Friday, August 30, 2002 Friday, August 30, 2002Then again, I might not.
3:55:53 PM # Google It!
World failure brought about by, say, a large asteroid impact, presents problems where the ongoing running of a company should not, at this stage, be at the forefront of anybody's mind. However, Quocirca believes that for those who really want to think ahead, the use of narrow-beam radio technology will enable you to stream your data out into space, and that this stream could be captured and rebuilt as data from the depths of space onto a extra-terrestrial mirrored data system.
— Disaster Tolerance
11:01:35 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
9:59:25 AM # Google It!
categories: Learning
8:45:40 AM # Google It!
Thursday, August 29, 2002The remaining large chunk of my telephone bill goes not to Verizon, but to AT&T, because we call less than 15 miles away in the next county — outside the regional calling area. Each call is assessed at 10¢ per minute. It's cheaper to call Virginia, or California.
I just switched to Verizon. They're cheaper.
3:15:08 PM # Google It!
After David Weinberger oddly echoed my comment on Sifry's post about what length would be appropriate, Dave Winer revealed that he's coming at this topic from a completely different philosophical perspective.
For crying out loud David, it's super simple. If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want.
The argument is about copyright on the surface, but underneath it's about property. Specifically, are thought and it's expressions property?
It might help to read this. In it, Tom Palmer explores the arguments for and against intellectual property rights, quoting, among others, Ayn Rand:
patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind.
With that, I think, given his analogy above, Dave will concur.
However, Rand further states
If [intellectual property] were held in perpetuity, it would lead to the opposite of the very principle on which it is based: it would lead, not to the earned reward of achievement, but to the unearned support of parasitism. It would become a cumulative lien on the production of unborn generations, which would immediately paralyze them.
Regardless of whether one agrees with intellectual property being held in perpetuity, it is not the perspective held by the Constitution.
Is the house that Dave built real property, or the expression of his creative mind? Or, both?
12:21:05 PM # Google It!
categories: Law
This point is clarified when we open our monthly statement: NYSEG is an energy delivery company.
8:45:23 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
7:49:03 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Wednesday, August 28, 200211:28:54 AM # Google It!
categories: Media
InfoWorld: Notes is dead. Read Ray Ozzie's original comments as well. This sounds a little too much like a Microsoft sales pitch for my taste, but it's interesting nonetheless. (I'm not a Notes fan, but I also don't think it's a foregone conclusion that all former Notes shops are going to move to Exchange.) [Hack the Planet]Nice response by Ray Ozzie.
For a while I was the system manager for Notes at Associated Press. As Joel Sposky wrote in another context
It was being sold as a groupware platform, but in reality, it was being bought (and used) as an email program.That was our situation. Notes is deployed from the top down. Any centralized mail system is, but Exchange has an advantage, beyond that of licensing: the client is bundled with Microsoft Office. Outlook is readily used, if not usable, as a PIM and mail user agent, even without an Exchange backend. So Exchange can be sold as an enhancement to something that people are already using.
I've picked up Groove a couple of times to see how well it works. I've two immediate issues with it:
So, I'm online in Groove, but until I see someone I know, I'm nothing but a wallflower.
9:35:48 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Messaging
pair Hosts Blosxom Blogs. pair Networks, a Web hosting provider, makes Blosxom available to users as one of its "System CGI"s. Wonderful! [raelity bytes]
From my perspective, Blosxom has some tremendous advantages for this role. It's small. It's dead simple to use. And there's an Apache module if you don't use mod_perl to speed up Perl CGIs.
7:47:30 AM # Google It!
Tuesday, August 27, 2002I don't want to be an eloi enabler.
— David McCusker
1:24:18 PM #
12:04:48 PM # Google It!
11:12:22 AM #
categories: Low-Hanging Fruit
10:34:13 AM # Google It!
[A]n Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.On one occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last received the operators’ manuals that had laboriously been translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly minted manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, promptly collected the manuals from those crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge. Being the only person who could explain the fire control instrumentation or bore sight artillery weapons brought prestige and attention.
In military terms this means that very little cross-training is accomplished and that, for instance in a tank crew, the gunners, loaders and drivers might be proficient in their jobs but are not prepared to fill in should one become a casualty. Not understanding one another’s jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher level it means that there is no depth in technical proficiency. [emphasis mine]
— Norvell B. De Atkine, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," American Diplomacy, Vol. V, No. 4, Fall 2000
These observations apply equally well elsewhere, such as corporate America, where similar cultural impediments to sharing prevail.
