Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

The Problem with Renaming

If you caught my talk in Seattle last week, I talked about names, versions, and SVN.

One of the things I touched on with names was their problematic nature. And believe me, I know about that. You see, I’m a Cleveland Indians fan.

And yes, I think the name (and the logo) are racist.

You can’t rename things, but you can rebrand

When I said this, I meant that you can’t rename a plugin slug. Yoast SEO will forever have the URL of wordpress-seo because we do not have a way to rename the slug and properly redirect everyone. We just don’t. And even if we did, the old URL would need to remain in perpetuity in order for everyone who upgraded super late to still get the new code.

Names are really important. Your name is (often) your brand, and your brand is how people know you and how to find you. When you consider a name like the Cleveland Indians, today we can see the problems with it. Racism. But in 1914, we were a little simpler, a little more naive…. A little stupider. Okay a lot stupider.

The problems that Cleveland faces with renaming are related to the problems you would face in renaming your product.

Rebranding has a cost, and it could be everything

The crux of all issues with renaming is that if people don’t like the new name, or can’t find you because of it, they will walk away. If you’re a small company with a few sales, and people can’t find your name anymore, you could go bankrupt. For Cleveland, it would be worse. If the baseball team went belly up, it would translate to thousands of people going out of work.

This is not to say the renaming or rebranding isn’t important. Cleveland’s reasons are obvious. Yours may be less so. You may be asked to rebrand to prevent a potential legal issue. Or you may decide that Mailpoet is a better name than Wysija Newsletters. But the rebranding can come at a cost.

Losing history can loose users

In baseball, one of the rationales for not renaming a team is the team history. A team is known by it’s name and its mascot (and logo). The logos of most team are fairly mutable over time, you can see the growth and development when you look at it historically. There’s a reason most redesigns are actually not dramatic, but careful and planned. That can not be said of the names, which rarely (if ever) change unless a team moves.

The same goes for your name. If Cleveland renames their baseball team to, say, the Lancers or the Blues, how do you handle the change? You have to make sure everyone knows (this is easier for baseball than the rest of us) and you have to make sure they know why.

When a similar warning was put up before Tom & Jerry cartoons, the Internet lost their shit. Go figure. And yet that’s the problem here. People react in unpredictable ways to being told “A thing you liked and empathized with is bad” because they think it means they were bad. Generally no, they weren’t.

That’s a much bigger issue for baseball than for your code though. Unless you decided to name your theme Mien Kampf, or decided to present your plugin as ‘The Final Solution.’ That’s because a name is not isolated. You are not isolated. You live in a world where the implications and uses of a word and a logo can have far reaching effects. People who, for whatever reason, connect with your plugin name can feel left out when you rebrand.

No matter how deep your pockets are, you will pay

Thankfully you are way luckier than baseball (or football, hello). You have the opportunity to know the world you’re in. Today we are more aware of the implications of our words, but also we now listen to other cultures and viewpoints about how our words and actions are perceived.

The cost of renaming yourself is high, but the ultimate question is not to ask how much the cost is of the renaming. The question is which cost is higher: The loss that stems from renaming, or the loss that stems from defending a name. If you’re being sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement over a name, and yes it happens, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. What matters is you’re probably going to lose.

If you’re baseball, you generally have a lot more money than the average joe. You might be able to win a lawsuit. But your reputation will be tarnished, and that too will impact your bottom line.

If you know what to do and you don’t do it, there you bloody well are, aren’t you.

— Lord Buckley

2 November, 2016
Hot Hands And Playoffs

Today I’m wandering off topic into a world of baseball and statistics.

My family have been Cleveland Indians fans since they came to the United States and settled in the city. My grandmother was an accountant, my father a mathematician, and I a web developer who works on software used by 26% of the Internet. Give or take. I’m also a third (and probably final) generation Clevelander. Yes, I root for my home team.

October of 2016 marked the first time since 2007 that Cleveland was in the American League Championship Series (ALCS). In the intervening years, my family had all migrated to iPhones and iMessage, allowing us to converse in real time across two continents, two countries, four time-zones, and five cities.

My father, the mathematician and risk analyst, kept a close watch on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight project, especially the MLB Predictions, as Mr. Silver has been quite spot on for things for a while, understanding the implications of probability and chance.

