Yesterday, walking out of the Metropolitan Market with a bag of groceries, I inadvertently stepped in a puddle of spilled juice, which sent me skidding across the floor. As I fumbled about trying to remain upright, I was reminded of a problem with Delicious Library. Before I get into that, let me tell you a horrid little story. If you are eating something, let me warn you right now: do not read this.
My first job was at a discount department store called GEM, which is not unlike a K-Mart or Wal*Mart, except we had neither in Hawaii at that time. I started in the warehouse, then was transferred to the garden department, whose manager was not so much evil as completely insane.
At one point I ran over my foot with a pallet jack, crushing my big toe. Since I didn’t know about things like worker’s compensation and an employer’s responsibility to provide treatment for on-the-job injuries, and since my mother forbade me from using my health insurance, this injury went untreated for over a year.
The toe became infected, but I suffered through it. I did my best to lance it and keep it clean, but the rigors of, for example, marching band, ensured I always ended the day by peeling off a bloody, pus-soaked sock, the horrid stench of which quickly made anyone in the room lose their lunch.
As a side-effect of my mother’s scheme to make me join the military, I was finally able to see a doctor for some minor surgery and a round of antibiotics, but not before the thing was shown to every doctor in the hospital and documented for posterity. It was unanimously voted the worst example of an infected paronychia anyone had ever seen.
This lead me to an obsession with the weakness of my feet, ultimately leading me to do away with the whole idea of footwear for some two years. Not only did I not wear shoes of any sort, I intentionally walked on any hot or rough surface I could to strengthen them up. Soon my feet were strong enough that walking on broken glass literally became trivial.
I was eventually forced to at least wear rubber slippers by two factors. First, in Hawaii, it’s traditional to remove your shoes before entering the house. Without shoes, you have nothing to remove, and I accidentally soiled more than a few carpets. Second, I became a liability to my friends because we never knew when someone would notice my lack of footwear and deny us access because of it.
The last straw came when we couldn’t get into a movie theater because I wasn’t wearing any shoes. I argued that there’s nothing about a movie theater that requires shoes, and any argument one could make for having to wear shoes should disqualify wearing rubber slippers, yet somehow strapping a little piece of rubber to the bottom of your foot was deemed acceptable.
All reasons, at their core, came down to this: that’s how it’s done. You have to wear shoes because people wear shoes. That’s just how it’s done. It doesn’t matter how better or worse wearing slippers are to bare feet. Shoes are just how it’s done. Had I not been wearing shoes at the market yesterday, I wouldn’t have slipped. My feet are the result of millions of years of evolution, but I have to void all that work with slippery bits of rubber because that’s how it’s done.
So what does all this have to do with Delicious Library? One problem we are constantly thinking about is that of sorting. Originally, we just sorted everything as written. Enough people complained about wanting to sort by last name that we changed the book and movie collections to sort from the last word, rather than the first. Music, however, remains sorted from the beginning, because there’s no way for a machine to know what’s a person’s name, and what’s a band name.
Thing is though, why do we sort on last name anyway? I’ve never heard a satisfactory explanation, other than some vague nonsense about last names being less common and more meaningful. Ultimately what it comes down to is, that’s how it’s done. To that I say, bah. How it’s done is wrong.
As a record store owner, where would you put the works of Mazzy Star? One assumes you know enough about music to know that there’s no person named Mazzy Star, so you should file it under M. Of course, that’s assuming your customer knows the same thing, yet most people I’ve met assume Mazzy Star refers to the woman whose haunting voice gives the band their signature style.
Come to that, what do you do about Ben Folds versus the Ben Folds Five, Dave Matthews versus the Dave Matthews band, or George Clinton, versus George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars? What about Madonna? Should you put her under C, even though nobody knows her last name? What about Prince? Should you put him under N?
Ultimately, your customers shouldn’t have to care that the voice belongs to Hope Sandoval, and that Mazzy Star belongs under M and not S. They shouldn’t have to care because music should be sorted by the artist’s name, as written. After all, Billy Joel is Billy Joel, not “Joel, William.” Mariah Carey is Mariah Carey, not “Carey, Mariah.” Madonna is, dare I say, Madonna, not “Ciccone, Madonna,” just as Prince is just Prince, not “Nelson, Prince.”
The vehement insistence on sorting by last name because that’s how it’s done makes things needlessly difficult on users and developers alike. If I had my druthers, I’d undo all the sorting algorithm nonsense we’ve been forced into implementing by users and sort everything as written. You might not like it, but it would sure as hell make it easier to find things, which is what the program was designed to do in the first place.
This picture has nothing to do with the story, but I think it’s a funny picture. On the right, Mike Jones dressed as his boss, Steve Jobs. Picture by Mary Brunson.
Monday, October 29, 2007
How It’s Done