7:27:53 AM # Google It!
categories: Learning
Monday, August 26, 2002
Say you have 100,000 people that you want to enable to publish a weblog. Given that these are weblogs and not simple homepages (like GeoCities) that are published once and forgotten, a couple of things change. People use the functionality daily, if not several times a day.
The nature of medium encourages frequent publication, but any subject that captures your enthusiasm could be just as frequently updated. In fact, that's exactly what we want.
They also build massive sites. Compared to a one or two page "designed" personal home page on the last generation's site builders, the user of a weblog system will quickly find themselves publishing sites with hundreds if not thousands of pages. They get big fast.
The difference between weblogging software and sites like Tripod and GeoCities is that the user interface doesn't scale. The GeoCities editor and Tripod's have built in limits on the number of pages that may be published. It would be interesting to compare the backends of Blogger and LiveJournal.
If done centrally, you could probably put a thousand or two weblogs on a single server. That would take 50-100 servers, extensive rack space, and a huge budget for admin of those servers given that there is complex functionality on the server. In a decentralized model, you could put 10-20 k weblogs on a single static server. That would require only 5-10 servers (a single rack) and a very low admin budget.
This depends entirely on how the system's built.
First, let's distinguish between the centralized and decentralized models. In the centralized model, all functions are hosted on the server-side. In the decentralized model given here, the server exposes your works to the world, but editing and other tasks are completed on your desk. The classic web hosting arrangement is this decentralized model. For ease of use, to get away from the complexity of synchronizing filesystems over FTP, many vendors provided web-based HTML editors, and moved to the centralized model. But at some point it becomes easier to buy GoLive or DreamWeaver — unless you're using Blogger, Moveable Type, or one of the Userland tools. Think of the server as your upstream cache.
In a centralized environment, the systems performing the editing tasks are often segregated from those serving the final product. Usage shows that pages are read more frequently than they are written, so the editing systems need only support a small fraction of the total membership. If you store the data separate from the presentation, and render the two on the fly, then you run into some processing bottlenecks, but most on-line editors generate static HTML of one variety or another. The point being that you don't need 50-100 servers for 100,000 weblogs unless you're Manila.
It's very easy to throw hardware and bandwidth at sites and make them scale. The costs are more or less distributed depending on your architecture. What's difficult is building a scalable community, of finding like-minded souls. And thus we have the Radio Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem, blogdex and others — or the less-sophisticated GeoCites Member Pages directory.
2:39:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online, System Administration
> 90% of TV is crap.
10:50:55 AM # Google It!
categories: Media
I have a friend that did something.
It's almost as if that has replaced who and whom. Because we can't remember when to use whom and don't want to sound silly?
9:16:46 AM # Google It!
categories: Language
He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me. I was at an angle to him and the spray hit my right eye and our three year-old who I was holding in my right arm. In the same motion he turned the can on my wife who was holding our 10 month old baby and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than 3 feet.
— Don Joughin [ via The One True b!X]
Friday, August 23, 2002Larry Staton, Jr., has a good bit on copyright as applied to software. But, Dave, it's really very simple, so shut up and listen:
Copyright says that Dave Winer can't write his program using the same words that Larry Lessig used to write his.
They can have the same useful thought, but the person who patents it first gets it.
Is copyright appropriate for the computing arts? Are patents? That's a different question, and doesn't involve ad hominems and piss.
1:36:45 PM # Google It!
Option 2: Go out to dinner and a show.
Looks like The Road to Perdition is the only thing interesting showing in most of the cinemas near us. My Big Fat Greek Wedding might have potential. When this could be your last date until the newborn is weaned, you don't want to throw your time away on mediocre fluff. We have more great restaurants in the area than Hollywood has released films, so it's easier to pick one. (Finding those restaurants online is a little more difficult.)
12:36:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Family
[Vice Admiral Marty] Mayer said the war game's complexity precluded it being a completely free-play exercise
You mean like life?
The first casualty of battle is the plan.
The ArmyTimes article notes that Red Team used motorcycle messengers to avoid monitoring of electronic communications. Tricky. Encryption would yield a somewhat similar result, but mis-direction would be easier with the method used. Did Blue Team become aware of this during the game? Could Blue Team not interrupt both communications channels?
9:57:54 AM # Google It!
Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it.... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
— Will Rogers (1879-1935)
Obviously, the Shatter Attack isn't the real problem. The problem is the email virus that could deliver the attack or any other delivery vehicle that gives an attacker remote or physical access to a user's system. Thus, the details of the attack matter little. [links added]
— Paul Thurrott, Windows and .NET Magazine
They are both problems, if your security model doesn't allow for the possiblity that an end-user system will be compromised. It is not wise to ignore the potential of privilege escalation. You can limit the avenues of attack, but as long as the computer is on there will be an opportunity.
I am so sure that TCPA/Palladium will fix privilege escalation problems.
8:28:39 AM # Google It!
categories: Security
In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed issues of material fact in this case. Instead, the two sides reach vastly different conclusions based on the same set of facts. I find that, as a matter of law, no jury could find that Prodigy infringes the Sargent patent, whether directly or contributorily, either as part of the Internet or on its Web server viewed separate and apart from the Internet.
Now we can go back to arguing whether deep links are different in character from shallow links, without having to pay BT for the privilege.
6:57:08 AM # Google It!
categories: Law
Thursday, August 22, 2002And hey, if that doesn't motivate you, maybe this will: There's no way Bill Gates will do it. In fact, there's no way he can.
— Doc Searls
3:17:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media
2:34:04 PM # Google It!
categories: Messaging
Now, only a year after the release of SE Linux, the NSA has dropped its support for any future cyber security products based on the open source method. NSA officials say their cyber security enhancements made for SE Linux have not only benefited the NSA, but because of the terms of the GPL have also strengthened the security architecture of computers used by malicious cyber terrorists around the world."We didn’t fully understand the consequences of releasing software under the GPL," said Dick Schafer, deputy director of the NSA. "We received a lot of loud complaints regarding our efforts with SE Linux."
— WorldTech Tribune
It may be hard for the three-letter acronyms to admit, but whether or not the source is available and may help the terrorists is irrelevant. See Bruce Schneier for elaboration, or Ray Ozzie, or even the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group: the FBI captured passwords using a keystroke logger. Instead, this decision by the NSA harms us law-abiding citizens.
2:18:00 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics, Security
2:00:40 PM # Google It!
Of interest: Terascale Infrastructure for Discovery and other High End Computing Capabilities
From ComputerWorld:
"Take AOL, Yahoo and MSN and link them to a bunch of classified data, and that's Intelink," said [John] Brantley, [director of the Intelink management office,] calling the intranet the "basis for how people share information" in the intelligence community. And while he acknowledged that searching Intelink can be like shooting craps, Brantley maintains that despite the intranet's size, analysts shoot craps "with loaded dice."
I've long wondered why it's so much trouble to find out what the government knows about you.
1:51:11 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Politics, Security
Classmates is the bomb. They really hook you into providing information about yourself. I'm running across friends, enemies, and girls I had a crush on in elementary school. And I'm this close to giving them $36 so I can reach some of these people — after only 10 minutes of using the site.
Now I'm recommending it to my friends.
11:57:54 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Media
Moving: Caveat Lector is moving. Today. To http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/. This will be the LAST post at Textartisan.
— [Caveat Lector]
Dorothea has some minor difficulties with Moveable Type not maintaining permalinks on imports. I would suggest a mod_rewrite directive if she could discern a pattern. TextArtisan is running Zeus, so at first I thought "yet another use of meta refresh," but then I find that Zeus supports .htaccess. Looks like the syntax is the same as Apache's. Yarinareth runs Apache, so can use mod_rewrite.
So, redirect from textartisan to yarinareth. Rewrite from old permalink to new. Change DNS entries when yarinareth equals textartisan. Simple, right?
10:49:06 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
Raph notes
This highlights one of the major differences between proprietary and free software. People lose the motivation to work on projects all the time. But free software projects are like extremely hardy seeds; they can dry up and last a long time, and when a fertile environment comes along, sprout and flourish. When the author has particular rights over the code, a big risk is that it can really die.
I wonder if Mr. Hekkelmann will take my money to get rid of the registration dialog.
10:11:16 AM # Google It!
In the essay he examines the difficulty of implementing them in Notes and Groove.
But more than once, I've been shocked by a user who has been using Groove for months and months, and then points out "Do you mean that one of the other members of the Shared Space can copy & paste the shared data to a different shared space, sharing it with someone else, without my permission???"
