Notes From A Small Company

OS X Spellchecker Bug

2016-04-30T10:13:00.003-05:00

Dear Mr Apple,
I've found what appears to be a minor bug in El Cap's spelling autocorrection mechanism, however your feedback mechanism doesn't allow for enough characters to describe it. Here it is instead.

Summary

When the text insertion cursor is placed in a string of letters at a position in the string such that the letters to the left of the cursor constitute what spellcheck considers to be a misspelled but correctable word, it will not give the user warning. However, if a space is then inserted, the correction will be made, unannounced.

Tech Details

OS: OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.4
H/W: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch Mid 2015)

Example

Here is a common use case in which this behavior represents a bug. Suppose the user wants to modify the following phrase:

FROM:

To change your password, use the change-password command

TO:

To change your password, use the passwd command

Two possible methods for doing that are as follows:

Method #1

Place the text insert cursor just after the "d" at the end of "change-password"
Backspace 15 characters leftwards across all of "change-password"
Type out the 6 characters of “passwd"
The surrounding text is now “passwd| command” (with the “|” character showing the location of the text insertion cursor). The spellchecker is about to correct “passwd” to “passed" and so the user is provided with a visual warning to give them a chance to block that correction
The user hits ESC to block change:

Method #2

Place the text insert point just before the “c” at the start of “command"
Backspace 16 characters leftwards across all of "change-password "
Type out the 6 characters of “passwd"
At this point, the surrounding text is “passwd|command” (with the “|” character showing the location of the text insertion cursor). However, although, as before, the spellchecker is about to correct “passwd” to “passed”, no visual warning is given to the user
The user inserts the final space after “passwd” and the spellchecker makes the change. Then, typically:
The user backspaces three characters from after the just-inserted space, from “…passed “ to “…pass”, before re-typing “wd“ in an attempt to correct the problem
Again, the spellchecker gives no warning after “wd” is inserted
Repeat from step 5 until frustration sets in

The lack of visual warning in Method #2 step 4 is a bug.

Finally

Fellow users, if the above bothers you as it does me, turning off autocorrection completely can be done in System Preferences->Keyboard->Text by unchecking the Correct spelling automatically box.

To turn off autocorrection more selectively, for selected applications, see here.

Wailing and gnashing at Excel

2015-07-10T19:49:00.000-05:00

I just tripped over a monu-$@^*#(%-mental UI "bug" in Excel (for Mac 2011)! Please permit me to rage against the machine, and perhaps help someone else avoid this gotcha. :-(

In large multi-sheet Excel workbooks, I often use color-coding of sheet tabs to provide some visual grouping of related tabs. And such colouring can be applied en masse by selecting all the relevant tabs together via the usual Shift or ⌘ methods. I just did precisely that to 6 sheets within a 30-sheet workbook. Each of the six contained a table, identical in dimensions to the others, providing related but different functions.

Now colouring the tabs is really just one example of a more general feature of such sheet grouping -- i.e. group editing. And it's a very useful feature, especially when the sheets have common aspects. In my case, each sheet with its table acts like a software function or module, and just like in software it's not unusual to want make the same kind of change across a set of functions/sheets.
Not unusual, but not always. You can probably guess where this is going. Immediately after colouring the group, I needed to make a change to one of the sheets. It was a substantial change to the formula in every cell within that sheet's table. I changed one cell, made sure it was correct, and then copy-pasted the change to the rest of the table in the sheet. Or, I thought it was to the rest of the table in the sheet.

You see, when a number of tabs are group selected they remain selected until another tab, outside the group, is clicked. Now that's fair enough, but far less fair enough is that the fact that the sheets are still grouped is not very obvious. There is a slight change to the shading of the selected sheets, but it's subtle and doesn't stand out when neighbouring tabs are also part of the selected group.

So after applying the colour, my group of tabs remained selected, a fact that escaped my Friday-evening-and-been-hacking-Excel-all-day weary eyes. Since I was still operating within one of the grouped sheets, they all stayed grouped, and my edit, intended for only one of the sheets, was applied across the entire group, essentially making all six sheets identical. Although the sheets are related (hence the colouring in the first place), their respective formulae are both different and fairly complex. Wiping out that complexity in five of my six sheets kinda ruined my evening.

Of course Excel left the best bit to the very end. Deciding I hadn't suffered enough, the world's most popular spreadsheet program delivered its coup de grâce. Such group edits have no Undo option.

Happy Birthday To Us

2015-04-01T09:25:00.000-05:00

Today's date is not necessarily the best on which to make any kind of announcement, and it's true that the complexity of growing an international business from a standing start can often feel like an April's Fool joke, especially when I consider all the silly government-induced things we need to put up with. But it's true; Verilab is fifteen years old today!

Mark, Jason and I started in Scotland on this same date in 2000, about a week before NASDAQ peaked and then began its heady fall. (Sorry world, we never meant to burst the bubble.) A year or so later, we opened an office in Germany, and then around 2004 we arrived in Texas. Today we have people in those places, but also in: England, Oregon, Washington, Ottawa, and Quebec. The number of states and countries in which we serve clients is at least double that. Overall, across many hundreds of projects, we have seen all the very best (and not-so-very-best) in the development of advanced silicon system. In fact, I think it's likely that in Verilab there lives the single most concentrated collection of tool-independent chip verification expertise anywhere on the planet. In pursuit of the goal of helping clients to "tape-out" as quickly and as safely as possible, if we haven't seen it, it probably doesn't exist.

Well done and thank-you to all the team, our illustrious alumni, our many-splendored clients and partners, and of course our significant and long-suffering others. Happy Birthday to Us!

DVCon2015

2015-03-12T13:57:00.000-05:00

Just got back from a bunch of us from Verilab making our annual Journey to the West, to attend DVCon, one of the main conferences for our field. Wrap-up here.

The Entrepreneur's Creed

2014-03-08T16:36:00.000-06:00

Numbers and numerical analysis aren't my favourite part of running a business, but they're not far off it. I wrote the following as a reminder, advice to a young entrepreneur if you will, of the importance of getting to know your numbers. Based, of course, on Major General William H. Rupertus's famous lines.

The Entrepreneur's Creed

These are my numbers. There are many like them, but these are mine.

My numbers are among my best friends. They are part of my life.

I must master them as I must master my life.

My numbers, without me, are useless. Without my numbers, I am useless.

I must keep my numbers true. I must use them to turn confusion into clarity, and complexity into simplicity.

I must overcome complexity before it overcomes me.

My numbers and I know that what counts in business is not the calls we make, nor the noise and smoke of our marketing.

We know that it is the value delivered to customers that counts. We will deliver value.

My numbers are human, even as I, because they are part of my life. Thus, I will learn them as a soul-mate.

I will learn their weaknesses, their strengths, their parts, their deeper levels, their ratios, their essence.

I will keep my numbers precise and ready, even as I am ready and diligent. We will become part of each other.

My numbers and I are the defenders of my team and my company.

We are the masters of our field. We are the heart of success.

Let's Talk About Me!

