Firefox... you're killing me!

I'm trying to get caught up on my grading before the students return from the Thanksgiving break. Unfortunately, Firefox is driving me nuts, so pardon the short rant.

My web development class is mainly composed of freshmen and sophomores, many of whom have only been writing programs for a semester or two, and occasionally they will write CGI programs with infinite loops. Accessing these CGI programs causes an endless amount of data to be sent to the browser. Using Firefox to access these URLs often causes the entire browser to lock-up as shown below.



So I'm stuck using the Task Manager to kill Firefox and then restart the browser, just because one tab has gone haywire. This adds several minutes to my grading time each time I have to restart. Internet Explorer doesn't do much better; only Chrome lets me kill the offending tab without restarting the entire browser.

I suppose this wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't such an obvious pitfall that a seasoned browser can't accommodate.

Listen up GUI students... this is a prime example of when threading is necessary so your UI thread can continue to respond to the user!

Maps an obsolete technology?

Silicon Alley Insider recently listed 21 Things that Became Obsolete this Decade. (Guys, the decade isn't over yet.) Among them were PDAs, paid-for email accounts, VCRs, and a number of other items.

While I generally agree with these guys, I was very surprised they listed maps as an obsolete technology. They seem to think everyone can now navigate with a GPS or smartphone. While these technologies are certainly more helpful at times than a paper-based map, they aren't without their faults.

Believe it or not, sometimes GPS will give you bad directions. Just ask Michael Scott.

And it's not always available. On a recent trip to Louisiana and Dallas, I used the GPS on my Archos 5 Internet Tablet for the first time. There was a period of 3 hours where the GPS could not pick up a signal. And we were driving major highways the whole time! Without a map, I would have been forced to pull off the road and ask directions. Gasp!

Google Maps isn't perfect either. Google Maps suggested I take a road that didn't even exist as a shortcut to my parents' new home a few months ago. And before that, Google Maps told me my friend's house was 5 miles north of Fayetteville when it was actually south of the city.

And have you ever tried to get a good overview of the road system for a large city using a small screen? Impossible. A paper map that is 10 times larger than your tiny screen makes it significantly easier to figure out the highway system.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should throw away or newer navigation technologies, I'm just suggesting that the good 'ol map is still quite handy.

Improving movie recommendations

If you haven't yet checked out the new CACM blogs, you need to soon. One of the posts that caught my attention was Greg Linden's What is a Good Recommendation Algorithm? Linden wonders if Netflix's one million dollar reward for a better recommendation engine is a little short-sighted. The goal for their recommendation system is to only show people how much they might like a movie. But Linden points out:

However, this might not be what we want. Even in a feature that shows people how much they might like any particular movie, people care a lot more about misses at the extremes. For example, it could be much worse to say that you will be lukewarm (a prediction of 3 1/2 stars) on a movie you love (an actual of 4 1/2 stars) than to say you will be slightly less lukewarm (a prediction of 2 1/2 stars) on a movie you are lukewarm about (an actual of 3 1/2 stars). Moreover, what we often want is not to make a prediction for any movie, but find the best movies. (emphasis mine)

Shifting gears a little, I want talk about a couple of small fixes to an existing movie recommendation system that could make customers a lot happier.

I haven't used Netflix, but I've been using Blockbuster Online for over a year, and I've played with their recommendation feature a lot. I would assume their recommender is on par with Netflix (hint: someone needs to compare the two).

One feature Blockbuster offers allows you to select "Do not show me this movie again", a little icon on the side of each movie's ratings. I've clicked this icon a lot (is it just me, or there's a lot of garbage out there?), hoping Blockbuster would stop recommending these specific movies to me and others like them. However, the screen shot below is what I saw this morning when I logged into my account:


Note how I was recommended "Zack" and "Quarantine" despite having clicked on the no-show icon weeks ago. They also recommend , a movie I've already rated (and therefore obviously seen). But since I didn't rent "Changeling" directly from Blockbuster, they still offer it as a movie I "might have missed."

