Joe Ganley

More clearing the decks of old projects: This one is a JavaScript implementation of dots and boxes with a very simple computer opponent. It works perfectly in Firefox, but incorrectly in Chrome and not at all in Internet Explorer. This was an evening's work, and is under-tested and a bit brittle.

Labels: games, javascript, software

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I have a lot of old projects laying around in varying degrees of completeness, and I am finally going to put them all to bed so as to clear the decks for some new projects.

The first is a simulated annealing library (tarball or at GitHub). I wrote most of this on a plane several years ago. It is complete, except that there is an issue with the stop criterion that makes it often pass better solutions and end up on solutions not quite as good. This could be mitigated by writing the move manager to save the best solution seen, but the right answer is to just fix the stop criterion. Both it and the cooling schedule are very simple; my problem in writing an open simulated annealing library is that I know more sophisticated techniques for virtually every aspect of the annealing machinery, but frankly I don't feel like doing to research to figure out whether they're known prior art or whether we invented them at my past jobs (I've written several annealing engines before this one, and this one is extremely unsophisticated compared to those).

It's in C++. There is a Visual Studio solution and project, but no makefile; however, it's straightforward to compile.

I'm releasing this under what I like to call the "do the right thing" license. Which means, do whatever you want with it. No restrictions whatsoever. But please do the right thing. That means credit me. Let me know if it's useful to you, or if you make improvements to it that you choose to make open. If you use it in something that makes you money, maybe throw an Amazon.com gift certificate or something my way.

Labels: optimization, simulated annealing, software

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Since Microsoft is terminating Money, I've been looking around for a replacement, and so far it's just a whole lot of fail. I tried both GnuCash and MoneyDance, and not to put too fine a point on it, but they both suck. Quicken doesn't offer a free trial, as far as I can find. They do offer a free online version, but I just can't get comfortable with giving all of my credit-card logins, much less all of my financial data itself, to an online service. (This is the same thing that has kept me from trying out Mint.) I guess I'll keep looking.

Labels: finance, personal, software

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It's a minor thing, but this sort of thing is endemic to the suckfest that is iTunes on Windows. For security reasons, I disabled autorun on my machine. The next time I fired up iTunes, I got this alarming dialog:

Oh, crap. I don't want to turn autorun back on, but this seems to be saying that I won't be able to use CDs with iTunes if I don't. Oh well, I'll click No and deal with this later. The very next thing, I got this dialog:

Just kidding! When I said iTunes wouldn't recognize CDs any more, I meant unless you hit F5. I just wanted to see if I could make you turn autorun back on.

Disgraceful.

Labels: itunes, music, software, usability

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My search for a means of tracking tasks continues. In the cloud, I tried out Remember the Milk, Ta-da List, Todoist, and Toodledo. Of these, Toodledo is my favorite, but ultimately I wasn't happy with it either, and in any event I really wanted a local app rather than a web-based solution, because I want my data kept locally and I want to be able to use it when I'm offline.

In the app world, I tried the Jira bug-tracking system, which is free for personal use, but it is far heavier-weight than I need for this purpose. I tried AxoSoft OnTime and FruitfulTime TaskManager, but didn't really care for either of those. Things looks really nice, but it's Mac-only. My current favorite is Tudumo. It's simple and well-designed, and while it isn't quite perfect, I have few complaints. I like that it is designed with simplicity as a primary goal, it is GTD-friendly, it is reasonably priced (though not free), it has a generous 60-day trial period, and it gives me full control over my data (it will export CSV). If I end up sticking with it, I'll make a later post about how I think it could be improved.

Labels: lists, organization, software, todo

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Yesterday my youngest daughter asked me, "Where did the first people come from?" I tried to explain evolution to her, in terms that a 6-year-old can understand. This is difficult to do, but then I got an unexpected assist: She said, "Oh, like in Spore!" Spore FTW!

Labels: education, evolution, kids, software, spore

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I've been looking for an electronic way to track my to-do lists, tasks, and projects. None of the online services I've tried does quite what I want, and anyway I prefer to keep the data locally. This morning I had the revelation that what I wanted was almost identical to the functionality of a bug-tracking system. I could use Bugzilla! I've used it as a client for years, but never tried to install it myself. Here is how the installation instructions begin:

• Install Perl.
• Install a Database Engine.
• Install a Webserver.

And anyway, it isn't clear whether it works on Windows. Fail.

It seemed that a smart business model for commercial bug-tracking software would be to give away single-user licenses for personal use. And indeed, AxoSoft does this. However, I installed it, and it is incredibly complicated. I didn't look at it long enough to determine whether it just has way more functionality than I need, or is poorly engineered, but certainly its interface is overwhelmingly complex for the simple things I need to do.

