this post as long as I could. I really did. I’ve always been so excited about Drobo and everything they were doing to enable anyone to have the benefits of redundant blocks in a storage system. I was super excited when Drobo started going up-market with the introduction of the Drobo Pro a few years ago and later the Drobo Elite. It was going to be an exciting ride to see where Drobo took things.

Recently I made the mistake of upgrading to the new Drobo Dashboard, the management tool for monitoring one or more Drobo boxes. I was struggling to get my Mac Pro to see my Drobo after installing an SSD and pulling in a recovered OS configuration.

In any event, I ended up with the new Drobo Dashboard. You can tell it was designed by the marketing department because the Drobo name and logo appear at least 8 times in this screenshot. Do you think this reflects the voice of the customer? “Your UI is great, but I really wish you had the name of your company up on the screen in more places. One or two is just not enough!”

There are other problems with the look of this interface, of course–I have no other apps that look like this or behave like this (fact), it’s ugly (opinion), it’s hard to read (fact: white text on a black background is a bad idea)…. I could go on, but it’s too painful and frankly I feel bad. I’ve pumped out my share of bad user interfaces over the years, but none of them had the vendor name on them in 8 places in a single view.

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Fun with Mac Pro SSD Performance vs SAS vs eSATA

Posted by mitch on November 19, 2011
hardware

This week I finally got around to biting the bullet and buying a 250 GB SSD for my Mac Pro. I’ve been using MacBook Airs with SSDs for a few years now, but since I had a fast SAS RAID array on my Mac Pro, I had been pretty content to live without one in the Mac Pro. My Mac Pro is almost 4 years old and really starting to show its age. I’ve been hoping to keep it limping along until the next revision.

So with mild expectations, I bought an SSD from OWC (and a NewerTech 3.5″/2.5″ bracket from Amazon, shown in the picture above) and configured it as the boot/applications drive. I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard onto the SSD, updated it, and migrated over my applications. Using the ‘Advanced Options’ by right-clicking my account in the System Prefs > Accounts panel, I pointed my user account at my old home folder on the SAS RAID. Everything was good but a few things didn’t work as expected:

1. DropBox seems to have hard-coded /Users/<name>/Dropbox for its path. But my home directory is now /Volumes/sas-raid/Users/mitch. I wonder what else has the home directory hard-coded.
2. I forgot to change my boot arguments to boot 64-bit after reinstalling Snow Leopard, which caused some confusions for Adobe applications, Drobo, and others until I remembered to change that. (Note: This has nothing to do with the SSD, but rather that I was using 64-bit prior because I have 32 GB of RAM.)

Results
So what are the results? The raw benchmarks show that the SSD is about 2x faster for small, random 4K reads, a little faster for small, random 4K writes, and much slower for everything else:

So the SSD performs slower than the RAID for everything sequential, which is not surprising. (If you’re wondering why these results are lower than some SSD numbers you might have seen, bear in mind the 2008 Mac Pro has a slower SATA interface than the modern stuff.) However, the SSD is faster–in fact, twice as fast for small random reads! This is rather remarkable–the SSD runs about $400 and the RAID setup is about $2,000 (though with 32x the physical capacity).

The “real world” results in terms of how the computer feels is fantastic. All the usual speed you’ve heard about SSDs was true for me too–faster OS boot, faster login, faster app launches. I have a Windows 7 Pro VM for Outlook and a Linux development VM, both of which I tucked onto the SSD and resume/suspend is very fast–and best of all, VM operations don’t interfere with other operations on the computer. I will probably add a second SSD for these two VMs shortly.

Other Benchmarks
Since I was doing benchmarking anyway, I also compared my external eSATA 4 disk RAID and the DroboPro connected via iSCSI. The eSATA results are quite good for the price ($50 for the Sonnet Temp E2P card and you can put together an array with similar performance for $600). As expected, the Drobo is quite a bit slower (although sequential I/O is decent), but no one buys a Drobo for performance anyway:

Most striking here is the 300x difference between the small random writes on the eSATA RAID and the SSD! I believe this RAID is waiting for data to be on disk (vs the disk cache) and perhaps the other RAID examples are not (Areca is pretty clear on requiring a UPS for data integrity). And of course, we see an 8x favor for the SSD for small random reads. For the cost, I really like the performance of this RAID unit and plan to buy another of these with 7200 RPM drives. The Sonnet eSATA card I am using is SATA I and II; upgrading to the Sonnet Tempo 6Gb card probably won’t open up the performance of this RAID further (which OWC says is 3.0Gbps = SATA II).

