Category: obscure pursuits

Localfeeds.com

Localfeeds is a new kind of wire service. Sources and headlines are discovered automatically, and organized geographically. What are people writing within 30 miles of you? within 50 miles of Toronto? within 20 miles of your favorite blog?

But since it chokes on the ICBM metatags that GeoURL uses, I can’t get it installed. What I have in place (and blessed by GeoURL) is this:

<meta name="ICBM" content="47.688123,-122.29798" />

The ICBM metatag they want me to use looks like this (derived from my ZIP code):
<meta name="ICBM" content="47.432251,-121.803388">

And the parser at LocalFeeds doesn’t like the one supplied by LocalFeeds . . . . .

The mother of my children, my best friend and supporter, organized a vote tonight: “raise your hand if you think Daddy should stop working and stay at home?”

The vote was unanimous: 4 to 0 in favor of more involved meals, fresh bread, home-made pasta, and all the other benefits of having someone at home during the day.

So tomorrow, we call an end to this charade. And one suggested script goes like this: I go explain to the Superior Professor that I was hired to be an Administrative Assistant, a job for which I have no qualifications, experience, or aptitude. And she is the manager, for which she has no qualifications, experience, or aptitude. There’s only room for one of us, so I leave it to her. I’ll give them two weeks tomorrow, and call it quits.

I married well, in many ways: if love were edible, we’d never starve in my house.

I arrived at my desk this morning, dispirited at the thought of another day, but glad it was Friday. This is the first job I can recall where I counted the days of the week, longing for Friday. My voice mail light was lit: perhaps an outside call, perhaps not. Hmm, it was the Superior Professor, calling from a car dealership, saying she wanted to talk about my resignation letter.

It turns out an agreed-upon resignation date *would* be to everyone’s advantage, after all. And, surprise of surprises, she understood that my motives, to give her and the Subordinate Professor an opportunity to figure out how best to proceed, were in good faith. And that would mean a cessation of hostilities, no more corrective/punitive action . . . .

I couldn’t believe it. I found myself sitting at my desk after the call ended, sweat pouring down my back, a sense of relief like a weight being lifted from my chest.

No mention of it the rest of the day, when the car appointment was over: we just worked.
Continue reading “a dose of rationality”

The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide

Thoughts on PowerPoint as a communications tool.

BBspot – Dell Patents “Reboot and See If That Fixes It” Tech Support Process

Dell Patents “Reboot and See If That
Fixes It” Technical Support Process

Round Rock, TX – Dell announced that they had been granted a patent for the “reboot and see if that fixes it” technical support process, which they pioneered.

“We’re really taking our cue from other industries,” said CEO Michael Dell. “The American Medical Association patented the ‘let’s see if that hurts tomorrow’ treatment plan and General Motors patented the ‘turn it off and start it up again’ fixing process for automobiles.”

[IP] the Epidemic on the Internet (or better the wreak of it)

On Aug. 11, the Blaster virus and related bugs struck, hammering dozens of corporations, including Air Canada’s reservation and airport check-in systems. Ten days later, the SoBig virus took over, causing delays in freight traffic at rail giant CSX Corp. and shutting down more than 3,000 computers belonging to the city of Fort Worth. Worldwide, 15% of large companies and 30% of small companies were affected by SoBig, according to virus software tracker TruSecure Corp. Market researcher Computer Economics Inc. estimates damage will total $2 billion — one of the costliest viruses ever. All told, damage from viruses may amount to more than $13 billion this year.

$13 billion is a lot of money, even to MSFT. But their license agreements — or more precisely our willingness to agree to them — absolve them of any liability.

[ . . . . . ]

Ralph Szygenda, chief information officer at
General Motors Corp., got fed up when his computers were hit by the Nimda virus in late 2001. He called Microsoft executives. “I told them I’m going to move away from Windows,” Szygenda recalls. “They started talking about security all of a sudden.”

Last year, amid much fanfare, Microsoft launched its Trustworthy Computing initiative, a campaign it claimed would put security at the core of its software design. As part of the campaign, more than 8,500 Microsoft engineers stopped developing the upcoming Windows Server 2003 and conducted a security analysis of millions of lines of freshly written code. Microsoft ultimately spent $200 million on beefing up security in Windows Server 2003 alone. “It’s a fundamental change in the way we write software,” says Mike Nash, vice-president for security business. “If there was some way we could spend more money or throw more people on it, believe me, we’d do it.” Yet, embarrassingly, Windows Server 2003, released in April, was one of the operating systems exploited by Blaster.

Gah. What good does it do for them review their own code? I think we see the results . . . .

