SteveH.ca

That is to say, I’m developing something to do with garbage. I’ve just registered to participate in a hackfest which is designed to create an open platform in which Londoners can more easily check which day their garbage pick up is. If you’re not from London you’re probably thinking “These Londoners can’t remember one day of the week?” Well, London has a rather weird trash pickup system. In some places it’s the same day every week, in others it’s different every week and some weeks there’s no pickups at all. There’s also alternating recycling, composting days, etc.

This project will hopefully alleviate some of the problems Londoners have with this somewhat complex system. I know that I’ve missed my dates more than once. Among the features which will be included on this website is a lookup of schedules based on postal code, sms reminders the night before pick up and (hopefully) a mobile application which would supply this information to Android users. This is all scheduled for a 48 hour period.

London’s open data community has to date created eatsure.ca, which shows health inspection ratings received by restaurants, grocery stores and convenience stores in the city as well as NextStop, an app that allows you to access real time location information of London city buses. I’m looking forward to meeting the people who created this terrific resources.

If you’re a developer, UI designer or are just interested in open data then you should sign up for the hackfest. You don’t need to be a coder to participate. There are a million ways in which you can help contribute. It takes place over the September 24th weekend if you’re available. You can sign up at EventBrite. I look forward to seeing everybody there!

Over the last decade, we have been a part of the socialization of the web. More and more, content is being crowd sourced from the public, rather than being provided by the sites maintainers. This has led to very successful websites like Facebook, Digg, Reddit and any number of others. However, after all this innovation in crowd sourcing content, commenting systems are still absolutely horrid.

Commenting software allows users to give their opinions on an article, video, picture, what have you. They’re one of the oldest and most common methods of user interaction on the web still in popular use today. Why is it then, after all these years these systems are still so bad?

As an example, lets take a look at Engadget’s commenting system. Engadget is a large and popular blog focusing primary on consumer electronics. They make several posts a day and receive thousands of comments. Engadget uses a threaded commenting system limited with two tiers. I’ll explain what that means.

Threaded commenting means that rather than simply commenting on an article directly, I can comment on a comment as well. On some sites people can even comment on comments of comments, but Engadget is a little different. There are two tiers. Parent comments (people commenting directly in response to the article, not another comment) and child comments (people commenting in response to parent comments). This seems good in theory. Many sites which have a high number of tiers (or even unlimited) get quite messy and hard to follow, so two-tiers seem like a good solution to combat this.

The problem with a two-tier comment system, like all comment systems, is user abuse. I call this the First Post problem. After the first post in a thread, the second commenter has a decision to make; “Do I post this comment as a reply to the article or do I post it as a reply to the comment?” Ideally, this would be settled by the commenter deciding on which would be more appropriate based on the content of his post. The problem is that if the user posts as a reply to the first comment, he is guaranteed to have that comment placed on the front page throughout the lifetime of the article, so this is what he does. In turn, the next several users do the same and those who do follow the proper convention get their comments buried beneath the massive amount of replies to the first comment. This happens just about every time on an Engadget article.

This happens on every comment system that uses this two-tiered approach, in fact. Digg is another good example, although they have since fixed this by removing the second tier. The problem is with the users. Nobody wants to have their comment pushed to the bottom of the list, ensuring that few people (if any) will actually read it. No, it’s much easier to post off-topic content as a response to the first commenter on the board. In essence, this turns Engadget’s two-tiered comment system into a single-tiered one just based on the way users actually use the software.

I don’t want to just hard on Engadget though. Almost every site has a problem with its comments. Sites which allow multi-tiering end up looking messy and are hard or impossible to follow. Sites which have no tiering at all get polluted with garbage and the substantive comments are hard to find.

So what’s the solution? Slashdot has a multi-tiered comment system in which comments are displayed by relevance based on user moderation. This seems to work pretty well, although it is not perfect for reasons I will explain at a later date. I will only say that the way comments are laid out on a page is not as significant as the way those comments are moderated. More and more comments are being moderated by users, not site administrators. This has led to an entirely new problem on comment systems which I will later discuss at a later date.

