Pretty obvious I guess. If you are a construction worker for instance, you can physically see your work so you do not need anyone or anything to track your time. This is not the case for information workers who cannot measure their work so easily.

Tracking time for information workers is even more important these days due to the internet. While the internet can be credited for simplifying, speeding up, and making possible certain business processes, on the other hand it has to be heavily penalised for millions of hours wasted each year by employees on unproductive activities such as social networking, chatting and emailing jokes.

So at FruitfulTime we designed and developed FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter a software tool that tracks your computer time automatically. FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter is FREE for personal use so you can download it now to start tracking your computer time.

A new year is just around the corner so this is the perfect time to start tracking your computer time. You can only improve what you measure and so if you want to boost your productivity you first need to track and measure the time you spend on your computer activities.

In these hard economic times, being productive and making efficient use of your time can make the difference between being employed or seeking a job.

The simple answer is you cannot find an option if it is not there. StumbleUpon decided that it will provide all the options and settings in your online account profile except changing your password. This is ridiculous.

To change your password you need to download and install the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser and then from the Tools drop-down menu choose change password. I might be wrong, but to me this seems like a marketing ploy to force users to download and install your toolbar. I for one won’t bother to download and install any toolbar.

I like the whole idea of StumbleUpon and this password changing decision goes against the grain of online communities. First of all, I do not like to load my browser with myriad toolbars, hence the Minimalist Geek, and secondly if I want to change my password while not on my personal computer and haven’t the option to install toolbars, how will I manage to change my password.

Please StumbleUpon listen to your community and let them be free to choose whether to download and install your toolbar. Add the change password option to our online profile.

Next, I tried to log on with my new password but I got an invalid account or password message. As happens to common mortals I thought, oh I must have entered the new password wrongly. So I tried again carefully typing in every symbol. Same result same frustration.

To cut a long story short what should have taken me a minute to do ended up as an energy sapping 30 minute call with support. The thing is these guys, quite rightly I must say cause this is the case 99% of the time, assume that whoever is calling is yet another my computer is not working yet the power is out at my home kind of guy. So they start asking you basic questions such as is your modem on, did you change your network connection password etc etc. What is wrong though is the fact that they seem to follow a script without any kind of creative thinking on their part.

I mean, if the guy calling support sounds competent enough you should cut the run of the mill support questions and get to the real meat. Well, after convincing this guy that I knew what I was talking about he asked me whether I used mixed case letters in my password. My reply, after recovering from the neural shock of realising where this guy was going, was of course I did. What kind of password would use only small case letters only.

His reply to that was even more shocking. The password you specify is converted to all lower case he said. I assume they do this to make it simpler for single celled organisms to log on. Two things are very bad with this “policy” if you can call it so.

First of all let’s assume that this is a good idea. I think you should write a bold flashy note somewhere in the change password page so that users who are security conscious and use a mixed case password do not fall into this trap.

Secondly, and more importantly, who would take such a stupid decision. If a user chooses a weak password due to ingorance in the subject or pure naïveté that is one thing, but having a policy in place that drastically reduces the strength of a password is quite another.

A simple example will suffice to get my point across to the uninitiated in the subject. Let’s assume that the password can contain only the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’. For a single character password you have two possibilities, for a two letter password you have 4 possibilities (permutations), ‘aa’, ‘bb’, ‘ab’, ‘ba’, assuming symbols can be used more than once.

So for a password of length 8 characters where only English alphabet letters (both small and capitals) are allowed and letters can be repeated we get (26+26)^8 = 53459728531456 permutations. In theory, a dumb brute force attack trying 500000 passwords per second would take roughly 3.3 years to try all those possible passwords.

Now, by limiting your alphabet to only small case letters, for the same scenario we get these results.

26^8 = 208827064576 permutations. The same dumb brute force attack would take 4.8 days to try all possible passwords.

Clearly this is not a good choice to take. Sometimes I really wonder what was the rationale behind such decisions, assuming there was one in the first place.

Recently I upgraded my 2005 express edition of C# to 2008. As part of the installation they include the 2008 version of SQL Server Express. I thought since the installation is upgrading my current 2005 version to the 2008 versions it will include everything I already have installed. Unfortunately, it turned out I was assuming too much from an installation.

C# 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express editions were both upgraded to the 2008 version but the Management Studio was not. Surprisingly, or not, the 2005 management studio could not connect to the new 2008 installation. So I uninstalled it and went looking for the management studio version 2008.

So I fired google up and looked for SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express. The first match was the following microsoft link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms365247.aspx

All well and good. I was feeling confident I had found what I needed. I scanned for the download link and found it under the section header, SSMSE Download Site. A quick click on the link takes you to the following page http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796&DisplayLang=en.

There is only one big problem with that page though. It is the download page for the 2005 version of management studio and 2008 is nowhere to be found.

It was then that I went to look back at the google search page and found out that all the links past position one are queries on forums as to where is the 2008 version of the management studio.

