In case I haven’t mentioned it, a constantly (some might say obsessively) updated photo gallery of Alex is available at
To keep Alex’s pictures out of nefarious hands, the site is password protected. The username is family, and the password is alexander. If you’d like to subscribe to the photos as a feed, you can do so at
Man, am I having a bad week. No sooner had I been burned by beta testing Mendeley, I get absolutely toasted by trying out Dropbox. The goal of Dropbox, in case you haven’t heard of them, is to allow one to keep a folder of files transparently synchronized across multiple computers (and the web). In theory, all your computers will have the same set of files, transparently maintained by the Dropbox daemon (background program) running locally. Awesome, right? No more treking around an external drive, no more juggling multiple versions of files when you need to work on something on two or more platforms. It also handles folder sharing among users.
Fantastic. Awesome. Terrible. Sync is one of those killer applications that usually ends up killing the user, like a hand gun being passed around at a frat party. The result is often a solution worse than the problem, with data corruption and inconsistent data between locations a common failure mode. People have gotten it right recently, however. Apple has done a very good job with MobileMe, at least in terms of sync reliability. I have my complaints about them, but they’ve never messed up my data, even after more than a year and probably over 1000 synchronizations.
I was, therefore, perhaps a bit too unwary in trusting my data to Dropbox. I also figured that if they are already charging people they must have the bugs worked out, right? This is people’s data we’re talking about. No company is going to take control of your data with a product that is still buggy, right? Right?
Wrongo. It took me only two weeks of using Dropbox to find out I was grossly mistaken. Yesterday I moved a few large folders around on my linux machine, and the result was hopeless corruption of my Dropbox file system, with the server basically throwing its hands up and locking itself in the bathroom (folder “rejected by server”). Note that my problem wasn’t caused by conflicting edits made simultaneously to the same data on different devices (the typical difficulty with synchronization). Dropbox failed spectacularly just because I made multiple changes to ONE of my local copies and it got hopelessly confused. (Fortunately, I was able to restore everything from a backup on another computer, so you can stop sending cards and letters. I appreciate the sympathy, however.)
Talking with tech support, and looking at the forums, this is clearly a known issue that many users are having. A known issue that results in database corruption if you have the audacity to do something insane like move folders around! And they don’t mention this in the FAQ, let alone bright red flashing letters on their web page. Did I mention they are accepting legal tender for this product?
It seems to me their fundamental sync architecture is flawed (it apparently doesn’t record file operations in a way that is guaranteed to preserve the transformation of the file system from one state to another). I wonder if they don’t warn against this in their FAQ because they don’t want their VC funders (who are surprisingly big names) to know they are in over their heads, or if they are so far in over their heads they don’t know they have a problem. To do file sync, as far as I can tell, you basically have to be able to hook into all possible I/O operations on the disk and make sure you record every single change, in order, so that those operations can be “replayed” on the remote copy. I can’t think of another way to guarantee consistency. Maybe the folks at Dropbox found a way to avoid this complication. Maybe they were wrong. I’m not saying I’d be able to do better, and I know it’s a notoriously hard problem, but I’d hope that if I couldn’t solve it I’d at least know that I hadn’t. And I certainly hope I wouldn’t look for funding and customers before I’d solved it.
Looking at the Dropbox staff list, I should’ve been more careful. Its CEO and CTO seem like great guys, but they also look like they just started shaving last week. Their CTO, and well over half their staff, are very young, very recent MIT dropouts. With all the new humanities course requirements, I guess you can’t trust MIT undergrads with your data until they’ve gotten at least an MS. Either that, or MIT must cover some pretty important material senior year in Course 6. The fact that the first several iterations of their Mac OS X client didn’t even synchronize all possible parts of a file (despite not informing the user of this) should’ve been a red flag that Dropbox was not being run with a whole lot of discipline or adult supervision.
