Category: Technology

Brian and the Argotnots

Brian J. Noggle

Today, friends and readers, I coin for your amusement a term in the testers’ cant, a secret language spoken to confound developers. Just as developers confound us with talk of materialized views, mainClasses, and environmental PATH variables (all of which we testers know to be fictional), we testers have devised our own secret language with words and terms we can use to explain problems and then, with exaggerated patience and a healthy eye-rolling, define those terms for the silly developers who really don’t know anything about testing.

Today’s term: a zool.

Zool: a row in a database, added via an INSERT command, or rendered in the presentation layer (client application or Web interface) that is expected to contain information, but because of defective behavior of the software does not.

Used in context: "There is no data, only zool."

Try to use it in a sentence today. Extra credit goes to those who use it but don’t actually work in IT.

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I Think Someone Has Modified The History Books

Brian J. Noggle

Here’s a newsbit on CNet dated April 29:

Google denies FBI link to Gmail

Google on Thursday denied that it has had any contact with the FBI regarding the design of its Gmail Web e-mail service. The search firm’s denial came after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI seeking information about whether the bureau was considering the “possible use of Google’s Gmail service for law enforcement and intelligence investigations.” EPIC, which gave an award last week to a California state senator who is trying to ban Gmail, announced the request immediately after Google said it was filing for an initial public offering.

Critics immediately criticized EPIC’s request as a publicity stunt and because the nonprofit likened Google’s Web-based e-mail service to the FBI’s controversial Carnivore wiretapping utility and the Pentagon’s discontinued “Orwellian Total Information Awareness program.” EPIC’s request also asked whether Google had discussed licensing its search technology, in use by customers in the private sector, to the FBI “to further law enforcement investigations or intelligence gathering activities.” Google spokesman Nathan Tyler replied: “I cannot confirm whether they’re using our technology.”

Funny, I don’t remember the program having Orwellian right in the title.

But I’d better not draw attention to it, or it’s off to Room 101 for me for questioning CNet.

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Put Your Back Into It

Brian J. Noggle

Some phishers don’t even seem to be trying. Here’s one such e-mail I got today:

From: *Citi_C_a_r_d_s~Members
To: stlbrianj@hotmail.com
Subject: Citionline |E-Mail| Verification – stlbrianj@hotmail.com
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 19:42:58 +0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from cdm-66-76-235-89.tyrd.cox-internet.com ([66.76.235.89]) by
mc3-f40.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6824); Thu, 22 Apr 2004
12:35:09 -0700
X-Message-Info: 6sSXyD95QpXLoZz646LSJ7Ue2E0865la
Return-Path: BarbMartincich@ihaveahugecrotch.com
Message-ID:
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 22 Apr 2004 19:35:10.0582 (UTC)
FILETIME=[ECCAF960:01C428A0]

To_veerification_of _your_ [Email] address click on_the_link :

[hyperlink deleted to protect you, gentle reader.]

and enter in the |ittle window_ _your_ Citi ATM/Debit full_Card_number and
Pin
that you use in local Atm_Machine..

8QkooH8y8N eg4f36 5f7l0ly3v2e3h3x3f6c 7d022oda n9dh 7vz1h020z kNoph86

Like I’m going to fall for that again.

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Indian Tech Companies Outsource, Too

Brian J. Noggle

Remember those tech jobs leaving for foreign shores? Cue the Neil Diamond, because they’re coming to America. The Washington Post reports:

Infosys Technologies Ltd., which has become India’s second-largest software maker thanks largely to outsourced work from the West, is investing $20 million to create nearly 500 consulting jobs in the United States.

Just stay competitive, fellows, and commerce will flow to you.

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Hardware or Software?

Brian J. Noggle

Techdirt links to a story about a guy getting charged for putting a keystroke logger on a computer where he worked. Mike at Techdirt says this:

The interesting thing, though, is the only way they caught him was because he was fired from the company and asked another employee to remove the keystroke logger. In other words, it wasn’t any real detective work, but him telling someone. This means, if he hadn’t mentioned it, it’s likely this would have continued and no one would have noticed. It seems likely that things like keystroke loggers are becoming increasingly popular for those involved with corporate espionage – but it doesn’t seem like most companies do much to check if their computers are clean from such programs. [Emphasis mine]

Mike’s making an assumption, though. Here’s the text from the story:

A California man who prosecutors say planted an electronic bugging device on a computer at an insurance company was indicted on Tuesday on federal wiretapping charges in what prosecutors said was the first case of its kind.

