The Silicon Valley Geek

For the purposes of work, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Linux on a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

For some strange reason this morning, the Ubuntu virtual disk was just going on and on, spinning away and responsiveness was near zero.

Running “top” showed that a daemon called trackerd was eating a bunch of CPU cycles.

A quick search on Google revealed that trackerd indexes your hard disk for quicker searches.

Does that sound familiar?

Anyone who has encountered Windows Vista would have seen that same problem: the total lack of responsiveness in the user interface while the hard disk chugs away.

One would think that the Linux folks are generally more “progressive” than the people at Redmond.

But nooooo! As they say:”Fools seldom differ”.

OS X Leopard also has the same problem.

I think the issue is that no one in a product development organization goes through the end-to-end experience of an average user. Usually, someone has a machine all set up and all he does is to plunk in new binaries and run them.

On the other hand, the average user has a brand new computer and has to go through all that initial set up (and indexing à la trackerd/Vista).

So development organizations have to sit at the place of the end user and really examine every step the user goes through. Only then will their products be really user friendly.

I am still waiting…

And I am not referring to that blue screen of surprise that earlier versions of Windows are famous for.

Increasing numbers of people are shopping online. Usually, at the end of the shopping process, after you have entered your credit card information, you get a web page that confirms your purchase and includes any additional information to track or use the purchase e.g. order number, software registration code.

Common sense tells you that you should print out the web page and save it “just in case”.

Trouble is, you either end up with yet-another sheet of paper to misplace or you are at the airport with no access to a printer.

Here’s where Apple continues to pleasantly surprise.

OS X has always had the ability to print to PDF files (unlike Windows). This means that you don’t need to fork out mucho $$$$ for a copy of Adobe Acrobat to generate PDF files.  All you need to do is to print the document and then select the option to route the output to a PDF file.

With Leopard, Apple has gone one step further by automating the creation of the PDF file and where to place it. See the screenshot below.

If you just made an online purchase, all you need to do is to print out that last order confirmation page, click on the PDF button and select the “Print PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option. The confirmation web page is automatically converted to a PDF file, and saved to that folder, which is found in your Documents folder.

The screenshot below is of my online registration for the Santa Cruz Wharf-to-Wharf race. The PDF file is saved as “SignMeUp.com - Payment - Wharf to Wharf Race 2008″. How is that for a totally meaningful file name?

Rather than spending years coming up with a whiz-bang Windows Vista equivalent, Apple concentrated on features that actually makes sense to the average user. That is why as I continue to use my MacBook Pro full-time (work, school etc), I continue to be amazed at all the new stuff that I can do.

When Windows tries to be smart, it feels paternalistic: that it knows better than you and you spend time arguing with it.

OS X, on the other hand, makes you feel smart because you can now do all this new stuff!

You may be tempted to ask: what’s up with the little ads?

Answer: This is my experiment with Google AdSense.

AdSense is a mechanism by which Google can intelligently figure out the kind of content on a web page, and then as a result, serve advertising that is appropriate for that content. For example, you may notice a bunch of ads for running events and Mac products. That’s because recent blog entries dealt with these two topics.

The other aspect of AdSense is monetization for the website owner. For example, if you were to click on an ad on my blog, I will get some money from Google.  Of course, I have not seen cent yet. That’s probably due to the low number of visitors.

In the old days, webmasters put counters on every webpage. The counters would increment every time the associated webpage is served (i.e. viewed by someone). On the original www.svgeek.com site, the counters were visible to visitors. I also had a private web page which contained all the counters so that I could see, at a glance, how many hits the site got.

Today, I use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a set of code that you insert into every web page. When you log into your Google Analytics account, you can see the number of daily visitors and every imagination statistic. You can also see how the visitors got to your site, for example, if they found you via a Google search, or if they came from another site. If the visitors found you via Google, you can also see the search terms they used. This is an interesting tie-in with AdWords, another Google product. I imagine that you would use the search terms from Analytics and advertise appropriately via AdWords in order to drive visitors to your web site. Very clever of Google.

I am very tempted to play with AdWords to see how I can increase traffic to this blog. The nice thing with AdWords, compared to the banner ads of the past, is that you pay only if there is a click-through. So I could come up with a budget of few tens of dollars and see what happens. Hmmm…

My other hat is as co-chair of the Haas EWMBAA communications committee. We have been sending out a weekly eZine via email to all EWMBA students. One intention is to drive traffic to the web pages “owned” by the various student committees(Admissions, Career Services, Alumni Affairs etc). The best way of monitoring the success/failure is to use Google Analytics to track traffic. Unfortunately, Blogger.com (our hosting service) does not allow you to easily insert the Analytics code. This in spite of the fact that Blogger.com is a Google property. So we will probably have to manually edit the HTML. This will be fun…