--Mike--

iCloud - Apple copies Microsoft

2012-01-18T14:09:00.000-06:00

Steve Jobs liked claiming that Microsoft merely copied what Apple did... it turns out that Apple has copied Microsoft this time.

Microsoft Exchange is one of the best database servers you'll ever use. You can make offline changes on multiple devices, and it will handle things automatically. It just works.

iCloud is what happens when Apple decides to copy Microsoft Exchange, and possibly Sharepoint.

iCloud is NOT something that lets you see your calendar everywhere (unless it's the iCloud calendar).
iCloud does NOT sync your settings across devices
iCloud does NOTHING to help you deal with an Exchange account you want to see on all your iDevices.

$218 down the drain....

Something broke Outlooks meeting organizer, again.

2011-12-13T10:38:00.001-06:00

As a public service, I pass along some info from today's work activities.

I have discovered that something has changed everyone's Outlook calendar settings (in our organization, at least, some recent update perhaps?), without permission.

If you organize meetings using Outlook, you need to check and/or correct your settings, here is how..

In the Main outlook window, go to

Tools | Options

Then click on Calendar Options, and uncheck "Allow attendees to propose new times for meetings you organize"

Once this is unchecked, you can OK your way back out, and all new meetings should be safe from proposed changes (which have the un-intended consequence of wiping out the original meeting request, and any attachments or history included with them).

I have not found the exact cause of this change, and will continue to investigate, to prevent its recurrence.

--Mike--

Ramble of the day... Starting with Why we need general purpose computing

2011-11-24T04:28:00.001-06:00

https://www.google.com/search?q=death+of+general+purpose+computing

The end of general purpose computing has been written about before, but with the trend towards devices like the iPad and tablets running "apps" of all shades, we're rapidly moving away from running code of our choosing, and moving toward a word of walled gardens of curated choices for software as a service.

The underlying problem pushing us towards this unpalatable end is security. We're giving up our freedom for security, and it seems like a good trade for many. As long as there is a heavy counterweight of machines which can run anything, it's likely to remain a good trade, as you can always move back. However, this option will be closed off, just like the Borders bookstores that were no longer profitable because people chose to actually make their purchases at Amazon while browsing in their stores.

The fact that it's pretty much impossible to keep a computer virus free, and the DLL hell that people aren't even aware of (it manifests itself when you install a program and everything else stops working, and you can never get back to normal), combine to make general purpose computing a very unpalatable choice. Unfortunately, the only way we can maintain our civil liberties is to keep ownership of our information, communications, and privacy. This is not possible in a world where were everything is a closed up "app".

It doesn't have to be this way... really. Computers can be secure, easy to use, and general purpose. The problem is the underlying design choices made a few decades ago that are baked into all of our operating system choices.

It's a more general problem that just our computers... we're in the middle of a long rush towards being a consumer of everything, with no effective means of production, which is like being a turkey on a farm. Lots of great food every day from the nice supplier, then a very unpleasant ending.

We need to be smarter than the turkey... really.

We need to be able to make everything we use, all the way up and down the supply chains, lets they become chains of bondage.

We need to be able to repair instead of replace for a larger percentage of cases.

It's looking to me like the "cold fusion" of the 1980s is actually close to fruition. If (90% odds) it works out to be true, there are some economies of scale which will fall apart, making new opportunities for their replacements.

If power can be supplied locally at a lower cost than the grid, there are lots of towers, cables, transformers, pipelines, generating stations, etc... that will need to be decommissioned. The amount of scrap metal will be immense. Of course, the supply requirements to build millions of generators may more than equal this...

If you had free electricity, by the megawatt, what could you do that is not currently feasible? Extracting metals from minerals comes to mind as one of the first things that would be far cheaper.

It's worth revisiting the natural abundance of elements to see what is really available if energy isn't an issue.

Facebook is another example of the trend towards a service, blogging used to be something done by those that had their own web sites, then blogger became popular, then RSS made it easier to keep up with many sources, and now Facebook is the biggest aggregator of them all, and blogging is fading away, a bit.

Google screws the pooch with Postini.

2011-11-02T16:13:00.001-05:00

We've been trying out Google Apps for Business for a while, as a back burner project.... and now we've decided to look more closely at our options, and found a happy combination that we decided to go with...

Google Apps for Business and Google | Postini Email Continuity.

This would give us Google Docs, Groups, etc... and syncing of Contacts and Calendar along with Email between our Exchange Server and Gmail.

Everything on the web shows this scenario... a nice picture of a good platform to run our business on top of...

Except, Google doesn't understand platforms, even a Google insider has said so

After being forced into a reseller channel, and fighting to get an actual human on the phone, it turns out that you CAN'T have Google Apps and Google | Postini Email Continuity together.

Why? Nobody knows why, the salesman thinks it's nuts, and so do I.

I'm pissed off, and very disappointed. Now I'm worried that I look like an idiot for even proposing what turned out to be vaporware to the two layers of management above me. Google just burned through a lot of goodwill with this clusterfuck.

So, here I sit looking for a better way to do IT for a small business, while tolerating crappy internet connectivity from two different providers, and no easy way to sync it all up into the cloud in a non-home brew manner.

Google and Postini have really screwed the pooch on this one. I wonder who will fill this need and eat their customer base for lunch?

Intertubes refreshed...

2011-10-30T23:37:00.000-05:00

I've switched hosting plans at 1and1 from Windows to Linux, and in so doing I lost a lot of customization related to domains I have for various ideas. Intertubes.org is back on the air, though there isn't much there right now... here's the latest writeup which I posted in a comment to a story by Dave Winer over at Scripting News.

A while ago, I came up with the idea of a "tube" of stuff (at the time the internet was being described as a "set of tubes") and thus begat intertubes.org

The basic idea is to have a metadata file which keeps track of the files that belong to it, and synchronizes those changes to / from other copies of the tube. Example use cases include being able to share all of my photos (currently 336,637 files in 460 Gigabytes), in a sane manner... like this...

I give someone a copy of the tube containing all of my photos, it's basically just a metafile, taking a few k to hold the root information, and a revocable key which allows the holder of that copy to access some or all of the original tube. This gives them access via an api (hand waving here...) to get a list of all the files, and pointers to resources such as a thumbnail connector which can generate arbitrary sized thumbnails and send those instead of the originals.

Once the person I've given a copy of my tube has it, they can start to browse, at first they just see the list of folders, then they could start to dig (assuming an internet connection on both ends)... they would see thumbnails once they went into a folder (retrieved using their copy of the tube's key), which would then be stored locally, or however their policy decided to handle it. If they liked a thumbnail, they could get larger sizes, or the original.

Once they actually view the photo, they might wish to tag it, add notes, etc.... this new metadata would be synced back to the original tube, if they had the proper permissions. (why not, it can be revoked?)

Thus, I could share all my photos, and not have to give someone a 500GB drive and pray they were willing to wade through it.

This concept of a shared metadata pool extends the idea of RSS (as I understand it) to be a two way communicating container of objects AND their metadata. (The metadata is the valuable part that always gets lost when you have to push single files to people)

This could work for any number of types of files, video, music, documents, etc. It would just be some text files and API calls, it would be totally transport agnostic. Sneaker Net, TCP/IP, HTTP(S), FTP, BitTorrent, whatever works.

I think that you, Dave, have the wisdom to push something like this past the crazy idea stage towards something that people could actually implement and use... I'll keep the idea alive as much as I can as well.

What do you think?

1% above the law, NOT the top 1% pay grade

2011-10-26T23:06:00.002-05:00

There seems to be a lot of (deliberate?) confusion in the media as to what the Occupy Wall Street movements around the world are about... here's a reply I posted to one person's story about it.

No, it’s not about money, it’s about CRIMINALITY…. the blatantly unequal application of the law for the use of state insiders against outsiders.

Trying to make this an income issue is an interesting propaganda tactic being pushed by higher levels of the media, etc… but doesn’t reflect the views of anyone who thinks about it for 2 seconds, as you so forcefully pointed out.

When Bankers sell investments they know are going to implode to their “clients” and then make big bets that the implosion will happen, nothing happens outside of a small fine that might be 1% of the profit they made, if it ever does happen to get investigated.

Corporations got a special law passed which makes it impossible to find out what they are using in industrial quantities when they hydro-fracture the bedrock under the water tables of our nation, yet when an Amish farmer tries to sell “raw milk”, which used to be commonplace, the get a swat raid.

It’s about 1% being above the law, not the top 1% pay grade.

A letter to the editor that I hope helps...

2011-10-26T16:53:00.002-05:00

I just emailed this to 'triblet@bayareanewsgroup.com', and I hope it helps them relate to the internet better...

I have some friendly advice, and I hope this helps you make sense of some things you might not have expected...

You wrote a story... http://www.insidebayarea.com/opinion/ci_19190645

It's now getting lots of inbound links from the internet, bypassing all of the navigational structure that your regular readers would use to find replies, updates, etc.

If the opinion of your paper hasn't changed.... say so in an update, if not, you really need to add it to this story... at the same URL, not a new one.

As it stands, everyone is going to assume you have no sympathy at all for those harmed last night.

Like I said, I hope this helps.

--Mike--

More censorship on the way

2011-10-26T16:24:00.002-05:00

Well, the 0.1% are at it again, they've decided we need to pay for the White Album a few hundred more times, and are willing to destroy the internet to make it happen with a new "Protect IP" act.

I'm tired of worrying about this stuff, and I've come to realize that we are going to win in the end, as this will just take a few more bricks out of what is left of the "consent of the governed" they still have left as a foundation in Washington DC.

We're nearing a tipping point, it's going to be long and ugly, and you can't count on winning.... just worry about your survival, and helping your friends and family make it through... just like during the first Depression.

St Vincent De Paul - Davenport California - October 15 2001

2011-10-25T21:39:00.001-05:00

St Vincent De Paul - Davenport California - October 15 2001, a photo by --Mike-- on Flickr.

This is one of the hundreds of cool things we saw on our Honeymoon in October, 2001.

Waiting for a Lytro

2011-10-19T23:24:00.001-05:00

Ever since I heard of Lightfield Photography, I've wanted IN. You can focus through objects, focus after the fact, and a lot more that I haven't discovered yet. While I've wanted my own microlens camera to do experiments, the cost was just too far out there for me.

So I did what any good hacker would do, I started experimenting with my single camera from multiple view points. At first the photos really sucked, but they've been getting better over the years.

You can see some my virtual focus images (which is the end result of all this) in this gallery at Flickr.

SO, The Lytro camera has finally been announced. I'm ordering one as soon as I can.

It's a consumer appliance version of a camera, far from what I expected, but also FAR cheaper than I expected, and much more user friendly.

The big feature of this camera is that it captures a "light field", which is to say that it takes multiple photographs of the same scene from slightly different angles, all at the same instant. The raw data is then stored for later processing (later being milliseconds or years)... to render it into a 2d image along a selected focal plane.

They chose a configuration which doesn't require any mechanical focus system, which means you can grab images as soon as the CPU in the camera is ready... no hunt and seek focus in the dark. This is a big time plus if you've been frustrated with the shortcomings of "contrast detect" focus used on almost every "point and shoot" compact digital camera.

There are a lot of design choices that I don't get, but I don't have one, and I haven't used one, so I'll have to wait and see how well it actually works.

It will be fun, even if we have to wait until version 2.0 of this technology.

The Snitch who was a cover story

2011-10-16T08:42:00.002-05:00

I don't believe the story about the Guy who Snitched on the Occupy Wall Street protests...I have a different theory...

I think there is a much simpler explanation, that we're not supposed to figure out, because if we do, we can route around the damage, which would tip the scales towards justice, and we can't have that now, can we?

Remember Echelon?
How about Carnivore?
How about the secret rooms at the Telephone Company offices?

The Onion (which is a satirical publication)... has the best illustration of this in their story about the CIA funding Facebook.

(Update) - I think they simply scan everyone's communication for keywords which indicate dissent, and then dig in closer... it's quicker and cheaper, and more effective than random human offers of information.

Total Information Awareness is what they used to call it...
(/Update)

If my thesis is correct, and this is the result of monitoring and not human factors, instead of just mis-trusting each other, we simply need to encrypt our communications, and prevent this system from working against us while maintaining its advantages of quicker communication.

It's a theory... and words are cheap... take this with a grain of salt....

