Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/28/charles-babbages-difference-engine/
On our trip to London I spent some time browsing the Science Museum, which holds many wonders. When I got upstairs I tingled inside at the sight of this beauty. Charles Babbage was a genius who designed a mechanical, base-10 computing device way before the modern computer era. His vision was never built: it was just too hard and expensive and plain old ahead of its time. Finally, in the 1980s, this computer was built based on Babbage’s old designs. A beautiful brass hand-cranked calculating machine! For a modern computer geek this is not unlike seeing a dinosaur brought to life.
UPDATE: O’Reilley’s blog has a great explanation of the difference engine, and links to Plan 28, to reconstruct the original analytical engine! HELL YES!!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/25/quick-turn-it-off-and-hide/
Obama internet ‘kill switch’ bill approved
Really?
REALLY!?
Our current national information security policy basically amounts to every company hires their own militia to provide collective security against attacks, large and small. The major ISPs will cooperate with each other to filter out attacks when they can, but . . . it is basically “every man for himself”
And our own critical infrastructure, like the power grid and the military, is constantly being hacked by the Chinese, who have a standing Army of highly competitive, over-caffeinated nerds and a shortage of women. Guys who can’t get laid acquire a lot of energy that needs to be directed somewhere.
So, this new initiative, to use a military analogy, amounts to giving the President an especially large white flag which can be deployed at a moment’s notice. “The Internet is under attack!? Quick, turn everything off and hide!!”
I mean, I thought I was all for Socialism and all, but this rapid surrender option isn’t the part of French national policy that I was hoping we would emulate . . .
How about instead of a “kill switch” we invested some time and energy and patriotism in to building a common defense strategy that analysed threats in real time and coordinated with the parties who manage our national networking infrastructure to deploy a rapid response to threats? Too obvious? Maybe oh maybe that is what they’re trying to do, but they have this “kill switch provision” in there that is making the whole effort look more retarded than it is.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/06/06/growing-up-and-counting-the-cost/
I used to believe . . . that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently — during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere — and one can ignore or seize them.
Nick Hornby
I think that is a fair description. I think that for a long time I chose to be swept along with the current, without taking much responsibility for my destination. In the past few years I have gained a better understanding that the crises are “growing up” opportunities, and that I have successfully “grown up” from some of these experiences. Still, it is easy enough to be swept along and fail to learn lessons, and I have surely missed the opportunity to grow as much as I could have from some of these crises.
I also remember John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, recounting advice he had received during the dot-com boom, that you really only have a great company after you have survived an existential threat. After you have had to “grow up” and see what hard decisions you make when it comes time to make those hard decisions. John recounted with a grim face the large number of layoffs that Cisco chose to make in order to survive the dot-com crash. Today, Cisco pays well, and hands out bonuses, but although it has billions in the bank, it is also religious about managing expenses, which can be frustrating at times. All the same, I prefer to work for a company that can sometimes feel frustratingly stingy, if it means my job is less likely to be axed in the next recession. I like to think that this “stinginess” is the mark of a “grown up” company which is keen to reduce the risk of future crisis.
There is a well-worn adage that those who set out upon a great enterprise would do well to count the cost. I am not sure that this is always true. I think that some of the very greatest enterprises in the world have been carried out successfully simply because the people who undertook them did not count the cost; I am much of the opinion that . . . the most instructive consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The cost of doing nothing? Global Warming springs to mind. I have talked myself down from a lot of ideas because, for example, I have a better and better understanding of the costs of building a service on robust and scalable architecture. For the most part that is a good thing: great ideas should be able to wrestle down their opponents. But sometimes you just have to charge forward, and in the words of Buckminster Fuller, “dare to be naive.”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/24/google-privacy-done-right/
Logging in to Google Reader, I find that they have made an enhancement, with privacy implications:
Of course, I think my shared items have always been public, but it is nice that they’re trying to do the right thing.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/20/post-facebook-diaspora/
So, occasionally someone asks “well, what will we replace Facebook with?” We don’t really need to replace it right away, but there are some NYU kids who figure it would be a fun project to build a distributed social network where you get your own little “seed” site on a server somewhere, and you can connect with your friends, determining what you intend to share with whom. It sounds totally doable, though who knows if they’ll actually manage to execute and gain traction.
