Substitutions

My oldest daughter is working in an electronic orders fulfillment center until she can find a job in her field. She does not enjoy it but it does help her pay her bills. Our evening conversation today revolved around substitutions. Someone will order one product that she is unable to find in the warehouse and so the computer suggests an alternative. Sometimes those substitutions don't make sense and my daughter will note it but most of the time they work.

I thought about how I use substitutions in my daily job working with data. Sometimes I work with a small amount of data in a spreadsheet. Other times I work with large amounts of data in a data warehouse. Can I do the same operations in both tools? After doing this for many years, I can answer that question with a truthful, "Yes."

A few weeks ago I received a spreadsheet with 190,000 or so rows. I immediately needed to do some aggregate functions. That means I needed to count how many rows met certain criteria for text columns or come up with a sum or average for number columns. I had the choice of using either a database or a spreadsheet. To me it didn't make a difference which tool I used. Ultimately I inserted the rows into a database and performed my analysis there.

Working with a computer there are always a choice of tools you can use. While you may have grown used to Microsoft's Excel, you might not have that option with a new personal computer. If you have a Mac, the spreadsheet program Numbers is included in the operating system for free. You also have the choice of using Google spreadsheets. They all have their pros and cons but you should never feel locked into using a specific tool.

This is true for more complex software as well. My youngest son is a mechanical engineer and has access to a very expensive computer aided design (CAD) program called SolidWorks. It can do a lot. There are also a number of less capable products that can tackle any personal projects he decides to start without the exorbitant cost. When I needed to create very specific candle holders for one of my wife's Christmas decorations, I used TinkerCAD. I learned it easy and quickly had the design I needed for my 3D printer. There are a number of even more feature-rich options should you need them. The trick is knowing how to find them.

With the ubiquity of open source software and vast array of commercial software choices, you should never feel there is only one way to get something done on your computer. There are always multiple. The trick is learning how to use Internet search engines and sift through the bad suggestions to find good ones. Perhaps that is a post for another day.

My Favorite Short Cut: ALT-TAB

You can tell how long someone has been using computers by paying attention to the short cuts he/she uses to navigate on the computer. I usually have quite a few application running on my computer and I need to be able to quickly switch between them. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Windows 3.0 first came on the market, I used to only have one or two apps running and could easily just click between them. It didn't take long to quickly exhaust that functionality, especially with the small screens on laptops we had back then.

I remember leading a training session on a new database tool and I kept having to switch between a PowerPoint presentation and the tool. I would escape out of presentation mode, minimize PowerPoint, and show my demo. Once I completed the demo, I would expand PowerPoint and go back into presentation mode. Then someone showed me the power of ALT-TAB that allowed me to instantly switch between all running applications. I thought it was great and still use that key combination today even though there are more advanced ways of switching between running applications. For instance, you can see the running applications in Windows by just looking at the toolbar on the bottom of your screen. I still prefer ALT-TAB.

There are a number of other computer short cuts that will give away the length of time someone has been using computers. My work laptop run Microsoft Windows but I am an old Unix guy. When I open the Windows Power Shell it is a hard to remember not to use the "ls" command to get a directory listing of files instead of the preferred "dir" command familiar to those who learned "DOS." Fortunately Power Shell understands both commands and so I don't get the old "Syntax Error" I used to.

Another trick that really shows how old I am is from when I started using Oracle version 4. When you wanted to get a list of all the tables in the database, you would run the following command:

SELECT * FROM tab;

The result was a very simple listing of tables and some other basic information. Oracle later added more complete table definitions but I still use this simple command. Why? Because it is so simple and easy to remember. Are there better ways to find out what tables are in your database or schema? That depends upon how you define better. If you have to go to a manual and look it up, nope.

I used to work for a company that took PostgreSQL and made it look like Oracle for a lot less money. The first thing I tried when I sat down to play with the product was the command listed above. When it worked, I knew there were others at the company that appreciated quick and simple. I also knew they had people on the development staff that had used Oracle for a very long time, an important fact to me at the time.

Software Product Features

Earlier this week I attended 2 different seminars on how to get the most out of the software products I use daily in my job. I will confess that I didn't learn a lot but I discovered several new features that I didn't know about. It got me thinking about how to figure out what features are available in the many different software products we all use.

