E-Mail

Have at least three different e-Mail accounts.

• One for work, use that on your work computer(s), but never on private machines.
• One for real communication. Keep this e-Mail-Adress as sectret as possible, never use it to register for anything (I only use it for the most trusted and important sites) and only give it to friends. Everytime you get a mail on this account, you may want to read that. If you have a smartphone, you should use ONLY setup this address on the device.
• And one for everything else (this will attract spam, so I often call it my spammail
  ). I have one mail account that I just use for everything on the web and it goes through several spam filters before it lands only on my primary private PC. Don’t check for mail on this account more than once a day.

Twitter

As with e-Mail, I use two different accounts.

• One is my main account which I use to follow everything and everyone that interests me. At this moment, I follow186 accounts, and if you’re between these, I really like what you tweet. I use this stream to feed my interest from time to time, but I won’t always read everything. Also, I don’t check in this stream when I have no time or I need to focus. Then I just switch to my private account.
• My private account only follows some few people that I don’t want to miss tweets from or that I know and that I only allow trusted people or people I know to follow. Again, on my iPhone I let this account notify me of @replies and direct messages, but not the “main” account where more often @replies come in.

Another point: Don’t set something up that pops up messages. This is distration you intentionally install. I use Echofon for Firefox on Windows and Mac and set the preference that it doesn’t pop up stuff. Therefore I can see how many tweets are waiting, but I must intentionally klick on the echofon icon to read tweets.

Facebook

I just don’t use it. It is a whole network just made for distration, so I just don’t visit it when I don’t need to. Therefore I feed my twitter account in Facebook so it looks like I’m posting there. And I set up notifications on iPhone for messages and use Meebo to communicate via “Facebook chat” if someone uses that.

photo credit: Big Fat Rat

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I sadly didn’t find the solution, but probably the cause for this problem. I tried to uninstall Kaspersky’s Security Suite before, but didn’t uncheck the “protect this installation” – checkbox in the settings before … which led to Kaspersky not being uninstallable! When I finally managed to uninstall Kaspersky after trying to install Office 2010 (by unchecking the mentioned checkbox), I got some errors during uninstallation … but at least it was possible to uninstall. When I then tried to install Office 2010 again, I got the same errors – but ignoring them this time didn’t work out.

Hope you don’t run into this error.

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Since about 2 or 3 years, I’m registered on the german media-articles-exchange-platform Hitflip. Its a website where you can exchange media of all types, first and foremost videos and games, but also books and music CDs. There’s a certain virtual currency called “flips” to manage the exchanges, that you get by giving stuff away (or buying from Hitflip) and that you can use to get stuff from other people.

Hitflips Profits Skyrocket

Where we have a currency, and goods, we have a market. This is where Hitflip’s profit began – they created a market, and they can print the virtual money. This seems to be enough to rule the world. Imagine the possibilities: They could have expanded away from only exchanging media to all regular goods to become the second rise of eBay – with their own virtual currency where anyone is dependent on. Or they could have expanded to become a fully blown ClickAndPay clone.

Hitflip has a certain idea, of what things should cost.

But Hipflip wasn’t very creative to come to more profit. To be straight: they were just greedy. To be able to sell their virtual flips (they really wanted that!), they need to be sure that you can get something with those flips. This is the first time they failed badly. On a market, the price is always dependent on suppy and demand. They just cannot tell people, what their stuff is worth.

To not to give up a whole lot of money on this market, you (as Hitflips customer) will try to get things cheap (low amount of flips) and give things away for much more of this currency – its the natural way of approaching a market. This is the first factor that drove flip-prices to rise. If I got Super Mario Bros for 30 flips, I want to have at least 31 flips if I give it away.

The second factor is Hitflips greed. Instead of just having the profit of selling the flips to new members, they took 1 Euro for each transaction, and later rose this to 2 Euros for each transaction where a certain amount of flips changed the owner. This lead to me not wanting 31 flips for my Super Mario Bros, but 35. Oh, and lets not forget that I have to pay for the postage, so I’ll even want 40 flips for my game. Prices were spiraling up.

