Not in Chicago anymore

36 years

2012-02-12T19:00:00.000-06:00

Many years ago, I obtained my private pilot certificate. I started the process while living in North Carolina at a little airport named Strawberry Hill that was, naturally, in a valley. I finished it after moving to the Chicago area, where I flew at a few suburban airports including Dupage Airport and Clow.

In 1976 I made the decision to stop flying. Flying is an activity that should either be done regularly or not at all. It became obvious that I wasn’t able to fly enough to maintain my proficiency, so I opted for the “not at all” option. This was the right decision; “weekend warrior” pilots but themselves and other pilots at risk if they can’t find enough weekends.

When I retired, I considered getting back into flying. Again I made a reasoned decision – flying is expensive and I could not justify the expense based on the amount of pleasure that would accrue from that expense. For seven years I’ve stood by that decision, but finally emotion won out over logic.

Last week I found myself at the controls of an airplane for the first time in 36 years.

Not to panic, gentle readers. It is not possible for someone to run over to the local airport and rent an airplane and take it aloft using a 36-year-old license. I was treated the same way that someone who walked in of the street and said “I want to learn to fly” would have been treated – I hired an instructor to be with me.

It was a humbling experience to accomplish tasks that you haven’t done in 36 years. In many ways I’m exactly like someone who has never flown; in others, not so much. I wonder how fast the skill will return.

So here we are. I have decided that I want to pursue this endeavor until it becomes obvious that it’s futile, and I don’t expect it to be futile. How much will my experience from so long ago be offset by 36 years of slowing reflexes? We’ll see. It’s going to be an interesting project.

Florida voters give it 129%

2012-01-31T21:01:00.000-06:00

I have a love/hate relationship with traditional newspapers.

I realize that professional news reporting does not come cheap, and I appreciate its value. As many of you know, I want to be able to verify what I’m told, and I don’t consider reading it on Facebook or on someone’s blog as sufficient. Professional journalists who make their living reporting the news have to be paid, and some of that money has to come from the people who consume the product that they create.

On the other hand, I watch the traditional papers lumbering into the digital world with trepidation and a little amusement. Print journalism is on the decline and if these institutions don’t want to follow the buggy whip, they need to transition into a product that’s not distributed on ground up tree. I have to admit that overall they’re doing OK; mostly the web sites work.

But there have been a few interesting blunders.

I’ve not been impressed with the New York Times paywall, as I mentioned last year. I don’t appreciate being manipulated.

Then there’s the Washington Post. Last week I got this: “Our apologies, but the Customized Headlines system has experienced repeated catastrophic failures to assemble and mail. We are working to restore the systems. Thank you for your patience.” While I like the idea of receiving an email containing links to stories that I might like to read, their summary has always been rather lame – it lists the same story several times in the body of the email.

But tonight I would have loved to be a fly on the wall somewhere in the Post’s coverage of the Florida primary. Their news alert read, “With just under 40 percent of the precincts reporting, Romney was leading with 78 percent of the vote, followed by Gingrich with 31 percent, Rick Santorum with 13 percent and Ron Paul with 7 percent.” I glanced at it and my reaction was that Romney gave Newt an even bigger spanking than I had expected. It wasn’t until the correction arrived twenty minutes later that I realized that the percentages in the first email add up to 129%. And even that wasn’t really a correction; it was an update with results from 10% more precincts.

So here I am, valuing professional news organizations because they are accurate and reliable, when what I’m seeing seems to demonstrate the opposite. OK, granted, most of what I read is indeed accurate and reliable. I hope.

Market cap

2012-01-31T11:02:00.000-06:00

This is taken from an article in the Washington Post and refers to Facebook after it’s upcoming IPO:

. . . have a market capitalization larger than Disney ($70 billion) or General Motors ($38 billion), if reports that its market cap is expected to be between $75 billion and $100 billion ring true. Compared with its technology peers, however, its market cap would be on the low end of the list, as compared with Google ($187 billion), Microsoft ($248 billion) or, of course, Apple ($422.47 billion). It would, however, outstrip Amazon, which has a current market capitalization of about $87 billion.

This is interesting. What does “market capitalization” really mean these days? Is it a reflection of the future earnings power of the underlying company?

Another article puts forth the premise that there will not be another Facebook – that the company had a startup environment that will never exist again because regulators are now enforcing privacy requirements. “One of a kind” are always more valuable, even more since society so desperately needs a Facebook.

As usual, time will tell.

Issues for small businesses

2012-01-22T09:35:00.000-06:00

A couple of interesting articles in this morning’s Star Tribune.

Before I mention them, kudos to the headline writer at the StarTrib. “Florida next stop in now-scrambled Republican race”. Odd . . . I thought that the Republican race was well scrambled before “now”.

The first article describes an aging business owner’s decision to use an ESOP as a means of avoiding selling the business. It’s an interesting idea, although the real problem is finding someone to manage the company and that issue isn’t discussed. But I have a warm spot in my heart for ESOPs since there was one that was very good to me.

The second article discusses the issue of loans to small businesses. I was especially intrigued with “The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis says it's aggressively studying the problem.” That’s nice, but this isn’t a new problem. How about actually doing something? I was curious about whether the decrease in lending was due to a decrease in demand or the financial institutions’ desire to play it safe, and there’s no conclusion here. But the example they give suggests that the finance industry is part of the problem.

SOPA / PIPA

2012-01-14T18:59:00.000-06:00

First impressions often come from a name. Take the Patriot Act. How could anyone possibly criticize something that so obviously exists solely for the enhancement and protection of the most important principles of our country? Never mind that it strips privacy rights away from its citizens.

Enter the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). (There are two proposals because these days the Senate and House can’t even agree on what to name their work.)

Stopping piracy and protecting copyright are as high minded as motherhood and apple pie. Who could possibly have a problem with legislation to further these fine goals?

You don’t have to look long to find out. For example, and this is one of many examples, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and you’ll see this explanation:

These bills are targeted at "rogue" websites that allow indiscriminate piracy, but use vague definitions that could include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire, and Rapidshare; sites that discuss piracy such as pirate-party.us, p2pnet, Torrent Freak, torproject.org, and ZeroPaid; as well as a broad range of sites for user-generated content, such as SoundCloud, Etsy, and Deviant Art. Had these bills been passed five or ten years ago, even YouTube might not exist today — in other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law. These acts would allow the Attorney General, and even individuals, to create a blacklist to censor sites when no court has found that they have infringed copyright or any other law.

I made the mistake of trying to do my civic duty and express my opinion to my Senators.

One of them hasn’t even bothered to respond.

The other sent me the boilerplate response for PIPA comments. Basically it said, “I am a co-sponsor of this fine piece of legislation, and if you’re opposing it, you must be a dirty thief and maybe even a hacker.”

Since the White House came out today against the current bills, I am afraid that Republicans will work even harder for their passage. I hope that better judgment will prevail.

I'm the frog

2012-01-11T10:29:00.000-06:00

I was struck while reading an article in the Washington Post this morning that we’re being treated to the demonstration of what happens when you put a frog into cold water and heat the water to boiling . . . and we’re the frog.

I enjoy the convenience of today’s technology. When I buy gasoline, I insert my credit card into the reader at the pump and don’t have to walk into the store and pay. There’s a tiny side effect of that – the credit card company knows that I bought gasoline at that location. But I don’t much care; it’s not a particularly useful or sensitive fact and the company probably won’t share it anyway.

But slowly over the past few years the temperature of the water has been rising. My GPS-capable phone can tell me how to reach my destination, but it tells someone where I’ve been. My network-connected electric meter helps save energy but provides the company with a profile of my energy usage. I love the fact that Mayo knows every visit to my doctor and every drug that I take – that knowledge could save my life – but I’m not enthusiastic about it going public. My finance institutions have a very good idea of my preferences based on how I spend my money, and soon my TV will be reporting what I’m watching.

There are two trends here that are converging. First is the amount of information that is being collected about us – when I paid cash for my gasoline, no one knew where and when I purchased it. Second is the merging of all of this disparate data. I don’t much care if a firm knows where I bought my gasoline, but if one entity consolidates all the bits of information that are being collected about me, they know a lot.

So what? If I’ve got nothing to hide, why should I care? There’s this outmoded idea of privacy, much of which went away in the name of fighting terrorism. If the complete electronic dossier doesn’t exist then it won’t be abused. As it becomes more complete the probability for abuse increases.

Old technology gives insight into new technology

2012-01-03T09:51:00.001-06:00

Usenet is one of the oldest parts of the Internet, reaching back to the misty beginnings of what would eventually become the Internet. These days it’s pretty much an abandoned backwater, inhabited by people who are there because they’ve been there for years. There are exceptions, but most of the boisterous discussions have quieted or disappeared completely.

Usenet remains unique as an example of free speech. Over the years there have been a few attempts to control it, but an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup remains the only place I know of where anyone can say anything. Since Usenet consists of thousands of servers located all over the world, each with their own copy of what has been submitted, it’s impossible to reach out and destroy what has been submitted. Add to that an archive of Usenet at Google and the silly thing that you said twenty years ago can come back to haunt you at any time.

Fast forward to today’s technology and today’s society.

Many of you know PostSecret. It’s an ongoing project where people submit a postcard containing a “secret”; these are then selected by the project’s founder and posted weekly on a web site. There are books, museum exhibits, and presence on Facebook and Twitter. The founder of the project decided that it would be a good idea to develop an application for smartphones that would allow anyone to submit a secret.

In other words, he decided to re-invent Usenet.

What happened next came as no great surprise to those of us who have watched the same scenario unfold on Usenet. “Free speech” is a term that many people use but few have actually experienced. When you create an environment where anyone can say anything, a tiny percentage of the community will do exactly that. Add to that the ability to submit pictures and you’ve sealed your fate. The PostSecret app was shut down this weekend.

How is it that thirty years ago Usenet flourished but the same concept is impossible today?

Usenet flourished when its user base was restricted. In the early days of the Internet, the only people who could use it were academics or associated with the government. In the beginning they were hardcore computer geeks; as more user-friendly software was developed the user base expanded to a relatively non-technical audience that benefited from the wide-ranging discussions. Even so, the community knew how to ignore material that deserved to be ignored. There were consequences to being disruptive – you could lose your access – so there were few people motivated to disrupt and even when they did they were largely ignored.

This is much different from a PostSecret smartphone application with 30,000 submissions a day from a huge population of people who have no disincentive to disrupt and who don’t understand the concept of ignoring what deserves to be ignored. Add to this a heightened awareness in the law enforcement community and you’ve got a powder keg waiting to explode. Be careful what you ask for; you might just get it.

The trail you leave on the Internet

2011-12-29T12:45:00.000-06:00

There’s an article in the Washington Post with a headline of “As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with”. In addition to the bad grammar, my first impression was “Tell me something that I don’t already know.” But I decided to give it a quick look.

Here’s the paragraph that struck me:

Consumers might find even bigger surprises when an entire business fails. Bookseller Borders this year auctioned its customer database, including purchase history, in bankruptcy court. Information about users on defunct gay youth site XY were put up for sale, too, until the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to prevent the sale.

Not a new moral of the story, but reinforcement of an old one: Don’t share any information that you wouldn’t want your mother/spouse/children/employer to see.

Regulations? What regulations?

2011-12-26T09:53:00.002-06:00

I was disappointed in the response by Congress to the behavior of the financial segment as they brought the economy to its knees. The Dodd-Frank regulations that they passed were less than I expected based on what happened. But there were a lot of folks who didn’t want even these changes, including the heavy-hitting lobbyists from the big banks.

Well, they’ve won. According to an article in the Washington Post,

A year and a half has gone by since the Dodd-Frank financial reform act was signed into law, but barely a quarter of the rules in the legislation have been finalized . . .

As of Dec. 1, regulators have issued 154 proposals, finalized 74 of them and missed 200 deadlines . . .

How to get good customer support

2011-12-19T22:53:00.000-06:00

In honor of all those people who will be unpacking new computers or new software in a little under a week . . .

Want to get the best customer support? OK, here’s the secret: Put yourself in the shoes of the customer-service person and figure out what you would want to know if the roles were reversed.

This isn’t as easy as it might seem.

It means that you actually have to do a little work. You might need to actually understand a little bit about the product you’re calling about.