Chicago Ban's cellphone use while bicycling

2011-10-06T09:40:00.001-05:00

Chicago has banned the use of cell phones while actually riding a bicycle.. (not at rest).

Here is the source, which I include a copy of below. I'm a big believer in linking to the source documents, which nobody in the media is apparently willing to spend the time to find.

Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety
September 8, 2011 City Council

ORDINANCE

BE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO:

SECTION 1. Chapter 9-52 ofthe Municipal Code of Chicago is hereby amended by adding
a new Section 9-52-110, as follows:

9-52-110 Use of communication devices while operating a bicycle.

(a) For purposes of this section only, the following definitions apply:

"Communication device" means a device, including but not limited to a wireless telephone,
personal digital assistant, or a portable or mobile computer, which is designed to transmit and
receive electronic messages.

"Electronic message" means a self-contained piece of digital communication that is
designed or intended to be transmitted between communication devices. An "electronic message"
includes, but is not limited to electronic mail, a text message, an instant message, a command or
request to access an internet site, or talking or listening to another person on the telephone.

"Using" means composing, reading, sending or listening to an electronic message.

(b) Except as otherwise provided in subsection (c) of this section, no person shall operate
a bicycle while using a communication device. Except as otherwise provided in subsection (d) of
this section, any person who violates this subsection shall be subject to the fine range set forth in
section 9-4-020.

(c) The provisions of this section shall not apply to a:

(1) law enforcement officer or other emergency responder, when on duty and acting
in his official capacity;

(2) person using a communication device with a "hands free" device or in a voice-
activated mode, which allows the person to talk into and listen to the other party
without the use of hands;

(3) person using a communication device for the sole purpose of reporting an
emergency situation and continued communication with emergency personnel
during the emergency situation; or

(4) person using a communication device while maintaining a bicycle in a stationary
position.

(d) If a violation of subsection (b) of this section occurs at the time of a traffic accident, the
person operating the bicycle may be subject to a fine not to exceed $500.00 which shall be
assessed in addition to the fine provided by section 9-4-020.

SECTION 2. This ordinance shall take effect after its passage and publication.

Margaret Laurino
Alderman, 39th Ward

Reflections on 9/11

2011-09-12T15:51:00.002-05:00

A lot has been written with the passing of the 10th annivesary of 9/11/2001.

However, the best on 9/11 I’ve read to date in terms of matching my feelings about what’s happened was this post on SlashDot (warning, lots of righteous use of profanity)

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2422714&cid=37368428

My version of things is based on that, with some reflection and a different perspective.

9/11 CAN’T HAPPEN AGAIN… it couldn’t have happened on 9/12/2001 even with no changes other that the knowledge now carried by every passenger as to the real threat posed by hijackers.

The only really good money spent since 9/11 was on better cockpit doors.

We should have responded to the Crimes of 9/11 using the International Police, and the Intelligence agencies of the world.

ALL of the warfare in response to 9/11 was wasted and wrong.

We faced down the USSR, and didn’t give up our rights, why did we let 19 guys do to us what decades of cold war couldn’t?

Watching the fireworks for 30 seconds

2011-09-07T00:56:00.001-05:00

Watching the fireworks for 30 seconds, a photo by --Mike-- on Flickr.

I've been criticized for not fully understanding the power of a Nikon D40 and a tripod for taking night photos... here is one example of the photos you can take with it.
I bought the D40 instead of the D40x because of it's lower "resolution" and thus much better night photos, I've never regretted the decision.

The post with the most important idea I have to tell you today - told very poorly - verbose version #1

2011-09-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

I have an idea I need you to understand. It is the most important, deep, powerful, realization I've had in the last 24 hours. Please bear with me, and forgive my wandering... here goes.

The internet changes nothing.... just like Dave Rogers always says....

So I go to look him up, because it's been a while, I've been drinking RSS fed Koolaid for a bit too long...and of course...

Holy shit, it seems that Dave Rogers did it again... writes about what I'm about to say, before I say it... here... take a look.

Now I'll read that... and get back in a minute..... (time passes)...

Ok... he was almost about to say the same thing, but he too was triggered by something else on the internet... in this case it was this post at Akma's random thought.

Dave's post points out that a lot of blogging and commenting and "content" on social media is just a need to vent, rant, and express a bit of hostility in a safe manner... a manner not harmful to others.

Akma points out that when you do express something positive, it gets nowhere near the coverage that something tuned to provoke emotion gets, and it's far too easy to miss getting "credit" for things. It's also easy to slip into the "see, I was right" mode of being a cranky old man (which so far we ALL claim to be vulnerable to).

My triggering realization that brings me here was in watching this 10 minutes worth of Max Keiser, who I follow regularly, get into a carefully orchestrated shouting match with some of the "mainstream" media. It occurred to me that not only did Max correctly counter every argument thrown at him, it is very likely that nobody will learn anything new from the time spent. All that will happen is that whatever the viewers world view, it will be confirmed.

The problem is that when you have point - counterpoint, you eventually end up talking about Nazis.. (Godwin's law)...

No... that's not quite it..

When you have a conversational style that is all about responding to someone, in order to prove them wrong, you never get anywhere... that's a bit closer.

Conversation is too much like warfare these days. Yeah... that's the thread...

The 10 minutes of Max Keiser in a shouting match is like watching a boxing match, and the comments, links, etc.. are all about venting steam, with almost no exceptions (I'm hoping this is the rare one).

Sporting events are breads and circuses, at least in my mind.

Now blogging has devolved into the same thing, and I think RSS makes it worse.

I'd like to figure out why, and how to avoid it. I do have a pet theory, and I'd like to know if it's right or wrong, but most of all I'd like to tweak it to make it a more accurate theory, and more useful in fighting the crude devolution of things.

Here's my pet theory, which is certainly way off the mark, and quite possibly wrong.

There is NO good way to mark up someone else's text on the internet. This forces us to reply to whole articles, posts, videos, etc. We need better tools. HTML doesn't allow markup of hypertext.

Here's another pet theory, from long ago...

We've tuned the things we listen to incorrectly, instead of being informed by others who expand our views, we're feeding our own biases... we're in a positive feedback loop, like the squeal when a PA system feeds back into itself.

.... time passes...

If we had ways to link our documents like Ted Nelson wanted to in the 1960s, we'd automatically get informed of their usage when others used them and expanded on them. I think that this was a cool idea, but actually won't help much, because as we've seen, tons of links make things hard to sort through.

The need to be able to categorize things, tag them, mark them up, and write in a mode that doesn't emulate a teletype with good editing features is still unsatisfied. Our tools still such (oops... back to my pet theory, from a different angle).

If it were easy to watch every place that one of my blog posts got referenced, it would make it slightly more practical to use it as a conversational medium.

If it were easier to remix what other people said, without having to resort to tons of quotes, copy and paste, and paraphrasing, it might be a bit better as well.

The more things we can do to allow time for reflection, and bias AGAINST the need to quickly reply to a topic before it dies out, the better.

....

We need editors, I've known that I need one for a very, very long time. The tools we've built for ourselves are all about publishing our thoughts NOW... we're all shouting without taking time to ponder, or at least that's what I do far, far to often.

....

We need ways to gather up the pro and con sides of commentary, not as a means of building up an argument, but as a way of finding out the odd comment that is neither, and might be valuable to a lot of people.

We need ways to curate

A lot of this isn't technical, but if we figure out the ways we want to do something, someone will eventually automate it if enough people find it valuable.

The tools we need are not technical, just as a haiku doesn't need a compiler... it's just a set of rules.

Rules are tools

automation saves time

but what about reflection?

I love Saturday

Taking apart a problem as a means of solving it is good,

but we have to avoid pointing fingers and skipping the learning part...

I propose that we should all go back and re-examine one of our old arguments, find references to it that have something to add, and merge all of it into a new post, with proper back links.

Quote De Jour

2011-08-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

Looking for a safe asset class today, is like a Soviet bureaucrat in 1989, sensing trouble ahead, looking for the directorate with the safest job. - John Robb - 2011

2011-08-26T12:15:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I did some tripod photography, here's an HDR photo of "The Bean" at sunrise.

Please call it the "fair market" from now on...

2011-08-26T04:37:00.000-05:00

The value of Government regulation in commerce and other in aspects of life in the USA has been greatly depreciated by careful propaganda, called "framing", this is doing great harm, and needs to be corrected.

You CAN help... and it's easy... just use a better frame, every chance you get.

When you're about the write or say the phrase "free market", please say "fair market" instead. It's a simple and subtle substitution which puts the need for laws back into their proper place in the mindset when discussing such things.

Markets are a balancing act, they require rules in order to give the confidence required to trade without fear, but also the ability to set prices optimally, without unnecessary rules. A fair market maintains that balance, whereas a "free" market as defined by the right is one more like the wild west.

----

Notes only vaguely related to the above call to action...

1) As you might already know, any idea you have, is already on the internet, if you can conjure up the right search terms and cast the spell into Google. Such is the case with my idea for a new term, fair market capitalism.

2) There are many other frames which need to be addressed, especially "intellectual property", it would be nice if we had a place on the internet to discuss them get distribution, to counter the right-wing machinery put in place over the last 30 years. It should be fair and open discussion, with an emphasis on the desired result of getting a better framing around conversations to help us all in the long run.

Secure Little Application Project? - Saving an idea at 6 AM

2011-08-21T06:29:00.000-05:00

o/~~~
6AM,
wakin' up in the moning
Gotta write now
Gotta save that idea....

ok... enough of the Friday spoof

Here's an idea for implementing a secure space for applications to run in an otherwise insecure host environment, leveraging VMware, Zen, Citrix, QEMM, or a separate physical box to run applications cut off from reality, and restricted to a strange little world, where the default answer to "can I have this?" is NO.

--- copied from my WikidPad page on my laptop ---

++ Secure Little Application Project

Slap, Slip, SL?P

Write the smallest possible operating system that fits inside a virtual machine. It would make requests across the net (or some other API) for everything, thus not able to infect the host system.

Like Secnurse, the application would be in its own address space, cut off from all the normal API calls, and thus couldn't break the host.

In it's own little world, applications would run, and request resources from a host program written in something like Delpi, C++, or whatever is convinient.

It would then be somewhat easy to provide file and folder services, not being bound to the normal rules of things, and all the hidden holes that go with undocumented "features" in the host environment.

Separating the app from the host environment is a good step
Having multiple versions of the service host to chose from helps make sure the code is clean.
Everyone can implement their own, and compete for better models of things.

Host - the PC running the VM
Guest - the application
Concierge - the program that gets everything for the guest

Yet another story about security

2011-08-18T15:35:00.000-05:00

Recently, managed code was supposed to save computer security. I believe it solves the wrong problem, and I think this story will help explain why...imagine this bizarre scenario:

You wish to purchase a bottle of coke at the 7/11.

So you get to the check out counter, with the bottle of coke you wish to purchase.
You put yourself into suspension so that the clerk can...

Find your wallet, get money out, put all but $2.15 of it back in
Prepare your receipt
Wake you back up
Hand you the receipt

Imagine that you grew up in a world where this was normal behavior. Sure there were some dishonest clerks, but those were few and far between. Enough people eventually complained that they started a list of bad clerks, so you could check to see if the clerk was on the list before you decided to make a purchase.

Problem solved, right? WRONG...

What if someone tricks the clerk while you're in suspension?
What if they make a mistake?
What if they have an accident?
What if they just decided to turn evil, and aren't in the bad clerk list yet?

This bizzarro world is almost precisely how we do things with computers. Instead of ourselves, it's our computer account, and instead of the clerk, it's a program we're about to run.

Now... look at how we do things in the real world...

When you buy a coke at the 7-11, you hand take your coke to the register then you

Offer a form of payment, let's say $5.00
Get change and a receipt

Because you decide the form and amount of payment you offer, you decide the amount to risk. The worst that you can do is to get the wrong change back.

The side effects are limited BEFORE you decide to make the payment.

It's immediately obvious if you have completed the transaction.
There is no possibility of bizarre side effects, like having your living room painted a Slurpee Blue because of 7/11 decided to offer a new feature.

Why not have the operating system do it's job and enforce a scenario like this...

You have a program you'd like to run

Make a list of resources the program should be able to access
Specify read, write, modify access to each those resources
Present the list, along with the program, to the operating system, for execution
Enjoy the results

Since the operating system is the ultimate provider of access to resources on the computer, it can fairly and reliably check to see if access is should be granted. If a resource isn't in the list, the program will NOT get access to it.

