Watts Martin,

In a comment, John refers to the idea of the “allow access to the address book?” dialog box option as “security theater,” and it is—to the same degree the one for location services is. In both cases, it’s telling you something you probably should have known already (“what do you mean the Yelp app needs location services to figure out what businesses are around me?”), and none of us have any blessed idea what data any of those apps are sending back to their servers even with those dialog boxes.

Good designers use dialogue boxes minimally, yet sometimes we are forced to implement “checkpoints” for reasons none other than passing the buck. “You chose to give us your information!”

This isn’t to say that there aren’t valid reasons for having these checkpoints, but as explained above, they don’t tell us what is being done with that information. The answer to this is developer responsibility. Developers need to create a bond of trust with their users by crafting solutions that take their user’s emotions and respect into account. They need to realize the threat of breaking this trust, understanding the risks of alienating their user base. This threat of abandonment, in turn, is the check-and-balance provided by the user.

Inundating the user with “policies” is not the answer.

Comfort Zones are a dangerous place to lie. They deceive, they thwart. They promise consistency and predictability at the cost of high risk and high reward. Life is painful. Thinking is painful. Existing is painful. Fortunately we have been equipped with adaptation, the ability to subvert pain through constant exposure. Pressure: They say it maketh a diamond.

We toil in the mines of data, seeking to extract a better version of ourselves; one we can sell at a higher price to the covetous and the void — one we can sell to ourselves. We are the living strata of the earth, and yet we wish nothing more than to be lifeless, inanimate objects of subjective worth. If to live is better than to be lifeless, then surely it is better to be more than ourselves, more than human. Such a thing should come at a high price. We value our time. We value our assets. We do not value ourselves. Were we to do so, we would appreciate high risk and high reward. Within our very spirits would begin a fundamental change rooted in becoming the very high price we seek.

Discipline, restraint, and personal responsibility are the pillars of Human 2.0. We can not continue to exist as a self-proclaimed intelligent species when our behavior is modeled after that of the virus. We aren’t even respectful enough to be parasites. We feast until we die.

TV, Internet, information. We feast in new forms as they emerge. Where we once left physical waste, we now leave delusion, aggression, and division. We are not good enough to merit the title, “virus”, for at least a virus has a purpose. In our current form, we have none. Perhaps we are the Earth’s punishment for its transgressions.

Some predict a great change to occur in 2012, proclaiming the end of the world; others see it as the end of our current form. These prophets of prediction are a dime a dozen. Be wary of the public prophet, for they desire only to serve their ego. Listen carefully to the silent. They speak in words that need not be heard.

Wake. Eat. Work. Sleep. Wake. Eat. Work. Sleep. Again. The pattern repeats itself. Every day is exactly the same for those of us in a sick-cycle carousel. Wake, in our comfortable beds. Eat, from our comfortable stoves. Work, in our comfortable offices. Sleep, in our comfortable beds. It matters not whether these environments are physically comfortable. If it is routine, it is a comfort. We write checks from our couches and pews for to help the needy with idle hands would require discomfort. We shop online for to deal with others would distress ourselves. We captivate our minds with the Gehennas of the Internet for to step outside would require embracing reality. Reality is not as we would make it, so we bury our noses in our phones.

The Devil smiles… And we are left none the wiser.

Leena Rao at TechCrunch,

Users tap “Watch with eBay” and type in their zip code, cable provider, channel and the program they are currently watching; and using show and event-specific key word searches, the app will surface relevant merchandise from the more than 200 million listings available on the eBay marketplace.

Very interesting idea. While I find the idea of using an iPad while watching TV distracting, providing it’s a show I care about, it’s good to see eBay thinking outside of the box, transending mediums to promote its service through potentially useful features.

Every time Skype releases an update for the Mac, a glimmer of hope wells up in me. Could this be the version in which we finally get back the wonderful Skype 2.x OS X interface?

Alas, disappointment dawns as not only are we greeted with the awful, I-would-fire-the-designers-in-a-heartbeat Skype 5 interface that, unfortunately, Windows users have had to endure for even longer than we Mac users, but the UI/UX has been made worse, cluttered with features that take away from the joy of making a simple, high-quality call over the Internet.

