Only slightly bent

Why do basic meeting services still suck?

As if meetings weren’t destroying productivity badly enough these days, it’s amazing how basic meeting services can still continue to function so badly. For example, have you ever had a phone conference with more than two participants that wasn’t riddled with a bad connection, echos, interference, feedback noise or some other problem? Has any content sharing or collaboration software ever worked properly for all participants? Or, have you participated a meeting where all the projection equipment worked flawlessly and people never had a problem connecting to a projector?

Apart from the very high-end telepresence systems, the basic services continue to wreak havoc on most meetings. The Calvin & Hobbes comic below captures the feeling perfectly (click to enlarge):

And then we have the meeting etiquette, agenda definition, timeliness, processes and preparedness (or more often the lack of all five) problems on top of the basic technological problems and one can only imagine how many billions of dollars are being wasted in meetings.

100Mbps ought to be enough for everyone

Yes yes, that phrase is likely to come back and bite me. But a more pertinent question is what exactly is the benefit of having a 1Gbps connection (the ones Google is planning on trialing) as opposed to 100Mbps, which is the state-of-the-art consumer broadband connection available in select locations around the planet?

Video? No. HD video? No. 3D HD-video? Still no. In fact, some years ago Cisco estimated that an all-senses, indistinguishable-from-reality virtual reality system would require a bandwidth of around 70-100Mbps – call it the input bandwidth of the brain. With advanced video and other codecs, the requirement is likely to be less than that. So I think it’s a fair question to ask what do consumers need speeds over 100Mbps for? Especially with the rest of the Internet along with TCP limitations usually bogging down the speed much below that for non-P2P applications.

Dumb, dumber, government?

Mention NBN to anyone working in telecom in Australia and you’re bound to get an opinion. (NBN is a government initiative that, with some $40 billion in cash, is to build a nationwide broadband network, delivering 100Mbps to most households.) Nothing in the project, however, seems simple. But there’s one aspect in particular that is nothing short of mind-boggling; the government is taking and threatening to take a number of hostile actions against a single, publicly traded corporation – Telstra (disclaimer: I work for Telstra).

Now, I agree with the need for functional separation of access networks and services parts, part of a bill that is currently being debated and looks likely to fail. But what I have absolutely zero tolerance and understanding of are the threats made by the government that unless Telstra plays nice (again, only Telstra, a single publicly traded entity) and comes to an agreement with NBN Co. on a number of non-trivial things, it will be forced to divest its 50% ownership in a cable company, Foxtel, AND be forbidden from bidding on new 4G radio spectrum. WTF?

I’m all pro-competition and anti-monopoly, but come on! How can it possibly be constitutional for a government to start making laws that are custom-tailored against a single corporation?! That is hardly modern capitalism.

And on a lighter sidenote, how is Telstra identified in these wannabe-laws? By name? If so, Telstra could change its registered name every six months and dodge all the legal mandates ad infinitum ;P

On a semi-work-related task, I’ve played around with Google’s Nexus One “superphone” for a while to get a feeling what the Google guys are delivering. As is the tradition with my light-reviews, some positives and negatives I discovered include the following:

The Good

• It’s a well-constructed a good-looking device. Build quality seems to be good and the back cover material is nice “soft” plastic.
• The screen is gorgeous and the home screen UI is nicely customizable with widgets and the cute but gimmicky Live (animated and interactive) wallpapers.
• Google services are, unsurprisingly, very well integrated to the phone experience. Another plus is the existence of Google applications like Google Goggles that are not yet available on other platforms.
• While the Google Market is not exactly up to par with Apple’s App Store in either quality or breadth of content, there are plenty of nice applications available.
• One of the most important built-in “productivity” apps, the calendar, works well. It’s much better than, for example, the iPhone’s.
• Something I wasn’t quite sure of at first was the presence of a trackball below the touch screen; it feels like strange import from Blackberries, where I don’t particularly like it. Now, the trackball isn’t strictly needed for anything really, but it turns out it is useful in some situations for an alternative selection/scrolling device – and it allows for better one-handed usage of the phone than what would otherwise be possible. I still say it’s a bit of an oddball feature, but I’m veering towards it being a neutral or even a good rather than a bad thing.

The Bad

• The scrolling is a jerky all around; in home screen, in the browser, maps, everywhere. Considering the amount of CPU power at its disposal, I found this rather surprising. The iPhone 3GS scrolls much smoother, despite being significantly behind in available processing power.
• The UI is sometimes frustratingly unresponsive. The soft buttons at the bottom of the screen are probably the worst part; they often have to be pressed twice or more or more heavily for the push to register. This is highly annoying and significantly degrades the user experience.
• When the phone is locked, the only way to light up the screen is to press the power button. Pressing the trackball doesn’t do anything.
• While the home screen is customizable, the idle screen unfortunately is not. Nor does it show the next calendar entries.
• The camera, while better than the iPhone’s, is of rather poor quality. It still continues to puzzle me how my 3-year-old N82 can beat most or all of the top-end smartphones in terms of camera performance.. Do people really not use the cameras or why are such crappy cameras deemed good enough?

