I only just realised how lame getsatisfaction.com is:
- You can’t sort search results by popularity
- You can’t restrict search results to answered or unanswered questions
Well, that pretty much renders it totally useless right there, for both customers and companies, unless the community you’re searching is tiny, in which case why would you need the site anyway?
Oh yeah, and the undocumented boolean AND searches don’t work.
Staggering. (I’m praying someone will tell me I’m wrong about at least one of these.)
Update 2010/03/07: got a reply from getsatisfaction on search results sorting – I was right but there is a kind of lame alternative.
I just posted this on Motorola Europe’s facebook page:
Just got a Milestone and am impressed with the hardware but disappointed with Motorola’s attitude towards European customers regarding the closed bootloader. [An official statement from the manager of the technical team behind the MOTODEV program at Motorola] says “This practice is driven by a number of different business factors” but does not explain further – what are you hiding, Motorola? You seem to be underestimating
- (a) the potential of a technology community which promotes collaboration rather than hindering it (why do you think Android grew so quickly in the first place?), and
- (b) the importance of regular, open communication with your customers.
Sadly if this continues, I expect HTC and your other competitors will leave you far behind.
A few days ago whilst browsing the latest news on Quarq power-meters, I discovered that some very smart guys have answered my prayers and written a fabulous new piece of software called Golden Cheetah! Not only is it fully cross-platform and incredibly feature-rich, but it works natively with ANT+ devices via quarqd, and with the Computrainer not just in standard erg mode but also in online streaming mode allowing you train with someone on the other side of the Atlantic 🙂 It’s becoming harder and harder to resist buying a Garmin Forerunner 310XT and a Quarq Cinqo Saturn … But perhaps most importantly of all, it’s free software released under the GPL. The authors really do “get it”:
We believe that cyclists should be able to download their power data to the computer of their choice, analyze it in whatever way they see fit, and share their methods of analysis with others.
If only companies like Suunto “got it” rather than shipping miserable excuses for software such as Suunto Training Manager… *sigh*. Anyway, looking forward to getting my media PC fixed and trying this out soon… maybe I’ll even find some time to help improve it 🙂
Oh wow, that’s four hours of my life I won’t get back.
Four hours trying to figure out why the hell my changes to .java source files weren’t showing up in the compiled binaries, debugging an unholy mess of ant XML files, before I finally realised how badly ant’s dependency checking sucks … Then 5 minutes of googling for ‘ant sucks’ and I find two excellently written rants (the second seems to have since vanished off the face of the ‘net, but was at ) which confirm my discovery.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Anything which uses XML as a domain-specific language should have already set the alarm bells ringing, but my excitement at learning something new initially blotted out the dull headache caused by hacking in XML. Bah!
Almost two months into my new job and I’m absolutely loving it – if I was meant to be in IT (which sometimes I do wonder), then this is where I belong. My main observations are:
- My team is amazing. Really – full of uber-smart, motivated, helpful guys supported by great management, great interface to the business, and very slick, well-oiled processes.
- This was a huge sideways move, so the learning curve has been a similar experience to last year when I started triathlons and had to learn to freestyle without drowning. I love learning new things, definitely feel like I am over the hardest part now, and am trying to contribute to the team effort with as close as I can get to the breakneck speed the other guys do.
- When you really love something, it sucks you in – sometimes too much. Last night I was up until 3am 😕 I need to follow the advice Michael Meeks gave me when I asked him for tips on how to deal with being a full-time home-working geek:
Sure – get up at the same time every day; and quit work roughly 9 hours later without fail.
Then you stay sane 🙂
- It’s a more solitary lifestyle than my previous role, so I need to make more effort to get out and socialize in the evenings. Actually this could be a good thing because I used to occasionally use “work is quite social” as an excuse for not going out if I was tired.
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