Larry Lee Ropp, a 46-year-old former insurance claims manager, is the first defendant charged with a federal crime for using a “keystroke logger,” which tracks the activities on a computer and feeds the information back to its owner, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said.

Sounds like a hardware keystroke logger to me. What, you don’t know what a hardware keystroke logger is? Of course not, you’re not the Shidoshi of Paranoia. A hardware keystroke logger plugs in between the keyboard and the keyboard socket on the back of the PC. It looks like an adapter, but it’s got memory on it. Whatever you type goes into the memory and then to the computer, too. Bad guy comes along later, unplugs it, plugs it in on his computer, uses an escape key sequence, and copies the log onto his computer. You don’t have to break into the ‘hacked’ system to get it, and there are no software gotchas to deal with.

Also, it would explain why he needed someone to remove it from the PC, wot? Hey, buddy, just unplug my adapter I loaned to the secretary.

Learn your lesson, my students. Always look at the back of the PC before you start typing. I do.

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Not Worth My Time

Brian J. Noggle

Free clue to banks, financial institutions, and my creditors: Online bill paying is not worth my time nor trouble.

The Washington Post‘s Leslie Walker muses on online bill paying, but she focuses on the glitzy side:

Some things you expect to be no-brainers online turn out to be as tricky as a Rubik’s cube. Bill payments fall into that category. Nine years after the Web went commercial, many large Internet players are still trying to piece together the electronic-bill puzzle.

The puzzle, I assume, is to do it effectively. Which would mean profitably, of course, but the people behind the online bill paying maelstrom need to remember an important thing: it’s got to benefit consumers as well.

America Online is the latest to believe it has found the answer. Launched on Tuesday, AOL Bill Pay lets AOL members pay 2,500 different billers from a single menu. The service is free to subscribers even though AOL is paying a partner, Yodlee Inc., an undisclosed sum to do the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

America Online, unfortunately, you are nothing but the mechanism through which the money would flow. You can pay 2,500 billers? Big whoop. My checkbook is virtually unlimited, as are the more secure money orders. The number of people you can pay are not the stumbling block.

Increasingly, online bill paying is becoming a strategic tool used by large businesses to reel in and retain customers, especially since it appeals strongly to folks with high incomes and lots of monthly bills. Banks and other financial institutions have been falling over one another in the rush to offer free online bill payments, based on a belief that customers who take the trouble to set up the accounts will remain more loyal than those who don’t. So far, one-third of the nation’s largest banks and brokerage firms offer free Internet bill payments, according to financial research firm TowerGroup.

Okay, so large businesses will accept bill payment through this medium as a means to reel in and retain customers. Hmmm. So what? What’s the advantage over cash, check, or money order? I reckon it might be cheaper or more instantaneous for the recipient who accepts online bill pay. After all, the money’s sucked from the payer’s account into your coffers immediately, without the need to hire a bunch of letter openers.

But what’s the benefit for me, the payer?

Let’s face it. As far as these online bill paying schemes go, the people whom I can pay are still limited. A user cannot necessarily pay everyone whom he wants to pay, and so the user is expected to make his life more complicated using a variety of different mechanisms through which he can settle his accounts.

As Walker points out in her piece, she doesn’t want to spread her secure financial information too much throughout the Internet–yet, the recipients, and the companies who play middlemen, all get the data. It’s a security risk multiplied by the number of payees and middlemen. Any one of them could get hacked and suddenly, I am buying computers for Romanians.

Worse, if anyone of these entities has a mere computer glitch, suddenly my bank account is empty and all other checks, debits, and withdrawals are bouncing, and my bank is charging me an extra $20 a day to remind me that my account is still empty. I have seen enough critical defects outside the financial industry to recognize how tenuous the Web is and to put my actual information–and my credit rating–on the line.

In exchange for assuming these risks, what do my creditors and the online bill-paying industry offer me? Convenience.

I say: Not good enough.

So as a consumer, I am expected to incur the risks of theft, identity theft, and defect-related (unreversible) Insufficient Funds notices for mere convenience, while the person I am paying gets instantaneous access to the cash at a lower cost to the creditor. Sometimes I can pay extra for these goodies, too. You know what? Maybe I am not high enough income to be a target for this scam, but I am damn happy to expend the cost of ink, eight cents for a check, and thirty seven cents of postage for my peace of mind.