The first method of discovering new product features is when we do something new. This week I put together a Google Doc's document and needed one section to have 2 columns while the rest of the document just needed that standard single column. In Microsoft Word and other word processing software, there is a "Columns" icon. All you need to do is select the text you want to put into multiple columns, click the columns button, and select how many columns you want. In an effort to reduce screen clutter, Google decided it didn't need a column icon. Instead I just needed to select the text, click on the "Format" menu, and a drop-down menu showed a number of additional options, including columns. I correctly assumed the feature existed but didn't know how to use it until I had a document that required it.

The second method of discovering new product features is attending seminars outlining product features. This is what I did this week at work. We spend a lot of money with certain companies and they always want to make sure we are happy with our purchases and that generally includes taking advantage of all features. Unfortunately not everyone spends large amounts of money on software and don't have access to these seminars.

The third method of discovering new product features is through Internet searches and product videos. Perhaps you are trying to calculate something in a spreadsheet and the video you are watching shows you how to do the calculation but also shows some new features that you didn't know about. I find that very helpful.

Finally, there is the method of watching somebody doing something new that you have not seen before. Perhaps you are watching them edit a document and with a few keystrokes something amazing happens. Don't be afraid to ask them what they did. Then be sure to immediately give it a shot the next time you are working on a document. The best way to learn something new is to practice and so immediately trying something you have recently seen will reinforce the knowledge.

We all use quite a few different software products whether it is on our computers or on our phones. My personal estimate is that we really only use about a third of what the software can do. While we may not need all of those features on a daily basis, there are many more things we can do if we only know certain features exist.

Excel Trick: Computing an Average of Filtered Data

As everyone in the office seems to be out early on Christmas break, I am using all this time without meetings to do some analysis work. Yesterday I did a lot in Excel and came across yet another trick that I want to remember and so I thought I would put it here. Hopefully it helps somebody else out there.

The spreadsheet I am playing with has over 32,000 rows and 44 columns. Some of those columns don't have any data and so I have been filtering the rows to see just the data I am interested in analyzing. Yesterday I created a filter to see all the rows that had values in one column and reduced the number of rows down to 16,000. That cut my data in half but is more data than I can casually scroll through.

I removed my first filter and filtered on another column and got the number of rows down to 4,000. That is approaching an acceptable amount of data to review. I wanted to reduce it even further and so combined the 2 filters and reduced the amount of data to 1,500 rows. These rows turned out to be key for my analysis. Now I needed to average the values in a 3rd column.

I tend to use Excel a lot but don't consider myself a power user. Well at least not yet. I used the AVG function and got a number. Then I removed my filters and discovered that average did not change. That means that the AVG function works on cells even if they are hidden by a filter. Instead I needed to use the SUBTOTAL function. It only works on viewable data and can be used for a number of different calculations.

The first parameter in Excel's SUBTOTAL function is a number that signifies the mathematical calculation you want to perform. The numbers correspond to the following:

• 1 = Average
• 2 = Count of all values even if they are blank
  
• 3 = Count of all values that are not blank
  
• 4 = Maximum
• 5 = Minimum
• 6 = Product
• 7 = Standard Deviation if the data represents a sample
  
• 8 = Standard Deviation if the data represents the entire population
  
• 9 = Sum

There are more, but you get the idea. Personally if I was the creator of Excel I would have associated sum with the number 1 as I think a subtotal is a sum and not an average of values. I guess Microsoft never won any awards for being intuitive.

Once I used the SUBTOTAL function the math worked out and my hypothesis about the data turned out to be true. Furthermore I can go above and beyond the simple statement that customers in group A are more valuable than group B. I can say they spend 20% more and that is a significant amount.

Resending a Calendar Invite in Microsoft Outlook

I find that you learn the most about something when you try to use it for something new. Last week I sent out a Microsoft Outlook invitation to a bunch of people across different parts of Sony. One person declined the invitation due to a schedule conflict. He then asked if we could reschedule for a different time. I responded that with so many people on the meeting invitation I had to select a time where I knew most people could attend. He then worked on changing his schedule so he could be a part of the meeting. Now I needed to re-invite him to the meeting.

It is very easy to add someone to an existing meeting but I have never had to add someone to an Outlook calendar invite who previously declined the meeting. Sure I could cancel the meeting and send a new invitation to everyone on my list. That seemed like a lot of work that might annoy everyone who responded that they could attend the meeting. So I looked up the proper steps according to Microsoft and it turned out to be rather simple.

The first thing to do is open the calendar invite and remove the person that originally declined the invitation. Outlook will send out an update to just that one person saying they have been canceled from the meeting when you save the updated invitation. Then add them back to the meeting and it will send out a new notification to just that one person asking them to accept or decline the invitation. Nobody else will get notified of the changes, which is exactly what I wanted for such a large number of people attending the meeting.