They asked the Internet for $10,000 via KickStarter. So far they have been pledged $174,915. $25 of that is mine. I guess they won’t fail for lack of interest or money. Go go underdogs! :)
Oh, and if you’ve been tempted to ditch Facebook, but didn’t want to be the only crazy dweeb out there, you can join just over 6,000 other folks planning to quit on May 31: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/13/how-do-i-delete-my-facebook-account/
Of course, Google wouldn’t be spotting a trend for this search item if you didn’t have to use Google to figure out how to delete your Facebook account. CNN credits Danny Sullivan for noting this trend.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/10/password-manager-solution/
To a discussion as to preferred password manager solutions, I added the following:
I developed a simple algorithm I use to generate passwords using my brain. I have changed this algorithm a little a few times. At the most basic level, something like this would be you like to use the password “frog” . . . but then add the first two letters of the web site name: Yahoo -> frogya, Google -> froggo.
The benefits of this “password manager” are that as long as your brain functions appropriately, you will always have platform-independent access to your passwords. If any given password is compromised it is non-obvious to an attacker what your other passwords are.
The main drawback to this password manager is that different password policies are mutually exclusive: one site requires a special character, another site prohibits special characters.
I use a different algorithm for more complex passwords for important stuff like ssh keys and unix logins.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/06/celsius-where-metric-fails/
I love Metric, but I think for human purposes, Fahrenheit is more useful, and actually closer to the convenience of metric:
Celsius:
0: water freezes
100: water boils
Fahrenheit:
0: colder than Denmark
100: warmer than human blood
If I want to boil and freeze water: hell yeah, Celsius. But if I want to know how hot or cold it is outside, explain it to me in terms I can understand!
(Originally a comment on the Big Fat Blog)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/05/so-long-facebook/
You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?
Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.
Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.
Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.
And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.
So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.
If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/09/use-of-as-per-exploding-in-silicon-valley/
So, I occasionally get anxious when I perceive some trend in word usage, especially when it seems like hyper-correction. I swear that in the past few years everyone replaced “social” with “societal” and in the past few months I swear that everyone (that I correspond with) has started saying “as per” instead of . . . say, “per” . . . for example:
“I did the job per your instructions.”
Or:
“I did the job, as you instructed.”
Has lately become:
“I did the job, as per your instructions.”
I just saw a work e-mail where someone used “as per” in two consecutive sentences and I said “there has to be a way to track this.”
And there is a way. A very crude way: Google Trends.
I wasn’t able to find anything at first: “as per” is dwarfed by “as” and “per” but I confined my search to the past 12 months, then the United States . . . then . . . California:
| Cities |
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1. |
San Jose, CA, USA |
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2. |
Sacramento, CA, USA |
|
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3. |
San Francisco, CA, USA |
|
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4. |
Pleasanton, CA, USA |
|
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5. |
San Diego, CA, USA |
|
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6. |
Irvine, CA, USA |
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7. |
Los Angeles, CA, USA |
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8. |
Milpitas, CA, USA |
|
It is probably just a statistical blip for an incomplete corpus but at least for the moment I feel a little better to see some data demonstrating a measured spike in usage of “as per” in the Silicon Valley . . . I might not be as crazy as I suspect.
Is “as per” bad usage? It certainly annoys me. Some technical writers are grappling with the issue, and it sounds as if English craftspeople prefer to avoid using this weirdly redundant mish-mash of Germanic-Latin.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/02/01/death-of-books/
I just posted a comment on a friend’s Facebook status:
I think the Death of Paper Books has been predicted with the advent of newspapers, radio, television, microfiche, books-on-tape, CD-ROMs, the Internet, portable computers, e-books readers, and smart phones, but it still hasn’t happened yet.
I like books, I like holding them in my hands, and I like stacking them on shelves along the walls of my apartment. I suspect that this love of books will be transmitted to my children, much as it was inherited from my parents. I doubt we’ll have an “unabridged dictionary” or a set of encyclopedias like when I grew up, but hell yeah, as long as I and my descendants have the money to spend, paper books aren’t going to die out.
I think eBooks will serve a particular role, especially in lightening the load in school backpacks. For my normal routine of reading one book at a time, though, and then palming it off to a friend or family member, I am fine with having the pulp copy to thumb through, though access rights if I later want to search the book digitally would be nice.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/28/ipad/
Background: I am not an Apple fan, but I keep an eye out. Yesterday they said they would make a world-changing announcement, and they gave us: the iPad. Here’s a comment I just made about the iPad:
Lack of an OS? The thing is an extra-large iPhone that can’t place phone calls. It is a Kindle killer but for $500 it can not even keep up with cheapo PC netbooks.
