I wonder what my collection of Norton Antivirus discs will have. I have quite the set, from Norton 1997 to System Works 2000 with one or more copies of Norton Anti Virus 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
Geek Thoughts
Buy My Books!
Category: Technology
Fun with Software Pricing
Joel Spolsky examines an important topic: Camel and Rubber Duckies.
It covers the vagaries of pricing computer software, which is an important decision hopefully forthcoming from Jeracor. When we get our bountiful off-the-shelf applications written, I mean.
Buy My Books!
Zoo-Sized Pet Peeve
You know, I really hate when advertisements in online papers require an additional download to view. For example, in the stories today on StL Today, the online arm (complete with swinging arm flab) of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an in-article advertisement needs a plug in and instead of displaying with all its clock-cycle-grabbing beauty, overlays the actual text in the story.
Here’s a quick word to you online marketing types: I am not going to download a plugin to see advertising. What were you thinking? Pinheads.
Buy My Books!
The Government is my Firewall
Whenever I read a story like the one I saw on CNN.com entitled “Bush pressed for more Net security“, I immediately start putting the words crony and capitalist together and start leaving laissez-faire alone. For once we get into the details-that is, the first paragraphs-we see what this group wants:
Computer-security experts, including former government officials, urged the Bush administration on Tuesday to devote more effort to strengthening defenses against viruses, hackers and other online threats.
The Bush administration should spend more on computer-security research, share threat information with private-sector security vendors, and set up an emergency computer network that would remain functional during Internet blackouts, a computer-security trade group said.
It’s a trade group, which represents companies that take money to do computer security services such as researching computer-security, sharing threat information with private sector security vendors (each other), and setting up emergency computer networks to remain functional during Internet blackouts. That is, the trade group wants the government to devote money to pay to the trade group’s members. The call is as relevant as any group of potato farmers or mohair ranchers shrieking that the people of the United States need their product to survive.
I am alarmed, however, with the amount of play and seriousness given to the idea that the government should do something to ensure the security of computer networks. As companies have sacrificed security in developing their infrastructures and network capabilities in favor of cost savings, expediency, and convenience, they should not expect a government bailout now. The government undoubtedly should expend public funds to ensure that its capabilities remain intact during an emergency, but it shouldn’t retrofit, expensively and bureauwastefully, security for any factory or utility that placed its flow controls online on the Internet for convenience and a chance to lay off people who would have to check those controls in person. I don’t want to spend tax money to ensure that my bank is secure nor that my credit card companies can weather an attack, nor to ensure that my power company can continue delivering amperage down my pipes; that’s a cost of business, which the businesses often pass on to me through service fees and surcharges so that those costs don’t come out of the profit margin and the shareholder’s take.
However, since these lobbyists want the best of all worlds: surcharges to charge consumers for the cost of business and the government, and by that I mean us taxpayers, actually paying for the costs of business. Since the customer or taxpayer backlash hasn’t arisen, Willie, it’s go time.
As a taxpayer and a customer, I don’t look forward to the expanding synergy between government security administration and private industry. Let’s take an example from recent history: airports. Airlines, leaky boats which the government frequently bails out with buckets of taxpayer cash, and airport authorities, government bureaucracies in their own right in many cases and not very good at for-profit in others, abdicated their obligation to secure their places of business. First, they took government funds to pay for their own surly security employees, and when that wasn’t enough, the government stepped in and provided its own employees, surly and unaccountable to the private sector, to grope grandma.
So call it a slippery slope if you will, but private/public partnerships do resemble a water park. If a group of lobbyists paid highly by companies, whether profitable or failing, calls for government aid, they often get more than we customers or taxpayers want or deserve. Imagine a decade hence, when companies have pissed away the government funding on efforts to secure further government funding–which is where most government funding goes, even in the government. The private-public partnership has failed, and some legislator who wants to get on television midwifes the Computer Security Administration (CSA). This new authority dictates that computer owners must install the government flavor of McAfee anti-virus and must allow the government to schedule scans twice a week. Anyone who does not let the government perform its security function, loosely defined by Congress and arbitrarily envisioned by a mid-level Homeland Security manager looking forward to a better appointed position, faces a fine or felony charges just like impudent fliers do now. Our leadership class explains that responsible Internet travellers must accept this sacrifice, and the media will find some AOL user to explain that it’s a good idea and doesn’t impair his experience at all (it wouldn’t). The government gets to scan your hard drive every night for the good of the nation, and if you don’t like it, in four years you can vote for a different legislator too timid to agitate for its reversal.