I'd love to try FogBugz for this purpose, but even a single-user license is $200. I wouldn't mind paying, but that's far too much for what I need.

So, I keep looking. I might have to write something myself.

Labels: lists, organization, software, todo

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I've finally gotten around to reading Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things. This book probably belongs on the list of books programmers haven't really read, which is a pity; it's a fantastic book. It covers many of the same complaints I made about alarm clocks, and it also brought to a head another of my biggest design complaints: iTunes.

I love Apple. By and large, their products are the very model of good design: Simple, intuitive, and elegant. However, even after eight versions, they've completely fumbled with iTunes; almost every time I use it, I find something new to dislike about it.

First, simply from a gestalt point of view, it's a mess. Some functionality is in the menus (including the dreaded Advanced menu), and some is hidden behind buttons bearing cryptic icons, many of which provide little clue what they do. Within the iTunes window, these icons are all over the place; when I need to perform a task, there is little affordance as to where I should look for the widget that makes it happen. The functionality of a music player is intermingled with that of a music-library manager in a most haphazard way. And the Podcasts pane is even worse than the main one.

Playlists are simply a broken model for how to organize music. Consider my family: My wife, my oldest daughter, and I each have an iPod. To try to subdivide our music library into songs that belong on each iPod, I have to have a playlist for all of us, one for my wife and I, one for my wife and daughter, one for my daughter and I, and one for each of us alone. When my two youngest girls get iPods, this is going to exponentiate; I won't need all 31 possibilities, but the number will at least double. And this doesn't even cover the case of subdividing by mood or genre. The right model is tags. I could then specify that, for example, my daughter's iPod should be stocked with songs tagged megan first, and the remaining space filled with (joe and not explicit) (she likes a lot of the same music I do). I know some of this can be done with smart playlists, but it wouldn't be easy and simple and effortlessly "just work" like it could. Also, this would further allow visualization and manipulation of my collection via tag clouds and similar devices like you see on tag-based sites like Flickr.

Initially building a library is always an unpleasant experience in iTunes. Recently I installed a new hard drive for music. I reset iTunes to point there, and asked it to consolidate my library, copying songs from anywhere on the machine to the new drive, and organizing them its own way. This took forever, and many hours into it, I got a dialog informing me that the drive was full, and that iTunes would point to the song in its original location. The buttons on this dialog are OK and Cancel. Presumably OK just acknowledges and dismisses the dialog, but what does Cancel mean? Don't add this song to the library, or abort the entire consolidation? So many hours in, I don't want to abort the whole operation, so I hit OK. Now I get the same dialog again, presumably for the next song (it doesn't tell me what song it is complaining about). I hit OK again, and again, and again. Finally, frustrated, I hit Cancel, but I continue to get these dialogs a bunch more times, and then they stop. I can't tell now if I aborted the consolidation, or if it finished. I see no recourse other than to erase everything and start over, and to hit OK for every one of those dialogs (there ended up being a few hundred of them). There is no "Yes to all" or "Don't show this again" option.

Part of the reason the disk is full is duplicates: Songs that appear in multiple places on my machine. For some reason, iTunes copies and inserts in the library every copy. I can think of no reason to include duplicates in a library, especially when iTunes is making its own copies of the songs. Mind you, I'm not talking about songs with the same title or filename; I'm talking about songs that are bitwise identical on the disk. I don't want these taking up disk space or appearing multiple times in my library (though you can turn off the latter), but I know of no way to avoid it.

Similarly, the dialog you get if you try to add songs to a playlist that are already in it. You are asked whether you want to add them multiple times, or to skip the duplicates. They should have done this the Apple way: Simply don't enable the rare corner case where someone might want the same song in their playlist multiple times, and skip them always. Or at least give the dialog a "Don't ask this again" option.

As an extra added bonus, one of its automatic upgrades deleted all of my ratings data.

It's not just me; if you Google "itunes sucks" you get almost 18,000 hits, which cover most everything I've complained about here and many other equally legitimate issues.

I'm going to move my whole collection to a Linux box running some open-source music manager (I haven't figured out which one yet). I hardly ever buy music from iTunes anyway, because I can get it DRM-free from Amazon without paying extra for the privilege. I'll miss the free songs from Starbucks, but not enough to put up with this piece of garbage any longer. Given how hard it is to move a music collection to a new platform, you can guess how likely I am to ever come back to iTunes, even if they make it awesome. Congrats, Apple - your sorry usability has lost you a customer from the iTunes ecosystem for life. It'd be shameful even for a company who doesn't have such a long history of great design. Maybe I should send them my copy of Design of Everyday Things; apparently the iTunes team hasn't read it.

Labels: itunes, music, software, usability

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