2013-07-11T17:19:00.000-05:00

Digging around some old emails I came across an interview I did a few years ago for Hi-Tech Scotland Magazine (now defunct apparently -- hope it wasn't my interview that killed them!) Thought I'd post it here, with a few editorial updates where needed. It's in the typical question and answer format.

HTS: Describe your current role.
TK: I'm the overall manager of Verilab. For the UK parent, that's the Managing Director. For our German subsidiary, Verilab GmbH, I'm the awesome-sounding Geschäftsführer. And I'm CEO for the US subsidiary, Verilab Inc. In fact though, all three company entities form one team and I run that from Austin, TX. [Ed: we now also have Canadian teams in Ottawa and Montreal, under the fourth in the group, Verilab Canada Inc.] In theory, the most important part of my role is really, at the risk of sounding pompous, "Keeper of the Vision". My team work on very tough technical problems across Europe and the US, in projects that are often rapidly approaching key market windows and so are short on time and high on pressure. My job is, in the midst of all that stramash[1], to keep in all our minds what we formed Verilab for - to be the "McKinsey of VLSI engineering".

In practice though, I do what all small-firm CEOs do - anything and everything that needs done. Because we're a services firm, we bump into lots of government rules and regulations. I deal with those. I plan and monitor financial performance. I am constantly building and developing the operational infrastructure - HR, Engineering, IT, and so on - to allow us to continue to grow. And so on. It's busy!

HTS: When did you first become interested in technology as a career?
TK: Well, when I was three, I'm told I was hauled off a chair while trying to "fix" the Christmas tree lights with a screwdriver. And in primary five [Ed: US 4th grade] I announced that my ideal career was "Quantum Mechanic". Basically, I've always been interested in technology. I did hover between pure science and engineering for a while, and still harbour a secret desire to do physics. But as soon as I discovered microelectronics, I was so fascinated by those wee black packages on green circuit boards, I decided that's what I'd be working on.

HTS: Broadly speaking, from your own perspective, what sorts of technologies are likely to prove important over the next 10 years?
TK: Anything to do with communication - hardware and software. Every time I fly, I'm frustrated that I can't use my cellphone or connect to the internet. That's going to change. [Ed: Done!] I now have GPS in my cars, but it's annoying that they aren't linked to something like Google maps, or updated in real time. That's going to change. [Ed: Done!] My company has people at clients from California, through Texas, to Edinburgh, and on to Dresden. Despite all the current technology, I still can't get easy-to-setup, high def video conferencing with my teams, from& wherever each person is. That's going to change too. [Ed: Still not done :-( Come on video people: I have pain, I have budget, I am the decision-maker. Give me a call!] I believe that the difference between what I knew as IT as a kid (the build-it-yourself ZX-81), and what I see today, is just a small fraction of the difference between what the kids of today are seeing and what they will see in thirty years. Even the next ten is going to be awesome. And a huge part of that difference will be not from increased computationper se, but from increased communication.

HTS: Was it always your ambition to work overseas?
TK: Overseas in general? Not really. But I've always been a fan specifically of the USA and always wanted to spend some time there. Before moving, I really bought the message of their Lockean philosophy of respect for life and liberty and private property (the "pursuit of happiness" bit always struck me as a bit superfluous when you have the others, but that may just be my inner Scot speaking). And I also believed that precisely because of that philosophy, they were a much more productive nation in business than most of the rest of the world. Now that I have direct experience of the differences between Europe and the US, I think I can confirm that US folks are indeed often more productive in general [Ed: they certainly take fewer vacation days]. But, unfortunately, I've realized that on the philosophy of freedom side of things, there is a bit of a gap between the ideal of their Constitution and what's happening day to day. Sometimes I try to remind them of that :-)

HTS: Has being Scottish ever been an advantage (or disadvantage) to you elsewhere in the world?
TK: It's been both. In general, being Scottish - or, more precisely, having a Scottish accent - is a big plus. People often go all sentimental when they hear my accent and say something like "Ye know,ah'm from Sca'lun' too. Ye ken?" Which typically means, their great-great-great-granny came from Dumbarton via Ellis Island. Also, Scotland is one of those places that everyone would just love to visit. So being a native Scot carries a lot of kudos.

The downside though is, as a thoroughbred Scot, having been born and brought up just outside Paisley, I think I carry some of what Carol Craig described in "The Scots' Crisis of Confidence". There's something about having lived and breathed the cauld rainy air for 40 some years, and having absorbed a culture that sees any display of wealth as ostentatious, that runs deep in a person and is hard to shake. Even today, having grown Verilab to an elite international consultancy of increasingly high reputation, there's still sometimes a wee voice inside that can say, "Here you, don't get too big heided".

HTS: Do you have any remaining ambitions?
TK: To really understand Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

[1] stramash [strəˈmæʃ] Scot
an upoar; tumult; brawl

On video blogging - not

2012-05-20T17:32:00.006-05:00

Because Verilab is spread over a chunk of the western hemisphere, getting regular news and status updates out to the teams can be a challenge. I've tried various methods, one in particular being short videos. I create them using Camtasia, which lets me capture not only my video and audio, but also screen activity like a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, or maybe just the movement of the mouse across a spreadsheet as I describe the numbers. After minimal editing (I usually do the whole 10 minutes or so in one "take"), I export it to an mp4 file and then upload it to our business Google Video area within our Google Apps account. Usually the videos are made visible for everyone in the company, and there's an easy default setting to allow that. But on the occasions where I'm addressing only one or two folk, that's easily done too. So far, so good.

But more recently I thought it would be useful to have those videos displayed in the context of a blog. The two big advantages of that are:

It would let me include text and other media (like photos)
It would allow the team to comment on what I was saying and ask questions

Another little advantage is that a blog provides an easy feed mechanism (e.g. RSS) so that the team can know when there's something to see. I know they hang on my every word and can't wait to see the next excitement installment of "Tommy Does Excel".

Of course in theory all of the above can already be done, given that the hardest port -- hosting the video -- is covered by Google Video. I could simply email the team when a new video was ready, and use that email for any text message or photos. And then they could reply to that email as a form of comment stream. But anyone who has frequented the "blogosphere", as either a blogger or a commenter, will know that an important component in determining whether or not you will participate is "friction". That is, all the little, even tiny obstructions that get between you and your thoughts being immortalized in text. There's too much to discus on that topic to fit here so all I'll say is that patched-together combinations of emails, hosted videos (that are linked from but not embedded in the emails), and so on all constitute too much friction.

So I've decided what I want is a decent company-internal-use-only video blogging setup that meets the following criteria:

As easy to use, as an author or commenter or reader, as Blogger, or Wordpress, or Typepad, etc.
Able to host videos of between 5 and 20 minutes duration, and to have those embedded within blog posts
Uses EITHER one of our existing company authentication mechanisms OR a "stand-alone" authentication mechanism wherein the user is not required to create an account on some web service somewhere
Allows for user-by-user authentication

Well, to cut a long story short, I failed. I simply cannot find, certainly among the widely available platforms, any combination of services to do the above. Here, for anyone wanting to avoid blind alleys, were the prime contenders and why they failed.

