Tralfaz

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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.

  • 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.  

  • Market Analysis Oddities – Pulling my hair out

    I am doing a market analysis to help us decide where we want to spend our next development dollars on.

    To accomplish this, I really need to get a good idea of their revenue.

    Top down, I took the bible, the accepted research.  I also took the number uttered during the Q4 2011 analysts call, and started from there.  I have some historical knowledge of the business, so I could subtract big swaths right away.  They also reported “strong” performance in two segments that I knwo A LOT about.  Cool.  More clarity.

    I get a number that feels right.  It is damn close whether I do a top down, or bottom up analysis.

    It falls apart when I try to model for product mix, and units moved.  There is NO FRIGGIN WAY that they sold as many units as we calculate with known ASP’s.  Try a two tier (higher ASP when non-competitive) model?  Still too high.  Adjust the ASP’s to make the number reasonable, and it just is ludicrous (the ASP’s have to TRIPLE to match with what we think we know about their capacity).

    Poop.  Back to the grinding stone.

  • Things that make you go hmmmmm

    My wife has a touch of OCD.  When we are traveling, she will close the hotel door.  Then check to see it is locked. Then invariably, she will go back 5 seconds later to check it again.

    When shopping, after using the remote to lock the doors of the car, she will walk about 40 feet away, and then return to check the doors again (all the doors, not just one).

    Weird, compulsive and annoying.

    But in the online world, she uses weak passwords (about 4 of them) and repeats them everywhere.  Can’t remember anything really difficult, so they are rediculously predictable.

    I bought her 1Password, and have tried to teach her how to use it.  Can’t get it.  She must have 50 saved logins for her online banking site.  Sigh.

  • Disgusting Things

    I exercise by walking or running on public roads.  I do this everywhere I travel, and even at home.  In my “pounding the pavement” I have come across a lot of things, credit cards (returned), drivers licenses, cash (once I found a $50 bill.. It pays to watch the road…) and more than a few dead animals.

    But the one thing that I come across most often is the “spit bottle”.  For those unaware, folks who chew tobacco (or “snuff”) while driving need someplace to “spit” the juices.  Mostly, they use an old Water bottle, or a Gatorade bottle.  Better than just spitting on the road.  

    But, when it becomes full, do these people find a trashcan to deposit this brown ugly mess? No. They toss it out the window.  

    Hence I come across them very often.  

    Please, if you chew, and spit in a bottle, toss it in the trash.  It is unsightly, unsanitary, and doesn’t belong on the roadside.

  • A product management community – just starting

    It has been a poorly kept secret that I have had an alter ego, the snarky, White Russian drinking league bowler known as the PM Dude.  Created to be an outlet for some truly bad management from above, and with a high level of snark, it was cathartic.

    However, as I have in the past 5 months started a great new job with a kick-ass company, the need for the snarky persona has lessened considerably.  What to do with the PM Dude’s blog?

    First, I migrated the most insightful (hey, the Dude did make some good points in the midst of the snark) to my main page: http://tralfaz.org so that you can go back and read the archives.  Look in “The Dude’s Corner”.

    Second, I started playing with some forum software.  Actually, as part of a beta test for my hosting provider, I saw this thing called “Vanilla Forums”.  Dove in and love this framework.  Clean, relatively lightweight, and it seems pretty solid.  Spent about a week testing it, and creating a theme (it is STUPID easy to adjust the look and feel by messing with the CSS file(s)).

    Now I am ready to launch.  Come on over to http://thepmdude.com and register, start some conversations, and in general hang out and talk product management, product marketing, and anything that tickles the fancy.

     

  • The GoDaddy outage

    Sigh, tough place to be today.  I manage a few websites, and one that is for a non-profit that I volunteer at.  My personal stuff is all hosted at MediaTemple, and they have been awesome.

    But, I “picked” GoDaddy for the big site.  It was pretty cheap, about 1/4 the cost monthly, and it seemed to have a good amount of capabilities.

    Can’t complain about the setup.  Real easy to get up and running.  I had a couple of support calls early on, but their support did a great job, and were very responsive to my queries.

    Of course, today they have been down hard.  First symptom was someone complaining about the site throwing MySQL errors, but not it is down hard.  For three hours.

