I’m a huge O’Reilly Media fan boy. I can’t hide it. I hear Tim O’Reilly speak at conferences and I think to myself, “Screw being president, I want to be Tim O’Reilly.” I’ve been a subscriber to their online book services called Safari Books Online for years. Every month I see the bill for $43 come through and I think to myself, “Self, that’s the best $43 you spent all month.” But the real downside of Safari Books Online is that it is, as the name implies, an online service. I spend 90 minutes each day on a train and I would LOVE to spend a huge chunk of that time reading O’Reilly books. My iPad is not the 3g model so reading Safari Books Online is not an option for me. Then earlier this week I read that they had released the O’Reilly Safari to Go app for the iPad. I was stoked and excited! I got so breathless that I even tweeted my excitement and then was re-tweeted by @OreillyMedia as you can see from the image in the upper left corner.

I immediately downloaded the app and started playing with it. The fit and finish was not too good, but this is a first release product so I was cutting it some slack. It was a little slow and the screens visibly flashed when I changed screens. Typing was so sluggish that the cursor would lag behind my typing for 5-6 letters. This was all annoying but I was so excited to have these books on my train ride. After struggling a little to figure out how to get books into my offline book-bag I loaded 6 books into the bag and then left the app up and iPad running so they could download while I worked. When I got on the train I was dismayed to discover that I had no books at all in my off line book back. Odd. I know I put 6 in there. After tucking my daughter into bed I spent 3 hours fighting with the app. My final conclusion is that the app is complete and utter shit. It’s poorly designed, poorly executed, and horrible to use. And the UI is nothing like an iPad app. It has zero redeeming value. The offline book bag is so buggy that it takes me ~8 tries to get a single book in the book bag. Often this after waiting for > 5 minutes for the book to download only to have it fail and I have to start over. For online book reading on the iPad the mobile version of the Safari Books website is far superior to the iPad app. Most of my time with the app was reading error messages like the one to the left. What I found bemusing was that I really did feel mad at O’Reilly for this app. It wasn’t the mad that I feel when I get ripped off, it was the mad that I feel when my 3 year old dumps her plate out on the table like a baby. It was a feeling of being let down by someone who I know can do better. And it appears I’m not the only one. The pissed off comments on the Safari Books Online official blog are down right angry. So I did a little soul searching and asked myself why I felt so angry about my experience with the app. What I uncovered I tried to capture in a response post I made to CJ Rayhill, SVP Product Management & Technology. You can see my response here. And here’s the same text for your easy reading enjoyment:

CJ, I know you and your team have to be in pain over this app. It’s terrible. You know that. And now you have a sunk cost problem, a vendor issue, and a “pissed off geeks with pitchforks” problem. Many of us have been there. There are bound to be multiple come-to-Jesus meetings over this. I’ve sat in meetings like that. I’ve led meetings like that. It sucks for every single person at the table.

I’m not sure if the vitriol in the tone of the comments above makes sense to you or your leadership team. Some folks reading this blog might think that the responses are a little over the top. Let me take a shot at helping this make sense through a personal anecdote.

I love O’Reilly Publishing. Recently I was invited to be a tech reviewer for _R Cookbook_ and I was over the moon to be asked by O’Reilly to be a reviewer because I love O’Reilly and I have a ton of positive feelings about those fantastic animal clad book covers. So, it’s an understatement to say I’m a fan. And I have this very personal device, my iPad, which I also love. This device is so intimate that I bring it to bed with me and my wife sometimes feels jealousy toward the time and attention I give to this device. So I invited O’Reilly, who I love and trust, to come join me for a shared experience on this very personal device. And when O’Reilly came over, in the form of the Safari to Go app, it was like having a trusted friend over who then decides to rub their muddy shoes on my suede couch while yelling “F*ck your couch! F*ck your couch!” The app is shockingly bad and totally inconsistent with the rest of my experience with O’Reilly. Hours which I could have spent kicking ass were spent being mocked by this poorly coded and dysfunctional app now hogging the resources of my most intimate personal companion.

You can see this level of hurt and frustration in the blog comments above. The relationship O’Reilly has with its customers is special. You help us kick ass each and every day. When we want to learn something we go to you and you teach us through your books, your blogs, and your magazines. We’re the ones who download IT Conversations podcast and scan through the playlist deleting Dr. Moira Gunn in order to move Tim O’Reilly higher up in the playlist. When we daydream about being rock stars, we don’t think about which model of Fender we’ll play, we think about which animal the editors will pick to go on the cover of our book. And we hope to god they don’t pick some overly cuddly critter or a 3 toed sloth. We want to be like Randal Schwartz and have our book known simply by the animal on the cover.