I've run into that. There's a great lack of understanding of how computers work, aggravated by Marketing's misinformation in advertisements. For some reason, if you use a computer, you can get everything done faster. It's not like you have to wait for the computer. This directly affects customer expectations, so I spent a good deal of time lowering expectations when I worked at AlphaGraphics.
But what I don't understand is the lack of understanding of the computer as a communications device. Do you not gossip over the back fence? Did you think the secret you told would stay secret?
9:16:46 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media, Security
Media chief decries Net's moral fiber
The president of News Corp. warns that the Internet's future is threatened by porn, spam and rampant piracy. He condemns the medium's "enormous amount" of worthless content.
Mine:
Media chief running scared.
The president of News Corp. warns that their future is threatened by the "enormous amount" of worthless advertising on the Internet
8:40:36 AM # Google It!
categories: Media
I'm so happy with my feet on the ground
So happy, my head spins around
Quite content to sit on this fence
Quite content now a little bit older
The mirror people one day shall be free
The mirror people laugh at you and laugh at me
The mirror people, know not how to cry
So they scream, the mirror people scream inside
— "Mirror People," Earth, Sun, Moon, Love & Rockets
Wednesday, August 21, 2002There's something wrong here.
5:29:23 PM # Google It!
icann.blog has been ticked off wondering about this as well.
I haven't read through the bids, so I can't comment on them. However, I do think that the use of the .org space has been perverted from its original intent. (Bear in mind that I'm saying this as someone who bought a .net domain, though I'm not a network access provider, because the domain is intended for my home network.) There are some idiocies in the TLD structure, but unrestricted poaching in trying to make a profit from the .org space doesn't solve them.
4:04:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration
I [Jeff Darcy] finally found an actual recording of a platypus! [Canned Platypus]
3:41:39 PM # Google It!
The "Happy Mac" that users have become accustomed to seeing at startup has been replaced by a light grey screen with a dark grey Apple logo in the center.
— MacCentral
1:59:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Low-Hanging Fruit
The only chance that we have to influence the legislators is to use our smaller gravitational fields in a unified way. To do that we have to put aside our differences. I don't know code, but I know the legal system. And guys, let me tell you, we are the unarmed amatuers venturing into a well fortified military encampment. Let's find some common ground here. And quickly.
[Ernie the Attorney]
The fifth is the first Tuesday in November: Election Day.
The fifth is also, coincidentally enough, Guy Fawkes Day.
1:40:49 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics
1:27:52 PM #
In the world envisioned by our friends in Hollywood, there is no jazz.
12:25:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Media
In 1980, when the same sort of listener burnout bedeviled the biz and its superstars, salvation came from an unexpected source: MTV, an upstart cable channel that began broadcasting clips by a new generation of British bands simply because the established U.S. performers weren't yet making video clips. Groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran, and the Clash—whose label didn't even release the original version of its first album in the United States till 2000—broke through to a novelty-starved audience. Suddenly, home taping wasn't an issue anymore.This is just the sort of shock that the music industry needs—and labors so hard to prevent.
12:13:47 PM # Google It!
categories: Media
11:50:16 AM # Google It!
categories: Media
Tuesday, August 20, 200212:28:46 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
10:29:59 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Short version: Niek Hockx better take lots of beach pictures while he can.
9:42:12 AM # Google It!
The trend remains, though the main graph is disturbed by fluctuations at large entities, contributing to a 6% loss in Microsoft's share. It's difficult to lock in share in commodity markets.
8:04:04 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Where?
There.
Oh!
Don't touch the spider, he might bite.
He might not.
Don't touch him.
He might not bite.
You don't want to get bitten.
Maybe I do.
7:25:33 AM # Google It!
categories: Family
Monday, August 19, 20025:20:12 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Also the HTTP Redirection header is obeyed and stored to reduce the number of round trips retrieving files. In addition all this information is stored in a seperate file so that if you are using Aggie to read an OPML file from a remote site you still get all the speed enhancements.
— BitWorking
4:19:54 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
The man is the head of the family, but the woman is the neck.
— Italian proverb
1:33:33 PM #
Why is this bug annoying me so much? Because otherwise I would really like using this tool. If I can't use it to write technical documentation, then I won't use at all.
11:47:15 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
(Wow, the double-decode of title really broke the aggregator.)
I'm posting my tests to this feed, including meta elements. Hopefully I won't forget to uncheck the "Home Page" category checkbox. So far it seems that Radio is encoding just dandy.
11:26:25 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Isn't markup wonderful?