Image that todayI can pay 1 flip for 1 Euro and that a new Heavy Rain (PS3) costs 199 flips and God of War 3 (PS3) costs 289 flips. Usual other games with lower populatity like … say … the  nearly three year old Tekken 6 (PS3) cost 119 flips. On other markets, there are lower values. The popular (but now also quite old) Resident Evil 4 (Wii) costs 35 flips – and 10€ if you buy it somewhere else.

Hitflip forces lower prices for goods

Now for the reason I’m writing this post. About one year ago, they tripled all flips, for whatever reason. I guess they hoped that people would still put in their trading goods cheap, but of course everyone was now tripling the prices. A plain, meaningless fail. Then, they stocked up the pricing for each transaction that was above a certain flip-limit – hoping that this would keep prices below this limit. Which (of course) wasn’t the case. They just made me want 45 flips instead of 40 for the item I got with 30 flips, as transaction got even more expensive.

Yesterday, Hitflip began to use an automatic check for “too high prices” and took items, that were “too expensive”, in a pause-mode. I just put em active again, as what else should I have done? Next day, same thing. So they try to tell us, how high the market price of a flip is? They must have lost their minds! (Hint: later I’ll give you the solution they should use, as I like Hitflip … as it basically works).

Dear Hitflip: Why can’t all this work?

Three things:

1. Because there’s a certain amount of flips flying around. If everyone would just lower their “too high” prices, the cheaper items would gain in value and the more popular items would loose value. And I don’t want that, I got some good games lying around here!

2. Hitflip is printing money every time they give out flips for free (as when you begin on the platform or get an affiliate bonus for bringing someone on the platform) of for money (as when you buy flips). Printing money leads to loss of value of this currency. So, flips will be worth less over time … its just the way things are.

3. When everyone can better buy God of War 3 for 45€ and exchange it on Hitflip rather than buying 280 flips for 280€, it should be clear for Hitflip that noone will buy their flips anymore. Their flips aren’t worth 1€ and never will be, no matter how hard they try.

Dear Hitflip: Its hard, but not that hard

You have to accept reality. Don’t try to dictate the market. The market will correct itself. What you can do to sell flips again – and make new members happy?

1. You have metrics, how much an item is worth if I buy a new one, and you can find out how much people want on your platform for this item. Make an approximation over 10000 items of different categories and calculate the real value of a flip in €. Take into account the “age” and “condition” of that items. Put that estimation online, so every member (including the new ones) can transparently see that. Do that calculation every day or every hour, as the market might change.

2. Now that everyone knows, how much value a flip really has, make it possible to get flips by paying you that exact exchange rate plus a (very small) transaction fee (that might diminish for higher amounts of flips purchased). People WILL buy them, as they’re priced fairly. This might lead to people rising prices even much higher in the first few weeks, as much more virtual money will enter the market – but in the end you have no other options.

3. There will be grief. You must  pause all items of existing members, so they can adapt to the new market. As their flips aren’t worth the same anymore, I would advise you to grant them “real money” on their accounts according to how much flips they had as exchange for the lost value.  Say someone has 100 flips and the real value of a flip is only 0,25€ This would mean they can do a lot of transactions for free, but at least they don’t sue you for robbery.

4. Take away that higher fee for exchanging higher priced articles. It will only distort the market and let people take much higher prices than necessary.

Final thoughts

If you like Hitflip as I do, you know that something has to change. Please make them read this article. They have a german blog and they’re on Twitter. Dear Hitflip, please let me know what you think. If you want to hire me as a consultant, go for it. But don’t try to tell me that you understood that you have a (pretty free) market there and that you know how to handle it well.

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In case you don’t know this trick, I’ll show it to you. What helps us find a contact on Twitter is … Google! Did you already guess that? Well, its not like a usual Google Search. You can also find a lot of contacts a time.