After reading through quite a few of them and myriad setup attempts, I finally found the solution and I am outlining it here to save your time and sanity.

The solution is to go to the following page, http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download/, and download the SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools.

If you already installed SQL Server 2008 Express Edition without tools or as part of the Visual Studio Express edition install or upgrade process, uninstall it first before doing anything else, since adding features like the management studio to an existing installation did not work either.

Then run the installation of SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools. From the left side bar click the Installation entry and from the right pane click New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation. The setup will check for some pre-requisites and then install setup support files. Next it will check some setup support rules and you need to click Next to enter the Installation Type section. Select Perform  a new installation of SQL Server 2008 and click Next until you reach the Feature Selection page. In the right pane, under Instance Features select Database Engine Services and under Shared Features make sure to select Management Tools - Basic. Then continue by clicking Next and following the rest of the installation process.

You should now have a brand new installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition complete with the Management Studio.

What is really annoying is the fact that the first Microsoft page I visited, i.e. the one Google returned in the first position contained a note to highlight the fact that the download link is incorrect and you should go to a new address. Problem is, the download link is the first thing on the page, and the corrective comment is well below the fold, and you need to scroll two full pages to view it.

So I have two comments to make regarding this. The link could have been fixed immediately instead of posting a comment to highlight the error. It definetely took more time to write the comment than to fix a single URL. Not to mention how quicker and painless the whole process would have been for me and countless other users doing this upgrade process.

Finally, if red tape rules the day at Microsoft, and they need to wait for the official “Documentation Refresh” before changing a document, this crucial note should have been written next to the download link itself. There it will surely draw attention and save the day.

Today I am happy to announce that after months of hard work, today we launched FruitfulTime TaskManager 2.

Time to celebrate

Go check it out and download your own free 10 day trial from here.

Installation is only 300KB, so you can download and install in less than a minute

FruitfulTime is a startup company developing productivity software, and I am co-founder along with my friend Gaetano. Our first product, FruitfulTime TaskManager is a simple, lightweight, yet powerful to do list management software.

Following the success we had with the first version, we continued to research ways to improve the product further and include feature requests received from our customers.

The next version of FruitfulTime TaskManager is a major release and includes many enhancements and new features which further simplify the product whilst making it more functional.

You can read more about FruitfulTime TaskManager 2 here.

John Maeda’s post YAHOOGLE! contains a graphic showing Yahoo’s and Google’s search engine home page evolution through the years. I am reproducing it below as a thumbnail, and you can click on it to view the larger version.

Jeff Atwood’s post In Pursuit of Simplicity, provides more details and excerpts all related to Google’s attention to simplicity.

So it seems complexity has plagued Yahoo’s design of its search engine home page for a long time. I wonder who is behind such complexity? My take is Yahoo’s marketing and management guys have more power than the user experience and usability guys. I can imagine one of the marketing team guys talking along these lines. “Oh… there you see, we have 40 square pixels free on the home page. Let us insert some more ads, or links, or anything that will cause people to spend more time here.”

Problem is… that usually has the very opposite effect on people, especially those who come over to search.

In his book, Jeff Hawkins states that we currently have a lot of data about the brain but not much as regards theories of how it really works. In fact, the Redwood institute task is to ”to use mathematical and physical principles to understand the nature of coding, dynamics, circuitry and plasticity in nervous systems.”

Being a brain geek and proud owner of a brain myself ;), just like Jeff, although definitely with less knowledge on this topic than him, from the books I have read so far on the brain and how it functions I agree with him. An excellent short introduction to the brain is the book, The Brain: A Very Short Introduction, by Michael O’Shea. For a more visual and less technical book I suggest any book by Richard Restak, but specifically The Secret Life of the Brain.

The more you read about the brain to more you realise that a lot of research is being done on how the brain functions, from an electro-chemical point of view, and a lot of data has been gathered which is cool, but when it comes to the really hard questions, such as how is a simple picture like a shape encoded and stored in the neurons, you come empty handed. Does a single neuron store all the information about a shape? If it does, how does it do it? I do not think that a single neuron stores information about a simple shape, but rather a group of neurons interact together to store that information. As in all things in nature I think that the brain tries to economise the use of its resources, and so if it has a neuron with the colour yellow encoded in it, it will reuse it in any group of neurons that need to encode data about anything yellow, for example, a yellow ball.

The above of course is just my idea of how the brain might encode information, but that is the kind of real brain knowledge we need to get before we can create intelligent machines. No wonder that with the current knowledge no computer is capable to recognise simple characters and digits that are slightly morphed or covered with noise, yet humans can do it with ease. This type of problem is called the invariance problem, in that a human being can identify a familiar object, say a tree, no matter from which angle or under which lighting conditions it is presented, variances.

Presently, this is good news for people in the security sector or website owners who exploit this known algorithmic difficulty, through captchas, to defeat bots employed by spammers from flooding websites with comments or doing other malicious stuff.