9:10:10 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Friday, August 16, 2002Let me guess -- this post will truncate after the word "system"? Nope. It truncates after a fixed char length.
4:51:24 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
I'm trying to truncate my feed again. Luckily Rick wrote down the instructions, since I forgot to write mine. :-( The UserTalk script Dave supplies
on truncate (description, adrpost) {return (string.firstSentence (description))}doesn't consider ! and ? to be the end of sentences. It stops at the first dot (.). It also has trouble with blockquotes, IIRC.
Good thing Google's around, otherwise I'd have even more difficulty following the historical thread on this topic. There's something to be said for threaded discussions in a single venue.
3:06:25 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
2:59:27 PM # Google It!
categories: Security
If you were Google, would you pay the $60,000,000 in license fees?
(That's retail: $4,000 per unit for Windows 2000 Advanced Server, for 15,000 units.)
10:49:04 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Thursday, August 15, 2002Vendor: I'm sorry, but that's proprietary technology.
Me: Oh? Really?
Vendor: We have a box that makes your site work. If you'd like to sign a contract with us for $20,000, we can answer that question for you.
5:08:06 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
We also need to detect new wireless access points. They can potentially open up the network in a big way and people all over the state want to add them in order to give users additional capabilities. They can also create huge issues with your security architecture.
Does your security architecture fail if there's a hole in the dike?
The design should, as much as possible, take into account that people will work around limitations you establish.
5:02:44 PM # Google It!
categories: Security
" The most successful online subscription service today is Classmates.com, with 3 million paying customers (almost 5 times WSJ.com). .... It is critically important to remember that they do not charge for content; they charge for functionality – the ability to contact long lost friends."
— Patrick Spain, co-founder of Hoover's, in an interview with eFinance Insider, via [PAID: the economics of content]
1:39:36 PM # Google It!
1:35:58 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics, Security
1:07:27 PM #
categories: Writing Online
SAN FRANCISCO--Telecommunications company Verizon Communications saved $6 million in equipment costs by moving its programmers to Linux computers, the company said Wednesday.The company cut costs by replacing programmers' Unix and Windows workstations with Linux systems that run OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, said George Hughes, a Verizon executive overseeing the work. The average desktop cost went from $22,000 to $3,000 per developer, he said in a talk at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.
— "Verizon switches programmers to Linux," c|net
$6 million is a lot more than that saved by cutting our coffee ration.
12:33:21 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics
Tim May, one of the founding members of Cypherpunks, got up and declared before a packed house that his job was not to make anyone's data secure. His job, he figured, was to make bribing the cleaning service more cost-effective than trying to hack in.....
The thread connecting all of this - Schneier, May, the Gartner analyst - is that technology will never be a panacea. Software can be perfectly suited to the task and still come up short. In the end, the users must be committed to its success.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Would it help if we remembered the etymology of technology?
10:36:14 AM # Google It!
categories: Language, Security
Wednesday, August 14, 2002I like your site. But it's not as useful as my News Aggregator. I assume you're working on a fix to whatever is causing my NAGG to redirect to your site. Thanks!
Well, Ernie, you caught on to my little ploy: redirect my many readers to the HTML version of the site in order to boost my standing in the RCS rankings. Drats! Foiled again!
Jon Udell's feed doesn't cause Radio's aggregator to get all cockeyed, because he's added a <fullitem/> element that the aggregator ignores.
4:19:35 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
I know you guys are loaded right now, but could you take a few minutes and
These two items are pushing me towards Blosxom or Moveable Type.
3:23:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
He wonders if Google will notice the change.
Google takes a while, but does notice if there's a permanent redirect, HTTP status 301. It collates the old location with the new. A search for my previous URL links to the current location.
What's unfortunate is that using a redirect in a meta element is less well known than using a refresh not really possible.
12:57:15 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online, System Administration
Damn straight.
11:40:08 AM #
Tuesday, August 13, 2002I don't know what to do.
That sounds familiar. So I click. It's a Remote Desktop/Terminal Services client using the Remote Display Desktop Protocol. Schweet. Next thing you know, even sysadmins won't have to have Windows on their desktop.
11:30:42 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
Monday, August 12, 2002Perhaps this points the way, to the next step.
(and yes, I'm still working on this post)
5:36:09 PM # Google It!
Some people like to argue that "intellectual property" is just exactly like real property and should have the same protection. Let's all remember that the law protects the sidewalks too.