First, have a Google Account – as we need Google Contacts for this. If you don’t have one (or don’t want to mix up with your existing contacts), go, create one (more). Then enter the E-Mail you look for in Google Contacts. If you want to bulk upload a lot of E-Mail-adresses, you can use Google’s import feature, that takes properly formatted .csv files – but remember that Google only allows up to 3000 contacts a time, before you have to mass delete all your contacts and upload a new .csv-file. Should anyone have a handy script for automating this, please drop a comment.

Then head for the Twitter page. Click on Find Friends and then Gmail. Enter your (new fake) Google Accounts login and wait for the info you look for. Now all that can save your job candidate is a private Twitter account or the wise selection of a different E-Mail adress. Go get yourself one.

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I listen to some software-engineering postcasts, read some SE-blogs and generally try to get better at what I do for a living (which is developing software). But I listen to those bloggers and postcasters,  who have often developed software for two or three decades (this means 20-30 friggin’ years), and wonder if they think we all did so. No, we didn’t. And this is where they fail.

They are gurus. Nerdy heroes. They developed languages, built enterprise software, know all the technical details and some may even be able to read assembler code. They work at google, microsoft or some agile startup that will do it all right. The wiser ones tell us what the best practices are, which design patterns are more superb than others and why dynamically typed languages rule now that we’re doing test-driven development. The lesser wise ones use other buzzwords like SEO, Social, Scrum, Semantic, … S-omething. Some are talking about architectural layers, loose coupling, ORMS, SQL vs. NoSql databases, the importance of version control, team-management and the big difference between computer science and the software development craft. Dependency inversion and injection. They’re talking about a wide array of frameworks, tools, libraries and assemblies. Damn, and they still talk about command-line-tools, grep-commands and build-scripts.

But they fail to realise that the usual software-developer out there doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. I see it every day. Computer scientists that finish with a university-degree know next-to-nothing about software development. People programming everything in PHP. I mean the easy stuff and the complex stuff – and PHP wasn’t made for both. I met doctors of “buisiness informatics” with no clue about Software Development – but a good skill with word and powerpoint. Project planners who taught this at university – but fail at leading a team finishing a project in real life. I experience it in my own skills, that I may know all the ideas, but in the short time, I haven’t worked with 1% of what the gurus talk about. We didn’t get taught that at university – and if you try to teach it to yourself, you’re doomed to fail (for some time at least). Try pair programming alone. Or getting the idea behind version control – alone. Try to write structured code – if you’re the only person reading it. Try learning programming as the one guy not having programmed for 5 years besides two others who have. They won’t wait for you, and you won’t learn.

Image via Wikipedia

All just Buzzwords? Well, what about those fancy Design Patterns? Architecture? MVC? Unit-Testing? To be true, I know that the gurus are right. Many gurus also think about these issues. I work for a real guru who also understands that the fresh programmers need to learn, and he’s a good teacher and patient with us learners. And I try to get used to all the best practices, the agile development, the continuous learning, the new tools. But I think that 80% of the developers out there just want to do what they were trained to do, not knowing that at school or university, they just saw 5% of what they really need to know. And they truely have no intention to learn even more – as 8 hours of work a day certainly is enough!

But are CS-students software developers? Or do those developers come from somewhere else? India comes to my mind. But no, thats not what I meant. I believe good software developers are born from themselves – no school is gonna bring you to developing good software, the only thing that will help you is an unlimited thirst for knowledge. I heard the word “Infovore” somewhere, and thats exactly the kind of people that transcend into those good developers. Enjoying learning new stuff.

I don’t mean SuperBrains. Well, there are the few geeks that came on this world with the fun to code and which were born with a linux-kernel in mind, but please try to realise that software development tools and techniques need to be usable. And that at universities more practical work needs to be done. And people should have more basic-courses. Learn programming more. Get lessons on source control, on getting to know different IDEs. On learning using basic libraries. Get told more was object oriented means instead of giving them a definition and telling them “this is better than goto”. WTF is goto? Show them! Let them make some Basic or Pascal code. Let every wanna-be developer do a lot of projects with different focusses. And let them explain their code afterwards, so they’ll do it themselves. Instead of people from China who just earned 20 bucks.