Wordpress hosted on wordpress.com

Wordpress is blogging software. But to use it, you need a place to run it and on which to keep the blogs themselves. One option for that is wordpress.com. On its own, this fails 2 -- wordpress.com won't host videos. But that could have been solved using the not-too-expensive videopress.com plugin. But the real problem was 3, authentication. Wordpress blogs do allow you to restrict access to certain users but the authentication credentials -- the information you provide, usually a username or email and a password, to tell wordpress.com who you are -- are the username and password of a wordpress.com account. In other words, to restrict my wordpress.com blog to be readable only by my team I'd have had to lock the whole thing down, and then open it up to my team based on each of them having their own wordpress.com account. That's a fail.

Wordpress hosted on our own machines

This is similar to the above in that it would use Wordpress software, but we'd install it on our own machines. Point 1 passed. Crucially, we all already have authentication credentials for that (because we use our company machines for a lot of other stuff), so this passes points 3 and 4. But the problem is hosting the videos, Point 2. We realized that in fact we didn't actually need videopress.com because we already have a hosting solution -- Google Video for Business (i.e. within our overall Google Apps setup). All we have to do then is figure out how to embed those Google Video videos in wordpress posts. And can we figure that out? Nope. The Google Videos provide the necessary HTML snippet to share the video. And we even tested that that HTML worked by embedding it within a Blogger blog and a Typepad blog; both worked fine. But after several days of hacking, we can't get Wordpress to embed the video. Of course this leaves as a loose end the option of self-hosted Wordpress combined with the videopress.com plugin. I may revisit that, but I don't hold out much hope for getting that to work easily when we've not managed to get Google Video embedding to work. I've no doubt we'd get there eventually, but getting a video blog is not the only thing we have to do with our time, and there comes a point when it makes sense to take the loss and move on. So, another fail.

MovableType hosted on typepad.com

Analogous to Wordpress, MovableType is blogging software; and analogous to wordpress.com is typepad.com, a hosting service. And in some ways this is the most promising of all. MT on typepad.com handles embedding of the Google Videos fine. Authentication to *watch* those videos is achieved via our already-in-use Google Apps authentication. So all we need is something to restrict access to the blog itself (otherwise while unwelcome visitors may not be able to see the videos, they would be able to see everything else). And in fact, typepad.com has precisely that -- you can simply password a blog. Yay! So it's passing criterion 3. The problem is criterion 4. Because the protection mechanism is a simple password *for the blog* (i.e. it is not authenticating on a per user basis), if someone leaves the company, I'd have to change the password for everyone. And in fact it would probably be wise to be changing the password every few months anyway, even if no one left, just to cover password "leakage" into the wider world. Fail! :-(

OK, but then I had a bit of a Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment. I've noted that we already have the video hosting part of the solution -- Google Video, part of our overall Google Apps setup. But in fact, we now also have that for the blogging engine too; Blogger, now owned by Google, is now (and has been for some time) available within Google Apps too. So:

Blogger under Google Apps

Well at first glance this looks perfect. Authentication is going to be the same as for the rest of Google Apps. Hosting of the video is also Google Apps. And embedding works (I tried it). I think we have a winner. Yeah, if only. To understand the problem it's necessary to understand that while Blogger is owned by Google and the service is now included within Google Apps, it is not -- unlike Gmail, Calendar, Video, and so on -- a core Google Apps service. In theory, all that means is you don't get support for it from Google. But in practice the fact that Blogger is somehow less part of the Google Apps family has made itself known via a nasty little hole in Blogger authentication. Basically, what happened was this. After checking that the core functionality -- blogging, video embedding -- worked, and that the security appeared to do what I expected, I then enabled all my team to read the blog. That's done within the Blogger dashboard and the result is that each user receives an email containing a link that they need to click to accept the invitation. Once that's done, they can then read my blog, and watch the embedded videos, providing their browser is authenticated with their Google Apps credentials.

The problem appeared when the Blogger invites were accepted by a few of my users who also have personal gmail accounts. It turns out that if someone is reading the invitation email and accepts the invitation while in a browser that is also authenticated for (i.e. logged in to) their personal google account, then although the invitation may have been sent to <persons-name-at-verilab>@verilab.com, it gets accepted by <persons-name-at-gmail>@gmail.com. Worse, Blogger takes that acceptance as valid! In fact, if I, the inviter, look back at the list of people to whom I've given blog-reading permissions, the entry corresponding to that person has changed -- from <persons-name-at-verilab>@verilab.com to <persons-name-at-gmail>@gmail.com. Failalamadingdong!

The only point in Blogger's favour here is that at least I -- the Blog owner -- get an email with subject "Your invitation was accepted using a different email address" and highlighting who the user in question is. But at that point, all I can do is remove their personal gmail from the list, re-insert them under their company address, and try again. Unfortunately if they again accept under a multiply-authenticated browser, the same thing will happen again.

Now, one of my users did argue that maybe Google were doing The Right Thing here. I invited Fred, and Google is permitting Fred access. OK I invited Fred@here.com and they're permitting Fred@there.com, but they know (not sure how, but they do) that those are one and the same Fred, so they're not being unreasonable. I have two problems with that.

First, from my point of view, Fred@here.com and Fred@there.com should be regarded as two different people from a security point of view. The reason is that it's conceivable that a person would apply different levels of "security in use" to their personal email versus their work email. For example, someone may share their personal email credentials with a family member, but not do the same with their work email.

Second, even if I did allow for Blogger seeing two Freds as being the same, Google Video does not see that. So while either Fred@here.com or Fred@there.com would be able to read the blog, only Fred@here.com would be able to see the embedded videos.

Conclusion

Well, the conclusion is, it can't be done. Of course, clearly it can -- all of the bits and pieces are out there waiting to be bolted together. But the same could be said about plain old text-only blogging in the days before blogging machinery. But blogging didn't take off until someone bolted together those blogging machines. So today, for your average small company, even your very technically able small company, getting a company-internal-use-only video blogging setup working may be more bother than it's worth.

But make no mistake, it's worth something. If I'm the only person who'd use this kind of thing, then I fully expect to be ignored and to see nothing change. But if there are enough of me out there (and YouTube, Google Video itself, and even wee curiosities like ConnectNote, suggest that there's all kind of demand for video comms bubbling under the surface), then it looks like an opportunity for some college-dormed entrepreneur or other. When you've got it up and running, I'll be your first user.

On mats, and cats, and programming

2012-03-29T22:05:00.006-05:00

You are a teacher of C++ or any of a number of similar languages. You are marking an exam. The first question is, "Write code to add 1 to variable x."

Candidate A's answer consisted primarily of the following:

x = x + 1;

Candidate B had, by contrast:

x++;

I'm guessing, but I reckon the majority of examiners would find no fault with Candidate A's answer. They'd do that because by most standards, there is nothing wrong with Candidate A's answer. It means exactly what it was supposed to mean. It says what it was supposed to say.