The difference is subtle... giving everything by default, or by denying everything by default. Windows, Linux, Mac OS, all give everything by default. Perhaps it's time to reverse that decision.

The truth about computer security, a military analogy

2011-08-10T10:29:00.000-05:00

Imagine if you could only decide if you trusted a soldier or not, a binary decision, for each and every soldier in the military, at their time of enlistment.
If you trusted him, he had full access to every weapon and resource at our countries command, until he decided to leave.
If not, he wouldn't have access to anything.

Would it be possible to have a classification system in such a regime, when one spy could give away everything to the highest bidder?
Would it be possible to have an effective command and control system, when rank means nothing because there are no privileges that go with it?
Would it be possible to even have a country, if one loose cannon could launch Armageddon?

No, of course not... security decisions have to be much more fine grained than that... you don't trust any soldier absolutely, it would be insane to do so.

Even the tightest background checks in the world wouldn't help, because it only takes one mistake to lose everything.

Yet we have no problem with giving that soldier (or any user, for that matter) a computer and that same choice... either trust the program he's about to run with every resource at his command, or don't accomplish anything.

Until we remove this false choice, we can never have secure computing.

Today's rant against.... ATT

2011-08-05T09:59:00.000-05:00

I spent wayyyyy to much time on the various ATT/SBC web sites (there isn't just one, and they are interlinked) trying to find a new phone plan that doesn't end up costing almost $1/minute to talk to someone 20 minutes away.

Somewhere in between various web servers going back and forth on every click, I must have crossed over the River Styx, and began a descent into HTML hell....

After my best shot at it, I bailed out and started looking for a phone number to a real person.

I eventually found someone to CALL, and got it all taken care of... whew...

At the end of the web experience, I answered a lengthy survey about the web site(s)... here's what I said to the "what do you suggest to make things better" question:

1. Unify all of the sites, eliminate artificial (sp?) separations between local and long distance, between DSL and Uverse, wired and wireless, etc.

2. Fix naviation so that the BACK button actuall works as intended.

3. Always have support links on the page, a number to call, an email address, and a place to chat.

4. Always show where in the naviation tree things are, and UNIFY that tree.

5. Make a nice grid for showing options on phone service, even if I have to scroll both directions, it's much better than trying to work around a broken back button...

This web site is like playing ZORK, except there's no place to type XYZZY to get back to a known location.

Why Social Security is NOT an entitlement

2011-07-29T10:45:00.000-05:00

I hear Social Security called an entitlement, and I get VERY angry... here's why

Social security is NOT an entitlement.... we've been paying into it for our whole working lives, it's the big hit after taxes called FICA. It's got a HUGE surplus, which won't run out for more than 20 years.

However... they've been "borrowing" this surplus by "investing" it in government bonds... to keep the cash flow going, since the 1960s... only now that it's about time to start pulling out of the "surplus" do they want to cut it as an "entitlement"...

In other words, we paid money in... they were supposed to set it aside for us, and now they don't want to admit that they've already STOLEN it, and it won't be there when we need it.

All of the spending to bail out banks, corporations, etc... was all out of our retirement funds... don't forget it.

Today's political act

2011-05-26T15:43:00.002-05:00

I wrote to my Indiana State Representative today.... here's what I wrote:

I ask that you consider introducing legislation similar to that of the recently pulled HB 1937 of the State of Texas.
Here's the link to their web site about the bill: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=82R&Bill=HB1937
It would criminalize the types of searches the TSA has been doing, which are in violation of the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution.

In introducing this, you would show that you stand for the rights of your fellow Hoosiers. We don't have as much air traffic to worry about, so their is less fallout. You would also show some distance between yourself and the DC beltway crowd, which will probably come in handy soon, as they keep debasing the dollar, leaving the States out to dry.
Thanks for your time and attention.

Delphi Starter Edition sucks

2011-05-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

So we went and got Delphi XE starter edition.

The feature matrix is confusing, to say the least... but if you look at the sales page, it makes it very clear that the difference between the Starter and Pro editions is in the licensing of applications. Check the link above, or read the description yourself (retrieved May 11, 2011):

Delphi XE Starter is a great way to get started building high-performance applications for Windows. Delphi Starter includes a streamlined IDE, code editor, ultra fast compiler, integrated debugger, two-way visual designers to speed development, hundreds of visual components, InterBase Express for connectivity with the InterBase database, and a limited commercial deployment license.
If you’re an individual you may use the Starter Edition to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenues reach $1,000 per year. If you’re a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $1,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Starter Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license.

The REAL difference is in functionality, not licensing... the refactoring and other reasons for upgrading from Delphi 7 are MISSING in the "starter" edition. This is NOT mentioned here... and definitely should be. I suspect this omission is deliberate. Starter edition should instead be renamed "bait".

Oh well... can't get a refund... don't want to pay $500 to see if the next level up is more crap.

Delphi XE sucks.

Rackspace - Web Site Design... well, just a glitch

2011-03-13T09:12:00.001-05:00

Today I decided to investigate Rackspace to see if their model of Virtual Server management was better or not than Amazon in terms of what happens when you shut down a Windows Server.

The Website kept pushing an offer to Live Chat sales in front of me, keeping me from reading what I wanted... eventually I gave in, and was then told that Live Chat isn't available now!

If you offer it, it MUST be available, otherwise turn it off!

Design fail - not as bad as throwing away 3 hours of work, but still pretty stupid.

Ok... I jumped the gun a bit... and got to chat.

I'm told that they don't delete Windows Servers until you tell them to.

I'll be testing that this week.

Amazon EC2 design FAIL - What, Why, and How to fix it.

2011-03-10T20:55:00.003-06:00

This is a rant, a screed, a diatribe, a scream in the wilderness hoping to call the adults in charge to notice a major design flaw in Amazon's otherwise excellent Elastic Cloud Computing service, know as EC2 for short.

However, unlike most rants, screeds, etc... I offer a reasonable and easy to implement solution which should work well for all concerned.

What EC2 is:
EC2 lets you create virtual servers based on their hardware and networks. It's fast, reliable, and pretty flexible when it comes to getting far more computing resources in short notice than would even be possible for a small company to arrange, let alone finance, because you can pay by the hour of computing time, and the megabyte of disk storage.

Amazon offers a wide variety of Linux and Microsoft operating systems to run within these virtual servers, and they make it easy to provision new machines, or "instances".

My story:
Yesterday, I was at work, and for whatever reason, I couldn't find the instance of Windows Media Streaming I had last used on Amazon EC2 about 6 months ago that I needed for a demo. With real servers, it's obvious when you have boxes to look at, hopefully all nicely labeled, but since virtual servers don't actually take up physical space in the office, they end up just like any other misplaced computer file.

I then proceeded to create a new one from scratch. The setup wasn't that long, but my work day because a long one while I got everything set. It got worse when I figured out that the Hardware Streaming Box we were going to use wasn't using the same protocol I had previously used. I got all that sorted out about midnight, but then found out something else was amiss. I thought it could be either the streaming box, or the virtual server that was mis-configured, so I created a virtual server in our own local network (using VMware) to divide the problem and more accurately place blame. At about 6 AM I had proof that it was the streaming box, and it had a virus. It needed to be reset to factory standards... I waited for our supplier to call back to get the proper procedure for doing so, and got everything working by 10 AM today. (Now a 26 hour work day).

I then proceeded to help everyone else test out their parts of the demo, and showed them how everything worked with the box, Amazon, Windows, etc... I was done after lunch at about 1:30PM. I was taking care of putting the hardware away, cleaning up my office, etc... when I shut down the Virtual Server. I was looking at the configuration of it, and it seemed to be stuck in the process of shutting down (terminating) far longer than expected.

Then I couldn't find it! (Deja vue)

It was about 15 minutes later that I found out what had happened.... Amazon threw my newly configured virtual machine away, assuming I no longer wanted it, merely because I turned it off (using the Windows Shutdown command) to save the compute costs while I wasn't using it. My reaction was one of surprise and sadness, and resignation to an even longer work shift that was now like to stretch from 8AM to 5 PM the next day.

I'm upset about this, I understand how someone on the product team might have justified using the word Terminate to signify deleting a server, and someone else defended the decision to delete them by default, but it's not the way people use computers.

How you can relate:
Imagine if the mere act of turning off your desktop machine resulted in its disappearance and the need to set up a new one, no matter how inexpensive. This is the problem I faced. I invested hours of time getting everything working just right, and testing it.... I had to spend another 3 hours to do it all over again.

How to fix it:
Now... here's my message to the folks who control the design of this system...

You have added a "termination prevention" system, which helps to alleveiate the problem, if the user has a clear understanding of the NON-STANDARD use of the word termination in this context. This kludge of a fix tells me that the product managers don't quite have a good enough grasp of how things work.

A far better fix, one that fits with far less ambiguity, and far less pain for all involved, is to use the standard word DELETE when describing the act of removing a virtual machine from existence.

Deletion of a virtual machine, or set of files should NEVER happen merely because a virtual machine powered itself down. It should ALWAYS and ONLY be the result of a positive direct action at the request of a user, who then gets a message warning them of the full implications of their actions before giving their final confirmation of the action.

Summary:
Please take this in the spirit with which it is intended, as CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, and a possible fix.

You'll save all of your new users having to go through this painful experience, and have a better product to boot.

Update: As you can see in the comments, this design fail is making a hole for others to fill.

Instead of cyberwar, and all that mess, let's just FIX things

2011-02-19T19:40:00.000-06:00

I strongly believe that it's possible to reduce the treat of "cyber war" by actually fixing the security problem at it's source, our computers and servers. Imagine if it were possible to greatly reduce the number of security holes on the average pc or server. If this were the case, we wouldn't need to have politically motivated filtering and other types of control to "save us" from our own systems.

The internet is just a big network, and while BGP seems to have it's issues, with some work they can be solved. The network itself is just a "series of tubes", as it's been described in the past, and you don't have to guard the tubes if the ends are secured.

There is a deep design flaw in the operating systems and applications we use on a regular basis. Historically it's been possible to tightly control the code we run, so it was reasonable to trust the code to do its job. This assumption no longer is valid.

We can no longer afford the luxury of trusting our applications.
We can't even afford to trust our drivers with kernel mode.
We can't afford to trust the system processes to stick to their designated roles.

At a practical level, we have to trust some code, why not trust as little of it as possible? Micro-kernels present the smallest amount of code required to manage the operating system. There has been much research in this area, and recently there have been "proven" micro-kernels which theoretically have no flaws in their implementation of their specifications.

Now, the kernel needs device drivers and other system processes to make a usable operating environment for the user and programs. A kernel which doesn't trust its drivers must use a new strategy. One way forward is to use the concept of capabilities. A "capability" is a token / key (really, just a big number) which allows access to a resource. Each device driver, system process, etc... is given the appropriate set of keys to the resources that are required to do the job. If the key isn't present, the access is not allowed.

Thus a disk driver wouldn't get access to the internet. A clock driver wouldn't need to either. The system time demon would get access to a log file, a specific set of internet ports and addresses, and the clock. Any bug or vulnerability in one of these drivers would only affect it, and the capabilities it happened to have at the time.

Applications would have to be re-designed as well, for example, if you want to open a file in OpenOffice, the program opens a system dialog box to get the name and path to a file, it then opens the files as required. The new version would instead call a slightly different dialog box, which would them return the file handle (a capability) to only that file. The save dialog would also be modified in a similar fashion. If there are libraries required, etc... they can be included in the applications home folder. A capabilities based version of OpenOffice would thus work the same way, but be far more secure.

With this approach, we end up with secure systems that are still usable.

I think I've shown fairly well that we must re-design things from the ground, a decidedly non-trivial task, but it is the only way to avoid having government overlords telling us what code we can and can't use. If we wish to own our own systems as free men, we need to get our act together and fix things now, before it's too late and we loose the freedom to write our own code.

The path we are on ends with computers we merely have license to use, secured by the government, censored by the government, rented from big corporations, running applications we rent or buy from app stores. This is a future we need to avoid.

Thank you for your time, attention, and comments.