— Edward Felten
A dozen or so neighbors bought the DSLAM for approximately $5,000. With the addition of modems, routers, and various other components (some of which they bought on eBay), the Ruby Ranch folks were able to build their own broadband service. The Coop now offers DSL service to all homes in the Ruby Ranch neighborhood. Their industriousness means they don't have to wait until the next decade to be "always on".
You don't necessarily need to be rural to make use of this technique. Your friendly neighborhood association could do the same. (I'm saying that as if I talk to my neighbors.)
4:55:52 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
This all reminds me of Greg Bear's Blood Music.
Answer? Avoid meat like the plague.
12:41:00 PM #
Friday, August 09, 2002
It's amazing to me how thin a line there is between "software that tries so hard to be 'smart' that it interferes with your workflow" and "software that does what you tend to want".
Quinn "The Eskimo!" documented some classic human interface subtleties. My personal favorite, because it is so annoying on other GUIs, is the Disappearing Cursor.
He used to have a discussion of the cursor blink rate, but that's no longer there.
12:13:34 PM # Google It!
categories: Dear Microsoft, Low-Hanging Fruit
[i]nteractive web access log analyzer: instead of getting a static set of reports, build queries like "referrers of all the 404s" or "requested URLs of all the hits referred by Google," and get tables and charts dynamically generated. I know it takes a while to crunch that kinda data, so this would be good for exhibiting or attaining one's grok-in-fullness status wrt data structures. [via Phil Pearson]
We're using a product that kinda-sorta does that. It requires Oracle, and has some issues with large data sets, but works reasonably well.
11:38:59 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
[G]etting dressed at 3:15 AM and driving 15 miles to the pharmacy to mix and make an IV for a patient in need-- and get the Rx out and deliver it in less than 90 minutes.
As I unhelpfully pointed out to an irate client who was displeased with our 15 minute response time: his problem was not a matter of life and death. It was very important to him, but there was no demonstrable impact on his business at 04:00 EST, and nobody died. We were not in the medical business.
On the other hand, alert project managers shouldn't let the sleep-deprived deal with the clients.
10:04:08 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
Thursday, August 08, 2002Does it mean you have a beeper? A cell phone? What's your response time?
Having only a pager is next to useless. You know that someone wants you, but you don't know for what. Have you tried to find a pay-phone lately? What if you're driving? (NOTE: paging more than once in a 10-minute period will result in the pager being thrown across the room.)
Having a text pager is an improvement, but still pretty much useless. You know that someone wants you, you know for what, but you don't have a means of letting that person know that the problem is insignificant. And so you receive page after futile page.
Having a cell phone is a vast improvement. You can receive messages, even text messages, and you can respond. If you leave it on.
Companies which issue only pagers to their staff don't have on-call support.
3:47:49 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
Now playing on Sirius satellite radio. How appropriate.
1:03:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Media
Unlike Jenny, I'm not an avid media consumer. Even if I were, the broadcast model fails: it doesn't fit into my schedule. What I want to watch is not on when I want to watch it. I expect some couch potatoes feel the same.
12:49:51 PM # Google It!
categories: Media
What is that screeching sound? It seems that some administrators are shocked, shocked to discover unplanned use of Groove on their internal networks. [Stephen Dulaney via Jon's Radio]
Does the BOFH need to give someone a good LARTing upside the head? Some IT organizations do not understand what their role is.
Note to the Mistaken: If you don't want users installing software, don't grant them administrative privileges on their workstations. Enjoy the rise in support calls that results, and congratulate yourself on securing your job.
11:44:08 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
It broke. There is something nasty in my news page that is automatically redirecting my browser to udell's new rss feed. I wonder where I configure mozilla to ignore redirects. It's annoying. Very annoying. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]
Sorry about that, Brett. I included Jon Udell's sample refresh statement in a post yesterday. Radio then failed to encode it properly. I thought it might do that, but didn't bother to check. I must be becoming not unlike a developer ;-)
10:22:10 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
10:09:46 AM # Google It!
Trellix powers the personal web sites at Tripod and c|net, among others. It should be interesting to see how Blogger works within Trellix Web Express, once the beta is released.
9:44:30 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Oddly enough, the same things that you find advertised on late-night broadcast television.
9:10:42 AM # Google It!