It doesn’t mean you need to be a programmer, or know the detailed internal operation of the product or system that’s failing. But you need to be able to give the customer service representative enough information to intelligently research the issue.

For example,

What, exactly is the problem. “It doesn’t work” won’t cut it.
If there are error messages, what are they?
What were you doing immediately before the error? Exactly. If the support person can reproduce the problem, you’ve made a huge leap.
What is the environment? Operating system? Hardware? Version of product?

These simple steps won’t guarantee you good support. Some companies simply are unwilling or too clueless to offer good customer support. But if you don’t follow these recommendations, I can guarantee that you’ll get nowhere.

Companies juggle their 401(k) plans

2011-12-17T09:07:00.000-06:00

This article suggests that regulations that go into effect next year requiring 401(k) plans to clearly disclose management fees are motivating firms to juggle their 401(k) plans.

The article brought back a memory. Many years ago when I was still actively investing in my 401(k), there was an anomaly in my statement. I compared the interest payment in a specific fund with the amount on my wife’s statement for the same fund, and the amounts didn’t jibe. We had almost the same amount in the fund, had made almost the same contribution during the period, but one interest payment was twice as large as the other. I was never able to get anything approximating a reasonable explanation, but I was offered the opportunity to remove my money from the 401(k) and put it into an IRA, and I still don’t understand how this was lawful.

One would think that companies would put special effort into getting the best deal possible for their employees in the 401(k). It’s a benefit that is important to the employee and costs the company nothing except due diligence. But the number of changes to 401(k) plans and falling fees (.11% between 2007 and 2009) suggest that it took the pressure of impending regulation to make this happen, and recent class-action lawsuits based on excessive fees support that idea.

I hope that most companies pay attention to how well their 401(k) plans work, but statistics in the article suggest otherwise. I expect there’s a full spectrum – from companies that find the absolute best deal for their employees, through companies that are clueless, into companies that actively skim money out of the 401(k) that should be in their employees’ pockets. What I don’t know is the distribution. The fact that 64% of firms changed their 401(k) last year compared to less than 20% in 2009 doesn’t prove that there was a problem but the quotes and statistics in the article suggest it.

Are these changes happening because regulations take effect next year? That’s the assumption in the article, but there are other possible explanations. A few high-profile lawsuits can motivate companies to do what they should have been doing anyway; more hard-to-answer questions from better-informed employees can do it. Changes in the economy or the investment environment could even be part of the explanation. But whatever the cause, lower fees and more transparency in 401(k) plans are good.

Check your source. Then check again.

2011-12-09T08:40:00.002-06:00

I like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. I saw his segment on the “Tree Fighting Ceremony” and enjoyed it. I did think it a bit odd that Congress would be in session on Christmas during the early history of the US, but stranger things have happened.

This provides us with a fine illustration of how sources that we trust can lead us astray. I consider the History Channel, the ACLU website, and an actual published book to be reliable sources; as an individual I wouldn’t go any farther in checking out the “fact”. Perhaps we should hold national TV shows to a higher standard, but I’m afraid that if I had been the fact checker for The Daily Show I would have missed this one.

PolitiFact Rhode Island didn’t miss it. They awarded Stewart, the ACLU and the History channel a collective Pants On Fire after doing additional research and discovering that the claim was completely bogus.

Oops.

Want to loan Uncle Sam some money?

2011-12-06T08:58:00.000-06:00

I knew that rates on Treasury instruments were low, but the actual situation was illustrated when I visited the U.S. Treasury Department’s Daily Real Yield Curve page. I discovered this little gem while reading an article at Slate.

As of yesterday, if you loaned money to Uncle Sam for five years, your interest rate would be about -1%. That’s a negative sign. If you let him keep it for ten years, he would give you back almost as much as you loaned (interest rate -.01%). These are inflation-adjusted rates and we don’t know what the rate of inflation will be, but the point is clear. As the author of the Slate article puts it,

People take out mortgages, for example, rather than buying houses with credit cards. When mortgage rates fall, there’s a rush to refinance. Cheap money is better than expensive money. But what you never get is an offer of free money. The idea, always, is that someone will give you some money today and in exchange you have to give him back more money later on. Unless, that is, you’re the government of the United States of America, and lenders are willing to pay for the privilege of lending you money.

I downloaded a bit of ancient history from the Treasury Department and found rates over 15% in the early 1980s. This too will pass, just as that did. In the meantime, I won’t be buying any Treasury instruments.

To the New York Times: You blew it.

2011-12-02T13:33:00.000-06:00

Way back in September 2009 I blogged about newspapers charging for content. In March of this year, the New York Times implemented a “paywall” – unless you were a subscriber, your access was limited to twenty articles a month.

I decided to put my money where my mouth was and subscribe. As I said in 2009, I don’t mind paying for something when it’s worth paying for, and I want the traditional newspapers to survive. You don’t get decent reporting for nothing; those people have to be paid and those of us who consume their product should pay for it. So in March I signed up for an electronic subscription to the New York Times for $10.50 a month. That was about the upper limit of what I was willing to pay, but I felt that it was worth it.

In September, the subscription went up to $12.75. I wasn’t happy – especially that I got no notice of or explanation for the increase – but I left things alone.

This month the bill came in for $15. Again, no explanation or warning. That was above my threshold. So I went to their web site to cancel my subscription. I logged in, found the “cancel my subscription” link, and clicked on it. I was presented with a blank screen. I tried different routes through the web site and experienced the same behavior. So I went back to the original documentation, used that URL, and was treated to a 404 – page not found.

At this point I decided to try one last tactic and I accessed the page using Internet Explorer on a Microsoft platform. This time I didn’t see a blank screen – instead, one that told me that if I wanted to cancel my subscription I had to do it by telephone.

So I called the number. When I explained that $15 a month was above my threshold for the value of the New York Times, the customer service representative offered to drop my rate to $7.50 a month. I declined. I feel that that is an unethical business practice.

But here’s the bottom line: If you have an online subscription to the New York Times and you call their customer service and threaten to cancel it, you can get your rate cut in half.

I remain convinced that the only way that traditional newspapers will survive is by charging for online access. But not this way.

CRP

2011-11-28T08:22:00.000-06:00

In today’s environment of cutting spending on Federal programs, tough decisions are being made. Here’s a program that most of you in urban areas have not even heard of, but it’s a big issue for farmers and it affects all of us.

An article in the Star Tribune discusses the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). This program pays farmers to keep marginal land out of cultivation. The benefit to the rest of us:

Keeping those acres out of production has reaped enormous environmental benefits. CRP has increased the number of ducks in the Prairie Pothole Region of Minnesota and the Dakotas by 2 million a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationally, between 2004 and 2007, CRP lands retained 1.86 billion pounds of nitrogen, 420 million pounds of phosphorus and 1.8 billion tons of soil -- much of which would have found its way into the Mississippi River and the so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It also reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 200 million tons. And that was just four years.

But the program is under fire from two fronts. First, with today’s grain prices, CRP payments don’t compete with what the farmer could earn by cultivating the land. Second, the program will likely be a victim of cost cutting during the budget negotiations.

How much is it worth to improve air and water quality? Is it more important than other potential cost-cutting targets? Just one more thing to consider.

License plate readers: boon, bane, or both?

2011-11-20T19:39:00.000-06:00

Here’s another technology with a huge potential for good and a disturbing probability of abuse.

A recent story in the Washington Post describes how license plate readers are being used in law enforcement. These devices simply capture your license number as you drive by. I took advantage of the technology myself recently when I used a tollway and a bill magically appeared a couple of weeks later even though I never stopped. The issue isn’t that the technology can do good.

The technology first came to the Washington region in 2004 as a pilot program. During an early test, members of the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement Unit recovered eight cars, found 12 stolen license plates and made three arrests in a single shift.

Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.

The issue is lack of any control. There are no rules and no consistency on how long the data is stored, how it’s aggregated, who has access, and what it can be used for.

The DC area is apparently ahead of the rest of the country in implementation, with 27 million reads a year for the Maryland State Police alone. Doubtless as word spreads other geographic areas will jump on the bandwagon. There are no easy answers here, but right now this data is not controlled by any consistent oversight. At least the debate needs to take place.

Three Pinocchios for recent campaign ads

2011-11-15T07:47:00.000-06:00

This Washington Post Fact Checker article is one of their better efforts. It shows a transcript of the interviews from which the excerpts in the advertisements in question are taken, with the portion that actually appears in the ad in bold. It’s a great illustration of how you can twist someone’s words by creative snipping of what they say.

It saddens me that our political process has sunk this low. I used to refuse to vote for any candidate who preferred to smear their opponent rather than running on their own merits, but recently it has become obvious that this principle would leave me no one to vote for. The real pity is that the vast majority of American voters will use campaign ads like this to make up their mind. “Don’t confuse me with facts.”

Tradeoff

2011-11-14T10:11:00.000-06:00

We all know that every decision is a tradeoff.

We want our government to be efficient and purchase from the lowest bidder but to be sensitive to veterans and other individuals who deserve a break. A recent Washington Post story examines the issue of how the Veterans Affairs Department should resolve this conflict. One law mandates that they buy from the lowest bidder; Veterans First mandates that they steer work to veteran-owned suppliers.

Two goals that are noble and mutually exclusive.

I don't really have anything to rant about

2011-11-07T20:11:00.001-06:00

I am turning into an angry old man. There are those of you who would comment that that’s no transition – that it happened decades ago. So take this tail of woe with the appropriate grain of salt. In the great scheme of things, I don’t have even the most tiny problem. But it will feel good to tell it.

We had high winds over the weekend. The good and bad news is that it stripped most of the leaves off the trees. Good because now I don’t have to wait any longer to do my raking . . . bad because the work I’ve done so far was basically undone by leaves blowing into any nook or cranny big enough to shelter a leaf. So this morning I decided to rake leaves, especially since the weather is supposed to turn cold and wet tomorrow. (We have had a glorious autumn . . . warm and dry . . . so I can’t complain if the weather turns seasonal.)

“Raking leaves” for me consists of cranking up the mower and blowing the leaves into strips, then raking those and carting them away in the lawn trailer. This I did. And did. In fact, I misjudged the time and came in later than I meant to; I had a 1 PM appointment to give blood. But it all worked out fine . . . I took a quick shower, bolted down a quick lunch, and got to my 1 PM appointment a few minutes early.

Except that there were about 30 people in front of me. It seems that there was a bit of a misunderstanding in terms of appointments. You could call to set one up, or you could do it on the web site. But the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. I think there were 40 people signed up for 1 PM appointments.

I got into the screening session, and the screener didn’t have a thermometer. Then she didn’t have a stethoscope to take my blood pressure. Then I had to explain the geographic deferral rules to her. “No, you aren’t deferred if you’ve been to Turkey; it’s on the other list where you have to be there five years to merit a deferral.”

The good news – as it turns out, the only good news for the visit – was that my hemoglobin was high enough to qualify me to donate double red. So I go to the machine, and the phlebotomist proceeds to complain at length about recent procedure changes and how bad they are. Complain if you want, but not to the person who’s there to give blood!

Then the comment that should have tipped me off: “I don’t see the vein but it must be there somewhere.” Stick. Blood flows for about two minutes, and stops.

I have been donating blood for more than 40 years and this has never happened to me. Maybe I’ve been lucky. But I don’t believe that. Ms “I don’t see the vein” managed to make me waste a couple of hours and endure the discomfort, and for it there is nothing to show.

So this evening I rewarded myself by having a pint of the beer that we missed on Friday night. Made me feel better . . . and writing this blog entry is having the same effect.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

Our government? Something right?

2011-11-01T16:15:00.000-05:00

It’s refreshing to see our government do something right for a change. Several government agencies shared in the National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for installing secure configurations on PCs from the beginning and reducing the time to deploy critical patches from 57 days to just 72 hours. Full details here.

And a special award to PR Newswire for the most ridiculous URL seen this week, hidden in the link above:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-central-command-j-6-us-air-force-us-army-and-department-of-defense-chief-information-officers-and-their-teams-and-the-department-of-defense-joint-consensus-working-group-win-national-cybersecurity-innovation-award-132943903.html

Free markets and distracted driving

2011-10-25T09:25:00.000-05:00

I discovered this morning that there’s a government-sponsored web site dedicated to the topic of distracted driving.

