Ontic Oren

As of today, I’ve had my Kindle for two months.  I’ve read 13 books in that time, a few magazines, two newspapers, one blog, and a PDF or two.  The verdict?  It’s a good device.  It’s clearly the future.  If you’re not an insane geek, wait till something a bit better comes up.  Here’s my more in-depth thoughts:

Screen:

Amazing, and a bit disappointing.  If you’ve not yet seen e-ink, you’ll be in for a surprise.  It looks like printed text.  It is extremely readable in all lighting conditions.  The slight grey background has no impact for me at all.   The screen can display the text in 5 sizes; I’ve found that I most like the second smallest.  It’s the right compromise between jaggy and density.  The screen is only 600×800 pixels, so the smaller font sizes are noticible for not being smooth.  They are totally readable, but just not as good as the printer page.  I’d almost call them comparable to an inkjet on quick – a little messy, but totally readable.   If they could double the resolution, I’d be happy.  The single font doesn’t bother me at all, nor does the lack of formating.  Just get rid of the jaggies.

The flash: yes there is one.  The screen goes black for 1 second while it’s changing pages.  Beyond the speed impact, it’s not an issue.  At all.  I got used to it in 10 min, and don’t notice it.  Move along.

Graphics in books are a joke.  The “screensaver” shows that it’s possible, but I suppose that no one is releasing graphics optimized Kindle e-books yet.  If your book includes graphics as a key element, just get it in print for now.

Ergonomics:

The first real red flag.  Take a gander at that picture.  See how the disembdied hand is holding the Kindle?  Good, cause that’s basically the ONLY way to hold the kindle.  Pick it up anywhere else, and you hit a button.   But you don’t want to hold it that way?  Tough.  And see those nice big buttons on the side?  You are going to hit them.  Not only to turn the page, but every time you glance at the thing.  You will lose your page a dozen times till you get locking religion, and lock out the keyboard everytime you put it down.  A sneeze will change the page.  The keyboard?  It feels like crap, but that’s ok, cause you’ll use it for 5 min max.  So why does it take up 20% of the machine?

You can hold onto the included case, which gives you some more options.  Till the Kindle drops out, as it’s held in by weak little monkeys trying vainly to clamp onto the 2 square micrometers of free space that doesn’t have buttons, and even their genetically engineered hands don’t have the strength.  Especially if you’re like me and hold books in odd ways, upside down hanging off couches, etc.

Oh yeah, about that case.  You’ve been trained like a good Pavlovian OCD pigeon to lock the keyboard EVERY time  you put the Kindle down?  Right?  Right!?  Cause if not, forget it.  The cover will hit some button, if you’re lucky you’ll be 50 pages from where you were when you put it down.  If you’re like me, your battery will be DEAD.   Let’s say your lucky, and only some random location from where you originally were.  Well, good luck.  Changing pages takes ~ 3 seconds per page.  3 x 50 = 150.  That’s 2.5 minutes of flipping pages.  SO BORING.  So remember, LOCK the keyboard, even if you’re putting it down for 5 seconds.

Now, the much maligned, and well, frankly asinine back button.   This deserves a special place in hell.  The concept is great – take me back to where I was just at. The problem is, let’s say you’re reading a book, and maybe, for some reason, you might have say first started this book at the front, then flipped forward 20 pages.  Then you hit the back button.  and you’re back… to the begining.  Literally.  Yes, you now need to flip 20 pages.  It’s SO easy to hit this, and totally lose your place.  It’s in the #1 button position, begging to be pressed.  DON’T DO IT.  I have yet to find a situation in which I’m not better off figuring out some other way of getting back.  I’ve trained myself to just never hit that back button, and I’m much better for it, thank you.

Content:

Content is king, or so 18,900,000 people say.   Amazon has decent coverage, borderline acceptable.  I am constantly finding books that aren’t available however.  I’d say around 50% of the books that I’ve wanted to read have not been available, and some are not exactly long tail.  If you are into some more obscure content, forget it.  I was curious to get some philosophy books, with NO luck.  The collection is fairly similar to my library.  That’s not fair – my local library has more books.

The other aspect of content is appropriateness for format. Obvisouly, this isn’t the device to read coffee table photography books.  Unexpectedly, I’d also argue that it isn’t the device to read reference material on.  The Kindle is ideal for linear content, such as fiction or some non-fiction.  However, I often find when I read more challenging material, 10 pages after reading something, I suddenly realize I need to re-read a paragraph.  Usually it’s a 10 second flip flip, found the section, read and think, then back to where I was.  Not with the Kindle.  Here, you’ve got to find the passage, which can take a while as you press, flash, wait, scan over and over.  Then you need to get back to where you were.  ick.  This cuts out all reference, programming, and intellectual content for me.  Sure, you can search, but I need the serendipitous random search, not the computer driven kind.

