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Attention Panel @ FOO

Kathy Sierra said she was inspired by Linda Stone's talk on Continuous Partial Attention, but that she was surprised by the reaction she got to an unfavorable blog she posted about Twitter, so the topic is clearly polarizing.

Linda gave a 10,000 foot summary of her talk. She said recently she's been working with researchers at the NIH looking at what happens in the body when you timeslice. MRIs show some effects in the brain, but more interesting are breathing patterns. People timeslicing tend to stop breathing, and their CO2 levels soar. The folks at Twitter and say there are two clear user patterns emerging 1) Grandstanders who want to tell you everything they are doing and 2) Engaging in Continuous Partial Friendship (as coined by Dave Weinberger).

Dan Russell alked about his research into how attention works. High jitter (frequent interrupts) can be smoothed over in User Design by normalizing the timeslice...we can handle frequent interruptions so long as the interval is consistent (so in IRC for instance, you may be timeslicing conversations, but the rate of new messages is fairly consistent). But, stacking interruptions (you're in the middle of a task and a completely different task interrupts) cause chaos. Popping the stack is again as simple as breathing. Meditators may be on to something.

Kathy spoke about "clicker training" for pets and how our email queue is an intermittent variable reward and is clicker training us to keep checking back for more "treats" (emails). On her Twitter post: What she actually said was that Twitter was causing so many interrupts that she doesn't know how anyone is getting things done. High-order experts have a genetic predisposition to hyper focus, not to timeslice.

Linda said the gaming industry is starting to shift to design games from Continuous Partial Attention "shooter" games to logic games that give birth to deeper thinking.

Audience discussion: Our generation has grown up with a high level of signal-to-noise, and kids today are perhaps even more able to handle these tendencies (is this just Evolution?). Cory Doctorow said that his writing style has evolved to only a daily 20 minutes of dedicated writing. Is this an age thing? We had a Twitter employee Blaine Cook is in the audience, who said that demographically the users are actually "old" (other than him anyway...he's 27). Inductive vs. deductive thinking came up...do inductive thinkers love interrupt because it allows a background process to cook? Linda pointed out that dedication to a task (intention) is antithetical to accepting interrupt (so Cory's 20 minutes are very very focused). Linda pointed out that rock climbing is a very intentional task.

Speak of the Devil

My former boss and good friend, Claire Giordano (whose blog on women in technology I pointed to yesterday) is the focal point of the sun.com homepage today! There's an interview with John Gage and Claire, talking about her baby, OpenSolaris. Way to go, Claire!

Postfacto Recognition

So, I just learnt via my friend Will Snow that a project I worked on...blogs.sun.com...just won a Chairman's award at Sun!

Gmail for Intel employees...tools matter

A week under my belt at Intel and I'm starting to figure out the internal systems...at least the common ones like email, calendar, phonebook and internal chat. I am struck again by how much internal systems reinforce culture, or is it vice versa? Of course such systems are designed to make workers more productive while protecting things like privacy and intellectual property. But in my experience corporate systems also contribute to a hive-mind effect that can be unintentionally limiting.

Years ago on my first day at Microsoft I asked for an Internet connection. Two weeks later they lugged in another physical machine, set it up on my credenza and hooked it to the outside world. In early 1994 at Microsoft you couldn't get an outside connection on the same computer as your internal email and files! As a result they weren't thinking much about the Internet...very few Microsoft people ever used it (I was only eligible for an Internet machine because I technically worked in the Research Library group). Microsoft as a company famously came quite late to Internet awareness and that fact was noticeable in their products as well.

Some years later at Symantec I worked on a popular product called ACT!, a personal information manager. ACT! version 3.0 was a rewrite to support 32-bit architecture that included a new feature...support for email. During the years when ACT! 3.0 was written, Symantec's internal emailer system was "cc:mail". When I joined the team during ACT! 4.0 development I was given the task of re-specifying the email feature because I was coming straight from Apple and, like the majority of ACT! customers (but unlike the developers writing ACT!), I had actually *used* emailers other than cc:mail.

In fact, I had used many emailers because in those days Apple encouraged employees to use whatever tools made them most productive (in those days we even saw some PCs floating around because Apple laptops were insanely mediocre at that point) and I am naturally curious. My favorite was a beta tool which allowed aggregation of all your various mail accounts into a single local inbox. I wasn't the only one who loved that feature apparently, since you can find it in today's Apple Mail client.