A tale of rules and their makers

2011-02-18T08:41:00.001-06:00

Management had made the choice, there was no disputing it without risking his job, he had heard bad things about the new system, but resigned himself to making it work. So he started reading the documentation and signed up for the support forums. The tutorials showed how rules worked, how to make new ones, the configuration of the auto-update feature, and how to submit a rule to the pool. The system worked by freely sharing rules which helped, so at least he could get the help of his peers.

Soon he was making rules that worked, and after that he learned how to make them simple and elegant. He could make a rule that had very few side effects, and stopped the threat without much cost. The system was getting slower, but thanks to advances in technology, a new system would soon be installed which was more than twice as fast as the old one. The users were fairly happy with things, as it kept disruptions to a minimum.

Over time, he learned about the pros and cons of the other rule systems, and how they worked. He wasn't a big fan of his system, but felt the users of the others were a bit too smug in their claims that there systems were somehow much better. He knew the basics were the same, that it was just a matter of time before theirs had similar problems, and that they mistook temporary conditions as a permanent condition.

One day it occurred to him that there might be a better way to do things. A friend had joked that instead of making rules to stop threats, perhaps it would be better to have a list of things that were not threats. It stuck in the back of his mind, and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. He tried to explain his new idea to his friends, but they thought it was silly, and it would make it way too difficult to manage things, and would make the users complain too much about things they couldn't do because they weren't in the list.

Eventually he convinced some friends to build a prototype system, it would watch what the user did, and build rules to allow those things, and had a new feature which denied everything else. The idea of denying everything was crazy, but it worked in this case. The prototype system was interesting, but he thought it should go further. He had an even bigger idea, the thought the prototype should become the standard way of doing things.

His friends and peers thought he was nuts! How could you possibly list all the things the user wanted to do? Why would the users, who were the source of profit, possibly allow his group do such an absurd thing. If the list of allowed things didn't have something they needed, they would have to stop work and tell his group and get it added to the list. Such a presumption of power was surely a foolish thing to do.

He was sure his idea was right, but it wouldn't work because of the politics of it. He then wondered what would happen if the users could add things to the list themselves? This would leave the users with a system that would allow them to do what they needed, but without the need to have his group always blocking threats. Such a system would leave his group with a lot more time to work on the other tasks they had to keep interrupting, he was sure it would be worth it, but how to convince his peers?

Well.... by writing this very story. The above is a description of an imaginary world in which firewalls lack the ability to include a default deny rule. This makes it necessary to enumerate every threat and create a rule to stop it, and to share the list of rules. In our world, firewalls do have this ability, and we (network administrators) make rules explicitly allowing each protocol and port connection from the internet to our servers.

The above is also a description of this world. This is the way we currently handle computer viruses. We subscribe to services which list rules to identify bad code fragments, and we have systems which block those fragments when they are found. The point of this story is to get you to consider the opposite... a system which trusts nothing, and lets the users explicitly choose what connections and resources a program should get.

It's called capability based security, CabSec for short.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Small miracles

2011-02-14T07:51:00.002-06:00

I'm very thankful for the random appearance of a piece of red paper in my life this morning.

God works in mysterious ways.

A case against arbitrary field size limits in Medical Records

2011-02-13T08:41:00.000-06:00

Here's my IT perspective on The Doctor vs. the Computer, which appeared in today's New York Times.

The doctor in question hit an arbitrarily sized text field for inputing the evaluation of a patient, and was arbitrarily stopped at 1000 characters. The help desk confirmed the limit, and was snarky about it.

I can see how this may have been an acceptable design decision when systems had a total of 5 megabytes of space in the 1960s, but it is clearly not acceptable by any means in our current era.

I found the article via Quora, and here's the comment I wrote there:

Wow... I can see how such things happen... and that is a truly stupid situation. Hours of lost medical care to save a few megabyte of disk space across a year.

A single photograph, let alone some MRI or CT scan data could wipe this savings out in an instant.

The savings in this case, assuming the doctor had 5000 characters of text, would be 4000 bytes... and at today's prices of about 10 Gigabytes / $US, that works out to 0.00004 cents. Let's say it took 2 minutes to do the edit.

Done 10,000 times per year, that's 13.8 days of medical staff time, to save a whopping 0.04 cents!

Yikes!

Now... I'm cross posting it here to reach a wider audience. If you're in IT, and considering the size limits of a text field, be very sure you don't just want a memo field instead.

Thanks for your time and attention.

UFO over Chicago???

2011-01-23T22:48:00.001-06:00

DSC_0641_UFO Crop
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

I went and took photos Friday on my way to work. It was cold, the kind of bitter cold that makes for frozen fingers but GREAT photos.

I found this (which is a crop to show detail) while reviewing things. I'm wondering what it is. It's a UFO, right in the middle of a panorama sequence. I'll clone it out in the final output, but I am curious to what could make this kind of image.

If it was summertime, I'd say some a finch or oriel happend into the frame... but it was well below freezing, in the middle of winter.

Comments, suggestions?

On the importance of having an editor

2011-01-20T07:05:00.002-06:00

My last two blog posts had some points which I think are very important, but it has been pointed out, quite correctly, that they are not very coherent, and need a good re-write, which I will do.

Thank you, Noran!

25 years of insecurity

2011-01-19T11:23:00.000-06:00

It's been 25 years since the first computer virus, and we still haven't learned our lesson.

It's possible to build an operating system which is both secure and usable, by changing one fundamental assumption underlying everything. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of computing, but most people don't understand the problem, and thus can't properly evaluate the quality of the solutions offered to date.

How we got here

Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, all are based on a security model called "Default Permit". This means that unless something is blocked (by a virus scanner, for example), it is allowed to run.

Now, on the face of it, this is the obvious way that computers should work. Who would want to make it harder to run a program, after all it is our computer, and should do what we want, right?

It's when you consider what that program is allowed to do, that the situation starts to get interesting. A computer program can do anything you are allowed to do, on your behalf. If you can access your passwords, so can the program you just launched... if you can send an email, so can the program you just launched, etc.

Adding complexity to the situation further is the fact that there are a number of system services running at any given time which are supposed to have privileges beyond that normally allowed by the user, and these programs can be mislead into mischief.

Any running program runs unbelievably quickly, and it can try to do all sorts of things in the blink of the eye... so if there are any holes in security, it can exploit them without you noticing. This forces you to have to trust any program you run to do exactly what it says it will do.

In response for the past 25 years, we've grown accustomed to virus scanners, spyware scanners, firewalls, and any number of filters to try to stop bad programs, but they don't work perfectly, and in fact, they never will.

Now there are literally billions of computers all networked together, each with their own set of imperfectly protected exploitable resources, a vast ecosystem, if you will, waiting to be exploited, and it is being exploited. On the global level, there are entire socioeconomic systems which have grown to exploit the weaknesses in our computers for financial gain.

The fact that our filters and firewalls are imperfect leave us with a choice.... security or usability.

I strongly believe this is a false choice, and there is a better way.

CABsec - A better way

If the security model is flipped 180 degrees, to a default deny... security becomes a problem which can be solved. I call it CABsec (CApability Based SECurity), so Google can find it in the future.

The basis of CABsec is that at the time a program or process is to be run, a list of capabilities is supplied to the operating system with it. Just like we have icons on our desktops which are shortcuts to programs, this list could be similarly supplied and default to a reasonable range of actions. The typical user wouldn't even need to be aware of it, in most cases. Usability is not affected.

Every system process can be similarly equipped with a list of privileges. It's not necessary for a file-system to access the internet, for example... which means the there is no possibility of file system driver process being mislead into leaking information to the internet. In a similar manner, properly configured system processes can each be locked down to provide bulletproof security.

This leaves the user with a system which can actually enforce it's rules in a secure manner, without the possibility of being broken by a rogue application. The user is provided with a system which could then allow them to specify that their accounting program access one specific folder. The program would never be able to access anything else (like the internet for example)... so it would be self contained and secure.

Such a system would never need a virus scanner, because it would never trust a program, and thus a program couldn't go rogue.

A virus would find itself like the Greeks inside the Trojan horse finding that the horse had been sealed inside a layer of bulletproof glass... they could never escape to do their mischief.

It's a big project to get a cabsec system built... I thought it would have already happened, there have been hints of if with things like Midori at Microsoft, but they never pan out. I'm doing my own little bits of work promoting capabilities and least privilege. I'm hoping that this leaves you with a better understanding of what can be done, and a better way forward.

Taking back our computers.

2011-01-19T09:41:00.000-06:00

Apparently the US and Israel hired some hackers and managed to set back the Iranian nuclear program a few years. I'm pissed that it's even possible for this type of subversion to take place, but not because I believe in the freedom to enrich uranium.

I believe that we should own our computers, and not have them subject to the whim of others. The only practical way of achieving this that I'm aware of is by using something I call CABsec, which is least privilege, CApability Based Security.

Our current systems are based on the opposite concept... which is to allow everything, and add roadblocks in the appropriate places to prevent mischief. It's this way for lots of reasons, including that it matches up with the way we view the world in general.

The cost of checking everything against a list of privileges is small, but non-zero, likely on the order of 1% of the computers time for a typical user, if that. Compare that to the at least 50% speed loss caused by our current crop of antivirus and anti-spyware... and that will seem like a bargain.

It's a matter of replacing a lot of things in order to build a CABsec based system... in computer programming circles its a "Boil the Ocean" type of solution, so it's not likely to arise unless someone gets out and pushes... and keeps pushing.

I'm pushing... will anyone else help?

--

You can read up on the concepts, starting with the Principle of least privilege.

Why I'm worried, and you should be too, part 1... 9/11/2001 changed nothing

2011-01-08T09:22:00.001-06:00

A few years ago, you might have called the author of a post like this paranoid... but now you're not so sure.

9/11 Changed everything, and yet changed nothing.

9/11 was an excuse to shove the American people towards a set of goals, most of which are still not clear to me.

The economy was in the tank before 9/11 happened. People who weren't yet affected by it will likely view 9/11 as the cause of everything after that point, it wasn't. 9/11 changed nothing.

Many people believe that 9/11 provided justification for starting the wars, but they were being planned before it, just waiting for an excuse. 9/11 changed nothing.

Many people forget that the World Trade Center was almost destroyed 8 years earlier, but that there was a mistake in the placement of the charges. 9/11 wasn't the first attack.

9/11 was used as leverage to get us to do something... it's not the first time something like this has happened in our history, it won't be the last. There is always an element in government making plans like this, for example here's one from 1962.

The point here is that government actions are consistent across time, and administrations. It doesn't matter who is elected, the direction is clear, one of growth and more control over the people.

My Old Years resolutions for 2010

2010-12-27T08:58:00.001-06:00

This should be the least interrupted workweek of the year thanks to the wrap-around holidays. I have 2 Old Years resolutions for 2010:

Get TryPod off the ground, with workable code, examples and some help
Get my office cleaned up

Let's see how I do... I have 4 work days.

The end of the internet as we knew it.

2010-12-16T17:02:00.000-06:00

Cloud computing suddenly has a dark future, taking what may be a mortal blow thanks to the Wikileaks censorship by Amazon.

Yahoo is killing off delicious, a seriously good social bookmarking site.

Yahoo may next kill off Flickr, if their track record is any guide, they have no clue how to create value on the internet.

Facebook is just one big flytrap for personal information.

There was a big migration to hosted services on the internet.... and this was allowing everyone to ignore the asymmetric model of access being slide under our noses... but no longer.

If you want your kids and future generations to have a voice at all in the future... here are some things you need to learn about.

Net neutrality means that everyone should be able to host their own stuff, create new services, and have them equally accessible from anywhere on the net. It is not a communist plot to deprive ISPs from profit.
If you can't run your own servers, you don't have free speech... its worth a few bucks to have freedom.
Computing Security can be fixed... it requires a new model of security called Capability Based Security, or also known as the "principle of least privilege". If you have this model in place, you'll never need a virus scanner ever again.
Wikileaks is not evil... they didn't break any laws... those who denounce them are the ones you have to worry about if you value your liberty.
If you want to share photos with your family... you should be able to do it with your own hardware and an internet connection.... nobody else should be required as middlemen.

Things are changing... power is being re-distributed back to the people who chose to take it back, one small piece at a time.

On the need for real internet connections

2010-12-05T22:08:00.001-06:00

Most of us don't have a real internet connection, and it limits our freedom in a subtle, but increasingly important way. We are NOT free to use the internet as it was originally intended... to allow anyone to make a program on their server freely available to others. We've slowly been migrated into a "consumer" version, where we are merely free to choose from selections handed down to us by others who know what's good for us.