My research was the result of an article in yesterday’s Washington Post that describes car makers’ efforts to reduce the distraction of texting while driving. My initial reaction to this was quite negative – no matter how you slice it, texting while driving is distracting. Distracted driving is responsible for accidents and the way to reduce those accidents is to reduce distracted driving.

As I read the article, I understood why consumers are so eager to be able to do something useful while driving, especially if they’re stuck in traffic. But there’s a huge tradeoff . . . it’s one thing to take your mind off the job of driving if you’re in a traffic jam and an entirely different issue when you’re steering a couple of tons of steel at highway speeds.

I understand the automakers’ side, too. If their competitors offer their customers the option of killing themselves by texting while driving, they’ll be at a serious disadvantage if they don’t offer the same features. We idealize the idea of a free market, and here it is at its best.

There are obvious solutions to this enigma – things like shutting down the facility when the car is moving faster than X. But consumers won’t accept that kind of restriction. I parted ways with the national ham radio association because they feel that ham radio operators are immune from issues of distracted driving and should be exempt from laws intended to prevent it. We all think that we can talk and drive, and none of us can. This is one of the interesting negative side effects of technology.

Word to the wise: Check your backup

2011-10-18T08:38:00.000-05:00

I had occasion to test my backup yesterday. As a part of an operating system upgrade, Apple introduced iCloud. I am not a fan of cloud-based products for my personal use, and in the process of installing the upgrade iCloud managed to completely obliterate the address book on my laptop. As in, gone. Imagine the sinking feeling you would get if you opened your address book and what met your eye was “No contacts.”

In spite of my criticism of Time Machine in the immediately preceding blog post here, it performed perfectly in retrieving my address book. The process of getting it back took no more than a couple of minutes, most of which was figuring out where the files were that I needed to restore. This is in contrast to a conversation I overheard this weekend where someone was trying to get people to send him emails to that he could re-populate his address book.

OK, so I am preaching to you today from this blog. If you don’t have a decent backup process in place for the data on your personal computer, it’s only a matter of time until you will suffer the consequences. The SANS OUCH! newsletter covers the topic of backups this month and there is plenty of information available; review your own situation and if it’s not appropriate, take action to make it right.

I know . . . backups are a pain. But not having them when you need them is much worse.

Looking for just one example of perfect technology

2011-10-08T18:12:00.000-05:00

“To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.” Translation: Technology is never perfect.

Time Machine is Apple’s backup mechanism for data on personal computers. It’s a great innovation – as a user, you don’t do a thing, and it keeps a backup of your data. You can even buy another piece of Apple equipment –Time Capsule – that doubles as the repository for this data and a wireless network hub. It works great . . . there’s even a nifty interface to move backwards in time and see what your data looked like in the past, and restore that file if you wish.

That is, until this popup appears. It happened several weeks ago for my wife, and today it appeared for me. The end result, after an overnight-or-more backup extravaganza, will be that I lose all that historical data. I’ll have a backup of things as they are now, but I won’t be able to go back to last week, last month, or last year. For whatever reason, Time Machine has decided that it’s confused and needs to start from scratch.

I suppose that I’m an undying pessimist, but I’ve concluded that all technology is this way. Nothing seems to work completely right, and just about the time that you’ve decided that finally here is a product that proves the theory wrong, it demonstrates its weakness.

Take GPS – 99% of the time it unerringly directs me, and then suddenly it’s telling me to turn when I’m on a viaduct 100 feet in the air or that my current speed is 473 mph. It lulls me into a happy dependency, only to demonstrate its failings.

Perhaps the best example in our happy network-connected world is email. Message after message is delivered without problem until, one day, an email simply disappears into the bit bucket. Invariably it causes problems because we just don’t expect this infallible technology to fail. But fail it does, just often enough to remind us that it’s not perfect.

Turkey trip

2011-10-04T10:12:00.001-05:00

I have just returned from a unique trip to Turkey. Several months ago I stumbled across the Traveleyes web site. This company organizes trips for the visually impaired and recruits sighted travelers to act as the eyes for the visually impaired participants. In return for this contribution, the sighted travelers get a discounted rate.

My initial interest was a trip to Cuba, as this is a destination that has always appealed to me and I want to go soon because I think the days of Cuba as it is today will end suddenly at some point when the restrictions on travel between the US and Cuba are removed and the island is flooded with Americans. Unfortunately, the Cuba trip was full. A trip to Turkey caught my eye; I went to Turkey many years ago and enjoyed it immensely, so I signed up for the Turkey trip.

Traveleyes is based in the UK, so that’s where their trips start. This one left from Stansted Airport so I had to figure out the logistics of getting from Heathrow where my flight arrived. Based on the timing I decided to spend a night in London on the way; it didn’t take a lot of prodding to make that decision. I love London, and in fact I should have arranged for more than one night there. But the time I spent in London was quite pleasant.

The experience of traveling with a mixed group of visually impaired and “light dependent” people is difficult to describe. The group dynamics are interesting; you have 17 people who meet for the first time at an airport and form a coherent group. Being the eyes of someone else adds a dimension to the experience. You actually tend to see things when you’re sharing your experience that you wouldn’t be aware of otherwise.

The reaction that I get most often when I relate this trip to others is, “Why would ‘they’ want to travel? They can’t see.” I already knew the answer to that before the trip but I have a much better grasp now than I did . . . sight is just one sense, and the lack of it does not imply that someone has no interest in experiencing what the other senses can provide. In fact, I was constantly pushed outside my usual “box” with what we did – placed into the position of doing things that I would never have considered, and finding them fun.

What did we do? One of the first activities was a boat trip to a nearby island, and I began to get a better understanding of the philosophy and capabilities of the group when we stopped for a swim. You might think it would be scary to jump off a boat and swim in the ocean if you couldn’t see, but it didn’t bother these folks a bit. Tell me, based on the picture to the left, which of these folks are seeing the water and which are not . . . I bet you’ll be wrong.

The next day we went sea kayaking. We jumped into jeeps for a trip to the Kerkova area and kayaked over the “Sunken City”. These are two-person kayaks, with a sighted and visually impaired traveler paired. None of the ten of us who participated had any real experience in a kayak, but the local guide was fantastic and got us up to speed remarkably quickly. The picture is from a stop on the island which is a protected archeological site; this is the only location where people are allowed to even step ashore.

Other things we did: A 5 km trek out in the country through a village, along a road carved out of the side of the mountain, to have lunch at a mosque. (Ever been a few feet from the loudspeakers for the call to prayer? Interesting experience.) A glass bottom boat trip along the same area that we kayaked to get a different perspective. A hike down the bottom of a river gorge, in the river, climbing over rocks. Covering each other with mud in a mud bath, then washing it off in the same river we had just conquered.

And eating. This was Traveleye’s fourth trip to the same location in Turkey, and we learned from the experience of previous trips. The restaurants we visited were great. Food in Turkey is an experience in itself, with mezes prepared from the freshest ingredients and abundant fresh seafood. Even on the boat . . . they brought mezes along and grilled chicken on the boat. I love Mediterranean cuisine and Turkey does it wonderfully.

So, bottom line, it was a most interesting week. I made new friends, had new experiences, and had generally a pleasant time. Naturally there were a few experiences that were best forgotten, but indeed they will be forgotten as time passes. Maybe I’ll make it to Cuba with Traveleyes yet.

Weakest link

2011-09-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

In case you wonder why this blog gets updated so rarely these days . . . this entry is typical in the sense that I started composing it at about 7 AM and it’s now after 11. I wonder how many times I was interrupted in the process. So if it seems a little scattered, that’s one of the reasons.

Perhaps it’s today’s frosty morning that puts me in the mood to write about computer security. The low this morning was 30° and since my garden is in a low spot it was cooler there, so I think this marks the end of this gardening season. (Not really, as garlic will get planted in about a month.)

There’s a rather good summary of the recent DigiNotar flap in an IEEE publication. In case you missed it, or didn’t know why you might care, this company sells the security certificates that your web browser uses to verify that you’re at the web site that you thought you were. When you couple the ability to obtain bogus certificates with the ability to infiltrate the Domain Name Services server that tells your browser where web sites are, it’s possible that you could innocently type Amazon.Com into your browser and end up at a completely different site where you would happily provide your credit card information.

I had a bad experience with one of the certificate providers years ago. Go to their site, give them money, and they would sell you a certificate for whatever company you claimed to be. It was sad. Here’s something that’s the cornerstone of a big chunk of security, that we all just take for granted in our everyday web surfing, and it’s built on a foundation of sand.

If there’s a moral to this story, what is it? One possible interpretation would be that it’s just not safe to do commerce via the Internet. If that’s true, it’s just not safe to go to a restaurant and hand your credit card over when it’s time to pay the bill, so I’m not ready to abandon online commerce just yet. [Why is it that we’re so behind in the US in this respect? Go to any other country and pay for your meal by credit card, and they bring the little wireless machine to you at the table; your credit card never leaves your sight.]

The moral I take away is not to be lured into a feeling of absolute safety, either on the Net or anywhere else. No system is stronger than its weakest link. I try not to be the weakest link myself, but I recognize that I can’t always count on the other links in the chain. Not that I have a choice . . .

Understatement of the week

2011-08-08T09:19:00.000-05:00

“It is undeniable that this Congress faces real challenges reaching bipartisan, bicameral agreement on anything.”

This is a quote from Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It appeared in an article in the Washington Post.

According to the article about No Child Left Behind, neither Republicans nor Democrats like the current law but they’ve made no progress on revamping it. In the meantime, states can apply for waivers. Instead of Congress doing its job and providing uniform guidance at the Federal level, each State will do its own thing.

On a related topic . . . screams of anguish from Washington that the US bond rating was cut. These are the same folks who were screaming that the bond rating companies were negligent when they helped bring our economy to its knees by assigning rosy ratings to mortgage-backed securities. Be careful what you ask for.

DC

2011-08-06T20:31:00.000-05:00

As I type this, its Thursday evening and I am sitting in Washington, DC. You may think that it’s a little weird to publish something to a blog that was written several days before. This is because I am old-fashioned – I still believe that it is unwise to publicize the fact that you’re out of town; by the time you read this I will be back home.

Tonight I found myself alone at dinnertime. I could have waited around for another hour and joined a couple of people in the group that I’m working with here, but I was more in the mood to strike out by myself. So I did.

I ended up at a little bar that I had noticed on another walk through the city. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it looked interesting and I was ready to eat and in the mood for a good beer and burger, so I went in.

It turns out that they have both good beer and good burgers. They have about thirty different burgers on the menu, and a deal where you can order four mini-burgers – one each of your favorites from the list. This I did, along with a nice draft beer. (And another different one later. And another.)

I sat at the bar and fell into conversation with the nearby patrons. One was a physics professor at George Washington (the is in the GW neighborhood) and the other was the IT support person for a Senator.

I finished my meal and conversations and while walking back to the hotel I called Cathy. When I mentioned that I had eaten at the Red Lion, she informed me that I had just eaten at the epicenter of one of the early preservation fights in DC. Later I did a Google search and discovered a 2004 keynote address to a meeting of the DC Preservation League containing this paragraph

In the early ’70s though, with the anti-freeway battles mostly over and mostly won or well on the way to being won, preservation did become the focus, and the first focal point in Washington was, of course, the Old Post Office Building. But there were battles all over the place, and one I particularly remember was the conflict over the 2000 block of Pennsylvania Avenue -- the question there being the ordinary draconian choice, to tear it down or not. A George Washington University undergraduate preservation activist named Karen Gordon had the fighting good sense to name it “Red Lion Row,” after a bar that occupied one of the mostly 19th-century brick buildings on the block. This gave it instant identity in the public mind. The fight was long, but thanks largely to the perseverance of Gordon and others, most of the buildings eventually were saved from demolition and incorporated into the large development we see today. Red Lion Row is often sited as one of the first instances of “Washington facadism,” but actually it only looks that way. In reality, as we know, those old buildings were saved to their full original depth.

It was pure chance that I stumbled into an historic building for my dinner, but it underscores that Washington, DC is indeed a “special” place.

