I’m not normally one to recommend music, since it’s highly subjective. But a couple weeks ago I was driving home and heard a great song.

First, a disclaimer: I’m going to link to a few music videos. Where possible, I’m using the official music videos. Many feature scantily-clad woman and/or lots of profanity, so if you’re sitting at work or have lots of small children crowded around your computer, it might not be a good idea to click these links. I don’t find much of a reason to watch music videos, but Youtube is a great place to listen to music. Just leave it up in a tab while you work.

Thanks to Shazam, I was able to identify the song as Sexy Chick by David Guetta. I’d never heard of him, but it turns out that he’s apparently a chart-topping French DJ, doing House and Electro. I’m not really sure why his music hasn’t caught on here: Sexy Chick was played once on some late-night radio program that mixes in some rarely-played songs in lieu of the normal Top 40 routine, and it was one of the few songs I’ve ever fallen in love with immediately. Europeans seem to eat up everything he does, while no one will play any of his music here. Sexy Chick even features Akon, whose songs do get featured on every Top 40 station out here. Some of his songs are a little too repetitive for my liking, but I’m positive I’ve heard his 2005 hit, , before. It’s a great song, too.

The only other time I can recall blogging about music was The Black Eyed Peas, who made history by simultaneously occupying the #1 and #2 spot on the Billboard Top 100, not for a day or week, but for 26 consecutive weeks. The two songs were I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow. (The latter, by the way, is practically a different song when you play a high-quality—e.g., not Youtube—version through a set of decent speakers.)

It turns out that the Black Eyed Peas asked Guetta to produce I Gotta Feeling. And as for Boom Boom Pow? He didn’t produce that, but he did produce Boom Boom Wow and Boom Boom Guetta, two of the more popular remixes of the song.

Incidentally, Boom Boom Pow has an unreasonably high number of remixes for a recent song. There’s , and another Kid Cudi. There’s that’s supposed to be to the beat of Pitbull’s Calle Ocho, though I’m not sure they succeeded in that. There’s even , a parody.

Remember when Amazon realized that 1984 was being distributed on the Kindle by someone who didn’t have distribution rights, so they deleted it from everyone’s Kindles? They were sued, but reached an agreement in which they set a new policy to not delete books. Except that that’s not true. The policy, as I quote from the linked article, is to not delete books

“unless (a) the user consents; (b) the user seeks a refund or an electronic payment fails to clear; (c) a court orders the deletion; or (d) deletion is necessary to protect against malware.”

(a) doesn’t count. If the user consents to deletion, it’s not really anything creepy. (Well, assuming it is voluntary consent free from coercion.) (b) kind of makes sense, too: if you seek a refund, the book will be deleted.

But the list doesn’t stop there. If a court orders Amazon to delete books, they can. Granted, this is probably standard legalese. Most contracts seem to include that exception for everything, whether it makes any sense or not. But this doesn’t sit well with me. (d) raises questions, too. Malware? How can an electronic book distribute malware? If it’s possible, Amazon is doing something wrong. Sure, I can see how user-downloaded files could be crafted to exploit vulnerabilities. But these are books distributed by, and presumably formatted for the Kindle by, Amazon. It should be completely impossible.  Also, they seem to clarify that all of this only applies to US users.

I would contend that this isn’t actually progress. Amazon still owns the e-book that you just bought and grants you a license to use it. They can apparently revoke that license at any time, or modify the terms at any time. In my mind, if you pay a one-time fee to obtain something, you become the owner. There is no licensing or terms. You bought it. Copyright law still applies, of course, and is plenty restrictive.

But Amazon, here’s the thing. I’m not going to pay for an e-book if I can’t own it. Granted, your Kindle is too expensive for me anyway, and I want the ability to load my own PDFs. But I couldn’t think of a better way to undermine credibility in the Kindle. While people struggle with whether an electronic book is as good as a paper book, you seem intent on proving that electronic books are, well, Orwellian. Besides the fact that users merely purchase a revocable license to use your books, with an attached contract that you can change at any time, you’ve demonstrated that the e-book reader with wireless is, in fact, as creepy as the tinfoil hat brigade said it was.

And besides, who am I supposed to buy an e-book reader from now? Certainly not Sony.

