Nov 26, 2004 | General, Technology
At our thanksgiving celebration we go around and everyone attending says something they are thankful for. In this pre-holiday shopping season, where we tend to get very excited about the latest high-tech toy, it occurred to me to take a moment and note a number of technological marvels that I personally am thankful for. No hype here – these are the things I use every day.
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Google
My main search engine and fount of all wisdom, it’s a rare technical problem for which I can’t find some guidance by following it’s paths.
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Amazon.com
More than a store, it helps me find new books and music, and provides a first pass at market pricing. Plus, it’s a great place for me to sell my own eBooks.
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Yahoo Calender
I don’t like PDA’s (yeah, old fashioned, but it’s just another thing to carry around, keep charged, and worry about losing). Yahoo’s online calender has all the features I need, is available everywhere, and is free if you have SBC DSL.
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Boston Acoustics & Plasma Displays
A great display and a fine set of speakers makes a home theatre shine. All the plasmas look great (mine happens to be Toshiba), but I hunted for months before settling on Boston Acoustics Micro 100x speakers.
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Wacky Voice Alarm Clock
You’d think I’d have gotten tired of this one, but it still works. Annoying enough to get me up when I must, funny enough so I haven’t (yet) taken a sledge hammer to it.
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Tivo
Once you start using a DVR, you can never go back.
More suggestions are welcome. Meanwhile, I wish you all a very succesful pre-holiday shopping season. May you always find an open parking space at the mall. May that gift you just have to get always be on sale.
Nov 15, 2004 | General
When I set up this blog, one of the key factors in choosing the software was that it supports moderation of comments. I’d seen other blogs flooded with comment spam (much of it obscene) and did not want to be put in the position of having to constantly check for and delete spam comments. This turned out to be a wise choice.
What has fascinated me recently is the cleverness of spammers trying to get their message posted. The vast majority of spam attempts seem to consist of very witty comments that are almost relevant to the original message. In many cases they consist of famous quotes where the only indication that they are spam is that the “relevant” links within the quote point to an online poker or porn site. I suspect these posts are designed primarily to get by automatic filters, and I expect they meet some success in that.
Today I received one that was clever enough for me to want to share:
A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:
Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals … Now did the Lord say, First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.
Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
What this has to do with refinancing mortgages I can’t tell you, and which mortgage refinancer posted this I won’t post here, but if you really want to know drop me a note. Any company choosing that quote deserves to succeed.
Nov 5, 2004 | Software Development
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest eBook “Visual Basic .NET or C#: Which to Choose (VS 2005 edition).” Based on VS 2005 (Whidbey) beta 1, it is a major rewrite/revision of the previous VS 2003 title, based not only on changes to the two languages, but on the evolution of .NET in general.
Available from Desaware, Amazon.com and Lockergnome
Nov 3, 2004 | Society & Politics
My condolences to the Democrats among us, who are in a state of shock wondering how Bush could have won.
My condolences to Republicans among us as well – of all the Republicans out there, you get to have Bush represent your party (at least we in California have Schwarzenegger).
Anyway, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Business as usual in Iraq, an increasing national debt, a degraded environment, increased challenges to civil liberties and a preference for corporations over individual rights. There’s no reason to expect much change on this score.
You may be wondering what you can do about it. Sorry, you can’t all move to Canada or New Zealand.
And you can’t do much about Iraq or the deficit.
But if you’re concerned about freedom and civil liberties, there are two things you can do right now that will make a difference. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, just that you care about freedom (the first, and most important of American values).
Join the American Civil Liberties Union. www.aclu.org
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. www.eff.org
You’ve got nothing better to do for the next 2 years until campaign 2008 starts, and you can make a difference. Spread the word.
Oct 27, 2004 | Software Development, Technology
Now that we have reached the home stretch of the political season, the chance to actually vote on something… and the prelude to what is likely to be an extended and painful period of lawsuits, recounts and recriminations for one side or the other, it’s time to look ahead at what we can do to occupy our spare time for the few months until the next election cycle begins.
