Month: November 2012

  • Stone age thinking in the internet age

    I am a huge fan of accessibility, and convenience for my customers.  In my new role, we have a product that is a little long in tooth, and the software is a bit dated as well.  Working to fix that, but one hangup is our absolutely shitty help system.  

    It is web based, and installed on the PC that the software is installed on.  It uses some POS ActiveX control, so it ONLY works with IE (and not IE9).  

    Even when you get the right browser, and configuration, it is a lousy format, hard to navigate, and the search/index is terrible.

    I want to go to a completely online, standards compliant interface, and always up to date.

    But our marketing team, who controls the manuals and the help system generation/maintenance is paranoid that making the help information accessible to all would lead our competitors to find ways to attack us. Words fail me.

    F’ me.  You can’t make this shit up.  How backwards is that.  

    Swimming upstream here.

  • How come really smart people are so dumb sometimes?

    Just had an ambush call.  (that is when Sales invites you on a call, but “forgets” to clue you in on what is to be discussed). Needless to say, some pretty deep hip waders were needed.

    The whole premise was that we failed to accomplish some performance goals in a demo.  We make high end, scientific instruments.  Part of the analyses we do, required you to “find” a region of interest.  We, our competitors, and indeed all products on the market like ours uses a similar design. A video camera, a microscope objective/or telescope, and a real time window on the UI to see the sample/instrument.  

    The problem is that they are looking at SRAM cells, that are 45nm in dimension.  And they kept harping on the “magnification”. If only we made the image look bigger, we would see the features.

    Uh, no.  The classic difference between resolution and magnification.  A rule of thumb is that the limit of resolution is proportional to wavelength/(2 * NA).  There is a constant, but it really can be ignored or assumed to be 1.  If you have broad spectrum white light, your central wavelength is 540nm (a “green” color), and you use that to calculate resolution.

    For a super high resolution system your NA can be as high as 0.95 in air (> 1 if you can do oil immersion).  But since we have lots of hardware in the way, we need a much longer working distance.  50 or so millimeters of WD.  The best commercially available optics at this range will give a NA of 0.15 or so.  Thus, we become diffraction limited at about 1.8um.  Since they want to find features that are 0.045um in dimension, the resolution limit is going to be equivalent to 40 cells.  That means that there is no hope to see the features they want.

    Of course, they didn’t understand this, and kept repeating the “more magnification” mantra. FML.

     

    *NA = Numerical Aperture – a measure of the light gathering capability of an optical system.

  • Phew, things to be thankful for…

    Long time Mac user here.  One utility that I just can’t live without is Alsoft’s Disk Warrior.  I have Drive Genius and MacTools Pro, but neither one “just works” as well as Disk Warrior.

    A month or so ago, my wife’s iMac was behaving wonky, so I grabbed my copy of DW and off we go.  When it is done, she dutifully removed it from her computer, put the boot DVD in the case and set it on her desk.

    Later that afternoon, Tate, our “puppy-like” greyhound grabbed it and ate it.  Grrrr.  Thought I wouldhave to go groveling to Alsoft for a replacement.  But it turns out I used the down rev version, and my version 4.4 is still pristine.  Woo hoo!

    Good thing too, because I need to clean up my disks on my Mac Book Pro.

  • A fucking shame – Boss 302 Mustang

    A wicked american piece of heavy metal, a real muscle car, the Mustang 302 Boss.  A bitchen car from 1969 and 1970 has been re-introduced.  A worthy successor.  However, it is a fucking crime against humanity to defenestrate such an awesome machine with a pussy automatic transmission, I saw one today.  I hung my head in shame.  It wasn’t even a chick driving it.

  • Sugar coating: Sometimes you have to tell your engineers their software SUCKS

    You get to a point where you can no longer hold back.  It is like that bad uncle with the Comb-over who is not fooling anyone.  

    Your software sucks.  It is a shitty UI, it looks like technicolor vomit erupted on the screen.

    It is so unusable, that people prefer to go to the engineering screen to get a better handle on system control.

    It crashes. A lot.  It takes out Windows 7, which is hard.

    Please don’t hate me for telling you the truth.  Let’s fix this.