These movies do not appear in my formal set of recommendations (the screen that results from clicking on the Recommendations link), so my guess is Blockbuster is using a different set of algorithms to populate their might-have-missed list from their formal recommendation list. However, I suggest that the might-have-missed list should take advantage of previous ratings to improve overall customer satisfaction.

This should be common sense: Do not suggest a movie that a user has already marked "do not show me this movie again". Especially not on the first page the user sees when logging into your site.

One more point. Below is a screen shot from the first page of recommendations made by Blockbuster. None of the movies below appeal to me, but I can see how they might have been recommended based on my viewing history and ratings.



But one movie really stands out as a bad recommendation: "Swing" (bottom-left). Note how it has only received two stars on average, equivalent to "I didn't like this movie".

Why would Blockbuster think I would like this movie when most people don't?

I know my taste in movies is probably not typical, but I don't think I've ever given a movie with an average rating of two stars a rating better than two stars. Even if Blockbuster thinks this movie matches my tastes, it would make much more sense to put movies with higher overall ratings on the first result page and bump lower rated movies back a few pages.

My experience in general has been that Blockbuster's recommendations don't really work. I've found one recommended movie in the past year that I thought looked interesting. Then again, I don't often try iffy movie recommendations because I'm not ready to gamble on two hours of a nice evening.

I'm looking forward to a time when the recommendation system really works well, but until then, I'll be consulting with my friends and family who have a much better idea of what I really like to see.

Why I (sometimes) hate cloud computing

Cloud computing offers a lot of positive benefits, namely access to data from anywhere.

But today I hate it.

I realize "hate" is a strong word, and I rarely break it out, but today I must.

I decided to write my first Knol yesterday. Google's Knol system uses an online editor and saves your data in their systems (i.e., in the cloud). After working on my article for some time, the system started having problems saving, but a warning message at the top of the screen warned that Knol would be down for about an hour. So after waiting the hour, I returned to the system and was able to make a lot of progress.

Or so I thought.

This morning when I returned to my article, only the first two paragraphs remained. I accessed the revision system to see if there were previous versions that contained my complete article, but every revision was the same: just two paragraphs. This really jolted me because I had repeatedly saved every so often just so something like this wouldn't happen. I never received a single error message after pressing Save.

Thankfully I had been smart and saved a copy of my article in Microsoft Word... my previous experience with cloud computing told me such a move would be smart. So I didn't loose my cool too much... I just copy and pasted my stuff back into Knol and then worked on some formatting issues.

About 10 minutes after I started editing, I got this error message warning me that my session had expired:


The message suggested I refresh the page. Knowing what I know, this is usually not a good way to repair an "expired" session. But there was nothing else I could do. Sure enough, after refreshing the page, my content was all gone. Back to two paragraphs.

Now I'm hot.

After taking a little walk to calm down, I returned to my office and decided to persist. I think I'm almost done with my Knol now, but I'm still feeling raw. If this is what cloud computing is going to be like, I'd rather stay on the ground. I've never had Word lose my document because my session expired.

Now you may be thinking this is an isolated issue with Knol, but I have had similar losses with Blogger (losing entire blog posts when their system was temporarily inaccessible) and Google Calendar (losing a number of appointments I had typed in but were apparently never saved). Maybe this is more a Google problem than a cloud problem, but if Google can't seem to get it right, who will?

How *not* to implement online security

I have an online account with a bank which shall remain nameless. Let's just call them Amgirl Direct. They use a really "sophisticated" security system which they have apparently leased from a third party named Information Technology, Inc.

Here's how I login to my account:

1. First I must enter my 9 digit number account which I have not been able to memorize because I use it once a month. So I have to search for it in my email each time.
   
   
2. I then am told I need to answer a security question because the bank doesn't recognize my IP address. (Of course it doesn't... my home computer is assigned a new one periodically by my ISP.) The security question is always the same:
   
   What is your high school mascot?
   
   I went to two high schools, and I have no idea which mascot I entered originally. But it doesn't matter... if I type in the mascot of either high school, the answer is always wrong.
   
