Geekularity

Monday night, Sean Kane, the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, gave his presentation entitled “Developing a Great User Interface” to members of the East Bay IT Group . I found it particularly fascinating to see how Netflix integrates their feature development and testing into a very rapid, biweekly release cycle. Most of the features, once they graduate to production grade code, will exist on the production web site and will only be available to one or more select groups of users; usually groups of about 10,000 users each. Depending on the feature and what usability metric they are testing for, these test groups will last for several weeks or several months. Other test groups might run concurrently and will often overlap. This testing system sounds fascinating, especially when I realized that I may have been a member of one of the test groups in the past!

One point I found especially cool was Sean’s discussion about the red star ratings system. Many Netflix users, including myself, believe that the red stars are the average rating from everyone who rates that movie. It turns out that this is only true when you first subscribe to the Netflix service and your ratings and movie queue are nil. Once you have added movies into your queue or begin to rate other movies, the red star rating becomes personalized to you. Based on you viewing, rating, and queuing history for example:

A “Weekend at Bernie’s” search while not logged in and my cookies cleared

Same search, but this time I’m logged into my account

Apparently Netflix thinks I am not as much of a fan of “Weekend at Bernie’s 2″ as the rest of the Netflix population. To the contrary, I loved it! I’m a sucker for both of those movies. Just after I took those screen shots, I rated them both 5 stars!

But this isn’t about my taste in super awesome movies, this is about user experience. As Kane even admits, Netflix needs to do a better job explaining some of the finer points of their user interface. Perhaps a delayed pop-up bubble when hovering over the ratings object could present the user with a “did you know” type explanation with a link to a details page that explains the ratings features in depth. While this feature is optional and would not divert too many users away from the task of hunting down movies to watch, it would give the geekier of us the chance to understand the system a bit more.

Here’s a terrific video that explains what Network Neutrality is all about. It’s very entertaining and it ends with a call to action to join SaveTheInternet.com. Please watch the video and if you agree with it, please sign the petition and then call your congressional representatives.

This is an impressive bit of ASCII art, and it appears to be composed of part of the GNU/Linux kernel code. Way Cool! [Link]

Anytime you upgrade your operating system, there will always be a couple of programs and devices that just won’t work right. In my case, my ten year old webcam is no longer supported by Windows Vista or by the manufacturer. C’est la vie. It’s time to move on to something new.

I chose the Logitech QuickCam® for Notebooks Pro mostly because it was small and easy to take with me on the road. I set it up, and it works fine. It works as I expected, so that’s all I have to say about the webcam itself. The reason why I wrote this post, and the reason why I’m so happy with Logitech, is the packaging that the webcam came in.

I am not a fan of the hard plastic cases that most electronics come packaged in. These “clamshell” packages are difficult to open, and are even dangerous. I have sliced open my hands more than once and have come to use industrial tin snips (huge scissors) in order to get into the worst of the clamshells.

I understand why manufactures encase their products in these virtual bear traps. They stand up to rough shipping and most, if not all, of the packaging can be recycled. The clamshell supposedly cuts down on casual theft, and when a product is returned, it certainly is easy to tell if the packaging has been opened. I suspect that it also the cheapest packaging to produce. Nevertheless, I hate clamshell packaging… hate, hate, hate, hate it! And hate is a word that my mommy told me never to use!

So imagine my surprise when I looked at the bottom of the packaging and saw a set of embossed arrows indicating that I could just pull this clamshell package apart. Another sticker on the top of the package showed yet another way to easily open the shell. So, I reluctantly put my gi-normous scissors down, and gave it a go. Astonishingly, the pieces of packaging came right apart and without any gashes or scrapes! It was actually a pleasant experience opening this package! I nearly wept with excitement when my digits all came back to me in tact!

I want to give Logitech a huge kudos for spending a few extra cents per unit to make their packaging more hand-friendly. I have voted with my wallet, and seconded the motion with this blog post. It is my hope that Logitech continues to offer their products in similarly easy to open packaging. It is also my hope that other electronics manufacturers take a page from Logitech. Make your products easy to open. It may actually be a differentiating feature in my future buying decisions.

Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropology professor at Kansas State University, posted this video to YouTube a couple of weeks ago as a kick off to the Digital Ethnography working group that he facilitates along with his students. This brief, but content packed video, is thought provoking and certainly worth a view or five! Then, when you’re done, participate in the discussion on the Digital Ethnography blog.

This was a multi-step solution for me, and I thought I’d post my links to the solutions that I found for getting to my EVDO card to work on my Dell Latitude D610.

First of all, check with Verizon to see if they have an updated VZ Access manager available for your card yet (VZAccess Software Site). In my case, I have a KPC 650 which won’t have a fix until at least March so I have chosen to do the hack outlined in Keith Comb’s blog post. He describes how to install the VZAccess Manager in WinXP compatibility mode and to create a dialup connection for your card.

One additional note, on my Dell Latitude D610, I would get the blue screen of death after I installed the KPC 650 drivers. I found this post in evdo forums which instructed me to disable my smart card reader, which is fine as I don’t use it anyway.

Now, Things seem to be running smoothly! The only problem I have now is that I can’t get the ppp adapter connection to participate in the network bridging that I need to connect my Parallels Virtual Machines to the internet. So, I’m now evaluating VMWare Workstation 6 Beta, which I’ll probably purchase upon its release unless Parallels catches up and gets their “Vista compatibility” to be truly compatible.

If you are like me, and you have a couple of encrypted web services that use self-signed SSL certificates, you may run into problems getting Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 to trust a web site with a self-signed certificate even though you consider it safe. I found these instructions on the MSDN Channel9 blog and thought that I would pass this useful tip along:

To install a certificate when visiting a self-signed OWA server on Vista, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Run IE as an administrator (Right-click the desktop icon)
2. Visit the site.
3. Click through the certificate error
4. Click the “Certificate Error” button in the address bar.
5. Click View Certificate
6. Click Install Certificate
7. Unlike on XP, you must click the “Place all certificates in the following store” radio button, and choose the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” store. If you don’t do this, the certificate goes in your personal store, and it isn’t trusted by IE.

Yes, this is cumbersome, but for good reason: Self-signed certificates are quite dangerous, because unless you manually compare the thumbprint/hash via secure or out-of-band communication, you have no assurance that your connection isn’t being man-in-the-middle attacked.

Thanks to Eric Lawrence, Program Manager, IE Networking for these instructions.