So my question to my creditors is, “What’s in it for me?”

All of you in the online bill paying industry ought to come up with a better answer than “Convenience.” Paying bills is never convenient. Show me the money.

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Tech Professionals Suddenly Anti-Free Markets

Brian J. Noggle

Funny, I seem to remember about six years ago that all of the IT professionals in the world were all for the free markets, especially since those free markets meant that the IT professional’s next job in six months would yield a 20% salary raise. Oh, how shallow the sentiments ran.

According to CNet, the IEEE has come out against outsourcing:

In a policy statement, IEEE-USA said U.S. government procurement rules should favor work done in the country and should “restrict the offshoring of work in any instance where there is not a clear long-term economic benefit to the nation or where the work supports technologies that are critical to our national economic or military security.”

I agree with the bit about security, much as I think the country should have manufacturing capability to build B2s when every other country is against us, but I don’t think the government should prop up an overpaid bunch of undercompetent IT workers. Let the marketplace do its work and return those who cannot produce quality, and inexpensive, hardware or software back to the retail or services industry where they belong. If you alone are making twice the national median income or more for a family, stop begging for sympathy and complaining about workers who can support an elevated personal standard of living for less than you can.

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Searching for Software Tester

Brian J. Noggle
   Sometimes, on long days on the job, I hear the voice of Ben Kingsley in my mind, paraphrasing those lines from Searching for Bobby Fischer:

    Bruce: Do you know what it means to have “contempt” for the software?
    Brian: No.
    Bruce: It means to hate it. You have to hate it, Brian, it hates you.

I’ve never actually seen the movie, but I do hear Ben Kingsley talking to me, oh yes I do.

I don’t even play chess well.

On long days, my mind just wanders.

Long nights, too, I guess.

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Ya Think?

Brian J. Noggle

In an essay on CNet, Dan Schoenbaum states the obvious:

    Instead of exponentially increasing business productivity and allowing us to realize the full potential of our ever-faster and more powerful hardware, software consistently grows more complex, bloated, cumbersome and slow.

    It is no secret that the majority of IT initiatives fail. Software is hard to write, hard to understand, hard to deploy, hard to use, hard to manage, hard to maintain and increasingly hard to justify. We spend billions of dollars building, implementing, fixing and fighting with our software, and yet we demand little in return, meekly accepting that our investments come with no quality or performance guarantees.

Because:

    IT projects fail because we often approach the software development process with reckless abandon. We have thrown the proven engineering principles and processes that other disciplines adhere to right out the window. We are lax in planning, we have few standards and design principles.

The solution is to embrace the concept of total quality throughout the SDLC (software development lifecycle) and hold to the virtues of some other contemporary buzzwords and blah blah blah.

This gets written and discussed ad infinitum, but if ignoring it completely is what it takes to get one more sale in the current quarter, then those are the sacrifices with which we have to live.

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Written By A Non Technical Person

Brian J. Noggle

From the Financial Times story describing the coming yawn search engine conflict:

Yahoo on Wednesday raised the stakes in the internet search wars as it abandoned Google in favour of using an in-house search engine on its own web sites.

With Microsoft waiting in the wings to launch a rival technology of its own, the move sets up a three-way struggle that will challenge Google’s recent dominance of internet searching.

The coming battle reflects the emergence of search as the internet’s “killer application” since the rise of Google. With more people using a search engine as the starting point whenever they go online, whether to find information or products to buy, control of search has become central to the ambitions of all three companies.

Spare me. When was the last time you used the search feature in Windows? Come on, you know how to do it. Select Start > Search…. or press the Windows key and F. What, don’t use it much, if at all? Searching the Internet is a supplemental technology at best. I don’t know of many people who have Google as their starting point, nor any search engine. Personally, I don’t use a toolbar for searches and I ignore whenever Internet Explorer wants to search for me.

As people become more mature and Internet-aware, search engines will fall by the wayside. When I’m on the Internet, I tend to know where I want to go, and if I use a search engine, I use it to find content, not its paid advertisers.

Sorry, Uncas Ray, John, and Vinod.

(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)

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Jim Comes Out

Brian J. Noggle

In a post on Electric Venom, Jim of Snooze Button Dreams comes out of the closet:

And no, this is not an “I have a friend with a problem” thing, it really was my cousin. I’m in QA – I don’t have to deal with people outside of the company.