Now; you are a teacher of English As A Foreign Language[1]. You are marking an exam. The first question showed a picture and the following jumble of words: "mat", "the", "sat", "cat", "on", "the".

The candidate had to "Rearrange the word jumble to match the picture."

Candidate A wrote the following:

On the mat the cat sat

Candidate B had:

The cat sat on the mat

I'm guessing, but I reckon the majority of examiners would find fault with Candidate A's answer. They'd do that because by most standards, there is clearly something wrong with Candidate A's answer. Although it means exactly what it was supposed to mean, and says what it was supposed to say, it's wrong. It's not how English is spoken by English speakers.

The difference is simple. In natural languages, idiomatic correctness is seen as being part and parcel of overall correctness and we don't stand for it when it is missing. By contrast, we seem to tolerate its absence in programming languages?

Why?

[1] I chose EFL instead of just English for my example, because lets face it, the more enlightened examiner may give more marks to "On the mat the cat sat" to reward its more poetic quality, a quality lacking in the idiomatically correct but more mundane, "The cat sat on the mat". But EFL is, sadly perhaps, more about simply getting on in English speaking environments than about writing poetry.

(Trying to do) Business in Canada

2012-03-13T19:05:00.002-05:00

Over six months since my last post and what is it that gives me the kick in the pants needed to blog again? Not some advance in the field of chip verification; not an epiphany on how to spot future world class programmers from the way they play Plants versus Zombies. No, nothing so valuable. What's got me hitting the keys again is what always gets me hitting keys hard: government and how it can get in the way of Just Doing Business. I annoyed some people a few years back when I lobbed a few barbs at Germany for its anti-business funkiness. Well have a break Germany, cuz it's Canada's turn now, eh?

Enter Canada's Regulation 105. It goes something like this (subject to the usual IANAL caveat)

If a non-Canadian firm delivers a service to a Canadian client, then that client may be required by the Canada Revenue Agency to withhold 15% of their invoice payments, to cover possible Canadian tax. Now it's important to re-stress: the 15% withholding is merely provision for possible tax. In the case of a US firm, it is entirely possible -- likely even -- that if its affairs are in order (specifically, if it is not deemed to have a Permanent Establishment in Canada) it will be paying the relevant taxes back in the US and it simply will not owe any tax to Canada at all. In that case, at the end of the year, the US firm can submit a Canadian tax return and and request a refund of all the withheld money. But even though at the end of the day there may be no actual money owed to the CRA, 105 is still expensive, especially to the smaller company. Here are five reasons why.

First, it creates the intangible cost of risk

Canadian Reg 105 is currently poorly understood, even by so-called experts. So even the honest and diligent firm has to work hard to obey it. In my investigations so far, I have had three opinions, two contradicting each other, and the third not agreeing entirely with the others. And the two contradictory views came from the same office of the same Big Four accounting firm! Also, I've seen situations, in other US firms I know who are providing a lot more services to Canada than we currently are, where their clients are as confused as we are. My fellow CEO reports of some clients not applying the 15% haircut at all, others applying it across the board, and still others applying it with no apparent consistency. One even began a particular project by applying the 15% to early payments, but then several months in (perhaps their own advisors finally agreed where mine have yet to do so) they stopped. It should be clear, this is not the clients' fault, nor is it my CEO friend's. Reg 105 is just complicated, it seems. In other words, even once a firm has found what appears to be The Truth, it may still carry the nagging doubt that it may, despite its best efforts, have made a mistake and as a result still be doing something wrong or inefficiently. There are enough risks in business without imprecise government rules adding more.

Second, it can hurt cash flow

Withholding hurts the firm's revenue today, even though it may see that reminded later. And of course that also imposes some cost in the form of lost interest income or increased interest payments.

Third, it costs in the form of more time

Reg 105 means more time is needed for administrative work, thereby hurting the firm's ability to do their actual work; i.e. serving their clients, and in the process building jobs and economies. On its own, each piece of admin overhead like 105 is annoying enough, but it's just another one of a myriad of pieces of such overhead that distract companies from doing the things that result in them making the money in the first place that can then be taxed. Of course Canada is far from alone on this front. The new US 1099 provisions, anyone, or, for very small UK businesses back in the day, the infamous IR35?

Fourth, it costs in the form of money

The regulation may require more money to be paid to advisors. First. the non-Canadian firm may incur costs merely to find out what is going on when they first see a 15% slice coming off their incoming invoice payments. Then, if it is confirmed that Reg 105 is at work, then they may incur costs in deciding whether a waiver application may be in order. If it is, they may incur more costs in getting professional help in applying for one. If a waiver application is not deemed worthwhile, or if it was but it failed nonetheless, they will then begin to incur regular annual costs because they'll have to submit a Canadian tax return to request a refund of the withheld money (i.e. the 15%, which their client will have forwarded on to the CRA). And again, remember, those tax return costs will be incurred even though the non-Canadian firm doesn't actually owe Canada any money. And to understand the significance of these advisory costs, it's important to bear in mind that partly because of 105's of lack of clarity, but also because it has multi-jurisdictional implications, getting advice on this needs advisors who are both good, and have international reach. In practice that means Big Four, and those guys aren't cheap[1]. (And they'll sometimes charge you even when they're learning stuff!). Given that, there is a final particularly nasty risk, the minimization of which would almost certainly require the advice of a big international firm, and which could be non-trivial in cost. And that risk is:

Fifth, ouch!

Consider the following scenario (very simplified to keep us all awake):

A particular non-Canadian firm is, for various reason, not liable for Canadian tax, but is liable to pay the withholding (and then reclaim it)
They don't realize this and fail to pay the withholding (of course neither do they reclaim anything)
Five years later they are audited, and two things are decided. First, the foreign firm is, as they thought all along, not liable for Canadian tax. But second, they were liable to pay withholding.
The CRA demands the unpaid withhold, even though they acknowledge that no tax was ever due. After all, rules are rules and even though everyone knows the foreign firm is going to apply for a full refund, the payment must first be made
So the firm pays the withhold
And then they apply for the refund
Remember, they were not liable for any Canadian tax whatsoever
The CRA refuses the refund. The reason is that there is a statutory limit on the length of time in which certain reclaims may be applied for. And in this case, the limit is three years, and we're now two years past that limit.

The end result is that the CRA gets to keep a portion of tax to which they were never entitled, and that's because they allow themselves more than three years to get it but allow the victim only three years in which to reclaim it. Now if they're lucky, the non-Canadian firm may find a reciprocity treaty allows them to reclaim the money from their own country's tax authorities. But I suspect that is unlikely. Their own tax people would, I'd bet, express sympathy but point out that the firm does indeed owe the tax in the home country (i.e. not in Canada, as confirmed by the audit), and the fact that the CRE has the money is a bug in Canada's reclaim mechanism, and has nothing to do with whether the firm owes their home country tax. OK, that's not all exactly true. I'd be willing to concede it's unlikely that the firm's home country tax people would express any sympathy...