Technology: It just works

2011-07-21T09:55:00.000-05:00

I am not generally a fan of podcasts; I do not find them an efficient way to obtain information. This one is interesting enough to recommend. The new soccer stadium in Kansas City is architected to support a full-function wireless connection for each of 18,000 possible fans. While that’s an impressive number, it does rather pale when compared to the 50,000+ fans at a big sporting event or millions at something like the New Years festivities in Times Square.

Even so, for those of us who have struggled to support 50 laptops on a wireless network at a disaster operation, this is an interesting development. It also is a nice illustration of the technology that regular folks use today and expect to be able to use wherever they are, even in a bowl with a few thousand of their new friends. People just expect this stuff to work, and don’t consider how much effort it takes in the background to make it happen.

What's a frustrated voter to do?

2011-07-19T08:23:00.000-05:00

I was mowing the grass yesterday, a task that leaves plenty of brain capacity for mulling things over. I was considering how broken the current political climate is, and how we can communicate our frustration to our elected officials. It was the situation in Minnesota that prompted these thoughts, but the negotiation process for raising the debt ceiling is a national issue that is identical.

My knee jerk reaction is “Throw the bums out.” This is unfortunately too simplistic. I voted for specific people because they held specific views. Now I’m upset with the whole process because these bozos have allowed our State government to shut down, but the alternative is abandoning the very principles that prompted my vote. Now they have abandoned the principles that got them elected and shut down State government.

Where does that leave me as a voter? As much as I would like to take out my frustration on the people that I voted for, that’s not the right action. There’s nothing they can do when legislators who believe that any tax increase is evil hold them hostage. The voters have spoken, and I was on the losing side.

I hope that the folks on the winning side are happy with what they got.

"Stopgap" is not a strong enough term

2011-07-17T10:36:00.000-05:00

I’m reading the article in the Star Tribune about the latest fiasco that our State politicians have cooked up. I don’t expect most folks to be interested enough to read the article, but here are a few depressing quotes.

"’Everybody recognizes what this budget does is delay the reckoning,’ said state economist Tom Stinson.” This is the second year that the legislature has been so non-functional that they cannot make decisions required to actually solve the problems.

Regarding the decision to withhold $700 million from K-12 schools, “House Speaker Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove, acknowledged recently the blow to school budgets. ‘It will lead them out on to the ice, but they won't fall through.’” Maybe not, but forcing local government to spend more on borrowing so that State legislators can say that they balanced the budget is just silly. “Charlie Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, said schools cannot continue to serve as the state's piggy bank of last resort.”

Regarding the decision to issue “tobacco bonds”, “These kind of bonds generally carry higher interest rates than conventional municipal debt, so they could prove a heavy cost. Over 20 years, Minnesota taxpayers would pay $1.2 billion to borrow $700 million, according to state analysts.” This reminds me of a private individual buying a house that they cannot afford, and we all know where that led.

State shutdown. Debt ceiling.

2011-07-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

I didn’t think it possible, but my respect for politicians has reached a new low. Here I sit in Minnesota with its State government shut down, watching our fine national politicians dance around raising the debt ceiling. (Yes, our State legislators have reached a deal on the budget, but it will at best be several days before I can stop at a rest area.)

But the worst of the worst are the politicians who are using this situation to their own advantage. Michelle Bachman leverages it in her campaign even as she is ineffective as an actual legislator. She has even gone so far as to explain how it wouldn’t really matter – now let’s see, am I going to believe her or the Washington Post?

While there’s no chance that I’ll vote for Bachman or her ilk, I’m almost to the point of adopting a policy of throwing them all out. I’m sure that there must be good people in our government these days who are making sincere efforts to be logical and reach reasonable compromises, but it’s going to be tough to identify them when election time rolls around. Then there’s the question – could things get worse? I suppose that they could. And they probably will . . .

Steve is on Facebook

2011-06-21T21:54:00.000-05:00

With a great deal of trepidation, I have created a Facebook page. I thought I might use it as a replacement for this blog, but my current impression is that the two facilities serve different purposes.

Facebook’s strength is the social networking aspect and I have found a number of people that I’ve lost touch with. It’s fine for short updates but not so good for anything longer.

I find the site itself rather difficult, but I think that’s because it’s trying to do so much and offer every option that anyone can think of. The jury’s still out on how it handles images. Here is a link that is supposed to make a small album available to anyone; let me know how it works for you if you’re not a Facebook user.

Butt emailed

2011-06-21T14:47:00.000-05:00

I’ve heard of being “butt dialed” but today I was “butt emailed”.

During the recruiting process we send emails to confirm the availability of volunteers – “Joe has indicated that he’s available for deployment; please confirm with him that he can deploy to such-and-such disaster.” The person at the local chapter checks with Joe, then responds to the email and Joe is on his way to wherever.

This morning we sent the usual batch of availability confirmation emails. A bit later a response appeared with the original email quoted (as usual) but only a single character response: “V”. Plus, of course, the Blackberry template that was particularly appropriate for this one: “Please pardon the brevity of the response as it was typed on my Blackberry.”

I thought that perhaps I had missed the training class on Blackberry abbreviations and “V” was short for “This person is ready to go!” Not being quite comfortable with this interpretation, I asked for a clarification. What I got was, “Sorry, my BB was in my pocket.”

The prairie iris

2011-06-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

On the north part of our property we've created a prairie restoration. It doesn't look like much from a distance, but it's a real pleasure to venture in and discover the variety of plants there. This iris is one that popped up this week. There are many other little gems.

What's not pleasant is keeping the whole thing from being taken over by cottonwood and maple trees. I don't know where the cottonwood tree is, but if you've ever been anywhere near one this time of year you understand how seeds get blown in. The maple is ours; it's a gorgeous Norway maple, but in spite of how beautiful the tree is, I now understand its designation as "invasive". I cut down a bunch of seedlings the other day, and I have a few more mornings of "weeding" to go.

Mowing tracks

2011-06-07T21:07:00.000-05:00

Maybe it was the beer that I had with tonight's pizza. Twice now I've attempted a terribly complex blog post with seven pictures, and twice Blogspot has lashed out at me with a terminal error. So let's go to plan B, otherwise known as KISS.

This picture was taken on May 23 -- two whole weeks ago, and in another lifetime. Back then, it was cool and wet. So wet, in fact, that what you see in the picture is the tracks from turning the lawn mower. I even managed to get it stuck at one point.

Things have changed. Someone flipped a switch, and with nary a break in step we changed from early Spring to mid Summer. The temperature today did not quite top 100 here, but it did only a bit north of us. It hasn't been this warm in more than 20 years. I don't mean "on June 7". I mean, at any time.

The heat and the wind have taken care of the irises. They're still beautiful, if a bit bedraggled and wind-blown. It seems that every year there's a wind storm just as they bloom, and on such long stalks, they don't cope well.

Stinky car

2011-06-01T19:43:00.000-05:00

This morning when I opened the door to the car I almost gagged. It smells like something rotten. Apparently this started yesterday. I don’t know if a mouse crawled up in something and died, or we spilled something in the trunk without realizing it . . . but the odor is really potent. It’s especially bad after the car has sat closed up in the sun for a while.

Cathy has another theory. We visited a car dealer last week to investigate what we read about used car prices being at an all-time high. We wondered if this was the right time to trade in. (We decided not to do anything.) Her theory is that the folks at the dealership bugged the car with something that would encourage us to come back . . .

PS: It’s a good thing I can’t post an “image” of this on the blog.

Once burned

2011-05-20T10:36:00.000-05:00

There are many variants to this expression: Once bitten, twice shy. Once burned, twice cautious. The burnt child dreads the fire.

I see that we are, as a society, still wrestling with how to handle social media. I don’t feel so bad about my own misgivings.

Comcast shot themselves in the foot by yanking funding for a non-profit after an employee tweeted amazement that an FCC staffer was joining Comcast. Having been burned myself years ago for something similar, I’m a little surprised that this kind of thing is still happening.

No, actually, I’m not surprised at all. I take it as a reminder that companies large and small pay attention to what individuals say in their blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages. Sometimes, too much attention.

<waving> Hello, Big Brother.

The devil in the details

2011-05-20T09:53:00.002-05:00

There’s an interesting article in today’s Star Trib on the merger of Northwest and Delta. Northwest is “our airline” since they dominate the Minneapolis market, much as United was “our airline” when we were in Chicago. We’ve observed many of the changes mentioned in the article.

Who would have thought that the number of slices in a lime would make a meeting attended by the CEO?

Volunteers make the Red Cross work

2011-05-16T16:30:00.001-05:00

As most of you know, I’m involved in the recruiting effort for the Red Cross, so you can imagine that I’ve been rather busy lately. There are some interesting numbers at the Disaster Online Newsroom.

The one that I find particularly significant, given my involvement, is

8,159 Red Cross workers, of which 7,061 are volunteers, have assisted with relief and recovery efforts.

That’s 87% volunteers. Pretty nice to see.

You’ll very seldom hear the phrase, “I’m only a volunteer” in the Red Cross.

The Winter that won't end

2011-05-15T09:39:00.000-05:00

It’s a good thing that I spent three weeks in North Carolina because if I had been here I would have been ranting about the weather. It actually snowed here after I left for NC. This is shaping up as the winter that won’t end. With one exception – the day that I flew back from NC the temperature climbed almost to 90, triggering thunderstorms that closed the airport and prompted my plane to divert to Omaha. By the time I actually made it into Minneapolis, the temperature had dropped into the 60s.

Last year I planted a weeping willow at the end of the pond, and with only one year’s growth it has already turned into an impressive tree. We purchased a couple more, and yesterday morning I planted them. There are many things on my mental list of desirable jobs that fall above planting trees in the rain when the temperature is 45°, especially beside the pond where a hole fills with water. I hope these trees like wet feet because that’s what they’re going to have.

It’s a good thing that I got the job done in the morning since the rain got worse later in the day. I slept most of the afternoon. Usually if I take a long nap I have problems sleeping at night, but not this time. I hope that my body has finally caught up with the sleep deficiency from a three-week disaster deployment.

Today the sun is out (at least I think that’s the correct term for that bright light in the sky) but the low tonight is forecast to be 35° and the ground is saturated. I have plants for the garden, but they’re not going to be planted today. The weather forecast is for continued cool weather, but this has to end some day. I hope.

It has been a busy time in Lake Wobegon

2011-05-09T13:37:00.003-05:00

I feel a little bit like Garrison Keillor and his news from Lake Wobegon. I’ve been running since March 19. Here’s a quick synopsis.

March 19 was our annual “Dancing with the Freeborn County Stars” fundraiser, as I mentioned on my previous blog entry dated March 17. It went well, bringing in $30,000 for the local Red Cross chapter.

The next morning, March 20, I flew to Seattle for a Red Cross conference. We had a nationwide recruiting exercise, and it turned out to be very timely because of what has happened recently with tornados and flooding.

I got home just in time to jump in the car and drive to Tampa to visit my daughter and granddaughter. We drove because we had some heavy stuff to deliver. The visit was delightful, and I worked in three days of Red Cross training while I was in Florida.

I was home a couple of days and flew to Washington, DC for another Red Cross event. I returned on Friday, April 15, ready for a nice long rest.

On Monday, April 18 I left for North Carolina to assist with the tornado recovery operation. I am still there. The current plan is to fly home tomorrow.

The North Carolina operation has been a good one and a very typical Red Cross deployment for me. On the first day we wired a headquarters, the equivalent of wiring a midsized business. On subsequent days we brought up three remote sites. It was a big operation with 500+ people involved at its peak. The fact that I’m writing this blog entry and going home suggests that we’re about done.

I mentioned in the paragraph above that our recruiting exercise in Seattle was “very timely”. We conducted it because there had been so little disaster activity that many of the people involved in recruiting were getting rusty. Let me assure you that this rust is now a thing of the past. As I write this there are ten active disasters for which the Red Cross is recruiting workers. I could easily move directly from this operation to another, but I owe it to the people who have been covering for me in the recruiting effort to cover for them now so that they can be deployed. The current activity level is reminiscent of Katrina but spread over a much larger geographic area.

I may write more detail on aspects of this in the next few days. Or I may just sleep for a week straight.

Floods?

2011-03-17T18:55:00.003-05:00

Well, I see that I have let another month go by without updating the blog. Rather makes me wonder why I bother at all.