   
3. After I answer the first security question wrong twice, I'm finally asked for my mother's middle name. Thankfully it recognizes my answer to this question.
   


4. Next I'm asked to enter my password. But supposedly my password has something to do with an "authentication image" which is always a white vase. I have no idea why. There's no link to an explanation. It's always the same image, and I have only one password, so I'm left wondering what-in-the-world this vase has to do with anything.
   
   (Note Information Technology, Inc.'s proud declaration of ownership for their system.)


5. After entering my password, I'm finally logged in (usually). But be careful! If you ever click the back or forward browser button at any time, you are presented with this most unhelpful error message:
   
   

   Error
   
   A Security Error Has Occurred. Your Online Session Has Expired.
   Possible Reasons Include Double Clicking A Link Or Pressing The Browser's Back Forward Or Refresh Buttons.
   Return To The Login Page To Continue Your Session.

   
   
   They "expire" my session for using navigation buttons that most users are accustomed to using. And there is no link to a login page... you just have to re-type Amgirl Direct's original URL and proceed through the steps above once again.
   

I keep asking myself, is using an online bank with this lousy of a system really worth the 2.25% APY?

Feel the Nutch burn...

This week I spent all 3 hours of class time showing my Search Engine students how to install, run, and modify Nutch, an open-source search engine written in Java. Since Nutch is new to me as well, I spent several hours last week trying to get familiar enough to walk my students through the time-consuming, error-prone, and laborious process of getting Nutch to run on Windows and in Eclipse.

I have labeled my newbie experience the "Nutch burn." And boy does it.

I followed a couple of tutorials that were pretty helpful, but I ran into several problems that required me to scour the Web looking for solutions. After much trial and effort, I was able to overcome and make some modifications to Nutch in Eclipse. I also got my modifications to run from the command line.

The barrier to entry is so high and the learning curve so steep that it makes me wonder... there's got to be a better way. The goal is for my class to make a major contribution to Nutch. Maybe our contribution could be to make the initial install/edit process just a little easier.

Sometimes I hate Travelocity

Yesterday I was booking a flight from Little Rock to the Raleigh-Durham airport. I used Travelocity.com as I frequently do, found a great rate for $174 on Continental, and proceeded to provide all my detailed travel information (address, phone number, frequent flier number, etc.) and my payment info (credit card number, expiration date, etc.). I then went through four screens, meticulously picking out an available seat on each flight near the emergency exit.

After entering all this information and agreeing to their draconian cancellation terms, Travelocity finally asked me to click one final button which would charge the ticket to my credit card. After clicking it and waiting a few seconds, I got this message:

Sorry, but that ticket is no longer available.

I tried to remain calm as I started my search over and selected different Continental flights listed at the same price. I again went through the multiple screens as before, re-entered all my personal information, re-selected the seats I wanted (there were a ton of open seats), and clicked on the final purchase button. Again:

Sorry, but that ticket is no longer available.

At this point I nearly punched my computer. I yelled out something I'm sure most of the faculty heard from their offices. I'm usually not an angry kind of guy, but I was hot.

When I started my search over again, the same flights that had been denied me were still listed as valid selections!

In my anger, I swore I would not give Travelocity my business. I headed over to Expedia where I found the same flights for about the same price. When I selected them for purchase, I again was given an error message that the flights were not available. At least this time I was told before having spent 15 minutes entering all my info and selecting my seats. However, re-doing my search still brought up the same flights.

Hey guys: If you are going to frustrate your users by giving them the option of selecting flights that may or may not actually be available, at least have the decency of removing the unavailable flights from the user's search results once you know they are definitely unavailable!

Secondly, don't ask the user to duplicate their work. There was no reason for Travelocity to make me re-enter all the same personal information a second time, especially when I clicked on the checkbox that told them I wanted them to remember my info!

I realize there was probably some software glitch with Continental's pricing info since it affected both sites, but you should account for these types of errors. Don't waste your users' time. Suggestion to Travelocity and Expedia programmers: read GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson and take some good notes.