Overall? Good work from HTC and Google. Solid first entry into the market. On its own it is not a “killer” device, but give Android, Google and HTC a year or two to polish everything – which I hope they’ll do, rather than just pile on features – and we should be looking at some seriously good devices.

After being a 100% Nokia-user for almost 15 years, I bought myself an Apple iPhone 3GS some months back – primarily because the Nokia N97 is weighed down by the legacy of Symbian and the Nokia N900 doesn’t have 3G support at 850MHz, the best 3G network around here. I was initially hesitant on making the switch, but quickly realized I should’ve switched earlier. The iPhone simply offers a good user experience. After some months of usage, here are some observations:

The good

• The browsing experience; it’s simply great.
• UI responsiveness is in a class of its own; scrolling is ultra-smooth throughout (smoother than on many Snapdragon-powered newer phones) and things just feel responsive.
• The touch screen, as far as capacitive touch screens go, is very sensitive, accurate and responsive. Even typing works surprisingly well on the virtual keyboard. The screen resolution is a bit on the low side for a modern high-end smartphone, but is sufficient for most uses.
• The availability of a huge selection of applications and the convenience of the App Store; as I have noted earlier, while the App Store interface is not very good, the existence of a single repository for all apps and simple, quick purchase & installation process makes for a good user experience. And there are some excellent apps – so good that they could play a role in the device selection. I will highlight a few in a later post.
• The seamless switching to WLAN access whenever one is available works very well and makes for a good user experience, especially in locations with “known” access points like at home or at work.

The bad

• The camera. While it takes decent video, the photo-quality and user experience is downright terrible. My three-year old N82 easily trumps the iPhone in photo quality.
• Non-customizable idle screen; I want widgets or at least some level of customization for the idle screen. With the iPhone, all you can change is the background picture. The idle screen doesn’t even have upcoming calendar events for crying out loud.
• Some UI idiosyncrasies and limitations; for example there is no splitting of the SMS conversations; I would like to be able to cut off a conversation and start a new one with the same person instead of having all the messages to one person in a single list that eventually grows too big anyway. And there’s not even a good way of archiving the messages to a “saved” folder or anything.
• No Flash support. It’s sometimes annoying as many websites use Flash, but most of the time it’s not a huge deal – YouTube being supported by its own application helps.
• E-mail interface could be better. It’s good as it is, but has some annoying little things: for example, switching among multiple accounts takes too many clicks and GMail conversations show up as individual e-mails.
• The calendar UI is actually quite bad. Adding an entry is far too complicated and it’s missing a week-view!
• No multitasking. I used to consider this a deal-breaker, but I’ve learned to live with the lack of multitasking quite well. A working notifications infra helps a lot.

All in all – and despite the lengthy negatives list above – I am more than happy with it. The iPhone has certainly increased my time spent using a mobile device – it’s a device that’s a pleasure to use. It most certainly suffers from some deficiencies, as noted above, but the positives outweigh the negatives.

Depending on what Apple comes up with later this year, however, my next phone in 18 months’ time might or might not be an iPhone; I have lately been quite impressed by the newer Android devices like Google’s Nexus One. Give it another year or two to mature and we’ll have an interesting competition on our hands. And the Intel/Nokia MeeGo might end up surprising in a couple of years time as well. But today? The iPhone still wins in the user experience sophistication and simplicity – i.e. the stuff that matters the most to most people.

It’s time to note down some cultural impressions I’ve made about Australia; in particular, I will focus on a few things which strike me as somehow strange. Just to clarify, I treat these mainly as rhetorical questions as the reasons are clear enough for most of them.

Isn’t it strange..

• .. that Australia has the biggest houses in the world^[1], while simultaneously being the country that most increases the time spent outdoors for expats?^{[2, 3]} With a culture geared towards the outdoors life and a climate to match, why would people need the biggest indoor dwellings in the world?

• .. that Australia has one of the best solar power generation potential in the world^[4], yet produces over 80% of its electricity with coal?^[5]

• .. that Australia have some of the best-managed and sustainable fisheries in the world^{[6, 7]}, plenty of fresh produce and even wine locally available – i.e. a good potential for an ideal Mediterranean diet – but Australians are still among the most obese (if not the most obese) people in the world? ^{[8, 9]}

• .. that people in Australia are generally friendlier and more willing to help (my subjective experience, of course) than in Finland, despite Finland scoring quite a bit lower on the Hofstede’s individuality index?^[10]

• .. that people consider USA the great “melting pot”, even though only 11% of people in the USA are foreign-born, compared to over 25% in Australia?^{[11, 12]}

Resources

1. Australians live in worlds biggest houses
2. HSBC: Expat Survey
3. HSBC: Offshore offspring
4. Desertec Foundation: Australia’s Concentrating Solar Power Potential
5. Australian Coal Association: Electricity Production
6. Marine Stewardship Council: Certified fisheries
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: Fisheries resource management
8. Stewart, S: Australia’s Future ‘Fat Bomb’
9. NationMaster: Obesity Statistics
10. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: Finland and Australia
11. US Census Bureau: State & Country QuickFacts
12. Australian Bureau of statistics: Over one quarter of Australians were born overseas

I have a terrible backlog of posts to do, but this thing called life nowadays seems to be interfering with blogging. Anyhow, a few weeks back we took a small road trip along the Great Ocean Road for a few days. A few selected photos follows.