This makes itself firmly felt when someone wants to tell the truth, and finds themselves unable to offer them hosting because one Senator (or any other "Elite") makes a subtle threat in a phone call to Amazon. Isn't technology great, you don't have to burn books any more, you can just cut off internet connections! Goebbles would drool at the power exercised by Mr Lieberman in the past week.

Free speech is an important check on the abuse of power by those in Government and other positions of authority. It has now been shown that freedom of speech on the Internet is fundamentally non-existent for most of us.

Net neutrality is important... if you don't understand what it means, find out.

"In Germany they first came for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —

and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Please don't let history repeat itself.

The Internet Licensing countdown

2010-12-01T10:02:00.000-06:00

How long do YOU think it will be until we have to have a license to use the internet?

I suspect it'll take about 6 months from now.

I suspect everyone will go along with it.

Crossing the wikileaks Rubicon.

2010-11-29T19:36:00.002-06:00

It seems that Representative Pete King wants to have Wikileaks.org declared a Terrorist Organization. I can see how this might be a very appealing idea to someone who wants to wrap himself up in the flag, and doesn't believe we'll think too hard about it.

However, things are not as simple as King would like. Wikileaks has not committed any crimes, nor are they attempting to terrorize anyone. They exist because the mainstream media has been rendered useless by their corporate masters in the consolidation of the "news business" over the last 50 years. Had journalists been doing their jobs, the things being leaked might have been uncovered years ago, instead of being allowed to fester in the dark alleys of power in Washington.

If King gets his wish, the line in the sand couldn't be clearer... the State Department would in effect be declaring itself to be above the law, above reproach or redress from the citizens of this or any other nation. Wikileaks is a free association of people who are effectively The Press. The FREEDOM of the PRESS should never be violated.

Declaring Wikileaks to be an enemy of the state is a line over which the administration would be foolish to cross. Once this rubicon is crossed, it is obvious that no peaceful reforms can be accomplished within the existing framework handed down by our forefathers for peaceful change... leaving the other means of change they used so effectively against the previous administrations that ruled without regard to the citizens from distant shores.

We, the people, have a right to assemble, to speak and publish our views and facts as we find them. We will not stand for the destruction of our 1st amendment right of free speech.

To declare the majority of citizens as terrorists is to give up the consent of the governed.

To ban Wikileaks is the path of fools... lets hope calmer voices prevail.

Good night, and good luck.

StumbleUpon breaks the rules a bit

2010-11-23T11:43:00.000-06:00

In the "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not a Nazi" spirit.. I'd like to lodge this gentle complaint about StumbleUpon.

People like the photo I posted yesterday, which is fun to watch the reaction to... but one of the referers that Flickr showed was

http://stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3A//www.flickr.com/photos/--mike--/5198232631/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Unfortunately, this doesn't actually refer to a StumbleUpon page, and instead feeds me to a generic page about StumbleUpon.

I'd like to know who referred to my photo, and why. It's not unreasonable to want to know what is being said about my stuff. Referrer fields exist to help give this feedback, and StumbleUpon breaks this social norm.

If the people at StumbleUpon could fix this, it would be appreciated.

2010-11-22T17:00:00.000-06:00

Sometimes an experiment works out well... this is one of those times. I'm VERY pleased with this photo. It is a stack of day and night images composited into this view. You can see the lights on, and the reflections of the city lights in the water. It's a bit surrealist, and kind of fun.

I hope you like it as well.

Truth on the Internet

2010-10-30T09:14:00.000-05:00

Popularity of opinion is orthogonal to truth, see example.

On the slow diffusion of technology

2010-10-27T09:59:00.002-05:00

I've often wondered why it takes so long for new technologies to mix with others. We had the telephone for a very long time before we got answering machines, for example. Today I think I've figured out a bit of it.

It's my theory that it's the young people who come up with innovations, but they generally don't get them built because they lack the technical and business chops to do so. They also don't know as well how to discriminate between really good ideas and the random thoughts that occur to us all. So they sit on some of their ideas for a long time, tweaking them and getting to the essential core over time. As they grow in experience they also become more adept at gathering resources and navigating the world. It is at this point when they can take those ideas they have nurtured, and reify them.

The example that inspired this comes from Thom Robertson, who just released Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator for Windows. In his frequently asked questions...

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Artemis?

A: Long ago, when my buddies and I all had Commodore64s (like, 25 years ago), I had an idea. I could link our computers together and play a game like the Star Trek bridge. One machine would run the simulation and the "main screen". Each other machine would be a bridge station, like Helm, Science, or Weapons. That idea has lain dormant in my brain for a very long time, but recently my muse told me "Make it. Now." So I finally did.

This leads me to suspect a lot of middle aged hackers are going to be coming up with some really cool things over the next few years that they've been thinking about for a long time.

Augsburg Svenska Skola

2010-10-17T21:09:00.001-05:00

Augsburg Svenska Skola
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

A few years ago I stumbled across this building by accident. I've been trying to find it every chance I get when I'm in the area.

Today I managed to find a park ranger who knew of it, and gave me accurate directions.

Here's the text on the marker to the left of the building.

"This structure served as the first school for children of Swedish immigrants that settled in this area in the late 1840s.
In 1885 when the county public school was built nearby, the building was turned over to the Augsburg Evangelical Lutheran church whose members and friends have preserved this early landmark.
The building and its contents are in the national historic land site registry in Washington DC and in recognition of its value a record has been placed in the library of Congress."

The lesser evil can hit the road.

2010-09-30T21:51:00.000-05:00

I will no longer vote for the lesser of two evils.

I'm done.

The only vote anyone is going to get from me from here on out is an affirmative one... either I like you, or you're not getting my vote. I'm not falling for the lie of "throwing my vote away".

We're now entering the Greater Depression... it's only a matter of time before The Union is seriously threatened... and there is no substantial difference between either of the incumbent political parties. I refuse to give them my support, ever again.

I hope that we can emerge from this with representative government... it might be nice if it's still called the United States, but I don't really care what it's called, as long as Freedom and Justice for all result.

The currency has been debased, and collapse of Federalism is imminent. Unfortunately, the States are not much better off, for the most part, though North Dakota does seem to have it's banking act together.

Hunting for a photo

2010-09-28T13:21:00.000-05:00

Ansel Adams would often revisit places, and a curator of one of his exhibitions stated that he "hunted" a photo across time. I feel myself doing the same thing.

A few days ago, on a whim I followed one of my friends off the train at the Van Buren exit in Chicago. I then took this photograph.

I've been revisiting the location as I can, looking for something, I'm not sure what.... Today I met Rachel on my quest, and she was kind enough to pose for this photograph, which still needs a bit of tweaking.

I'm still not sure what it is I'm trying to find, but the quest continues.

Fixing RSS with UDP

2010-09-23T19:59:00.000-05:00

I like parts of Russ Nelson's idea about fixing RSS. I think it would be far better to use UDP packets instead, that would save everyone a lot of time and effort. The key would be to send a subscription packet, which would then get a current item index... if this was newer than the last observed item, there could be a request for more items. (Or... the request could be built into the subscription packet if things are efficiently stored)

New items after that would just be UDP broadcasts of packets to the subscribed hosts. UnACKnowledged packets could be retried a few times, then written off the list of subscriptions.

This would work through NAT if the timeouts don't get in the way, just like they would with a TCP connection.

The Blame game... a bit of a rant

2010-09-21T11:42:00.004-05:00

So I get an email making a joke and blaming our current administration for the mess we find ourselves in...

I shot this back in reply

Really?

Wasn't it the Bush Jr. administration who spent us into oblivion in two wars for what should have been an Interpol action, while simultaneously redistributing welfare to the richest 1% in our nation?

Wasn't it the Clinton administration who tore down the protections of the Glass-Stegal act which enshrined the hard won lessons of the Great Depression?

Wasn't it the Bush Sr. administration who needed to raise taxes after all, but didn't have the balls to do it directly, and so hid new taxes as fees everywhere?

Wasn't it the Regan administration and a compliant Congress that de-regulated everything, and incentivized offshoring all of our manufacturing capabilities?

Wasn't it the Carter administration who arbitrarily decided the nuclear fuel cycle should be snipped in the middle, and what would have been a valuable commodity ready for reuse should become one of our nations many headaches?

Wasn't it the Ford administration who covered up the crimes of the Nixon administration?

Wasn't it the Nixon administration who arbitrarily pulled us off the Gold standard instead of straightening out our finances?

Wasn't it the Johnson administration who debased our coins?

Wasn't it the Kennedy administration who got us involved in Vietnam?

Wasn't it the Eisenhower administration who let the Military Industrial Complex get out of hand?

Wasn't it the Truman administration who started the CIA on it's merry mis-adventures?

Wasn't it the Roosevelt administration who helped our country out of the Great Depression and did the grunt work of winning WWII? Oh... good place to stop.

InterTubes as filtering mechanism

2010-09-18T10:27:00.001-05:00

I'm still trying to figure out all of the details of my InterTubes idea. I was replying to one Doc Searls blog posts, and had this to say... and I think it applies to InterTubes

...imagine a world in which twitter isn’t a silo, and it’s possible to rate other users on any scales you wish. You could rate someone on how “corporate shill” or “honest” or “intelligent” or “funny” or how they lean ideologically… and share those ratings.

You’d be able to do it on a single piece of data, or a string of them, or on the person sending them.

This would be a tremendously useful filtering mechanism.

It could apply to almost anything, not just tweet streams.

This is, in fact one of the core features of a Tube, the ability to share metadata about objects in the tube. I think this is a new use case.

Mike's code of IT conduct

2010-09-06T02:17:00.000-05:00

I was recently answering a question at a discussion site I frequent... and the question of person code of conduct arose... I put some time and thought into my answer, so I thought I'd repost it here.

My code for being an IT guy is pretty simple.

0. Computers are a tool to help people get real work done. That work pays the bills.

1. My job is to absorb uncertainty.

2. Backups are important, and should be tested often.

3. When things go wrong, it's NOT YOUR FAULT. Example... drag an icon from one folder to another on the desktop... what happens? 3 different things depending on conditions you can't possibly know about. Don't worry... you won't break it.

4. The users lie, but they don't mean to... never assume they know the nuances, nor should you assume they know how to answer your precisely worded question correctly. It's a skill to be able to work through them and get things fixed over the phone... fortunately with UltraVNC-SC, that's not as necessary any more.

5. Computers do everything with high speed and great precision, even if it's stupid and wrong.

6. Always help people out with "personal" stuff... it's a fringe benefit of working for the company to get that kind of IT help.

7. Did you reboot yet? ;-)

8. Can you see CNN? Do you see the story about X? (Always test for internet connectivity before troubleshooting access problems)

9. We can do anything, if you can get a job # to bill it to.

10. I'm on call 24x7, call my cell if there is an emergency.

11. If you have any doubt, don't open the attachment, if you did... pull out the power cable, THEN call me. I'll NEVER yell at you about it... it's not your fault. (See #3 above)

12. I am NOT a network Nazi... I do not monitor your email, browsing, or other habits. You are an adult, and I'll treat you as one.

13. Save important stuff on the G: drive, it's backed up every night.

14. I'm getting paid... I'll gladly help out in any way I can, even if computers aren't involved.

So, I hope that all makes sense, and is sensible.

Ageism and mis-tuned loops

2010-08-30T14:20:00.000-05:00

According to TechCruch ageism is alive and well in Silicon Valley. As I've stated before... you have to be careful what you tune your feedback loops to optimize on, in that case it was the subject matter of blogs and conversations... in this case, it's the nature of the technology that gets developed.

When you optimize along the lines of youth and vigor, you lose experience as a lever in the bargain. You end up wasting a lot of time re-exploring parts of the design space that have already been explored, several times in some instances.

Example....

In the early 1970s, the problem was that an explosion of processor types meant that compiler writers found themselves overtaxed trying to keep up, so they came up with a virtual processor as a means to help contain the extent of code they had to write on each new system, and thus the UCSD Pascal P-system was born.

However... it was slower than native code, and it had no separate process space to run applications on separate from the development environment, so it tended to crash a lot.

In the 1990s, the problem was that an explosion of web browsers meant that developers found themselves overtaxed trying to keep up, and so they latched on to Oak (now Java) as a means to help contain the extend of the code they had to write on each new system, and thus Java is run almost everywhere.