I use Outlook constantly but occasionally get to try things that are outside what I have done before. This trick is probably very intuitive if you stop and think about the steps to follow. I appreciated being able to look up the solution and get the software to do what I wanted. Hopefully this trick helps you too.

A Neat Trick in Excel: VLOOKUP

Lately I have been doing a lot of data analysis. One of the tools I have been using is Microsoft Excel and I recently learned a new trick using VLOOKUP. I thought I would put the information here in case I ever need it again. Oh and it may help you as well.

Most of the time I work with data, I use a relational database. That allows me to join various tables to replace cryptic values with more descriptive ones. A classic example is that of an EMPLOYEE table that uses a department number instead of the name. The database will then have a lookup table that converts the number into the name. This saves a certain amount of space and makes for much more efficient queries.

You can do the same thing in Excel using the VLOOKUP function. In my spreadsheet I have 2 tabs with the first being the employee information and the second being the department. Let's assume the employee tab has the following information:

	A	B	C
1	Firstname	Lastname	Deptno
2	Matthew	Bennett	10
3	Mike	Smith	20
4	Sara	King	30

 Now let's assume that those department numbers translate to something much more readable like:

	A	B
1	Deptno	Name
2	10	Research
3	20	Operations
4	30	Finance

You can use the VLOOKUP function in the 4th column of the table to include values from the department tab. It has the following syntax:

VLOOKUP(LookupCell, TabName!StartCell:EndCell, PasteColumn, Match)

So the LookupCell is that of the number that we want to convert to descriptive text. In the example above, we would use the column C values. 

The next values to fill in are that of the lookup table. While we could have them on the same page of the workbook, I find it easier to list them on a different one and call it the "department" tab. There are only 3 values and so we would start in column A on the second row. We would then run to B4.

The PasteColumn corresponds to the column number on the lookup tab that contains the value we want to show. Our descriptive text is in the 2nd column and so we would use the value "2".

The Match parameter indicates if we want to use an approximate or exact match. This example uses an exact match and so it should be set to "FALSE". I haven't tried doing an approximate match and so I am not sure of a use case for setting it to TRUE. Perhaps I can play with it for another blog entry.

Now let's put it all together. In cell D2, I would use the following value:

=VLOOKUP(C2, department!$A$2:$B$4, 2, FALSE)

I would then copy that formula and paste it into cells D3 and D4.

If those dollar signs confuse you, that is to hold the values constant regardless of what cell you paste the formula into. Otherwise Excel will adjust the reference. In the above example, the C2 reference doesn't have the dollar sign and will be converted into C3 when you paste it in the C3 cell.

This really helped me with some analysis I did and so I hope it helps you too.

Windows vs. Mac for Reliability

Today I headed to work in my home office and tried to bring my Windows laptop out of sleep. I got a pretty little screen with a frozen cursor. I only had a few minutes until my next meeting and so I joined the meeting from my phone while I tried to figure out how to wake the laptop up. Ultimately I had to hold the power button for 10 seconds. The machine seemed to power cycle and then asked me if I wanted to troubleshoot the issue or just turn the laptop off. I chose the latter and then turned it back on. This is a weekly process and it has me somewhat frustrated.

I have 2 computers on my desk at home. The first is my personal Mac that I use to read personal e-mail, create YouTube videos, and manage my personal calendar. The second is my work laptop running Microsoft Windows 10. I use it for a lot of browser-based applications like Jira and Confluence. I also have Outlook installed for my work e-mail.

I have to reboot my Windows laptop about once a week, as I stated above. I checked how long my Mac has been running without being shut down and it has only been up for 4 days. That is because I had an operating system update over the weekend and that required a system reboot. The previous reboot for my Mac was the last software update about a month before.

When my laptop wouldn't wake up this morning and I had to join my meeting from my smartphone, I got really frustrated. My Mac never seems to need rebooting compared to my Windows laptop. Now I will admit that I am a bigger fan of the MacOS but I had hoped that Windows had become more reliable in the past half-decade. I would say that it has but is still nowhere near the MacOS is for reliability.

If you are someone that turns off your machine nightly, then Windows may work fine for you. If you are like me and just put your machine to sleep and keep it running non-stop, I would suggest running either Linux or MacOS.

Apple's Numbers vs. Microsoft's Excel

For the past several months I have been using Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program since I had to give up my work laptop. On my work laptop, I used Microsoft's Excel and even after almost half a year I have to say that I prefer Excel. I'm sure part of that is because I have years of experience with one versus a few months with the other.

