Search, indexing, and automated relevance is hard. It's often not worth the effort to shoot at better and miss.

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Why Everyone Uses Google is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

One of my favorite music players, cubed, has all sorts of interesting browsing abilities, but most off them are dependent on album art. The developer is flat-out against simple lists off music that you click through. His fans finally convinced him to add a list-driven menu. He named this theme Boring.

If you don't find that funny, then android might not be for you.

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Android's Community Personality is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

And other times, it's evidence that people want lots and lots and lots of graphs available to them.

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Ghostery and Tracking is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

Taken from the demo version of Dungeons.

Possible left and right values:

• baby cooing — sous chef cursing
• engineering functional specification — marketing brochure
• politician speech — government budget meeting
• end user license agreement — donut receipt
• post-coital pillowtalk — marriage breakup

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Language Slide Bar is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

These screenshots were taken at 12:40pm today. This first one is of Logan Airport's status.

Ignore the sorting. The airport is aware that all of Delta's flights have been canceled for the remainder of the day.

Here's what Delta's page is showing at that same moment:

Note:

1. Status of each flight that was supposed to depart today: Past Schedule
2. 1:30 flight and all subsequent flights today are still accepting reservations. Despite being cancelled.

I've been watching over the course of the day, and what happens is that when the wallclock time passes each intended departure time, that "Book>" button becomes "Past Schedule".

What are the primary purposes of the Delta website? Book flights and check status of flights.

You know what does work on their webpage? Most everything, but most amusing: their blog — most recent entry: "Connect With Your Facebook Friends In-Flight!" Or at the terminal, because if you book a flight or go to the airport today, that's where you'll be.

So how does a website get this broken? I'm guessing: no internal users. The communications worker has to look at every blog post. The HR department has to verify that each job listing is what they expect. But nobody at Delta is using their website to check flights. The nice customer service representative at the airport is using some internal interface — always works. The phone representative is using a similar, internal system as well. Because these people simply could not do their job if this were their tool.

Testing, validation, internal customers. Get as many of your own people to use your product as possible. Keep that use going. It's your best source of information, because you'll know even before you get a bug report whether something is broken.

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Primary Goals and Internal Customers is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

Details matter.

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Details Matter is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

I also read about how some iPhone developers have a hard time because Apple keeps their garden tended, and gardening takes time and effort. Meanwhile, I'm glad that LevelUp studio can just update his incredible Plume twitter app as often as he wants–which is often, because he's aggressively trying to be the best at what he does.

Having said that, it's also good to laugh at the weeds that appear in the android market:

http://www.appbrain.com/app/the-handwarmer/com.handwarmer

I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't see such an app in the iPhone store. Unless the goal was to sell more hardware.

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Weeds in the Android Garden is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

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Out of Touch Buffer is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

When I want to learn about current web technology and design? Websites and web-derived authors: Smashing Magazine. A List Apart. Net Tuts. A Book Apart.

Current events apart from the day-to-day headlines? Atlantic Magazine.

When I have to give a big presentation at work? Books. I purchase and read Confessions of a Public Speaker. (Great book!)

Games. Movies. Relationships. Parenting. Economics. Finances. Politics. Philosophy. Career. Programming. Fitness. Design. Gardening.

Books. Blogs. Forums. Websites. Twitter. Magazines. Op-eds. Essays. The Boston Metro that someone just put down in the Red Line.

And that doesn't count undirected reading of the random and interesting corners of the internet.

And then to relax? Fiction.

All reading. Read, read, read.

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Words, Words, Words is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.

This is a review of the books Old Man's War, Ghost Brigade, Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale, all by John Scalzi. There isn't an official name of the series, but people refer to it as the Old Man series.

I guess I'm a tourist science fiction reader, in that I still care about things like characterization and plot. I can certainly enjoy explosions and melodrama, and big ideas about the human condition are always welcome, but sometimes I want to sit down with a real meal. I want it all. For me, this series is a full, enjoyable meal.

Scalzi mentions Heinlein in the acknowledgements of his Old Man's War, crediting Starship Troopers as an ancestor to his novel. Starship Troopers was a great, bold vision — hard and wondrous right up until the book sits the reader down in a desk and delivers a lengthy treatise on service, sacrifice, duty, and citizenship, excerpted here:

But duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.

This is virtually every character interaction in the book, with stand-in questions filling the gaps like a 1950s instructional movie. ("Gee, Mr. Simon, that's really interesting. Can you tell me more?") I remember that bit above as being part of a forty-page-long lecture, although I'm sure it wasn't that long. You simply can't get away with that anymore. People overlook that style now because at the time, you couldn't get the good parts (the big ideas) of the book anywhere else. Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four have similar screeds embedded, as did non-genre books of the time, and so all end up in the same category: brilliant, but you must be aware of the era it was written in. The craft of fiction has moved on, and unless you're willing to couch your experience in the appreciation of art history, you probably won't like it.

Which brings me back to Scalzi. His prose is smooth, his characters flawed and multidimensional, and his content is on par with the good parts of Heinlein. He's not overdone and literary, doesn't lecture, and is sneaky-smart. The first three lines of Old Man's War:

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Wastes no time.

While I'm thinking about the issues of identity, service, relationships, longevity, and more, I also care about these characters. I don't know if this is the best of what current speculative fiction has to offer — I haven't read enough — but they are exactly what I want.

The subsequent books in the series continue to challenge conceptually while being eminently readable. These aren't traditional sequels, as sequels tend to follow the same characters through a repeated cycle of the first story (Die Hard 2), or are a grand arc (Lord of the Rings) broken into multiple books. The Old Man books follow the story of a future humanity, and while the organizations and enemies persist, there's no single "main character" of the series. Each book stands alone, and with every additional book, I had my expectations challenged in an ultimately pleasant way. I enjoyed Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony as much as Old Man's War.

The only book of the series that didn't work for me was Zoe's Tale. It's not an original story, but a parallel telling of Last Colony from a minor character's point of view. Zoe is a teenager, and Scalzi captures the insecurity and teenage model of thought very well. I just wish it were to a greater end; the plot follows the framework of Last Colony perfectly, with little or no deviation, which ended up reducing my enthusiasm. I kept waiting to find out how this tied into the greater story, or have the events of the other book cast into a different light, but that moment never came. This novel very much had the feeling of bonus features on a dvd that you never quite get around to watching. I wonder if it's just that the book paled in comparison to the others.

That exception aside, I very much enjoyed this series. I could stop thinking about his craft and just enjoy the ride, and I thought about the stories and characters after I finished each book. These are great books. I hope that Scalzi writes more in this series.

Amazon Affiliate Links:

Old Man's War (hardcopy) | Old Man's War (kindle)

The Ghost Brigades (hardcopy) | The Ghost Brigades (kindle)

The Last Colony (hardcopy) | The Last Colony (kindle)

Zoe's Tale (hardcopy) | Zoe's Tale (kindle)

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Review of "Old Man series" by John Scalzi is a post from spaceponies by Clint Howarth.