Technology Woman

I'm banned for hate speech on WyldRyde. Yup. My name, you see, has the word "gay" in it, and thus "gayle" is hate speech.

This happens fairly often as it turns out. I've hit this issue on AOL, Microsoft's theSpoke.com, planes with games on their lcd screens, etc.

I have to wonder though. Suppose my last name were "Straighth", would I be banned as often? Why is "gay" considered hate speech?

(PS: I would check if WyldRyde banned "Straighth", but it's banned my computer completely. Anyone want to check any find out?)

I recently sent in a support ticket to evite about a pretty huge issue with their site. I can't say what it is - yet - but it's not a little bug. It's a huge, massive, gaping issue.

Anyway, I get the usual "thank you for your email" auto-response. Then, two hours later, I get this:

Thank you for your patience. The issues you have experienced have been corrected, and you may now create, edit, and manage your invitation as desired. If you experience any further difficulties, you may alleviate this by deleting the cookies and clearing your browser’s cache, as they may still contain the error page information. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you. If we can further assist you, please contact us.

Uhh, no, it hasn't been fixed. In fact, judging from the non-sensicalness of the response, they didn't even read my email. What this means is:

1. They have an auto-response, on a time delay, saying that they've fixed the issue when they haven't done squat.
   
2. Some minion clicks a button to say that they're fixed issues when they haven't done squat.

Either way, they're just blindly telling their users that they're fixed issues that they haven't even looked into. Sweet.

Funnily enough, this response probably actually works a good percentage of the time out of the pure flakiness of their site.

By contrast, I've had pretty good experience with customer support at other companies:

1. Facebook: Once Seattle Anti-Freeze exceeded about 1500 members, we could no longer send messages to the group or invite the group to an event. Facebook employees Luke Shepard and Paul McDonald got those limits raised. Thanks guys!!
2. Pingg: I've written in feature / bug requests. Their support team has promptly responded with well thought out responses.
3. MyPunchBowl: After I posted about MyPunchBowl, the founder emailed me - within hours.
4. Zoji.com: I have exchanged numerous emails with the founders.

The lesson is: Don't automatically respond to users saying that their issue has been fixed.

Google App Engine:

"We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, and
we'll keep you updated on our progress."

Google writes this as though it's "no biggie - we're just disabling caching for an hour - your app will operate as normal".

If you've used App Engine, you know how ridiculous that is. You can't operate an App Engine site without lots and lots of caching.

App Engine takes your generous daily quota and divides it up into tiny little minute or second long quotas. Their logic is something like this:

1. You can eat 2000 calories in one day.
   Hurray! That's a lot of food!
2. It's good to pace yourself and not eat it all at once.
   Absolutely. You wouldn't want to pig out on breakfast and not be able to eat anything else all day.
3. Therefore, we will only let you eat 1.4 calories per minute.
   Well, f*ck. Pass me two thirds of a tic tac?
   

CareerCup gets about 10,000 page views per day - not the smallest site, but hardly the biggest. CareerCup cannot operate without heavy caching. By taking down caching, they took down my site for an hour. Not cool.

Now, Google could have mitigated this by removing the absurdly small quotas temporarily. CareerCup would have run slowly, but at least it would have run. Instead, though, users get punished for expensive-ish queries, with no chance to avoid it. Not cool.

This brings me to my next point:
Google, if you're going to take down people's sites, can you pick a better time than 9am - 10am? Try, perhaps, 2am - 3am? I know you don't want to come into work at 2am. I know it's not really Google culture to tell a team that they have to be at work and away from their families 2am. But you have to. You have real users operating real businesses, many of which are a whole lot bigger than CareerCup. We depend on you to keep our websites up.

Google: Don't act like taking down memcache doesn't disable our sites. And don't disable our sites at 9am when you could've done this 2am.

I've been using Talkinator, an embeddable chat program for websites, for a few months now.

I realize I might be the only post-1995 site to want a chatroom, but it's actually rather useful. For example, when people are discussing, say, Microsoft Interview Questions, they'll jump in the chatroom to discuss problems. This use was expected.

The more interesting use-case was simply feedback. People hesitate feedback via email, or even through anonymous forms. They will, however, jump in a chatroom and complain. I've discovered a number of bugs this way.