CJ, you’re an ass kicker too. You graduated from the Navel [sic] Academy, for crying out loud. You’re a trail blazer and the Safari to Go app is a trailblazer. But I (and many others) think this project has lost its way. It seems the trail you tried to blaze was creating a multi-platform reader. Please allow me to be so bold as to suggest this is not the right goal. A better goal is to thrill your rock star fans with the best possible mobile off line Safari reading experience that helps them kick serious ass. You’ve got some hard choices to make about your vendor, your technology stack, and your implementation strategy. They are hard choices. But hard choices are the cost of being a trailblazer. If it was easy, someone else would have already done it.

I believe that the Safari mobile initiative could revolutionize not only technical books, but also text books. But the core of the platform has to be solid. Not only is the current core not solid, it’s unusable. But I know you can fix it. I’m glad Safari Books Online has you at the helm of their ship. Fix this thing, CJ, so we can all be rock stars with you. We’re mad because were disappointed. But we want so much to be thrilled.

-JD Long
@CMastication

If the couch reference is not entirely obvious, then you should brush up on your Dave Chappelle:

Dirk’s comment is actually spot on. I’ve asked the same damn question at least 4-5 times. Only I didn’t really understand it was the same question. That’s one of the problems of not really being good at something; it’s hard to think abstractly about it. I’m not really good at R, so sometimes I don’t realize that multiple concepts are related. As I talk with other new users of R it’s clear that unless they come from a programming language with an apply-esque construct they likely are struggling with R. I think most of the confusion comes from a) not understanding what data format apply() is going to return and b) not understanding anonymous functions.

With this in mind I did a little screencast illustrating how this struggle plays out for a new users. I also show why I use the plyr package for much of the stuff other folks use apply() for.

Any feedback you have is appreciated. This is my first stab at a screencast, so I am still trying to figure out the best approach/method as well as how many drinks puts me on the Ballmer Peak.

EDIT: it’s been pointed out that I misuse some terminology a number of times. I should have named my year vector “yearVector.” By calling it “yearList” I then refer to the vector as a list. I was using “list” in the vernacular, but since list is a specific R data structure it is confusing that I named a vector a name with “list” in it.

Ever since Sept 15th, 2008 I have had a bit of a fetish with studying accident theory (that’s when our financial system started its current free fall).  One of the best books I have read on how big studs like Sully make decisions is the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein. Mr Klein helps us understand how critical descionmakers think under fire (both literal and figurative). It’s definitly worth reading.

Taleb is a bit harder to like than Mandelbrot. He’s mouthy, arrogant, and demands that his publisher not edit his books. If he crosses your ideology you will find yourself wanting to write him a pissy letter starting with the greeting, “Look you arrogant ass…” But he also has some really great intuition about risk. Most folks get religion after they have a near death experience. Taleb got his religion after he got rich. NNT was holding a double butt load (that’s a technical term, go look it up) of calls when the financial world went to hell in 1987. NNT knew that the reason he got rich was not because he was smarter or had more foresight than anyone else. He did know one thing, there is no way to know what the probability of a huge price swing is. So he bought out of the money options in both directions since he suspected that the probability of these options paying off BIG was not properly accounted for in the price. It seems he may have been right. He’s also waged a war against value at risk or VAR which I don’t fully agree with, but C’est la vie.

Below is a video segment from PBS News Hour where they interview NNT and Dr. Mandelbrot (notice how I did not use his initials? gotta show him some respect). It’s a good interview, but it cracks me up that the host clearly has Mandelbrot’s ideas confused with Edward Lorenz, the man who coined the phrase ‘Butterfly Effect.’ See 4:55 in the video for the most blatant confusion. Mandelbrot does a good job of ignoring the confusion but eventually at 6:20ish he starts to redirect the host to his true thought contribution which is that big movements are under-anticipated. To the host’s credit Mandelbrot and Lorenz have co-authored papers so it’s not like they are totally disconnected.

I can’t mention Mandelbrot without posting this great tribute song/video made in honor of his namesake Mandelbrot Set.

Shameless commerce (yeah, I stole that from those Car Talk Guys) related to this post:

If you are an option trader or would like to learn how options markets really work, try NNT’s first book: