With ApacheCon EU just around the corner, you might like to hear what other people thought about the last one.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Phones on planes
While I’m entirely in agreement that a couple hours in flight without listening to strangers yammering on their cell phones is a *good* thing, the heart of Mike Elgan’s article is this:
Either phones and other gadgets can crash airplanes or they can’t. If they can, then we’ve got a serious problem on our hands, and airplanes need to be upgraded to protect the public safety.
What’s to stop terrorists from testing various gadgets, finding the ones with the highest levels of interferences, then turning on dozens of them at some crucial phase of flight, such as during a landing in bad weather?
If gadgets can’t crash planes, then the ban is costing billions of hours per year of lost productivity by business people who want to work in flight.
For the government to avoid knowing the answer is incredibly irresponsible.
The argument for lost productivity is, in my mind, hogwash (or, at least, of hardly any interest to me). Having a few hours away from the office is, for most of us, a good thing.
But to honestly not know whether cell phones can cause planes to crash is indeed profoundly irresponsible. If they can, then it is the responsibility of the FAA to require planes to be fixed. I’ve forgotten to turn off my cell phone on a plane. So have you. And some of you have left them on intentionally. Wouldn’t it be good to know if that’s likely to kill people?
Pornography in spam
Over the last few months, I have increasingly received pornographic images in spam. Various attempts at spam filtering have failed, and now I’m getting several dozen every day. The email in question is usually advertising genital enhancement concoctions, although occasionally it’s for either pornography sites or dating sites. Once or twice it is for prostitutes. Yes, I’m receiving email for prostitute services.
It has reached the point where I simply cannot check my email if my daughter is around.
I imagine that my various attempts to express how angry spammers make me have all fallen rather short. I spend hundreds of hours a year combating their efforts. Large businesses spend billions of dollars a year combating their efforts, and appear to consider it a legitimate business expense.
Additionally, I spend several minutes every day deleting spam comments from my various websites.
It stands to reason that there are people out there who purchase the advertised products, buy the advertised stocks, or buy memberships on the advertised websites. It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that there are a sufficient number of idiots in the world to support the huge bulk of businesses that employ this marketing strategy, but I guess there must be, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.
When an activity that is clearly, at least to me, criminal, consumes hours of my time, every week, I’m forced to wonder where “online” law enforcement is spending their time. Then, I read the news, and am reminded that we’re spending trillions of dollars helping the music industry make more money.
I honestly can’t figure out why we’d be willing to devote the force of online law enforcement to tracking down who is downloading a particular music file, and yet are incapable of locating, and incarcerating, the scum who are costing EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS IN THE WORLD a significant part of their IT budget. Surely that’s a large enough lobbying group? Why do we just put up with this as though it is an ordinary part of the cost of doing business?
Ex-10
Some time yesterday, my X-10 stuff abruptly quit working. Restarting the service hasn’t helped. Restarting the various bits of hardware hasn’t helped. Everything is unreachable. I’m having to re-learn how to turn lights on and off. I’m not yet sure if I’m going to replace the transceiver, which is presumably the bit that has gone bad. Perhaps I’ll see if I can stand living how normal people live, at least for a while.
Is it a poem?
In honor of National Poetry Month, I offer:
Poem?
When I was young, I learned that poems rhyme.
And so, when I discovered that my Best Beloved wrote poems
as lyrical as de la Mare, and more meaningful than Causley
but which did not rhyme
I was somewhat taken aback.
Was it poetry?
Not being one to care what the dictionary had to say on the topic,
I searched, instead, my soul,
to see if this was poetry.
While there, I found that, not only was it poetry
but that there were several poems of my own
cowering there, afraid to come out into the light
because they knew not what Iambic Pentameter might be,
and were afraid of the scorn of the Madding Crowd.
So, is this a poem?
I’m relieved to discover that I no longer care.
Palms and Macs
It has long irritated me how poorly Palm devices are supported on Macs. The Palm desktop for Mac is the finest software that 1989 has to offer. (Actually, the last release was 2005.) It doesn’t sync the memo pad. It doesn’t sync tasks (todo items) properly. It doesn’t integrate with iCal particularly well (there’s no support for categories, for example). And the user interface looks like something I’d expect on Windows 3.11.
And folks keep telling me “use Missing Sync, it’s better.”
I was leery of this, because I knew that it wouldn’t work, that it would introduce other problems, and that I’d regret spending money on it.
Finally, this week, I received an unexpected royalty check, and I got Missing Sync.