Blogs and periodicals fall into the same problem.  I like to skim, and dive.  Kindle doesn’t work for that.  Stick to linear works.

Social:

Reading is inherently a social activity for me.  My family goes on trips once a year, where everyone brings books, reads everyone elses, and powers through way too many.  Not with the kindle.  No sharing here.  This may be Olivia’s #1 issue with it.  I read something, tell her about it, and basically taunt her, since I’m not going to give her my Kindle.  This isn’t really Amazon’s fault, it’s just something to be aware of.  If you do have multiple Kindle’, it actually works fairly well.  My dad also has a Kindle, and it’s tied to my account.  Although he’s in NJ, and I’m in CA, we both have full access to anything the other person purchases, barring periodicals.

Technology:

The wireless is slick.  Great signal everywhere I go, and it just works.  Surfing web pages is stupid painful, due to the screen and UI refresh.  Wikipedia access is cool, and useable.  I use the embedded dictionary at least once an hour, possibly my favorite ancillary feature.  Battery life, assuming you lock the damn thing, is great – 5 days with wireless on, 2 weeks with it off.  Although it has a USB port, that’s just for data transfer, not charging.  Only way to charge is to plug in with the wall-wart.

The sample feature is neat.  You can download the first few pages of any book for free.  It seems to be the first few pages from the beginning, regardless of the book.  If there’s a huge TOC, you may only get 1-2 pages of actual book.  If there’s not much fluff at the beginning, you could get a whole chapter.  I’ve love to see them move to the first 20 pages of “content” if possible.

Je ne sais quoi:

All things being equal, there’s still something about the paper book.  It just feels better to read on paper.  There really just is a certain something about paper.  Now, that said, I’m very happy with the Kindle.  I’m reading more, both on paper and electronically with it.  Especially for traveling, the Kindle is great.  Having 5 books on hand at once, in a light package, is wonderful.

If they fix the basic ergo issues, I’d recommend it for linear reading with a big thumbs up.  As it is, go in with your eyes open, and you may find it’s a great device.

I’ve concluded the tools analysis that I kicked off a few weeks ago. What initially began as a look into requirements management tools quickly expanded into the entire product development lifecycle. Tools can not make up for broken process, so that’s the place to start. As I looked back at what’s worked and not in the past, I realized that the MOST critical success factor has always been alignment. If engineering, product management, sales and the customer aren’t all aligned on what, when, how, and why, we create massive headaches for ourselves. To ensure alignment, we need one source of truth, one place to track everything that’s going on. If we need to keep two system in sync, we lose. If everyone in the company can’t see everything, we lose. If everyone isn’t bought into the process, we lose.

In order to get everyone on the same page, we need to look at the toughest participant. I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but usually that’s engineering. Not only are they the largest team, they also have the strongest opinions. Starting from that vantage, I realized the plan of record has to be kept in a bug database. It’s the only thing engineering will update. In my past lives I’ve many times tried to keep a separate list, one focused on features, and engineering’s DB focused on bugs. But what happens when you classify a bug as a feature enhancement? It’s such a grey area, do you start replicating and moving data? Duplicating it? Either way, it’s a disaster. I’ve gotten into massive fights over this before, and even if I was “right”, is it worth fighting that over and over?Yes, tools like Rally and Accept can interop with Bugzilla or Jira. But if I need to have the bug DB anyway, is the extra effort and cost worth while? For such a small shop as ours, I’m not sure the answer is yes. I’ve used Accept for a few years, and have loved the tool. For traceability and analysis, it’s the perfect tool. I think I may have let those aspects get in the way of focusing on what the requirements themselves are, and how we get alignment in the groups. Frankly, all the tools I looked at in the previous post just seem like total overkill for any <50 (and maybe even <300) person company.

Now clearly, the bug database by itself isn’t sufficient. You need a place for more unstructured data, for planning, notes, etc. For marketing data, sales plans, and just the rest of the company. Obviously, a wiki is the best place to put this. This leaves us needing a great bug DB, and a great Wiki. In a stroke, I’ve thrown out almost all the tools I was looking at before: Accept, Rally, Feature Plan, VersionOne. They all are… complex. I’m sure for a large company, they’d work great, and have their advantages, but for a startup looking at Scrum and frankly trying to save some money, I just couldn’t see the value. So that leaves us with only four options that I could see out there:

• Fogbugz (with or without external wiki)
• Twiki + Bugzilla
• Trac
• Confluence + Jira

Fogbugz I quickly ruled out. Although it’s got a great UI, and I hear good things about it, it’s also just not the right fit. Some of the additional features were lackluster (the wiki is atrocious, the forum useless compared to phpBB), plus it’s very general (good), and needs to be shoehorned to fit Scrum or other agile processes (bad).

