Headworx

Bad implementations are a big risk to standards, especially to emerging ones. Users can never experience and appreciate the specification of a standard directly. Only via products that claim compliance to the standard. Of course there are tests, but at the standard qualification test it is impossible to conduct the most important tests: quality, stability. And also user experience is almost always out of scope. "Bluetooth never worked for me" - told me once a man responsible for smart home strategy at a tier-1 platform provider. And it did not matter how much I could pitch to him the virtues of Bluetooth mesh. "No... Bluetooth does not work. It has problems connecting, it has problems with interoperability, I don't like this technology." he kept on repeating.  He left the company since then and I'm now hearing they like Bluetooth a lot. But I could not even blame the guy. It was his experience. He certainly was unlucky to experience badly implemented produc...

I love Nikon cameras. Yes I know. I am a dinosaur. I'm spending a night under stars now at the top of Babia Gora, watching (and memorizing through heavy glass on sd cards) the wonderful arch of Milky Way spanning over the Tatra mountains. I tugged here on my back two full frame DSLRs and a 15kg worth of lenses, tripods, heads and other photographic equipment. People don't do that, unless this is their bizarre hobby. "Why bother taking all those pictures if you can find better ones on Google?" asked me once a tour guide when going to the Antelope Canyon. The problem is that just few hobbyists like me are not able to support the dying digital camera business. Some seem to be excited by the news of Sony overtaking Nikon to secure 2nd place right after Canon. But the truth is they are all dying a slow death. The death caused by the lack of software innovation. "Software?" you will ask... aren't they being forced to the niche corner by smartphones and drones?...

A file still remains the material artifact of ownership. Even though a file is not physical - it is just a sequence of bits, you can own a file. Have it on a hard drive of your computer, back it up to a USB pen drive, upload it somewhere etc. It clearly is yours . Handing over the file to a service which promises to continue serving you the content of the file may mean giving up the ownership.  This is exactly what happened to Google Music. It lured users (including myself) to upload music files they owned to continue listening to this music on any device, thanks to the synchronization feature. I uploaded the entire music collection I owned and enjoyed this music syncing automatically to my Android phone and to my iPad. But of course I kept the copies of the files. They cane up handy when I realized that to listen to music streamed from my Garmin watch, i needed the files to be actually uploaded over USB to the watch. And they are handy again as Google continues the tradition of dr...

Making software that works is easy. Making software that works most of the time is harder. Making software that works all the time is extremely hard, Getting to the "all the time" goal is almost an asymptotic curve, with time, cost, patience and perseverance on the other axis. So this is more a mindset, the road to quality rather then a point at which quality can be achieved.  Running a purely software company I often feel the pain others like us have been going through, Microsoft perhaps is the most obvious example.  PC hardware is much better now and test / qualifying procedures are much stricter now. But roll back to early 1990's and some of you may recall hard drive controllers that worked with only certain motherboards, interrupt conflicts etc. This chaotic hardware landscape was the main reason behind the bad press Windows was getting, especially in comparison with Apple. Apple was lucky to have full control of the hardware. Or I should not say lucky - it was just t...

One thing that COVID has taught us is things we had considered serious before, are not that really serious. A flight does not need to be on time, as long as it lands safely. And if a web service is down for an hour (or a day) it is not the end of the world. There is this notions of schedule, being on-time and several "nines' of availability. Especially in the Western civilization. Things are different in Latin America, for example. The other day waiting in Nazca (Peru) for a night bus to Arequipa, I witnessed a conversation between a (Western) tourist and the local clerk in the ticket office on the bus station. She wanted to know "precisely" when the bus will arrive. The clerk was explaining politely that the bus left Lima at 3pm and keeps going. And that it was 450 kilometers stage, so considering the unknown road conditions, it could be here withing 1-3 hours. The tourist could not believe why the bus line could not be more precise. And the bus was simply doing it...