A long-standing pet peeve of mine has been the fact that industries go years and years with “innovating” all the wrong features. Until recently, for example, digital camera companies kept adding more and more megapixels. My camera has too many megapixels. I turned it down because the files were way too big. It wasn’t until about a year ago that manufacturers caught on that what we really wanted was better ISO sensitivity so we could take pictures in lower light.

Radios and police scanners in particular are an area where I’m even more aggravated at resources being put in the wrong areas. RadioShack just filed for FCC certification for the Pro106, a police scanner with controls looking straight out of an iPod. I’ll refrain from making snide comments about its appearance. But what I will say is that there are a lot of features I’d like on a police scanner. Copying a first-gen iPod is not one of them.

Before I bought a $500 police scanner, I owned a Motorola ASTRO Saber. More than a decade ago, it was a state-of-the-art digital radio, one of the first Project 25 radios produced. Public safety agencies timidly tested the digital waters, spending four figures on each of the radios. I bought mine by way of eBay about a decade after it was produced, and it was a radio that had clearly seen some use in its day. It had a firmware revision that was probably five or more years old, too. When I got the Pro96 (the $500 RadioShack digital police scanner), I realized something surprising. It cost more than the “real” Motorola radio, though the Motorola was a decade old with ancient firmware… Yet the Motorola sounded much better. The State Police run mobile data terminals on the same frequency. The Pro96 treats it as analog audio and blares it through the speaker. The Motorola didn’t do anything since it wasn’t a valid digital signal. The Pro96 periodically stops decoding digital and either makes horrible bleeps as it goes in and out, or it switches to analog, making sounds akin to a really loud modem. Remember, the Pro96 has decoding software that should be at least 5 years newer.

I took meticulous care of the Pro96. There’s nary a scratch on it. You’d be hard-pressed to find dust. And yet it has problems. The audio cuts out, or goes so quiet that you can’t hear it. I ranted a lot about this in my Pro96 review, which essentially concluded that, given all the problems it has, it’s really not worth the money. The ASTRO Saber had scratches and scrapes, and had no issues at all. Volume was clear, and could go very loud. Or, unlike the Pro96 before volume problems, you could turn it down really low, too. The Motorola also had big knobs, because it was designed with people using it in mind. The Pro96 has tiny knobs that are slippery. Not unusable, mind you, but hardly the epitome of usability. The knobs on most any Saber-line radio are shaped in such a way that you can tell by touch exactly how far they’re turned, too. While driving, I have to use my fingernail to try to find the small notch on the Pro96 knobs.

The Motorola has some features that, after existing for at least a decade, haven’t ever been imitated. Nuisance delete is one that I really wish people would scan. On most any scanner, you can hit “Lockout” and exclude a channel from being scanned. It won’t ever be scanned again until you manually find the channel and remove the Lockout. Most any modern radio has the capacity for thousands of channels, though, so odds are good that you’ll forget all about it and just never hear it again. But nuisance delete is a sort of “soft” lockout. It persists for your scanning “session,” but when you turn the radio off and back on, nuisance deletes are lost. This subtle distinction is huge, because most of the time I want to stop scanning a particular frequency, I’m just annoyed that static is coming through the speaker, or that an asinine conversation is taking place. Scanner makers, you’ve had more than a decade to copy a very basic feature that couldn’t possibly be patented.

Like a lot of geeks, I’m one of those people who can often intuitively understand how to use an electronic device. I don’t read manuals. I just tend to think like the people who design electronics, apparently. But I’ve had to read the manuals for most any radio I’ve ever owned, just to have the foggiest clue how to work it. Rather than menus or a sane arrangement of buttons, you have buttons that might as well be haphazardly placed, and you have to know what buttons to press to make things work. To deal with limited space, there’s often a “Function” key that, when pressed, changes the function of all the buttons. I’ve learned how to use the radios I’ve bought in short order, but if I start using one, moving back to another is hard, because I have to re-learn how it works. By contrast, I can pick up any cell phone ever made and easy use the menus to find anything in short order. Why don’t radio companies use menus, rather than expecting us to learn arcane key combinations?

Why are there almost no radios that can record audio? The past few phones I’ve owned have had this capability. Why not put an SD slot on a radio and let me record audio? Why don’t scanners ever show me the signal strength of what I’m listening to, a feature most any ham radio has? Why don’t radios show me the battery level, a feature most any cell phone has? Why are scanners bigger and bulkier than radios that cover the same range but can also transmit 5 Watts on multiple bands? Why don’t they make scanners that can receive SSB?