What should you conclude? Certainly what makes sense for your work is likely different than mine. But you’re still going to have an OS and applications and the SSD random I/O performance makes that quick. What else you augment the SSD with may vary, but I think at this point, any and every power user is going to see benefit from investing in one or more SSDs.

All the benchmarks were performed with XBench 2.1. I ran them a few times and eyeballed that the results were relatively consistent. I didn’t do any averaging. The computer was otherwise relatively idle, with regards to both CPU and I/O. An obvious benchmark that is missing here is comparing the speed of a single SATA internal disk. I just don’t have any bare drives in my Mac Pro to test at this time.

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My Favorite Parts of “Getting Things Done”

Posted by mitch on November 09, 2011
productivity

I first read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done in December 2008. Now that I’ve been using pieces of his system for a few years, I can comment on some of my favorite parts:

1. Put manuals in a file cabinet. I used to have stacks of manuals in drawers, corners, shelves, on top of bookcases, and so on. Now I have a few dozen folders in a file cabinet that contain all the manuals for my appliances, computer stuff, electronics, and tools. This has reduced clutter and stress of needing to find manuals. I know some folks have moved to just downloading PDFs from the manufacturer and keeping those organized. I do that for some things, but big purchases like a kitchen appliance, I’ve kept the physical manual.

2. Label all files with a label maker. Allen says that doing this will inspire you to keep your files neat and tidy. And he’s right! I have a lateral file cabinet and two pedestal file drawers in my desk. All of my folders are labeled with a $100 label maker. Allen says buy the cheapest one; I didn’t because I had used both a nice one and a cheap one before and really liked the nice one a lot better. Until I took this approach, I never really used my file cabinets. In fact, I got so much use out of this system that I had to buy the lateral cabinet after I filled my pedestal drawers.

3. Do a regular brain dump where you write down EVERYTHING you need to do. Off the bat this can easily be over 100 things: Empty the trash in the laundry room, sweep the garage, prepare a report for work, pay the water bill, donate clothes, buy a new ceiling fan, and so on. Allen says getting all this stuff out of your head will reduce your stress. I have found he is absolutely right.

I read Allen’s book because I was pushing myself to accomplish more in less time than I had ever done so before and it really helped me get a framework that works. I have forgotten less and accomplished more in the last 3 years than I ever would have imagined myself doing prior to doing it. For $10, this book was well worth the investment.

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Mousing Around

Posted by mitch on November 06, 2011
hardware, productivity

A few months ago, my right wrist was bothering me. I had been using the Apple Magic Mouse since it came out on all my computers. But apparently my wrist was tired and I needed to look for alternatives. So I bought a lot of mice of various sorts. After testing them for a few months, here’s what I learned about these mice (from left to right in the picture above):

Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 ($60, Amazon)
This mouse is a “fat” mouse on the left side; it forces your hand at an angle vs the “flat palm down” position of a regular mouse. I was excited about the angle. The tracking and scroll wheel are the same as all other Microsoft mice. If you like other Microsoft mice and you mouse with your right hand, this could be a great mouse for you. However, I have never been a fan of Microsoft scroll wheels, so it wasn’t a good solution for me.

Apple Magic Trackpad ($70, Apple)
I actually bought this when it came out but rarely used it. I still don’t find it comfortable as a solo mouse on my desktop. There are a few things I do love about it—the gestures such as two-finger scroll are all wonderful. I find clicking on it a bit awkward.

Apple Magic Mouse ($70, Apple)
I love this mouse. It has left/right click, it’s relatively lightweight, and enables two-dimensional scrolling. It is “short” and that took some getting used to. I own four Magic Mouses and really enjoy them.

Logictech Wireless Trackball M570 ($50, Amazon)
I didn’t expect to like this but I bought it in the interest of diversity. It is actually quite wonderful. Although it doesn’t put my hand in a substantially different position, the use of the thumb to move the cursor instead of the wrist means my hand is doing different motions.

Razer Abyssus High Precision Optical Gaming Mouse (wired) ($30, Amazon)
I bought this because a friend mentioned she loved her Razer mouse. I love how lightweight the mouse is (note that I have a corded version). It’s very easy to move around and tracks very well. Unfortunately, it’s just a regular mouse and didn’t put my hand into a different position, so I didn’t notice any difference in pain.

Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 (Right Hand) ($90, Amazon)
A colleague had this mouse on his desk and so I thought I’d given it a spin. Initially it feels very strange to use, like coaxing a potato around on your desk. It took me a few days to get the hang of it. In particular, precision movements are very tough initially. My girlfriend took this mouse for a drive and loved it so much she ordered a left-hand version for her office. This mouse comes in two versions, left and right-hand, so you’ll need to know which hand you will mouse with before you order. The scroll wheel is very nice to use on this mouse.

DXT Precision Mouse ($100, only available from Kinesis)
This mouse is similar to the Evoluent, except it feels more like holding a pencil in your hand. The mouse is small, super lightweight and “reversible” for either left or right hand use. The buttons feel good and tracking is excellent. The only negative is that the scroll wheel is a disaster. My hands really can’t use the scroll wheel at all on this mouse. I think this is my favorite mouse, scrolling issues aside.

Adesso Glidepoint (in the background in the above picture)
I actually bought this mouse years ago. It was good for its time and has two-dimensional scrolling by moving your finger on the edges of the pad. However, the Apple Trackpad is the winner in this category now. I wouldn’t buy this now, but tossed it into this lineup for comparison. My biggest issue with this trackpad at the time was that it’s not heavy enough and it would end up sliding around on the desk. Trackpads should stay put.

So what did I end up doing?
Because none of the mouses were perfect, I have ended up using 4 mice most of the time: The DXT Precision Mouse and the Logitech Thumb Trackball I use with my right hand and switch back and forth between them throughout the day. I found it more convenient to buy a large mousepad (about 14″ x 18″!) to avoid running out of room as I switch which mouse is closest to the keyboard. With my left hand I switch back and forth between the Apple Trackpad and Magic Mouse. This lets me keep the nice scrolling features of those mice handy and offer a bit of relief to my right arm. Sometimes I will use one of the other mice for a little bit to get my arm into a different position. Although I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, my belief is that the key to “RSI” is the “R” (repetitive). Putting my hands in different positions should reduce the “R”. Either way, the pain is gone.

If you’re looking for a better mouse solution, I’d definitely give the DXT a shot although the scrolling situation for large hands isn’t very good. If you have the room and budget for a secondary scrolling solution, that might be an ideal combination.

(“Mousing Around” was the name of the mousing tutorial that came with the Macintosh in 1984 to teach folks how to use the mouse. I loved that program.)

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Herman Miller Embody vs Herman Miller Aeron

Posted by mitch on September 29, 2011
productivity

A few months ago, I bought a Herman Miller Embody chair. I’ve had the chair for about 10 weeks now and sat in it for about 5 of those weeks.

Cosmetically, I love the Embody. I love the colors, the texture of the “Balance” fabric, the shape. Functionally, it’s easier to lean back in the Embody than the Aeron, the seat pan depth is adjustable (great if your legs (thighs) are long), and the arm width is adjustable in a way that is far superior to the Aeron. However, the back support of the Embody is just strange and I can’t seem to get used to it. The lower back area has no padded support–it’s like sitting up against a plastic booth at a fast food joint. I also haven’t been able to get the back support to fit the shape of my back very well.

My complaint about the Aeron is that the front of the seat pan rises up a little too much. This is a common complaint from many folks and my solution was to sit with my heels on the casters, thus bracing my body to the chair and elevating my thighs a bit more to relieve the pressure from the seat pan. I always felt a bit strange doing this, but the Aeron supports my back very well and made it worthwhile.

The big advantage the Aeron has over the Embody is the thermal coolness. The mesh of the Aeron is wider gauge than that of the Embody, so the Aeron breathes more. Literally, the Aeron is a very cool chair to sit in. The Embody Balance mesh is breathable like the Aeron, but the mesh is finer and doesn’t breathe as much. There were some days in August that I noticed the heat trapped in the chair.

The Embody doesn’t fit my body as well as the Aeron (or I don’t have it adjusted properly). I plan to keep using the Embody and see if I can get the back adjustment right, but if I can’t pull that off shortly, I’m going to sell it. I don’t regret buying the chair–there’s just no way to know if a chair will fit you without using it for a while. No amount of in-store demo or using it for just one week can reveal the longer term issues. Don’t read this post and be scared off from trying the Embody yourself–your body is probably different from mine. The Embody is a high quality piece of engineering, as is the Aeron.