Life in Minnesota. Snow is melting. This is good. This is bad. Snow turns to water; water turns to floods. The Red Cross operation in Fargo has begun. I could have gone today, except that this weekend is our major chapter fundraising event.

Dancing with the Freeborn County Stars. One performance only. Saturday, March 19. The programs are delivered from the printer and everything is coming together. Tomorrow is dress rehearsal – a time of controlled chaos. It will be a great show; the dancers are having fun at last now that they’ve learned their routines, and the community is gearing up.

Unfortunately there will be little time for rest after the big event, with three trips planned during what’s left of Mach into April. Looks like I will miss Fargo. Again.

And finally, on an unrelated topic: My three main sources of news are the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. A few weeks ago the Star Trib began to charge for some of the content on its web site; since I subscribe to the paper version (Sunday only) I was able to invoke that subscription to gain access to the premium content. Today I received an email from the Times; they’re going to a subscription system at the end of the month. The Post just completed a significant redesign of their web site and email delivery platform; I’d be surprised if they didn’t announce a subscription before long.

I think that this is a good thing. I’m not eager to pay for content that I’ve been enjoying at no charge, but I realize that’s simply not a sustainable business model. If I want these companies to survive, I’m going to have to pay my part of their cost of doing business. Given the alternative of paying for the news I consume or depending on the largess of some billionaire who is more interested in getting his point of view across than providing actual news, I’ll swallow the cost any day.

I hope it flies. It failed when the Times tried it before. Maybe this time they will be motivated to stick by their guns and/or the other news sources will jump on the bandwagon.

Death of the Internet imminent. Film at 11.

2011-02-15T18:19:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you read text and it makes you realize how the majority of people perceive something. So it was today when I read my daily "Today's Headlines" email from the New York Times.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"It was 1977. We thought we were doing an experiment. The problem was, the experiment never ended."
VINT CERF, who was part of a Defense Department group that in the 1970s assigned 4.3 billion Web site addresses. They are estimated to run out in the next 18 months.

I added the emphasis on Web site. I’m not trying to deduce the popular perception of the Internet based on one half-brained editor, but this far from the only example of the attitude that “Web” and “Internet” are synonyms.

It’s unfortunate that the only two tools that most folks have to experience the Internet are a web browser and an email client.

New cat

2011-01-24T12:42:00.003-06:00

After Wile's untimely death, the feline and human residents of this home felt a big gap. The other two cats were moping around, and the humans were not in much better shape. So we made a visit to the local humane society and a new kitten picked us.

She's very thin and had been recently picked up from a neighborhood. We put her in the guest bedroom / bathroom initially to let the cats get used to each other by smell. She's venturing out into the house now and things seem to be going well in the cat-social sense. As kittens are inclined to do, she's been eating continually. Her first visit to the vet is in an hour.

It would have been a shame to leave a space open in the perfect cat living experience that we have here.

Very public information

2011-01-23T08:52:00.000-06:00

If you want a graphic illustration of how public our public records have become, visit spokeo.com and type your name in the search bar at the top of their home page.

This is an example of many sites that are selling their work to collect public information and make it instantly available. It was always possible to collect all this stuff on an individual, but you had to work at it. No more. For a nominal fee, you can avail yourself of the efforts of someone else to harvest public information, index it, and make it so available that people will pay to see it.

I’ll give credit where credit is due . . . they did a good job of making it easy to find the information and showing just enough of it to make you want more. I didn’t travel down the road that they built for me. I looked at the free stuff and resisted the temptation to pay for more. I expect that there are a lot of people willing to pay a nominal amount to see profiles of others. There are several errors in my own data, but people will not question the accuracy; it is on their computer screen so it must be right.

Sanitizing hard drives

2011-01-20T08:32:00.000-06:00

I have mentioned the SANS OUCH! Newsletter in previous blog entries. For those few of you who might remember the hint ‘o the week, it’s reminiscent of that. They provide insight into a security topic in each issue.

The current issue discusses how to discard that old PC without giving away all the sensitive information that’s on its disk drive. This is a step overlooked by many folks, sometimes to their chagrin. It’s interesting reading and the subscription information for the newsletter is at the end of the article. Previous issues are available on their web site.

Goodbye Wile. I miss you.

2011-01-18T18:44:00.003-06:00

Humans are strange animals. Why do we keep pets? Why do we get so attached to them?

This morning began with the cry, “There’s something wrong with Wile” (pronounced as in Wile E. Coyote of Road Runner cartoon fame). Within about fifteen minutes, Wile was dead. The vet’s best guess is that he had a blood clot that first immobilized his back legs and then went to his heart.

Wile was indeed named after the character in the Road Runner cartoon. When he was a kitten, he would make great leaps to the top of the couch, from the back, and make it about halfway, then fall to the floor. After a few more weeks he could make that jump.

Wile lived the perfect cat’s life. He could go out into his personal hunting preserve any time he wished, or stay inside and watch the birds through the deck door; “Cat TV” as we call it. He had two cat buddies and all the love he could have wanted. Perhaps the most touching part of this morning’s trauma was when we were comforting him, just before he died, and he started to purr. A great life and a quick death are noble goals for any of us, human or cat.

Good news on a day when it's especially welcome

2011-01-10T09:07:00.001-06:00

With the news out of Arizona this weekend, I was especially gratified this morning to receive word that one of my ham radio and Red Cross friends is healthy again. One doctor wrote him off but he decided to get a second opinion, went through chemotherapy, and has received a clean bill of health.

There’s a lesson in this for all of us, but especially for pessimists like me. Even when things look dark, they may turn out OK. And there’s the other lesson – always get a second opinion.

On the other side of the coin, I will be joining many other people for a moment of silence at 10 AM Central time this morning . . . but somehow it seems that it should be a moment of screaming, or crying, or grinding your teeth.

Indeed, not in Chicago

2010-12-28T09:07:00.001-06:00

This morning I was starting the fire in the wood stove, and the front page article in the newspaper I was about to burn caught my eye as an illustration of the name of this blog. It describes the tallest building in Albert Lea, which appropriately is a residence for the elderly.

A few numbers from the article –

90 feet high
8 floors
built in 1972
$4680 per month average for power bill

This is just a little different from the 54 floor high rise that I lived in before moving to Minnesota.

Albert Lea is different from Chicago in a lot of ways . . . some good, some not so good. Here’s another illustration.

We have decided to take a trip this summer with a local couple. They had been working with a local travel agency so we went there to sign up for the trip, which is a tour run by one of the big tour companies. This is not how we normally make travel arrangements; we use online travel companies and/or make our reservations directly at the airline web sites. But the norm here is to use the local travel agency; it’s just The Way It’s Done. Given that the local folks had already put effort into research, it seemed appropriate to give them the business.

The whole experience was like stepping back in time. There was a computer on the agent’s desk, but she didn’t use it for anything. She was on the telephone, and I think that there were three individuals involved – the local agent, someone at her corporate headquarters, and a representative of the company that runs the actual tour. Information like passport numbers was carefully dictated over the phone so someone else could actually enter it into whatever reservation system they were using. The coup d'état was the payment method . . . they pulled out a traditional credit card embosser. I can’t remember the last time my credit card was squished into a multi-part form to create a paper transaction receipt.

It was a telling illustration that we’re not in downtown Chicago any more.

OpenDNS

2010-12-18T12:02:00.003-06:00

I received a Christmas Card this morning from OpenDNS with the cute image shown to the left on it [I’m linking to their site, so at some point the image might disappear]. It motivated me to blog on the topic.

I found out about OpenDNS recently, which is a bit surprising since it’s the kind of thing I would have expected to run into long ago. For those who don’t know, Domain Name Service, or DNS, is the thing that converts human-friendly names like www.opendns.com into IP addresses like “208.69.38.160” so that your system can actually establish a connection to that server. You can have a perfectly healthy Internet connection, but if your DNS server is down, you’ll not be surfing the web.

And that’s exactly what was happening to me on a regular basis. My Internet Service Provider doesn’t have a reliable DNS. It tends to be dead in the morning when I get up and want to read my email. In their defense, this doesn’t happen often, but enough to be extremely annoying.

Enter OpenDNS. Now instead of using the service provided by my ISP, I obtain that name-to-IP lookup from OpenDNS. Their site tells you how to make the trivial configuration changes to your system to switch to their site.

Google also offers a public DNS service. Since you configure a primary and alternate DNS address for your system, take one OpenDNS address and one Google address.

So what’s the down side of doing this? Well . . . OpenDNS now knows every site I visit on the Internet. But you can’t avoid leaving that trail somewhere, and frankly I trust OpenDNS more than my local ISP. Then there’s the extra level of complexity introduced by changing a configuration parameter, and the additional dependency on one more company that might slink away in the dead of night.

For me, the tradeoff was definitely worth it. I have not experienced an outage in my Internet service since I switched.

CPR

2010-12-18T10:15:00.002-06:00

Today is my birthday. Want to give me a birthday present? Learn CPR.

Here’s a story of someone with really good luck. He had a heart attack while driving, ran off the road, and was resuscitated by two trained medical people in separate vehicles behind him, one of whom happened to be driving a truck equipped with an AED.

The moral of this story is not to find a soft snow bank to run into while being followed by trained medical people. It’s a plea to learn CPR. Pray you never have to use it, but learn how to administer it.

One of the places you can find out about a class is here. Information on the hands-only technique for CPR is here or Google can provide more than you could possibly want to know.

Say what you mean

2010-12-09T08:32:00.000-06:00

I am amused and annoyed by people who do not grasp the concept of significant digits. The example that brought forth this morning’s rant is in an article in today’s Star Tribune: “seriously delinquent credit cards . . . will decline 10.67 percent”.

Does the company making this estimate really believe that it’s accurate to .01%? That’s what they’re saying by providing a number with four significant digits. A more accurate phrasing would be simply “10%” or “about 10%”.

Yes, it’s the residual engineer in me, but “10%” is not the same as “10.67%”.

If your interest has been piqued, here’s a source for more information.

Management

2010-11-27T08:34:00.001-06:00

When I entered the work force the norm was to start with an entry-level job, do your best, and if that effort was good enough you would eventually work your way up to management. At some point it became generally acknowledged that skill at making widgets doesn’t necessarily translate to skill at managing the people who make widgets. The revolutionary idea was born that not everyone needed to “progress” to management and that perhaps an expert widget maker could contribute more to the company in a role other than managing people.

I was caught up in this transition. Following the only option open to me, I found myself a manager. When given the opportunity to contribute in a different way, I jumped on the chance. My time in management taught me that there is one aspect of the job that I genuinely dislike . . . I’ll call it “playing God”.

I do not relish the prospect of my personal decisions having huge impacts on the lives of other people. Here’s a bucket of money for this year’s salary budget; who gets what? Who gets hired; who gets fired; who gets promoted? I know that someone has to make these decisions, and it’s not that I feel that someone else is necessarily better at it than I am, but I just dislike the gnawing feeling that it was my decision that changed someone else’s life.

These memories were awakened this morning while reading this article in the Washington Post. The gist is that an individual was stripped of his security clearance and no one will tell him why. He speculates that the action was based on the result of polygraph tests.

I dislike polygraph tests intensely. I’ve seen two occasions when they ruined the life of people subjected to them, in one case because the test dredged up an insignificant event from fifteen years before and in the other case because the results were completely invalid. Polygraph tests are like any other test – they are one fact that should be considered with the other information available. Making a decision based solely on the basis of what the machine says is as stupid as making a decision based on any one other piece of information.

Somewhere there’s an individual who made the decision to take away this man’s livelihood by stripping him of his security clearance and to hide the reason in the interest of national security. Maybe that’s the right decision; we don’t have the facts so all we can do is second-guess the decision. I just don’t want to be the person to make it.

Stuxnet

2010-11-16T14:58:00.001-06:00

First, a short unrelated statement: I am transferring the domain name beebear.com from one domain registrar to another. This should have precisely no effect on anything that you can observe . . . but I’m mentioning it just in case it breaks the URL to this blog. If that happens, I should be able to fix it in short order, but Murphy’s Law suggests that vast numbers of people will visit the blog during the period of brokenness. It takes somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks to effect a domain transfer, so I’m not sure exactly when it will happen, thus the warning.

