The illusion of fairness

Let me first say that I got a 3.5 review this time and got a hefty bonus etc etc. So I am not the so called loser wining. My average review rating is way above 3.0 and after having gone through this for the couple of years, I still think that the review system is unfair and does not encourage colloboration, team effort and make people more individualistic. I really felt good at the moment I knew I got a 3.5 rating. Soon after I exited my manager's office, my enthusiam vanished as I started thinking about my teams accomplishment and how almost 1/3 of the team got screwed with 3.0 even though I think the team did an amazing job. My boss's boss refers to our last year as "Running Hot" implying the long hours put by the team and the team's drive to the finish line on time. Well, if that was true, I would have expected everyone in the team to get an equal share of the pie. That didn't happen for certain.

What is the solution? Read the employee feedback in MS Poll. In other words, the management is not listening to the employees in this matter!!!

One and only thing I wish for

Everything in my life is something I can live with. The headline Israel Confirms Plan to Seize West Bank Land for Barrier in NYTimes got me into disliking the Israel govenment even more for its actions. While I appreciated the gaza withdrawl, it had not changed much of my attitude towards the government. There has been so much land grab (since the six day war) for the sake of security and I don't know how it thinks it can take land just like that. What the fuck is the international community doing? It is a complete joke if it thinks putting physical barriers is going to save it from all its trouble and stop people from hating Israel for its actions.

There are only 2 thinks I wish for.
1. Dismantle all jewish settlements in westbank and Gaza. If people think they like to stay there, let them get palentinian citizenship. No matter what the history is, Israelis and the government do not own middleeast and all its land.
2. Return all the land it grabbed since the 1964 war

and I can promise that they can live in greater peace than what they have now. I would recommend the following books to get some idea about the history of the situation:
Six Days of War : June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
The Missing Peace : The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace

Apples and Oranges

I am really glad there is this thing called "Blog" that lets me capture my thoughts as they happen and makes it possible share it with others. The other alternative would have been to use the good old diaries which nobody would have had the opportunity to look into.

I wanted to write about why Microsoft will never become Apple ever. Quite often, I would have disagreements with the way decisions are made at my product team that runs counter to what I belive is the essence of the software. To begin with, here is a real life encounter with a developer last week about an issue:
I notice that a dialog in our product is not looking nice and there was lots of dead space here and there and so I went to the developer to discuss the issue and ask him fix it (I wish I had the time to fix everything!). He asked me 3 straight questions:

• Is the functionality broken?
• Is there some sort of data loss?
• Is it crashing under any circumstances?

The answer to all the 3 were "No" and he asked me why should he be fixing what I see? The dialog looked ugly and I thought that was more than a good reason to fix it to make the product look better and customers wouldn't mind using great products that look good as well.

Fast farward to this week: One of the internal users (and this happens in one of my machines as well) complained that the selection doesn't look good in a dialog control which any customer would see first when booting the product. What did the product team do with the bug? It just won't fixed the bug without any investigation as to what is causing this issue and if this is a regression caused by some code change. The reason for shooting down the bug is that the developer thought that it is o.k to ship like that!!!!

I wasn't surprised by these reactions or with a lot things that happen I disagree with. I wouldn't buy a car that is ugly no matter how functional it is. Software isn't for professionals only. It is designed to be used by everyone (take the case of Microsoft Money which my Mom uses). The software I use makes a fashion statement about my tastes as much as about my choice. I would want the software be designed well and looks cool just like the physical things I use everyday like the Mp3 player. There are a lot of style concious users out there like me who would appreciate and consider a product on the factors other than the functionality.

Lets be real. Microsoft isn't known for making software that looks great. Tell me one software that Microsoft shipped in the last decade that won many acclaims for UI design and for the coolness factor? Microsoft tends to focus more on functionality and addressing the customer needs and so focusses less on few things that are important as well. Here is some information that supports my arguments:

• All the UI in our product team is not designed by the so called product designers or graphic designers. They are normally done by program managers and developers who sometimes are fresh out of collage with no background on industrial design or with UI guidelines.
• There is no consistent UI guidelines across the product. When a new UI needs to be done, the PM will give the general layout and the developer will do his best to make the dialog look closer to the layout desired with no thoughts about adhering to some standard UI guidelines about spacing/margin between controls, height/width of the controls or the dialog form factor etc. The end result is a functional ugly looking dialog.
• All Microsoft prodcuts look the same with a standard menus/toolbars/context meu stuff with the bluish or the grayish look. Agreed that the users don't have to learn new user interfaces, but that shouldn't stop us from trying out new things or build interfaces that are better.
• Theming an application is unheard of in many Microsoft applications. With the exception of Media player, virtually there is no app that allows users to customize the visual themes to fit his tastes or moods! I am talking about an app that has close to 50+ million users and everyone will be running the familier and boring grayish UI.
• http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2001/december/windowsxprough will give you some ideas to where I am leading you! These things may be small but matters so much shows how much we care! Microsoft Software is used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide and I expect lot more attention to detail and design given the large audience

I just hope that "Windows Vista" breaks this tradition and makes software visually compelling, consistent and easy to use. This is one place where I always think Apple wins my credits a lot.

The Art of Intrusion

Just finished reading the book written by the well known and respected hacker Kevin D. Mitnick.

The Art of Intrusion : The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers

The book was

• fun reading since it was a collection of stories about intrusions some of which went on like hollywood action movie. But at times, I felt that there was some repetition in the themes.
• I picked up some cool hacker lingo and some new insights into the possible attack vectors.
• Most of the attacks that Kevin describes was made possible by either default/bad passwords or misconfigured systems. It felt like hacking most of the times does not seem to be difficult thing at all.

Overall, it is a very good weekend read for anyone interested in security. I have not read his other book "The Art of Deception" and I don't plan to as my book pipeline is booked at least for a year.

My next read is going to be "Sources of power" by Gary Klein and I am already looking forward to it.