Update 15-Nov-2011: I spent a few weeks not sitting in the Embody and switched back to the Aeron. Then I sat in the Embody for one day. The sad conclusion is that I am selling the Embody. I absolutely love the arm rests and the seat pan and the look of the Embody, but the Embody doesn’t fit my back properly. I plan to try the Steelcase Leap WorkLounge next… Don’t let this post discourage you from trying or buying the Embody, though. If it fits your body, you will absolutely love it. And who can say whether a chair fits without sitting in it for extended periods?

More pictures here.

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My Audi R8 “test drive” on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Posted by mitch on September 03, 2011
cars

Recently a friend and I were in Las Vegas for VMworld 2011 and spent the Sunday prior to the show up at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway where we drove the 4.2L V8 Audi R8 through Las Vegas Exotics Racing. Both of us have had a fascination with this car for a while now. I did 10 laps in the R8 and he did 5.

Unlike a lot of cars of its caliber, the R8 was a comfortable fit for me. I am 6’2″ with a broad frame. The R8 is a little too tight for me to wear a helmet comfortably, but seat height, dash distance, seat width, and gauge visibility were all excellent for my body size. We were on a pretty technical track with 9 turns and the R8 handles it well. The racing instructors are pretty intense on helping the driver get more out of the car (“you can take this turn faster”). No surprise that the car handles well—the steering is very tight, braking and acceleration are wonderful, and the sound of the engine is excellent. This is the first car I’ve driven with a mid-mount engine so the weight balance difference was new to me. Certainly 10 laps isn’t enough to really comment on anything in detail.

I highly recommend the Las Vegas Exotics Racing guys. You really do get to drive the cars and it’s worth the price. I am planning to go back in a few weeks to drive the R8 again (SFO to LAS is a quick day trip). They also have a bunch of other high end cars—the R8 is at the bottom of their car line-up but it is the most interesting to me.


About to pull onto the track.


Yours truly at the wheel.


My buddy bringing the car back after his laps.


One of at least 3 Lamborghinis available.


Two of at least 4 Ferraris available.

More pictures here.

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Sony MDR-DS3000 vs Sennheiser RS 180: Wireless Headphones Compared

Posted by mitch on July 16, 2011
audio, hardware

Back in December 2005, I received a pair of Sony MDR-DS3000 headphones for Christmas. I reviewed them on Amazon, giving them 5/5 stars. I used them for years and never had any problems with them–they are comfortable, have good range, and the strange proprietary batteries still work great.

However, the audio quality of the Sonys was at best fair and I wanted something a little more. In order to achieve acceptable audio quality with them, an amplifier is needed and the user should keep the volume on the headphones themselves no more than 50-60% up. Even with these tweaks, the audio quality is just acceptable–it’s not fantastic.

So in July 2011, I bought the Sennheiser RS 180 headphones. I’ve been a Sennheiser fan for a while now; I also own the Sennheiser PXC 350 noise canceling headphones and the Sennheiser HD800 headphones.

The audio quality of the Sennheisers is much better than that of the Sony. The other nice feature is a line output that enables plugging amplified speakers or another downstream device into the headphones.

Where Sennheiser misses compared to the Sony is the amount of micromanagement required by the user. There is a power button on the base to start transmitting to the headphones. This is stupid; if the headphones are lifted from the base, that should be an implicit ‘on’ operation. There is also a power button on the headphones themselves. The way the Sony headphones work is that the power button is embedded into the head adjustment, such that putting on the headphones causes the headphones to turn on. Brilliant, and I assume Sony has a patent on this design–but Sennheiser needs their own technique to accomplish the same. If you were reading closely, you realized that the Sony has no power buttons the user has to turn on while the Sennheiser has two power buttons. On the bright side, Sennheiser uses standard NiMH AAA batteries and includes a pair with the headphones. The base is also a little nicer styling-wise.

The other major difference is transmission technology. The Sony is infrared, so line-of-sight is required. The advantage is that there’s no chance of cordless phone or other RF interference. The RS-180 is radio. Both transmit a digital stream; the RS-180 claims to transmit lossless 44.1 khz 16 bit audio to the headphones. I am not sure what the Sony is transmitting, though I’d be impressed if it is transmitting such a wide stream of data over IR. The Sony can take an S/PDIF optical input and provide simulated surround sound. I never used this feature and cannot comment on it.

The other contender worth looking at is the Sony MDRDS6500 — it has a modern stand like the Sennheiser and uses RF instead of IR. If it matches the Sennheiser sound quality with some of the conveniences of no power buttons, that would be a clear winner. I am skeptical on the audio quality front, but it is possible.


I will write more on this when I’ve had a chance to live with the RS 180 headphones more.