These are just pet peeves that I’ve encountered, not the product of a team of people sitting down and brainstorming ideas. So why is my list so far ahead of companies that should have a team of people sitting down and brainstorming these ideas?

Canon 24mm Tilt-Shift lens, 1-week rental: $40 Credit left on ticket for T from a couple weeks ago: ($6) Prudential Observatory, 50th floor, admission price: $12* Unused AmEx gift card: ($100) Parking in work garage with shuttle to downtown Boston: Free Discovering more than a week of vacation time that must be used before January 1: Priceless.

• Excludes student discount. My student ID, it turns out, does not expire. But probably worth $2 to not get thrown out.

The Canon 5D Mark II, and now the Canon 7D, are digital SLRs that have HD video capabilities. Video on a camera is nothing new, and “prosumer” point-and-shoot cameras have been able to do HD for a while now. SLRs are different, for two reasons:

• Much like Live View (the ability to preview the image on the LCD), it shouldn’t be possible. An SLR has a mirror that sits in front of the sensor (formerly film, now CCD/CMOS), which redirects the image up into the viewfinder. When you squeeze the shutter, the mirror is lifted, and dropped as soon as the shutter closes. This is why you have to hold SLRs up to your eye while composing a shot. (And why you can’t see through the viewfinder while the shutter is open.)
• SLRs have nice lenses allowing things like low-light performance and shallow depths of field.

Between HD and the high-quality optics, you can end up with some amazing films that look straight out of Hollywood. (Except that it’s first-generation quality and often has onboard sound… But I digress.)

I passed over the Rebel T1i as an unneeded frivolity, even though it greatly expands my ISO range (improving low-light performance) and adds full HD video. I just stumbled across a neat post by Dan Chung, who got his hands on one of the first production Canon 7D cameras, and produced Another Night in Beijing, the first of the two videos on that page.

Now I’m really regretting not having purchased the T1i when it was $800 with a $300 printer included…

Uncrate recently posted about Parking Tickets, an ingenious* little way for those of us who are passive-aggressive to inform people of their need to practice their parking skills a bit more.

• Why does adding “in” in front of “genius” require an “o” be inserted in the middle? For that matter, why does adding “in” in front of “genius” make “genius” an adjective, not negate it?

I’ve probably posted too often here about people invoking their First Amendment rights in situations that make no sense. The newspaper doesn’t run their crazy letter to the editor, or a private website takes down their threats to kill the President (!!!) and it’s “violating their First Amendment rights.” It drives me out of my mind that these people have clearly never actually taken the time to read the First Amendment, which pretty obviously does not pertain to newspapers exercising editorial standards or websites not wanting to be seen as promoting domestic terrorism. (And, actually, its restriction on the abridging of free speech doesn’t apply to newspapers or websites at all, unless they’re government-run.)

But I’ve found another pet peeve. Someone starts a post on a site somewhere expressing a controversial opinion or complaining about something. Others chime in and disagree with them. And suddenly, the original poster gets all flustered. They were expressing their opinion, and think it’s really out of line for people to disagree with them.

I never understood their reasoning, though. Aren’t the people replying to your opinion also expressing their opinion? Why is yours okay and theirs is out of line?

I hope you agree with me about this. If you don’t, I don’t want to hear it, because I’m expressing my opinion.

I just discovered sIFR, which has apparently been around for a long time. It’s really nifty, actually. A lot of the time you want to display headers on your site formatted in some fancy font, but chances are good that most of your  visitors won’t have it. The general solution is to use an image or Flash app to display it, but this causes usability and SEO problems, since the visually-impaired and bots can’t read the text, since it’s not text at all.

sIFR solves this by having your page be normally-formatted, but using JavaScript to overlay a Flash app with the desired font where the browser supports this. It seems like it was designed by people like me who hate Flash apps and images of text all over the page, because it’s incredibly slick and you wouldn’t know it was happening unless you happen to notice a fancy font being displayed inline on a page.

Often, it seems that quality and quantity are inversely proportional. You can spend all day doing lots of really quick things poorly, or you can spend all day doing one thing really well. Most people would tell you that quality is really important, so you should spend all day doing one thing really well.

