Inhumane URLs (and why Oxford University fails, again.)

Uniform Resource Locators, commonly known as URLs are the address system for finding things on the internet.  Unfortunately, they’re often not very humane.  Can you imagine having to type this lovely example into your browser (much less trying to remember it!)

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000100000020200502000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Yikes! (This, by the way, is the URL of our new physics paper) Getabs? Servlet? prog=normal?  WTF?

This blog, powered by WordPress, does a little better:

http://buhjillions.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/inhumane-urls-and-why-oxford-university-fails-again/

The blog’s domain, followed by the year, month, and date of the post, and finally the title.  Not bad for something generated by a computer each time I sit down and write a new post.  WordPress also gives me the option of writing the URL myself, but I never bother.  Why?  Because people have designed systems to deal with this problem, or have otherwise learned to cope.  People create bookmarks for places they want to get back to, or remember instead of the URL, the path that they took to get there from other websites, or enough keywords that they locate it again via Google.

Still, the one part of a URL which people actually do try to remember is the domain name, the something.whatsit.com.  It is the part which is often spoken aloud, in conversation or in radio and TV adverts.  People remember the domain names, and good ones are worth a lot of money.

Which is why doing inhumane things with your domains is an inexcusable offense.  Consider the difference between typing ox.ac.uk and www.ox.ac.uk in your browser bar.  That’s right, one dumps you to an ‘address not found’ failwhale, and the other gets you to the University of Oxford’s homepage.  Why doesn’t ox.ac.uk redirect to www.ox.ac.uk just like every other website on the internet?

Fail Whale.

I requested this ‘feature’ on a feedback form from the OUCS website (located at www.oucs.ox.ac.uk).  The response?

“I’m afraid that this isn’t possible in the Oxford environment.”

That’s right folks.  Whatever crazy hosting technologies we’re packing here at the 2nd best university in the world (12th best in technology), they aren’t capable of issuing an HTTP redirect.  What kind of shady bub’s business are we running here? I’m not sure if I should be reassured that it isn’t just OUCS being too lazy to set up the redirect.

Oxford, I’m not sure how you’ve managed to rest on your laurels for this long and not drop completely off the top 100 list, but it’s high time that you get your shit together.

(Postscript: Although I mention OUCS in this post, I’m not necessisarily pointing the finger of blame directly at them.  Maybe OUCS needs to sober up to what it really takes to run a world-class information technology department, or maybe the University governanace needs to actually give them the resources they need.  How high up the org chart this issue goes, I don’t really know.)

Xobni: funny name, good times with Outlook

It’s hard to come up with a decent name for your web startup. Believe me, we spent ages brainstorming, arguing, deciding everything we brainstormed was crap, and brainstorming some more before we came up with a name for the web startup that I was very briefly involved in. Whatever name we ended up with must have been underwhelming because I can’t actually remember it sitting here in front of my computer 3 years later.

Even the big boys—who can pay slickery consultants to sit in a room and pontificate on made-up words that will jive with whatever freaky internet talk them kids are sending down the tubes these days—come up with ridiculous names for services and websites. Please allow me to Joost up my Hulu-craft and so that we may partake in a Qoop down the Jaiku.

In a world where every English word is already registered on the .com top-level domain, the makers of Xobni can be forgiven for spelling “inbox” backward and calling it a day.

If you use Microsoft Outlook (2003/2007) for your email, then Xobni (even in its currently beta incarnation) is definitely worth a look. At its core, Xobni is an email-search tool, but it is decidedly different in its approach than what you’d get with Google Desktop or Windows Search. Xobni’s interface is people-centric. I don’t mean this in a dopey television ad way; Xobni’s interface is primarily organized to show you helpful information about the people you email. When you preview a message in Outlook, Xobni’s vertical panel shows you information about the sender, along with the most recent conversations you’ve had, and every file you’ve sent or received from that person. It automatically parses telephone numbers from mail, so you don’t have to go hunting, although this feature doesn’t always find them, in my limited experience so far.

