Back in the early 90s, computers were not popular in China. Our school had only one Apple II computer and a dozen of its clones. I was lucky enough to be able to use that Apple II. It was the first computer I have used and it was the best memory I can recall now about my elementary school. Thank you, Steve.

Steve did not only redefine computers, or music players, or phones, or tablets. Most importantly, he redefined how people interact with technologies, which is fundamental to every consumer product. To improve technologies is hard, but to make them easy to use is even harder. Many people didn’t realize it; Steve did, and he proved it by Apple’s huge success.

A while ago, a Chinese press company was recruiting people to translate Steve’s bio. I wanted to participate and thus translated his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech into Chinese. I love every piece of that speech. I eventually gave up, because I didn’t have time to do it at all. I wish I could have done it…

San Diego was gloomy and rainy today, which is very very rare. It turned out to be a really sad day indeed. I cannot believe that I’m so deeply affected by a person’s death who I haven’t even met. RIP, Steve Jobs. You did what you wanted to – change the world with what you have created, but that’s just a part of your achievement. More importantly, you have influenced and inspired a lot of people, and I’m certainly one of them. Thank you!

We put a card and candles in front of a nearby Apple Store. RIP, Steve.

Startups should focus on really bold ideas. They might fail, but at least if they win, they’ll be big/impactful.

The exact same thing applies to doing research.

First, I think the key is seamless integration with the two operating system upgrades. By “seamless”, I meant SEAMLESS. The user should not need to do much additional planning or configuration in order to store their stuff in iCloud. For example, I want to use iTune as how I do it today even if the content lives in iCloud. iPhoto and iMovie are two other examples. Seamless integration with iPhoto means that I import pictures from camera and iPhoto does the rest to talk to iCloud automatically. Then I can pick some pictures to make a gallery or send to my friends. Simple like this.

Second, iCloud will first focus on storing media purchased from the iTune store, like music, movies or TV shows. One obvious benefit is to encourage people buy more from the iTune store. Moreover, storing purchases from the iTune store actually does not bring much additional storage to Apple’s data center. But the bottom line is that iCloud will provide no less than what MobileMe can do today.

Third, iCloud will emphasize more on sync across multiple devices, less on backup. So I don’t think iCloud will work like a full disk back up tool, such as CrashPlan. It will still work more like iDisk or DropBox. However, that’s bad, because it means users need to make plans, i.e., they need to think about which files to put in local disk and which files to put in iCloud. Let’s see what Apple will come up with to make it easier.

Forth, iCloud will emphasize more on sharing, less on collaboration. I don’t think collaboration is a huge focus today for personal computing, but sharing is. But again, sharing would become even easier if iCloud seamlessly works with two new OS upgrades.

Will iCloud be only about storage in cloud or also computation in cloud? This will be very interesting. For example, if iMovie stores data in iCloud, can they do the movie rendering also in iCloud instead of on local machine? I don’t think the first release of iCloud will do this, but it’s something to expect in the future.

Last but not the least, iCloud will not be completely free. I think it will be free for purchases from iTune and a small amount of storage for a little bit of other things. Users will need to pay for additional storage or features. But I wish it will be cheaper than how much MobileMe costs today ($99/year), which is too steep.

Can’t wait for Jobs’ keynote!

Percentage of buggy commits (bars) and total number of commits (circles) versus time-of-day in Linux Kernel

I recently come across an interesting paper talking about social characteristics of buggy commits – “Do Time of Day and Developer Experience Affect Commit Bugginess?” It checks buggy commits from two open source projects, Linux and PostgreSQL, and digs out some interesting findings.

The first thing it finds is that when developers commit code matters. As the above picture shows, commits made around mid-night have higher buggy rate, especially changes made right after mid-night. Maybe people just rush to commit something before going to bed. The number of commits drops rapidly during night, as expected. Interestingly, people makes less bugs in early morning. Commits made around 7 to 9 o’clock in the morning have obviously the lowest bug rate. So this tells us when you want commit a change late night, you may want to think twice. Good motivation for developers to become a morning person, which most of us are not :-)

Here is a couple more findings from the authors:

1. Developers make less bugs as they get more experiences, as expected, except for PostgreSQL for which the paper finds the “most experienced” authors make quite some mistakes.
2. Ratio of buggy commits keeps constant across days of a week. But for PostgreSQL, people make a little less bugs on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; and a little more bugs on Sundays and Mondays.
3. “The Linux kernel developers who commit changes daily, but not as their day job, produce the largest number of commits and the smallest number of bug-introducing commits, followed by the single-commit authors”.
4. More than 1200 commits to Linux Kernel are solely for fixing comments.
5. “Inexperienced developers tend to do more commits between midnight and 2 AM than experienced developers, who do more commits between 8 AM and 4 PM”.