Nifty.

Racism is rampant. Maybe this election has made people less racist, maybe it hasn't. At the very least, I hope that it has made people realize that, yes, racism is still very much alive. As a quick illustration, check out the top 10 Google search suggestions for Obama: 30% are race-related issues: "birth certificate", "muslim" and "antichrist".

The most frustrating part is that people don't even see the racism and sexism. A Google coworker who had a "Hillary Nutcracker" displayed in his office window - he probably didn't think about how that's dripping with sexism. Nor did the Republican friend who asked online for one good thing that "Barack HUSSEIN Obama" has ever done. Nor does the other friend who asserts that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama because he's black.

We don't see these things because we see them all too often. We've become immune to it. It's time that we wake up and call these things out for the racist, sexist acts that they are.

As the founder of CareerCup, the web's largest source for technical interview questions, I have over 500 Microsoft Interview Questions at my disposal, with more added every day. Everyday people ask me what they should study before their Microsoft interview.

So, without further ado, I present the the Top 10 Best Microsoft Interview Questions:

Microsoft Interview Question #10
Given two nodes in a binary tree, find the first common parent node. You are not allowed to store any nodes in a data structure.

Microsoft Interview Question #9
Simulate a 7 sided die using a 5 sided die.

Microsoft Interview Question #8
How long would it take to sort 1 billion numbers?

Microsoft Interview Question #7
Given two sets of objects, S1 and S2, write an algorithm to determine their subset relationship. Eg, which of the following is true: C1 is a subset of C2, C2 is a subset of C1, C1 equals C2, or none of these?

Microsoft Interview Question #6
Given a value in a binary search tree, print all the paths (starting from the root or any other node) which sum up to that value.

Microsoft Interview Question #5
Imagine there is a square matrix with n x n cells. Each cell is either filled with a black pixel or a white pixel. Design an algorithm to find the maximum subsquare such that all four borders are filled with black pixels.

Microsoft Interview Question #4
How would you divide an integer array into 2 sub-arrays such that their averages were equal?

Microsoft Interview Question #3
Given two binary trees T1 and T2 which store character data, write an algorithm to decide whether T2 is a subtree of T1. T1 has millions of nodes and T2 has hundreds of nodes, and each may have duplicates.

Microsoft Interview Question #2
Implement boggle: Given an NxN matrix, print a list of all words that appear in the matrix. To find a word, you can move left, right, up or down, as long as you do not use the same letter twice. For example, if the matrix were:
W A
D R
You could find the words: WAR, WARD, DRAW and RAW

Microsoft Interview Question #1
Design a webcrawler.

Brought to you by Google's 2001 search index, a quick comparison to show just how new to the scene Sarah Palin is:

John McCain: 158,000 hits in 2001
Joe Biden: 3,240 hits in 2001
Barack Obama: 671 hits in 2001
Sarah Palin: 0 hits in 2001.

Despite being mayor of a small town, the internet had not even heard of her in 2001. I'm not sure if that says more about Palin or Google...

It's been a good run. We've have laughed, we've cried, we've... ok, mostly just cried. What's up with evite? I swear, the only thing that the evite does is make the service worse.

I usually don't cross-post Seattle Anti-Freeze events, but this one's for a good cause...

Drink for the Cure / Bid for the Cure - Charity Auction
Oct 1, 2008 at 8pm (Location TBD - Belltown / Downtown)

Every three minutes, a woman in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer. One out of every eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lives. Seattle Anti-Freeze invites you to make a difference.

On Oct 1st, please join Seattle Anti-Freeze members for a silent auction to benefit Susan G. Komen foundation. Mix & mingle - drink & bid.

There is no cost for this event, but donations at the event for the Susan G. Komen foundation are, of course, appreciated.

DONATING ITEMS
Got something cool, funky, unique or useful that you'd be willing to part with? It doesn't have to be anything fancy - all donations are appreciated! In return, you receive good karma, and two free tickets to a Seattle Anti-Freeze event of your choosing.

If you have something you could donate, I'd really appreciate it :-). Click here (or just shoot me an email).

Want to come? Join the Seattle Anti-Freeze list.