    Grrrr.  I hate moving sites, but I suspect that for the greater good, I will move it all under my MEdiaTemple account.

     

  • Hardware woes

    As a Product Manager for a scientific instrument, part of our system is a “controller”.  This is nothing more than asimple PC that can run our software and doesn’t have any conflicts with our system.

    Recently, the system we used went end of sales (Dell Precision T3500 workstation). I decided to look at the specs and see if there was anything I could change to meet our performance requirement, and, to possibly save a few bucks.  The Precision line is hardly inexpensive.

    Turns out that we are using Intel Xeon E5 series CPU’s.  A fine CPU, but then we hamstring it with 4G ram, and Win7 x86.  Me thinks we can go to a high end Core i5 (quad core), bump it to 8G ram, and run Win7 x64.  Yes that would work, but it only saves me $45.00.  Sigh, that is a lot of qualification headache for so little money.

    So, I will likely stick with the higher spec, the Xeon processor, up the memory (it is practically free) and drop Win7 x64 on it and move on.

    For the record, these systems are running ~ $1500.  A lot more than their Vostro consumer targeted system.  But there is a reason for it.  We build systems. We demand some stability. That means that the computer we buy next month, 6 months from now, and in a year are the same. You just can’t get that with the consumer grade systems.  There the life cycle are measured in the low single digits of months.

    But, I am in a good state with this instrument.  At least it isn’t like my other product that requires 2 full size PCI slots (not PCI-e, or PCI-x).  Groan.

  • Bad start to Monday

    I know that Windoes 7 can be ultra stable and reliable.  I have used it for mor than 2 years, and it was rock solid.

    Now I know that it can be made to be unreliable, unstable, and glitchy.

    Where I work, there are all kinds of additions. Full disk encryption, Symantec Endpoint Protection, a software lifecycle and inventory system, and some really bizarre policies that have the machine doing multiple command shell scripts at inopportune times.

    All this leads to weirdness in the install (note: I would never try to circumvent these things. I do live with it).

    THree times ( in three months ) the OST file has become corrupted.  Fortunately there is a utility that can fix it.  But it is a pain in the arse to run. I have to shut down several programs that “touch” the OST file, and I have to remember where they all are.  Groan.

    Twice now, it has done a forced full scan for malware and viruses. This happens on the first wednesday of the month.  Two of the three times it has run, there has been a bout a 2.5 hour delay as it barfs on a file (in an email cache in AppData). This leads the full scan to be about 9 hours. Painful, to say the least.

    This morning, I had all these issues come to a head.  An Acrobat update (forced restart), a corrupted OST (forced restart), and an update to my copy of 1Password (a third forced restart).  Here I am, roughly one hour into the day, and I finally can get some work done.  Sigh…

  • Bad UI of the week: VMWare’s “my.vmware.com”

    Continuing on the theme of bad UI, this week’s hall of shame goes to VMWare.  Sad, because they used to “get it”, or so it seemed to me.

    Background:

    I have long been a VMWare user.  I have (purchased) a license for Workstation and Fusion, the desktop products for virtualization on the PC and Mac platforms respectively.  On the PC Side, I use Workstation to segment software that seems invasive (Sales Logix, I am looking at you) from my main install.  On the Mac it is to use the (dwindling) PC only apps that I can’t live without.

    The situation:

    Two weeks ago, I took the plunge and upgraded to Mountain Lion (OS-X 10.8), and my version of Fusion wasn’t supported.  Off to the VMWare website.  In the past, I would just log in, and the option to view my licenses and download my entitled products was on the main page.

    Now they have this my.vmware.com stuff.  I can find my licenses OK, but downloads?  It seemed I could only sign up for a demo version to download.  No amount of navigation got me there.  And yes, I know that using the demo version would work, but then you get harassed by their inside sales people.  Another story for another day.

    I ended up searching, and finding the download page on the main site.  But still the my.vmware.com site kept trying to navigate me back to it.  Argh. Perhaps if I spent time on their site every week, it would make sense, but for my, the 2 or 3 visits a year, it was painful.

    I am sure this will not be the last installment in UI ridiculousness.