SteveX Compiled

I went to the doctor's office a few days ago to sign up with a new doctor. I was surprised to see the clinic was all Mac based - the nurse was entering our information into a 15" MacBook Pro and there were iMac's scattered through the clinic.

But then I saw the software they were using. I don't know what it was called, but it was some custom-built application that looked like it was designed for clinics. It was Mac software but it was ugly. It looked like the Mac version had been built using one of those cross-platform GUI toolkits that uses native widgets (you can tell I'm writing more Java code these days because I said Widget and not Control) but never really gives you a great experience on any platform.

Today I was in again for some other tests and this time the test equipment was hooked up to a PC running an old version of Windows which was clearly struggling to run the software, and the software was, again, ugly.

Take a look at the software you see the next time you're making a purchase at a store, arranging finances at a bank, or at your doctor's office. Chances are not much attention was paid to the user experience of the application.

Last time I was at my bank, the rep I was working with to arrange the mortgage for our house turned his monitor so I could see what he was entering and verify the data, and look at options available. Again, of course, ugly software, but this collaborative data entry experience was actually pretty effective.

This is what companies should be designing for. These days, the old model of the person behind the desk with the computer typing while you read information out loud seems a little silly doesn't it? It's error-prone, inefficient, and not very enjoyable, not to mention, open to eavesdroppers.

Why should the clinic care about user experience if the plain UI gets the job done? Because it's part of the patient's overall experience interacting with the clinic. There's just so much room for improvement.

I like Safari. I like the funky home screen, I like its integration with the rest of the Mac experience. I wasn't planning on using Chrome.

But Safari for me has been unstable. Not hugely unstable - it can go days without crashing or locking up - but it does lock up from time to time.

Meanwhile, I've been playing World of Warcraft on and off, and there's a website with a great guide that I like to keep open. The page is very long, and I have it scrolled to the place I'm currently at in the guide. Every time Safari crashes, I lose my place in the guide.

So, just to keep this guide open, I installed Chrome.

Here are my tweets on the subject:

I have one page open in Safari and it's using 277mb RAM. I'm going to try Chrome just to see if it uses less RAM.

Launch browser, no pages open: Safari using 183mb, Chrome using 66mb (44mb + 22mb).

Page with some Flash ads on it using 2% CPU in Safari, averaging about 30% CPU in Chrome. Score that one for Safari.

Safari seems to load cnn.com faster than Chrome.

Page scrolling feels much snapper in Safari than Chrome. BTW, I'm using a MacBook Pro 15" 2.4ghz.

Chrome launches in about 1 second, Safari in about 3.

I'm still planning to use Safari for most of my Mac browsing, but Chrome is a pretty strong contender. And it hasn't crashed on me yet.

The government has tabled a new law aimed at fighting child porn online in Canada. It's apparently a big problem in Canada, but the new laws don't really seem to accomplish anything that the existing laws didn't already accomplish. I mean, if it's already illegal to rob people, then do you need a new law that says it's illegal to rob seniors? This seems to be another case like that.

If they want to really fight the problem, here's how they should do it.

Giant cash rewards.

Offer $10,000 for any tip that leads to an arrest and that specifically leads to a source of the stuff being taken offline.

I'll bet this would work better than the current laws, and probably end up being cheaper as well.

(All that said, this law doesn't seem to be all that bad - it's much better than what the NDP is suggesting, which is making ISPs responsible for all the content that they host. That would be like making Bell Canada responsible for anything illegal you say on the telephone - there's no way Bell, or the ISPs, could possibly monitor all the data that goes through their systems).

The house we moved into is a bit of an oddball in some ways, and one of them is in the HVAC system. The original house is about 30 years old, and there was an addition built on about 10 years ago.

The utility room in the original house is in a location that makes it impossible to run ducts from there to the addition, so when they built the addition, they added a second furnace and air conditioner.

The thermostat in the main house is a nice programmable unit, but in the addition, it was one of those old style round manual types.

