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GRAFFITI -- January 05, 2009 thru January 11, 2009 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

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January 5, 2009

0001 - First Post! Oh, wait, I'm the only poster, except when someone writes in with something pertinent or fun. That doesn't happen so much since I take more time with other aspects of life, and devote less time here than previously. Well, these things come and go in cycles. You may see more of me this year ... or maybe not. Anyway, this is a placeholder post for testing all my year-end roll-over stuff. So expect more later...

2215 - Howdy. Yeah, I'm back. Official-like, welcome to 2009. Today? The usual Monday stuff this evening, along with roasting a couple of batches of beans for some espresso on Wednesday at the office. Other than that, it was a normal-ish working Monday. That and fifteen days left until the Inauguration. There's more tech rumbling around here, too, but nothing ready for public consumption yet. I'd best wrap this up - I've got to be at the office at 0700 for the HVAC guy.

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January 6, 2009

1757 - Another ice storm averted through an act of will. Not mine, probably, though. MacWorld keynote fundamentally conservative and boring. New hardware == the new 17" MBP, starting MSRP $2800. Yowza! Pretty box, nice specs, though. I'll have to see how close I can get to that config at Dell or Lenovo, just for fun.

Among the few I follow on Twitter, @timoreilly seems to have the time and inclination to provide me with a rather extraordinary and eclectic set of links. One of the recent ones was to the first segment of two from the Columbia Journalism Review interview with Clay Shirky. One of the more interesting tidbits I found in the interview was this:

So my nightmare is that every city with less than a quarter of a million people in it sees its only daily newspaper vanish. And that a good portion of those cities turn to 1950s-style, you know, 1950s New Orleans-style corruption. Which is to say because there�s no one watching, no one will be held accountable.

Other stuff worth thinking about... I bought some stuff from Amazon the other day. Shortly after the order was completed, I got an email saying that @amazongolddeals was following me on Twitter. The impression I get is that if I follow @amazongolddeals back, I'll get DMs about deals appropriate to my Amazon account. However, the very first thought I had was that if I were to follow that tweeter, I would shortly get some targeted phishing attacks about shipping or account problems or something, trying to take me to a page where my account data could be lifted. While following a feed like that might be a good idea, always be paranoid enough to be aware of possible consequences of the activity.

I renewed my Linux Journal subscription back in September, shortly after it expired. It takes a while to process such things, but I expected something from them. Finally, around the end of October, I sent an email asking why they'd cashed my check, but I didn't see any magazine. I then thought no more about it, between school and visiting the Thompsons and whatnot. A couple of days ago I got an email asking me back... and I noticed that I still had not received any magazine. I sent an email off Monday, copying my first message. I was a bit sterner, but not impolite. This afternoon I got comms from both the standard customer service desk *and* from the Director of Subscriptions, or some such titled bloke. They're taking care of it, and doing it the right way. Good on them. Often these things don't come out well - this one did. I still don't think much of the way Phil handled the separation from Linux Gazette, but I learn useful stuff from LJ, so there you go.

Now, to feed the dogs, and then myself. Ciao!

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January 7, 2009

1908 - Ooooh! A continuing topic! Svenson writes:

[quote]Which is to say because there's no one watching, no one will be held accountable.[/quote]

Good points.

But then again. The newspapers are not simply disapearing, they are being replaced, mostly by Internet feeds. So the problem is not that no one is watching anymore. The problem is that "internet journalism" usualy is far from neutral and balance. So if you want you can still see what's happening and who is doing what (wrong) but you will have to do your own filtering. And few people are willing to do that, you see, it means reading things you don't like and don't agree with.

I replied:

Well, that, and possibly only the people with axes to grind are paying attention until it's too late. Look at me: I live in a neighborhood with an HOA and covenants. The last thing I want to do is "participate" and be one of the nosy neighbors that tells people what to do. City Councils and their staffs are mostly full of people who, at heart, are scaled up HOA folk: happiest when they're screwing around in other people's business. It's unpleasant to watch, and many won't. If our local paper went down, and I didn't *personally* go to council meetings to see what they're getting up to, how will I know for sure? I don't *want* to do that, because it's boring and I don't want to do that - there are better things to do, like work for a living. But the folks who *do* want to attend those and might report on them are also mostly nosy parkers: how can I trust what they report?

There's an article at Slate on Apple, post-Jobs, at the end of the piece: "The big question for the company's fans and investors: What happens to a cult without a leader?" I would merely point at Scientology and say, "Just fine, apparently." Do you suppose that AGW hysteria would continue without Al Gore (or Jim Hansen)? Yeah, sadly, I think so, too.

@sheigh (aka Sheigh Crabtree, most recently of the LA Times) just clued me in to the concept of "Oscar campaigns". Sigh. I would have thunk that it had to do with performances and whatnot. Clearly I lead a sheltered life, there's so much I don't know. I do know that we've had a shedload of rain in the last two days. 1.8" so far. Imagine what that would have been like had the temps been conducive to snow. Oh, here's the final numbers from this hovel, for last year.