It does take up quite a bit of screen real estate, and I feel like my preview pane is now slightly too narrow, but it does pack a bunch useful stuff into the small space. My geeky, data-visualization-loving side can’t help but appreciate the histogram of the sender’s emailing habits by hour of day, but I can’t yet to claim I’ve actually found this to be useful. One day!

Oxford’s upcoming groupware project

OK, so I’ve blogged previously about how much email at Oxford sucks. But, as I alluded to, and as commented by our friendly neighborhood Oxford-IT-guy (thanks for reading, BTW), Oxford University Computing Services has a plan! The call it the Groupware for the University Project, or just groupware. Groupware is software designed to help groups collaborate. It’s been around forever, even though the name is new; and I guarantee that you’ve used it.

Email was the original groupware. It was the first “killer app” for the internet, and the vast majority of traffic on the early ‘net was email. Groups of researchers used it communicate in those early days, and today it is as mainstream as chocolate pudding. Usenet came next, in the 80s. It was a kind of discussion forum arranged around categories called newsgroups. Although it is still in use today, it has largely been supplanted by newer developments like web-based forums. The point is that lots of software is groupware: instant messanging, wikis, etc. So we all use different types of groupware for different purposes or for different groups. Other than email, there has been no University-wide attempt to give everyone a common set of groupware applications.

OUCS plans to begin deployment, according to the project page, in June of this year. However, the user requirements document was finalized in February, so we already have a pretty good “high level” idea of what the University hopes to accomplish. Even though the document breaks up requirements into 8 “components,” from a user’s perspective, there are 5 main applications:

1. Email
2. Calendaring and Resource Booking
3. Contact List
4. Shared Data Repository
5. Interface to Student Information System (SIS)

(The other 3 requirements components cover all the applications and are: encryption support, remote web access, and mobile access.)

Email is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple requirements worth noting:

• webmail needs to support a range of functions “typical of leading/common current webmail clients.”
• must have the ability to synchronize with mobile clients (e.g. syncML, Blackberry, ActiveSync)
• support for shared mail folders

The last one is particularly important for on-campus student groups, who often want to have an email inbox for the group which can be monitored by all the officers.

Calendaring is the ability to keep and manage one or more calendars which are stored on the server and accessible from either the web interface, a mobile device, or a desktop calendar client (iCal, Outlook, etc.). This becomes groupware when you have the ability to share your calendar with people or groups to aid in scheduling. Unfortunately, there isn’t a requirement to be able to schedule meetings with a visual representation of people’s Free/Busy information (generated from their calendar, if they choose to share it). This is one of my favorite features of using a system like MS Exchange Server. Let’s hope whatever we get has this feature anyway. Resource booking means being able to see when resources, like rooms or projectors, are unscheduled, and the ability to reserve them from the groupware. That’ll save a lot of time in trying to book tutorials.

The contact list is just like it sounds—an address book. They’ve included some much needed requirements that it is straightforward to import and export from the contact list. They’ve also mandated that the groupware interact with something called the Core User Directory, which I can only assume is the central University Admin’s database of all the people at Oxford. This should hopefully mean you can find contact information for people who are members of the University very easily.

The Shared Data Repository is a fancy name for a place to upload files you want to share with people or groups. Notably, though, it is required to have version control (yes!), be searchable, be cross-platform, and have directory-level access control.

The interface to the Student Information System is an integration requirement with Oxford’s existing system. The SIS is where students can look up administrative information about their status and update their contact information with the University (among other things).

I appreciate that OUCS has been careful to include requirements about platform-agnosticism: there would otherwise be the potential of many a Linux user being left out in the cold. The requirement that all groupware functionality be fully available via the web, securely, from any internet connection is a bold one, and I’ll be interested to see what software vendors come up with. I’m also pleased that at least for the email and calendaring they’ve explicitly listed mobile access as a requirement. It would be nice to see for the contact list as well, but there is a requirement about the groupware being compatible with 3rd party interfaces like Intellisync, so I’m hopeful this one will also end up being in the final implementation. I’d also liked to have seen a standards-based (i.e. Jabber) instant messaging system. I know that everyone already has their own favorite IM service/client, but the integration with the user database would make it much easier to find and make contact with people.