Daring Fireball: Fair and Balanced

[ excerpted ]

Two Simple Goals

Every company, big or small, should mandate two goals for its computer systems: high reliability and low maintenance. Start from there, and everything else falls into place. (E.g., CIOs should be rewarded for having small staffs, not large ones.)

Some companies already require high reliability and low maintenance, because their computers are essential components of their businesses. If the computers are down for a few days at some companies, it might be merely inconvenient. But at other companies, like, say, weekly magazines such as Time or Newsweek, computer downtime is simply unacceptable.

A long rant, but there’s a lot of good stuff in it. First of all, while the writer is a Mac advocate and not a Windows fan, the core of his argument is that putting your emphasis on core protocols, rather than chrome, will get you more reliability at a lower cost and with fewer surprises than marching in lockstep to a vendor’s agenda.

I don’t get email viruses on the Mac or FreeBSD, but I also didn’t get them in Windows: the key was using something other than Outlook. I used Mozilla and Pine, and I see a lot of Pine users around (it being a home-grown product and all), most of whom have been in the workplace longer than Outlook.

I stop short of thinking that Windows is a full-employment program for IT workers — that seems too contrived — but I do concur that many IT workers know very little about information technology beyond what the CD prompts tell them. It’s sad that MCSE is understood to stand for “must consult someone experienced.” And it’s also puzzling that no one seems to take notice of how many IT people one needs to support the modern office. Rather than rewarding CIOs for keeping headcount down — at what expense in service is not discussed — it would be more useful and fair to benchmark headcount against industry numbers. After all, costs are costs, and keeping them under control makes good business sense.

So what I take away from this is a lament for the commoditization of information technology, where earnest and energetic fellows with fannypacks of CDs are following the mantra of “format and reinstall.” But at the same time, it’s easy to read that we should expect mainstream office computing to work like our reliable home appliances or public utilities.

I was looking over the iSchool website: there’s a lot of interesting work going on over there.

But then I discovered they have their mailing lists open for public access and made the mistake of reading some of them. there was some discussion of the Slammer worm and how the MSFT monoculture perpetuates it. The IT director for the iSchool responded thusly:

One report I read claimed that last year there were more security incidents associated with “open source” software such as Linux and MySQL than even in Microsoft software.  I have no idea is that is true or not, but the point is that there are security incidents and bugs associated with all software. 

If it may not be true, why repeat it? This is how people respond when their version of the truth comes under fire.

On a related note, I was looking at their documentation for how to access their VPN, and they have instructions for all the popular operating systems. The OS with the least steps is — wait for it — OS X, but I noted they got progressively more complex with each version, from WIN98 to XP. This is progress??

The Eyre Affair was a fast but enjoyable read: the reviews at Amazon are as good or better than anything I can put here, but I’ll take a stab at it.

The book was recommended by my niece and I just decided to try it without researching it at all. Just as well: I have no idea what I would have made of a book where time travel, alternative history (the US and England are not separate, air travel is by airship since the airplane was never invented, England was occupied by the Nazis but still won the war, though somehow w/o Churchill), and a variety of literary japes (a villain named Jack Schitt?) are employed. The book moves along so quickly, you don’t really linger over the rough bits and the inspired lunacy of the plot and premise amply covers any shortcomings.

Imagine a world where it’s possible to move between fantasy and reality and the characters in books are as alive as we are, within their books and outside of them if they can get out. They can also become just as dead, which rewrites the book — just the copy they were in or all copies if a character were removed from the manuscript version. Mucking with literature is a crime in this not quite parallel world and someone has taken it to the next level by removing, at first minor and then namesake, characters from the original manuscripts of great books (the title of the book should give a clue as to one of the books involved).

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | I am a ‘net pirate’

[ . . . . ] what happens if I hear a song on the radio and I want to own that one song?
Let’s say the song is five years old and was never a chart hit and my local record store does not have a copy, or even an album on which it appeared.
The music industry makes it virtually impossible for me to buy that one song, although it is more than happy to charge me £15 for a Beatles album released more than 30 years ago.
[ . . . ] The technology to let me buy one song from the internet has been around for the last 10 years but still the record industry is dragging its feet.
Back catalogues of millions of songs remain under lock and key in dusty archives rather than being offered as potentially lucrative choices to music lovers.

Interestingly, the Beatles are notably absent from the iTunes Music Store, by far the most well-known “per track” outlet. And of course, it’s not like those 30+ year old recordings, which recouped their costs shortly after release, are any cheaper than the latest over-produced dreck.

Just imagine all the rarities collecting dust in record company vaults . . . . who knows if we’ll ever hear them, at any price?