[1] FWIW, the biggest hourly rate I've seen from the Big Four firm we use is over $2,000/hr -- yes, that's two thousand dollars an hour. It was some some kind of Senior Intercontinental Ballistic Executive Partner. She popped into a conference call (for only 15 minutes, thank goodness!) with some of the minions and goblins she'd assigned to work with us. Incidentally, the bill rates I've seen for Big Four Minions and Goblins are in the order of $650/hr and $450/hr respectively. But I'm based in Austin, which is why they're so cheap...

Clouds of EDA

2011-06-08T00:21:00.000-05:00

Todays DAC panel session on EDA and Cloud Computing was interesting and the ensuing discussion was fairly lively (I'm speaking relatively of course. it's a conference of chip design geeks; how lively do you think it could ever get?) But while cries of "The Cloud, The Cloud, My Kingdom for The Cloud" are all very well, I'm only going to get excited when I see some important enabling technology show its face first. Here are four:

Mobile apps. This is really what Cloud computing is all about. Sure you get to stuff your stuff up on Amazon, somewhere in, well, in the Cloud. But it's how you interact with it when it's up there that's important. You have a LinkedIn app on your iPhone? Or a DropBox one on your iPad? Well, you'll want a Regression Dashboard one too.
Data Visualization Technology. It's already bad enough trying to wade through a jillion lines of plaintext logfile coming off one or two or five simulations. Imagine what it's going to look like when you have five thousand simulations running in parallel, the log outputs combining into a flood. I'm not just looking for a glorified grep I can run during a boring DAC talk (the Cloud one wasn't boring). We need new ways to look at and in other ways analyze simulation data. We don't, for the most part, know how to do that yet. People like Edward Tufte might. We should ask him. (Here at Verilab we already sent one of the team to do exactly that.)
Virtualization. Partly because the chip design environment is so heterogeneous (lots of different things as opposed to lots of things-the-same), partly because the EDA tools are not always as well-behaved citizens of the GNU/Linux environments in which the live as we'd like, and partly because it's not easy making a large number of GNU/Linux boxes behave in a sane and stable way anyway, the last thing we want to do is in anything like a manual fashion try to configure five thousand in-the-cloud servers so they are ready to run big chip sims. One way to solve this is to rely on virtual machines which are then cloned and farmed out to the farm.
Much *much* more robust GNU/Linux configuration. Even with the help of virtualization, that merely helps the scaling, You need a stable system in the first place. Unfortunately GNU/Linux sysadmin is often treated as little more than a glorified (if that) backup-tape-changing, email-fixing job. Its not. If we compare looking after GNU/Linux systems in a chip engineering environment to looking after financial systems, then too often GNU/Linux admin is barely at the level of book-keeping. What it should be compared to is the role of the sophisticated M&A specialist, or investment quant. The GNU/Linux infrastructure needed to design and verify a modern SoC is a significant piece of engineering in its own right, and it needs a significant piece of engineering brain power to run it. Every chip team worth its salt needs such a large-brained sysadmin. Verilab has one. If you don't, go get one. If you don't know what one looks like, ask me and I'll tell you. But a clue: if your guys aren't running Puppet, or something similar, ask why.

Of course there's more to it than even that. We'll want FaceBook "Like" buttons next to simulation output displays, and the ability to retweet a successful regression will be cool too. All of this is why, unlike what one questioner suggested at this evening's panel, "The Cloud" is much more than the same simple build-versus-buy decision we've contemplated for years. No; done right, Cloud-based EDA -- Cloud-based anything -- will be a game changer. Why else would Big Brother Steve be so excited about it, and Brother Richard so not?

Programming as Soulcraft

2011-06-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

I'm always looking for "proxies for greatness" in potential new members of the Verilab team. It can take some time to find out if someone is good, because in the end "good" in this context means something like "consistently delivering desired results", and you can only see that over time. But there are clues early on that a person may be, or may become, good. Those are the P'sforG.

One is mentioned by philosopher-turned-mechanic, Matthew Crawford in his "Shop Class as Soulcraft". In chapter eight, "The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional" he tells the story "Of Madness, a Magna, and Metaphysics" in which he takes on the task of bringing back to life an old and neglected-by-underuse 1983 Honda Magna V45. A key part of the repair was fixing the clutch hydraulics.

As he burrows in through the layers of grease and grime, he encounters a suspicious oil seal that he suspects is the culprit. But he can't be sure without a lot of extra work. This triggers a debate within himself as to the sense of digging into that oil seal when he knows he can perform a reasonable if temporary fix by simply focusing on the slave cylinder:

"It occurred to me that the best decision would be to forget I'd ever seen the ambiguously buggered oil seal. With a freshly rebuilt slave cylinder, the clutch worked fine. Even if my idle speculation about the weeping oil seal causing the failure of the slave cylinder was right, so what? It would take quite a while for the problem to reappear, and who knows if this guy would still own the bike by then. If it is not likely to be his problem, I shouldn't make it my problem."

Note that he's not idly trying to avoid work. His concern is for the client (who'll have to pay for the extra work), and for sheer economic sense in to the bargain. But there's more at work here than simple economics:

"But as I walked back into the fluorescent brightness of the shop, I wasn't thinking about the owner, only about the bike. I just couldn't let that oil seal go. The compulsion was setting in, and I did little to resist it."

It's that word "compulsion" that intrigues me. Only sentences later he mentions it again:

"There is something perverse at work here, and I would like to understand it. The oil seal was the opening to Pandora's box: I felt compelled to get to the bottom of things, to gape them open and clean them out. "

Not money, not because the boss or client wants it. A compulsion, and thinking only about the bike. I agree with him; it's perverse, and I too would like to understand it. And his inner conflict, and outright guilt at the perversity of it is clear:

"But this lust for thoroughness is at odds with the world of human concerns in which the bike is situated, where all that matters is that the bike works... [The] more ... pragmatic view of the motorcycle ... grounds the fiduciary responsibility of the mechanic to the owner. In digging at that oil seal needlessly, I was acting out of some need of my own."

But if he didn't intend to be ironic there, he should have. And that's my point. It is the very compulsion he demonstrates that I believe is a Proxy For Greatness. I see it (and its sad opposite, a robotic lack of compulsion) all around in software.

The Proxy -- the sign you may be standing in the presence of programming greatness, or the potential for it -- is the tendency in some individuals to write clean, well-nigh poetic code not because it's useful (although it usually is) or reusable (ditto) but because they cannot *not* write such code. They are compelled to do so. They avoid, where possible, writing the same lines of code in more than one place not because a coding standard tells them not to, but because they are compelled to be succinct. Saying the same thing twice is icky -- it *feels* bad. Or they look on existing code, and cannot help but notice that those four "different" functions are really the same function. The itch to refactor develops, and may well become irresistible.

The correlation is not 100%. There are potentially fine programmers out there who don't have this instinct but can learn it. And I've met a few who go too far to the extreme, sacrificing all real concerns for an elusive platonic form of every program. But I reckon it's a very strong predictor. And I'd recommend erring on the side of too much of it than too little.