I would have to say that my biggest complaint with Numbers is that a new document with a fixed-size spreadsheet. The default is a table with only 7 columns and 22 rows. Sure you can add columns or rows but each addition requires the click of an on-screen button. There also is a button that allows you to grab the lower right corner of the spreadsheet and drag it to as large as you think you will need. I actually prefer Excel's way of allowing you to scroll right or down and having new columns and rows appear.

Another thing that takes a bit of getting used to in Numbers is the right-side format bar. I feel like this should give me greater control of how the spreadsheet is formatted. Unfortunately it feels more like wasted space. I like how Excel puts all the format control at the top of the spreadsheet allowing for more visible columns.

Where the two spreadsheet products are similar is with a lot of the calculations and functions. The formula "=sum(B2:B14)" works equally well in both programs and that is important. I would hate to have to learn a new way of entering formulas.

I moved a lot of my personal spreadsheets from my work laptop to my personal computer and Numbers does a pretty good job of reading them. There are some missing fonts that I keep getting errors about but I can deal with that problem easily. The error I get is "This spreadsheet has missing fonts." I think a bigger problem would be functions that are not supported and I haven't seen any of those.

I will continue to use Numbers as I like the price: FREE. It is included with the MacOS and updated regularly. Perhaps I will learn to embrace the differences in the future but right now I see them as annoyances.

Change Is Not Always Good

Working in technology I see a lot of companies changing user interfaces simply to differentiate them from older versions. Apple is famous for eliminating features available in previous versions of their software much to the disappointment of their users. More often than not though companies will change colors (Microsoft Windows serves as a great example of this) or where certain features are located with no additional benefits and I have to question why they do it.

Technology is not the only area where this happens. Today I got bit by a fashion change that had the potential to really embarrass me. Every year I look at early ski season sales for discounts on gear. I ski enough that my gear often wears out and needs replacing. This year I found too good deal on some ski pants and now know why. When I first bought the pants, I tried them on and noticed that the front zipper is operated using the left hand instead of the right. While I am fairly ambidextrous, I have been trained to zip and unzip pants with my right hand throughout my entire life. I didn't think it would be too much of a change until I skied up to the lodge this afternoon in a semi-panicked state as I headed to the restroom. When I bought my ski pants, my wife told me they were European. What she meant was You-re-a-pee-in as in You-re-a-pee-in-in-your-pants-in-an-emergency. That almost came true today. This is one of those cases where changing something just to be different can actually be a bad thing.

Should you happen to be working in software and think it would help to differentiate your product by changing a feature's location just to differentiate it from a previous version, remember that it could be confusing to some of your long-time users. They may not appreciate your stylistic updates. Now I need to go practice zipping and unzipping my pants with my left hand so I don't have an accident in the future.

Problems with the Cloud

Microsoft used to run an ad where a woman at home had a problem to solve. She then says, "To the cloud," like it is a miracle solution that will solve all problems. I remember thinking how stupid the response seemed to me. She just needed to know how to use some of the software she probably already had on her computer. Since the ad first appeared, we have seen a number of software and services transition to Internet servers and I some of it doesn't make sense.

Last night I turned on the nightly news and saw a story about how 911 services went down around the state. The disruption caused the FCC to get involved as emergency calls are rather important. It turns out that Microsoft had an issue with their cloud authentication for several hours making it so people couldn't log into e-mail, Azure, Sharepoint, One-Drive, and a number of other services. I have to admit that I am a bit concerned when I see that Microsoft's cloud is running such important things as 911 services. I have never trusted Microsoft products for critical systems as I have had too many crashes and lost a significant amount of work throughout the years. That is one of the reasons I am writing this on a Mac and have my blog hosted by Google.

The Microsoft crash effected two of my tasks yesterday as Sony uses a number of Microsoft cloud products such as Sharepoint and Exchange (e-mail). Fortunately I had other things I could do and so I just moved onto those tasks until this morning. Now everything seems to be running smoothly.

So what went wrong? I did a quick Internet search this morning as I assumed there would be plenty of information about the outage. I was not wrong as a number of news sources felt the outage worth reporting. Ultimately they all use Microsoft as the source for the problem. Some speculated that this might be caused by some sort of Distributed Denial of Surface (DDoS) attack. Microsoft came and said that it wasn't. Their explanation revealed a "code issue" that kept their servers from processing login information appropriately. Does that concern anyone as much as it does me?

There are a number of services that benefit from moving from people's local computers up into the Internet cloud. Then there are some others that are best left to local hardware. Hopefully we are not all blinded by the promises of the cloud to be stupid about it.