A Dell Mini 10 has a better screen, lower price, keyboard, can run all non-Apple software, video chat, and USB ports so you can offload your digital camera without buying an extra dongle, and you can buy it last year.
I am hoping to see more touch screens on netbooks, going forward.
Another thing I have noticed is that if I trash PCs, Windows, or Linux, people will either agree with me, or not take it personally. “Yeah, things aint perfect.” But if I trash Apple stuff, Apple people quickly become offended. I suspect that a part of the loyalty of Apple users is that they have paid a premium to buy in to the club. Any perception that is positive reaffirms the extra investment they have made into buying only the very best, but any negative perception undermines their self-confidence regarding their investment, and provokes a hostile reaction.
Windows users? Hell they’re just glad if they haven’t had a virus in the past six months.
Linux users? They downloaded a CD and managed to get something non-Windows running, with a little advice from web forums. Some of it is really sweet, some of it is pretty enh.
Mac users get offended that Firefox doesn’t match the style of the rest of their purely Mac applications.
For me, the best part about the iPad is that it was already advertised back in 2006. It is just too bad that the 2010 model lacks Vaginal Firewall Protection.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/26/when-will-google-voice-support-apps-users/
Background: Google Apps is a service where Google will host the e-mail and calendar for your domain. So, instead of going to gmail.com I go to mail.toldme.com and log in as dannyman for dannyman@toldme.com. The annoying thing that has been going on for several years now is that only a minority of the growing array of Google software that features personalized content will support my Apps login, so I have two completely separate Google accounts:
Apps Account: dannyman@toldme.com
Gmail Account: picasasucks69@gmail.com
The first contains an archive of e-mail going back 15 years, my combined e-mail, telephone, and address book of all my friends, and Calendar appointments for the past five years. It integrates seamlessly with my Android Phone.
The second is for all the stupid Google applications that do not work with my Google account and require me to have a Gmail account that I never use otherwise: Picasa, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Voice . . . that last one is especially annoying, because now the brokenness leaks onto my Android phone!
The following is adapted from http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?fid=475790531056779f00047e151dc314f4:
As a big Google fan, I have an Android phone and a Google Apps account, and a Google Voice account. Google Voice is really neat, but since it only supports Gmail logins it is really poor that my Gmail / Android contacts aren’t available in Google Voice. That’s right: since I’m a really big Google fan, the Google Voice application will NOT sync with my Google Phone.
I understand that it is possible to install software that pulls the data out of your Apps Gmail account or Android phone, and then re-copies that back in to the Google Voice non-Apps account. But this requires extra effort on my part to maintain a kludge to have duplicate copies of data stored in two different places.
What I want instead is the obvious and sane solution, where I log in to Google Voice the same way I log in to everything else: with my Google Apps account. My Android phone logs in to my Google Apps account and has instant access to my contacts list, and my hosted Gmail logs in to my hosted Apps account, and has instant access to the very same contacts list shared seamlessly with my Android phone. So, when I log in to Google Voice, I want to log in with my Apps account, and then Google Voice has instant access to all of my phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with my Google Apps login.
Basically, I am asking for sanity, and short of sanity, at least an acknowledgement that sanity is a desired outcome.
This “second class citizen” treatment is really frustrating at times: the biggest fans get the worst support. Any idea when Google Voice is going to stop locking us out? And when that time comes will I be able to keep my phone number, or will it be like when I was forcibly migrated from Google Calendar over to a blank Google Apps Calendar, losing all my appointments and shared calendars, with no option to migrate my data?
I have tried to get an answer from Google Voice to no avail. I would like to think the Google employees behind Apps are working behind the scenes to make Google Voice available seamlessly to paying and loyal customers. Or maybe this simply is not a priority and us common folk Google Evangelists just shouldn’t get too worked up about Google products, and consider switching to competing technologies. Thanks!
These days my Android phone is in a weird way, because I’m starting to use Google Voice for SMS, except Google Voice has no access to my address book, so everywhere I am accustomed to seeing names and pictures for my contacts I see a ten-digit number, because Google Voice has no access to the contacts in my Google account.
Ugh!
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/25/week-of-17-january-2010/
Sunday, January 17
2.0h V for Vendetta
Monday, January 18
A quiet day on-call, cooped up. Mei had to pull a long shift at the hospital, but when she got home we enjoyed the from-scratch Apple Pie she made for my birthday.