Now there was nothing in the configuration of their intranet keeping Symantec employees from using other emailers, except for inertia due to familiarity with the approved tool. Because cc:mail included a centralized phonebook feature, most Symantec employees didn't actually know each other's email addresses (and they weren't standardized). And of course it was easier to continue to use cc:mail to get routine tasks done than it was to venture into the unknown. These days there might be more stringent corporate mandates in response to the proliferation of email viruses for instance, but those were halcyon virus-free days.

Did I mention that ACT!'s major competitor was the up and coming Microsoft Outlook, which had a rather specific email architecture that was very tightly integrated into the operating system. I reasoned that we could differentiate for ACT! by offering more flexibility and meeting our customers where they were at instead of forcing them to do work "our way".

My first official action as the owner of the email feature in ACT! 4.0 was to mandate that my engineering team start to use other emailers to discover how they might differ from the known. Oh, the complaining! But slowly they started to realize how cc:mail had limited their experience and their world view of email...and the resulting flexible email feature in ACT! 4.0 contributed to an award-winning release. Best of all was that most of those engineers continued to be curious about what was going on "outside" the firewalls, which was the real win because that curiosity is vital to designing better experiences for customers.

And speaking of a shift from tightly integrated desktop applications...I notice that I now have 50 free gmail accounts to give away. I'll give them to the first 50 Intel employees who ping me on corporate email :-)

Google and Remembering Easters Past

I'm a holiday nut...well really a holidy party nut. From the age of about 10 I've been organizing parties around holidays (any excuse to get everyone together in the backyard). I can throw a party in no time. Once when I actually forgot that I'd agreed to host a party until the first guest arrived...and still it was a great party.

I really love a good Easter party. Its so nice to be outside in the spring participating in vernal equinox fertility rites....like the hiding and hunting of the eggs. When my kids were small we used to pool families together and throw a really big Easter bash at Rancho San Antonio park in Los Altos. Some years we hid more than 300 eggs. Usually not hard-boiled and dyed eggs (nobody really wants to eat those, as it turns out) but colorful plastic or paper-mache eggs filled with candy and small trinkets and coins. Some years we did have some beautiful Ukrainian Eggs to hide, but they weren't for eating. In later years we filled the hollow eggs with colorful slips of paper that described what trinkets or candy the finder had won (insures that the chocolate doesn't melt before the eggs are found). We always hid several "special" eggs...really big ones with plush toys inside and "crystal" eggs with higher denomination money...and then there was the grand-prize "golden bunny". Finding him was worth $20 and gave you first pick of a partner for the raw egg toss!

If you were a grownup coming to our Easter bash you could choose to be a kid for the purpose of hunting eggs. We'd send all the "kids" off on a long walk together while we did the hiding. The ground where eggs were hidden was marked off with big pinwheels stuck into the grass. The little kids got to start hunting 10 minutes before the middling ones got to join for 10 more minutes, and then the big kids (some as old as in their 50s) could start.

The golden bunny was often the last to be found, and for some reason even though everyone looked hard for it, my son was most often the lucky finder. We were speaking today about how he went about finding it...he said he'd take a moment to "think like Mom" and he could usually figure out which hiding place I'd selected for the grand prize.

Many of the hidden eggs were cascarones (intact eggshells with the raw contents blown out through a hole in the bottom and then dyed bright colors and filled with confetti). So throughout all the egg hunting there would be periodic shreaks as somebody got a cascarone smashed on their head.

Then the hunt would be done and we'd all tuck in to a big potluck picnic lunch sitting on quilts laid out on the grass and soak up the sun. By early afternoon a wind would come up and we'd scurry to get everything back in the cars for the drive home.

By now you're asking what this could possibly have to do with Google, right?

Well, I have a lot of friends working on getting hired by Google just now, and I heard a story which convinced me that I might want to work there myself someday. It seems there was a Vice President-type position open and an acquaintance was interviewing for it. He'd gotten pretty far in the interviewing when he got tripped up by the following hypothetical: "Say its your first day on the job at Google, and you have 100 employees reporting to you. So, how would you spend your first day?"....

Of course any seasoned executive would spend it profitably, right? Interviewing the liutenants, getting to understand the current structure of the organization...WRONG!!! The correct answer (at Google anyway) was "Throw a Party!". No wonder everybody wants to work at Google! Wonder what they did at Google for Easter?