The biggest challenge of doing this type of analysis is that source code commits are ad hoc. It is hard to decide if a commit is a bug fix and which bug (or bugs) it tries to fix, which makes it even hard to find which commits introduce bugs. This paper has to reply on some heuristics. One may think of letting developers to always fix one bug at one commit and specify which bug this commit aims to fix. But based on my experience, non-automatic rules would never work for developers. So maybe it is a good idea to integrate some features to SCM tools to make commits easier to understand and analyze.

I find this kind of research interesting and useful. There are many tools that analyze source code, but less analyze developers’ behaviors and social activities, which also have big impact on source code quality. If you’re also interested, check out this conference, Mining Software Repositories. Developers’ activities vary across different development communities, so hopefully the authors will release the tools for everybody to analyze their own repositories.

An amazing architecture built by Scott Weaver with over 100,000 toothpicks over the course of 35 years. It shows you what it feels like rolling through the Bay Area.

The iPad is actually opening up technology to more people. None of this crap about it being closed is accurate. By giving people freedom to explore the app store without having to worry about anything (except their wallets), Apple has possibly made the best move they could make by locking down the iPad’s installation sources. That’s the one that’s the most helpful for the general state of technology. Apple is encouraging people to explore and play around. The iPad only does less than a regular computer to us geeks. To everyone else, it does more. This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing. It’s powerful, but for ordinary people, it’s too powerful.

Kids tell true feelings. They are not fooled by buzzwords.

Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.

As found out later, 87,000 email addresses and cellphones also received the same message. 15 minutes later, another email said the previous one was a mistake. I’m sure some people realized this earlier, especially thinking about the fire alert yesterday and the message not mentioning building names. But still, it caused many people to panic.

So what happened? Later this afternoon, the Chief of Police explained that the incident was caused by a person making a mistake. The person was updating the template of the alert message about active shooter threats. Instead of pushing the “Save” button to save the template, the person pushed the “Submit” button, which made the system send thousands of emails and text messages within two minutes.

Is this person the only one who should be blamed? Honestly, I think it is more of the system’s fault, more specifically, the user interface is seriously flawed. I’m really curious about how the interface looks like. Why on the earth do they put “Save” and “Submit” together? In this context, these two words could be very confusing. Clicking the wrong button could happen to anybody. Shouldn’t it at least say “Save as a template” and “Submit to send an alert”? The system should also ask the operator to confirm sending an alert. For operations like this, confirmation is absolutely necessary. I doubt there was, otherwise that person would probably not have confirmed it.

When it comes to user interface design, it is not just about how easy to do things, it is also about to do the right things and avoid mistakes. Human errors are inevitable, computer systems should have better user interface to prevent human errors.

This is a lesson that every user interface designer should learn from.

Step 1. Enable IMAP in your GMail account.

Step 2. Remove “fat” labels from IMAP. They may choke Mail.app or even block IMAP access to Gmail.

Gmail labels are considered as mailboxes in IMAP. If a label applies to too many emails, it may slow down the client significantly. Things may get worse when Mail.app downloads too many emails – Gmail will block IMAP access to your account for 24 hours. You will get the “Account exceeded bandwidth limits” failure when you use Mail.app to get emails. So you definitely want to remove those “fat” labels from IMAP. Here is how.

First, enable “Advanced IMAP Controls” in Gmail labs. To do it, go to “Settings” -> “Labs”, find “Advanced IMAP Controls” and enable it.

Then go to “Settings” -> “Labels”. You will see each label now has a checkbox – “Show in IMAP”. Unchecking that checkbox will remove that label from IMAP. “All Mail” is the first one you want to remove.  Also do not show “Spam”, “Trash” and “[GMail]/Spam” . If you have custom labels that are not very important but have a lot of emails, do not show them in IMAP as well.

By doing this, obviously you won’t have access to all of your emails, but you need to think about if that’s really a problem for you. It is never a big problem for myself. I extensively use filters in Gmail to label emails automatically. I don’t have to label them manually in Apple Mail.app. For emails that I have processed, I archive them and I usually don’t need to access them. So it doesn’t matter even if they are not accessible in Apple Mail.app.

Step 3. Configure Apple Mail 4 to access Gmail through IMAP.

Step 4. Do not save draft on Gmail, since it causes a very weird behavior.

Saving draft on Gmail servers causes a very weird behavior. Every time when Apple Mail.app automatically saves an unfinished draft, the draft is saved as a separate email in that thread and then being marked as deleted. So if you go to Gmail’s web interface, you will find that thread has *** messages in Trash.

To not save draft on Gmail, go to “Preference” -> “Account” -> “Mailbox Behaviors” and uncheck “Store draft messages on the server”. The risk of doing this is that drafts composed in Apple Mail.app won’t show up in Gmail’s draft box.