Am I just writing this to complain? Of course not. I would never do that! I’m writing this with the hope that my experience may prevent at least one other person from wasting their time with Dropbox, or losing their data. I’m also writing about this because my experience with Dropbox, as well as Mendeley, bring up interesting questions about VC technical vetting, a topic which I will discuss in my next post.
I’ve noticed (probably about two years later than the rest of the world, of course) that the latest in men’s fashion are printed designer t-shirts. Actually, I kind of like some of them, as fashion goes. Or did, rather, until I found out that people are paying $70 for a silk screened t-shirt. You know, the genre of clothing favored by little league t-ball teams all across the country? Apparently when you replace “Bob’s Rib Shack Temecula Valley Bluejays” with a skull and crossbones, the price goes up considerably. I can only imagine this is the result of a very cynical wager made over beers wine spritzers by two designers after work one day regarding who could get people to pay more for a t-shirt.
And that’s how we got this. The worst elements of the success of this trend is the fact that (a) about half the male population of the country is falling for this “designer t-shirt” scam and (b) they are legally allowed to vote in federal elections. I know some people will fault me for not understanding fashion, and in general I don’t, but I think it’s a self-evident truth that if somebody gets you to pay $70 for something that costs $4 to produce, you need to rethink your priorities. Especially if that thing can be had for $10 with equivalent function elsewhere. But god bless the fashion victims, because lord knows where our economy would be without them loading up their credit cards with four-color printed underwear at a 1200% markup.
As pointed out by Mish Shedlock, the public MTA union has brokered an 11% pay increase while municipalities across the country struggle to make ends meet. The callous disregard of public unions for their taxpaying “employers” is highlighted in this article by the candid comments of an Albany police union chief, who stated for the record that “If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen… and their taxes have go up to cover my raise, I’m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership.”
Given that most local and state government budgets are complete disasters, the only possible result of such union intransigence is massive layoffs. It’s already happening, in fact, as municipalities all over cut back on police and fire budgets. Some towns have even shuttered their police departments, relying on county sheriffs for protection.
Plot illustrating the steady decline in union membership over the past several decades.
It’s pretty clear that unions, far from providing job security to their members, more often price their members out of a job. One need only look at the massive decline in American union membership (see the included figure) to see proof of this. Union bosses get rich at the expense of the junior members, whose jobs are cut. But how is this possible? How can union presidents continue to get elected despite the fact that they are clearly pricing their members out of existence?
The answer, I think, is that unions are inherently self-destructing because of a survivorship bias in their member voting, exacerbated by union domination of the labor prices in certain fields. When union jobs are lost, those who are fired are likely to seek employment in other fields, as unions do everything they can to ensure that when a job is priced out of existence at one firm, it is priced out of existence at all firms. That’s why there are three (for now) US auto companies but only one union. If companies do it, it’s called price fixing. If labor does it, it’s called the United Autoworkers Union.
Intuitively, one would expect that any union boss so arrogant as to insist on pay raises unaffordable by the employer would get voted out by union members. However, if you lose your job you’re probably not going to sit around paying union dues, you’ll probably going to start looking into a lateral move into another trade. Or you might just give up looking for work or retire early. The point is this: the people who continue voting for the status quo union leadership are, by definition, those who have benefitted from union membership, not the millions of workers who have had to leave their chosen profession due to the union destroying their jobs.
Imagine a hospital which has such poor medical care that anybody who has more than a cold dies, but whose cafeteria serves fillet for every meal. Customer surveys of this hospital would be nearly unanimously positive; all the people who leave the hospital will have had a great time, but the corpses can’t complain. This pretty much describes what is happening at unions.
The New Jersey district court finds it necessary to specifically inform potential jurors that they are not permitted to show up for jury duty in nylon track suits. Ah, Jersey…
One of the (many) influences Google has had on the software industry is the concept of the beta release as product. In some ways, this is a good idea, as it creates a community of early-adopters who can act as a massive beta testing community, giving the company feedback on real world use and making for an even more stable general release. The early adopters benefit from access to early technology, the public benefits from better software, and the company benefits from advance publicity and testing.