Once the government takes over the security, all customer ill will regarding the inconvenience and the intrusiveness of the practices goes to the government and its employees, and the companies and their trade groups can only shrug their collectivist shoulders and say to their customers, sorry, it’s the government running its fingers over your shapely posterior, not us. All responsibility for irresponsibility successfully shirked, the trade groups can turn their attention to the next government handout–and hand over.
Sound crazy? Imagine what you would have thought about current TSA practices in 1994. Or 1987.
To make a short story long, Internet and corporate network security are not the government’s business. They’re the exclusive burden of companies who choose to participate in networks and of the consortia and standards bodies and organizations, well, organized by private industry. If our “capitalist” industries cede that obligation to the government, they’re putting their short term cost savings ahead of the ultimate best interests of their customers and the interests of the citizens of the Republic.
Buy My Books!
Open Sourcers Hate Technical Writers
There, I’ve said it: those whack job developers in the open source movement absolutely hate technical writers and seek, in their passive aggressive ways, to make communications professionals look stupid. My proof? Recursive abbreviations.
Look, when a technical writer puts an abbreviation into a document, he or she should spell it out the first time, like this: Java Server Pages (JSP).
But these damn silly recursive abbreviations look really silly when presented this way: PHP Hypertext Protocol (PHP) or GNUs Not UNIX (GNU).
It’s designed so that technical writers cannot sound intelligent while trying to explain the esoteric and eldritch secrets of the divine open-source technology technotheocracy and so that the rabble–that is, the users, cannot fathom the depths of their geniuses.
Pathetic, that’s what it is. And I call it.
Buy My Books!
Perspective in the Geek World
Dale Franks at Q and O sees that Sun is just giving Solaris away these days, and he rightfully sneers:
Solaris isn’t some mystically wonderful operating system chock full of Sun’s proprietary goodness. It’s just freakin’ UNIX for cripe’s sake. They’ve been giving away a free UNIX-based operating system for years, anyway. It’s called Linux, and despite all its hype, it’s still where it was five years ago: restricted to the hard-core, geek community. Ask 10 average computer users what Linux is, and 9 of ’em will tell you it’s the blanket-toting Great Pumpkin kid from Peanuts. In fact, if Sun is giving away Solaris, I suspect it’s far more likely that they’re doing so because Linux is eating into their user base, and there’s a whole UNIX-based open source community that’s starting to eat their lunch.
Microsoft, on the other hand, owns the desktop. Look, the desktop OS is about as perfect an example of a natural monopoly that you can find. If you have a business–and this is more true the larger the business is–you can’t have twelve different operating systems running concurrently. If you do, your corporate IT division has to puff up like a tick just to support all the different configuration, software, and hardware tics that will result. So will your training section, because every time a typist/clerk has to move from the UNIX/StarOffice system to Windows/Office 200X system, you’ve gotta put them through a whole new training cycle to learn all the new stuff.
I’ve linked to Dale Franks’ posts before because he’s a geek with perspective. Software’s but a tool, and its silly factions of technology partisans make as much sense as contractors continuing to argue Bosch versus Black and Decker. Who, outside of those partisans and some salespeople, cares?
Perhaps I’ve stumbled upon the secret of open-source addiction amongst the geek community–not only do the developers get to write it, but they get to sell it, too, but they’re not very good salespeople.
Or maybe that’s not an insight after all.
Buy My Books!
Crunch Time
I’m reminded of a project manager who once used, “We all have to pitch in and give a little extra when crunch time comes….” when I read this story:
Within weeks production had accelerated into a ‘mild’ crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this “pre-crunch” was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don’t know how many of the developers bought EA’s explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title’s shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.