I'm always impressed by the number of tech / networking / startup opportunities in Seattle. Well, impressed / overwhelmed. Here's another one that came my way: Seattle Girl Geek Dinners.

The second dinner is coming up on Thursday, September 11 and will be hosted by Amazon.

Our 2nd dinner is right around the corner! Amazon.com is hosting, and will be presenting on some of the key technologies they are developing.

Thank you Amazon!

The date is Thursday, Sept 11 at 5:30pm.

To register: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/158982521

We also need help with finding sponsors, and are looking for your ideas on making this a great opportunity for local technical women to meet.

Website | Facebook Group

Creepy. From the New York Times:

The authorities will be able to track San Antonio students with a history of skipping school using ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring. Linda Penn, a justice of the peace, said she expected that some 50 students would wear the devices in a six-month pilot program. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the plan, but Ms. Penn linked truancy with later criminal activity. “We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on life,” she said. “I don’t want to see the latter.”

You're going to give kids ankle bracelets? To do what, exactly? It's not like you don't know if they skip school - the morning roll call already does that. It will, however, ensure that they're treated like criminals.

It seems everyone wants to get a piece of the college ranking game, and Forbes is latest contender.

Let's look at how the Ivy League - the group of schools America loves to hate - fared in the newest contest:

College	US News	Forbes
Princeton	#1	#1
Harvard	#2	#3
Yale	#3	#9
Columbia	#9	#10
Brown	#14	#27
Penn	#5	#61
Cornell	#12	#121
Dartmouth	#11	#127

Yes, that's right - Wabash College (#12) and Centre College (#13) are all better than half of the Ivy League.

While I firmly believe that one can get a great education anywhere, something is just not right about these rankings.

It becomes quite apparent when you look at Forbes' methodology:

(1) Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who's Who in America (25%)

Ironically, Forbes' itself wrote an article ("The Hall of Lame") criticizing that it "appears to contain a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves..." Apparently, the majority of those who apply are selected. Anyone want to be in Who's Who? Think of how you'll help your college!

(2) Student Evaluations of Professors from RateMyProfessors.com (25%)

Students' input about professors to RateMyProfessors is limited to four criteria: Clarity, Easiness, Helpfulness and Hotness. Nowhere in there do the students provide information about how much they learned. And this accounts for a whopping 25% of Forbes' rankings? At least Forbes decided not to include "hotness" as a criteria.

(3) Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

This criteria appears a tad more fair. But still, what about a school which has a large number of students pursuing double majors, simultaneous masters degrees, etc? Some school encourage these sorts of academic challenges which would drop their four year graduation rate, while other schools effectively prohibit it.

(4) Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

For once, I have no complaint about this criteria. Ok, ok, maybe just one: is the sample statistically size fair?

(5) Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

For the 64% of students who do borrow money for school, leave it to them to decide if going into debt is worth it.

This is like ranking cars based on the average debt of its owners.

Forbes should be embarrassed by their list. 50% of the rankings are derived from extremely unreliable sources, and another 16.6% is a financial consideration that is best left up to each individual student. If you took their list seriously, you would be led to believe that a small, liberal college is the only place to get a solid education in this country.

What's really shocking about this list is that no one at Forbes took a glance at this list and said, "Hey, guys, did we really mean to put Hampden-Sydney College over 250 spots above NYU?"

Shame on Forbes. I'd expect better statistics from such a source.

McKinney, charged with kidnapping and rape over thirty years ago, has recently emerged. Time Magazine tells us that in the winter of 1977, McKinney and a friend kidnapped a Mormon missionary by the name of Anderson, whom McKinney had been stalking since their relationship ended in 1975. Anderson was chained to a bed for three days and raped repeatedly by McKinney.

In an odd - if not shocking - choice of words, Time Magazine describes the details as "sexy and surreal". Instead of calling it rape, Time calls it "forcibly having sex." It's also called a "sex scandal."

So how could Time possibly describe an abduction and rape this way? The rapist was a woman and the victim was a man.

Rape is not sex and it is never, ever, sexy.