However... it is slower than native code, it has no separate process space to run applications, and it's security model sucks (again).

Meanwhile, Microsoft had a problem with security and applications. It chose to implement a new virtual machine platform in an attempt to isolate applications and ensure their security by clever design of compilers and runtime systems, this gave rise to the .NET platform.

However... they seem to also have chosen the wrong security model, and because they are trying to include the entire operating system in the .NET framework, there are a huge number of libraries involved, and the performance and maintenance of it has a very high cost.

So... as you can see... the same bad choices for building a VM keep cropping up... something an experienced programmer would know about and avoid, at least by the 3rd time. 8)

Why slashdot sucks (for deep thoughts)

2010-08-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

Slashdot is an interesting place to meet with fellow avid computer users, and share stories and comments of a social fraternal nature. It is not the place for deep thoughts... nor can it be due to its very nature. There are a number of possible moderation signals to give, insightful and funny being amongst them, but in the end it all comes down to points.

Funny, insightful, informative, troll, and other signals should be orthogonal to each other. It should be possible with the default UI to filter out funny messages, as they are often off topic, and distracting. Sometimes that's all you want. Because it all comes down to points, all of that information is lost, and every comment is essentially an entry in a popularity contest.

Information is lost in the moderation system, and further information is lost in the hard limits up or down... nothing can ever go higher than +5 points, or below -1. This means that a really popular story may have more than the default 50 replies shown reaching the +5 level of moderation... which cancels out the effect of moderation for those entries.

It would be an interesting exercise to redesign the moderation rules to accomodate tags or user-supplied dimensions of rating, such as "accurate", "bogus", "spam", etc, which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Bait?

2010-08-11T11:41:00.002-05:00

We had functionally obsolete battleships as bait in Pearl Harbor, while most of the fleet was out.

Now we're parking functionally obsolete aircraft carriers as bait in the Straight of Hormuz.. meanwhile the drones and cruise missile launch capability is likely to remain out of range.

Who says history doesn't rhyme?

Odd fact of the day

2010-08-04T11:40:00.001-05:00

My daily trip to work is 1.45 picoParsec.

Bare Metal Hypervisors for the Desktop, why we really need them

2010-07-30T10:32:00.000-05:00

A recent story in Network World brought my attention to the efforts to deliver a "Bare Metal" hypervisor to the users desktop machine. The obvious problem with getting anything to run bare metal is drivers. This is going to be a VERY hard nut to crack.

The operating systems we currently use are not secure enough, are prone to failure, and are hard to manage. Virtualization would ease all of these concerns, thus the perceived need.

The real issue is one of the nature of operating systems. The operating system exists to manage the resources of the underlying hardware and to make it available to the programs that wish to use it. The current crop of desktop operating systems fail miserably in this role because of their flawed security model. The rush towards virtualization is actually all about security models.

In a VM environment, the system administrators explicitly define the resources to be given to a virtual system. This is a course grained capabilities system.

Eventually it will dawn on everyone that you could do this in a finer grained way, using Cabsec, but that may take another 20 years.

In the mean while, we'll keep on filtering the net, scanning for viruses, blocking spam, and moving virtual machines around.

The stock market should be batch processed

2010-07-30T10:03:00.000-05:00

Apparently some programmers who write code to do High Frequency Trading aren't happy with their lot in life. There is a slashdot story about them.

My opinion is that High Frequency Trading (HFT) is almost impossible to differentiate from Front Running... which IS theft.

The markets should operate in batch mode, with a new batch every 5 minutes for markets with volume. Everyone puts in their bids and asks... and then they get their results after the run. That single step would kill off most of the abuse.

If the frequency of the batches needs to be adjusted up or down, that should be the pervue of the regulators.

Delayed write failure - tracking down the cause

2010-07-27T09:10:00.000-05:00

We're being forced to migrate to newer and "better" versions of Windows Server. Our brand new spiffy Windows 2003 file server is making me miserable. First the permissions work slightly differently... which caused 40 minutes of down time as I watched all of them get reset. Now we get "delayed write failure" messages on our XP workstations.

It turns out that Microsoft decided that any task can be completed in 15 minutes flat... and built that timeout into the file server. There is an easy way to disable it..

net config server /autodisconnect:-1

This tells it never to disconnect a user... which is as it should be.

Whew!

"Pole Shift Theory" to reality in a few easy steps...

2010-07-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

I was sent a link to this story which is being used as evidence on a site which promotes the theory of an upcoming pole shift. It doesn't say anything about where it happened.

So I found the original story, using Google. It happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Then I found this story from Milwaukee, from last year.. apparently it's not extraordinary after all. Note the cause:

”Thawing and traffic vibrations likely busted a sewer main. The void left by the broken pipe caused this slow underground erosion over days, possibly weeks. To repair the section of Locust, a road crew must bring down the street and build it up again. That means at least one noisy night for people who live in nearby apartment and condo towers. “I live right in the front, too,” said Katie Hobson.

Either we can worry about an imaginary "Pole Shift" which is just an unsupported fairy tail, or we could spend that same emotional energy worrying about something that actually matters... how to make sure that our infrastructure is maintained. I strongly suggest we worry about keeping our infrastructure up to date... or civilization will literally collapse around us.

Google and open WiFi... political action

2010-07-22T11:03:00.000-05:00

Here's what I wrote to my State Attorney General today in response to the news that there is a Witch-hunt in progress. You should write yours as well.

TO:

Office of the Indiana Attorney General
Indiana Government Center South
302 W. Washington St., 5th Floor
Indianapolis, IN 46204
Phone: 317.232.6201
Fax: 317.232.7979

E-mail: Constituent@atg.in.gov

FROM: Mike Warot

Hi
I'm Mike Warot, from Hammond. I'm a network administrator working in Chicago.

I've recently learned that 37 states are joining in an investigation of Google's collection of WiFi data, as typified in this story from the LA Times

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/07/google-street-view.html

The issue at hand seems to be quite simple. They were trying to make a list of open (unencrypted) WiFi access points as a supplement to GPS to help in navigation. Because the software used to collect this data (Kismet) defaults to collecting entire packets instead of just the names of the access points, there is now an uproar that "passwords were stolen" and other Bull Shit. It was a simple technical oversight, not an evil plot.

Please DO NOT WASTE MY TAX DOLLARS on this wild goose chase. I'm sure you have plenty of other more important work to do.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Violence in the name of God

2010-07-22T09:59:00.001-05:00

Violence in the name of God
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

This is what happens when someone thinks they know the mind of God.

It's so wrong, it makes me so angry. Why do we put up with this bullshit?

Cool hack - data through 3 inch thick solid steel

2010-07-21T22:26:00.001-05:00

The folks at BAE have done what can only be described as a cool hack... sending data through a 3 inch thick steel wall, "wirelessly".

It's not radio, as you probably already guessed.... it uses acoustic transmission, which is a really neat idea.

More coverage at http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/21/uk-defense-firm-pumps-data-through-solid-submarine-walls

What keeps an IT guy up at night?

2010-07-21T12:15:00.001-05:00

Recently I was asked what keeps me up at night, in view of my work in IT. Here's the reply I penned.

1. Our IT infrastructure rests on a bed of sand. The security model we all use right now is based on the idea of trusting the user, or not trusting them. This is great if you are talking about 1970's area college campuses prior to the internet, but falls far short of today's security needs. No amount of cybersecurity can fix bad design. It's going to take a series of total system collapses to get people to consider alternatives seriously, because it's a deep problem which very few people understand. If you want to understand it... read on...

When you run a program, you are essentially giving ALL of your rights to the program. It's like going to pay at the store and handing your wallet to the cashier when you need to pay.... and hoping that they don't just take everything from you. Actually... it's worse than that even.... because you can examine the actions of the cashier, computers are a box that just sits there.

When paying at the store, you don't give everything away... you decide what resources you wish to give to the cashier... and they can't get more without coercion. Paying for a gallon of milk with cash can never cause the cashier to be able to drain your bank accounts, because you didn't give them the CAPABILITY to access your bank account.

We don't have operating systems that incorporate the idea of handing a limited set of capabilities to a program, instead of every capability the user possesses.

This means that ANY program running can be subverted to do anything, provided it has a bug.

It means that all computers hooked to the internet are vulnerable to attack, security is mostly a matter of luck.

Because the computers on the net aren't secure, this provides a rich environment for theft and fraud.

The criminal element has found this resource, and is now exploiting it, worldwide.

Most people don't even see the root cause, which I've just explained. Most people believe that firewalls and virus scanners can deliver adequate security. Most people don't even think the problem can be truly solved. If you've read this far, you might be one who thinks otherwise.

THAT is the FIRST thing that keeps me up and night.

2. We're at Peak oil, according the the Department of Energy world oil production peaked in 2005. This means that the foundation of our industrial infrastructure is going to be harder and harder to maintain at it's current level of complexity. This could lead to the end of the progress brought with Moore's law... and even a slide backwards in the future.

3. Computer security is a political issue, and not a technical one. When is the last time political decisions actually made rational sense for the general public?

Thanks for your time and attention...

Sweet Dreams

-
-Mike--

The Bitgrid project

2010-07-19T16:54:00.004-05:00

I've got an idea I'm working on for a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) architecture which may be just the thing needed to achieve the goal of 1 ExaFlop per second when put into a sufficiently large grid.

It's called the BitGrid, It's got a blog http://bitgrid.blogspot.com

It's a crazy idea because it goes against the grain of 30 years of FPGA design in that it has NO routing hardware, it's all logic. This removes many of the problems with trying to fit a design into a chip.

It's crazy because it wastes gates and power to route signals around.

It's crazy because you just can't program it in C++, or any other procedural language.

But....

It is fault tolerant
It's conceptually very simple and elegant
It should work to Exascale level challenges
It should be possible to make a small chip for $1.00 in quantity.
Gates not used would consume almost no power.
It's never been tried before. (I've spend a LOT of time trying to find a precedent)

I've been building simulation software as a step in getting to actually building one. The simulator is open source. http://code.google.com/p/bitgrid-sim/

So.. there it is.
What do you think?

Email replacement needed

2010-07-13T23:48:00.000-05:00

Email is rapidly losing its utility as connectivity is being slowly killed by the need for ever more aggressive spam filtering. I'm looking for suggestions for something to replace it long term.

Could the simple addition of some authentication protocols pull us out of the spam trap, or is it too late?

Coding progress - bitgrid cell simulation

2010-07-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

It took a bit of work, but I managed to refactor the code in Sim01 so that all of the computing of the bitcell is done within a tBitCell object, supplied by the BitGrid unit. This means I can tweak the code a lot easier later, and potentially reuse it in the SimGrid project.

It took hours... and I'm tired.

Naming in the age of Google

2010-07-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

Keyword search works best when a word has a single meaning. Google doesn't work well when something can be contextualized many different ways. A strategy to counter this is to make up a new word (a neologism) when you want to talk about a subject that is otherwise lacking in suitable keywords. I've done it twice so far, and I'm writing this to point to the other blogs where I talk about the subjects in detail. (On the theory that each blog should generally stick to a topic... which I'm starting to believe is a mistake, but I'm willing to wait a while (a few more years) to be certain about it)

A bitgrid is a computing fabric composed of the smallest practical computing element I could envision working when put into a grid. The individual cells consist of little more than a look up table with 4 address lines going in, and 4 data lines going out. The nearest Cartesian neighbors each get an input and output. This makes it possible to do computation on sources from up to 4 inputs having up to 4 output bits. Most of the time it'll be partitioned differently, though. It's a continuation of an idea I had back around 1981. The conceptual design space has been pretty much written off since that time by others, as local connectivity only is thought to be far to inefficient use of a chip.

Cabsec is a word coined for me by Doc Searls. It's meant to describe CApability Based SECurity, a concept wherein the user decides that resources from a computer should be given to a program at the time you run it. The nice thing about explicitly supplying the list is that it's almost trivial to enforce from an OS design point of view. It also makes it trivial to stop things like viruses and Trojan horses, because you would have to explicitly allow them to have access to your OS files.

So, a bit of linguistic pollution in the name of launching new memes... a fare trade-off, I think.