Remember to be Machiavellian with your employers because they most certainly treat you that way; once you’ve given them 50 hours for a crunch, they will expect 50 and will ask you for 60.
Buy My Books!
The Microsoftization of Google Continues
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs this piece of insightful analysis about the new Google desktop searching application:
People who use public or work computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new privacy risk to worry about: a new free tool from Google Inc. that indexes a PC’s contents to locate data quickly.
If it’s installed on computers at libraries and Internet cafes, users unwittingly could allow people who follow them on a PC to see sensitive material in e-mails they’ve exchanged. That could lead to disclosure of passwords, conversations with doctors or lawyers, or viewed Web pages detailing purchases.
Spare me.
First of all, many companies closely monitor the stuff filtering through their computers, even those used by individual employees. Yes, Virginia, your computer at work isn’t your computer, and you better believe that the creepy guy down in IT (to purloin the stereotype) reads everything you type into it, so don’t do anything on it that you wouldn’t want everyone else to see. Personal banking, hot e-mails to your wife and mistress, nothing. Expect that you’ll get a temp or consultant working in IT who wants nothing more than to snag your credit card or passwords before moving on.
And come on, if you use an Internet cafe, library, or college computer lab for anything but the most mundane Internet browsing, you’re already asking for the big hurt. Not only do you have to worry about an IT infrastructure staffed with transients (see above for risks involved with that), but you’re also facing other anonymous users installing spyware. I mean, public computers are public.
Unfortunately, the author of this piece attributes these security risks with the Google desktop when the risks actually represent an inherent danger of the computing environments described whether or not Google’s desktop has been installed.
Perhaps Google is on its way to being the next big technology company for media and the general population to nip in the flanks.
Buy My Books!
Always Check the ALT Tags
As a Web software tester, I always check the ALT tags of images and, much to the chagrin of the developers with whom I work, I frequently take issue with non-parallel text, misspellings, or grammatical errors in the text that displays when a user mouses over an image.
Which is why you’ll never see this in a site (or HTML-enabled e-mail) I’ve tested:
A fund-raising e-mail from a Democratic congressional candidate contained a hidden expletive directed at his opponent, a newspaper reported Saturday.
The expletive aimed at Republican Greg Walcher could be seen when recipients dragged their cursor over an image of John Salazar, who sent the e-mail to supporters Thursday seeking donations, The Denver Post reported.
Sheesh. But I expect the team who put together the piece wasn’t concerned with quality.
(Link seen on Instapundit, who needs a link from me like he needs to find a penny on the sidewalk.)
Buy My Books!
Google Desktop Deemed Creepy
In a Tech Test Drive column, Mike Langberg finds the new Google desktop useful, but creepy. Why is it creepy?
Desktop Search does three things in particular that could compromise your privacy when someone else uses your computer:
First, the software keeps a copy of all your AOL Instant Messenger conversations. AIM, for many users, is like talking over the water cooler at work — you say things you don’t want preserved for posterity. Until now, AIM conversations with your buddies disappeared from your computer the moment you closed the discussion window. Desktop Search, however, makes a copy of AIM conversations and keeps them forever.
Second, the software keeps its own copy of all your Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail messages — even after you delete them from within Outlook or Outlook Express. A confidential company memo, in other words, will still pop up during Google searches after you’ve emptied the Deleted Items folder in Outlook.
Third, the software keeps a copy of every Web page you visit and lists those pages in search results with the date and time of your visit. This even includes Web pages that are supposed to be secure from prying eyes, such as those run by online banking sites.
It’s creepy because it shows you the sort of personal information that someone else’s servers already store about you and gives you insight into how much information you’re leaving scattered around the world.
The fact that it’s available on your local machine shouldn’t give you additional pause unless you’re susceptible to the old ploy of letting a man with a thick Slavic accent whose car has broken down sit at your computer so he can send an e-mail to his mechanic. Or, of course, if your local machine is fundamentally insecure.
Nevertheless, I have given the edict to those machines that I administer that Google Desktop shall not be installed. Crikey, how about you do some organization of your materials and then use the Microsoft Find feature to fill the gaps, wot?