The next three was a much tougher decision. Trac looks great. For an internal focused project, or an open source project, it’s probably the one I’d use. However, we have need for both private and external content, tighter security controls, and some more advanced commercial features that they don’t seem to cover. I REALLY liked Trac, but I didn’t see it fitting into our commercial environment.

Now it’s really hard. I LOVE twiki. Better than Confluence. I like Jira better than Bugzilla. Ultimately, the support & integration that Atlassian is providing, plus the larger suite of products such as Fisheye, Bamboo, etc all pushed me over the edge. Maybe it’s just a dream, but the thought of having a view into CI data, test status, check-ins, all tied and traceable, makes me a tingle.

From a cost perspective, for a small team like ours we’re looking at a $3,600 investment for Jira and Confluence, plus $1,800 for maintenance. We’ll put them in VMs on existing HW, running Fedora. The incremental admin costs for two new machines should be minimal. I’m figuring if we buy into their whole stack, we may wind up spending 10K with them. On the one hand, that ain’t chump change, especially when we could be getting it for “free” with Twiki/Bugzilla or even Trac for internal + Twiki for external wiki needs. I’m counting on the support, the features, and the overall new development will all make this pay off.

I know many other people out there on the internets have gone through similar evaluations. Which way did you go? 6 months or a year later, are you happy about it?

BTW, the photos are from a recent drive I did. They are there just for decoration.

UPDATE 5/26: Apogee has a new release of the firewire driver that fixes the issue!

All is not well with my shiny new Apogee Duet.

It’s causing kernel panics all too often. Plugging it in while the computer is on is the sure fire way. It also seems to have issues waking from sleep, crashing 60%+. I don’t appear to be alone on this issue, nor is it limited to the Duet.  Mailed support 9 days ago with my latest info, except for a cursory response nothing yet.  Pulling 50% of my RAM doesn’t sound like a good idea. I really hope Apogee and Apple figure this out soon. It’s a wonderful device that I like more and more as I use it, the crashes are killing me though.

photo credit: David Reece

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that I slipped in my resignation from Sun. Today, March 14th, is my last day.

I’m embarking on the riskiest of all options – a tiny new startup. We’re looking at how we can address some issues that arise with the use of virtualization and network management. I’ll be doing product mangement, plus whatever it takes (markeing, cooking, cleaning) to make sure we’re a huge success, and maximize the reward side.  [If I've 10x my risk, but also 10x the potential reward, I guess my risk/reward ratio remains constant? I guess I've probably 10x the risk for <10x the reward.]

So why jump now?  For the first time in my career, I’m not running away from an old job. The Sun xVM team, and especially my boss, are doing an amazing job. They are building a great team and a great product. I’ve even managed to recruit two new people to the team in the past week, in spite of my departure! I have no doubt that I’ll be talking with the Sun xVM team shortly on how we can work together.

Proving just how random our lives truly are, I found this job through one of those serendipitous moments. A colleague of my wife asked if she knew anyone for a certain position at this other small company, just in passing, and a month later I’m resigning!  The team, the opportunity, and frankly, the risk, were all to good to pass up.  I’m excited to be scared sh-tless and I’m excited to make something from nothing.

Rich, Rich, and Ken – I can’t wait to join you and the rest of the team on this adventure.

I think life is really all about balancing our risk / reward ratios.

For the past year, our dog has spent 1 day/week at Smilin Dogs. We first found them when Olivia saw a neighbor’s dog bouncing 5′ in the air with this white van picking him up. These guys have a great model – they have 750 acres they’re renting out in the HMB coastal area. They take packs of dogs to hike and play all day. Our dog loves it – I’ve never seen an animal get so excited as when they come to pick him up. He’s happy, tired, and satisfied when he gets home.

Since we first started looking, there have always been rumors of issues. Friends in the guide-dog community, vet techs, others, have whispered about dogs getting hurt, lost, etc. After hearing a friend relate how one dog broke his leg, Olivia and I reluctantly canceled the service. The owner, Conrad, quickly called to find out why. He was very polite, and was genuinely curious to know if there was anything he could do. During the call, he said something that resonated to my core – “this is inherently risky. We walk them off leash, with a pack of dogs, in a wild enviornment. We could keep them locked up, and it would be much safer. But that’s why you chose us in the first place.” And he’s totally right. Of course, if my dog was at home in a kenel all day, he would be safe. And sad. Conrad has explicitly set out to run a business with inhrent risk, and with great reward for the dogs that participate.