Shout it loudly, shout it proudly:

I’m QA and that’s OK!

Note: This is not a dig at everyone else in IT; it’s okay to be a developer, too. There’s nothing of which to be ashamed. Some of my best friends are developers. Or were, anyway, until they read this note.

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Cyber Keystone Koppers

Brian J. Noggle

I realize it’s probably the journalist adding drama to (that is, creating whole) an anecdote, but the lead from this SFGate story doesn’t portray the bastions of public safety in too good of a light:

Washington — Sitting at his home in Virginia Beach, Va., Joe Yuhasz almost reached for his wallet when an e-mail message popped into his inbox and told him America Online needed to verify his credit card information.

The site linked to the e-mail looked identical to AOL’s billing center, until Yuhasz noticed the domain name was a fake — a scam commonly known as phishing.

Almost reached for his wallet? Cheese, Louise, even my dear aunt knows better than that.

Maybe it’s part of a far-ranging ploy to lull the cyberbadguys into a false sense of superiority.

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I Don’t Think That Means What You Think It Means

Brian J. Noggle

Instapundit links to a Wired article about outsourcing. It’s an even-handed treatment, but the author quotes an Indian programmer:

Aparna Jairam isn’t trying to steal your job. That’s what she tells me, and I believe her. But if Jairam does end up taking it – and, let’s face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey – she won’t lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: “Do what you’re supposed to do. And don’t worry about the fruits. They’ll come on their own.”

She’s quoting the Bhagavad Gita? The Bhagavad Gita? That, and the particular quote, is particularly funny and ironic.

Here’s the Brian’s Notes version of the Bhagavad Gita, kids: Prince Arjuna is a little reluctant to enter a war where he has friends and relatives on the other side. He’s a bit reluctant to go into battle because he doesn’t want to slaughter them. His charioteer, Krishna, happens to be an incarnation of a deity, and he spends the poem convincing Arjuna that it’s his duty to go into battle and slaughter his friends and relatives because that’s how the his life is scripted. So Arjuna does. I’d imagine this quote is Krishna giving a pep talk, probably before revealing one of his majestic and terrifying forms.

With that context, make of the quote what you will. Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of Java!

Note: Don’t take this post as demeaning to the Bhagavad Gita or Hinduism. Go read the whole thing, as they say. It’s an interesting piece, and describes an eastern worldview that I don’t entirely share. It’s got certain truths in it, though, and as from any philosophical work, perhaps you can draw something from it to apply to your own life.

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Lazy Fare

Brian J. Noggle

SFGate.com has a story featuring Carly Fiorina, head of Hewlett-Packard-Compaq-Digital, telling the information technology professionals who are watching their profession awaken after the party that was the Internet boom and stagger into the developing world for a quick bit of relief from burgeoning labor costs. Fiorina says:

“There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”

Right on, sister. Capitalism keeps our prices down as consumers, so as long as we continue to adapt as producers, we can continue buying stuff and make the whole world go around. I’m all for that, because I realize once all the jobs are overseas, the board of directors will realize CEOs will be cheaper over there, too. No, no, they tell themselves, it won’t happen to us…. just like the myopic IT career counselors told their charges in the 1990s.

But that’s the way business works, and society and government ought to let the businesses do their thing. I’m with you, Carly. Of course, I wouldn’t invest money in that sinking ship you’re piloting towards the crumbling glacier, but I’m with you.

Well, no, I’m not. Because the solutions she proposes are not laissez-faire capitalism solutions:

They outlined a list of objectives, including a doubling of federal spending on basic research in U.S. universities. Barrett derided Washington’s decision to spend as much as $40 billion a year on farm subsidies and just $5 billion on basic research in the physical sciences.

“I have a real degree of difficulty with the fact that we are spending some five to eight times as much on the industry of the 19th century than we are on the industry of the 21st century,” Barrett said.

The executives also urged a national broadband policy to allow more homes and businesses to quickly take advantage of high-speed data networks, much as Japan and Korea have done.

They also called for dramatic improvements in K-12 education in the United States, saying schools act more to block budding math and science students than to foster them.

Federal government should start throwing money to the technical industry the same way it throws money to all industry. Fiorina and her buddies don’t want laissez-faire capitalism. They want crony capitalism and are auditioning for the roles of “cronies.”

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