Fortunately, there is an ongoing contest that is quickly becoming just as extreme, just as polarized, and just as lacking in honesty as any political contest we’ve seen yet. Yep, it’s the good old closed vs. open source debate.
This is prompted by a couple of friendly messages I’ve received lately. The first sent by a good friend is an presumably objective report in the Register comparing the security of the two systems.
The other, an email from my good friend Steve Ballmer (who I’ve never met, but have seen from a distance at a technical conference or two), containing six pages (2700+ words) extolling the benefits of Windows over Linux in every possible way (including, of course, security, with an indirect reference to a study by Forrester Research).
Now, the Register article seemed to me well researched, but it’s pretty easy to see that despite the innocuous title “Security Report: Windows vs. Linux”, the piece is clearly advocating the Linux side. Let’s face it, an objective report is unlikely to have it’s first couple of sections titled “Myth: There’s Safety In Small Numbers” and “Myth: Open Source is Inherently Dangerous.” Still, it makes for a fascinating read, and the author’s arguments are based both on technological reasoning and hard statistics – not the anecdotal evidence so common in white papers and political campaigns.
I’m afraid this time the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” spam of the year award has to go to Ballmer’s letter. It was just too easy to see the spin. My first hint came with the name dropping – while reading the list of customer case studies I couldn’t help but see Kerry in his second debate name dropping an endless list of senators and generals. I also found Ballmer’s choose Windows because “being on the wrong end of a software patent lawsuit could cost a customer millions of dollars, and massively disrupt their business” argument comparable to Dick Cheney’s “if you choose Kerry the terrorists will attack us” tirade (as a technologist, the idea of choosing software to avoid lawsuits instead of based on cost represents a huge failure on the part of our industry and society).
Then there’s the security article itself. The MSDN page is headlined “Windows Users have Fewer Vulnerabilities.” Imagine my surprise when I found the actual title of the Forrester report was “Is Linux more Secure than Windows”
Ok, so maybe the MSDN page refers to the conclusion? No – the executive summary of the report concludes: “both Windows and four key Linux distributions can be deployed securely”.
Ok, so do Windows users actually have fewer vulnerabilities?
Well, Windows users do have fewer overall days of risk by their metrics – which might explain this quote. But the study also shows that Windows had the highest percentage of high-severity vulnerabilities.
I’m not going to try to guess which system is really more secure. I don’t have time to reconcile the methodology of these two reports (the Register report found that Windows had more vulnerabilities). Which brings me to my greatest frustration.
With technology advocacy and marketing becoming as polarized as a political campaign, who can we look towards to be honest brokers? Even non-sponsored objective reports are inevitably influenced by the biases and backgrounds of their authors, and their results spun by each side.
On one hand, I truly sympathize with anyone who actually has to make a choice between platforms. Between the lack of trustworthy information and the flood of marketing noise, the chances of being able to truly choose the best one for your situation are slim. On the other hand, perhaps there is good news after all. Both platforms work, and can be secured. Cost studies go both ways, but few of them seem to claim a real difference in total cost of more than 20%, which is probably well within the margin of error when calculating the cost of a large scale platform deployment anyway.
So if the two approaches really are comparable in cost, and security, maybe the right answer is to choose based on a more arbitrary standard, like which name you like, or which fits better with your personal politics, or maybe the roll of a dice. Who knows, the money you save by not studying and comparing and analyzing the choice may be more than the ultimate cost difference between Windows and Linux.
Oct 18, 2004 | Technology
It’s the killer app – the one that’s going to revolutionize content and media distribution. Your life will never be the same. It’s a truly disruptive technology that will completely shake up the industry. Billions will be won or lost as companies race to become the leader in this new wave of technology (oops, strike that – my mistake. Nobody except Apple will make a dime because it’s mostly open source). Developers and geeks will pounce on the podwagon, afraid of being left behind the next great wave of technological progress.
