Month: April 2003

after last weekend’s experience of discomfort and greater than usual fatique increasing with the miles, I took my bike in for a fitting this afternoon, and a couple of small adjustments might make a big difference.

For one, the seats saddles on these modern bikes are adjustable in ways I never knew, so Leif, the expert at Gregg’s at Greenlake, fixed me up there. The handlebars are now a little closer to me, thanks to a new fitting (the name of which I’ll get wrong, so I’ll leave it out).

And I also got some posture pointers that will be the most helpful.

We’ll see how we go this weekend. I’m eager to find out.

While I was actually a pretty good fit for an off the shelf 58 cm road bike, I think fitting is a must and would do it for any bike I expected to spend a lot of time on.

So my inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise is making for some bad days at the office. There was huge contretemps over a PC used by our recently separated director (now off to champion consumer protection for the attorney general). It’s prudent to remove login permissions when people leave an organization, as anyone in the IT game would recognize. But rather than just remove access for the former staff member and appoint a new owner for those files, all access to them was blocked, without a single attempt at asking what we, the customer of a service organization, wanted done with them.

After denying anything had been done to the PC, lo and behold a CD is delivered to the ten year old daughter of one of the staff (she happened to be in the office and the messenger couldn’t be bothered to wait around). And after another day, we get admin rights to the PC.

That only took five days. Getting hectored by a law professor on how this is standard procedure (if it was, why not say so up front or at any time in the ensuing 5 days?) and that locking down a login is not doing anything with a PC is a little much for me: I could almost see the head of computer services’s hand moving the mouth of the person speaking to me.

And today I learn that one of the IT staff has engaged his brother as a vendor to sell server equipment to the new law school building. This is a large state law school at a large state university, so we’re talking either taxpayer dollars or gift dollars from the building campaign going to staff under the guise of vendors.

I’m not sure if I should file an action or check my basement for stuff I can sell.

I also was appointed to a working group to discuss technology needs and plans, chaired by the head of computing: her assistant sent around an email with her superior’s availability for our initial meeting. I suggested we might set a good example if we used the calendaring system to help plan the meetings. No reply yet.

It might be time to look for a real job where accountability matters and where tenure does not equate to competence.

Slashdot | Princeton CS Prof Edward W. Felten (Almost) Live

4) Prohibition of what got us here?
by Xesdeeni

Do I completely misunderstand the scope of the DMCA, or would it have actually prohibited the actions of clone manufacturers, starting with Compaq, when they reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS in 1984?

It seems this simple fact alone would highlight the ludicrous nature of a law which would prohibit precisely the actions that provided the current state of the industry.

Prof. Felten:

The effect of the DMCA on reverse engineering is complicated. The DMCA does not flatly ban reverse engineering, but if you have to circumvent a technical protection measure in order to do your reverse engineering, then the DMCA will be an issue. The DMCA does have a limited safe harbor for reverse engineering, but it has been widely criticized as too narrow.

I hate to dodge your question, but I’m not really qualified to say whether what the clone makers did would be legal under 2003 law.

Talk about your law of unintended consequences . . . .