These guys take safety seriously. They are literally doing everything they can to mitigate the inherent risk in their endeavor. They run report cards on each dog every time they go. They eject any dogs that aren’t acceptable. Conrad personally interviews every single dog that comes in. Yes, every now and then a dog gets lost. Apparently new dogs sometimes get a little freaked out, usually they haven’t been properly dog socialized, and run away. So far, Smilin Dogs has always found the dog the next day. Yes, dogs get hurt. One excited dog ran into another one, and broke the poor guys leg. But that could happen at the dog park just as easily. They take thousands of dogs up ever year, and apparently have a very small incident ratio. They have understood the risk, the randomness, and the reward, and have taken the right steps to put the ratio into a positive balance.

I’m willing to take risks in my life – for my job, for my wife, for myself – that pay off with huge rewards. There’s no such thing as a 100% safe environment. We all lose sight of the impact of randomness in our life, and I lost sight just this past week. Olivia and I talked it over, and realized that we were losing perspective. Starting this Thursday, Indy will be VERY happy once again. For the right dog (well socialized, gregarious, not-aggressive, friendly) Smilin Dogs is the BEST treat I believe you can give them.

Conrad, thanks for taking the time to call, and taking the time to personally care so much about this. You’ve taken a risk yourself with this business, and hopefully it’s one that we can all reward.

Once I get started, it’s hard to stop. After picking up the NHT, I of course had to look around on the internet some more, and opened my eyes up to the world of DACs. (head-fi.org is pure evil. If you value your wallet, do not visit.) Not content to wonder, I ordered two DACs. One was almost the same price as the NHT PVC, the other twice as expensive.

NHT PVC PC

What: A passive volume control. Simply attenuates whatever is fed into it. In home computer use, the claim is keeping your computer audio at maximum, and then using this analog controller provides better audio quality. Includes ground loop eliminator.

Connections: RCA in and out. Hook up to monitors only. No power. No headphone.

Aural: Compared with direct, it’s honestly hard to say. In my case, the ground loop noise was BAD without this. With, it’s clean and nice. I’ll call this baseline, but I honestly don’t know if it sounds better barring the ground loop noise.

Purchase: ListenUp.com. $179 delivered.

Fubar III

What: A small little integrated USB DAC and amp. Front features a big smooth pot, headphone jack, and two LEDs. Bottom blue led is power. Top led indicates active audio source. Green when active. Red when unplugged or computer is sleeping. The bottom blue one is so bright it’s distracting. 2-3x brighter than the green/red one. At eye level, it’s almost blinding. Off-axis, it’s just damn annoying. It’s always on.

Connections: USB to computer for DAC. Just plug in, and the mac automatically routes audio out to it. Truly PnP. Provides line-level ouputs as well as headphone jack. Headphone and line-out are active at same time, i.e. plugging in headphones does NOT turn off line-out audio. I left speakers always plugged in, but turned off when not in use. Unplugged headphones when not in use. 12V DC. Includes cheapo wall wart. Offers upgrade for another $100. Didn’t purchase upgrade.

Aural: A clear step up from the PVC PC and iMac. Enhanced, broader and clearer imaging. Better overall definition across the range. Slightly less boomy sounding on the NHT M-00 (though it’s still there, and annoying me more and more). Getting into serious audio realm. Check out this great review of the NHT/Fubar combo for more details. He does a better job than I, so I’ll leave it to him.

Other: Every 20 min, I’m getting audio drop out and stutter for 1 second. Annoying, and not sure what’s causing it yet.

Purchase: Audiophile Products. $238.97 delivered to California. Although in Canada, cheapest shipping took exactly 1 week door to door. Between this and the PVC, it’s a NO brainer. Dump the PVC, get the Fubar III instead.

Apogeee Duet

What: Firewire AD/DA. Targeted to musicians. Mac only. Level meters and big old knob on top. Build like a brick. Perfect fit in a mac environment from build and looks.

Connections: XLR mic input, 1/4″ instrument input, 1/4″ monitor out, 1/4″ headphone jack. The 1/4″ monitor is running straight into my NHTs. First, I set the levels from a test signal to 94db (84db with -10db test signal) on both the duet and the Fubar. Since the NHT have both 1/4″ and RCA in, I was able to leave both DAC hooked up, and switch in the Sound control panel back and forth.

Aural: I A/B’d this with the Fubar for about 6 hours of listning. Music included:

• Joshua Judges Ruth by Lyle Lovett
• Speakerboxxx / The Love Below by Outkast
• Don’t Mess With The Dragon by Ozomatli
• O by Damien Rice

plus a smattering of Paul Simon, Imogen Heap, AC/DC, and Vampire Weekend.