“Man-in-the-middleware” at its finest.

Rest in Peace, Steven Paul Jobs. You were an inspiration to many, myself included.

Why the name “Siri”? It’s the name of the company they bought. Here’s what I dig about the name, “Siri”, aside from the the voice technology, the icon is great: beautiful and reminiscent of Hal. Combined with the name, and the way it glows and levels as you speak, Siri feels like an actual entity.

Ever have this error occur when working with tests in Ruby?

Expected block to return true value

Not very descriptive is it? This post by Deryl Doucette explains that there was a regression introduced to Ruby 1.9.2 between p136 and p188.

To resolve this, simply update your Ruby:

rvm install ruby-1.9.2-head

Or for patched awesomeness:

curl https://raw.github.com/gist/1008945/4edd1e1dcc1f0db52d4816843a9d1e6b60661122/ruby-1.9.2p290.patch > /tmp/require-performance-fix.patch
rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290 --patch /tmp/require-performance-fix.patch -n patched

If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.

“Ideas, Not Hierarchy: On Steve Jobs Supposedly Making All Apple Decisions”, by Tom Reestman.

Let’s say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here’s how you do it.

“H-P’s One-Year Plan”, by Al Lewis.

I have an obsession with the past and future. I will daydream for hours about what will be, spending other hours on what once was. In some cases, these dreams lead to visions, imaginations of a hopeful future. Other times, reflections on the past only serve to provide guilt, stress, and shame.

We must embrace the present.

It is important to remove temptation from one’s life. To this end, I set iCal to purge events after 30 days and will occasionally purge my task lists. Why should I keep these things around? I rarely look back upon them, and when I do, it is often a vain attempt to feel a sense of accomplishment, to see what I’ve done and where I have spent my time.

To truly derive accuracy from such reflections, I would have to implement new behavioral patterns and requirements that demand consistency. This is just more overhead and cognitive load. I need less. I need as little as possible. Our systems should serve us; we should not serve them. Thus, time spent digging through my browser history to see how I have spent my day is time wasted.

The truth is, we know when we have been productive and when we have not. We feel it. It is in our cells. We bask in productivity. We wallow in waste. This is the only compass we need. Yet Resistance lies to us. It tells us that our intuition is not good enough. No! We need concrete data. We need more systems. We need more structure.

Recently I began keeping a log of when I would wake and sleep. This was designed to keep my average wake time at 5:30 AM. I did wake up at this time for a while but began to wane. Eventually, I tired of keeping this log and ceased to do so, despite the fact that these systems only work if one maintains them vigorously.

I began to reflect: Why do i struggle to maintain such systems? While any new pattern takes time to fully adopt, one should have firm reason for why the given system should exist in the first place. “Because we always have…”, “Because they say so…” are not good enough. In order to have acceptance, one must have understanding. I had forgotten why I should wake up this early in the first place. My sleep schedule had become a game, nothing more than points of data on a spreadsheet.

My reflections deepened.

I realized that the reason I had wanted to wake up early to begin with was for the personal benefits. There was nothing magical about the time 5:30 AM, but when I would awaken this early, I would feel more refreshed, greeting the sun, ready to face the day with more energy and productivity. Waking up later in the morning left me feeling as if I were catching up with the rest of the world. Much later — devastated. Once again I had motivation, true reason. I had a pure desire for structure, one not wrapped in red tape.

Reflections can give us appreciation for the past, but as a compass, they are only beneficial in brief and in change. The past is best captured not in numbers, events, and data, but in emotion. The writings of one’s feelings, the pictures of history, the scrapbooks of desires — these serve to remind us of days long ago, of impressions we had upon the existence of time and where those impressions will, or were meant to, take us. This is how we must reflect. Though our bodies may be machines, our spirits are not. This we must hold dear.

Structure is important, but it demands the right reasons in order to be embraced. We must be conscious of our time spent, choosing decisively, not simply reacting. The future depends upon the actions of the present. This future exists when we decide.