Of course, the one thing that cannot be overlooked when driving the Great Ocean Road are the beaches. Many awesome beaches dot the coastline, along with many world-class surf spots. Spots like Jan Juc, which could be classified as not very crowded:

One fascinating place was the Otway National Park and a feature called the Otway Fly – a long steel canopy walk built up to 45m high among the forest. Very impressive, almost had an Avatar-like feeling of a different world being among the massive trees and ferns the size of eight meters across.

The scale of the cliffs (this one near the 12 Apostles) can best be understood by looking at the dozens of people standing on top of this cliff below. Yes there are people there.

Another great place was the Loch Ard Gorge:

And we return to the Otway National Park; what would be a bushwalk without seeing some koalas?

.. or Kookaburras for that matter:

Finally on the way back, we took a walk to the beautiful Stevenson’s Falls waterfall before returning home:

Overall a great trip with some breathtaking and diverse views.

Borrowing the post title from the great Calvin & Hobbes comic, that’s something I’ve been wondering the past day or so. The Economist delved at length on the topic in their end-of-the-year double issue with the theme “Progress and its perils”. It’s a good issue, so pick up a copy or read what you can online if you haven’t yet. While The Economist looked at some big issues, morals and all, I’ll leave those alone for now and focus a minute on some smaller ones where “progress” is actually a four-letter word.

Remember when flying used to be fun?

10 or 15 years ago, flying was a pleasant experience. But now? Now flying is a royal pain with all the added “security” hurdles and restrictions. The latest bombing attempt incident has already – again – caused even further tightened security measures, like the completely braindead approach of demanding passengers sit down for the last hour of the flight. That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb. All this even though everyone should know most of the so-called security procedures are futile. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

The rest, i.e. most of it, is just a nuisance that adds up. In essence, we the passengers have to put up with great inconveniences for the sake of security theater. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with all security theater, but do we have to pick the most annoying, counter-productive, useless, expensive and abusive theater practices? That sucks. Especially when we could do something useful.

Remember when e-commerce was actually convenient?

“Progress” is also creating problems in another walk of life: credit cards. Even though we all agree they should be more secure (I should know, my card details were compromised two weeks ago), the layers of added security are becoming a painful thing for the user. The Visa/Mastercard 3D-Secure protocol in particular is annoying as hell and has caused many a transaction to fail. It has, in fact, worsened the user experience so much that I have reduced my card usage because of that. Why? Because 3DS adds numerous steps to the payment process, the verifying bank’s systems often don’t work or the transaction just mysteriously fails. Who cares if it’s more secure if it doesn’t work?!

Remember when the Internet was actually global?

Back in the 1990’s the Internet was a rather nice place to hang out in. Of course we didn’t have all the cool services we have now, but the signal-to-noise ratio was vastly better than it is now. IRC was used for intelligent and/or interesting conversations. Usenet was actually useful. And so on.

Now, ironically enough, electronic national barriers seem to be popping up everywhere. You would think the region codes in DVDs were the last geographically limited media thing we’d see, but no. Try watching YouTube videos from anywhere but the United States and you’ll soon enough hit the “We’re sorry, … is not currently available in your country“-message. Ditto for Hulu. And for crying out loud, even the Daily Show’s official site bans visitors from Down Under. What’s more, if an item in Amazon is sold by another merchant, chances are they don’t ship abroad. What kind of globalization is that?

Of course there are ways to get around some of this stuff – like having a VPN tunnel to the USA or buying a redirecting service with a US address – but the point is one shouldn’t have to do that.

The really big picture

All that is, of course, peanuts compared to situations where real progress actually would’ve been needed. Back on the larger scale of things, economically the past 10 years have taken most of the developed world nowhere.

And don’t even get me started on the political ineptitude of dealing with climate change; the worst part is that it is only a political problem as technically and economically dealing with climate change is perfectly feasible, relatively simple and even relatively cheap. Just reminds me of the quote:

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”

Hence, globally, 2010’s better be better than the “naughties” or whatever you want to call this decade.

In the spirit of improving things – or at least not making them any worse – I shall now do the most economical and environmentally responsible thing I can imagine: hit the local beach. It just so happens it’s also one of the most fun things to do.

Lucky coincidence.