Sometimes, I’m sure those people are right. If you’re assembling an airplane, please take as much time as you need. But increasingly, I find the focus on perfection to be an obstacle. Guy Kawasaki is famous for his, “Don’t worry, be crappy” quote. He doesn’t mean that you should show up to work late, give a half-hearted attempt at doing your job, take a 2-hour lunch, and then leave early. The point is just that you should focus on getting something done, and worry about perfecting things when it becomes necessary.

There are really a lot of reasons to focus on being “good enough”:

• Why try to “finish” something before getting user feedback or full testing? From the PlentyOfFish Architecture article on HighScalability.com comes this quote: “The development process is: come up with an idea. Throw it up within 24 hours. It kind of half works. See what user response is by looking at what they actually do on the site.” Maybe they like it, and then you can perfect it. Maybe they find bugs you would have missed anyway, and you can fix them. Or maybe they hate it, so you take the feature down, not having wasted too much time perfecting it in the first place.
• Why waste time fine-tuning something that doesn’t need it? As a mundane example, I added an admin tool to something at work, and tried to figure out how to gracefully handle the fact that it would do an awful full table scan against one of our biggest tables because it depended on running a SELECT on a field with no index. The solution? Do nothing. The tool is used infrequently enough that we just wait a few seconds for the results. It’s not user-facing, and it doesn’t impact the site performance, just the particular page. Adding the proper indexes would have taken considerably more time and yet manifested itself by shaving half a second off the load time of a tool used a couple times a week. Why bother?
• Don’t spend too much time on the small things. Just as a pastry chef wouldn’t spend all day keeping the front of his store immaculate, it’s not really my place to pour copious resources into perfecting an unimportant feature. Build something that works. If it’s an important task, do it very well. If not, it’s taking time away from you doing a better job on something more important. (Don’t mistake this with doing a bad job. The pastry chef with a small shop wouldn’t allow the front of the shop to become a disgusting mess that scared customers away, but he shouldn’t spent twenty hours a week polishing the floor and shampooing the carpets, either. Do a good enough job on the non-priorities, and focus on doing a really good job on what you do best.)
• You might not even know what you’re building. I’m doing some rapid prototyping of some new features, and the specifications change considerably all the time. This is sort of an extension of the first point, really. As we flesh out the prototype a bit more, they firm up some features a little bit more. Just as you wouldn’t work on hanging the blinds while you were still putting up the frame of a house, it’s not a good use of your time to work on tweaking the performance of features that are still being developed. Again, don’t do a bad job and build something that can never scale without being reimplemented from scratch, because you’re shooting yourself in the foot.  But don’t do a perfect job building the most efficient interface ever on something that has an excellent change of being scrapped.

Fairly tangential to this, and yet the same general concept, is the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule). What I find fascinating is the areas where it’s considerably more distorted. Spam is a good example, really, of something that’s more like the 99.9/0.1 rule. Both here and at work, spam has been a massive problem. But if you focus on solving the 99.9% of spammers, it turns out to be extremely simple. The ability to block registrations from an IP or range, the ability to quarantine posts containing certain keywords, and a throttle on what new users can do has practically eliminated spam as a concern. The people that would sign up and start spam-bombing every user on the site still try every now and again, but find that it doesn’t work.

We spent a while discussing some of these things. “If we block their IP, won’t they just use a proxy server? Should the limit be x or y messages, and over what time period?” At the end of the day, though, an unreasonably huge amount of spam can be stopped by a few really basic rules. In theory, spammers can just get a new IP, or can exploit a few things we identified as possible vulnerabilities. In reality, a handful of very basic features made spam volume drop orders of magnitude. Rather than spending all day working through a growing backlog of spammers, we click a few buttons every now and then to delete the few that bother. It’s somewhat like greylisting with SMTP: in theory, spammers have had years to work around it, and it should take 30 minutes of coding to make their spam software pass greylisting. In reality, something like 95% of people who get graylisted (at an inbox that gets 100% spam) either don’t try again at all, or they try again with totally different information and get rejected again.

I feel compelled to repeat that none of this is saying you should do anything but your best. You should always do your best, but often, doing your best means that you do a good enough (still acceptable) job on the things that you need to do that distract you from what actually creates value. If you slack off or cut too many corners, you’re not doing good enough. Thus doing good enough is necessarily good enough.

This is a feature I’ve wanted for a long time. No more searching a  500GB NFS mount of images while searching through source code.