I have one final complaint: no wikis?

I’ll end by noting that I’m on the email list for the User Consultative Group, and we’ve just been having a discussion about “use cases” to send to software vendors.  So, I remain somewhat skeptical about them having a solution shortlisted and then chosen by June. My guess is that implementation is delayed until late summer at the earliest—but this is Hofstadter’s Law-style pessimism, so take it with a grain of salt.

Desktop as a UI extension of mobile devices

I was thinking about another post I’ve wanted to write about switching from a paper planner (diary for the Brits) to an electronic one. One of the few interactions in which paper calendars tend to come out ahead of electronic calendars is entering an appointment. Mobile devices just don’t have text entry interfaces that can keep up with ye olde pencil (yes, that includes you, iPhone). However, when I’m sitting in front of my desktop, I enter events into Outlook—where the interaction is just as fast as the paper planner (click the day and time, start typing). My schedule lives in the cloud somewhere and is synced to my computers (home, work, laptop) as well, but it’s the iPhone that I associate with the physical object that is “my planner.” It’s the thing I carry with me, just like I did my paper planner back in the day. The iPhone is sitting in my pocket when I’m entering appointments into Outlook, and in this sense, it’s as if my desktop computer is acting as an interface extension to my iPhone. I use the comparatively rich desktop interface to modify information on my iPhone—modifications that I’m perfectly capable of making with the iPhone’s interface, but which are simply accomplished easier with the mouse, keyboard, and full-sized display of my computer.

This got me thinking that there are plenty of other interactions I have with my mobile device which would be much easier on my computer, like sending a text message or choosing a ring-tone. I spend a good deal of time every day in front of a computer with my mobile sitting in my pocket. What if whenever I was parked in front of the computer, my mobile used a wireless link (like Bluetooth) to forward interaction tasks to my desktop. I could send and receive text messages from a small ‘chat’-style application, giving my thumbs a break. I could highlight a phone number, maybe one I found online or one from my contacts list, and issue a command to have my phone dial it. By the time I fished it out of my pocket I’d be talking to the person I called.

No, this isn’t a replacement for a good phone interface. There’s still many hours each day that I don’t have a computer around, and good interface design makes a mobile device a joy to use rather than a pain. However, there are limitations to how good you can make the interaction and still expect me to hold the thing up to my ear or slip it into my pant- (trouser-) pockets. If I’m already focused on the computer, put as much the phone interface there as possible. It would allow me to integrate my mobile even more closely into my normal workflow, and prevent me from having to dig it out and put it back, making it much less of an interruption when I do use it at my desk.

Anyone heard of any software out there already that allows you to do this kind of thing (besides the example I mentioned with the calendar)?

Why Oxford’s email sucks

I’m a student at the University of Oxford, and as is standard practice, they provide a email system for staff and students. It’s called Herald, and I assume it’s a home-grown email server that has evolved from code written in the 1980s.

It’s a piece of crap.

I kid, I kid! Admittedly, that’s probably dropping a little too much hate on its poor aged lines of God-knows-what language. It has basic features and gets the job done… most of the time.

But the internet means so much more to so many more people these days, and Herald isn’t equipped to let people make the most of it. Take webmail, for example: ugly, testy, difficult—these are words which spring to my mind when I think of Herald webmail.  You’re stuck sending and receiving in plaintext, and the interface is offensively bad.  It was never supposed to be this way—Herald was designed to be used via your email client of choice, a hulking server hiding in the shadow of a more carefully crafted interface.  But since the early days of Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Netscape and the rest, webmail has been a primary avenue of accessing email.  Some people prefer it that way, and its easy to see why: one interface to learn which can be used on any computer with an internet connection and a browser, and no obnoxious setup steps (IMAP or POP3? SMT-what? SSL-port-who?).  And since gmail came on the scene a few years back, there’s simply no reason to believe that webmail can’t be a pleasant experience.  Something is deeply wrong when free webmail services outclass what’s provided to you by the people you pay £10,000 a year.