Compared with the step from the PVC to the Fubar, the difference between the Fubar and the Duet is relatively small. The first thing I noticed is an unveiling (sorry Tara, not quite an unleashing) of the music. A layer of gauze has been removed: the soundstage is broader, the layers of the music clearer, the tone more balanced. There’s a sense of space that emerges in the Duet that is totally missing from the Fubar. Interestingly, the Duet is less sibilant than the Fubar. I can’t tell which is more “accurate”, but I am preferring the Duet.

Unlike the PVC/Fubar comparison, which it instantly recognizable as better, the Duet requires more careful listening to appreciate. Further, I’m very aware of the price bias I have. My wife and I setup a little ABX test, and we both could actually tell the difference. In her words, “the duet sounds clearer”, which is just about the perfect description.

Other: Apogee has done a great job integrating this into the Mac. The volume control is unified – changing the system volume with the keyboard is the same as turning the wheel. Turning the wheel displays the volume on screen. It feels like a part of the normal flow.

The Duet is actually designed for input – instruments, mics, etc. I am NOT the target audience here. I’m hoping to use it for some podcasting work moving forward as well, but frankly that’s just icing on the cake.

Purchase: Sweetwater. $495 delivered.

What am I keeping?

The Apogee Duet. It sounds better. It’s integrated. It doesn’t skip every now and then. It has input, which I can at least pretend I’ll be using at some point. Plus, it looks damn good on the desk, and doesn’t have those insanely bright LEDs. The Fubar is sitting in full on sun right now, and the blue LED is STILL too bright.

For those headphones users – I compared the Fubar and Duet with my Sennheiser 580 for an hour or so as well. I couldn’t balance the levels very easily and thus can’t really tell to accuratly. I’d say the Duet sound better, same comments as above. Perhaps better bass and cleaner power delivery.

There is something about seeing a map of my photos that floats my boat. If it floats yours too, and you want to know how I do it, you’re in luck!

1. you gotta grab that GPS data. I need a small device, reasonably durable, good battery life, and Mac compatible. Wintec WBT-201 fits that to a tee. You can see an earlier post on my one aborted attempt to look at a different device. The WBT-201 is so simple, this step is done. Turn it on. That’s it.
2. Take pictures. Keep in mind that you will be syncing the GPS and photos based on time. Make sure to set your camera clock accuratly. Instead of messing with timezones, I’ve taken to just setting the camera to GMT. When I don’t, for some reason I can NEVER get the GPS data and photos to line up.
3. Import and tag your photos.
   1. First use HoudahGPS to get the data off the WBT-201. Free, works over bluetooth perfectly.
   2. Merge the photos and GPS. I use ImageIngester, which also takes care of getting the files off the memory card. (If you import with some other tool, you can also use the excellent HoudahGeo.) In ImageIngester, go to tools->GPS, “read GPS data”, set timezone (London UTC 0 for me), check “enable GPS tagging”, and select close. The import, and it will merge in to any file – CR2 in my case
4. Upload to a site that supports geotagging, such as flickr or smugmug.

That’s it.  The trick, of course, is to remeber to BRING the damn GPS device, and TURN IT ON.  I’m not so good at that.

Back from a week in Maui. Minimal email, some reading, some being a bum, and some photography.

Saw whales plus waterfalls and occasional fauna.

The whale shots were pure luck. We took a tour with Pacific Whale Foundation. It was OK, saw some whales in the distance, got lucky and saw dolphins swimming with some whales (bad photos), but overall it was a bit disappointing. Until the LAST 5 min. I was just sitting there, gazing out when this guy above does his thing right in front of me, maybe 300 yards away. So lucky. Still could have used more lens. ;)

As of 12:30PM today, I’m on to my 3rd iPhone.

Phone 1 died when I dropped it.   Apple was awesome, they replaced it no questions asked.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and all of a sudden the bottom dock area of the phone stopped responding.  I could unlock the phone since the slider is a little bit higher, but I couldn’t actually get to any dock items.  This makes using the phone a bit… difficult.  Actually, impossible.  I figured out that double-tapping the home button to get to favorite would let me dial those people.  My sister was smart enough to point out that I could then add anyone I wanted to the favorites list and call them.

No SMS, no email, no maps searching, since all those require you hitting the nice button in the lower right.

Made an appointment at the apple store, went in, and walked out 15 min later with yet another new phone.   Great service, all is working well.  For now.  Let’s hope that phone #3 lasts for a longer while.