More Apple Attribution

Coincidence it seems that somebody else was reading the Apple Folklore site recently and found a reference to the Quadra 660 Easter Egg which was a QuickTime movie un-marked on the System Install CD (recompressed for your viewing pleasure here of the team toasting the finish of the project in front of a Pirate Flag. The windows look like the Valley Green 6 building to me. They also show the motherboard (which had surface mount components on both sides! It ends after more harmless nonsense with a nice fadeout on the Pirate flag...

The deal with Easter Eggs at Apple in those days was that typically there was NO approval for them (management wanted plausible deniability), and if you got caught before ship (or sometimes after ship) you could get fired. Still, it was considered very cool to manage to ship one, and some of them were really clever. A true Easter Egg was only accessible if you did something specific (such as a certain keystroke sequence while launching the About or some other routine sequence). As an Easter present, here's a pointer to a nice list of Easter Eggs in MacOSX.

About Attribution

Re-opening comments, due to popular demand.

I had an email exchange this week that reminded me of this topic, which I've been meaning to blog about for a long time (thanks, Ben). Attribution!

I believe that fundamentally the best programmers in the world are artists. I'm not the only one to draw this conclusion, but I did draw it independently from Paul Graham.

Back when I started at Apple they had an ethic of attribution. Everybody signed their work. Some of the original Macintoshes even had signatures inside the case (I know because I've looked...I used to run the Apple Archives and we had several signed cases). For sofware there was the About Box. I've just found a link on Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore site about why we got to be in the About Box. Very interesting piece of history. As a result of Bill Atkinson, the About Box in the late 80s through mid-90s always included a list of the people who worked on the software, sometimes also what jobs they did and if there was room also a picture. Sometimes the picture was only accessible in an Easter Egg. For QuickTime Conferencing it was my job to create the About Box list. It was so cool to be able to tell your Mom and Dad how to look for you in the About Box.

In about 1997 it was decided that About Boxes would no longer include attribution, because Apple had noticed that every time a new version of software came out, everyone on the list got an unsolicited call from a recruiter.

Now, I don't know about you, but if obscurity is the only reason I'm still with my company....there's a problem!

If I was at Apple now you'd better believe I'd be arguing for attribution again. In fact I think every programmer should fight for attribution, no matter what company is writing the paycheck. Look at the entertainment industry. Who shows up where in the credits is a big, big deal...translating directly to job satisfaction and a way to track an individual's body of work over time.

This is one of the best features of open source in my opinion. I tell people all over the world that open source (and blogging) can help build them a reputation that will serve them when looking for employment. Why should that stop when you get a job? You should get credit for everything you do (good and bad)...responsibility and accountability come along with attribution too.

So sign your work! Sign your comments on blogs while you're at it!

First Day at Intel

So, I've had my first day (mostly orientation) at Intel. The building, in fact the very room, where they held the orientation was under re-construction (imagine hammering and sawing going on just behind those very thin partition walls they use to divide ballrooms into conference session rooms in hotels). Everyone was pretty good-natured and making the best of it, though.

Having orientation under construction makes me feel like I am coming into a company that is reconfiguring itself. There was press at the new year about Intel re-organizing its businesses (must confess, I've been reading stories about Intel more since I started considering this change :-) ). The switch to a platform focus must feel unsettling to old-timers here, but one of my big orientation take-aways is that Intel is about Risk-Taking. It is considered a core competency here. So I should fit right in, right ;-)?

One thing I learnt in the orientation...I need to make it clear here (and often) that this blog is mine and does not reflect the opinions of my (new) employer...but those of you who know me know that THAT has always been true.

Leaving Sun

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

After the flurry of stories on Friday and over the weekend (my favorites being Jim Grisanzio's lovely farewell, Matt Asay's surprising testimonial and the original blog written by David Berlind), it will come to no surprise that I'm leaving Sun. I'm off to see if I can have any influence at Intel, a company which has benefitted hugely from the increased popularity of Free and Open Source software around the world. I'm quite sad to leave the many good friends I've made over the years at Sun. Change it always hard.

I'm excited to be going to Intel, though! There will be fascinating challenges (like seeing if I can run my Intel life from a computer running open source software), new people to make friends with (84,000 of them) and hopefully good work to do for the open source movement.

Ciao for now, Sun! Although global, the internet makes this is a very small playground of an industry and I know I'll be seeing you continue to shine!