Overpass Experiences The Eric Wroolie Blog

Importance of back-ups

I had a bit of a scare last night with my computer last night.

I have spent the past several days doing some work for a client and am travelling out to their office today to deploy the work on their servers.  The plan was to download the release from Subversion onto a workstation and upload to their server (and updates configs and all that). 

Last night at 9pm, my main pc wouldn’t start.  I could hear the fan humming and disks spinning, but nothing showing up on the monitor—not even bios set-up screens. It’s a four-year-old Dell Dimension 9150, so the pc isn’t new and I expect there to be problems from time-to-time, but this kind of problem couldn’t happen at all those times I don’t have any clients?

My main development PC gets backed up once a week to an external hard drive using Acronis True Image.  My PC also wakes from hibernate every morning at 2am and takes a local backup from all my websites and databases hosted on different web servers.  I have a Subversion repository hosted off-site where I keep all my code.  I’ve thought a lot about disaster recovery.  But it wasn’t enough.

I wasn’t concerned about the PC as much as I was concerned about the code.  But, as much as I tell my developers to check-in every day, I was a bit lazy here and didn’t do it myself for two days. 

After Googling the problem for a while (on my laptop) I found the issue was some RAM had gone bad.  I took memory out one by one until the computer would start again.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  Eventually removed two RAM modules (bringing my pc from 4gb down to 2gb)—and the first thing I did was check my code into Subversion.  So after a few hours of panic, everything was fine.

Here’s the problem with my backup strategy—it’s not regular enough.  It’s geared for a hard-drive failure more than anything else.  If my pc completely packs it in, I can restore my operating system, hard drives and everything else onto a new box—but my backup only runs once a week.  I could be 6 days out of date.  I need to increase it.  Besides, I live in Oxfordshire.  It’s not like I’m in San Diego where you can swing down to Fries at 9pm on a Sunday night and pick up a hard drive.

If you’ve ever had a hard drive fail, you know how important back-ups are—but they got to be automated or they won’t happen.  When you get paid for the work you do on your computer, it’s even more important. 

In love with our own lingo

I worked on a software project recently where the interface was developed more by developers than end-users (you see this a lot, actually).  In this instance, the application needed a phone number (but not a mobile number).  Rather than asking for a land-line number (or just “Phone number”), the entry form asked for a PSTN.  I was doing a usability review of the app and pointed this out-- “What the hell is a PSTN?”

The IT head pointed out to me that a PSTN is the industry term for a land-line (it stands for Public Switched Telephone Network) and that, now that I knew this, it should make sense to me.  I suggested he change it to “Phone Number”—since this app was going to be used by the general public.  He insisted that most people know this—just not me.  I told him he should still change it.  This advice fell on deaf ears, but we made some other good changes to improve the usability of the app.

photo credit: jakeliefer

My logic is (and continues to be)—if I don’t understand a term, it’s too confusing.  If I do understand it, would my grandmother?  In my situation, there are still occasions when I don't understand something because of cultural differences-- like expressions used in the UK but I never grew up with.  I still question them anyway.

This happens all the time—techies want to educate the non-techies on how to talk about technology.  Sometimes, these aren’t even terms in the technology industry—but acronyms and abbreviations used in a specific company that everyone adopts.  I’ve been in small twenty-person offices where you would think everyone went to school to learn how to talk like they do—even the secretaries: “Are you going to de-duplicate the NOC node or shall I?”  Eventually, no one knows how to talk like a regular person anymore.

We techies love our lingo.  In even smaller arenas (like a company or an industry) this lingo becomes even more precious. When we talk like this, we really sound like we know what we are talking about.  It impresses people (or so we think).  I can remember the feeling of working on a stock trading application for a major bank and talking about trade flips and different types of transactions and FSA systems and then stopping to reflect on how cool it must all sound—I was an insider.  I wasn’t a newbie—I sounded like an authority.

But all good software and hardware have the ability to take techie jargon and make it palatable to the masses.  A good site or web application should not imply when you log in that you have no business being there because you don’t know how to use it.  If you don’t understand the menu options, then you are in the wrong place.

In the future, people may look back at our gadgets today and conclude that Apple created the digital music player.  The truth was that portable MP3 players existed a few years before the iPod, but while techie ruled this area (with Rippers, LAME codecs, etc), Apple made the whole process simple for those who didn’t feel like pouring through thousands of forums and blogs to figure out who to rip a cd.  Try explaining to your grandmother how to set up a podcast aggregator while not using iTunes and you can see how much they simplified this area.  The term MP3 made it into the mainstream lexicon, but most of the terms of the early days did not.  Today, you still hear people argue about the benefit of Ogg or Flac over MP3, and can’t figure out why the mainstream hasn’t switched from MP3 to the superior Flac.  But the general public doesn’t care about this.

Google is revolutionary and I love the company, but to read many of the books out there (like “The Google Story” or “What would Google do?”) you would think that before Google, we were all randomly typing URLs into our browsers hoping to find something.  Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, etc were all there.  But Google made it easy in addition to being far more efficient.  One textbox, one button.  It was easy to tell your grandmother how to use it.

In technology, especially when it comes to interface design or anything that requires us to interact with the public, the best skill is to be a layperson.  Some people call this the “mother” test.  If your mother came to this site, or used your application, could she figure out how to use it without calling you?

I think about every time I have to fill in my tax forms how lost I am.  Even the “How to fill in this form” instructions confuse me.  It makes sense to someone, but they are in love with their lingo too.