There are only so many people speaking binary even if they’re developing software. I heard Linux has reached 1% market share. By making better GUIs. Go figure.

At the end, I want to give you the link to a really great post by one of the wiser programming guys: Confessions of a terrible programmer. You may think this is all BS. :-) See ya.

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Okay three people forwarding me this article brings it to an end. WTF. Heise always was kinda “professional”, but this officially NOT SPONSORED by Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia & Co. “objective” study really tries to tell us that we iPhone users are CRAZY as we’re taken hostage by our telephone and defend its really bad existence due to some irritational psychological damage?

Well, I’m sure I’m not the only iPhone user getting forwarded all those silly news about “iPhone Worms Ripping Apples Product Apart”, “Security Issues with jailbroken devices (and their stupid users)” or this newest headline. What’s your problem?  I’m sure you’re thinking “Oh again one of those iPhone users held hostage by its smartphone, trying to defend its weak points”. Right. Thats the point. Its not about the malicious joy of people’s envy of a phone that does, what their similarly priced smartphone with much better hardware just doesn’t do: it works, its easy to use and you don’t need days to configure it.

But back to this silly study. There is one smart thing about it: if you critisize it, they seem to be correct. Well. So smart. The following could also be found out by someone without an iPhone. I’m disqualifying 80% of their points made.

Lets look at the points this study proves its view with:

1. “The first iPhone was not a 3G phone: What do you need 3G for? You can easily use the iPhone without using a 3G network and anyway, 3G is not particularly widespread, so this is not a problem.”

Nonexistant problem. When was this study made? Three years ago? Who cares?

2. “The phone cannot send MMS: There is no need to send MMSs, hardly anybody sends MMSs.”

Nonexistant problem now. BTW, I just sent one MMS so far with my iPhone, just to try it out – guess what? The receiving nokia device (XPress 5800, a pretty new device) couldn’t display MMS.

3. “You cannot forward a SMS: This is a function that hardly anybody uses and was therefore not included in the first iPhones.”

Nonexistant problem now. Needed to check that, as the crazy iPhone-users statements seems to be true to the bone.

4. “The phone has a poor camera: The built-in camera is perfectly adequate and the iPhone takes fantastic photos with its camera.”

Nonexistant problem. 3.2 MP is standard nowadays and in each iteration the cam gets an upgrade. Sorry for not using 10MP cams, but storage capacity scarce and the device 100€ more expensive. Oh and today we have the knowledge that MPs don’t translate into picture quality.

5. “It is not a real Smartphone, it cannot multitask: The phone has all the necessary functions and the OS is technically superior compared to other Smartphone OSs currently on the mobile market.”

This is a real limitation, but not as worse as described. The iPhone CAN do multitasking, but only some Apple services (like music, mail, timers, etc.) can do that. But technically, I’ll count this as a real point made. Even if noone ever has defined a smartphone to be a multitasking-monster. Well, Real Problem anyways.

6. “The iPhone cannot multitask, resulting in a great number of applications being unusable: The absence of multitasking is a deliberate design decision resulting in a faster UI.”

Nonexistant problem: Nothing is “unusable” because of missing multitasking. And this is technically the same point as 5.

7. “You can not change battery on the iPhone: How many customers run around with spare batteries? None or very few.”

My battery keeps up 2 days, so if I could change it, I wouldn’t do it. But this is of course a limit. If my battery gets broken, I can’t easily change it. Shame on Apple here! Real problem.

8. “Apple decides which applications you can install on the phone: This is good, because Apple thereby ensures that you do not get inferior programs on your phone.”

This is also a real limitation, but I wouldn’t say nobody mournes about this. This is in fact the most critisized part of the AppStore, and I hardly see iPhone-Fanboys defend that process. Real problem.

9. “The app store is a closed universe: Apple knows what is best for end users, which is good for the many iPhone users.”