I'd been looking at a programmable thermostat for the addition, since it's mostly my office over there and the potential benefits from having the temperature adjust on a regular schedule would be significant.

There are a few features I like to have on a thermostat. Automatic switching from heating to cooling, for example, and adaptive recovery. Adaptive recovery is where the thermostat learns how long it takes the temperature in the house to adjust, so that when you say you want the temperature to be 72 degrees at 7am, it learns how many minutes before 7am it needs to turn the furnace on to get the temperature to 72 degrees by 7am.

Newer thermostats have touchscreen control; not something I was really looking for, but nice to have.

Ontario has this program going on called PeakSaver, where, in exchange for granting them the ability to raise the temperature by 2 degrees on hot days when the power grid is stressed, they will give you a free thermostat and install it for you. And they'll throw in a $25 credit.

A thermostat that has these features, like this Honeywell model, is around $149. PeakSaver provides a Honeywell UtilityPRO thermostat, including installation, free.

I signed up today and went into Brant County Power's office to pick up the thermostat. It'll be installed tomorrow morning.

Curious about how the thermostat communicates with the utility I did a bit of digging. On the case are some patent numbers, and one leads to US Patent Application # 11770615. Of course, being a patent application, the wording is as non-specific as possible. For example:

In some instances, thermostat may receive signals from utility via a communication network. Communication network may include wireless communication between utility and thermostat, using radio frequencies and the like. In some cases, communication network may represent a hard-wired communication network between utility and thermostat, such as copper wiring, coaxial cable, CAT 5 cable, fiber optics, and the like.

Looking at the back inside of the unit, a small wire antenna is visible. This rules out communications over the power line.

A bit more digging and I found this press release from Honeywell noting that they had added ZigBee support to the UtilityPRO thermostats (via a module - the thermostat looks like the communications system may be modular). Another page notes that "this allows utilities to further leverage their investment in the smart grid versus having to establish third-party paging networks, which are traditionally used for demand response programs".

ZigBee might make sense if I had a smart meter, but I don't. Brant County Power isn't rolling out smart meters until May 2010.
So here's my take: The UtilityPRO thermostat has a modular communications system, and the communications system they're using in Ontario is based on the pager network. The device can't transmit; it can only receive signals, so THE MAN isn't watching what you set your termperature to.

A lot of people I've talked to are very leery of, or dead against, having this thermostat installed, because they don't want the government controlling their air conditioning. This just doesn't bother me. Yes, it's true the power company could ask the thermostat to raise the temperature in my house by 2 degrees on very hot days. They're not going to do this until they're on the verge of rolling blackouts, because it costs them money to reduce power consumption. And even if they do it, two degrees is not that big a deal.

In exchange for what you're giving up, you get not just the cool thermostat, but a service that I'm sure in any other circumstance you'd be paying for: Internet access to programming the thermostat.

You can bring up a web browser, log in to the site the power company gives you, and set up your thermostat. The settings get sent to the thermostat through the pager network. And you can do this from anywhere. Out of town and forgot to set the thermostat to save energy? You can do it from wherever you are.

This thermostat also allows them to send short messages (like SMS) to your thermostat with information like how much power you've used this month, upcoming weather events, or more likely in the future, ads.

The PeakSaver program launched with some much less interesting hardware: A box that attaches directly to the power line to the air conditioner, originally, then a basic ExpressStat thermometer, and now this one. Seems to me the utilities are trying to overcome public resistance to the program by sweetening the deal. And it worked on me.

Llano, Bobcat, Bulldozer, Clarkdale, Arrandale, Sandy Bridge, Phenom II, Fusion, Leo, Dorado, Thuban, Dragon, Pisces, Kodiak, Scorpius, Zambezi, Lynx, Velocity, Conroe, Tigris, Caspian, Danube, Champlain, Sabine, Concensus, Huron, Nile, Ontario, Brazos, Geneva, Maranello, Magny-Cours, San Marino, Lisbon, Adelaide, Interlagos, Valencia.

That's a pretty good crop, for just one article.