Now on to something completely different.

I commend this article from Symantec for your reading pleasure. Its topic is Stuxnet, a most interesting piece of malware that hasn’t gotten a lot of press because it doesn’t affect the general population. Instead it infects the computers used in manufacturing, and the latest discoveries suggest that it’s very specialized and aimed at nuclear enrichment operations. There’s a most entertaining and disturbing video at the end of the text article that I recommend.

Is testing a lost art?

2010-11-09T08:23:00.003-06:00

I received an email yesterday from the Chicago Tribune that explained that they had changed their registration system and I needed to re-register. I hope that the subsequent experience doesn’t illustrate the current situation in the computer industry. In my day, we actually tested systems before putting them into production. It’s obvious to the causal observer that no one has even tried to test this one.

My first attempts to follow the link in the email resulted in a “connection reset” error. I figured that the Tribune probably sent the same email to much of the known world and everyone was trying to re-register at the same time. Maybe so, but based on subsequent experience, I suspect that the server was simply down.

This morning I was able to at least reach the registration server. They’re supporting login using third-party authentication; if you have a Google account you don’t need to set up an additional account at the Tribune. Nice feature. Except that when you try to use it, you get sent to the ever popular server <null>. No one has ever tested this code path.

So I clicked on the link to create a new account. This got me a 404 – page not found; another indication that things are completely broken.

Why would a company place a nonfunctional application on their public web site and send thousands of emails encouraging their customers to use it?

What's the Fed up to?

2010-11-05T08:53:00.000-05:00

If you’ve heard that the Fed is doing something to goose the economy, and you’re not sure what, here are a couple of articles from the Washington Post that may provide some insight.

This one provides an overview of the process from the Post’s point of view. No publication provides completely unbiased information on a topic like this one, but this article covers both sides of the issue including dissent from within the Federal Open Market Committee and concerns of economists.

The other item is a piece by Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. This one requires a larger grain of salt, but provides insight on how the actual decision makers are thinking.

Today is election day

2010-11-02T08:42:00.003-05:00

Not that there are many people who read this blog . . . but I want to do my part by saying,

Vote!

The implicit responsibility that goes with that is doing sufficient research to cast a meaningful vote. I received an email last week that described a situation in which a woman took her friend to vote early, and the woman cast her vote at the same time since it was convenient. She bragged about the fact that she voted in spite of not having the foggiest idea who to vote for – “I recognized this person's name so I voted for him.” Problem is, the reason that she recognized his name was because of the his recent indictment.

I will be headed out to my little township office to vote shortly. It is certainly different than when I voted in the lobby of my high rise building in downtown Chicago.

A bump in the road for OpenOffice

2010-10-28T09:18:00.002-05:00

I have mentioned OpenOffice in this blog a few times. I have suffered a serious bump in the road related to the product.

On October 20, Apple released an update for Java. I generally install Apple patches when they are released because they almost always have security ramifications, and the Java patch was no exception. Unfortunately, installing the update rendered OpenOffice useless on my laptop. OpenOffice uses Java for many functions, and although there were a few very simple documents that I could still open, effectively I lost my primary word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tools.

I was out of business until last night, when I installed a fix that was made available in a format that “normal” people would not have been able to use – two obscure files with difficult names on an FTP site that had to be downloaded and then moved into place in a directory about ten levels deep. The fix did work, but this experience shook my faith in OpenOffice and made me realize that since I selected it most of the positive aspects of OpenOffice have been blunted. I chose it because,

It's not a Microsoft product. This may sound like sour grapes, and maybe there is a bit of that, but I'm seriously bothered by Microsoft's domination of the consumer software market. Just as diversity is desirable in the plant world, I don't want to see us in the situation where a computer virus can disable 95% of all the workstations in the country.
I like the product better than Office. For example, if you're editing a bulleted list, OpenOffice pops up a little window containing icons for the most common functions you use when editing a bulleted list. I noticed when using the most recent version of Word that it now does the same thing.
OpenOffice runs much faster on my Mac than older versions of Office, especially for large documents. This difference is less significant with newer versions of Office.
The last time I investigated Office there were hundreds of megabytes of patches that needed to be downloaded and applied to the distributed product. I suspect this will continue to be an issue, but OpenOffice also provides fixes in the form of new releases of the product and they're not trivial to download either.

Then there's the issue of compatibility. OpenOffice uses the Open Document standard, which is great, but incompatible with the 400-pound gorilla of Microsoft Office. OpenOffice can save documents in Microsoft format (.doc, .xls, .ppt) but I've discovered that the conversion is far from perfect. My intent was to use OpenOffice myself, and if I needed to share documents with others I could save in Office format and share that file. This plan works only for the most simple documents.

Finally there is a new wrinkle related to Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Sun has been big in the OpenOffice project but Oracle's role is unclear. This throws doubt on the future of the product, to the point of a couple of groups splitting off from the main OpenOffice project team. The last thing that this product needs is for the group of volunteers who develop it to split into several competing groups. This is a place were competition is not a good thing.

Ironically enough, in the middle of this period of losing my primary word-processing capability, Microsoft released Office 2011 for the Mac. With great sadness, I have ordered it.

Old farts and technology

2010-10-16T08:53:00.002-05:00

I read the news this morning that the ex-CEO of Countrywide Financial has settled a lawsuit with the SEC. The amount that he will pay, about $70 million, is a fraction of the $521.5 million compensation he received between 2000 and 2008.

Beyond the monetary penalty, which is symbolic in any case, a couple of things struck me.

There's a peek into the environment in this industry leading up to the horrific bust that affected all of us. A statement in an email: “In all my years in the business, I have never seen a more toxic product.” So much for thinking that management didn't understand the situation. Perhaps they thought that toxic was the new norm.

The other aspect that mystifies me is how statements like this can end up as evidence in a lawsuit. Do the people who write the email not understand that they're creating a written record? I remember being caught up in this conundrum while still working – if you keep email it may come back to haunt you in court, but if you prevent people from keeping it you're depriving them of an important business tool. I wonder if today's generation of CEO-types is any more savvy in this area after seeing their peers skewered by their emails. Probably not.

While I was in the industry we transitioned from an environment in which touching a keyboard was unheard of for an executive to one in which the staff expects interaction with their management at all levels using email, blogs, and other means. I wonder how many of the traditional managers have actually transitioned into using technology, and how many pretend to do so. There's a political ad that we see coming out of Iowa that has some old fart who is running for his umpteenth term that shows him holding a cell phone and claiming that he will use technology for the good of the State . . . I bet his aides do all the “dirty work” and he wouldn't even know how to get his own voice mail.

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

2010-10-14T11:10:00.006-05:00

After my stupid initial pictures from Berlin, let's move to something more serious.

One of the couples we met in Berlin is the couple that has led several of the trips we have taken in the past. They weren't leading this trip – it was just a group of friends traveling together – but when they told me that the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was not to be missed, I listened. This might not normally have been high on my list, but it a truly impressive site.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to capture the effect in a photograph. Two of the four here are mine, and two are post card images. There are lots more on the net; I've listed several links below. The outside is a collection of large rectangular stones set on slopes so that the light plays over them. It's very impressive.

There is an information center under the memorial that is also well done. Unlike the above-ground structure, which has no inscriptions and no names, the information center focuses on individuals and families.

It's almost amusing to see photographers struggle with this challenge. You can easily find lots of image attempts using Google; here are a few starters:

Wikipedia
A View on Cities
About.com Architecture

Berlin public WCs

2010-10-10T19:44:00.003-05:00

I promised pictures from Berlin.

This is the first collection. It's very silly. The first one is the signage on the building. The second is the very interesting door to the "pissor".

Then there's the "business end" of the facility, followed by a different "business end" of collecting the fee for using it.

With all the things that you can see in Berlin that actually are relevant, I'm feeling very perverse posting these as the first images from the trip.

The DOJ versus interchange fees

2010-10-09T14:44:00.001-05:00

Interchange fees are what the merchant pays to the credit card company when you pay with a credit card. They were a $35 billion item last year.

The Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against American Express, Mastercard, and Visa. Their merchant agreements prohibited the merchant from even offering information on these charges, much less offering discounts for paying using a different method. Mastercard and Visa agreed to a settlement; American Express has vowed to fight on.

The ruling allows merchants to offer discounts for cash or for using credit cards that have lower interchange fees. I find it difficult to see how this could be bad for consumers, but naturally my imagination is limited. I read one article blasting the whole idea because it will confuse consumers. We don't want to give those consumers options, after all.

I am considering canceling my American Express card. I don't have a high opinion of them, and their behavior here reinforces that view. I got the card to have on hand in case I was in a location where neither Visa nor Mastercard was accepted but it's much more common to find American Express not accepted. It they continue this behavior it's going to become even more common.

At last, progress in honeybee research

2010-10-08T09:48:00.002-05:00

A summary of a recent breakthrough in finding the cause for widespread death of bees is in a recent New York Times article. There are plenty of other references available including the original research paper.

I no longer keep my own bees, but this research is an interesting development for two reasons. First, it is a big step towards understanding the root cause of the problem so that steps can be taken to address it. Second, it's a fascinating case of a working relationship between two groups that normally don't cooperate and could not have done the work on their own.

One of the identified components that's apparently causing Colony Collapse Disorder is a bee disease that beekeepers have known for years; the other is a newly-identified virus. Neither kills the colony on its own but in combination they're deadly. This finding is consistent with a strong consensus in the beekeeping community that CCD is the result of a combination of factors. The next step is to figure out how to keep it from happening.

Fall in Minnesota

2010-10-07T07:59:00.001-05:00

It has been almost a month since I updated this blog. Time passes fast.

One of the reasons for the lack of entries here is a trip to Germany; we returned Monday from almost two weeks in Berlin. We met up there with two other couples that we've traveled with on several prior trips and enjoyed spending time with them. On most days the three couples went their separate ways during the day, getting together for breakfast and dinner. These starts and ends of the day were very pleasant.

We drove through heavy rain on the way to the airport on September 22. We did not realize how heavy it was until we read news in Berlin of widespread flooding in Minnesota. Yet again, I was on another continent for a significant disaster relief operation. We've had two in Minnesota this year – the tornados in June and the floods in September. I was in London for the first and Berlin for the second. I understand that my name was taken in vain many times, and I've received instructions that I am not allowed to leave again. Ever.

We came back to delightful weather – the high yesterday was 72° – but there was a light frost while we were gone that ended the growing season. I “put to sleep” the big garden before the trip – pulled up the tomato plants, put away the cages, did the fall tilling. Now I'm getting ready for the 2nd Annual Potluck and Bonfire for the local Red Cross disaster team tonight. Last year the weather turned nasty the day of the event and we passed on the bonfire; this year the weather is cooperating. One of yesterday's tasks was to move the fire ring that's near the pond . . . a volunteer willow tree has grown so large in the past few years, since the fire ring was installed, that a fire in the old location would damage the tree.

Finally a few words on the camera that I mentioned in the last blog entry. It performed quite well on the trip. There were a number of opportunities to use the low-light capabilities in museums and churches, and I'm pleased with the result. I took the same shot with the low-light feature and with traditional exposure, and while the difference isn't dramatic, it's there. I will try to share some Berlin shots here soon.

Fuji FinePix F300EXR

2010-09-09T22:22:00.002-05:00

Technology marches on.

A few years ago I bought a Fuji F50fd digital camera primarily because it had better low-light performance than the camera we had. Indeed, we were quite pleased on our next trip to discover that we had better success capturing interiors of churches and other low-light venues.

In preparation for an upcoming trip, I discovered that Fuji had recently introduced a new model – the F300EXR. It looked attractive for several reasons:

The basic controls are similar to the F50 and that should make it easier to learn to use the new camera and to switch back and forth between them. Both cameras use the same battery and memory card.

The new camera has a 15X zoom, from a 24 mm wide angle to a 360 mm telephoto (35 mm equivalent). The two pictures here were taken from the same place. The little white dot if the left picture (halfway top-to-bottom and near the left side) you can see in the first one is the bucket that is very clear in the second.
The low-light capability is even better than the F50, plus there's a “pro mode” in which the camera takes three exposures and combines them into one to enhance low-light performance.
My wife likes to take candid shots, and one of the things that bugs her about digital cameras as compared to good 'ole film cameras is the delay between the time she mashes the shutter release and the picture is actually taken. This has improved markedly from the first generation of digital cameras, and the F300EXR claims to have taken a big step in improving time-to-focus by incorporating the type of focus detection that until now was only available in larger SLR cameras.

So I ordered the camera from Amazon. They didn't have a release date, so I hoped it would be here in time for our trip. Yesterday they informed me that it would ship; it did; today it arrived.

Since the camera arrived late in the day, I've had little time to really put it through its paces. As you can see, the zoom is phenomenal, but for some reason the pictures taken with the zoom have less resolution than normal. Time to RTFM, I guess.

There are a couple of other features that are disappointing, but I didn't buy the camera for them, so I don't much care.

There's a built-in panorama feature. Turn it on, push the shutter, and pan the camera. It captures images as needed and then stitches them into one image. And it works. Problem is, the image is only 720 pixels high. I have created some nice images by using software to stitch together multiple images, but this camera feature does not approach that capability. I suppose it might be nice for capturing a general impression of a scene, but that's about it.

Finally, a real marketing ploy . . . the logical extension of face recognition – pet recognition. This camera has a cat-recognition mode and a dog-recognition mode. There's even a Fuji-sponsored YouTube video that demonstrates how you can set up your camera on a tripod, go stand in front of it with your dog, and when the camera detects that the dog is looking at it it will take the picture. Well, at least as far as Fuji cat-recognition is concerned, my cats are not cats. But I bet this sells cameras!

Beware! Terrorists on the train!

2010-08-30T08:03:00.002-05:00

I was shocked when I read this article in the New York Times. It describes Border Patrol actions on a train that runs from Chicago to New York City without crossing the border. Agents routinely question passengers and remove passengers who cannot produce satisfactory documentation.

I do not carry my passport with me at all times. I didn't think it was necessary. And for me, it's probably not – I am unlikely to be racially profiled.

Is there any justification for this expense and invasion of privacy? Are terrorists likely to be riding the train between Chicago and New York City? Have any been apprehended? If actions like this are justified in that travel corridor, are they justified between Chicago and Atlanta? Where does it end, and how did it get started?

I have no problem with enforcing laws, guarding the border, and investing reasonable effort into enhancing everyone's security. This is way over the top. It's worse than what we go through every time we fly – an expensive and poorly executed attempt to enhance security that was designed with no consideration of cost/benefit or the rights and feelings of 99.999% of the people involved. Are programs like this needed to apprehend the .001%? Maybe, if they actually worked; I've seen no indication that they're justified based on actual results. But their advocates would assure me that such results indeed exist; I am simply not allowed to see them because they're too sensitive.

One last comment. Although they don't volunteer the information, responding to interrogation in this case is voluntary. Moral of the story: If someone in uniform shines a flashlight into your eyes and starts asking questions, don't assume that you're required to answer them.

Flash Cookies

2010-08-29T08:58:00.003-05:00

You might want to take a few minutes and explore the situation with Flash cookies on your computer.

This morning I read the following entry in the SANS newsletter:

--Attorney Files Lawsuits Over Flash Cookies
(August 24, 20100
Privacy attorney Joseph Malley has filed a lawsuit against Specificmedia for using technology to respawn cookies that users have deleted. Malley has filed two other similar lawsuits: one against a number of companies, including MTV and Hulu, for using Quantcast technology to recreate cookies and another against Disney and Demand media for using a Clearspring Technology widget that does the same thing. All the technologies use Adobe Flash to store copies of browser cookies; while clearing regular cookies is fairly straightforward, clearing Flash cookies can be complicated because they cannot be managed through browser privacy controls. According to the lawsuits, the companies did not inform users about the use of Flash to store the information; the suits allege that using Flash in this way violates state and federal privacy and computer security laws. Flash cookies allow websites to store 25 times more information than traditional cookies hold.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/specificmedia-zombie-cookie/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ad-network-at-center-of-third-flash-cookie-lawsuit/38346
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/epicenter/2010/08/No.-1-Attachement-1.pdf

This piqued my interest sufficiently to do a Google search on “Flash cookies” that led me to the web page used to manipulate Flash cookies and the settings that control them.

I saw a list of web sites that I regularly visit and the Flash cookies that they had stored on my system. If you do the same I suspect you'll be surprised at what you see. Don't miss the explanation that you need to go to the global settings page to disable the ability of web sites to set these cookies.

Happy Birthday to OpenOffice

2010-08-22T11:17:00.001-05:00

Early this year I blogged about how impressed I was by the functionality of the new version of OpenOffice, which is an open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. I continue to use it as my primary word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation (“PowerPoint”) software, and I've been quite satisfied.

This morning I was reading some OpenOffice propaganda concerning the conference that will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the project. Held in Bulgaria, the conference has over 100 speakers in four parallel tracks.

I have to say . . . this is pretty impressive for what's basically a volunteer effort. I say “volunteer effort” with some hesitation because I don't really know how much support the project has received from companies like Sun and Oracle. They have obvious corporate motivation to undermine Microsoft's domination of the market for office software so I don't doubt that they've put money into the effort. Even so, the result is amazing when compared with the resources that Microsoft has thrown at their Office product.

Here's another interesting web page. The data illustrates the broad adoption of OpenOffice, especially outside of the US. But what's really fascinating is the way that the data was gathered.

The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites.

Now that's both innovative and the least big scary.

Washington Post goes to Chicago

2010-08-21T10:28:00.001-05:00

The Washington Post has an article today that impressed me. I'm not usually a big fan of economic analysis by individuals, but this article is datelined Chicago and makes sense. The gist is that we're in a different economic environment – the other side of the spending spree before the economic bust. The last sentence is

"It took us a decade to get in the ditch we are in," Speer [CEO of Illinois Toolworks] said. "There isn't going to be instant gratification to get us out of it. We're going to have to get used to a lower growth economy, and that is going to be a big adjustment for all of us."

Internet credibility and growth

2010-08-19T08:44:00.002-05:00

This blog entry has two different points.

The first one relates to an article in Wired that claims that the Web is dead. To support that claim they show us a graph of Internet traffic that indeed suggests that the amount devoted to the Web has declined to insignificance. Rob Beschizza has discussion of this graph at the boingboing.net site. The value graphed is percentage of traffic. Since other technologies use vastly more bandwidth than surfing the web, this statistic does suggest the decline of the web. Rob goes on to examine the usage of the web based on actual bandwidth and concludes that it's growing, not declining.

So the first moral of the story today is the old saw that by warping the numbers you can prove any premise. Or, more simply, don't believe everything you read, even if you've trusted the source in the past.

The second remarkable item is the growth of the Internet. I used to watch this back in the early 1990's with amazement – the Internet providers were scrambling to put additional capacity in place to keep up with explosive growth. It should come as no surprise to me that this growth has continued, but I hadn't realized that today's Internet provides an opportunity to use that once-elusive term “exabyte”.

In fact, between 1995 and 2006, the total amount of web traffic went from about 10 terabytes a month to 1,000,000 terabytes (or 1 exabyte). According to Cisco, the same source Wired used for its projections, total internet traffic rose then from about 1 exabyte to 7 exabytes between 2005 and 2010.

There's a graph of this at the boingboing site, but it just shows explosive growth. The graph is especially impressive because it's based on such a small initial value, but today's usage numbers are impressive on their own.

Thanks to Demetri for clueing me in on this.

Has your car been hacked yet?

2010-08-18T08:00:00.002-05:00

The story included below is from the current edition of the SANS newsletter:

--Researchers Present Wireless Hack of Car Warning Systems
(August 12 & 13, 2010)
Researchers said they have developed an attack that allows them to access wireless warning systems in cars while the cars are in motion. The experiment sent phony tire pressure warning messages to cars. Tire pressure monitoring systems have been mandatory in all new cars in the US since 2008. The messages were sent between two moving vehicles over a distance of up to 40 meters. The findings of the research were presented at the Usenix Security Symposium in Washington, DC last week.

Earlier this year, another group of researchers said they had developed an attack that gave them access to cars' onboard computer networks that control engines, brakes and other systems.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0813/Scientists-hack-into-cars-computers-control-brakes-engine
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/13/car_sensor_wireless_hack/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226700146&subSection=All+Stories

This brings to mind a very old story that may be completely fabricated. I had a friend in high school who installed a very powerful ham radio setup in his car. He was transmitting at the legal limit for power – a full kilowatt. He related the experience of having another car that kept trying to pass him, only to have its engine stop every time he transmitted. His theory was that his radio output was scrambling the computer that controlled the fuel injection for the other car and that as soon as the other driver got close enough for this effect to happen, his car stalled.

At any rate, with today's automobiles having much more computing power than the Lunar Lander, one wonders how long it will be until there is some serious hacking.

How to lose an election

2010-08-17T08:22:00.002-05:00

State politics. You folks in Illinois have your Blagojevich, Daley, and such colorful characters. In Minnesota, things are different . . . and exactly the same.

Our fine governor, who has just about run the state into the ground in his eight years, has decided that he needs to ruin bigger and better things, so he's not running for a third term and instead has managed to build his polling level in Iowa to almost 1%. Since there is no incumbent, the governor's race this year is even more interesting – not that a state that elected Jesse Ventura needs an excuse for an interesting governor's race.

The Republicans settled on a candidate early; there was effectively no Republican primary. The DFL [that's Minnesotan for “Democrat”] party, on the other hand, couldn't make up its mind in a big way. First there was a very contentious party convention in which three capable candidates fought it out for the party endorsement. You would think that that would be the end of the process, but this is Minnesota. The endorsement just gave the candidate the privilege of entering the primary as the endorsed candidate; two additional candidates didn't even participate in the convention.

The primary vote outcome was very close. Not close enough to take almost a year to decide, like the Senate race, but 7,000 votes does not a mandate make. The endorsed candidate lost. I suspect that a fair number of the winner's votes were from Republicans who wanted the weakest candidate to win the primary. I wonder if this is an example of the adage, “There's no such thing as bad publicity.” Or do the voters have the perception that the DFL is unorganized and drifting?

Now we have the DFL candidate whining about Republican campaign tactics. I'm sure that the folks he's complaining about were obnoxious, but I'm equally sure that they were careful to stay within the law. Welcome to the real world of politics in the new century.

My prediction is that the Minnesota Democrats will snare defeat from the jaws of victory in November. They have a clear opportunity this year to recapture the governor position after years of non-Democrat state executives. No candidate has the incumbent advantage and voters are unhappy with what they've seen for eight years. By demonstrating a lack of party unity and allowing the least-electable candidate to represent the party, they're frittering away that advantage. This could even end up being another Jesse Ventura year with the Independent coming out ahead.

My tax money at work

2010-08-13T11:19:00.001-05:00

An article in the Star Tribune informs me that I'm funding a project to examine pictures on Minnesota driver's licenses to find possible duplicates.

Certainly it's a noble cause to look for duplicate driver's license photos. But really . . . is it worth the cost to examine 11 million photos? Is computer face-recognition software up to the challenge?

I wonder who got a kickback from this one . . . of all the ways to spend tax money, this one is pretty close to the bottom of the list, especially in today's economy.

I am not a cow, in spite of my name

2010-08-12T08:50:00.002-05:00

I hate banks.

That's a pretty irrational thing to say for someone who spent 31 years in the finance industry. But I'm not proud of the way that my adopted business segment has been acting for the past decade or so. Nothing is too sleazy if it brings in a little profit, as long as it's just over the line from being illegal.

A recent court ruling has moved that line slightly. By manipulating the order in which they processed transactions, Wells Fargo was maximizing the number of overdrafts. The story describes how the customer generated four overdrafts, with associated charges, but if the transactions had been processed in chronological order there would have been only one overdraft. One of the $35 overdraft fees was associated with a $3.09 purchase.

Financial institutions today have no class. They are out to wring every dime out of every customer. ATM fees . . . foreign transaction fees . . . late-payment fees . . . interest rates on credit cards that hurt the very people least able to bear the cost . . . all of this gives the impression of money-grubbing low-class operations. Then the greed of industry sends the economy into a tailspin, and we all suffer.