Eventually I purchased a more expensive ticket on Southwest Airlines from the SWA website. I'm still angry.

Taxing the poor

Congratulations, Arkansas, on becoming the 43rd state to adopt a tax on the poor, ignorant, and others who are looking to loose a few extra dollars when filling up at the pump. In the guise of funding scholarships and education, the Arkansas State Lottery Initiative has passed the vote, thanks in part to the efforts of Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

Although increasing the personal income tax a fraction of a percent would have funded scholarships and education by the same amount, I'm glad to see we are instead teaching our fellow Arkansans that wealth comes from luck, not hard work. And the ever important message: winning millions will make your life wonderful.

I can't wait to stand in line behind the mathematically impaired at the gas station or view the beautiful Lotto signs that will soon scatter across the landscape! Thanks, Bill!

(So when are we going to start funding the Lt. Gov.'s office with casino revenues?)

Amazon ghost reviews

So I did an Amazon search for an upcoming book I'm interested in called The Future of Reputation and I get this result:


I thought to myself, "wow, five people have already given this book 5 stars! This is must be a really good book." So I visit the book's page and order a copy of it for the Harding library. 

Then I decide to take a look at the reviews out of curiosity. I can't seem to find them on the book's main page, so I go back to the search result and click on the 5 star rating. Then I see this:

So, is this just a bug in Amazon's software, or do they routinely award yet-to-be-released books with five 5-star ratings from ghost reviewers?

"Move Over" law is being enforced in Arkansas

While driving through Pocahontas, Arkansas, on Hwy 64, Becky and I encountered a police officer on the side of the road giving someone a ticket. We were in the right lane close to the two cars, so I snugged the left side of the lane to give them plenty of room. I could have moved over a lane, but there wasn't any need since they had plenty of space.

A few minutes later the same police car was tailing us with his lights on. After being pulled over, we were told that we had vilolated the law because we did not move over a lane when driving past him. I couldn't believe it. This was a law?

Now you would think the officer would have checked his records and seen that I had never received a ticket in my life. "Hmm... this is a law abiding citizen... maybe I should just give him a warning since he's the kind of person who will follow the law now that he knows about it." Instead, he gave me a whopping ticket.

I could say more about the ridiculousness of getting ticketed for this offense, but instead I just want everyone to know: you must pull into the other lane whenever you pass a police car, ambulance, etc. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Macaroni and cheese considered harmful

Last night we fed Ethan some Gerber macaroni and cheese. Five minutes later he looked Rocky Balboa after a fight (I would post a photo, but Becky thought it was too gruesome). We rushed him to the ER where he got several doses of various meds. He got more and more hives as the evening progressed, but thankfully he looked back to normal in the morning.

I guess Ethan is allergic to something in it, but maybe we shouldn't have been feeding him that stuff in the first place. We bought it while in a nostalgic mood (it was one of Becky's favorite meals as a kid), but the stuff is totally nutritionally devoid. Why is Gerber even selling this junk?

Nokia 2610: The worst phone I've ever owned

When we moved from Virginia to Arkansas, we switched our cell phone service to AT&T. Of course our T-Mobile phones wouldn't work (what's up with that?), so we had to purchase new phones. Being the frugal couple people we are, we picked their least expensive phone, the Nokia 2610.

I find it hard to believe that this phone passed a thorough usability inspection (looks like I'm not alone). The arrow buttons are so narrow only a squirrel can press them, and the screen is totally unreadable when outside, even on a cloudy day. The default button shortcuts makes me think they just randomly chose from the set of options no one ever uses. Maybe it's the just the poor reception in this area, but the voice quality is pretty lousy as well.

The only positive thing is that it doesn't have stupid buttons on the side that accidentally get pressed when in my pocket, changing my ringer from vibrate to loud (thanks to Motorola for that exceptional design).

Sorry, but I'm just not in the best mood today. Maybe it's because I keep running into poorly designed technology that causes me to waste an exorbitant amount of time or just get angry. Here's just a few gripes:

• A few weeks ago I wasted 15 minutes trying to find the Print button in Office "let's-confuse-them-by-removing-the-menu" 2007. (At least I didn't have to figure out how to open the box.)
  