Tearing down fences

2010-07-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

I was recently given a list of things as a guide to help chose which side of the Democrat/Republican fence I want to sit on. Here is my response:

Tear down the fence

Those are false choices... I refuse to pick a side... as the parties on both sides of it are corrupt and they work together to keep us down. The fence is a sheep pen, and we're expected to pay for it. I refuse to be a sheep.

As for Guns -

Guns are meant to protect us from all enemies, Foreign and Domestic. They probably won't help you if you are being carjacked... but they will help you defend yourself and your family at home. Criminals and people with diminished mental capacity shouldn't have them. Everyone should be licensed to use them, and have to prove they can safely operate their particular choice of weapon. (Just like cars). People with kids, or guests with kids should keep them locked up when they are not carrying them.

As for Food -

Cows shouldn't be fed cow parts. Testing for mad cow should be done on a wide scale probe to see if it's really an issue or not. Proper regulation of our food supply is a good and just purpose of the US Department of Agriculture and the FDA. Paying large corporations to consolidate megafarms and drive people off the land... is not.

As for Gays -

Some people think gays are born that way, others think its a sin. Either way, we're not God, we shouldn't judge them. Instead we should be on the lookout for abusive parents and others who do evil things to our children... and those people are usually straight.

As for Welfare -

As for the down and out, they are trying to figure out how to get by... they want work, honest work. It's the corrupt that spoil it for everyone... The corrupt at the bottom, and especially the corrupt at the top... who start wars for profit, who call the rest of us "little people", who will spend trillions to invade countries unrelated to the 9/11 attack... but don't want to pay unemployment benefits to those whose jobs have been shipped to China due to corporate greed.

As for Health Care -

Modern medicine is wonderful, and expensive as hell. We pay far more for it than every other modern country in the world, with far worse results. We need to get everyone's records in a database. We need to get rid of the insurance industry. They have proven to be a parasite that delivers NEGATIVE VALUE by sucking in vast amounts of money, and preventing health care. This should be done by the States, who already have infrastructure for dealing with it, not the Feds. (However, the Veterans Administration is now a model of how health care SHOULD be done, I'm amazed at how well it works)

As for The List -

I found the whole list interesting... but as I said at the start... it's a false choice. The "bipartisan" way is one of ignoring the real wishes of the people, and of dividing and conquering us. We need to end it, and get some real democracy going.

Symantec has put me in a Skinner Box

2010-07-02T07:58:00.000-05:00

Our "Premium Antispam" license from Symantec expired 2 days ago. I was concerned that the delay in getting a new license installed might cause issues, but was reassured that there was a full month's grace period. So I relaxed a bit.... wrong answer.

I now find myself in a high-tech skinner box. The spam filter turns itself off at Midnight each day now... and will resume functioning if I log into the server and re-enable it. I'm now doing battle with an evil cron job. I'm pissed.

Symantec Sucks.

Swan

2010-06-29T10:48:00.001-05:00

Swan
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

This is one of the many photos I took last night at the Full Moon Fire Jam on Chicago's lake front. I look forward to returning with my family.

I think it looks like a swan, don't you?

Chicago's gun control, explained

2010-06-29T10:01:00.001-05:00

The Gangs run parts of Chicago, it's almost a failed City... but to keep confidence up, the City has used the gun control ordinance to set up a straw man. If violence goes up... the administration gets to site the lack of similar legislation elsewhere as an excuse... and if it goes down... obviously it was good administration.

Actual enforcement of prohibition didn't work here in the 1920s... it's not working now... but real solutions are off the table as long as the public is distracted by the gun rights hysteria.

Why people tweet instead of blogging

2010-06-25T14:39:00.000-05:00

Doc Searls is on a well deserved vacation in France. He was unable to tweet because of the fail whale, but noted that he could still blog. This got me to thinking about why people put up with the stovepipe system that is twitter.

Marketing folks love twitter because they can use it as a way to broadcast without being accused of spamming. It's hard to criticize a tweet, because they are only 140 characters, and viewed as throw away. They also get picked up based on keywords, and thus avoid the reputation filtering that people get when choosing blogs.

This is yet another place where the application of Gresham's law is appropriate. When you search by keyword, you get spammed, because the good tweets get drowned out by the bad.

I think twitter is best used with a carefully selected list of people to follow. This reputation based system is further enhanced when the people you wish to follow can re-tweet something, and thus spread good ideas faster. The hashtag and saved searches, on the other hand... are only good for flash use, as they will eventually become spambait.

That's my take on it... now back to my sickbed. Thanks for reading.

Why Doc Searls is on my Blogroll

2010-06-18T07:25:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Doc Searls since I first heard of him via the Cluetrain. He is a marketing person who defected to our side... that of the public, who don't care to be shouted at. You'll find a deep vein of insight and wisdom, some of which is his, and the balance of which is from the conversations he starts. He doesn't post with the regularity we are all told to have, but I don't care... when he does post it's pretty good stuff.

You'll also get a nice dose of slice of life stuff, family history, current events affecting the area he lives in, and other things that are both entertaining and instructive. You can learn a lot about how to tell stories in this new medium from Doc.

Doc's quest is to invert the power relationships that dominated the previous century. He's tired of being a consumer, and wants us to all be free people, in control of our destiny. He sees the internet as a medium for positive social change. His pet project is VRM, which intends to provide the opposite of CRM.

I check Doc's blog every day.

Spring cleaning

2010-06-18T05:49:00.000-05:00

It's spring cleaning time... I've trimmed up the tags used on this blog, and I'm planning to get everything in the archives into proper categories. This should make it easier to discover stuff one is interested in reading.

I also plan to put a blogroll back in place, with a small twist... I'll provide a post about each entry, why I link to them, and the value they provide. I'll add a link to that post as well in the blogroll.

Windows Live Writer – First post

2010-06-17T21:31:00.001-05:00

I didn’t even know I had it installed on my laptop, but here it is… Windows Live Writer.

I’m seeing what it can do.

Here’s a photo I took yesterday.

Lion03

2010-06-16T11:40:00.001-05:00

Lion03
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

Synthetic focus (aka the "Warot Method") continues to be fun. Here is a nice shot of the Lion with a Blackhawks helmet.

Flickr App on the iPad - don't bother

2010-06-10T13:05:00.002-05:00

I tried the Yahoo Flickr App for the iPhone and iPad, and it sucks. There's no way to get it to take the whole screen on the iPad, for starters.

It doesn't recognize orientation, nor does it have any way to save photos locally.

It lasted about 2 minutes, now it's gone.

iPad - Connecting to my XP desktop

2010-06-10T11:41:00.001-05:00

I got Remote Desktop Lite for free via the App store on the iPad. It was able to connect to my desktop (XP) across the internet just fine. It doesn't support servers, so it has limited use.

IPad post #2, How to use blogger on an iPad

2010-06-10T10:19:00.003-05:00

If you go to the edit HTML option, you can directly type in text, which is how I made this post.

The onscreen keyboard is a drag, but as you can see it does work.

iPad experience so far... it REALLY sucks

2010-06-10T09:50:00.001-05:00

So, you can see my first iPad based post below, and read all about my experience.... NOT.

The f*cking keyboard app doesn't work in the WYSIWYG portion of blogger... talk about stupid!

iPad post #1

2010-06-10T09:46:00.001-05:00

iPad experience so far.... it sucks!

2010-06-10T09:30:00.004-05:00

I got the iPad today, all set up, connected to our WiFi, and was happy... until I tried to resize a video playing inside a web page (in safari)... now safari only shows a black screen....

power off doesn't help

off to visit Aunt Google for help.

Found out how to restart the iPad.

Hay as a way to capture floating oil.... some quick math

2010-06-08T09:27:00.003-05:00

Today, an email linking to this youtube video suggests using hay to adsorb floating oil. I was curious to see if it might work out, supply wise... so here is the math.

US total hay production.... approx 150 million tons, according to the US EPA

Total amount of oil spill, per year

25000 barrels per day using the highest estimate
365 days
42 gallons/barrel
6 pounds / gallon of oil (my estimate)
1 ton / 2000 pounds
---------------------

191,625 tons of oil and assorted goo per annum

Assuming a 1:1 relationship weight wise, it could work. It would take far less than 1% of the US hay output.

--Mike--

Idea - trade in program for lead solder

2010-06-07T22:03:00.002-05:00

After learning that corporations actually listen to tweets and blog posts... here is a suggestion for Indium corporation, and any others that make lead-free solder.

Those of us who are electronics hobbyists will hang on to our stocks of lead-tin solder for a very long time, unless we are given a reason to switch. Perhaps someone who makes a lead-free solder might offer a trade-in program as an incentive? Either outright swap if the economics are right (I have no idea how much indium costs)... or some discount.

Samples would be ok as well, of course.

Lost: Summarized in 3 minutes

2010-05-27T10:19:00.002-05:00

Not being a fan or follower of lost, I can now relate to it once it comes out on DVD, or iTunes.

Diaspora does NOT have an idea problem.

2010-05-13T15:33:00.005-05:00

Alex Wilhelm says that the Diaspora project already has an idea problem. He figures that the reliance on people setting up servers is a fatal flaw, it's need for servers to run on.

Not to say that hosting a personal FriendFeed and attempting to link it to my friends and their own FriendFeeds does not sound like fun, but it would be mind-numbingly tedious for most. The friction to get started is far too high for this project to ever gain real traction.

He goes on to make several variations of this argument. I think he overestimates the complexity and cost of getting servers up and running on the internet. He also underestimates the ability that people have to automate the process.

Depending on how the Diaspora project is done, it might be possible to host it on a regular web hosting site that supports PHP or some other scripting language. It could also probably be wedged into a Google Appspot instance. VMware and or Amazon EC2 could also come into play.

For any given popular web platform, eventually a number of providers of that service arise and will take care of the details for you. I'd imagine that Robert Scoble is already talking to his coworkers at Rackspace about making it happen for Diaspora once they get all the details.

If the guys get it done, I expect to be able to rent an instance for about $5/month, if not less. (10 instances in a family plan for $10/month wouldn't be too much of a stretch). For commercial free social networking, it would be well worth it.

I could also imagine the larger ISPs bundling it in, or making special provisions for it in their traffic management, because local ip traffic costs them far less than packets that traverse the backbones.

I hope that Diaspora and other projects get off the ground. It'll be good to open up the web again.

A Window of Opprotunity

2010-05-12T11:38:00.001-05:00

The diaspora from Facebook is beginning. It's now apparent to me that there is a window of opportunity to get the message of Cabsec embedded into whatever replaces it.

Bye Bye Facebook

2010-05-09T07:52:00.003-05:00

I've decided to kill my Facebook account. It's too much evil in one spot.

I'll miss it... like I miss all of the stupid things I used to do in my youth, but now know better than to do.

How I gave up on x-ray vision, and ended up taking pretty pictures instead.

2010-05-07T16:06:00.003-05:00

I first became interested when they photos showed the magic ability to see through objects, like the fabled x-ray glasses that populated the backs of comic books in the old days. The researchers at Stanford had actually shown the ability to look through things, though not totally opaque, but close enough. I wanted to learn how it was done, and once I read enough, I resolved to do it myself.

I didn't have the budget, nor the staff, nor the gear... I did have a willingness to experiment, willingness to give it a try, just to see what happened. The first results were interesting, but not what I had hoped for. The focus was on the wrong items, and I learned that it was going to be a fairly manual operation to get things to work right. But with time and practice, my technique improved, and I was able to slowly replicate what took hundreds of cameras and and the work of a few graduate students.

Here is my first result... I managed to see through the trees!

Over time, the ability to see through things lost it's attraction, because it was far easier to just look around something, rather than spend hours after the fact, not knowing if it would even pan out. The experimentation continued, however... and I got some interesting results along the way.

I kept discovering new effects, and new ways of looking at things, including time itself. My interests moved and transformed into something else, the ability to create photographs that would showcase a single object in a frame, with that nice soft focus only achievable in practice with a very large and heavy camera that I could never afford, nor successfully carry.

I wrote about my work on my blog, and posted photos on Flickr, and got some attention. It was enough to keep plugging away at it, learning the tradeoffs involved in order to get the creamy soft focus I really wanted.

I'm now at the point where I think I've got the technical part of it all set, and the artistic choices are going to be the main influencer at this point. I've demonstrated and experimented enough... now I just want pretty photos.

If you find yourself impressed with something, be like me... see if you can figure out how to do it within the limitations you have... you might achieve your goal, or you might just invent something interesting and beautiful along the way.