Nonexistant problem for end-users. Besides, everyone else is copying the appstore for their own software world. It makes it easier for developers to give out their products. Oh, BTW this is the same as point 8.

10. “The phone does not support Java, so games need to be developed especially for the iPhone: Java is slow and not properly integrated with mobile phones, games for the iPhone are much better because they are directly developed for the iPhone.”

Well and other Phones might not support Fortan, or another favourite language of mine. Totally nonexistant problem.

11. “The app store contains numerous small trivial commercial programs: The app store’s large selection gives users the freedom of choice and the many small programs help make the end users daily lives more fun.”

Nonexistant problem. If you don’t want it, don’t use it. Or go to the Ovi store, hahaha. You won’t find more than a handful of reaaaly bad games in there.

12. “It is difficult to use the touchscreen for fast SMS messaging: The touchscreen makes the phone easier to use and you quickly get used to it.”

Nonexistant problem: since 3.0 you can type emails and SMS in landscape mode, and I’m nearly as fast on that as on a real desktop keyboard. The non-landscape-mode is not that good, but so far I didn’t see a better virtual keyboard.

13. “The iPhone is a low technology phone packaged in a sleek design: Apple has taken the combination of the design and UI to the next level, therefore the technological specifications don’t really matter.”

If you want faster hardware, go for it. As long as the hardware supports a fluently working OS, this is a nonexistant problem. Especially if you have 1Ghz and your windows mobile interface still is unresponsive.

14. “The quality of the phone is poor, calls are often interrupted and network coverage is poor: It is a good phone, these problems are due to the operators’ networks and not the phone.”

Nonexistant problem. At least I’ve never had a problem, and I doubt I got the single super-iPhone they built just for me while every other is broken.

15. “You can only purchase the iPhone from operators chosen by Apple: Apple has spent a great deal of time and energy selecting the best operators for customers.”

Real Problem: This is a real issue of course. But none that customers don’t whine about!

16. “The iPhone is targeted at a niche segment and will not be able to develop further: Apple has succeeded in designing a phone for people that appreciate design and user friendliness.”

“The iPhone is targeted at a niche segment and will not be able to develop further”? Did you read the numbers? Did you read the news? The iPhone IS 50% OF THE SMARTPHONE WORLD because it steadily develops!!111elevenone!

17. “The iPhone does not support memory cards: Iphones already offer the necessary memory people require and end users can choose between two models, one with a little memory and one with a great deal of memory.”

Well, thats Apple’s philosophy. I took the 16 GB version. But where is the difference to the many smartphones out there giving you a 8GB-memory-card and that are extendable up to 16GB? None. Well, okay, acutally if I had bought an 8GB version I couldn’t have upgraded it later on. Well. But its just stupid to count this as a problem of the device, its a problem of the user. And therefore a nonexistant problem.

18. “You can not install your own browser: The browser Apple has designed is so superior that you do not need any other browser on your phone.”

This is a real problem too. Its the same as points 8 and 9, but I’m in a good mood so this could be called another real problem.

19. “You cannot use the iPhone as a modem for your portable PC: People that have an iPhone do not need their portable when on the move.”

Nonexistant problem today. And Hello! There’s the jailbreak! And jailbreaking is easier than sticking a new battery in your phone!

20. “There is no radio in the phone: You do not need a radio in your iPhone because the iPhone supports iTunes that offers almost unlimited music.”

Nonexistant problem. I use Last.fm and there’re a lot more radioservices. Sure, they don’t use century-old technology for this, so you need to stream the stuff. Could be called a problem, but I’m not willing to count it. After all you have an integrated iPod too.

Conculsion: Again, the Apple-haters had food for their selfmade problems, but please keep away with such totally stupid studies. THAT SURELY HAS NOT BEEN SPONSORED BY (put name of big phone company in here) AND WAS MADE BY VERY SCIENTIFIC MEANS. If you see the logic in there, please drop a note. Other comments are appreciated too.

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