• Yesterday I rebooted my computer a dozen times because various software I installed said they "required" rebooting.
• Vista continues to ask me 10 times a day if I really meant to start a program or change a setting.
  
• iTunes won't play a purchased TV show on my brand-new computer without pausing every 2 seconds for 20-30 seconds at a time.
  
• I can't get my car to quit saying "Maintenance required" on the dash because it requires me to do the equivalent of saying the alphabet backwards while standing on my head underwater.
  
• And I keep hitting the panic button on my car door opener because some bozo thought they'd put the button right where by thumb needs to be when pressing the trunk button!

Argh...

Oh yeah, my dissertation is due 3 weeks from today, so I'm a little more uptight than usual.

Note to Acer

To the Acer Desktop Design Team:

Guess what happens when you put a power button that activates at the slightest touch on a tower which sits by the operator's knee? You get one very irritated user who feels like hurling your tower out the window.

Regards,

Frustrated in Norfolk

Spelling bees and other ways to waste your child's time

Warning: Rant ahead.

Last night I caught a few minutes of the National Spelling Bee contest on TV. Kid after kid tried to spell the most ridiculous words, stalling as they repeatedly asked for the definition, alternate pronunciations, etc. After the contest had ended, thirteen-year-old Evan O'Dorney, the contest winner, had this to say:

"My favorite things to do were math and music, and with the math I really like the way the numbers fit together, and with the music I like to let out ideas by composing notes—and the spelling is just a bunch of memorization."

This wise kid seems to understand the futility of spelling bees- it is nothing more than rote memorization of the long tail (see figure below). What I mean is, spelling bees don’t test your intelligence, only your ability to memorize words that no one, even the memorizer, will ever use in daily conversation or even in their writing in graduate school. (OK- a word or two may appear on your SAT.) Honoring a kid as the best speller in America is like honoring a kid for being able to memorize the most digits in pi.


It’s sad we English speakers have a language that uses so many words that aren’t phonetically spelled and words brought in from every other language on the planet. Consider there are about 100,000 words in the French language, but 10 times as many in the English language! Countless hours are wasted by children (and those learning English as a second language) learning trivial spellings and rules like “a i before e accept except after c.” Wouldn’t their time be better spent learning to play an instrument, playing a sport, or even just playing with their friends? Or how about spending that time serving their church or community?

Don’t hear me wrong- I acknowledge there are some benefits to spelling bees in general, but our focus should be on the blue circle, not the red. I'd much rather my son put down the Webster and pick up his tennis racket any day.

On a related note: Kudos to Mozilla Firefox 2.0. They added spell-check functionality into the browser, so now when I'm editing my blog or Wikipedia in a textbox, I can easily correct my spelling mistakes just like I would using MS Word! (Ha! No need to memorize the spelling of seldom used words for me!)

Tax time again

It’s tax time, and you probably hate the process as much as me. I spent around 20 hours using TurboTax, and I still have no idea if I got it right. Even though our income is nearly the same in 2005 and 2006, I owed the feds more than $1K in 2005, and this year they owe me over $1K! It’s a shame that someone with (almost) a Ph.D. can’t figure them out.

Some other tax tidbits that drive home just how ludicrous our tax system really is:

• If you were to use some tax-savings strategies, you could be in danger of patent infringement.


• According to a new study, loop-holes in California's tax code leave the poorest fifth of California households (average income of $11,100) paying 11.7% of their income on state and local taxes and the highest earning 1% of earners paying 7.1%.


• Even though California created a system to simplify how many citizens paid their income taxes in 2005, the system has been stifled by companies that could lose money if consumers quit using their parasitic tax preparation services.


• And you thought you had a pretty good personal relationship with your tax preparer? Well, he’d like you to know that he doesn’t want to hear about your personal matters, including what your kids are up to.

"Taxation with representation ain't so hot either."
-Gerald Barzan