Save the paper

When the Amazon first announced the Kindle, I was not that interested. Partly because of its 'retro' design compares to the iPhone, but also because of its high price. However, recently I am getting more interested in getting a Kindle to save me from carrying books on the train every week to work.

One of the big selling points of the Kindle is long battery life and that is mainly because of the use of e-ink. E-ink only uses power when it changes the text, not while the text is displayed. While the contrast level of the e-ink display is fine for displaying text, it is not so good at showing graphics. Text heavy magazine (with some simple graphics) like Time or Reader's Digest would be fine on the Kindle but others such as Entertainment Weekly, which relies fairly heavily on pictures, would not. One solution would be for publishers to provide specially formatted version to Amazon but this would increase costs, which either Amazon has to absorb or pass on to the consumers. Another solution would be for Amazon to convert the full color magazine data to suit the Kindle. Again there would some cost involve and possibly copyright issue due to the nature of modifying content. Perhaps this is the reason I think why there is not more magazines in the Kindle store. Right now there are exactly eight, that's right eight, magazines on the Kindle Magazine store.

However, if Amazon starts providing many more magazines than what they currently offer I would not hesitate to order one tomorrow. I have two magazines that I consume weekly so I am throwing away a fair amount of printed-paper every week. Not to mention the carbon emission 'cost' of the printing process and the transportation. I would love to have New Scientist and Autosport (both of them are available on Amazon as regular magazine subscriptions) delivered wirelessly to me because while using the Amazon Kindle to read books would definitely save paper as well as fuel to transport the heavy books, I think the most saving would actually come from reading periodicals. This is because even though books use a lot of paper we generally keep them around after we finish. On the other hand, we tend to treat magazines as consumables and throw them away as soon as we are done with them or when the next weekly edition arrives.

So just like the high-definition DVD battle or the digital music distribution, it would be content that decides the fate of the Kindle. Amazon has already won the e-book battle against Sony because of its much larger book library (more than 100,000 vs. 20,000) despite having a less beautiful hardware design. But to win over the general consumers Amazon would have to make much more content be available so that people would worry about what is not available on the Kindle store than think about what is today.

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March 2, 2008 0

What do you do?

I don't often met new people and thus question of what I do does not pop up this frequently. But it has been hard to describe what I do to people who are not in the software development community since the first day I started my first job. Normally I just say I am a software developer and that tends to put most people off since they don't understand software at all. To them software is a black box, it is magic, it is voodoo. But every now and then there will be someone who does a bit of Visual Basic Scripting in the office and thinks s/he knows software development. This person would then try to probe deeper about what I actually do. In that situation, I'd have no mercy and just tell the person exactly what I do. 99.99% of the time, eyes would glazed over within 10 seconds and conversation would die as soon as I finish my sentence.

Recently my father-in-law asked me about my current project (via my wife). Note that he is a software project manager so I did not filter/dumb down my response. My reply is below and if you understand what I am talking about, give me a shout; ThoughtWorks is looking for someone like you!

We are developing the build & deploy system for the whole enterprise. That is, a system that allows in-house developers to build their applications and deploy the applications to the machines. Sounds simple but we are also implementing Continuous Integration concept using build servers, trigger off source control checkins. (The main reason ThoughtWorks was brought in as we are known in the industry as build expert, re: CruiseControl)

We are also solving their source and binary dependency problem so applications would be self-contained when they are built, tested, and packaged by the build server. The deployment/install process would allow environment specific properties to be substitute during deploy time so packages can be deployed to multiple environments without going through the build process again. (Build once, deploy everywhere)

Deployment process also includes workflow steps to manage code review/gatekeeper approvals, security audits, and code signing.

All of these are built with extensibility in mind so future technology, such as Ruby, IronPython, can be introduced into the organization via plugins with minimum alteration to the system.

In addition, we are also advising the client on code branching and merging strategy, best development and unit testing practices, dependency management, database upgrades (model and data) using delta scripts, etc.

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