So I’d like to frame an argument against dogfooding and in favor of something else: Plagiarism.

My argument goes like this:

1. Dogfooding doesn’t work, or at least it’s not sufficient, because it’s not a good predictor of software success. Some software that is dogfooded is very successful. Most software that is dogfooded fails. (Most software fails and most software is dogfooded therefore dogfooding fails.)
2. Dogfooding is really bad because it give you a false sense of doing something to improve your product: “It’s OK, I know our software is terrible but we’re forcing our employees to dogfood it and out of shear frustration they will make things better! Everyone go back to sleep…”
3. Dogfooding reinforces bad product design. Human beings are highly adaptable (and last time I looked software devs are still considered human). We get used to things, especially in a culture where company pride and team spirit are valued (e.g. groupthink). Over time poor performance becomes typical performance. It starts to feel natural. Thus slow loading Windows operating systems become the gold standard for thousands of loyal Microsoft employees and customers. Instead of fixing the software we are fixed by it.

I believe that the urge to Dogfood is an emergent strategy of mature tech companies that want to rejuvenate their software development process. Management starts talking about Dogfooding when they realize the spark of creativity has gone out and they want to reignite it.

One of the reasons Dogfooding fails is that you never eat your own dog food in the beginning: The dog food didn’t exist yet. You had to get your inspiration from outside the company. Microsoft Windows was not the first OS with a graphical mouse-driven shell. At some point the Windows devs must have looked at the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers for inspiration. And the Apple devs looked at the Xerox Star. And the Xerox devs drew their inspiration from the physical world: The first GUI desktop was modeled on an actual physical desktop. No dog food there.

So rather than dogfooding we should talking about plagiarism. If you want to make a great software product eat another a great software product and make it taste better–don’t eat yucky dog food.

Microsoft should force their devs to use the fastest computers running the best operating systems with really cool applications. I think they must have bought some MacBook Airs, installed Ubuntu and Spotify because Windows 8 looks pretty awesome

When it comes to buying a computer I have three criteria:

1. Don’t buy something that will become obsolete in a quarter.
2. Don’t buy less or more power than I need.
3. Pay as little as possible while still buying something that won’t embarrass me in front on the cool kids.

When I met my wife she explained to me that you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes. A cool hip guy might walk around in an outfit from Target but the brand of his shoes will tell you if he is being ironic or a showoff or a cheapskate. In the 21st century you can apply the same criteria to computer laptops. Some guys (or gals) buy the most expensive luxury desktop replacement money can buy as if to say: “I’m bad!” Other guys buy the cheapest under powered plastic toy “puter” that buy.com has on sale as to say: “I make Scrooge McDuck look like Bill Gates! (The current Bill Gates not the earlier one who acted a lot like Scrooge McDuck before he got married.) Then there are understated nerds like me who try to say something nuanced with their laptops: “Yes it’s not the fastest, but we know that RAM and HD speed are more important than raw CPU speed for real world applications.”

After much research and discussion with my hardware otakus this is what I bought and why:

I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.40 GHz Intel i5 core CPU with 320 GB hard disk and 4 GB of RAM. This is the least expensive 15″ model Apple sells at $1799. I asked Apple for one extra: A higher resolution LCD display (1680 x 1050 instead of 1440 x 900) at only $100 more. With the Apple sale I got the hires screen for free but at only $100 for 30% more pixels it’s a bargain–one of the few true steals to be found in the Apple Store.

The display resolution is why I bought the 15″ and not the 13″. More pixels means less scrolling and more productivity. But I could have bought the 17″ MBP with a whopping 1920 x 1200 screen resolution. But I’ve used the 17″ model before and it’s not really portable. As a hard core northeastern corridor commuter I need something that fits into a standard backpack, weighs less then a 3KG medicine ball, and actually fits on my lap in the crowded train car.

Apple has options for much more powerful (i7 core) and faster (2.8 GHz) CPUs. But while benchmark software will show you a 25% to 30% performance boost between the 2.40 GHz i5 and the 2.80 GHz i7 pure CPU speed isn’t the problem unless you’ve unclogged all the other performance bottlenecks in your laptop.

The the real roadblocks to a laptop snappiness are memory and storage speed and size. Modern operating systems accommodate today’s bloated software applications by organizing memory usage into “pages” and swapping these pages in and out of disk as needed. Adobe Photoshop is the exemplar: It can’t let you edit that 21.1 megapixel image without shuffling pages of memory around. Some operations, like filters, are CPU intensive, but most operations (reading, writing, zooming, scrolling, copying, pasting, …) are memory bound.

To lessen the bound of memory I ordered a 4 GB ram stick and a 7200 RPM 500 GB hard disk from a third party: Not Apple! Apple charges extraordinarily high prices for RAM and hard disk upgrades. To buff up my MBP would have cost an additional $550. The third party RAM and HD only cost me $154.31 and 1/2 hour to unscrew the back of the MBP and install everything. In the end I had a sweet new MBP with 6 GB of RAM and 1/2 a terabyte of storage. Photoshop is happy.