Knowledge and the Internet

2010-04-30T09:43:00.004-05:00

There's a service called HARO - Help A Reporter Out, which is pretty cool. Today one of the queries asked for opinions about the value of "real knowledge" in the internet age. I'd post it here, but there is no clear policy about what kind of privacy they expect for the queries that go out.

First, it's important to understand that there are categories of knowledge, and they are nested.

Stuff you don't even know you don't know
Stuff you know that you don't know
Stuff you actually know
Stuff you do all the time and can apply practically

People think that the purpose of Education is to increase to the necessary size the area of practical knowledge (#4), but this is a false assumption. The real purpose of education is to increase the size of #2, thus decreasing slightly the size of #1.

Category 1 stuff is the most dangerous stuff. It's the reason we parent children. They are naive to the dangers around them, having no idea of the tremendous potential energy surround them in the form of stairs, shelves, cars, trucks, trains, etc. Parenting is first of all about reducing the size of #1 stuff to the point where you don't get killed just going about your day. It then moves to #2 over time.

The problem with teenagers, fundamentalists, and younger versions of myself is that they don't really know about #1 at this point, because they have deluded themselves into the false and dangerous belief that they have reduced its size and scope to zero. This leads them to undervalue any skills or products that depend on knowledge that they didn't even know existed.

Through reflection and life experience, wisdom comes when you are fully aware of the vast size and scope of the stuff you know you don't know. It humbles you, and makes you more likely to consider fairly the opinions of others who do know the domain in question.

Now... how does the Internet and Google come into play here?

The internet helps you to explore stuff you don't know anything about, and get the basics. By makes you aware of all of the details of that stuff, and increases your awareness of the stuff you didn't know you didn't know... and makes it stuff you now know you don't know. This allows you to have a much better sense of an area.

So, if you are wise, and open you can both greatly decrease the size of #1 for a subject of interest by moving it into #2, and possibly increase #3 along the way.

Now... this does not help you become an expert instantly. That continues to take practice and work, but it does help you become more well rounded. The internet and Google play an incredible role in making it possible to learn about things that would otherwise be opaque. They are an immense positive asset.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash

2010-04-29T11:47:00.003-05:00

Steve Jobs has made his case against flash on the iPad. It's interesting, and I kept reminding myself about the presence of the well known reality distortion field that permeates his being.

As a programmer, and person, I hate reality distortion fields. This blog post is meant as an exercise in building skills to see through it.

First, the post was not just Steve, sitting in his office, jotting down a few notes. He's thought about it, long and hard, carefully avoiding certain areas that might cost him points, while pushing the strengths of his position. Lots of my stuff here is off the cuff, and might qualify as a jot... his definitely is not something quick and dirty.

First, there is "open", as Steve said. Just how do you send code to someone who owns an iPad? It appears to this observer that the way is definitely not open, but only goes through the Apple toll both. Open ports like USB would be nice too.

The there is the "full web"... Flash sucks because it's a layer between the web and the browser. It's a shim at best. However, it's the best shim out there for most cases. Allowing flash, with some disclaimers would be far better than denying the use of this shim.

Then there is security. If you can't protect your iPad from bugs in Flash, you certainly can't protect it from any other rogue applications either. It's just a matter of time before the holes start showing up. Steve - read up on Capability Based Security.

Battery life - good point. Hardware acceleration is good. It would be nice if I could replace the battery at some point as well.

Then there is Touch - If you don't allow cross compatibility, how are others going to figure out how to deal with touch? You'll always be a special case, and never mainstream.

Conclusion - Steve is good at distorting reality, but it's a near field effect with limited range.

Humor: How to give a cat a pill

2010-04-16T14:51:00.004-05:00

How to Give a Cat a Pill

1. Pick up cat and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby.

Position right forefinger and thumb on either side of cat's mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill in right hand. As cat opens mouth, pop pill into mouth.

Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.

2. Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa.

Cradle cat in left arm and repeat process.

3. Retrieve cat from bedroom, and throw soggy pill away.

4. Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm, holding rear paws tightly with left hand.

Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for a count of ten.

5. Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe.

Call spouse in from the garden.

6. Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, hold front and rear paws.

Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into mouth. Drop pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.

7. Retrieve cat from curtain rail.

Get another pill from foil wrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep shattered figurines and vases from hearth and set to one side for gluing later.

8. Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with head just visible from below armpit.

Put pill in end of drinking straw, force mouth open with pencil and blow down drinking straw

9. Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans and drink one beer to take taste away. Apply band-aid to spouse's forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.

10. Retrieve cat from neighbor's shed.

Get another pill. Open another beer. Place cat in cupboard, and close door onto neck, to leave head showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with elastic band.

11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on hinges. Drink beer. Fetch bottle of scotch. Pour shot, drink.

Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Apply whiskey compress to cheek to disinfect. Toss back another shot. Throw tee-shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.

12. Call fire department to retrieve the damn cat from the top of the tree across the road. Apologize to neighbor who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat.

Take last pill from foil wrap.

13. Using heavy-duty pruning gloves from shed, tie the little *&#%^'s front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table. Push pill into mouth followed by large piece of filet steak. Be rough about it. Hold head vertically and pour two pints of water down throat to wash pill down.

14. Consume remainder of scotch. Get spouse to drive you to the emergency room. Sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearm and removes pill remnants from right eye. Call furniture shop on way home to order new table.

15. Arrange for ASPCA to collect mutant cat from hell and call local pet shop to see if they have any hamsters.

How To Give A Dog A Pill

1. Wrap it in bacon.

2. Toss it in the air.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did reading it. The photos and text came to me in an email, author and photographers unknown.

2010-04-13T23:45:00.002-05:00

Looks like Twitter has managed to upset some of their vendors to the point of taking action to offsource it.

20 minutes of down time due to updates

2010-04-10T10:44:00.003-05:00

I spent 20 minutes without computing resources, because both Adobe Acrobat, and Java needed to be updated. I could spend an hour or so figuring out why, but I strongly suspect they had security patches as the lead cause, not functionality increases.

Once again, time lost because we don't have cabsec.

I have several important ideas to express

2010-04-10T09:31:00.002-05:00

Like most bloggers, I have ideas I think are really important. These are deep, very meta ideas. Ideas which can make a huge difference in the world, if I can effectively communicate them to others, but alas, I wasn't taught rhetoric. This is making things far less efficient than they could have been.

I will list some of them below:

Computer security can be fixed using cabsec
Because computers aren't secure, people don't really own their own computers
Because we're not the true owners of our computers, we can't really own our data
We can't run our own networks because we can't keep them secure, we have to pay others
This invites censorship and government intervention because we can't keep them private
We're not taught the skills necessary to be citizens in the US these days, perhaps deliberately.
The US economy is imploding because we don't manufacture things anymore.
The civil war was about grabbing power, it did not end slavery, but transformed it.
The Federal reserve caused the Great Depression, and is causing the Second as well.
Peak oil happened already, Thanksgiving 2005
It's impossible to find the truth about global warming for the average citizen. It seems to be happening, but it could also be the basis for yet another power grab.

See, that's quite a list... and I'm sure there are more things to add to it. I might have effectively communicated 10 of these ideas to 10 people in the last 10 years, if I'm lucky. I need to do far, far better if I'm to make any kind of dent in this world before I pass on.

There are some things I'd also like to know

Who really killed JFK?
Who runs the US, really?
Where did all of the bailout money go?
Where did the Trillion dollars the DOD lost go to?
Is our current lack of computer security a historical accident, or was it deliberate?
Why didn't we learn that prohibition doesn't work?
What would it take to restore our country to a true democracy of informed citizens? Can it still be done?
What's up with global warming?
How do we effectively discuss non-trivial concepts when Google is the tool to find the conversations? Keyword search only works well for popular subjects, and hides alternative meanings.

Ok... tangents and time sinks and really deep questions... comments and conversations welcome.

The importance of Rhetoric and the Trivium

2010-04-10T09:11:00.003-05:00

It is now apparent that the US educational system has failed me. I was never taught Rhetoric, and it's causing me to be very frustrated. I have a deep hole to dig out of.

The classical education movement is interested in the Trivium. This is an educational system that teaches children in three age-appropriate steps.

Grammar is the words we speak, what they mean, and the rules for putting them together.
Logic is how to think about those words and concepts, and the rules of critical thinking skills.
Rhetoric is the means and rules for communicating those concepts clearly to others.

The education system I was brought up in did teach Grammar fairly well. It taught a little bit of logic, but not enough of it. Most of my cohort lack were not given the critical thinking skills necessary to be good citizens at the time we graduated, myself included. Rhetoric was right out.

It's possible to learn logic and critical thinking skills given sufficient life experience. When it doesn't happen, you either end up naive, or cynical. We seem to have an overabundance of both of those in the US at this time.

Where things really fall apart is the lack of proper education in Rhetoric. We don't know how to properly convey our thoughts and transmit them to others. The lack of proper rhetorical skills is really frustrating me at this point. I'm going to spend quite a bit of effort to catch up to speed in the next few years. Its sad that I wasn't taught this stuff 30 years ago.

Blogging has helped, as have various life experiences, including my current job as IT manager at a small marketing firm. It really opened my eyes when I learned the behind the scenes reasons for the way things work. I never thought about having to distill a message down before that point. I just assumed you just start talking until you've said the what they need to know. It's far more nuanced and requires a much higher level of skill than I could have even thought possible 12 years ago.

It is my hope that I can successfully help my daughter, Virginia, make it through all of the Trivium by the time she leaves our nest. I want her to have all the skills I have, as well as the ones I aspire to, when she starts her adult life. I want her to be a fully empowered citizen.

Offsourcing Web 2.0

2010-04-08T09:57:00.004-05:00

I believe that the silos are winning the war, and we need a new strategy.

In the Electronics industry, there has traditionally been a strong preference for choosing components which have a second source, that is an provider who can independently deliver functionally identical and interchangeable parts. Businesses prefer this as it helps to protect against supply side disruption, and the need to change designs because a part can no longer be purchased.

A second source for Twitter, for example... would be API equivalent, and would hopefully be able to perform the same functions should Twitter close up shop. However, this is not an attractive option, because Twitter is not a component, it is a complete service and infrastructure.

A better way to provide second sourcing for Twitter would be to provide the tools to build a Twitter equivalent ourselves, so that we maintain the infrastructure (or pay a hosting provider to do so). If any part of the system goes down, we could route around the nodes that have failed.

I'd like to call this idea offsourcing, for lack of a better Google tag.

We should start figuring out ways to offsource the main things we all depend upon daily. To figure out components and services that could be used as replacements. Then we need to start offsourcing to these new systems and networks.

Merely replicating an existing system is not enough, however. There needs to be an through analysis of what the benefits are of a system, and how it really interacts with things. For example, twitter has evolved into a notification platform. When you post a blog entry, you can tweet it. But it's more than that... it's also a voting platform, because you can retweet someone's notification about a blog post, in effect giving it your endorsement, and a vote.

The downside of twitter is that it's a big stream, and people tend to piss in it. As pointed out by Merlin Mann in his post, Better, we need to be more mindful of what we put out there, and we need to add value. It's impossible to edit your posts once they are out there, so they are biased towards low value, high flow sewage.

An ideal Twitter replacement would allow notification, but would be more nuanced. It would allow better curation, and support editors. it wouldn't be Twitter anymore, but would keep the best features.

I believe it will take a while to find the necessary components to build a useful, decentralized slower but more useful Twitter replacement. I don't have a quick fix to offer here. I just want to get the idea of doing it into play.

Maybe I'm getting too tied to creating a new term... but I think this type of analysis needs to be done for a lot of things, and I'd like to be able to find those ideas with google, so it needs a new term to help.

Cabsec work continues

2010-04-01T00:38:00.002-05:00

I've now got TortoiseHg, Google App Engine SDK for Python, Python 2.5.4, and the source code for myfs on my laptop. I hope to be able to cobble together some basic capabilities demos to get the ball rolling.

It looks like I'll need to define all of the basic mechanisms necessary to build what would eventually be the basis of the internet operating system as defined by me... not the Tim O'Reilly version.

Ugh

2010-03-31T08:56:00.001-05:00

It's one of those days.... have infected machines to deal with at work.

Forgot something important for my beautiful bride

And the medications aren't strong enough to deal with today's kidney stone pain...

pray for me