Scott Hanselman

My fortieth Podcast is up.  In this one, Carl and I chat about Architecture, for the first time in person, in the halls of TechEd Europe in Barcelona.

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

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Links from the show are also always on the show site, although this show had no links to speak of. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'll post technical stuff about the conference later, but today Mo and the baby and I wandered around Barcelona. Here's a few pics, with the rest on Flickr.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hola from Spain. A crazy flight, and a crazy night as Z (my 11 month old) struggles to adjust to the 9 hour time change, but we arrived and survived.

Here's a picture of this morning's presentation, specifically the "Abilities of the Architect" talk at the Architecture Pre-Conference with Ron Jacobs and I.

Already a blog post from Lorenzo Barbieri, an attendee, about the talk where I explained to the European audience what "The Bus Factor" is.

Architecting by Coincidence - Bella la definizione... simile a quella di Programming by Coincidence, ma con conseguenze ancora più gravi...

Fa il paio con "The Bus Factor": cosa succederebbe al vostro progetto se la persona X venisse investita da un autobus?
- (feel free to translate at the BabelFish)

It's a common turn of phrase in the states. I didn't coin it, I'm sure it just was out there, but I mentioned it once here.

...stuff like this has what I call a "High Bus Factor." That means if the developer who wrote it is hit by a bus, you're screwed.

Great questions from the audience and all in all, a fine time was had by all.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm sitting in a cab right now on the way to a large NW Bank (I'm using Verizon Wireless on my laptop, which is working quite nicely, BTW) and I am coveting the Sony Reader, or what I personal call "eBooks last chance." At least, until another generation of early adopters lives and dies and forgets (or at least chooses to) the sins of the father.

I remember reading eBooks on my Newton. I really wanted it to work. (In case you haven't heard, I may by an early adopter myself) back then and I struggle to read eBooks (funny thing about eBooks is that when there's no real modern content you find yourself reading Sherlock Holmes again because it's in the public domain and you're SUCH an early adopter that you convince yourself you're really interested in The Case of the Two Blue Shoes and not something with more meat.)

Besides the expense, which is currently US$350, the real issue will be one of content. How many books are available? To quote the guy at Borders "Well, all of them. The whole store." I can't confirm that claim, but I did check out the Connect eBooks Sony Store and it does seem to have a lot of books.

I wonder why Sony didn't just work a deal out with Amazon, who was already dipping their toes into the eBook pool, and may just jump in completely with the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is looking pretty rough right now, but it's early.

Aside: Kindle? Seriously, could the marketers at ordinarily-savvy Amazon come up with we a limper name? How about Amazon Not-Dead-Tree? Amazon Vue? Amazon Perspective? Amazon ePaperBack, for crying out loud. Amazon Kindle sparks (sorry) images of burning paper, not exactly the kind of environmentally friendly eBook perspective you'd want.

I played with the Sony Reader for 15 minutes at the Airport Borders, and here's my first impressions:

• It's very light and very comfortable. It has a nice flip around case and reminds me of a larger Palm V - to this day still Palm's most elegant PDA, IMHO.
• There's too many buttons. There's ten 0-9 buttons that are multi-purpose (multi-purpose buttons are mistake cop-out number one in good design, IMHO). They are used to access the internal menus by numbered item, but their primary function is to quick jump a percentage of the way into the book. So pressing 5 gets you 50% of the way into the book. There's no way to go directly to a page that I could see.
• There's multiple ways to turn the page, and they are both on the left side of the reader. The two buttons on the left bezel while oriented up/down, are actually left/right page turning buttons. I think it'd have been more thoughtful and innovative to just touch a long line on the far left or far right bezel to turn the page.
• The memory card slot supports both Memory Sticks and SD Cards - choice is good.
• The lower right corner features a joystick-like, sigh, multifunction, nubbin. It's a little confusing because I assumed that the page-turning interface would double as the main interaction element for the utility UI.
• The screen, the screen. It's all about the screen. It's eInk. It's not an LED - that's important to note. It's 170 DPI with four levels of gray, versus 96 DPI (or possibly 120 DPI) on a laptop or PDA screen. The battery is used only to change the configuration of the screen i.e. you only use power when turning the page.
• You can apparently read RSS feeds on it as well, downloadable via USB. Interestingly, RSS might be the killer app for this Reader, rather than books.
• It also has volume buttons and headphones so you can use it as an audiobook reader or MP3 Player. This also allows you to read while listening to background music.
• The guy at Borders said they haven't had to change the batteries on the demo model ever. They say 7500 page turns on a single battery.
• There's 3 font sizes...each is comfortable, even the smallest, but I'm a big font guy so I think I'd have trouble committing to a size.

If it were US$99 or US$150, sold. $199, eh...getting dangerously out of the WAF range. Considering that I carried 3 books with me on my last three business trips and they were a hassle in my backpack, I could totally see using this little gadget, but it's really expensive at $350, although you do get $50 in free books.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My thirty-ninth Podcast is up.  This one is about Identity, Information Cards and Windows CardSpaces.

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

Subscribe:

Links from the show are also always on the show site, although this show had no links to speak of. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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