Greatest Hits Games

For anyone looking to save money on video games, there is a little trick to be aware of at this point in the console lifecycle. Both Sony and Microsoft have announced new consoles but they won't be appearing this year. In order to keep the game sales moving, there are some steep discounts on a number of really great games. While new releases are often in the $60 range, games that were best sellers a while ago can be had for $20. These are referred to as "Greatest Hits" in the PlayStation world. I'm sure Microsoft has something similar.

I have a lot of credit on my PlayStation account and so I thought I would run through the list of Greatest Hits to see if there is anything I might have missed and want to play now. I looked at what is currently available for $19.99 and have a couple of recommendations for those that have not played these games yet.

One of the best deals out there is the "Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection" available on the PS4. This includes Uncharted One, Two, and Three all for the low price of only $19.99. When the games were originally released on the PS3, they cost $60 each for a total of $180. Talk about a huge discount. All 3 games have been remastered for the higher quality sound and graphics available in the PS4 console. If you like those 3 games, Uncharted 4 is also in the Greatest Hits collection and is also only $19.99.

The second game I would like to recommend is Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition. This includes the Frozen Wilds DLC that came out several months after the original game release. I enjoyed the DLC so much, I paid the $15 full-price for it. I have a lot of fond memories playing the game and highly recommend it.

Video games can be expensive and so looking for great deals like this is one way to keep the costs down. I highly recommend these games and the price makes them almost too good a deal to pass up if you haven't played them yet. If you have, there are a number of other games in the Greatest Hits collection you might want to consider.

Buy, Rent, or Borrow Computing Power for Machine Learning

I am going through an interesting exercise at work. There are a number of us going through a Reinforcement Learning book and we all want to play with the code described in the various chapters. While I have the luxury of having a Linux machine sitting under my desk, others are not so fortunate. One of my coworkers has a rather large Linux box with a lot of computing power and so several people are running the exercises there. Unfortunately it can only handle about 3 really large jobs concurrently and so we are looking at other options for getting compute power for our Machine Learning exercises.

We tried the first solution by buying a large computer but there are a number of problems associated with that. I explained the first being that we are limited to about 3 people using it at the same time. the resources are fixed and don't scale well. The second problem is we have to maintain that computer. During one particularly large job, the computer stopped running at 4am and we have no idea why. We believe it might have been a hardware failure because the logs just suddenly stopped recording anything. It would be nice to have someone monitoring the computer 24 hours a day but that is not possible. Especially for a simple learning exercise.

The next option is to rent space on a cloud service such as Amazon (AWS), Google (GCE), or Microsoft (Azure). We do not require graphics processing units (GPUs) and so we can get enough computing power for all our experiments for around $650/month. We will take 2 to 3 months to read the book and would require about $2,000. That is significantly less than the price we paid for buying the computer mentioned previously. Furthermore the hardware will scale nicely. If we want to run more experiments, we increase the number of servers we rent. When we don't need them any more, we shut them down and don't pay to keep them running.

Finally there is the option of borrowing computing power. There are a number of other groups within the company that have spare compute cycles we could use for our learning exercises. This is the ideal solution if we only factor in cost. However the reality is that someone could be kicked off the hardware when other higher-priority tasks need to run instead or the problem of spreading out experiments evenly across the company.

We will probably end up renting servers from one of the public cloud companies as it seems to strike the balance between being cost effective and least troublesome. Your situation may be different and it is always worth considering all 3 options.

AI is Still Pretty Stupid

This past week I have been doing some research on artificial intelligence and it has been a lot of fun. I created one program to tell knock-knock jokes. Then I created another to play something similar to the old text-based game called Adventure. Both of those programs I create with the help of AIML and they each only took a few hours.

Next I looked at doing something a bit more advanced and utilized scikit-learn in Python with some machine learning. This time I played with creating a program to converse with me. I downloaded a number of training files that are used to train the program in the English language. The training took less than an hour and soon I could start interacting with my program. I typed in my first statement and it thought about it for a while. After several minutes, it spit out something in English that didn't match my initial comment. I figured my program needed a bit more training and so I taught it a few facts like "2 + 2 = 4". It responded with the correct answer when I asked what "two plus two" was. Then I asked about 2 plus 3 and it returned "2 + 2 = 4".