Verilab is hiring that kind of people in the field of chip verification. If you're looking for a place where Programming as Soulcraft is appreciated, where the beauty of a solution is part of its merit, and where you would be part of an elite team who understand the compulsion to Just Do It Right, give us a call.

Egnyte - update

2011-05-27T17:59:00.000-05:00

So, a local person (well, US) called me. Turns out the latest local cloud client is busting something on Mac SnowLeopard. They gave me an older version and I'm now in action. Now I can start comparing.

Egnyte versus DropBox, or, No You Can't Login To My Machine With GotoMeeting!

2011-05-27T17:07:00.008-05:00

Sorry but this isn't a comparison. If you want a comparison, go somewhere else for now. It might become a comparison, but it can't yet be one because Egnyte has fallen at the first fence.

The story so far. After quite a bit of diligence and analysis, and looking at lots of options, we settled a year or so ago on Dropbox for Teams for my company. I had a whole list of requirements but the primary ones were:

Fast local access to files (no having to download them from websites)
A regular folder-view of the local files, so my non-techie users felt at home
Secure in transmission and secure in storage

DropBox does all that, but there are a few things that I wish were different. I wish:

There was an option to lock files on the local copies so that you had to explicitly unlock before editing. That would give conflict resolution. DropBox isn't completely clueless in this respect, and it tends to "fail" safely by letting you know there has been a conflict (and giving you copies of the file in question). But it doesn't prevent conflict
There was finer-grained access control. For now it's an all-or-nothing control at any given shared folder (and children). I cannot give you access to: A, A/B, A/C but not A/D; while giving someone else access to A, A/B, A/D but not A/C. The workaround is to think carefully about your top level folder arrangements, but finer grained controls would be better.
You could have multiple DropBox accounts on a single machine. Many of my team have personal DB accounts, but also need access to our DB for teams account. Not easily done.

But despite those things, DB is pretty awesome. We use it constantly, and I like it.

But one thing arose today that made me go revisit Egnyte, which was one of our shortlisted candidates when we first looked about. I don't think we every disqualified it, we just had to make a decision and I went for DB. But today I found myself wanting to share a large file with someone outside the company who did not have a DropBox account (or a Google Docs account, which would have been an alternative). Asking on a local business support group I received the following advice (thanks Paul):

"We use www.egnyte.com as our cloud server and then can share files with end clients with links that require login, expire after X clicks, or expire after X days."

That got me interested enough to re-visit Egnyte and I noticed a bunch of other things that DB doesn't have. It appears to have the fine grained access control I'd like. Also it has lock-modify-unlock. Tasty. Now I don't know if it allows multiple accounts per machine -- I'm going to guess it doesn't. But if we used Egnyte for business, everyone could happily continue to use their own DB accounts for their personal stuff.

So, rather than faff about with lots more reading I thought I'd go for a 15 day free trial of the "Pro" edition. I'll mess with it for a days, then let some of my team play. If we like it, cool. If not, no loss. The sign up and install seemed to be fine. I now have web access. But the local disk access is vital, so I downloaded the client and got it installed on my Mac. And the problems begin. Throughout the process I have only ever provided one password, so when I was sent to a web page to set my local cloud preferences and was asked for a password, I used that one password. I got the following message, "Change password to match Cloud File Server. Please re-authenticate."

Now exactly what does that mean? Does it mean that it wants me to change the password? Why? To what? I have only one password (and it works on the main Egnyte site). And what is the cryptic note below the "Save" button? And yes while I'd like some answers, wouldn't it just be better if the errors meant something to a normal user?

So it gets more frustrating. If I click on that "Contact Support" icon at the top right, I stay stuck on the page. In fact if I click on anything on that page I stay stuck there. Apparently you can't get support about not being able to login unless you are able to login.

Nest step, I find a phone number for support and call them. Couple of menu button presses and I'm at technical support. A message suggests I may want to raise an email support ticket (which they say may be faster) but I'm thinking this should be a ten-seconds-to-fix problem, so I decide to wait for a human.

I wait. The opening bars of "Morning Mood" from Grieg's Peer Gynt waft plaintively over my phone, which I have on speaker in case it takes them a few minutes to get to me.

I wait. I notice that their on-hold music is *only* the opening bars -- the first four to be precise.

I wait, and wait, and ... ah! You can always tell when you're about to get through because the on-hold music tends to step and you'll hear a phone ringing. My internal Pavlovian response is always a giddy, "It's my turn! It's my turn!".

But no, not this time. After a couple of rings, we're back to Morning Mood. First four bars. Again, and again, and again.

5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. The frustration builds. Not only does the phone keep ringing, tantalizing me that maybe this time I'm through, but I am driven nuts by the lack of progression on what I used to, until now, consider a delightful melody. Curse you Egnyte phone system! Who would have known what solace, what relief, what homecoming Grieg had built into that 8th bar. It may be that his genius is only fully appreciated when you experience the mounting despair at being deprived of the precious B, G#, F# sequence and instead repeatedly get fed bloody bar 4 instead!

18 minutes. Right! That's it! I mail their "support" begging for a phone call. Simultaneously I get an email from one of their customer satisfaction people. So I copy him too.

19 minutes.
20 minutes.

The phone rings! It's a (650) area code, so it looks like the customer experience dude himself has come to my aid. Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! But no. Oh, no. What I've experienced thus far is a mere taster for the despondency I am about to face.

Now let me pause to make one thing clear. No, two things. First, I am a foreigner with a funny accent. Second, I have nothing against Indians, and in fact some of my guys are from India and they're as smart as they come.

But when I heard that accent on the phone, my heart fell. Why, because I knew -- I could feel it in my support-line-wearied bones -- I knew I was almost certainly facing a Script Follower. And how did I know that -- from hearing the Indian accent? I'll tell you why.

Companies do not outsource support work to India because although it is not cheap, it is world class.

No.

Companies outsource support work to India because although it is not necessarily world class, it is cheap.

Now careful here of taking that through a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and inferring that India implies low quality. This has nothing to do with India or Indian workers. It has everything to do with American (and European) companies saying one thing about support ("It's important") and doing another ("Is it crap."). In other words:

Companies outsource support work to cheap places because they don't really give a shit about support.

Anyway, I gave up very quickly as the support dude requested that I let him access my machine using GotoMeeting to solve the problem. I don't have a problem with that in principle. I don't think he's going to drop some trojan on me and then steal my stuff. In fact I think it and things like it are a fine way to provide certain kinds of support. But, acchhhh, I just cannae be bothered. I don't have time for that kind of thing. I'd already been on the bloomin' phone for 20 minutes, all I wanted was to hear someone who was sufficiently knowledgeable they didn't need a script. Fulfill that requirement (and speak English at least as intelligibly as I do -- not hard). Exactly where they live is not a concern of mine.

So, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Charge me more money people and stop relying on low-grade scripted people to fix stuff. Money is not the only thing I think about; the more you share my priorities, the more likely I'll buy your stuff.

