Category: it could be called work

this is news?

Ensight – Jeremy C. Wright

It appears that productivity is quickly becoming more important than security to business leaders.

It was bound to happen, really. It’s part of the cycle that things go through. Just like you are most likely to get money for security after a major virus or hacking attack than you are 2 months afterwards [or two months prior -ed]

I’m act[ua]lly surprised the focus on security has lasted this long.

The original article is about corporate instant messaging, not IT management in general. Risk management is a large component of IT management, so this is nothing new. I wasn’t aware that security had ever superceded productivity . . . . the job growth numbers (or lack thereof) suggest otherwise.

Given the vitality of the virus/worms we’re seeing, this does make me wonder why anyone would want to adopt a new closed-source version of an existing open protocol and even mention security.

must-read books on the sciences

Freedom to Tinker: Must-Read Books: Readers’ Choices:

Last week, I asked readers to name five must-read books on science and technology. The results are below. I included nominations from my comments section, from the comments over at Crooked Timber, and from any other blogs I spotted. This represents the consensus of about thirty people.

So I need to expand my reading list . . .

I think what happened on this was people chose their favorite books, without giving any thought to an audience other than themselves.

A few notes:

* The reviews of Guns, Germs, and Steel, a popular choice of contributors, are so uneven, I’m not sure what to make of it. It doesn’t make Professor Felten’s list, either. Likewise, Gödel, Escher, Bach . . .
* A Short History of Nearly Everything has to be good, given its author, and I think that’s what’s required here: a survey for generalists with pointers on where to learn more.
* To that end, The Evolution of Useful Things looks interesting as well.

This brings up an idea I have had periodically since the earky days of Amazon.com (nearly 10 years on): I’d like to have a subscription of books delivered to me, regularly (monthly or so) based on my interests. The various book clubs can’t offer that: they’re too narrow. It could come at various price points: $10/$20/$30 and let the member choose what of several books is required. And of course, this feeds into the collaborative filtering/recommendation engine.

what I read: publishing my aggregator’s contents

I have never liked the idea of blogrolls: they seemed too much like logrolling, ie, dropping names or linking to folks without reading them. Much better to extract the sites you read from your aggregator for two reasons: 1. it’s accurate, 2, it’s automatic, or as close as possible to it.

To that end, I found the very useful MTOutliner plugin and after working with its inventor, we got it working. Some impedance mismatch on carriage returns and linefeeds, of all things.

You can see it all in the bottom of the left sidebar.

I also added some more explicit references to the feeds (the links go to the home page of the site and to the feed). Those RSS 2.0 buttons aren’t buttons at all: they’re CSS-styled text, so they’re indexable by crawlers/robots and they’re easily changed.

I just wrap them in a span tag:

<span class="xmlbtn">RSS 2.0</span>

with this style applied.
.xmlbtn {
   border:1px solid;
   border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
   padding:0 3px;
   font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
   color:#FFF;
   background:#F60;
   text-decoration:none;
   margin:0;
   text-align: right;
}

MovableType Plugin Manager: useful, even if you don’t use many of them

This is proving to be quite useful.

plugin-mgr

Like working with CPAN modules or FreeBSD’s ports system, all that’s stored locally is a skeleton outline of what’s available: you request something, and down it comes, fetched, unpacked, and installed. Uninstalling is just as painless.

I have more plugins installed than I realized, and I had to walk through the manual registration process (you match each file in your plugins directory against a registered plugin) to start things off properly. The only one that is unclaimed is the Zeitgeist module, but that will be taken care of soon, I’m assured.

Almost all those plugins are in use: the ArchiveYear one I have yet to work with and the Outliner is giving me some problems. The author and I have been in contact: it’s supposed to take the OPML data from NetNewsWire or your RSS reader of choice and generate a reading list/blogroll based on what you’re actually subscribed to.

The only gotcha I have found is in getting the MTW3CValidate and MTTextile to play nicely. MTTextile needs to load first, ideally as the first item in the template, followed by MTW3CValidate.
<$MTTextileOptions smarty_mode="2" trim_spaces="1"$>


[ . . . ] the rest of your page [ . . . ]

If you think this would help (and you’re a MovableType user) check it out.

how low can you get?

Center for American Progress – The Progress Report – Page:
*Daily Outrage*

bq. Conservative allies of the White House have resorted to attacking the military service of former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a triple-amputee war hero decorated for his service in Vietnam.

This is just outrageous. I don’t know what makes me more angry, the fact that someone would be allowed to broadcast this kind of slander, knowing it will be peddled as fact by “rip and read” conservative news organs, or that no one will repudiate these comments before they become woven into the fabric of the debate.

Despicable. A soldier covers a grenade to save his brother soldiers, 4 days after winning the Silver Star for gallantry, and the best a grateful nation can do is allow worthless pundits to disparage him.

Thoughts on outsourcing, globalism

Thinking over the employment situation and reviewing all I’ve read and heard about globalism and outsourcing, I wonder what trades/professions are unlikely to be outsourced? What work doesn’t travel?

Food/agriculture is globalized already, for better or worse. Farmed fish (catfish outranks cotton as a cash crop in Mississippi), apples (grown everywhere, from Australia to China), grapes (exported as fruit and wine on both sides of the equator), etc. Cars, electronics, clothes, all of these are imported now. (Next time, you hear some grumbling about the need to “buy American” ask them if they can be sure everything *they* buy is American-made?)
Continue reading “Thoughts on outsourcing, globalism”

when biometrics can reveal intent, they might work . . .

BIOMETRICS WON’T CATCH DISPOSABLE TERRORISTS – George Jonas – Benador Associates:

There may well be terrorist moles flying or servicing passenger and cargo jets in Western countries, waiting to be activated for a suicide mission. Some may be pilots or flight attendants; others may gain access to restricted places as mechanics, ground crew, baggage handlers, caterers, or cleaners. The papers of such infiltrators are in perfect health; the sickness is in their heads.

As Bruce Schneier points out, the phrase “disposable terrorists” has a disturbing ring to it. How do you defend against someone who has opted out of life?

from CryptoGram

paper is an insulator: never put it between yourself and another person

I just read a posting on a website at the UW: the author is a hiring manager in the client services group in the computing and communications group and he was bemoaning the fact he has been trying to hire a senior manager for about a year and hasn’t been able to.

First of all, the fact that anyone has a technology management job vacant for that long is very frustrating: in this market, am I to believe there are no qualified candidates? Nothing even close?

The author goes on to say that none of the resumes match what he’s looking for. Oh, well, that’s different: I thought he was looking for people, not resumes. Perhaps if he read through the resumes and looked beyond the bullet points and buzzwords to get a sense of the person and what they have done, he might have filled that job.