I played around a bit more and came to the conclusion that simple AI programs with an hour of training are really stupid. So how to do you spend more time teaching an AI program? Microsoft created Tay and let it loose on the Internet. In less than a day, it became incredibly racist. Naturally they quickly stopped the program. Think about it, would you really want your child to learn all its knowledge from the Internet? Of course not and so allowing your AI program to roam free on the Internet is probably not a good idea. The reason we send kids to school is that we want them to learn from a trusted source and for certain knowledge we don't even trust ourselves.

Windows Technical Support

Lately I have been getting phone calls from a company claiming that my computer is sending messages to their server and indicating there is a problem. When the phone calls first started, they claimed to be from "Windows Technical Support." I promptly informed them that I don't have any computers running Windows and that they should stop calling me. Did that stop the calls? Nope.

Two weeks ago I files a complaint with the Do Not Call registry as this company was not smart enough to mask their number from caller ID. Did the calls stop? Nope. The company continued calling with a "Blocked" caller ID number. Normally I wouldn't answer such calls but the marina in California where I keep my sailboat also has a "Blocked" caller ID number and so last week I answered the phone thinking it was them. My wife was lucky enough to be in my home office when the call came and it went something like this:

I answered, "Hello, this is Matt."

The female voice replied, "May I please speak with Matthew Bennett?"

"This is him."

"Hello, this is Susan with Computer Technical Support."

I noticed they had changed the name of the company somewhat but thought I would try to be polite. "Yes, and why are you calling."

"We noticed that your computer is sending us data that indicates it is having some problems."

I was intrigued but knew it was the same people that have been bugging me and so I asked a very important question, "Oh really, what kind of computer do I have?"

"It is a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system."

While that would account for most of the computers in the world, I don't have a single computer that has booted into Windows over the past 2 months and so I replied, "You are a liar. My laptop is a Mac and my desktop runs Linux." I may or may not have said a few more things before I rudely hung up on her.

I was relaying this story to one of my work colleagues and he responded that it is a scam and they got his mother recently. While they only billed her credit card for $90, there is a chance they will use the credit card number for other purposes and so my colleague had his mother cancel her card. After all, you can't really trust a crook to only steal $90.

If you take a step back and think about it, Microsoft technical support wouldn't bother calling you if it noticed a problem. They have much quicker ways of taking your money and don't need to rely on telemarketers posing as technical support. Besides, you might just ask them about a real problem you are having because there are so many.

Windows 8.1 Complicates Simple Tasks

I have spent the past 2 days trying to get Windows 8.1 usable for my wife. I can't believe people actually use Windows as it is such a pain. I am trying to hold off on installing another operating system on my wife's computer as that will be burning the Windows bridge once I start. Besides, I said I would give Windows a fair chance. Unfortunately Windows 8.1 is not very forgiving when you make mistakes and there are enough variations that trying to get help from the usual Internet sites is really confusing.

I bought a laptop that came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. That becomes important when trying to figure out problems. It is not Windows 8 nor is it Windows Server 2012. I don't have it connected to a specific domain, which to be honest should be true for most laptops. There are a lot of trolls on forums that assume it is a work computer and provide less than useful advice.

My latest mistake with Windows 8.1 started with user accounts. When you go to set up an account you have the option of a local account or an online account. I originally set up my wife's account as a local account because I think it is pointless to have an online one. Microsoft disagrees with me and strongly recommends the opposite. Why? because they can reset your password in the event that you forget it. They can also keep tabs on you and everything you do. My wife followed their recommendation and changed her local account to an online one and even provided them with her birth-date. When Microsoft gets hacked, as all unhackable sites do, then someone can use that information to help steal my wife's identity. Naturally I removed the online account and that was the mistake. I was sure to set up another administrator account before I did it, but as she was the administrator, it changed a bunch of the default settings. Instead of having a nice piano image when the computer boots, it had a really ugly yellow-rainbowish image that causes epileptic seizures in cats. That ugly image needed to be changed and that was my problem.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who wanted to change the pre-login screen and so I searched the Internet. I checked a number of Microsoft forum pages but they were useless and so I won't even bother to link them. I found one page that shed some light on the issue as well as a number of related issues with Microsoft's latest operating system. If you bother to go through the postings you can see my frustration. In an effort to save you from a lot of reading the string of posts goes something like this:

• I want to change the pre-login screen image
• Here is how to change the lock-screen image
• That is not what I asked
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft
• That just tells me how to change the lock-screen image and is not what I asked
• You are a moron, changing the lock-screen image changes the pre-login screen image
• No I'm not a moron, changing the lock-screen image works only if you have one account for your PC, I have multiple and want to know how to change the pre-login screen image.
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft on how to do it in Windows Server 2012.
• I'm not running Windows Server 2012, I am running Windows 8.1 on a PERSONAL computer.