Annoyances

2011-05-06T00:20:00.001-05:00

The swapping of positions of "Open Link in New Tab" and "Open Link in New Window" in the right-click context menu in Firefox 4.0.

Recently created documents in the PDF "Open" standard that can only be opened in Adobe's reader, and only in the latest version of that, at that.

The fact that MS Office's installer in OS X is too stupid to kill OS X's software updater despite the updater being smart enough to start the installer in the first place. (It's not the fact that the installer can't handle it per se -- it's the "Sheesh, would you shut down the updater already!" way it sounds like it's blaming you for the problem.)

Crappy little services companies

2011-04-25T06:42:00.005-05:00

Verilab is eleven years old (plus or minus a few weeks). Happy Birthday To Us.

The three of us started the whole shebang at the top of one of the slopes at Heavenly in Tahoe, in March/April 2000. It was just as NASDAQ began its (first) bubble-bursting dive. The timing is so close I've wondered occasionally if we were the pin that did the bursting.

And from day one I have had a single, simple, consistent vision for our services company. It is, *I* think anyway, exactly what a company vision should be: an "artist's impression" of where you want to go. It's meant to inspire. It's meant to help others to, well, to envision of course. And it's meant to have some poetry to it, some music, some pomp and circumstance; even a soupçon of pretentiousness. Not for vision, the day to day practicality of "goals" and "objectives". Even the longer term aspirations of "mission" are still too mundane. Vision should uplift, and challenge, and maybe scare. And if it makes the onlookers a tad worried at the sanity of the visionary, all the better.

Perhaps most important of all, the vision should invoke the Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor Effect. It should make you go "Ar Ar ARRR!".

It should convey the message -- no, the feeling -- that what we're doing is worth doing; a good fight to be fought; a race worth running, an Alamo worth defending; a K2 worth climbing or dying trying. A man's game[1]!

My vision for Verilab is to build:

"The McKinsey of VLSI".

Now I've learned over the years that my particular choice of white shoe firm sometimes poses a problem in high tech geekdom since half the people the analogy is intended to speak to have never even heard of McKinsey & Co! (And of course the recent allegations concerning Rajat Gupta haven't helped.) But I stick with my choice.

The analogy with McKinsey tugs at several heart strings, but front and centre is that the craft of professional services is not simply one to which failed product startup wannabes go to die (or pay their mortgages). It's a reminder that the list of "professional services organizations" includes such illustrious members as: the Institute For Advanced Study and The Academy, the Bolshoi and the Vienna Philharmonic, and even the British SAS and the US Navy SEALs.

But if you want something a little more down to earth, here's a recent good article (thanks JL) on why crappy little services companies aren't always so crappy or so little.

[1] Over the years, some of our best engineers have been women.

That Pesky Gregorian Calendar

2011-04-13T07:12:00.001-05:00

I've hired a new Director of Operations and Finance, to allow me to unload the myriad of day to day operational management tasks and let me focus more on our strategic growth. We're still very much in hand-over stage though, so there are lots of wee bits and pieces that make sense for me to finish off. One is the small matter of our credit card statement date.

We run largely paperless, mainly because we're so distributed internationally. A combination of Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners and DropBox and an increasingly honed scanning/naming/filing process makes everything smooth and efficient. Receipts for purchases made on our company credit cards is an example. We've finally converged on the following process.

Each time a purchase is made, paper receipts scanned, and soft receipts are printed to PDF (I'm also experimenting with the iPhone JotNot app as a way of being able to do the scan at the point of purchase). Each receipt is then filed in a DropBox folder that is shared with finance. There is a folder per month -- something like this (simplified for this post):

<path to DropBox>/credit-card/disbursements/<YYYY>-<MM>/

and the file is named something like this:

<date>_<amount>_<vendor>.pdf

where:

<date> takes the form YYYY-MM-DD
<amount> takes the form NNNNNN.NN where the part to the left of the decimal is always 6 characters, leading digits being replaced by the "-" character to pad. For example:

2011-04-05_---450.00_expedia.pdf
2010-12-23_--1245.56_toysrus.pdf

The result is that in every monthly folder you get a nice list of receipts, where the dates and amounts all line up. It makes for quick and easy statement reconciliation at the end of each month.

The problem is, one of our credit card companies does not, and now I am told cannot, provide calendar month statements. So there are always going to be receipts at the start of the month and the end of the month that for reconciliation purposes (which is the primary purpose) are in the wrong folder.

As far as I'm aware, they are the only one of our umpteen financial institutions, across four countries and two continents that cannot provide calendar-month statements. Sigh.

Trying to cancel MozyPro - part 5 of 6

2011-04-12T20:01:00.001-05:00

They got back to me with an email to confirm my account has been closed. I'm calling this 5 of 6 though because I'm waiting until the next billing date to make sure no money comes off my credit card.

Trying to cancel MozyPro - part 4 of 6

2011-04-12T09:43:00.003-05:00

Second email sent to my "Account Manager" asking that she confirm my account is now cancelled.

Trying to cancel MozyPro - part 3 of 6

2011-04-12T07:30:00.001-05:00

Well it's now Tuesday and I've not yet heard nothing back from the "please close my account" email I sent to my Mozy "Account Manager" sent on Saturday. Also, I forgot to mention, when I sent her the email, I Cc'ed "support@mozy.com". That Cc resulted in the following bounce message from invalidsupportrequest@mozy.com:

> You have emailed an unmonitored mailbox. For technical assistance with a
>
> Mozy product, please visit our Support Portal.
>
> United States: http://mozy.com/support
> France: http://mozy.fr/support
> Germany: http://mozy.de/support
> Ireland: http://mozy.ie/support
> United Kingdom: http://mozy.co.uk/support
>
> All other countries may access the Mozy Support Portal in English at
> http://mozy.com/support
>
> Thank you,
> Mozy

Trying to cancel MozyPro - part 2 of 6

2011-04-09T11:54:00.001-05:00

OK, had a quick conversation with the support guy. He located my account from my email address and had to inform me that, "This is the kind of account that I cannot cancel here. It has to be done by a sales representative and unfortunately they're not here at the weekend."

I mentioned that I had already mailed someone (the person who had called me recently) and requested cancellation. When I asked if that would be sufficient he said it would. So let's wait until next week and we'll see.

Just before he answered the call and I began documenting stuff on this blog, I had found something official-looking about canceling MozyPro (as opposed to the personal Mozy). It's here and the crucial part is this:

To permanently close the account, you must open a case with support...

It then goes on to explain how to open such a case. But that therefore appears to contradict the reassurance I just got from the phone guy about how my email to the sales gal would be sufficient.

And then, this just in. I just received an email from Mozy Support telling me that "Your recent Support case #00220118 regarding "Cancel account" has been closed....". Now call me Mr Picky but if that's referring to my phone call then it's not remotely closed.

The email also requested, "Because we value your feedback, I would like to invite you to take our short Customer Satisfaction Survey...". Hmm. I wonder how that's going to go for them.

More as I hear it.

