Joshua Nozzi (Page 4)

Usability Specialist Needed ASAP!!!!

Mar 092011

I received another article of career spam today. The recruiter was looking for a “usability specialist.” While she earned points for at least matching a relevant term in my resume (earning her a friendly-ish response), her client’s expectations were rather strange. An excerpt from the e-mail and my friendly(-ish) response are posted for your enjoyment.

The Inquiry

Subject: Usability Specialist Needed ASAP!!!!
The Contractor shall provide application and business planning, analysis, and requirements support, including business process modeling, …

My Response

Michele:
I’m afraid your client has some bewildering requirements for the position you listed. This is at least several different types of professional that are likely to be the same person only for those often referred to as “free-spirited” (albeit in a rather disappointing “business nerd” abuse of the term) rather than “useful.” The likelihood of finding a passible “usability specialist” who performs these tasks reasonably well is as likely as “neurosurgeon who shall provide diesel engine analysis and repair, legal consulting, full business accounting, civil engineering, and farmhand duties.”
While I’m not saying this is impossible, I am indeed saying such an expectation is misguided at best, assuming “mediocrity” is not the type of bullet point your client is looking for on the resumes of potential candidates.
We may still be able to help one-another out, however. I happen to know an out-of-work grief counselor with an excellent construction background. She has a degree in business management and minored in pantomime. She’s not very good at grief counseling (which would explain her present lack of employment in the field), but since her resume frequently comes up as a match in qualifications and skills for the position of Horse Whisperer (because “horse riding” was innocently listed as one of her hobbies), I’m certain she’d be perfect for a grief counseling position. Perhaps even CEO.
I’ve taken the liberty of sending her your contact information. Don’t let her clingy nature bother you, just don’t give her your personal e-mail address, phone number, face-book page, or anything like that. In fact, you’d best not use your real name as she will try to “friend” you and send you pictures of herself riding what she claims is a horse. Please note: I’m unable to act as a reference for her at this time.

… Michele has not replied.

Fairwell Letters to Coworkers

Rants, Jokes, Opinions, Writing

Feb 222011

I thought I’d try my hand at the kind of farewell resignation letters sent to coworkers since they seem to be popping up a lot lately. Maybe it’ll come in handy.

Appropriate form of address.
Statement of conflicting emotion regarding resignation. Reference to coworkers or employer as family. Statement of last day of work. Vague description of exciting new position. Optional details.
Expression of gratitude for past experiences and enjoyable events. Platitudes for coworkers and management.
Announcement of successor. Endorsement of successor. Assurances transition will occur smoothly. Optional details.
Repetition of gratitude. Optional invitation to keep in touch with personal contact information.
Signature.

SPICE Published in the Journal Cytometry

SPICE Published in the Journal Cytometry Bioinformatics, Recognition & Reviews, Writing

Jan 242011

SPICE was published in the Wiley journal Cytometry on January 7, 2011 and is listed on the Vaccine Research Center’s list of 2011 publications.

SPICE: Exploration and analysis of post-cytometric complex multivariate datasets

Mario Roederer, Joshua L. Nozzi, Martha X. Nason

Cytometry

DOI: 10.1002/cyto.a.21015

Abstract

Polychromatic flow cytometry results in complex, multivariate datasets. To date, tools for the aggregate analysis of these datasets across multiple specimens grouped by different categorical variables, such as demographic information, have not been optimized. Often, the exploration of such datasets is accomplished by visualization of patterns with pie charts or bar charts, without easy access to statistical comparisons of measurements that comprise multiple components. Here we report on algorithms and a graphical interface we developed for these purposes. In particular, we discuss thresholding necessary for accurate representation of data in pie charts, the implications for display and comparison of normalized versus unnormalized data, and the effects of averaging when samples with significant background noise are present. Finally, we define a statistic for the nonparametric comparison of complex distributions to test for difference between groups of samples based on multi-component measurements. While originally developed to support the analysis of T cell functional profiles, these techniques are amenable to a broad range of datatypes. Published 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

View & Download Full Article

View | Download PDF

SPICE Web Site

SPICE is a product of NIH/NIAID and is hosted here: http://exon.niaid.nih.gov/spice

Real Work One Year Later (Step Two: a Solid Developer Machine)

Tech Industry

Jan 122011

For years my primary development machine for my personal endeavors has been some form of PowerBook or MacBook. I liked being able to take the entirety of my digital environment with me wherever I went. During the last year or so, I decided to see how much of that environment I actually needed to be mobile. I even outlined a basic plan for this in early 2010. Here I am in early 2011 ready to take the next step – trading the laptop in for a powerful desktop computer and leaving mobile power behind.

How Did I Survive?

In Real Work, I said the first step would be to shed the tens of gigabytes I carried with me all the time. With my iPhone and iPad, I’ve been able to do just that. Though I’ve had the occasional missteps and frustrations, the truth is when I’m working hard on something I’m usually home or have good Internet access anyway, which lets me access my home file server. The biggest data burden I have is still my music collection, so it’s with me wherever I go, but most of my data has been successfully offloaded to my server and it hasn’t really hurt.

In practice, I find I typically am only surfing or reading e-mail (or entertaining myself) while on the couch. The iPad has very much filled that need. Even for light production work or administrative management tasks, the iPad is sufficient (better than the iPhone). When I need to do any coding or heavier work tasks, I use my laptop. Lately, my laptop has stayed on my desk downstairs – the designated work area I alluded to in Real Work.

Ready to Take The Plunge

The “next step” is to take the plunge and rid myself of a laptop, trading all the mobility for a significant power boost. Of course I went straight to the MacPro section of the Apple Store. A nicely-appointed MacPro plus a nice 27″ display was disappointingly expensive. Then it dawned on me – if my laptop with an SSD can out-perform my 8-core (16 virtual cores with hyperthreading) doing the stuff I do most, why not go for an iMac with an SSD and max out its RAM?