But still, armies of my classmates here at Oxford use Herald webmail as their primary email.  They hate it, even if they don’t realize it.  I know this because it shows.  They use Facebook to send messages to one another.  That’s right, Facebook.  Facebook, with it’s terrible message editor, iron-fisted threading, and walled-garden take on communication.

But I’ve just been informed of a project in the works at Oxford’s computing services to change all that, and finally move beyond email and into the realm of internet collaboration.  These services have existed for some time now, and what Oxford is proposing isn’t anything groundbreaking—but they’re a hell of a welcome (if overdue) change.

I’ll blog more about them soon.

iPhone Activation

So, I bought an iPhone over the weekend. There’s been plenty of praise for the iPhone out there on the web–hell, it came out in the US months ago. Since other sites have pretty much said most of what there is to say about how nice it is, I’ll just say that I love it, and move on.

I wanted to share two aspects of the activation process which struck me–one good, one not so. This is the UK, and so this is O2 we’re talking about, network-wise.

So I got my shiny box home, docked it with the computer, and was off and running in iTunes to do the activation. First snag: I already have an iTunes account from the US (I lived there up until fall 2006), so I put in my username and password at the prompt in the activation window. iTunes informs me that I’ll need a UK-based account to activate my phone.

“Fuck!,” I curse, thinking that iTunes is about to try to force me to repurchase all my US-downloaded tracks in order to use them with my iPhone.

But I enter create a new account, thinking, worst case scenario, I can just burn all my tracks to CD using my laptop, then re-rip them DRM-free. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when it came to sync my music–iTunes happily loaded everything onto the iPhone, and the iPhone has made no complaint about playing them. So, well done there, with the not-screwing-over people-who-move-overseas.

No, the biggest problem came when everything was finished in iTunes and I looked over to my iPhone again. It said it was connecting to the network to complete activation. “Fair enough,” I said. It did some more thinking, and then declared that no network service was available, and that perhaps I should try a different location. “Strange,” thought I, “I’ve never had problems getting mobile service in my room before.” I moved to a window, reset the phone, but still, it came back, “No Service.” I looked through Apple.com’s support pages, through O2’s support pages, and followed their suggestions–including a complete restore of my iPhone to its factory settings, forcing me to go through the tedious process of copying all my music again. I even went out into the street in pajama pants and slippers to give the iPhone a tediously clear view of the night sky. “No Service,” said the iPhone.

I went to bed convinced that there was something wrong with my phone, that the radio was not working, or the internal antenna was left on the factory floor, or something. I didn’t sleep well wondering if I’d be able to get a replacement at my local (Oxford) O2 store, or if I would have to trek all the way back to Regent Street, London to get it sorted. It was horrible!

In the morning, I called O2’s tech line for the iPhone. Well done there, O2, with a dedicated support team for iPhone issues. Phone tree? Tacky, but perhaps a necessary evil. Anyway, a few touch-tones later, I was talking to a real person! No “Your call is important to us”-bullshit or anything. He explained that the “No Service” simply means that O2’s network is backlogged with activations, and that I should have service before the end of the day. By 11:30am, I did have service, and was joyful.

My point, is that descriptive error messages are important! The original message led me to believe that the issue was with my phone or my location, not with their servers. So I tried to fix things by doing resets and taking the phone for a walk and went to bed frustrated. From their perspective, this issue generated an unnecessary call to their service center, and I can imagine I’m not alone in calling in to ask, “what’s the deal?” It probably cost them a lot of extra money which could have been saved by a simple, “Waiting for O2 to activate your phone,” message.