There is a risk that by upgrading you’re Mac you’ll ruin it and void the warrantee to boot. I alway get help from my hardware friends who show me how. There are also some good videos from MacSales that we’re really helpful. The voiding of the warrantee went from a definite yes to a maybe in the last few years. Apple reserves the right to blame your MacBook problems on you if you don’t use an authorized service provider.

For me, it was worth the Geek Cred to personally upgrade my MBP so I could have a great ice breaker at Starbucks:

“Oh, this that new MBP you got there?”

“Yes, but I haved $400 bucks by upgrading it myself and I got the hires screen for free on Black Friday.”

“OMG! 2G2BT! CSA!”

Immediately I ran into compatibility problems with Google’s Android SDK and the current versions of Eclipse (Helios) and the Java Developer Kit (JDK Version 6). In a nutshell Google’s cool Android dev tools don’t work with Helios–you need to install Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo). Galileo require’s JDK Version 5. All this info is prominently featured on the Android system reqs page–but who reads any more?

Digging up old versions of Eclipse is easy. You can find Galileo here.

Digging up old versions of the JDK is a bureaucratic nightmare. You can find JDK Version 5 here but to install it you have to fill out a form, give away PII, and then wait for an email.

One way around Sun Oracle’s walled garden is to install Open Office 3.2.1 which installs Java 1.6 (JDK Version 6) in such away that everything compiles.

Now that Google is throwing away all their Windows PC’s I’m sure this compatibility nonsense will get even worse. Here is a note from Google about enabling debugging of Android Phones:

If you develop on Mac OS X or Linux, you do not need a special driver to debug your application on an Android-powered device.

Damn it! I might have to go back to coding on the Mac and only using my PC for trival tasks like gaming and web browsing. Ironic huh?

I nearly lost all my data a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I was in no danger at all of losing my data but the terribad UI of Apple’s Time Machine and Time Capsule made me think I did! Apple’s backup solution is like a good looking school yard bully with a hidden inferiority complex.

I used to back up everything manually and it was messy. To be fair Apple seemed to conserve all that backup mess with the Time Capsule wireless base station/terabyte network drive and its slick Time Machine backup application. It just seemed to work: No settings, no maintenance, no hunting for the disk with the 3rd season of Buffy on it.

On the rare occasion when I did need a missing or deleted file Time Machine made it easy, and entertaining, to find (nothing like zooming back in time to give lulz).

One evening last week my MacBook Pro died and upon restart got stuck at the kernel panic screen. I took it Tek Serve in NYC (where they are a million time smarter than Apple’s Genius Bar) and learned that a fresh re-install of Mac OS X was the solution.

To make a long story short, when I connected my revived MacBook Pro to Time Capsule it restored a backup from 4 months ago! That’s a generation in Internet years! Also it took over 12 hours! I was aghast!

With grim determination I started the whole process over and tried to get support from Apple. But nothing helped until I just gave up and accessed Time Machine to confirm it was operational. And lo and behold: There was my data from the previous week. Right up to 30 minutes before the kernel panic attack!

%*@:-(

Just before I joined Apple I got some coaching from Bruce Tognizzni (I was designing a set of never-to-be-released apps for Letraset back in 1991). Tog explained that good user centered design doesn’t just hide complexity–it enables the user to navigate it. Time Machine and Time Capsule are bad user centered design according to this definition since they are pretty faces and not much more.

I can’t think of any better example of user centered design than the original Mac OS (version 3) and apps like MacPaint and MacWrite. And since you can’t run it anymore (but you can see screen shots at the Vintage Mac Museum) I decided to bring the Mac OS 3 back to life in flash. Embedded above is version 0.1 of the Mac OS 3 Flash Sim. It don’t do much but I promise to whittle away at it as time permits. I’ll post the source code shortly as well. Right now you can selected the trash can and pull down the apple menu.

It’s funny but the constrained yet expressive capabilities of the original Mac OS are much more like the user experience of the iPhone and iPod Touch then the current Mac OS X. There is something to be said for the power of limitations.

I don’t own a physical Kindle. I don’t need a another electronic device. All the sockets on my power strip are filled! The iPhone is my phone, emailer, broswer, PIM, GPS, notebook, music player, camera, and now e-book reader. While I don’t agree with Steve that Americans have stopped reading I do agree that that specialized single function harward like the Kindle has a dim future. Kindle software, and book readers in general, on small multifunctional devices like the iPhone have a bright future.

Since I downloaded the Kindle software I’ve bought and read 6 digital books in 60 days. But here’s the important point–I would not have read these books otherwise. I don’t get a lot of traditional time to read between a busy startup and a house full of kids. With the iPhone I can read while waiting on a line at the pharmacy, or while sitting on a stalled train somewhere between Newark and New York, or while waiting for soccer practice to fishing up.

When I was younger (by several decades) I used to carry around a paperback book on the off chance that I’d get a moment to read it. These days I don’t have the time to think that far ahead. Downloading and reading books on the iPhone is just so damn convenient it has replaced Blocked as my favorite time biding activity.

The only real issue is Amazon’s digital supply of Nebula Award winners is running dry. Some important books from the list, The Quantum Rose, Parable of the Talents, Forever Peace, and Moon and Sun, are tragically missing. I’m anxious to download Barns & Noble’s Bookstore reader and see if they can pick up the digital slack.