The short version is simple: Quality, Performance, Design.

You want something quality that performs well and then you look for which one looks better. This is a general way of how people select things and also how I’m approaching creating pretty much anything at all.

Let’s look at an example, because these terms are way too broad to make this easy understood at first glance.

A friend needs a frying pan. His old one is way too old so he goes to a store. There he has a selection of 20 different ones, ranging from high end to lowest crap. His need for quality is low, he needs a pan now and he knows no matter which one, after three years or so, the one he buys now is garbage anyways. He goes with one of the cheapest one, which will perform the task as equally as any other (or so close that there is virtually no difference). The design doesn’t even play a role, but I must say it’s a very ugly pan. Thankfully it’s a tool which is used temporary in the kitchen and spends the rest of it’s days in a cupboard. If he had a fancy kitchen where he hangs the pots up for display, he might chose something slightly less eye gauging.

Another friend want’s a new notebook. He has selected a Samsung or a Toshiba one, of the class of machines that are small and thin, but still fully capable notebooks. The quality is roughly equal as far as he can tell and the performance, well, it’s the same guts in essence anyways. So his decision is now down to design in the end. Which keyboard is more appealing, which casing, which screen.

So we almost always start out with a level of quality. That one is also determined by our budget more often than not, but quality is a huge key. Then in that range we look for performance, does it do the job well or better. And once those are satisfied, only then the true design is considered.

There are exceptions to this, like novelty items, or “cool looking thing” that you don’t really need or is impractical, but we select anyways for their design only.

In creating the quality is also paramount. A fine planed application or a quick hack. Performance, ignored (because of time constraints, not needed since it’s only a couple people using it) or highly optimized. And then in the end, a design (not application design, but the look and feel of it) to make it work smoothly or a like a huge kludge.

The principle applies rather broadly, not only to software as you can see in the samples, or purchases or projects. The sense also applies to relationships, to decisions in courses and so on. It boils down rather neatly, as long as you understand the fundamental contributors  of quality, performance and design.

It doesn’t work as advertised. First the install was weird. You need to download the driver and put it on a stick or something before you can actually install anything. After booting the Windows 7 disc, it will not find the drive, period. Out comes the USB stick with the driver. Load it and it suddenly finds it. Strangely it refused to install at that point, telling me it can’t create the partition or some such nonsense and that I should check the install log. What log? A reboot and repeat of the process later and it worked just fine.

A completion of the install later and I’m on Windows. Atto comes out and has a crack at it (standard settings, 256MB size and QD4). The excitement builds as the graphs go for larger chunks and then stops. At about 600 MB read and 700 MB write speed it’s done, no speed increases, nothing. No 1.5 Gigabytes by far.

Now I mentioned the mother board for a reason. See there is a little trick here. If you look closely at the specs of the RevoDrive, it says it’s PICe v2. If you check for the same on the motherboard, it says it has PCIe v2. Trouble is, only on the two beige 16x ports. The black 16x port is wired at 4x but it’s only PCIe v1. Guess which port my RevoDrive is sitting in and you will be right.

Lucky I had that second port free, but now the GFX card and the RevoDrive are sitting uncomfortably close. I switched them both around so there is one empty slot between them.

Booting up again, I gave Atto another go. Look what I get now:

Why can they lie? The devices are complicated, but for the sake of this bit, there are two major components at work, the controller and the memory. The controller knows nothing about the memory. When you create a device, you have to tell the controller what memory is attached to it and, here comes the clue, in what size! When your computer tells you it has 16GB on that stick, it reads what the controller has been told by the manufacturer. Now how did that cheap stick turn into a 16GB stick? Crafty people have discovered that they can use some tools to access the controller and change the value with a small piece of software. So they buy large quantities of cheap sticks (512MB or 1GB can be bought for next to nothing) then hack them into saying they are 16GB or whatever else size they come up with, and then sell them for what real sticks go at that size. The profit there is a large multiple.

To make matters worse, you will not recognize the problem until it’s too late. It will allow you to store past it’s real capacity, copying data onto it, and happy write your bits into nirvana once the storage limit is reached. You will only get an error when you try to access what you have copied onto the stick, by that time you might have lost or destroyed the original already.