On October 18th, FiveThirtyEight gave Cleveland a 53% chance of winning the ALCS game 4, a 94% chance of making the World Series, and a 38% chance of winning it all for the first time since 1948. The time Cleveland won before that? 1920. Not quite Cubs level of history, but it’s been a long enough time than my grandmother Taffy never got to see them win a third time (she was born July 7, 1920).

The game on the 17th was nothing short of incredible. The starting pitcher was yanked after 2 outs because his cut pinky was dripping blood. There are, you see, a bevy of incredible rules about what pitchers can and cannot wear. More than the normal player. And we’re talking about a sport than demands all players use a glove that has colors only within a PANTONE® color set lighter than the current 14-series. These guys are nuts. And one of the rules is no bandages on the pitchers’ hands.

a pitcher’s person cannot include any unessential or distracting thing (including jewelry, adhesive tape, or a batting glove), especially on his arm, wrist, hand, or fingers.

Bauer’s 11 stitches in his pinky split and was incredibly nasty, so he was replaced. Cleveland used seven pitchers, pretty much their entire relief bullpen, to get through the game. My family began to argue the intelligence of the move. Instead of using the rookie Merritt to start game 4, possible win-it-all game, Manager Terry Francona decided to start his ‘ace,’ Kluber.

To understand this, you have to start with the odd fact that Cleveland is down three of their best pitchers to injuries. This is including Drone Boy Bauer. Such a situation is rare for the playoffs, if not unheard of. That means they are more reliant than ever on their bullpen, so using every single pitcher possible on Monday meant they would all be a little tired on Tuesday. And Kluber would be starting 3 days rest when a pitcher normally gets 4 or 5.

Clearly Francona was banking on the team not needing to use the bullpen much on Game 4, but why would he make that decision knowing that the odds of winning on Tuesday were insanely low. As my dad said:

Winning 7 games straight is an outlier. They won 6 in a row twice, of course the 14 streak, 4 games three times. I’m betting they will lose the next two in Toronto.

Then he started emailing us all homework.

Before we get to the math, let’s look at the baseball logic. The reason you would play Bauer is that the odds are Cleveland will lose on the 18th, and a good manager would know that and bet on it, like my father. Teams winning 7 games in a row is crazy. It’s rare. It’s risky. By playing Kluber, an experienced pitcher, you solve two problems. First, Merritt is a rookie. Him losing will have a deep psychological impact on the young guy. Kluber can take a hit and keep going. Second, it means if Cleveland does win, Kluber will be well rested for the World Series. If Game 4 is lost, Merritt will pitch the safer Game 5.

The psychology of math is exactly why no one would discount the Cleveland Indians winning seven games in a row in the post season, however.

[…] what Terry is seeing is momentum, the intangible. You gotta measure the odds with numbers, but making good decisions goes beyond the odds … beyond just the odds. Like CoCo’s diving catch.

This is where the homework comes into play. Nine papers about hot streaks later, I came to the conclusion I had always felt had to be true. There is no such thing as a winning streak. They are nothing more than standard deviations from the mean. Models of the math have told us that there is only one event in baseball that has happened outside of the frequency of said models. Everything, the longest runs of losses and wins, are exactly as they should be and happen as often as they ought.

Except for one: Joe DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe’s 56–game hitting streak in 1941 doesn’t make any sense. As we read in Streak of Streaks by Jay Gould, in order to make it mathematically probably to have a run of 50 games with a hit, we should have had four batters with a lifetime average of .400, and 52 with .350 or higher over 1000 games. Instead, three players have achieved a batting average over .350 and not one has managed .400 lifetime.

You’re thinking “But Ty Cobb!” right now, and guess what? His lifetime is .367, followed by Hornsby at .358, and Shoeless Joe Jackson brings up the rear at .356 for his short career.

DiMaggio’s streak does not make sense.

Most MLB records we consider to be unbreakable are only that way due to changes in the way the game is played. Pitchers no longer play complete games on the regular, nor do they start 60+ games a season. The weirdness of DiMaggio is that his numbers are off the charts for that year, and actually the entirety of MLB history.

