There are lots of reasons people choose to use parallel programming- not all of them wise. This article by Michael Wolfe gives excellent insight into the current status of parallel algorithms and a call for better education of programmers in the field. What criteria do you use when deciding if a problem will benefit from the use of parallel programming? How do you pick the staff who will solve the problems?
Tag: software
uTest- a crowdsourcing experiment
I signed up today for an interesting experiment in the usage of crowd sourcing. UTest is a new service that is compiling a portfolio of software testers that will be paid on a per-bug basis. There is no good indication yet what the pay scale will be, except that it will be sliding and linked to the type of software ( web or desktop), type of bug, number of bugs left to find (if they have come up with some magical way to divine the number of bugs in a software project in order to know how many more are left, they could probably make a whole lot more off of that service alone 😉 ). What I think they actually mean here is that if you find the very first bug, likely it is an easy to find obvious one that is different than finding obscure bug number 150. Since there is no indication of what impact this has on the pay, I can not comment on the “rightness” of this algorithm, other than to indicate that that first bug found may NOT be the obvious jump in your face silly one- it could be that you have a really good tester who noticed the back end data linkage error that will kill you application. Perhaps their inclusion of factors like experience, “reputation” and other personal factors in the pay rate will balance some of this out. It is all a big social and business experiment, I will report back as we go how things play out. They are claiming that testers can make hundreds or thousands of dollar per week, so perhaps the pay rate will be higher than the small rates typical over on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. There is no guarantee of pay rates at this time, and you can only register for consideration- they say they are not assigning any jobs for a couple of weeks; but if you like to play with new software and think you are good at finding and defining bugs, hop on over and sign up- who knows, it may give you some vacation mad money.
A special note that in order to get paid, you have to sign up for a special debit card and your pay will be deposited into that account. If you have some particular phobia or annoyance about debit cards, this may not be a solution for you. As for me- I am up for the ride and interested to see if there is actually money to be made in them thar bugs..
Drop.io tests- come and play please
I have added a Drop.io widget to the page, to test some of the interesting functionality. Feel free to send me something interesting… a poem, a picture of your dog, a virtual gift. Please do NOT upload anything you do not already own the copyright to. It WILL be deleted post haste. This is a public box, so do NOT upload anything you do not want the rest of the world to see( if you don’t care if the rest of the world gets a good glimpse of your latest odd piercing, I don’t mind looking- but others will see). Please remember that this is a public blog and do not upload anything explicit.
I also want to test the voice to mp3 functionality. I will probably be calling later and creating something ya’ll can listen to, but you can try it out as well. Just dial 646-495-9201 x 91355 and leave me a message, or leave a message for the world.
Hmm…. this may turn into an interesting experiment into human nature, graffiti and self control….
Reviews of the technology and the experience in a future blog post. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts about the user interface/experience.
Viewdle testing
I am not generally a name dropper. I am not much impressed with someone just because they are famous, or their name is batted about. I have no compunctions about walking up to someone and talking to them or asking them a question, if I have something interesting to say, or have a question I really want to ask them. Actions and the person themselves tend to garner my respect more than their title or the famous-ness of their name. However, I do occasionally have reason to mention someone by name, and so the development of Viewdle as a utility intrigues me. This is my post to try it out.
The concept behind Viewdle is that the company is developing and maintain a library of pictures of the faces of famous people ( maybe someday they will allow us to upload pictures of ourselves and have ordinary people registered as well..). By some simple javascript pasting and putting a custom tag around references to people in text, hovering over that person’s name should pop up a picture of the person. I like this idea, because I will often find myself reading someone’s blog, they mention someone and I find myself hitting Google to look them up and remember who the Heck Robert Metcalfe is. If this database expands and the technology works, that mental mind shake in the form of a picture could come to you without ever leaving the page!.
So here, let’s test it out a little bit.
At SC’07 this past November, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with lots of new people, some of them famous and some who probably should be, but aren’t yet.
Dr. Raymond Orbach, the US Undersecretary of State for Science was one of the keynote speakers, and I had a chance to chat with him for a few minutes after his talk. He is very excited about the expanding use of modeling and simulation in manufacturing and wants to see it grow more. It is, he believes, what will give any manufacturer the competitive edge.
I spent a great amount of time with Dave Pokorney. We met in the Twitterverse. I had put in a watch on all Twitters mentioning “SC07” and his ( and a few others) popped up. We chatted back and forth a bit, then met in person. He is deeply involved with the team that does all of the networking for the conference, and got me some great behind the scenes interviews. Hopefully a Network World and a PMI Journal article will come out of those interviews.
All in all, SC07 was great fun and over the next month there should be a good number of publications coming out of it. Too much name dropping here will spoil the fun.
I did notice in the news this afternoon that Marc Andreessen is being a remarkable person and standing up for free speech on Ning, even though there are people up in arms about people chatting about sex on it. Come on folks, chatting sex, is NOT porn. If it were and it were really illegal, they would have to shut down every chat network in the universe. You really think there are NOT people on Yahoo or AIM or Meebo or gTalk out there chatting sex sometimes? I know I am.. being a healthy human who is often separated from her fiance for long periods of time, chat is one of the things that keeps our relationship going. Just because Ning has “networks” published where like minded people can hang out, does not make it the anti-christ. Honestly, I had not spent much time checking out Ning, but it is now on my list of things to test this week. Review and report to come.
So– a little bit of name dropping there, though not the celebrity Madonna type of names…. so it will be interesting to see how Viewdle handles it. Give me some feedback, what do you see? What do you think?