Wednesday, August 07, 2002- If you change the main template and regenerate your old site with a message pointing to the new site, remember to change it back when you regenerate the new site.- I wish I could insert into UserLand's Apache the one mod_rewrite directive that would redirect everything to the new site :-)
- I seem to have screwed up the old RSS file along the way. I really wish there were a way to replace its contents with:
[sample removed because Userland hasn't fixed a Very Important Bug]
As it stands, this might be the most disruptive part of the whole operation. Subscribers to the feed (evidently there are a goodly number) will need to resubscribe at the new address (standard version with short descriptions, alternate version with long ones). Come to think of it, there might be a way to make Radio upload an RSS file containing the redirect. But I can't face doing the experiment at 2:30AM...
He has three desires:
For the first, a simple blurb on his site suffices. For the second, he needs the minimal cooperation of Userland. The third requires a standard behavior. There was some small discussion of using a newElement. Now it appears that Kevin Burton has specified a new module for RDF, mod_subscription, which could help.
The second desire, continuity, can be provided very simply by Userland. Radio does not upload files which begin with a dot (.), for Security Reasons. Therefore an .htaccess file, which could modify the Apache configuration on radio.weblogs.com to include user-specific directives, can not be used. This is, however, what is needed to maintain continuity. So,
AccessFileName somethingThatDoesNotBeginWithADot
to the Apache configuration file, httpd.conf, and let Userland add
AllowOverride FileInfo
to the appropriate Directory section of said configuration file.
Redirect temp /0100887 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell Redirect permanent /0100887 http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell 3:33:44 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
This trend, from free to fee, is emblematic of a more ominous development in the Internet arena. ... [M]ature companies in mature categories striking back at Silicon Valley technology and the pricing-power collapse that it implies. They are doing so in Washington, DC and in state capitols, where the technology crowd is weakest and most clueless.....
[Silicon Valley] had no use for politics, no use for government, no use for the old rules. But it was more than that. They were openly disdainful of government regulation of any kind, and they didn't bother to hide their contempt.
So, instead of finding legislators who were willing to do nothing, they abstained from the system. DOJ v. Microsoft changed that for at least one company.
Just as their technology raised security concerns, it also threatened two established businesses in particular. The first was old-fashioned telephony -- the telephone business was the choke point of Internet technology. ... The problem was the so-called last mile: the wire into your home. Most homes were equipped with three wires: electric, telephone, and cable television. Most people connected to the Web over a standard phone line. Converting that line into a high-speed-access line was crucial to the success of all of the other Internet technologies that the Valley had to offer. [emphasis mine]But there was a problem. Regional Bell Operating Companies made their money on local and long-distance telephony. The Valley was proclaiming that the days of such services being fee-based were numbered; in the future ( through Internet-Protocol telephony ), all voice calls would be free. And it was true. If every last mile was connected by fiber-optic wire or high-speed cable, every voice call could be free.
The RBOCs, of course, did not see such a future as beneficial to their financial health. So they went to work at the state and federal level to forestall the implementation of this technology until they could control it. RBOCs have state and federal political relationships that are the envy of every industry, with the possible exception of the electric utilities.
And instead of working with the companies that controlled the chokepoint, they said, "The Internet will be the Death of you." Is it any wonder that we have over-capacity in the backbone and puny 56K links at home?
3:19:49 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Well, folks, in just this session of Congress alone I blocked several hundred bills from coming to the floor. These bills would have destroyed our Way of Life!
vs.
I passed the prescription drug coverage that you fine folks so desperately need! (I also extended the term for patent coverage, but that's neither here nor there.)
Does the Kosher politician abstain from porking the citizenry?
3:17:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Law
9:30:02 AM #
categories: Writing Online
Tuesday, August 06, 2002And here's where the problems continue.
netdiag says, "[FATAL] Failed to get system information of this machine." That's helpful. Luckily, Google says, ah-ha! Turns out that netdiag wants the Remote Registry Service. Good sysadmins that we are, we've already locked down our box and disabled the Remote Registry Service, so fat lot of good that does us.
At which point we write a scathing note to one Mr. Gates suggesting certain abnormal uses of certain appendages.
3:36:50 PM # Google It!
categories: Dear Microsoft, System Administration
* Maybe we need to pay people NOT to develop new protocols.
Yeah, I can do that.
I'd like to know the story behind this bullet:
ISO OSI threatened to replace TCP/IP
1:19:09 PM #
12:37:50 PM #
categories: Industry, Low-Hanging Fruit
Some in the sysadmin side of this field fail to share their knowledge. They see this as job security, making them irreplaceable. Others like products, often from a certain Redmond-based company, that require a lot of hand-holding, patching, and jury-rigging. They see this as job security, making them irreplaceable. Others like regulation. They see this as job security, making them irreplaceable.