The Hot Hand: A New Approach to an Old “Fallacy”. Notice the quotes? The theory behind the Sloan paper is that the Hot Hand (or streak) is a fallacy because we’ve always been working under bad assumptions. To whit:

However, prior research hinges on the assumption that player shot selection is random, independent of player-perceived hot or coldness. Said differently, it assumes that players will take the same types of shots, with the same level of defensive coverage, regardless of whether they have just made or missed three shots in a row. We find this assumption difficult to believe – if players have been shooting well, it seems logical that they would begin to attempt more difficult shots and opposing defenses would begin to cover them more tightly. This would potentially counteract the Hot Hand effect.

To make this more obvious to the conversation at hand, basketball is not baseball and men are not potatoes. Baseball is a rarity in sports. The defense has control of the ball and, barring injury, everyone who plays will have an at-bat (designated hitter rules aside). Basketball has no promise that everyone who plays will have a chance to shoot a basket, or even touch a ball. Baseball hitting streaks come down to one person versus a hundred. The batter versus every pitcher they face. Provided they’re not walked, the batter remains in control of their destiny.

All of this is quite fanciful. There are hundreds of articles, like Phil Birnbaum’s quest for evidence of the Hot Hand effect and Tangotiger’s Sabremetric blog on the impact of the Zone on streaks. The best we can say is ‘Streaks exist, but generally they do so within the expected norm of percentages.’

None of this considers the psychological impact of a streak. The longer a streak goes on, the more stress and nerves are put on a player. At the same time, the more ease is given a player, as the expectation of winning becomes a short-term norm.

Per FiveThirtyEight, the Cleveland Indians had a 53% chance of winning Game 4 of the ALCS on October 18, 2016. The Epstein family gave it much less of a chance. We were right.

28 October, 2016
Bundling – Not What We Wanted

There is a problem with bundling.

We like to bundle things together, to say “If you buy X, get Y as well for less!” And the simple problem is that our customers don’t actually always want X. We treat bundling like it solves our problems, but it doesn’t. It just makes angry customers who have more than they need, and pay more than they wanted for things they don’t use.

Let’s think of it like a coffee shop for a moment.

You go to Mooncoins and you want a latte and a gluten free donut. When you get there, you look for your $5 latte and see that you can’t buy it anymore but you can spend $10 for a latte and a vegan donut, non-gluten-free. If you want the gluten free bundle that’s another $15 and it comes with a muffin. You don’t want the muffin. You want the option to name your own bundle.

Okay, so how does this relate to software?

If you live in the US, you’ve probably heard about the Progressive insurance company. Yes, the Flo ones. Since they own Jacob’s Field in Cleveland, I hear a lot more of their commercials than I care about, but they have a weird deal with a ‘name your own price bundle’ where you pick what you want, and how much you want to pay for it. Within reason.

This means we ask “What are you bundling?”

I get waxed once a month or so and they offer ‘packages.’ There’s a ‘whole face’ package and a then separate services for lip, chin, and eyebrows. What I want is lip and chin, which they don’t offer, so instead of paying less for two services (which is what you get in a package), I have a choice of paying more for a package I don’t want (whole face) or more for two services I want (lip and chin).

The company wants me to pay for a package, which would save me quite a bit more than buying the lip, chin, and eyebrows as separates would cost. But they don’t have a ‘pick two’ option.

When you decide what you want to put in a bundle, you presume you know more about what the customer wants than the customer. And the flaw in this plan is that you don’t know more than the customers. You presume you know what works best, but you don’t.

You may have an idea of what works best for the people you’ve run into, but some of them would look at the price difference between paying for two services and paying for a package, see than it works out to less than $50 a year, and go for it. Then you have someone who thinks that $50 a year isn’t nothing, and would like to save it and not use services they don’t really want.

Bundling is meant to reduce options and let people pick what they need. What it more often does is require people to make different decisions of what they want and need, but also what the value is on those things in time and money.

Maybe we should start rethinking what we bundle and instead consider how we bundle. Let the customers have options. Use features like “People who bought X also bought Y.” Add in discounts “If you buy 3 products, get 5% off your entire purchase.” Offer them example bundles that are your current deals “Most people buy these 3 together. Purchase them now and save 5%, or mix and match your own.”

But start looking at how people purchase your products as a whole, and give them discounts not on the bundle you invent, but on the bundle they create. Guide them to what they need, not what you think they want.

21 October, 2016
Review: Spark Love for Your Gmail

Moving my email to Google Apps has, thus far, been interesting. I don’t regret it, and consolidating multiple emails down to three was a good choice. The learning curve of adding in email aliases so I can mail from all the accounts I use, and the limits of Gmails shitty filters so everything is funneled to the right place, has been tricky.