Yep, another earth shattering technical revolution is being hyped up the wazoo. And having lived through so many of these earth shattering ultra-hyped revolutions, I great this one with a resounding… yawn.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Many of the things people are saying about podcasting are absolutely true. The trend towards large number of individuals producing content, already prevalent on the Internet in text form, is certain to spread into audio and video. The tools are getting better. And with video and audio editing almost routine among kids today, the trend is clear. And using RSS (or it’s successors) to subscribe to content, along with tools to automatically download it to a media player, are innovative, yet at the same time logically inevitable advances.
But there are some additional forces at work that lead me to question the hype in this case.
Podcasting is essentially a distribution mechanism for audio content. But while some people do best with audio, it’s a relatively inefficient way to acquire information. Most of us read faster, and given that we are already overwhelmed by far more information than we can process, the idea that audio will somehow gain comparable traction to text blogs is questionable.
Yes, audio is important – commuters who currently listen to talk radio or audio books will find podcasting useful, and those represent large niche – but a niche nonetheless.
Podcasting is getting a lot of hype, and bleeding edge geeks are jumping on the bandwagon, figuring out how to launch their own audio-blogs, and they will meet with some success and gain listeners. But today’s exponential growth curve is going to hit a wall, and soon. And the growth will slow and maybe stop, and the media will write in dismay about another failed technology, until at some point, maybe a few years from now, maybe more, the world will catch up and podcasting will become routine. Except it won’t be podcasting – it will be vidcasting – with automatic downloads to tommorow’s handheld video player devices or cell phones, and the feeds will be short comic bits from places like The Onion and the Daily Show, or short news clips from CNN.
Oct 12, 2004 | General
I know I originally promised not to post the “minutia of my daily life” on this blog. But please forgive this exception.
Today is my father’s funeral.
He passed away Sunday night at home, surrounded by family, in as much peace as I suppose is possible under the circumstances.
I know some of you reading this met him – he would often come to the VBits conferences where Desaware exhibited and where I was a speaker. Conferences then were somewhat of a family affair for us. Aside from the obvious pride he had in watching me do my thing, he enjoyed the travel and the technology, and I was glad to be able to give him the opportunity. He had spent his working life traveling around the world for Fluor (a major construction company), and the conferences gave him a taste of that again. He loved his work – I remember the pride (and amazement) he expressed after negotiating his first billion dollar contract.
My dad definitely qualified as a “geek” by today’s standards. He spent hours on the computer, participating in online discussions, paying bills, playing solitaire, and various sundry other activities. No technophobe, whenever he ran into problems he would attempt to tackle them himself, and if necessary spend hours on the phones with tech support people until things worked. Only rarely would I have to come in and help out.
I don’t doubt that I inherited my love of technology from him. Curiously enough, as I struggle to focus on how he was, rather than how he died, I realized that it’s not his love that I remember most, but rather, his respect. I suppose every good father encourages his children to learn and try new things. But for me the real turning point was when I was 12 or 13 and my interest in electronics had gone just a step beyond building simple kits and playing with 50-in-one project sets from radio shack. I don’t know whether that’s the time when I knew more about electronics than he did, but even if I didn’t – he let me believe that. Suddenly I was the one in charge of repairing frayed extension cords, replacing bulbs, rewiring outlets, and any other household tasks that had anything to do with electronics or electricity.
That respect, or trust in my ability, was the core, but there were lots of little things as well. Buying me my first transceiver kit from Heathkit. Encouragement without pressure when I dragged home an old WWII radio and then took almost a year to repair it. Patience the numerous times I blew out fuses at home (or in hotel rooms). And a stalwart defense when the neighbors were ready to lynch me because my transmissions were coming out of their TV, intercom systems, toasters and so on.
He had a full life, and there were many aspects to it. He’s not a person one can reflect on in a single eulogy. But of all the things I want to say about him, these are the things that feel right to express here.