The posts go on for quite some time until finally someone actually gives a very convoluted way to do what the original poster asked. Coincidently that was what I was looking for. Other users having the same issue come up with numerous short cuts.

I read through the solutions and found one that seemed reasonable. In the process, I learned that there are a number of hidden directories (e.g. C:\ProgramData) that you can't get to unless you explicitly type it into the File Explorer. Even then there are a number of difficulties as administrators don't have permission to see who owns certain files. You have to change your administrator user to be the owner of files.

I used to belong to the group of people in the world that believed Microsoft knew how to write software. That is no longer the case as I think they over complicate even the simplest of tasks.

Windows 8: What Were They Thinking?

My son started playing with his new computer today and loves the hardware. It is not all roses though as this evening he is setting up Windows 8 and I am learning to swear in multiple languages. After living in Romania for 2 years, my son knows how to swear in Romanian, Russian, and Moldovan. Setting up Windows 8 is helping my learning process as there are plenty of opportunities to use such language.

Earlier in my career I worked on Larry Ellison's Network Computer. We basically took NetBSD and wrapped a user friendly interface around it. In the process I worked with our graphics designer and went through countless hours of usability testing. We would sit behind a one-way mirror and watch as users played with our software to do a number of simple computer tasks. We learned a lot in the process and created an award winning user interface. I only wish Microsoft had taken the time to do the same thing with Windows 8.

I don't know how Microsoft let Windows 8 get through any sort of usability testing. As near as I can figure, they wired electrodes to their users and had a plate of cookies on the table. When the users complained about the interface, they received an electric shock. When they appreciated the non-intuitive features of a horribly designed computer interface, they got a cookie. There is no way that anyone would prefer Windows 8 over an abacus.

Here are some examples of why I think only a fool would use Windows 8:

1. If you leave a CD in the drive too long, it won't eject. You have to restart the computer to get the disk out.

2. You have to get updated drivers for your laptop's touch pad in order to use multi-finger scrolling. It doesn't matter which hardware manufacturer you buy the laptop from, they all require the update. Sony, Toshiba, and Lenovo have their drivers posted in their technical support forums on their websites.

3. You have to use the task manager to kill Windows 8 native programs. Who writes a program and doesn't put a quit option in one of the menus? Isn't that part of user interface 101?

The longer I sit here typing my blog, the more examples of Microsoft stupidity are exposed. Unfortunately my son is almost in tears and wants to ditch Windows 8 in favor of Linux. We will probably spend the next couple of nights figuring out a way to run Linux as the primary operating system and Windows 8 in a VM. . . but only as a last resort.

Changes at Microsoft

I was in a meeting this afternoon and someone mentioned that the head of the XBox One is leaving Microsoft to go to Zynga. I didn't believe it at first and so I looked it up on the Internet as soon as I had a spare moment. Yes, it looks like Don Mattrick is headed to the folks that brought you Farmville. Now let's see if he can't help them create another product that is as successful as their first one. It is a tall order that Zynga has thus far failed to duplicate.

With Mr. Mattrick leaving Microsoft, what does that mean for the XBox One? Did he not believe in his own product? Or was the offer so good, it was worth going to a company with a ton of cash, but no visible future products? No matter the answers to those questions, Microsoft finds itself with yet another hurdle to overcome with its forthcoming console release.

In the meantime, Sony continues to march forward with the PlayStation 4 release. You can preorder a PS4 bundle from their Sony store. I'm not sure if the bundle shows retail prices for products, but if it does, then their equivalent hardware to Microsoft's Kinect is only $60. That means in an apples-to-apples comparison, the PS4 is $40 less than the XBox One. It will be interesting to see what other changes we will see before either product is launched.

PlayStation 4 vs XBox One

Microsoft and Sony have both made some significant announcements at the E3 conference in Los Angeles this week. The biggest is probably Sony unveiling the new PlayStation 4 along with pricing. In case you missed it, the PS4 will be priced at $399 while the XBox One is priced at $499. Microsoft also announced their policy about having to keep their console connected to the internet so it can check back in with the home office every 24 hours. If it doesn't, then the unit shuts down and won't play games.