How to earn a loyal customer
Let me just say up front, GooSync rocks. They have now earned my loyalty for a very long time. Here is my story:
I love and live in Google calendars. I live a life that is complex to the point of being confusing. We have a blended household. Both my fiance and I are divorced with kids from previous marriages. Both of us have shared custody situations. I have two girls, he has two sons. Currently we are in a situation where Mon-Fri during the school year he lives in a house an hour away with his two sons and on the weekends, holidays and summers he is back here with me. This means that sometimes there are 6 people who live in this house I call home and sometimes it is just me. Because the members of our clan need to access our schedule from work, from several homes and sometimes from the road- we needed something more flexible than a paper calendar hanging on the wall ( although we still have some of those.. they have such cool pictures…). Both my fiance and I also wanted to be able to have reminders sent to our treos, to keep us in line and make sure no child got left behind. Google Calendars fit this very well. We set up a joint family calendar and began filling it up. It nicely sends text messages to my phone, but it would not sync. When my work life was more crazed and I was running around the plant all day long from meeting to meeting, I used to sync my calendar with Outlook for work( yes, Outlook sucks, but I have no control over what is used from email and calendaring at work- I work for a very large corporation) and only my work appointments were on my treo. But then work shifted, and I work from home more- and do meetings more by teleconference- sitting here in front of my computer which can nicely remind me itself. No need to go through the hoops and hassles of a bluetooth sync up several times a day ( my sync cord for my treo long ago shorted out and refused to work). Before long, I was just ignoring the calendar feature on my Treo. This irritated me some… I wanted an easy way to check my schedule on the go. Besides, having technology that almost works is a pet peeve of mine.
In the meantime, our online google calendar life exploded. My fiance and his ex have a calendar for working out visitation issues- I have read access on that one, as I manage most of the family schedule. I am active in several professional arenas and have meetings for MESA, PMI-CIC IT committee and some other activities. Having all these professional commitments on the BnG Clan calendar was cluttering it up and confusing kids.. so I set up a professional calendar that has my professional commitments only in it. Besides, if I get to the point where my consulting/writing/speech giving schedule continues to grow ( one could hope) I will need a calendar like this to share on a professional website. My daughters rotate between my home and their dad’s home.. so having their family stuff online is helpful to them. They are old enough now that I am working hard to get them to use this as a management tool. Hopefully they will be adding things themselves. But having things like my monthly book club, Curtain Call executive committee meetings and other items of the sort on the family calendar drives clutter that confuses them, as well as puts them at risk for kid learning curve screw ups. So all of my personal life appointments are on their own google calendar.
As time went on, I continued to test and trial new gizmos and services that would sync your google calendar- but they all only synced your main calendar. This is nice, but no longer sufficient in our world.
Then came GooSync. I discovered them a week or so before Christmas. Tested, loved it and imediately bought it so I could sync multiple google calendars and not just one. It was amazing! I could even use categories and have new appointments on my treo auto sync to different google calendars. Brilliant! This was what I had been looking for. Oh ! And look- I can sync with Outlook as well! Cool!! This is a stroke of brilliance. Finally I will be able to use my mobile device the way it was meant to. But wait… Crap. That outlook sync just took all my personal, intimate,family appointments and dumped them into outlook as well. Groan. Facepalm. This is bad. HeadDesk. I quickly cleaned up Outlook to delete them all and moved into the Holidays. OK, honestly I cleaned up most of them, but left some in..the less intimate ones that I did not care if work saw– time was short. No more time to play with syncing gizmos when Santa was about to arrive. But the whole thing was buzzing about in my head in a semi-random way and a couple of days ago, I got the chance to test again. “What if”, I thought, “I did a one way sync from Outlook to my handheld and then a bi directional sync from the handheld to google? Then I get the work appointments dumped into the handheld and the 2 way sync with google. I have no reason to add work appointments on the fly in the treo and then want them to sync with outlook any more… so this should work, right?
(Let me here interject a word of advice that I should have known well. Back up your calendars before experimenting)
Here is what I thought would happen:
Outlook overwrites to the Treo. Treo is now full of only Work Appointments. Bi directional sync via GooSync to google calendars. GooSync: hmm… you have a bunch of appointments in google not on your handheld- let me add those in for you. Result: my entire world schedule in the palm of my hand.
Here is what actually happens:
Outlook overwrites to the Treo. Treo is now full of only Work Appointments. Bi directional sync via GooSync to Google Calendars. GooSync: hmmm…. you have a bunch of appointments that were removed from your handheld.. here let me remove those from Google for you as well. Result: my entire world schedule, other than work? Deleted. Not just from my handheld, but from Google as well. The only things that remained were personal items that had gotten inserted into outlook before Christmas that I had not bothered to delete.
Now, is this normal behavior, or a remnant of the sync and delete in Outlook before Christmas? I do not know. I will not try it again to find out, either. I Twittered my despair. I IM’d my fiance my panic ( especially before he could go to check the calendar and be caught by surprise when things were GONE). This may not seem like a big deal, but it was a total of almost 1700 items. ( I told you I lead a busy and complicated life….). I wrote an email to tech support at GooSync that was really just a rant. I just needed to vent. I did not expect it to fix anything, really. A while later, I got a response ” no problem, we can restore from tape. Just please tell us when this happened and stop syncing in the meantime”.
Holy majoly. This was an unexpected benefit ( you can see I did not carefully read all the fine print). And you know what? They did. All of my messed up calendars have been restored. I am happy syncing again. And I came up with a new solution for getting all of everything onto my treo without risking deletions and cross contaminations. I created a new work calendar in Google. I use a free version of Syncmycal to do a one way dump of Outlook to that specific google calendar. I added the new google calendar to my list of calendars that my treo does a bi drectional sync with over the air.. and everything is in the palm of my hand again. Now that I am using my treo to manage life and events, I need to go back and re-look at RTM for my todo lists as well.
The guys at GooSync? As far as I am concerned- they rock. I will stick with them for a long time now.