1.0h China From the Inside
0.5h Twilight Zone
Tuesday, January 19
Last day on-call.
In the evening Mei took me out for dinner at the restaurant where I had taken her for dinner for our anniversary. The anniversary dinner had been a perfect dining experience, and we later learned that the restaurant had a Michelin star. This time around we had a great meal, but the service wasn’t as perfect. I figured that like many restaurants they may not have their best staff working on Tuesdays.
Pushups: 35 + 35
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Wednesday, January 20
In the morning I biked down to the Tea Lounge. I wrote a follow-up review on Yelp explaining that although I love the Tea Lounge, if you serve diuretics your toilets shouldn’t be traumatizing to sit upon.
Later in the day I called the MTA to get my transit card replaced. They have a new program where you can purchase one transit card and they’ll just charge you more money when your balance runs low. Unfortunately, they send you the same little piece of paper that all the ephemeral transit cards use, so after a few months it was completely shot. They cancelled my defective transit card and said a new one would arrive within 15 days.
Later I dropped by the new orthodontist, who scanned my head in various ways and then got to the business of demanding that my teeth bow to his vision of an ideal alignment.
Pushups: 40
0.5h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Thursday, January 21
I asked Mei if she had any aspirin since my jaw was sore. I never take aspirin, and while I wasn’t quite in pain, my mouth felt sore enough that I’d rather not have it preoccupy my day. The good Doctor hooked me up.
I sent the city another letter explaining how I don’t want to pay them $115 for violating the no stopping zone that wasn’t adequately marked. I also bought some toilet paper which was marketed with the enticing promise “Virtually Lint Free” . . . 1,000 sheets for 59c? I also bought the name brand roll that was 1,000 sheets for 79c, in case Mei found the virtually lint free toilet paper to be exceedingly cheap in quality.
0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
Pushups: 35 + 35
Friday, January 22
Work kept me busy, but I can hardly complain given my commute.
Around 11:30 as we were near bed time Mei asked about these popups she was getting to run the virus scanner that we never installed that said her computer was under siege by viruses and she couldn’t run any programs because everything was infected and she was going to have to upgrade to the premium edition. The legitimate virus scanner couldn’t find anything, so I rebooted into Safe Mode and Windows offered to revert itself about two days, and upon the next boot Windows said it had reverted Internet Explorer and a couple shared libraries. Mei was sleeping by now, so I continued to install Google Chrome as an overall nicer alternative to Internet “zero-day exploits” Explorer, and then I went and scraped about two dozen software barnacles off of her hard drive. Her laptop seems happier with the tune-up. If I were more of a man I would disassemble the thing and solder new connections for the fragile speaker wires that have broken in the hinge. Assuming I owned a soldering iron and had balls enough to wave it at the girlfriend’s laptop computer.
1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Saturday, January 23
After sleeping in a bit, I took Mei to Cheryl’s and then we walked over to the ice skating rink in Prospect Park where her coworkers were having a get-together. I skipped the ice skating since on the one hand its not my thing and on the other hand I’m still Secondary On-Call with the work laptop in my bag. Better to hang out in the sun reading my magazine and synthesizing vitamin D.
1.0h Dirty Jobs
0.5h Daily Show
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/15/google-china-luck-not-bad/
There’s been a lot of buzz in the tech community over Google’s Tuesday announcement that they are just totally fed up with the Chinese government’s utter contempt for human rights and for playing nice on the Internet, and that as a consequence they are going to remove either the censorship filters from Google.cn, or Google.cn from China.
I don’t entirely grasp Google’s strategy here, but if a plucky technology company that I admire wants to goad an autocratic government, I’m naturally inclined to sympathize with them.
So, while it is still around, I figured I’d translate Google.cn‘s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: 手气ä¸é”™
手 shuo3 is a pictograph for “hand”
æ°” qi4 is a pictograph for curling clouds, meaning “air”
ä¸ bu4 is a pictograph of a bird rising to heaven, which once meant “to soar” but today means “not”
é”™ cuo4 etymologically combines “metal” and “dried meat” for the archaic meaning “gilt” which nowadays means “mistake”
But don’t get hung up on hand-air-not-mistake as the characters combine to form two words:
手气 means luck
ä¸é”™ means “not bad” as in “pretty good”
So, 手气ä¸é”™ translates for me as “luck not bad” and that is what I hope for both Google (è°·æŒ) and the ä¸å›½äºº.
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