As I mentioned before, I have a ton of aliases. Adding them in on the Google Admin back end (just renamed G Suite) is weird but easy enough. To be able to email from them, you have to also add them in via the normal Gmail web app. It’s tucked under Settings > Accounts, and under “Send mail as”, click Add another email address.

But if you don’t want to use the web app (and I don’t), Gmail can be a bit of a turd. It doesn’t work great with the desktop Mail.app, and it works terribly with iOS’s mail. Gmail and Apple are just at odds with how email works. They both want to control your experience and redefine email in different ways. Frankly I prefer the Mac way, but that’s personal preference.

What is a universal problem is that I needed a way to email from my aliases, and if you set up email as Google Mail in the iOS mail app … you can’t.

Yes, you read that right. It is flat out impossible to set up email aliases for a Google mail account. If you want to use the iOS mail app and Goggle email and aliases, you have to set up Gmail as an IMAP app, and that’s sort of a shit show in the making. Gmail’s IMAP implementation is non-standard, to put it simply. Among other things, you can only use 15 connections to IMAP per account. If I had the desktop app open and my iPhone and iPad, weird shit happened.

Now, there are solutions. You could use the Gmail app, but it sucks and doesn’t have an Apple Watch component. Also it’s ugly. Excuse me. It’s basic. You could also use Google’s Inbox app, but you have to use Inbox and the email filters aren’t as robust.

This leads us to our final solution. Spark.

This app was something I’d played with before, as it had email alerts on the Apple Watch, and I wanted to get pinged for some work emails while updating all DreamPress installs over at DreamHost. Sadly, the fault of the app not meeting that need is Gmail, again, which has no way to filter properly and send an alert only when an email meets specific criteria.

What Spark does do is everything else. It has a Watch component, it syncs between my iPad and iPhone, it looks like an iOS app, it acts like a Google app, it pulls in the features people rave about Inbox, and it has email aliases that are simple to set up. Whew. The only thing it doesn’t do is show me a count for unread messages in my folders.

I can live with that.

14 October, 2016
Two Forks In The Road

I believe in healthy competition.

Rivals, professionally and personally, have the ability to inspire us to reach great heights. They also have the ability to be terrible, but when a true rival, who respects you and your work, arrives, they should be embraced.

The other day I said that I would love to see a W3TC killer. Killer was the wrong word, as what I mean is that I would love to see something as amazing as W3TC that reaches out and tackles caching in a new and inventive way. I’d also love to see a WordPress killer, an iPhone killer, and a Linux killer. And a Hybrid Car killer.

I don’t mean I want any of those things to fail, I mean I want to see them have a challenger who does what they do, differently, in a way that inspires them to do more and more and better.

Growth stagnates without good rivalry. When you have a rival who does what you do, and they succeed, you want to succeed. When you’re both healthy rivals, you can carry it even further. Reaching out to your rivals and telling them “I am impressed with how you did X! Nice job!” is the greatest gift. With WordPress code, taking a leaf from their book and forking some of their code (with credit) is another way to hat-tip them.

In truth, W3TC and WP Super Cache never really competed. They can’t. They have wildly different approaches to just about everything, and they’re not even ‘after’ the same customer base. WP Super Cache appeals to people with it’s simplicity and directness. It works and you can (mostly) ignore it. W3TC has an insanely deep and complex set of tools that works closer to the base level of a server. W3TC has options, oh my god it has options, and they can overwhelm.

But the real crux to all this, besides the take away that caching is hella hard, is that there is always more than one way to solve a problem. And there is always room for multiple solutions in any ecosystem. It comes down to needs, wants, and user preferences. Both plugins I’ve named here do a great job at meeting the needs for their audiences. And both plugins grew out of someone’s need. Donnacha and Fredrick both created something to solve their own problems. They shared these solutions with the world and became unintentional rivals and kings of caching.

Okay so back to what I said.

Should there be a ‘killer’ caching plugin? Will there be one?

Maybe.

There should never be one killer app, no matter what it is. There should never be one perfect solution. Mostly because I don’t believe there’s such a thing. There’s nothing we can create that will suit everyone’s needs and wants. It’s statistically impossible. So when we talk about a ‘killer’ anything we never mean that. We mean “There should be options and the options creators should be healthy competition with each other to create some awesome things.”