Fear not, there is help. On heise.de you can find a tool called H2testw for Windows, or if you are hardcore, just H2Test for the command line. No Linux version I know off, sorry.

With this tool, which you can change to English once opened, you will find the culprits easy. Just run it on the stick (be sure to have any data you want off it, and make also sure it’s empty) and it will fill the stick slowly with large files. As it does so, it will check the files if they are correctly written. It will try to fill the entire space the controller says there should be. At the end it will report to you how much space you really have on that stick.

So when you buy something with storage, run H2testw on it and immediately react if you didn’t get what you paid for. This does not only include possible shady Ebay dealers, but also happened with USB sticks sold in retail chains! So be vigilant.

In June I made a total of about 3 dollars, not being really active at all, yet still having 16 things and 51 clicks (worth per incoming click, about 6 cents). July was 4 things strong, with about 50 cents worth of revenue on 22 clicks (bit more than 2 cents per click). August saw 7 things, 56 clicks and 1.45 in revenue (2 and a half cents per click worth).

Now why sum these up and make a September post at all?

5 things posted in September, 2 of which were forum “thanks” flattrs. One was the Flattr MediaWiki extension and one was the May post, I already linked above. These 4 things accumulated 5 clicks and 1.53 in revenue (a whooping 30 cents per click). But there is one thing missing, and that is ReFlattr. With only 16 clicks, it has managed to get a revenue of 14.52, or about 90 cents per click. Adding the whole month into one bundle, we get 21 clicks, 16.05 revenue and 76 cents worth per click.

This is a pretty huge jump, compared to the low click values of the months before this, even the ones that aren’t ReFlattr. But I haven’t talked about ReFlattr before.

The idea is simply to allow people to Flattr again without having to remember to Flattr again. The REST API of Flattr would generally allow that, except you can’t get the data needed yet. Doesn’t mean I can’t be programming it and be prepared for the moment when you can actually grab said data.

This also shows me that people really want to have this as a feature, so I will spend some more time on the code to make sure it is ready for when the data comes.

Of course my sample size is rather small, Flattr is still in it’s early and humble beginnings and many options are still missing from Flattr. But for a first full month, this is a respectable kick off.

Will Apple sell them? Yes for certain. Will they be the next big thing? No.

While the phone part was rather restricted, in this niche they are aiming at here, there already is a large selection of many different things going on. The most prominent spearhead there would be the Amazon Kindle. It’s about half the price of the lowest version of the iPad, holds out on it’s charge for an eternity (thanks to the display) and already has a massive backing of books and papers. It has it’s own shortcomings, but for that price and that niche, it does just brilliantly.

Others aren’t sleeping either. MSI is preparing one, HP said it’s gonna do one, Dell is on it too and so is ASUS.

Especially the ASUS DR-950 has a lot of potential, coming with a lot more punch to the game, while being also a lot more open.

The question is for whom is this iPad exactly? It’s not useful as a phone. Anyone needing something more, usually goes for the macbook (if you want that apple logo on your gear). So unless you just want another toy, who is going to use it? The only real use seems to be books and news papers, but for that it’s not really very well equipped either. It can’t play flash, so you couldn’t even see anything from any video streaming site. Using it as an iPod will suck the battery dry even faster.

I keep using my Palm TX for now and wait what happens with these devices.

An old lady on the bus was not riding it for over a month. I got my yearly pass so I don’t care too much about the ticketing machine but she was almost having a seizure. The price was raised from 2 bucks to 2.20 and she had only exactly the two bucks on her, just to take the bus home. As the lady came to the front to ask the bus driver what she should do, I took out my wallet and fished 20c out and gave it to her unasked. She was very happy and thankful, first she paid her ticket, then she came up to me again and thanked me, although the details were lost on me because she spoke Italian and my Italian is very much Swiss, full of holes. She thanked me again as she left the bus, just the second stop before mine, so she even lives in the close area.

I won’t miss those 20c any time soon, but making that old lady happy with such a little act has been pretty much one of my highlights of the past weeks. Small kindness goes along way I figure.

Still, there are things that are interesting to me and sometimes I have spent considerable time and nerves in something which might come in handy down the road for someone else. Or for myself, again. So besides the occasional rant, my content here is simple and straight forward.

Solutions to problems we didn’t know we had.