It can backfire if not done correctly, however, and Mendeley is providing a good object lesson in that. In theory, Mendeley is a killer app for people in academics. It is a cross-platform (including web), cloud-synced database for papers that handles citations and automatic import from all manner of online journals.
Unfortunately, the beta releases have been so bad that most of the word-of-mouth on Mendeley has been poor. Do a quick Google search on them and you’ll see a lot of complaining. In my experience, the software has tremendous potential but is so poorly implemented that it is currently unusable. Import of any paper with an accented letter in an author name, for example, fails. In my field, it seems half the people have umlauts in their name. Page numbers aren’t imported correctly, either, requiring the user to manually enter them. If you import a PDF for a paper already imported through other avenues, the software is happy to create duplicate entries. And so on…
After the frustration of importing their citation database from other software, only to find Mendeley too buggy to be usable, it’s likely many of the early users will not bother return for more punishment. So, what Mendeley is actually accomplishing with their beta program is the alienation of exactly the kind of people they are supposed to be winning over: technologically-minded members of their target audience. These are the people their collegues will to turn to when they are looking for citation software. Mendeley won’t be their answer.
Unfortunately for Mendeley, they may eventually have a great product, but when that final bug is fixed and they drop “beta” from the name, it may be a tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear.
Greenblatt & Goober, Attorneys
September 14, 2009
Dear Baby Alexander,
We are writing on behalf of our client, your father, Jonathan Birge. This is in followup to, and clarification of, the ad hoc verbal contract entered into by you and Dr. Birge during negotiations of the bedtime taking place on the evening of September 12th, 2009. To wit:
You (heretofore LITTLE BABY) agree to make a goodfaith effort to “hush,” including, but not limited to, not saying a word. In return, your father (henceforth ‘DADDY’) has authorized us to release into your possession one (1) live mockingbird.
In the unlikely event said mockingbird should fail to sing, as determined by a third-party arbitration panel, DADDY will purchase, for you, a diamond ring of commensurate retail value.
Should the diamond ring be found of fraudulent origin, limited to composition by brass alloy, a looking glass will be provided. Herein, “looking glass” is understood to be a term of art, not to imply construction of any particular material. Specifically, molded polymer magnifying optics of any kind will be acceptable under the terms of this contract.
If the looking glass should become “broke” due to faulty materials or workmanship, excluding acts of god and/or negligence on your part, you agree to accept from DADDY one (1) billy goat as full payment in-kind.
If the billy goat fails to perform under previously agreed upon provisions terms in the standard goat labor contract, (see “Pulling” in the attached rider), DADDY agrees to provide you with a cart and bull of equal or greater value, as determined by commodity prices published in the prior day’s Wall Street Journal.
No guarantee is provided as to the cart and/or bull’s suitability for any implied or express purpose. Only in the event that the cart and bull should, as a unit, “turn over” (as per the accepted legal definition of a rotation of no less than 90 degrees around the cart-bull axis) will the warrantee terms of this agreement be in effect, and renumeration provided in the form of a dog, to referred to as “Rover” by both parties for the duration of the contract.
In the event the dog named “Rover” is unable, or refuses, to bark audibly, both parties agree to final compensation in the form of a horse and cart, under identical liability terms to the previously mentioned cart and bull. Should the cart and horse fail to maintain appropriate orientation, as defined in the adjoining diagram, the “FALL DOWN” clause of the horse and cart contract will be in effect: DADDY agrees to stipulate for the record that you are “the best baby in town,” with both parties enjoined from further comment on the matter for a period of thirty (30) days.
By falling asleep, you give your full consent and agreement to this contract, and agree to waive all future legal action against your father as it pertains to this or any prior informal mockingbird for sleep agreements.
This Contract shall be interpreted under the laws of the State of Nevada.
This Constract is executed in the City of Cambridge, County of Middlesex, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Signed,
Steven Greenblatt, Esq.