At first glance it looks like the PS4 is the console to buy while you would have to be an idiot to buy an XBox One. Some gamers have even started calling Microsoft's offering "the XBox Done". I have to admit that I am a fan of the PlayStation and am happy to see that Sony did a few things right. However someone should point out that it is not all roses for the PS4. The obvious thing to ask is why the $100 price difference between the two hardware platforms. Well that is easy, the XBox comes with the Kinect while the equivalent PlayStation Eye is extra. I have not seen a price on the Eye and so I don't know if it will cost more or less than $100, but it is something to consider when arguing which platform will be better.

When it comes to being able to play used games, I have to say that Sony is taking the better path. I have started hating Apple because they feel it necessary to interfere with my MacBook Pro without my permission. Therefore I find it annoying that Microsoft feels they have the right to control whether or not you can share games with your friends. I have always believed that the best software licenses are ones that treat software like a book. You are free to loan your book to a friend, you just can't read it at the same time as your friend. There is still time before consumers can purchase either console and so I hope that Microsoft listens to their customers and figures out that we don't really want Big Brother watching everything we do.

One thing I have not seen is a comparison between the looks of the two devices. When the XBox One was announced, I found it to be a boring box. My opinion was that Sony didn't even have to try very hard to beat the ugly XBox One. When I saw the PS4 for the first time this week, I wished Sony had tried harder. Sony's looks like a box with slanted sides. I still think it looks better than Microsoft's console, but not by much. I do have to say that a closer look at the PS4 pictures shows a really sleek-looking color scheme and the design is starting to grow on me, but I'm not sure if that is my PS4 prejudice coming out or not.

Ultimately the success of either platform will be found in the services and games available. Microsoft is trying to appeal to the gamer as well as other consumers looking for an entertainment device. Sony seems to be appealing to the hard-core gamers. This is a role reversal from the last consoles provided by these two companies. While it is difficult to say the PS3 was a success for Sony, that fact that it was the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market kept it from being a dismal failure. A relatively high percentage of the original PS3 consoles were purchased simply as movie players and were never used for playing games. Perhaps the public is looking for an entertainment device and not just a video game one. If so, Microsoft is in a good position to take advantage of the trend.

I wish I could be more objective and say that I think both devices are good and there is room in every house for both. Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees and I still have to work hard for every dollar before I spend it. So when both consoles are released later this year, I will be standing in the Sony line, not the Microsoft one. And it will be my Christmas present I am buying, not the kids. If they want one, they can get their own PS4.

New Video Game Consoles

Tomorrow Sony PlayStation is expected to make a big announcement. The general consensus is that it will be regarding their new console unit which theoretically will be called the PlayStation 4. This brings up the question regarding if we need a new console or not. Both Microsoft and Sony seem to think we do as do a lot of industry experts. According to some, the PS3 and XBox 360 are over half a decade old and a new console will reignite the industry. Others think phones and tablets are the new gaming platform.

I think it all boils down to content. If you can create a compelling game on a basic console, then there is no reason buy an expensive next generation one. Sony sold a great many PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles because of a number of great games. Microsoft did the same for the Xbox and Xbox 360 simply because of Halo and a few other exclusive games. Publishers like EA and Activision don't care which console you own and create games for both. That is a lot of content.

With next generation tablets and smartphones, it is only a matter of time before they become powerful enough to play current console games. So what can the console creators do to make their products more compelling than the tablet and phone manufacturers? Perhaps we will find out tomorrow.

Doing it Right

I am not staying at a particularly nice hotel in Japan, yet I am impressed with the features in my room. There are a bunch of tiny details that really make my stay comfortable. I don't think the Japanese woke up one day and said, "We are going to make the ultimate hotel room." Instead I imagine it was an iterative process where they asked themselves, "How do we make our hotel more comfortable than our competitors?" That is how Apple has had their success as well as Microsoft.

Nobody remembers versions 1 and 2 of Microsoft Windows. I do because I had one of the original copies of Windows 2. It was a horrible product that was a cross between DOS and the original Macintosh. Rather than having pretty icons, you had a listing of file names that you could click to access. Nobody bought it and so Microsoft realized they had to make it better. Then came Windows 3.0 and we saw that Microsoft learned their lesson. It would be nice if they continued to make things better instead of simply changing things.

Apple is similar. They released their first iPod and then continued to refine it as other competitors entered the market place. When Microsoft introduced their attempt at an MP3 player, Apple was already ahead of them and continued to distance themselves with a better product. When solid-state storage became affordable, Apple continued to offer the larger capacity disk-based iPods, but also introduced a line of smaller and sleeker ones as well.

Successful technology companies will always ask that important question, "How do we make our product more appealing than our customers?" and not simply, "How do we make money?" Now if I could just figure out how to get a heated toilet seat in my bathroom at home.