With Windows XP and Vista, when an application wanted to attract your attention, it would flash its window in the task bar. When it stopped flashing, it would stay a fairly obvious orange colour.

Windows 7 uses a different mechanism, and one I find far too subtle.

Looking at this, you're probably thinking "hey it's obvious, the orange one wants your attention". And it does seem that way, but for some reason I find myself, with Windows 7, missing IM notifications and not responding to messages until hours later, because I just didn't notice that I had a new message.

Maybe it's because of all the additional noise in the taskbar - it's harder to tell at a glance that an app wants your attention, so I don't pick it up "out of the corner of my eye" the way I would with the XP style.

The Mac continues to animate icons that want your attention until you give in and click on it. Windows animates the icon for a few seconds and then settles on the orange look. One solution would be to change Windows 7 so that the animation continues until you respond.

The Adobe Developer Connection has been updated with some info on ES2.

Here's a video by Marcel Boucher that quickly introduces ES2 to developers. If you've no idea what LiveCycle is, have a look.

So apparently my son has H1N1.

Or had - he seems like he's doing pretty well today. Saturday evening he had a high fever and was shivering and miserable; some Tylenol fixed him right up but as soon as the Tylenol would run out he'd go back to miserable.

This ran through to this morning when he seemed to just snap out of it. We took him to a doctor because he still has a bit of a fever and after ruling out all the other usual causes of a fever in a toddler (throat infection, ear infection, etc), he said it was most likely the Swine Flu.

I find it a bit hard to believe, but if we're through it then that's a good thing.

I had a good experience at the clinic we visited in Brantford. We left home at 5:45pm and were back home at 8pm, and we spent over an hour not actually at the clinic. They let us register, said we could come back in and hour, and when we came back, brought us in within about 10 minutes. And I didn't know they could do a UTI check on-the-spot like that. Very nice.

If you're curious what the course of H1N1 might look like in a mild case like what Matthew had, here's some notes I took:

6:10pm Saturday, noticed Matthew didn't seem "normal". We checked his temperature and it wasn't far off normal at 99.3 but he seemed very sleepy / lethargic, unusually so for him.

At 6:30pm his temperature was 100.3. 6:50pm it was 102.9. 8:10pm, 103.5.

When I finally talked to someone at TeleHealth, they said not to bring him to the hospital unless his fever was over 105 degrees. Wow, that's high. At 103 it felt like I could cook eggs on his back.

We kept him on Tylenol through the night Saturday night, and Sunday morning, he woke up with pretty bad shivers. He had the shivers on and off through Saturday in a predictable pattern: He'd start shivering, we'd give him some Tylenol, and until the Tylenol kicked him, his temperature would spike up pretty quickly and he would seem lethargic and miserable until suddenly the Tylenol did its job and the fever would drop and he'd perk right up. He'd stay happy until about a half hour before his next dose was due when the cycle would start again.

Today, Monday, after about 2 days of this, he's doing fine, temperature stable at under 100 and no Tylenol.

Hopefully it stays that way.

I wanted to post this to help all the people googling symptoms to see what to expect - this is how it went for one little boy.

(Oh, and if you've got one of those digital thermometers - buy a backup battery. It's no fun having to run out to find one because the one in the unit dies on you).

MacHeist runs occasional deals on Mac software and right now there's a pretty good one: Get six Mac apps, absolutely free.

I'm not familiar with most of the apps but the one of them that I am makes the whole bundle worth getting. WriteRoom.

WriteRoom gives you a completely distraction-free screen to write in. It works like TextEdit, but when you hit Escape it toggles between a normal Mac window, and a full-screen green-screen style console.

It's a unique way to get some writing done. Definitely worth the price.

The iPhone went on sale in China last week, but a stripped-down iPhone without WiFi.

Turns out, people aren't buying it. Surprise surprise.

So often we see Chinese knock-offs of products like the iPhone whose quality is pretty seriously compromised compared to the original product. I wonder if some folks in China actually believe that it's the brand name that matters, and not the product?

They aren't going to sell 1 million weakened iPhone's a month no how much their officials believe they will.