Update (18/08/10): It seems that a few minutes after I posted this, Engadget implemented a new commenting system on their site for the first time in ages. They now use a six tiered system rather than two. This does not change the bulk of what I wrote here as it still seems they have the same problem as before with the replies to the first commenter, but more of the replies within this category are a little more on-topic now. An improvement to be sure, but still far from perfect.

I was looking at the terms of the Android Marketplace for developers today and something struck me as very odd. It seems that I, a software developer, am not allowed to submit paid applications to the Android Market because I am a Canadian. That’s right. Google does not allow Canadians (or several other nationalities) to submit paid applications to their market. Why? No explanation given.

This is a pretty big problem. First, this hurts the small software developer like myself. Every so often I tend to have a good idea that I think will make me a bit of money. Something I think people will want to pay for. However, since I’m Canadian I can’t implement this idea and distribute it to a large market of people who are both willing and able to pay for it. An American or Briton who has a similar idea even after I do is free to distribute it in the marketplace. This gives those ten select countries an advantage when it comes to the early days of Android development.

The marketplace is just starting to pick up steam. There are still a great many applications which require writing in order to achieve parity with iOS and its app store. Google’s insistence that the only people who are able to submit paid applications must be from a select list of ten countries is ridiculous. This is the absolute best time to be developing software for Android. The market share is growing fast and developers are struggling to reach parity with the Apple App Store. The developers who cannot submit paid apps (myself included) are being left out in the cold. There is simply no way for us to monetize our hard work on this platform.

Shame on Google for not respecting its international developers.

It’s not every day I nearly get into a fist fight over a trash can. Admittedly it happens to me more than one would consider normal, but I won’t bore you with the details of how I’m a victim of circumstance when it comes to trash cans. I’ll limit this post to a specific near fight I had over a particular trash can just this morning.

I had just finished getting a buzz cut at the local barber and paid him $13 with no tip. I don’t feel that I should tip for a simple buzz cut when I could do it myself at home quite easily. It only takes him like five minutes and he should feel lucky that I’m there at all giving him my business.

So I was leaving the barber shop with my new buzz cut. After I get a buzz cut my physical appearance changes to one of a chubby chemotherapy patient, or a sickly skinhead. Prior to this I look more like a chubby chemotherapy patient with slightly longer hair. I walked over to the bus stop and noticed that there was a garbage can on the side of the road. Like a good Samaritan that I am I picked it up and placed it on what I assumed to be the owners lawn. I was pretty proud of myself. I had single handedly made it so motorists didn’t have to dodge a roaming trash can. Good for me.

A few minutes later I noticed the same model of trash can in the middle of the right lane on the other side of the street (this was a four lane street). I noticed a gentleman walking on the opposite side walk and thought that he would probably do his civic duty and remove the garbage pail from the street. He walked right by it.

I think people are for the most part good and this gentleman probably just didn’t notice the pail directly to his left. I yelled “Excuse me, could you please move that trash can?” to which he responded… well, he didn’t respond verbally. He flipped me off. This left me a little stunned.

I realized at this point that if I wanted that trash can moved I would have to do it myself. I started crossing the street once traffic subsided. The man must have thought I looked threatening, like a skinhead undergoing chemotherapy (they have nothing to lose and only hate in their heart) so he started yelling “What, are you going to fight me now?” several times. I had no intention of fighting this man. I just wanted to move the trash can.

I moved the trash can to a nearby yard while the man was still yelling at me. I  said to him “I just came over to move the can”, which may have came out as “I came over to move the can because you’re a lazy self centred prick.” This for some reason upset him more. As I walked across the street to continue waiting for my bus I heard him yell “Pussy!” behind me. I turned around and started walking towards him as this clearly deserved a response. When I got near him his final words to me were “Fuck this” as he turned around and walked off.

This would have been among the most meaningless fights over a trash can I’d ever been a part of had it gone that far.