I wanted as many cores as possible and a nice big display, so I figured I’d start with the 27″ iMac with an i7 processor. I figured a non-Apple-supplied SSD and RAM would save me significant cash (and I’m right). Unfortunately, upgrading anything but the RAM with the latest iMacs require removing the glass panel on the display, which easily attracts dust and is hard to keep clean. A single dust speck caught between the display and glass is maddeningly visible and difficult to remove. Upgrading anything inside the iMac comes with a hell of a lot of caveats and other issues.

So I decided Apple’s SSD premium was worth my time, frustration, and possible mistake-making. I made up for the savings, however, in RAM. 4 4GB RAM modules will cost just under $200 from Crucial. Compare that with $1000 for the same upgrade factory-direct from Apple. Yeah … no.

So the specs I’ve decided on are a 27″ iMac i7 with a 256GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM. Total cost? ~$3100. I might even spring for the AppleCare plan.

So if more cores and a faster drive (and as ever, more RAM) are what developers need for smooth, fast coding and building, I think this machine has the best balance for its cost. I’ll let you know how it goes.

More Censorship

Rants, Jokes, Opinions

Jan 062011

Today I read yet another example of censorship that made me quite sad. In order to make the world a better place, some upstanding citizens decided to expunge an awful word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not that the offensive word “nigger” will be changed to the dubiously better word “slave” but that there are people actually asking for it and buying censored history from a publisher. It’s all the nuances of history that allow us to understand it. If we expunge the offensive bits of history from our collective memories, we only doom ourselves to repeat it. I hate the word but value the lesson its use teaches us. So did Samuel Clemens.

A man by the name of Russell Baker had an insightful thing to say about Clemens’ story (credit to jimbolauski):

The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, mows, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is ‘Nigger Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.

Clemens wasn’t a racist prick. In fact he lamented the state of many of humanity’s affairs including the complete disregard of other human beings on the basis of race. If people would read a bit deeper into books than the customers of NewSouth Books, perhaps they’d learn something valuable. After all, it’s better to face your own unpleasant past (I’m looking at you, The South) than to teach your children to ignore it.

Is the word nigger necessary to the story? Yes! It was – and in many parts of the US, still is – thrown about so casually to refer to a people as useless commodities to be traded, used, and abused. Leaving the word exactly as it is in the story fills the modern insightful reader with as much disgust as Clemens had when he wrote it. It shows us just how dismissive the people of the era and area were (and – again – still are in many places) of an entire race. Isn’t that worth remembering? Isn’t the regrettable, painful, and damaging act of putting your hand on a hot stove also worth remembering? It’s how we learn.

So, to NewSouth Books and its customers, let me say it plainly: your short-sighted stupidity is near the top of the list of things that are wrong with our country today. Learn from your past, don’t run from it you fucking cowards.

Incommunicado

Rants, Jokes, Opinions

Dec 302010

This morning on my way into work I was listening to WTOP, a local news, traffic, and weather radio station. One of the anchors lamented that 2010 was the “year we stopped talking to one-another.” His assertion was that too many of us are using text and e-mail versus voice. I find this both puzzling and absurd.

Though I assume his lament included face-to-face conversations, he implied telephone conversations were included in what he considers “talking to one-another.” I can only surmise from these statements that the only “real” talking is vocal. I found this idea offensive, given non-verbal communication has been used for millennia (remember actually writing letters? pen pals, maybe?).

I’ve heard plenty of rhetoric over the years about any technology that occupies a younger generation’s interest taking them away from human interaction. For some technologies this has certainly been true. However, never in our history have technical gadgets connected us to one-another more completely than our latest gadgets. Computers, video games, and “smart” phones (the latter having started out as telephones) are all designed around social interaction or they’re considered antiquated.

Is the WTOP anchor really suggesting our modern devices are somehow harming our communication? Certainly one of his points was that we e-mail a co-worker who might be in the next cube but what’s wrong with avoiding monopolizing someone’s time with a “now! now! now!” conversation? This is merely another alternative to a sometimes-inconvenient face-to-face chat. The ridiculous – texting someone right next to you with something that could’ve been said aloud – notwithstanding, I find these modern conveniences to be a rich social platform that can empower the shy to be bold.

I’ll say it again: in no point in history has the world been so “social.” The only thing we really have to worry about is making sure our younger generations aren’t complete idiots – that they can construct a coherent sentence with correctly-spelled words without relying on a spelling checker most of the time. Hell I’d even say “yay for spell-check!” as someone who has trouble with lesser-used words that are in my vocabulary nevertheless.

So I ask you, O’Wise Internet, just what in the hell is so wrong with using alternate forms of communication that have sparked even more interaction in our younger (and even older) generations?

Swipe Gestures in Mobile Safari

Tech Industry, User Experience

Dec 292010

It’s been eight months since I griped about a lack of a swipe-to-navigate gesture in Mobile Safari. There’s still been no progress, despite iOS 4 having come out since then. I think I have the reason why and a compromise.

The basic problem is that web pages can be horizontally scrolled. The deeper problem, I suspect, may be “not invented here syndrome” on Apple’s part.

The simplest solution is the brilliant drag-to-update metaphor introduced in Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone). If I drag left and I’m already as left as I can possibly be, show me a visual indicator that I’m about to navigate backward. Same story for the right side of the page.

It makes perfect sense, so where is it, Apple? Do you hate it because it wasn’t your invention? Come, now. Good ideas can be pilfered!

Another Xcode Debugging Tip

Cocoa, Xcode, Xcode 4 Book