Trying to cancel MozyPro - part 1 of 6

2011-04-09T11:43:00.002-05:00

We've been using MozPro for backups for a few years ago. But in fact we haven't actually made use of it, so I've decided to cancel and stop paying the $70-odd a month. Apparently this is easier said than done.

First I logon to our account and look for the usual suspects, "My Account", "Billing" and so on. But none of those have the desired button or link to "Cancel My Account".

Next, I go to their help system and try searching there. I search for "delete account" and "cancel account", but nothing useful appears.

OK, so it's already vaguely worrying, but let's check Google. I search for the same kinds of things but while I don't turn up anything actually telling me how to cancel, I find several posts on forums describing the very problem I'm having. For example here, and here. Now in fact I do find a couple of items describing a method for closing the account. For example here. The problem is, those instructions don't seem to apply to my account. They talk about selecting something called "My Profile" but no such thing exists on my account. Then I realize that those are instructions for Mozy, and not explicitly for MozyPro. Apparently there's a difference. Or something.

Then I realize, hang on, if I'm MozyPro then I'm paying and in which case surely there must be some kind of superior support line I could call. I did receive some recent emails from an account manager "checking on our needs" so maybe there's something there. Sure enough, I find a 24x7 support line and a support code I can use.

So, I'm on that line now. Have been for ... <checking>...13:57 minutes. Ah, someone has just answered!

Cost is not my only concern

2011-02-23T10:37:00.000-06:00

[This just after a phone call to my allegedly North American payroll provider who it turns out has a support center in Mauritius.]

To everyone running customer support lines, please take heed. I am willing to spend more money in order to speak to someone who:

Speaks English natively, or at very least very fluently
In an accent I can understand clearly[1]
On a phone line, and from a location, that doesn't result in their voice being distorted

In many things, you get what you pay for, and I'd like to pay for better. Please take my money and give me what I'm looking for.

[1] I accept that this probably disqualifies me and other Glaswegians. AhvNaeProblemWiThat.

Contrarianism

2011-02-21T19:09:00.000-06:00

When I was younger, if there was significant disagreement between two book reviewers, either one or both had to be wrong. There was no room for opinion. These days though, I find it fascinating to look at Amazon reviews and see five star gushes on the one hand, and one star death sentences on the other. How can the same book look so different to different people? It's, as I say, fascinating. And so when I offer opinions on two things -- an author, and a podcaster -- know that others may take the opposite view.

First, Seth Godin. I don't get him, or the fuss. About a year ago I read his "The Dip". I cannot fathom why anyone would see it as anything more than the following statement:

When the going gets tough you should push through; except when you shouldn't.

And now I've just finished reading "Linchpin". Ostensibly about what makes people indispensable, it looked like a useful addition to my list of readings about how to build a world class team. But to be honest, I have no idea what it was about. At least I could give a single sentence review of "The Dip". But "Linchpin" is just ... I mean, it's full of ... it's kinda like .... Shrug. Honest to god, it conveyed pretty much zero meaning to me.

And then there's Merlin Mann. Known primarily for his 43folders website, here I'm talking only about his "Back To Work" podcast. I just forced myself to listen to the entire first episode. To begin with it was actually to hear what he had to say. I tapped my fingers impatiently, waiting for the core content to begin: a minute or two, or five. Ten. Half an hour. By the time I got to 45 minutes I was just hanging on in disbelief to confirm that there never was any substantial content. And there wasn't -- not a thing. If BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" is a laser, then "Back To Work" is a blob of cold porridge in an old sock. No, it makes no sense to me either.

Now I don't know Merlin or Seth. But the vibe I picked up (it's all I picked up) from the "Linchpin" is that Godin is a very nice man. And I have no reason to believe that Mann is any different. So I have nothing against either of them. But they either both are full of hot air, or they are speaking a language I don't yet understand. For the sake of humanity and civility, I'm going to conclude the latter. But anyone else had the same experience?

Shiny shiny

2011-02-09T08:21:00.000-06:00

I am very very busy.
My time is valuable.
I will not look into using Julien's newly-announced org-contacts

I will not look into using Julien's newly-announced org-contacts

I will not ...

Whence programming greatness?

2011-01-07T07:54:00.000-06:00

http://xkcd.com/844/

In programming -- probably in almost any creative field (Oh; how radical! Programming is creative! It's not just a modern form of manufacturing!?) -- technology is kinda important, so is that ethereal thing known as methodology. But towering over them in importance is people-ology. In fact, my primary itch in running a consulting firm is trying to dig into that idea, with implications such as "I'll take the best people, and mediocre programming tools and languages, you take the cool tools and languages and average people, and I Will Kick Your Bottom" (and spend less money). I spend a large part of my thinking time trying to develop answers to the following four questions:

What are we trying to build? It's such an obvious question, I think sometimes we forget to ask it. Just what does an excellent person look like at any given stage in their development? What does their work product -- code, writing, effect on others -- look like?
What are the pre-requisites? I reckon that some of the things that make for a superb programmer must already be in place at a young age. If you don't have those, I can't give them to you. (Nor would you want me to, since they're probably fairly basic aspects of character.) This is getting into the "10,000 hours of deliberate practice" stuff. But I need more detail. As Geoff Colvin explains in Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, 10,000 hours is merely the penultimate rung (the final one being the attainment of greatness itself) in a multi-rung ladder to performance. Achieving 10K hours itself, depends on passion. Passion, in turn, depends on a degree of confidence that the goal being sought is achievable (otherwise no one is going to go through the pain and suffering of the 10K hours in the first place). And even confidence isn't the bottom line.
What are proxies for (potential) greatness? The best way I know to see if someone is, or could become, really good is to work with them for at least a year -- longer if they're just fresh from university -- and see what they produce. But an internship is measured in only weeks or months, and those are only useful for youngsters. If I'm hiring an allegedly experienced person, using a normal selection process -- interviews and stuff -- then my time is going to be measured in only hours or days. Now it may be that there's no good answer here other than the "work with them for a year and see" approach. But even if that's true, I'd still like some early indicators -- things I can spot in some kind of interview process -- that I may be onto a good thing. And just asking some cute puzzles is not, I think, enough.
How do we amplify? So, we've agreed on what we're building, we know what a candidate has to bring to the table, and we've figured out a way of spotting it. Trouble is, the difference between a bright-but-inexperienced youngster (or even an experienced person but from a non-consulting job) on the one hand, and a battle-hardened Verilab consultant on the other is very large. So what do we do to turn potential into actual? Well, if "training" -- at least in the usual sense we mean it in Europe and North America -- is much more than about 10% of this answer, I'll be surprised. For various reasons, the education systems of said continents are substantially clueless when it comes to the challenge of taking high-potential technical youngsters, and turning them into high-actual technical professionals (in the best but rarely intended sense of that last word). Fixing that is probably the single best way to improve new product development the world over.

At first sight I guess those are statements of the blindingly obvious. But, as Feynman probably never said, "if you think you understand how to build greatness, you don't understand how to build greatness".