Buy My Books!
Sounds Like a QA Problem
You know who’s to blame for this, don’t you?
NASA’s Genesis space capsule crashed in the Utah desert last month because a critical piece of equipment that was supposed to trigger the release of two parachutes apparently was installed backward, space-agency officials said Thursday.
Damn Quality Assurance! They should catch it when the engineers put the switch is put on backwards!
Buy My Books!
Good Software Takes Time
In a piece entitled “Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It“, Joel Spolsky explains how good, robust software needs time:
To experienced software people, none of this is very surprising. You write the first version of your product, a few people use it, they might like it, but there are too many obvious missing features, performance problems, whatever, so a year later, you’ve got version 2.0. Everybody argues about which features are going to go into 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, because there are so many important things to do. I remember from the Excel days how many things we had that we just had to do. Pivot Tables. 3-D spreadsheets. VBA. Data access. When you finally shipped a new version to the waiting public, people fell all over themselves to buy it. Remember Windows 3.1? And it positively, absolutely needed long file names, it needed memory protection, it needed plug and play, it needed a zillion important things that we can’t imagine living without, but there was no time, so those features had to wait for Windows 95.
I would disagree with the first sentence though; to experienced people working in the software industry, this might come as a surprise, but to many people in the software industry, good software is software that goes out on schedule or satisfies the terms of the contract; quality and usability don’t figure in.
(Link seen on American Digest.)
Buy My Books!
Your Data Or Your Life
Maybe I’m just a simpleton working in the very self-important IT world, but when I read Charles Cooper’s latest column, “Access to Tom Ridge or bust“, I found it a little hard to worry that the Department of Homeland Security is spending too little (for the IT industry’s taste) of its limited resources on protecting data:
Industry executives have long complained about the lack of attention given to an issue that rates more important than the occasional photo op.
There’s a pattern here. Both previous cybersecurity czars, Richard Clarke and Howard Schmidt, urged the government to move faster to combat the threat to the nation’s information infrastructure. But whatever progress has come has been at a snail’s pace.
You can understand why the administration is not circling the wagons. Unlike Iraq or the economy, the state of the nation’s Internet infrastructure won’t be on many people’s minds when they enter the voting booths Nov. 2. Out of sight, out of mind–unless, of course, the entire kit and caboodle comes crashing down because of an attack.
Until then, the Bushistas can continue to pursue a policy of benign neglect while pretending to be doing important work. It’s great politics, and isn’t that what this is really all about?
Oh, spare me. If my bank loses my data and takes a couple of days to restore from backups, I’ll be fine. Even if they lose all the money we have in the bank, our Just In Time earning habits ensure we won’t lose a lot of fiscal inventory. Uf the supply chain management of gas facilities prevents me from fueling my truck, I have a bike. I can walk. I can understand the four way stop concept if the stoplights go out, and if some stupid utility company put Internet-ready (that is insecure-already) flow controls that will leave me in the dark, I have pressboard to burn.
But if some jihadist cell streeams over the southern border and snipes, nukes, bombs, or otherwise kills me for the greater glory of its own fevered death fetish, I don’t have to worry about enduring temporary discomfort, ainna?
Self-appointed technomessiahs need to gain a little perspective and learn the difference between life and their livelihoods before lamenting that not enough chow is put in their federal trough. To blame it on the Bush administration’s political concerns is crass.
Buy My Books!
Steve Jobs and Michael Dell ARE IN MY HEAD!
Dell Computers and Apple Computers are trying to brainwash me. Here’s how:
In the course of my self-employed Pat-Verbeek-of-Software-Testingdom, I have cause to use an eMac computer and a Dell workstation to test the various and sundry applications that clients pay me innumerable (as I explain to the auditor) dollars to test. My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I’ve used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses.
But the eMac has a concave keyboard; that is, it’s curved, with the tops of the keys actually turning toward your fingers like flowers to a star.
But the Dell workstation has a convex keyboard; that is, it’s bowed outward, like its keys are employing centrifugal force to fling my software-destroying fingers into space.