Turns out I was rather too optimistic.
It is duplicating events. It is duplicating task categories, and moving my items from one category to another. It is putting some of my events in the Havana timezone, and others in the Indianapolis timezone. It is duplicating text files that I had on my Palm. It is occasionally deleting recurring events, or eliminating all but the first occurrence.
So, to say that I’m disappointed would be a bit of an understatement. In fact, the only thing that does work as advertised is that I am now able to sync my memo pad entries to my computer, which was a major reason for getting this.
And each time I sync, there are new surprises awaiting me. A new category. A missing category. A missing appointment. An appointment shifted an hour or two in one direction or another, or duplicated a few times.
*sigh*. What a waste of time and money.
Bob Pastorio
This weekend, someone I never met passed away quietly in his sleep. Bob was a frequent poster on a mailing list that I’ve been on since the very beginning – the FoodWine mailing list – where he offered sage advice, clever insight, and good food suggestions.
It’s hard to know what to say about someone that one has only known via email messages. We’ll certainly miss him on the list.
Unless the Lord watch
Mzee took it quite to heart –
to stay awake was in vain.
He looked so peaceful, too,
sure in his knowledge
that the Lord watched the house.
Each night, the Lord watched,
and Mzee slept,
but not in vain.
And we, too, slept
fearless
with peaceful dreams
even knowing that Mzee slept as well as we did
For we knew
Unless the Lord watch the house
the watchman sleepeth in vain
and if Mzee felt safe,
we, too, must be.
The sickos are in the minority
Kathy Sierra’s situation has now made it onto international news where they seem, in my opinion, to miss the point in a rather important way. They quote Tim saying that we need a bloggers’ code of ethics, or code of conduct, or something. The thing is, we have one. It’s called common human decency.
The sickos are in the minority. It only takes a handful of sickos to poison the water. Kathy is a great writer, a phenomenal speaker, giving what I believe was the very best talk at OSCon last year, and from all accounts a delightful person.
So how is it that some sick perverted (no word suffices – use your imagination) can intimidate her, cause her to withdraw from public life? Is it because bloggers, as a whole, are sick and perverted people, unable to differentiate the disgusting things they write in black-on-white from actual things said to actual people in the actual world? No. It’s because in any group of people, there is a certain subset of deviants. When the group gets large enough, the deviants start to stand out, and the press will be quick to label them as the norm. Viz. Pat Robertson.
Is it something that a code of conduct will fix?
No, of course not. Because the type of people that need the code are the type that won’t follow it.
I think that Kathy has the right idea when she says:
These people are interested in rage and they think that if you aren’t enraged then you are part of the problem. It seems that they hate my optimism.
Kathy’s talk at OSCon inspired me specifically because of her optimism that we, the software developers and content producers and writers and technology people, can make the world a better place, if we focus on what’s important – people, and helping them achieve their dreams. What I do, day after day, is create tools so that people can express themselves. That’s my job as a web application developer. If I lose sight of that, and create tools because it’s cool to create tools, then I’m becoming introverted and self-serving. But when I can talk with actual customers, and see what dream they are trying to achieve, and then be a part of helping them achieve that, then I am in turn achieving my dream. Indeed, this is why I became involved in Apache – because I could help people achieve what they were trying to do, while at the same time I was expressing my own talent for writing.
Some perverted juvenile criminals – and let’s not lose sight of the fact that what they did is criminal – have undermined the work of a great woman. This does not mean that the rest of us producing content on the web are all perverted criminals. Yes, we absolutely need a code of conduct. That code of conduct is this: Understand that who you are online is not disjoint from who you are. Understand that the people you speak to online are people, and not merely digital constructs. And if you are speaking to people online in such a degrading, criminal manner, you are unwell. You are sick. You are insane. You need to seek professional help, because what you have is dangerous, life threatening, and catching.
Kathy, I’m so sorry that there are monsters in the world who don’t know how to conduct themselves in civilized society. Please know that they are in the minority, and all sane, normal people who have heard you speak respect what you have to say, and respect you.
Twitter, take 2
Ok, after a little thought, here’s my revised take on Twitter.
Twitter appears to be a hosted blog service. Nothing more nor less. The only thing innovative about it is that it limits your postings to 90 characters, and thus encourages you to post less, more frequently. Since I already have a blog, if people want to subscribe to my RSS feed, well, I’ve already got one. And it doesn’t limit me to 90 characters. If I can say something in 90 characters, it probably wasn’t worth saying.