Flight Search

Recently, I was was trying to book a flight online. As my friend Brian can attest, this is a painful thing thing to do: You go to all these different websites and try to find the best airport/time/airline combination. This can take several hours, at the end of which you decide that you don't want to save $50 by flying through Anchorage. (Sometimes, you go with the first thing you found.)

This gets even more painful when you have poorly defined requirements. Sometimes, you know you want to go to Rome for a weekend. Any weekend. At other times, you want to visit Portugal for a wedding on July 17th, but would also like to go to Italy either before or after. Same thing with visiting family in three different states: What's the best ordering of visits?

Also, maybe taking a train would be cheaper and faster than flying.

So what do online sites have to offer? You choose "Flight", enter to/from, travel dates. Good websites, such as ITA Flight Search, will find you the cheapest weekend to go. But what about all the other requirements:

• Isn't there a better way to enter the flights you need? Couldn't we design a better interface for defining flight search parameters?
  
• Can't someone integrate all of the travel info that is out there (flights, trains, busses) into a common "travel search"?
  

And a special wish:

• Why do I have to enter my flight parameters by hand at every single travel website? Can't my browser offer some auto-filling? For this, a Firefox plug-in would work: If there is someone devoted enough to doing such a thing (and keeping it updated when input forms change).
  

There is much to improve.

Typewriters

In today's episode of your favorite show, "The Sad Life Of", we will take a glimpse into the life of a PhD student at ETH.

I love the time when a semester at ETH ends. This is the time when the architects have their critique sessions. Every student presents his project. The designs then get praised or verbally destroyed by professors, while the students stand around helplessly.

Of course, this is fun. Especially when you're not one of those students.

Still, there appears to be a form of critique session which is less fun for many: The diploma students get to exhibit their projects in ETH's main building. The professors then come around with their assistants. Together, in a state of deep meditation, they determine with a grade and dream up a text explaining that grade.

Today, I watched one of these professors. He was having great fun, saying things like: "The structure of the building is mediocre colon the programme has been disobeyed period." "Wait!", I thought, "why does he say things like 'colon' and 'period'?". It wasn't architectspeak. He was dictating his text to the poor PhD student sitting next to him. Is this the job you get for 5 years of quality ETH education?

Power to the Box

The promoters of switching are switching.

Big news brewing in Cupertino: Apple will apparently switch Macs to Intel processors. While the x86 design is something not everyone is happy about, the price for it is.

Meanwhile, in Redmond, Microsoft is gearing up the Xbox 360. They're switching, too: the original Xbox had a Pentium 3 processor, whereas the new model will feature an IBM PowerPC architecture.

Ah, the irony: When we were young, politicians were honest, and real estate was cheap, the only thing we took for granted was the unholy Microsoft-Intel alliance. Nothing lasts forever.

Outsourcing to Eastern Europe

Today's NZZ features an interview with Stefan Arn, the founder of AdNovum, a medium-size company. As far as I know, they mainly make software for Swiss banks.

Unlike US custom software shops, they outsource projects to Budapest, Hungary, and not Bangalore, India. The article goes on saying that a good Java programmer costs 1800 to 2400 CHF / month in Budapest, which is less than you pay for cleaning staff in Zurich. Overall, cost savings are 14% over developing things solely in Zurich.

Is this the future of custom software development? Rigidly specify customer requirements and software architecture in high-wage countries, and then ship the documentation and some volunteers to low-wage countries?

I'm not convinced: I certainly believe that outsourcing to Eastern Europe rather than India makes sense, due to several reasons (also mentioned by Stefan Arn):

• It's just physically closer, They're in the same time zone, so you can call them. Also, when problems appear, you can simply fly out there in the morning and fly back in the evening.


• It's culturally closer. Eastern Europeans are probably easier to understand than India or China. Both have about the same understanding of business and its processes.

But 14% cost savings? Is that it? After all, there is a risk that the cost advantage will be wiped out quickly by the rising cost of doing business in the new EU countries.