Some would argue, but is it wise to try and develop really intelligent machines, citing the possibility of these machines doing harm to humans. Jeff Hawkins argues against the idea of intelligent machines ever becoming dangerous to human beings, since he says it will be easier to build machines that can think better than us in higher level thought such as physics and mathematics, than to build walking robots. He is right about creating walking agile robots like Terminator. Just have a look at this video from Boston Dynamics of their Big Dog robot. I studied electronics myself and I can tell you that robot is as advanced as they can be as of now, to handle the rough, uneven, moving, sliding terrain, and the sideways pushing. Yet, it still is light years away from approaching the fluidity of movement and adaptability of a human being.

However, I disagree with Jeff that intelligent machines cannot become evil or used for malicious purposes, since he is assuming that for an intelligent machine to do harm it must move in real life 3D space. In an ever wired world, moving around the globe and causing havoc can easily be done in the not so virtual world of bits and bytes. I mean, look at today’s primitive bots. They still manage to wreak havoc on the internet. Now imagine a really intelligent bot, at least capable of reading captchas, what do you think it would be capable of?

Well, the good news is with intelligent machines there will be both good and evil bots roaming the internet, so the continuous war between white and black hat has no end in sight. Interesting times ahead.

Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.

Now, I do not want to start such an ideology war here, but in this post I will write what I think is the determining factor of why certain companies are winning ground, while others are losing it like there is no tomorrow.

So let me first compare Microsoft’s, Google’s, and Yahoo’s search engine offerings. I think everybody agrees that Google search dominates the market both from a business point of view and from a customer’s perspective. Now, do you think that only Google employs or affords to employ fine brains to come up with innovate and effective solutions to the ever growing search challenge? I strongly doubt it.

In fact, the search results returned by all three search engines are quite similar, so how come people opt to use Google instead of one of the others. Factors are multiple, some of them technical whilst others are based on perception, such as the Google is good, others are evil syndrome. Although this latter syndrome is starting to fade lately. As always, once you become the dominant player, people switch their views and go on the defensive.  I won’t go into those other factors here but will only focus on the minimalistic user experience factor.

The Google home page is clean and clutter free. The links to other services offered by Google are few, achieved by displaying the most common services and hiding the rest under the more link, and tucked neatly to the top left of the page. So all you see is the text box, and search button. Even the search results page is clean and minimalistic. Compare this with the Yahoo page. This page is chock full of stuff, links to other sections, articles, sign in buttons, and colours. You might say, but Yahoo is more than search, it is a portal, and my answer would be who cares. If I want to have a fraction of a chance of competing with Google I would not distract the users who come over to my site with all that noise, and instead would leave a clean and simple page, just like Google’s. So that the user can focus on just one thing, search. If you get to the Yahoo search results page it is not that bad and in fact looks quite similar to Google’s.

Microsoft in this regard seem to have grasped this idea since their Live search offering is clean and uncluttered, but then again imitating is easier than innovating. However the search results returned aren’t optimal. For instance, if you search for “jet fighter plane video” on Google the first hits are YouTube videos, whilst on Microsoft’s Live the links provided are useless to say the least. Not to mention that not only Google’s link match the user’s expectations perfectly, but I can also play the videos without leaving their page.

Personally, I do not know who still uses any of the other search engines. My guess is that a big chunk of searches on Live.com come from people getting started with technology who bought their first machine with Microsoft Windows pre-installed and you guessed it Internet Explorer defaulting to Live.com. But it is only a matter of time, until they see the proverbial light and experience Google’s search offering. Then there is no turning back.

Another example of minimalistic functionality and design offered by Google is Gmail. The thing just works. No hassle, no useless stuff. Compare that with Microsoft’s offering, Hotmail. Not only is their user interface heavy on the eyes and to load, the spam filtering barely works.

No wonder Microsoft is hurrying to become super friendly with Yahoo in a bid to take the Google giant. But I think it is all futile since you do not win at this type of game just by being big. As they say the consumer is king, and if Microsoft and Yahoo do not recognise that, they are bound to fail miserably. I am quite sure there are dissenting parties inside both companies that know this and if they were in control they would do something about it. Most probably they voiced their opinions, but as happens when companies have been in existence for such a long time and grow larger than life, bureaucracy kicks in.

I think both Microsoft and Yahoo have the technical ability to match or surpass Google’s offerings, but bureaucracy is keeping both of them back by stifling creativity, something which Google seems to have in abundance. And this comes as no surprise since Google know that keeping a startup atmosphere and culture is fertile ground for creativity, and creativity is what you need to be innovative. Also, a startup culture is the nemesis of bureaucracy and the home of getting things done. Thus, Google manage to keep the pace with the ever changing market demands further solidifying their position as market leaders. Hopefully, Google will never let success go to its head and become bureaucratic, lest it crumble under its own weight. 

So I think that whoever develops useful technology and presents it to the user in a minimalist way will succeed. People want things that just work, no more no less. They don’t care about and the majority of them do not understand the underlying technology. And I say why should they.

So what do you think?