And I really truly thing we should do that. I would love to see someone tackle WordPress with a serious self-hosted alternative. Something easier to install on my own than Ghost, but as easy as Hugo or Jekyll to write a post. Something extendable like Drupal, but with better backwards compatibility. Something next. And I want to see WordPress take what it learns from those other tools to become even more.

Because healthy rivalry between friends and equals is a good thing.

7 October, 2016
Moving cPanel email to Gmail

There should be a collective gasp here.

It’s no big secret I dislike Google. I don’t trust them at all. I think Cory Doctorow’s story Scroogled is pretty much on the ball. But I also have been struggling with handling my server’s email and spam situations and if there’s one thing Google has turned out to be pretty good at, it’s spam. Also having my email separate from my hosting means if the site goes down, I’ll still get emails… Which is sort of important.

So I bit the bullet, sorted out I needed to pay for three emails (making it $15 a month) and a boat load of secondary domains and filters. Since I’d dropped the cost of my hosting by $20 a month, this worked out alright.

The Setup

This part is the easy one. Go to https://apps.google.com and put in your information. If, like me, you have multiple domains, pick one to be your ‘master’ domain. I chose ipstenu.org because that’s my main domain in Multisite and there’s some parity going on here. Since this is geared to businesses, you do need to give your business a name. Sorry.

Next you’ll pick your users. Like I said, I have three: Me, my wife, and my admin account. Why does admin need it’s own account? It doesn’t. But it might. For now I had them email me at my personal gmail (I can always resend later) since I don’t want them to be alerted to things just yet as I planned to import all their old email.

Finally it does the “Verify your domain and set up email” step. Which failed. And took 50 minutes. Unfunny. Originally I did the TXT domain setup, and when that failed I did CNAME. Longest ‘about 50 minutes’ ever. And that failed too. Finally I did the damned ‘file verification’ which was ridiculous and stupid but that worked and it still took another 50 minutes to set up my emails.

Eventually, after talking to Google, my web host, and my domain registrar, it turned out there was a glitch in my domain servers… There was no A record for my nameservers. Thank you Carol, Samuel, and Tatyana for helping that one.

Migrating Data

I mentioned I have three accounts. They have around 30 megs of email each. But I also have secondary accounts which are basically the same accounts only not… And to be honest I don’t know why I have so many. This was a chance to combine everything, so I set up those three accounts and then I used the IMAP importer to pull in everything. And it worked. That simple.

Configuring Accounts

Now that I have three accounts, I needed to add in my ‘other’ emails. I have a lot of weird aliases. I used to have separate accounts for each email but … well that’s a pain in the ass. So instead of that, I set up folders. I made a folder for each domain alias and then set up redirects. If email was sent to the halfelf.org domain, then it went to a folder called ‘HalfElf.’ Originally I had a whole mess of weird redirects going on, like if it was from WP then it went to a WordPress folder and so on, but unraveling that and going simple seemed like a wise choice.

I went into the cPanel backups page and downloaded all my forwarder information as well and set up email forwards! Well. Not forwards. Aliases. Same idea really. And it was nice, since I added all my domains as aliases, ipstenu@[anydomain] would now work! I set up a lot of filters to keep things out of my inbox and in their proper, attention needing, spots.

Blocking Users

Finally it was time for my soon to be favorite step. Blocking users. Blocking senders for every domain is possible in Gmail and in my opinion, it’s huge. I have a list of 66 emails that I block on all my servers. This is for myriad reasons, but primarily is these are people who don’t know how the shut the hell up and leave me alone. Since I’m under no obligation to talk to these people, I blocked them.

Exporting that list from cPanel was un-fun. You can either manually copy it out, line by line, or you can find the filter rules. They are, sadly, stored in the /etc/vfilters directory, so you need root access (which I have), but it’s not easy to get at. BUT! As of the latest version of cPanel, if you go into backups you can export your filters. They’re in a YAML format, but that’s easier than copy/pasta.

Cleaning up cPanel

So now that everything is on gmail, do I even need to run email on the server? Yes. I have to be able to send email. I did go through and delete all the accounts, though, freeing up a bit of space, and I turned off Greylisting (I know, I just did that!), and I hid the ability to add new accounts.

30 September, 2016