"Tune it in 96/365" cc by-nc flickr user Crashmaster007

Although I love to try the latest software and gadget, I’ve most recently been spending more effort tuning my tools.

When time is family time it seems like a greater benefit to optimize where I can instead of always seeking the next great thing!

It’s also a lot more work than just playing with the shiny.

I find Google Gmail the best for my own workflow, but it is ripe with complexity and user experience issues.

Well over an five hour ago I emptied from trash a huge amount of email. Since then I couldn’t log back in till just now:

Text copy:

Temporary Error (500)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

Try Again Sign Out

This happens to a lesser extend every time I delete a large number of emails. I understand Google doesn’t like deleting things — they want to to organize the world’s information — but every time it leaves me upset.

Space and search are Gmail’s killerest feature, so it shouldn’t be unexpected that people would use it as a temporary data store of huge amounts of information.. Here I am trying to make excuses for them. It’s unacceptable that any action can take your email down for hours.

I recently tried Thunderbird 3– I really want to love it — but felt like I was in configuration hell. It would have taken days to get it as usable as Gmail already is for me.

A lot of colleagues and friends get a lot of milage from Apple Mail, but Mark Pilgrim’s “Juggling Oranges” rings in my ears. The articles describes Mark walking away from Mac for an completely open source stack, “Mail.app 2.0 helpfully auto-converted all my wonderful mbox files into Apple’s shitty undocumented format. ”

Why is individual emails still the focus on email? Instead of bigger picture collaboration with people?

Anyone dreaming of the fabled open source Mac mail client Letters.app? Synovel Spicebird looks intriguing.

"Sync Alert" Adding 1 Contact with iPhone OS 3.0 with Mac iTunes 8.2.1 (6)

Makes me laugh and cry a little.

This alert is likely meant to warn that a whole lot of data is being added, modified or deleted as part of a sync. It’s an “oh crap, likely either you are doing some wrong or the software is”.

I’m intrigued that UI Expert Aza Raskin (Humanized & Mozilla Lab) finds this alert the “The first good use of a warning I’ve seen!”

I’m not confident that it is generally helpful. Reading online, it does seem that Mac Sync has been quite buggy historically, so this would likely have been very helpful, but does make me nervous that this alert is a bandaid instead of the needed medicine. I would be interested to find out the use cases, and the scenarios where this has been needed.

Synchronization of data between two (or more) sources is a really hard problem. Well the hard problem is mostly related to conflicts when something is changed in two or more places. Daniel Jalkut once wrote, ‘Every developer faces the decision: “Do I want to be known as the jerk who won’t implement sync, or the jerk who can’t.”‘

I’m not actually syncing, because I don’t use Notes on the Mac (does it exist?). It’s really just doing a backup.

In this case, that is the “Sync Alert” of syncing an iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0 with my Mac over ethernet to iTunes 8.2.1 (6). I’m syncing 1 note.

Assuming that this behavior is generally useful, that I’m receiving a warning when 1 note is being added brings up the most obvious issue. There should be a minimum threshold before this exception behavior is triggered. It shouldn’t be 5% of nothing.

When you’re just starting to sync with your Mac, this could be a fairly high frequency alert. It depends on how quickly you add items; how quickly you get to more than 20 items in a category. You’ll also see this alert again when you start using a new feature (new type of item). This leads to the 2nd issue, the alert and warning language — I’m not seeing any yellow, but I’m sure feeling it. Because it is potentially high frequency, it should be presented and worded as a friendly confirmation.

The 3rd issue isn’t obvious from this screen shot. Another clue that it should be a confirmation is that sync does not continue until you have cleared this alert. This is actually problematic, because the alert is non-modal, meaning you can hide it or bury it under other windows. The worst part is iTunes with it’s animated progress bar makes it look like the sync is still progressing. This alert should at least stay on top of iTunes.

The 4th is I don’t think add, modify, and delete are equal. Adding an item is an easier event to undo then a modify or delete. I can just delete it. If something is modified or deleted, it may be hard to recover the lost information. The different events should have different weights. Adding an item should only trigger an alert if a lot are added.

How many is a lot? That brings me to the 5th and final issue that readily comes to mind. It likely shouldn’t be a percentage at all. How long would it take before 5% is a really big number? Probably not long at all. If I have 1000 business contacts, a sync would have to delete 50 of them for me to be notified. Again assuming this alert offers some protection, by using a percentage, even as low as 5% percentage you are penalizing your most passionate customers. Possibly, it could be a percentage that also factors in things like amount of time since last sync or what operations resulted in the changes, but that would likely get complex quick and I suspect the developers would more quickly find the sweet spot by using a constant number (possibly variable on a curve. I hesitate to recommend user defined variable).

Later in that discussion by Aza linked above, he does add “It could be laid out better, but I like the idea of “uhhhhh, that’s dangerous”. Of course, undo is always better ”. I don’t think undo would be the silver bullet. I definitely think there is value in confirming changing a large amount of data particularly when the change is destructive, and the need to undo might be overlooked. I just don’t think Apple has polished this implementation.

I feel a bit like I’m playing dirty writing this article now when the next version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard is only a couple of months away. Still, I was hoping this would be resolved with the new iTunes for iPhone OS 3.0. I’m still hopeful that Snow Leopard with it’s attention to polish might surprise me here.

The GNU Project is most famous for it’s versions of UNIX utilities and the GPL family of licenses. But whatever you think of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation‘s hard-line approaches and politics, everyone has benefited from their work. Every computerized device, if it doesn’t run GNU software, likely contains software that was influenced by the GNU project or software released under a GPL license. And the GNU Project’s influence extends beyond software to most areas where technology meets freedom.

Thanks again GNU!

Sorting back through my tabs, I discovered how I ended up on 2luo.com . I had done a Google search for “youtube floyd wall remix”

Visiting the result which I have underlined in red, I’m now at a site that looks like YouTube and behaves like YouTube in every way, except the URL isn’t YouTube. I have reason to worry about anything I submit to the site.

I can hope that it is a harmless reverse proxy, but the whois for that site isn’t reassuring:

kdkkdk
lg ggg (lgvcd@hotmail.com)
+1.90383920
Fax: +1.90383900
kdkk
dkdkkkk, DJ 47738
US

For some reason, I don’t think that they are really in the USA.

I checked at PhishTank and this site hasn’t been reported yet.

I don’t really know how to further investigate, so I will take my fresh minted passwords and get back to other things.

How did it come about that I made this mistake?

I was absent minded and admit to relying on Google and Firefox’s anti-phishing protection. YouTube is a Google property, so there is some irony.

How much was human error?

Recently, human error has been reconceptualized as resiliency to emphasize the positive aspects that humans bring to the operation of technical systems (see Hollnagel, Woods and Leveson, 2006)

Within the broad domain of industrial safety, the term resilience has come into use to emphasise that safety must be proactive as well as reactive.

So, I take ownership for the mistake, and for quickly minimizing the damage of the mistake. My error was distraction. Like everyone else, I’m not particularly good at staying vigilant. That is why as well as reasonable personal responsibility and consideration of habits, we need better tools.

In the German system, any user will still be allowed to make edits to any article. Those edits won’t show up in the live version of the site, though, until a registered user with a certain level of time and experience approves the changes.

Can the Germans fix Wikipedia?