And you might think it’s nothing but some sort of Substance of Style-ing to be neat-o, but friends, I can tell you what they’re doing–they’re doing Pavlovian and Skinner tricks on you, and you’re the dog and chicken. Apple, dog, and Dell, chicken. Pay attention!
You see, if you use one of these freak keyboards as your primary interface with the greater intelligence that is the Internet, Blogosphere, and Return to Zork, you’ll grow accustomed to the unholy shape beneath your fingers. Then, when you’re forced to use a different computer, that is, not a Dell or not a Macintosh, you’ll think it weird, inconvenient, and slightly uncomfortable. All because you’ll have to use a normal keyboard.
So forget Bill Gates; he’s trying to rule the world in an honest, straightforward fashion. Dell and Jobs are conditioning you, man. Rise up! By an old keyboard at a yard sale for a buck and use it. Or you will be a lifelong customer lackey of one of these aforementioned diablolical geniuses.
I beg of you.
(Why, yes, another part of my s.e.P.V.S.T. lifestyle is drinking a lot of coffee, sometimes two or three pots a day. Why do you ask?)
Buy My Books!
Renaming the Hamlet Test
Some IT shops within the greater St. Louis area have learned to fear the Hamlet test, wherein a software tester (whose identity shall remain hidden to protect him from the raging hordes of developers seeking revenge) pastes the entire contents of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a text box to see what happens when he tries to commit it to the database.
Well, those same developers should prepare themselves for the next generation of the Hamlet test: Hamlet in Klingon.
Unicode includes Klingon letters, ainna?
Buy My Books!
Another Helpful Error Message
Here’s a friendly error message courtesy of Amazon.com:
Browser Bug?
Attention: There appears to be a bug in the web browser
you are currently using. Here are some ways to get around the problem:
- To return to the page you were previously on:
–click the BACK button on your browser’s navigation bar until you
reach the desired page. - To checkout –click on the shopping cart icon at the top
of the page and proceed through the checkout process using the standard
server (instead of the secure server). You can phone or fax the credit
card information to us.
Your Web browser is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.
Error handling by blaming the user and the user’s Web browser. Swell, Amazon. Undoubtedly, your developers have convinced your project managers that this is acceptable, when it’s clearly not.
Buy My Books!
That’s a Friendly Error Message
A little helpful note from Blogger:
Internal Server ErrorThe server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, blogger@trakken.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
You know what I did? I used your schnucking product, that’s what I did.
Buy My Books!
No Irony To See Here, Move Along
From Mandrake Linux’s download page:
Since Mandrakelinux is an Open Source product, it needs your financial contribution. Developing a Linux distribution is very costly, so it’s up to the community of users to ensure its health. Do you want to help Mandrakelinux become even more robust and powerful? Would you like to see Mandrakelinux become the next standard operating system?
Before downloading our products, we ask for your support by joining the Mandrakelinux Users Club. The Club was created to fund the development of the Mandrakelinux distribution and to pay the salaries of employees who are dedicated to “external” Free Software projects such as the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, Prelude, and others. The Mandrakelinux Club also provides attractive benefits to its members such as specialized Internet services and download of many extra-applications.
Free Software can only remain healthy with your financial support, so please join the Mandrakelinux Users Club today.
I understand that’s why some communities–called “companies”–charge money for things.
It’s organic socialism, and I don’t mind it a bit; however, applying the same concepts to government leads to all kinds of irritation on the part of us heartless fiscal conservatives.
In case you’re wondering, I didn’t download from the Mandrake page; I’d rather pay for the convenience of having a set of CDs and some rudimentary documentation without having to read through a bunch of developer-created documentation scattered among Web pages.
Buy My Books!
Party Like It’s 1989
Hot or Not in ASCII.
Damn, look at the semi-colons on her!
Buy My Books!
Think About It
Adobe: A sun-dried, unburned brick of clay and straw.
Acrobat: One who is skilled in feats of balance and agility in gymnastics.
So one would think that an adobe acrobat would be the idiomatic equivalent of a lead zeppelin or a stone kite; that is, something that doesn’t fly very well.
Buy My Books!