Step 5. Archive messages on Gmail even if delete from Apple Mail.app.

When you remove a message from the Apple Mail.app inbox, you may want it to be archived instead of being actually deleted. To do it, go to “Preference” -> “Account” -> “Mailbox Behaviors” and uncheck “Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox” and check “Store deleted messages on the server”.

If you actually want to delete a message, you can drag it to the “[GMail]/Trash” mailbox. I usually do not do it, because I have filters set up on Gmail to label emails. I use labels to clean my Gmails account regularly.

Step 6. Disable spam filtering in Apple Mail.app.

Gmail’s spam filtering works great, so you don’t actually need local spam filtering. It sometimes slows down the machine. It’s your choice. To disable it, go to “Preference” -> “Junk Mail” and uncheck “Enable junk mail filtering”.

Step 7. Get Gmail-like thread grouping.

I like Gmail’s thread grouping, i.e. grouping all emails in a thread all together, including received emails and sent emails. Apple Mail.app can also do that. First, go to “View” and check “Organize by Thread”. To also put sent emails in thread groups, you need to always Bcc to yourself – go to “Preference” -> “Composing” and check “Automatically Bcc: myself”. Then set up a rule to mark those emails as “Read” automatically. Go to “Preference” -> “Rules” -> “Add Rule” and you will know what to do.

Last, go to “Preference” -> “Accounts” -> “Mailbox Behaviors” and uncheck “Store sent message on the server”. If you don’t do it, sent emails will be labeled with a weird label – “Send Message”.

Step 8. Install the greatest email notifier – Herald.

Herald is the best email notifier on Mac. I especially like its slick looking, in-notification pre-review and short-cut action buttons. Go to its website, download and install it as an Apple Mail.app plugin.

If you have filter on Gmail to label emails automatically, Herald may pop up duplicated notifications of the same email, this is again because Gmail labels are considered as mailboxes in IMAP. If an email is automatically labeled with one label, it appears in both the inbox and the mailbox for that label. So Herald will see them as two different emails. There is a way to fix, since Herald allows you to specify which mailboxes to check for new emails. Just go to “Preference” ->”Herald” -> “Mailboxes” and uncheck all mail boxes except inboxes.

Now you’re all set. Enjoy. :-)

Although Facebook didn’t invent social networking, it did a terrific job to execute the idea, grow insanely fast and beat its competitors, just like any other monopoly.

Since Facebook got to a great position, it started doing something, which usually early-age start-ups try hard to avoid – pissing off users, just like any other monopoly. More specifically, as you already knew, it keeps ignoring users’ privacy.

One important thing that backs it up is its business, social networking. Social networking is one of those businesses that once you use it, it is way too complicated and expensive to switch to other alternatives. If you already have hundreds of friends on Facebook, how could you easily shutdown your account and create another network somewhere else (which is nowhere for now, unfortunately)? Another good example is Microsoft’s territory in enterprise software. Most companies don’t even want to get rid of IE6 due to the cost, let along Windows and Office.

The whole philosophy behind Facebook’s privacy policy changes is two folds, in my opinion.

First, Facebook is betting that 90% of its users don’t realize that they should check the policy, or they don’t care. So it makes the default setting to share as much as possible. 90% of the rest of users won’t check the policy in detail if it is too complicated to understand. So it makes its policy implicit and complicated and makes policy setting interface extremely difficult.

Second, with its dominant position, Facebook can experiment kicking off bad policies without worrying much of losing users. Think about it, even if the policy doesn’t work out eventually, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Facebook can just roll back the changes and apologize. It will still have its, I don’t know exactly, hundreds of millions of users, even if tens of thousands of them are pissed off so badly and quit. Again, this is just like any other monopoly.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t completely hate Facebook. With no doubt, Facebook changed the way we share. On the day any of us created Facebook accounts, we admitted that we want to more or less share something. I also really like a few ideas from Facebook, such as Facebook Development APIs and Facebook Connect. I especially believe Open Graph is a great idea, if it is done right. While Google is aggregating information from the web, Facebook is aggregating information from our lives and our minds. This is HUGE. With this information, Facebook has big potential to really build better web to help people. For instance, I’m a big fan of Aardvark, which I think is a perfect example with which Facebook could make huge difference based on its user base and information. I’m actually surprised when Aardvark was bought by Google but Facebook, maybe Facebook has already started building its own.

It’s not very fair to blame Facebook for everything. Its whole business model is based on the number of users and the amount of information users are willing to share, or are forced to share, or share without even being aware of it. Facebook wants to grow and it does what it is meant to do. It depends on the user to accept it or not. When there are no other options, Facebook wins. What Facebook really needs is competitors, good competitors, just like any other monopoly.