A creationist explains why men have higher sex drives than women:

I believe God, in order to make certain that the human race would continue on, made sex one of most powerful desires known to mankind. But here’s the problem. If a guy created a baby every time he had sex and he had to take care of each and every baby and it’s mother for the next 20 years of his life and… THERE WAS NO PLEASURE IN THE ACT… how many guys would have sex? None! You think God didn’t know that? Of course he did. So, he had to make the desire for sex so pleasurable that most guys would do just about anything to have sex, baby or no baby. That way the generations would go on and on.

But the problem is, what if he made both men and women with the same desire? What if all men and women had the same intensity sexually as men? What would happen to our society? We’d never get anything done. We’d have so many babies it would overrun the Earths capacity. It would be terrible.

But on the other hand, what if both men and women had the same sexual intensity as most women? What would happen to our society then? We’d die out in one generation.

If the (alleged) difference in men's and women's sex drives is just God achieving population control, couldn't an omniscient, omnipotent God achieve this in other ways? Compared with creating the earth and the sun, tweaking fertility rates should be relatively easy.

Somehow, I find the evolutionary explanation a lot easier to follow...

Several months ago, I evaluated a number of evite alternatives out there. It's a crowded space, and lots of new sites have popped up since. Here's a new one that contacted me via a blog comment: BRADvite. Without looking at the comment again, I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say his name was Brad.

First Glance

BRADvite.com pops up with a loading screening. Literally - the background says "loading" all over it. It's sort of distracting. And then in the center, there's a picture of a guy talking on his cell phone. Brad, is that you? Why are you hanging out in the middle of the screen?

Invitation Themes

The various background images load relatively quickly in the background. Options include waterfalls, oceans, leafs, classical music sheet, etc. But my party is a toga party. On a boat. With a DJ. And drinking. As beautiful as a waterfall is, it has absolutely nothing to do with my party, nor does it express the "fun party" vibe. A picture of a keg would be more appropriate.

Tucked away in a corner is a little button to change the main image: a rose, secret service cartoon drawing, asian-style flowers, a man fighting off an elephant, aliens, etc. And, of course, a picture of our new friend Brad on a cell phone. Again, none of these match "toga party". Or even, say, a birthday / Christmas / Halloween party.

Registration

At least registration is fairly painless. It just asks me name and email address. The registration email didn't actually work, but they fixed that for me pretty quickly.

Event Details & Sending Invitation

I can't specify the time for the party. 'Nuff said.

Email Invitation

At least the email invitation is clean, elegant and provides useful information: host name, email address, date, location, and invitation details. To open the invitation, I see three links: View Comments | Click here to RSVP | Click for Map.

Yikes. I just want to open it. Shouldn't I be able to view comments and RSVP at the same time? And why not put "Click for map" next to the address, where it's most relevant and out of the way?

After the Invitation Is Sent

Host options are limited. I can edit the text of the invitation after I've sent the invitation, but not the background or main image. I can't export the guest list. I can't see when people RSVPd. There's no integration with Google Calendar or Outlook. I can't message guests.

Summary

The limitations of BRADvite are fairly significant, so I won't reiterate them. There is a more interesting point to be made.

Brad of BRADvite is clearly focusing on high quality images. Good. Far too many websites underestimate the importance of their user interface. The issue is that while the images are high quality, they don't very well match what the user wants to do. Brad needs to create user scenarios, such as the following:

1. Mary: 50 year old mother who is creating an invitation for her husband's 50th birthday party. It's a dinner party for 20 guests at their house.
   
2. AEPi: Fraternity which is inviting a sorority to their winter formal
3. Jake: 20 year old boy, soon to be 21. He's throwing a party for his 21st birthday in Las Vegas.
4. Gayle: throws large monthly parties with thousands of invited guests. (Hey, I had to throw myself in there.)

If Brad walked through these scenarios, he might see that as pretty as the background images are, none of them match what Jake or Gayle is doing. He might notice that AEPi, which is hosting a party as a group, might want to let multiple people edit the invite. He might notice that Mary needs the ability to message all the guests to tell them that they don't need to bring gifts. He might notice that if I'm throwing parties regularly, I need the ability to grab my guest list after each event.

Issues like this aren't limited to BRADvite, of course. Websites of all kinds need to stop thinking in the abstract "I am a website which provides [invitations, job listing, etc]" and start thinking concretely about exactly what problems they're trying to solve.