Row 1 - Normal rainfall Glenn Dale Bell Station, 1921-1987
* Only nine months measured in 2008

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January 8, 2009

2202 - Only a couple of fun bits today. In this month's IEEE Computer publication, one of the featured articles is entitled "Professional and Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering. A bit of a hoot in the second paragraph: "In ethics courses or through professional association codes, practitioners might be warned of situations or dilemmas that could eventually lead to unethical behavior, such as "Avoid harm to others." Clearly, it would a violation of ethics if one could not harm others. One merely needs to look at Clippy, or SCO, to understand how ethical software companies really behave. Grin.

In other news, Obama was said (on CNN) to be naming a Chief Performance Officer for his administration. Um, is that like Secretary of Viagra, or what? Apparently, it's something to do with money and budgets. I guess that OMB, Treasury, IRS, and the Fed aren't enough - we need more bureaucrats. But that's how we control the Federal deficits, by hiring more people ... errr, what?

Meantime, I'm playing with the Avant Window Navigator, an OS-X inspired dock for the bottom of my Linux system window. Shiny!

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January 9, 2009

2210 - Happy Friday! I got ssh and rsync from the cygwin suite working under Vista today, so that we can do effective remote backups for folks. That was my big success of the day. Oh, hey, note to $MAJOR_CREDIT_MONITORING_SERVICE: customer service != teaching people from India how to apologize. But I prevailed there, in the end, as well. Tonight we did some financial stuff, laid some tentative vacation plans for the next several months, and I roasted some Guatamalan beans for tomorrow's cuppa. Not a bad day, overall. Ciao!

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January 10, 2009

MaiPhone boo-boo

1906 - Sadness. It still works okay, but MaiPhone took a short, fast trip to visit Mr. Sidewalk this afternoon. There's a bunch of edge dings, and the clearly visible corner shatter. Sigh. Now to find out how Apple's coverage is ...

On the Twitter front, I'm now following Mitch Kapor (@mkapor), whom I haven't spoken to since the last time (or possibly the time before last) PyCon was in DC. One of the really smart [business && software] guys in the world, he's always impressed me. Also Twitter related, a couple of weeks ago @timoreilly recommended A Pattern Language as reading for anyone interested in Design Patterns. Okay, sez I, and picked it up, along with some other stuff I needed from Amazon. Here's an excerpt from one of the reader reviews at Amazon:

This book talks specifically about what works and doesn't work when building cities and towns and how to take the human element into consideration when doing so. However, I found its conclusions and most of its patterns applicable to software engineering. There are good books on software design patterns such as "Head First Design Patterns", and there are some good books on user interface design such as "Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design", but this book really helped me merge the idea of software design patterns with the user perspective in a way that other books I have read have not.

I've barely cracked the book, and by style and Preface alone, I can tell I'll be loving this book and what it has to teach me. More on this topic down the road, I'm sure. Thanks, Tim!

Today I picked up some new athletic shoes on sale at Sears. I wandered also through Best Buy, where once again nothing cried out to come home with me. I forgot to go by Bed, Bath and Beyond, where I need to buy a mesh colander for the coffee roasting process. Back home, I took a walk (that was when the iPhone took flying lessons), roasted half a pound of El Salvador Finca Mauritania to get us through the coming week, and had a yummy lunner (lunner: the meal between lunch and dinner) of eggs and bacon. Now I want to delve into my magazine stack, and (if I'm lucky), also finish reading The Fifth Elephant.

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January 11, 2009

1605 - Standard Sunday stuff ongoing... After the shopping, we crated up Christmas for the year and I packed it up into the garage attic. Okay, the Christmas decorations, I mean; our donation and giving program is a year 'round thing, in line with what we can afford. Regarding the iPhone and the sad flight yesterday, I think I'll just keep using it until it dies. There's nothing "broken" about it other than looks, right now. I saturated the breaks with a bit of some cyanoacrylate adhesive product, then scraped off the surface after it had set. That should hold the glass together in the middle term.

Tim O'Reilly plunked yet another thoughtful piece up on the O'Reilly Radar today: Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles. It's worth a read (as is most stuff that makes you think, rather than just consume).

There's going to be strong pressure on the incoming President to draw down forces in Iraq - he needs to ensure that political expedience at home doesn't override conditions on the ground and political stability in Iraq. Things are, to my eye, looking up. It would be a grave mistake to draw down too quickly, and waste the blood and treasure spent helping put things back together after taking care of Hussein. Our troops have done a great job, doing all sorts of activities that an army isn't normally responsible for (armies are for breaking things, holding ground, and killing enemies). Our armed forces are great at that stuff, too, of course. My hat's off to all of them. I am honored, and sobered, by the sacrifices they make on our behalf. Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen.

• Pfc. Christopher W. Lotter, 20, of Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, died Dec. 31, 2008, in Balad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when he was shot by enemy forces in Tikrit.
• Lance Cpl. Alberto Francesconi, 21, of Bronx, New York, died Jan. 1 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
• Lance Cpl. Chadwick A. Gilliam, 29, of Mayking, Kentucky, died Jan. 3 at a U.S. military base in Kuwait.
• Staff Sgt. Anthony D. Davis, 29, of Daytona Beach, Florida, died Jan. 6 in Northern Iraq, of wounds suffered when he was shot by enemy forces.
• Lance Cpl. Jessie A. Cassada, 19, of Hendersonville, North Carolina, died Jan. 6 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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