I think there's more than enough to go around, so why make it harder for yourself?
As for moving production overseas, the same things hinder that movement that keep commuters on the trains into New York City.
12:04:52 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
The OS Product or OS Components contain components that enable and facilitate the use of certain Internet-based services. You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer.
The default behavior for Automatic Updates is to download the files automatically, but to notify the user before installing. You can change this to install automatically. This clause indemnifies Microsoft in the case that their software might have a few bugs in it.
Martha, do you think we should install this "Heap Overrun in HTR Chunked Encoding Could Enable Web Server Compromise" thing?
However, the validity of shrink-wrap licenses is still an open question.
11:06:52 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, System Administration
Monday, August 05, 2002"We knew that members don't pay for synergy. They want to get online and find a community."
— Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman, AOL, as quoted in The New York Times
A lot of legislation seems to be of just that sort.
9:29:40 AM # Google It!
categories: Law
Friday, August 02, 2002Mr. Palmer is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. Though I found his site because the Volokh Conspiracy linked to it, and someone else linked to the Volokhs', I had just finished reading a piece on him in the Summer 2001 issue of the St. John's College, the alumni magazine.
6:25:48 PM # Google It!
categories: Law
12:33:20 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media
10:51:00 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media
4) Where and how the DMCA should be applied is a matter of great controversy. The reported letter to SnoSoft was not consistent or indicative of HP's policy. We can say emphatically that HP will not use the DMCA to stifle research or impede the flow of information that would benefit our customers and improve their system security.
— statement of Hewlett-Packard
Thursday, August 01, 2002
How many people want to consign Euro-America to the status of has-been economic engine in order to perpetuate property, labor, investment and class institutions from an obsolescent social context?
6:40:00 PM #
How about that?
3:47:02 PM #
Microsoft® Hotmail® service is a leading provider of free, Web-based e-mail, which in January surpassed 100 million active users worldwide and continues to grow at the rate of approximately 11 million users per quarter. .... The current network of more than 5,000 servers is organized into about a dozen clusters; each consisting of front-end servers linked to data storage machines.
5000 copies of Windows 2000 Advanced Server at $3,799 per unit is only $18,995,000. Good thing that price includes 125,000 client access licenses, otherwise we'd have to figure out the cost of 100 million of those (about $2,000,000,000).
No wonder MSN doesn't make money: They must be paying retail. ;-)
(Microsoft's MSN, which had revenue of about $1.5 billion for the fiscal year ended in June, has an average revenue per subscriber of only about $11, not enough to make the service profitable.)
On a related note, Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer of Google, will be presenting the keynote at LISA 2002 on "Scaling the Web: An Overview of Google (A Linux Cluster for Fun and Profit)"
3:33:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
2:45:06 PM # Google It!
SecurityFocus reports on a device presented at the Black Hat Briefings: a modified Sega Dreamcast.
Higbee and Davis perform penetration tests, and developed their game box cum attack tool after finding themselves more than once with physical access to a client's facilities -- posing as an employee in one case, crawling through a drop ceiling in another -- but without a way to leverage that access into remote control of the company's network.
Remember that for all the notoriety Kevin Mitnick achieved, his techniques did not involve computers.
12:29:49 PM # Google It!
categories: Security
Why is that the vendors get upset when someone points out that if you turn the steering wheel hard left, hard right, hard left, you tip over? Where would car safety be today without Unsafe at Any Speed. What kind of heads would you find in your chicken nuggets without Upton Sinclair?
Pointing out that the bulletproof glass in a bank is not bulletproof is qualitatively different from shouting fire in a crowded theatre. It is because it lends itself to overly broad interpretation that I'm suprised the DMCA hasn't fallen on First Amendment grounds.
12:04:06 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Law, Security
11:21:05 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, Security
(the whole "original intent" thing is something I love discussing, especially after a few beers) [Ernie the Attorney]
Beer? Did he say, "beer"?
10:48:35 AM #
I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.
What am I waiting for, you might ask. I'm waiting for the large programs I use to become active, for Windows to catch up to me.
This is not exactly a resource constrained system. Time to open perfmon and capture some statistics.
9:36:41 AM # Google It!
categories: Coffee, Dear Microsoft