Diving into LED Lighting

Posted by mitch on February 06, 2011
hardware

I’ve recently taken the plunge on LED light bulbs. I never found CFL bulbs that I liked enough to put into living areas of my house, so I have been using GE Reveal incandescent bulbs and GE Reveal halogens throughout most of my house.

However, I’ve recently found Philips AmbientLED bulbs, which have excellent color temperature and brightness. I tried a few of the bulbs and liked them so much that I’ve upgraded all the bulbs in my office to these bulbs. I am using 3 x 5 watt bulbs and 6 x 12.5 watt bulbs in the 9 lamps in my office. These lamps were using about 520 watts of electricity before the upgrade, but now that has been reduced to 90 watts. These bulbs aren’t cheap (total cost for the 9 bulbs was $300 before sales tax!), but the light quality is excellent. Electricity costs me $0.16 per KWH, so I’m looking at around 10-11 months for break-even. This estimate does not include reduced air conditioner costs in the summer, since the AC will not need to remove as much heat from the lights.

Beware not all LED bulbs are created even. I bought some cheaper bulbs for my front porch, since the front porch light isn’t on a sensor and we sometimes forget to turn it off. Those bulbs use far less electricity–about 4 watts instead of 120–but the color temperature is very similar to CFLs.

I am pretty new to these Philips bulbs and don’t have comprehensive experience with them, but I have observed that the metal parts of the housing take far longer to cool off than incandescent bulbs and they get far hotter to the touch, so be careful if when changing bulbs.

All in all, I am very excited about these bulbs and looking forward to reduced prices on them as the LED market matures.

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Fascinating Talk about Security and Theft of Computers

Posted by mitch on December 29, 2010
security

This video is worth watching for anyone interested in security.

In addition to an interesting talk, many of the conclusions are counter-intuitive.

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Mac Software I Want in 2011

Posted by mitch on December 25, 2010
productivity, software

2011 is just a week away now and there’s a few things I’d like to see come to the Mac in the next year.

This past year, we finally got something called ‘Outlook’ native on the Mac. It’s time that this Outlook got a few things that have been missing on the Mac for a while–for me, that means:

1. Google Apps Sync Engine for Outlook. Without this, Outlook on the Mac isn’t as exciting for Google Apps as it is for Windows.

2. Xobni for Mac Outlook. Xobni is a very handy tool and I have bought copies for it for both machines on which I use Windows. But I’d really like to have it on the Mac.

3. A Salesforce.com plug-in for the Mac Outlook. Again, we feature parity with Windows would be nice. Specifically, I want to easily tie emails onto contacts and opportunities in Salesforce.com.

In addition to these Outlook items, I have some other wishes:

4. OmniFocus needs a little email improvement. Right now, using email to send something to OmniFocus requires Apple Mail and custom rules. I’d like to see one of two solutions: (1) is to have OmniFocus check email with a dedicated account that the user configures. This seems confusing to explain to customers, so I am not sure that’s a good solution for Omni. (2) is for Omni to provide an email service, just like Evernote does. Evernote gets email integration right–just like Salesforce does–everyone should copy their approach.

5. More native DropBox support for iPad and iPhone apps. OK, this isn’t exactly Mac-specific, but I’d really like to see OmniFocus and Evernote applications able to browse DropBox contents easily. Native DropBox support for DAV as a front-end and DAV in apps with an eye towards simple DropBox integration would be handy.

6. Some better graphics tools. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, OmniGraffle; I’ve played with Pixelmator, DrawIt, and others–but somehow none of these quite do what I want for “marketing graphics”. I want the control of Illustrator and Photoshop to build widgets and something like OmniGraffle but with more intelligence to piece them together. This almost sounds like ClarisDraw… but EasyDraw isn’t the answer either.

7. More head-less and powerful virtualization. VMware Fusion guest processes are lost when the Mac window server goes away (e.g., killed via remote ssh). VMware Fusion needs support for multiple Ethernet interfaces without hacking around in random files. I’d like to see something marketed for a more professional workstation user with more of the Workstation features. I’d be happy to see a Fusion Pro or something at a higher price point if that is what’s needed.

8. VMware VI Client without having to run a Windows virtual machine in Fusion or investigate awkward WINE stuff.

I have some other wishes as well–I’d like to see Apple fix the broken iTunes sync with devices and limits around a single library. For example, music I buy on the road I cannot sync to an iPod or iPad or iPhone, since they all sync to my desktop–and my 256 GB MacBook Air isn’t big enough to hold my 1 TB iTunes library.

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