I have a personal bellwether for corporate sleaze in the credit card industry. When I start receiving bill that aren't due on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday then I'll conclude that someone has breathed a little ethics into the industry. Sending bills that are due on a non-business-day is a great way to boost late-payment fees, and a fine indication that the company sees its customers as cash cows.

Mooooooooooooooooooooooo

ISS

2010-08-12T08:23:00.001-05:00

I don't know if any of the readers of this blog are interested in the International Space Station. (I don't actually know if there are any readers of this blog.) But here are a couple of articles on the topic that I stumbled across today.

From the IEEE Spectrum a description of how maintenance procedures have changed due to the retirement of the Shuttle fleet. One of the things I found interesting in this one is information on how they handle the spare parts problem.

Current information on the specific failure that is described in the previous article.

Strawberries

2010-08-10T12:37:00.003-05:00

I thought I had blogged about the Great Strawberry Surprise, but apparently not. Here's the story.

Last Summer my wife suggested that I should grow strawberries since the place her mom had been acquiring strawberries had gone out of business. I agreed, but then had second thoughts. I decided that strawberries are cheap in the store, especially in season, and that we could buy all that we needed for much less than I could produce them, especially if I considered the amount of effort it takes to keep strawberry beds free of weeds.

Imagine my surprise this Spring when a box appeared containing 75 strawberry plants. No, I am not accusing my wife of ordering strawberry plants even though I had decided not to grow them. My theory is that I ordered them myself during the short interval when I had decided to add strawberries to my garden, although I honestly have no recollection of having done so.

So I planted them. This required tilling a portion of the garden that was not used during the previous year, and I knew that I would be battling weeds even more vigorously than usual. Sure enough, even though the patch was weed-free when we left for London, two weeks later when we returned the weeds had taken over so throughly that I could not even spot the strawberry plants. But I persevered, reclaimed the patch, and the two images to the left illustrate the results. One of the varieties is described as

Seascape: Highly successful for Northeastern growers for summer and fall production. The Univ. of California breeding program released this productive, day-neutral strawberry in 1992. The fruit is large, prolific, and has good flavor when picked ripe from the plant. Seascape has an overall good disease resistance but is susceptible to common leaf spot. Grows best in Zones 4-8.

The picture is picking from one day from one 25-foot row. I'm impressed.

(There are two images because I couldn't decide which effect I liked. One is with a flash; the other is without. Both have their good and bad aspects.)

Bottom line: Sometimes good things happen in spite of logical planning. These berries are much better than anything at the grocery store, and I have a feeling of accomplishment from growing them.

Movie recommendation

2010-08-10T09:41:00.001-05:00

I don't think I've ever provided a movie recommendation on this blog, so this is a first. I'm mentioning this one because it's unlikely that you would stumble across it.

The movie is Rotation from 1949. It was made just a few years after the end of the war, and it portrays the daily life of German people during Hitler's rise to power and through the fall of Berlin. If you've ever wondered how such horrible things could happen in a country with the seeming approval of the country's population, you should watch this film. It will give you an understanding of how the government can very effectively control not only how the citizens act but how they think. The portions that depict youth programs are particularly telling.

You might ask how we stumbled on this obscure production. My wife is researching an upcoming trip to Germany, and when she researches something, she knows how to do it right. Netflix is a superb source for this kind of obscure material, and she has found a lot of background for us. Much of it has been of somewhat marginal interest to me, but Rotation was certainly an exception.

Toyota, again

2010-08-06T10:17:00.001-05:00

I don't know how much play this story is getting outside of Minnesota. The gist is that a person's conviction for criminal vehicular homicide was reversed based on the possibility that the accident was caused by a defect in his Toyota.

The part of the story that made an impression on me was this one:

Smith said she gave particular credence to Ron Neumeister, a pilot for Sun Country Airlines and in the Minnesota National Guard.

He said he experienced several incidents in which his '96 Camry took off on its own. It was his experience as a pilot and soldier that helped him not panic and to regain control of the car by putting it in neutral and turning off the ignition.

Now this is just one person, but it's the first time that I've actually heard someone describe in detail that they stopped the incident by turning off the engine.

Our cars are too complicated. We used to joke about how a car that was powered by Microsoft Windows would have to pull over for a re-boot every few miles. That joke has become uncomfortably close to reality as the level of technology keeps increasing.

Forzen mice

2010-07-30T08:07:00.003-05:00

There are many products out there that I never heard of or thought about. Until a few minutes ago, one of them was frozen mice.

I'm sure that many of you already know about the recall of frozen mice from MiceDirect. You hadn't heard? Well, now you know.

Here's an interesting aside to this trivia. If you type “micedirect.com” into your browser, you'll find yourself at the secure version of the site (https://micedirect.com). That means that the company is maintaining a server whose only function in life is to redirect folks from the normal non-SLL site to the one that's encrypted and protected by SSL. One wonders . . . why?

Online personal financial management

2010-07-29T08:30:00.002-05:00

I don't understand.

I stumbled across an article this morning written by someone who is quite upset that the free service that he's been using from Intuit is being replaced by another free service that he judges as inferior.

It must be a generational thing. There are two aspects that baffle me.

First, why would anyone in their right mind use a web-based service to manage their finances? If there is one aspect of life that most people feel is private and sensitive, it's personal financial information. Of all the things not to upload to a web site, this has to be close to the top of the list. Keeping track of personal finances using a computer is great, but there are many reasonably priced alternatives that simply run on your own computer. Why would anyone make their private information available to the crew of pimply faced computer technicians with unrestricted data access that inhabit any online server farm? Or worse, considering the record of hacks that compromised data from online sites, to the risk of identity theft?

Second, when you use a subscription service, you're at the mercy of the provider of that service. This is more of an issue when you're using a free service, but paying a monthly fee doesn't give you much leverage. The idea of complaining because a vendor changes a free service is almost amusing. People who make a free service an integral part of their lives are taking a risk. I have many of the same concerns about Facebook and other social-networking products – they have become an important part of the lives of many people, but I don't think that these folks give much thought to the fact that they're being held hostage by companies that they don't really know.

Anyway . . . if you want to manage your personal finances on a computer, buy a piece of software to do it. At least you know that you've got what you've got and no one will change it or take it away. And “personal finance” includes tax preparation software; for all the reasons above, I don't understand why anyone would upload all their tax data to a web site where it's at risk rather than keeping it local (where it's also at risk but at least under your own control).

Actual financial regulations are born

2010-07-28T08:51:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the financial reform bill that was being signed into law. Now we're getting down to the nitty gritty.

An article in the New York Times describes the process of turning the legislation into actual regulations. The people who will do this are not your elected representatives, but the regulators themselves.

In my career in the financial industry, I met lots of regulators. Like every other job segment, there are good ones and bad ones. The gist of the NYT article is that the regulators are being recruited by the finance industry as lobbyists, and the ones who aren't jumping ship to more lucrative jobs are being assailed by an army of lobbyists whose goal it is to blunt the regulations that are actually implemented.

I wonder whether it will be the capable or the not-so-capable regulators who morph into lobbyists. The best ones are dedicated to their field, but at some point dedication gives way to the prospect of a much higher salary. The people left writing the rules will be the ones who weren't lured into being lobbyists. Will this be a highly-principled group who care deeply about their chosen career or people who were so incompetent that they weren't recruited as lobbyists?

The scary part is that at this point we have no input, no control, and no information. The regulations will be written based on negotiations between the regulators and the lobbyists. Congress is out of the picture. One wonders who is watching the watchers.

A couple of prairie pix

2010-07-24T17:09:00.002-05:00

We were exploring the prairie restoration today and these guys were posing for me.

Facebook

2010-07-21T08:02:00.000-05:00

The SANS folks publish a newsletter named "OUCH!" and this month's edition discusses Facebook. Whether you're an established user or just thinking about jumping on board, this is fascinating information. (And if you couldn't care less about Facebook, I bet you can ignore this blog entry very easily.)

Smart electric meters

2010-07-17T08:03:00.002-05:00

Have you ever been reading an article and stumbled across a sentence that made you go, “Hmmmm”? How about this one?

According to Don Kintner of the Electric Power Research Institute, a city with a million smart meters that communicate just an hour a day will end up transmitting nearly 300 gigabytes of data per year.

This is from an article in IEEE Spectrum (yes, I'm a geek in several different ways) that discusses development of wireless networks.

Electric meters that “call home” have been around for some time. I've had one since I moved to rural MN; reading meters when you have to travel miles between individual meters is rather more expensive than walking into a room in a high rise and being able to read 10 or 100 meters at the same time. So put yourself into the position of an electric utility that is building the next generation of “smart meter” that can do things like run your dishwasher in the middle of the night when load is lower. What do you use as a connectivity method to the home? What technology is going to last for the next 15-20 years?

Until a few years ago, the answer was clearly “use the telephone connection”, but with increasing numbers of people switching from traditional landline to cellular-only, that route doesn't seem as clear as it did. What wireless technology is going to be sufficiently stable to count on it for a decade? I don't see any candidates.

Interesting problem, and one that I'd never considered.

A related topic, and one that's addressed in this article only by a chart that's not supported by any text: broadband over power lines. You might not have heard of this brainchild, but it's one of those ideas that sounds almost too good to be true until you try to implement it. The idea (rather well expressed by the name of the facility) is to provide broadband network connectivity to homes by using existing power lines. Sounds reasonable . . . they're copper, they're there, how hard can it be?

The answer turns out to be somewhere between “very hard” and “impossible”.

There are many problems:

Power lines aren't shielded, like cable TV runs. This means that they make very good transmitting antennas for whatever signals you inject into them. It turns out that the broadband information translates to radio frequencies that other people care about, including ham radio operators. When the interference began to manifest itself, the national ham radio organization (ARRL) began a lively fight with the FCC and the power companies who were running pilot programs. While this might not have been enough to defeat the project if no other problems had surfaced, it did contribute to its failure.
The technology was almost ready for prime time. The units installed in the home (think "DSL modem") were expensive and unreliable.
Power companies are not Internet Service Providers. They don't understand the business.

The end result was cost overruns, customer acceptance levels vastly lower than expected, and a bottom line that spelled financial disaster. Another obvious good idea, down the tubes.

Finance reform

2010-07-16T10:36:00.001-05:00

A couple of years after the financial system collapsed, we have additional regulations to keep it from happening again. To be accurate, we have the legislation that authorizes additional regulations; it will be a while before the actual rules are written and begin to be enforced.

To me, this issue was simple and there were two options. Congress could do nothing or enact additional regulatory control. There are advantages and disadvantages to both paths. Generally speaking I am not a big fan of government intervention (“We are here to help”) but in this case it was clear that the industry could not be self-regulating. Maybe the new regs will do more harm than good, but the risk of doing nothing is higher. Good for Congress; they did something in the face of a huge lobbying effort by the finance industry.

But the Republicans are so predictable. They're just sitting back and waiting to use this bill as ammunition in the mid-term elections. Their technique will be to blame anything that's not 100% perfect on this bill, or any other actions that the current administration took. Since things are never 100% perfect, it will be easy for them to assign blame.

Tornado event

2010-07-13T08:51:00.003-05:00

It's coming up to a month after the event, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about the tornados in Minnesota on June 17.

The map at the left illustrates a couple of things. (Click on it for a bigger version.) Our house is marked by the red X. My wife actually saw one of the tornadoes – not the closest to us, but the one more to the east. Our view to the weat is blocked by trees, and since storms usually come from that direction this is an issue.

The other aspect of the event that the map illustrates is how much worse it could have been. If the west storm had drifted to the east instead of turning north, or either of the other two had touched down further south, the main populated area of the city would have been affected. As it was, the damage was in rural areas. Not to minimize the impact, but it could have been much worse.

We were called out immediately to open a shelter, but as it turned out no shelter was needed. People in rural areas tend to stay with friends or relatives in a situation like this.

The next morning we started disaster assessment activities. This isn't just driving around and exclaiming at the damage; it's a very regimented procedure that provides data for FEMA and state agencies in addition to the Red Cross. In importance just behind sheltering and feeding, disaster assessment sets the parameters on the size of the event so that appropriate response can be done, and the data is used for things like deciding whether Federal aid is available. Even though experience in the chapter is limited, we mounted a respectable effort and got the data quickly.

The tornadoes hit on Thursday night. On Sunday, I flew to London. This was a trip that had been planed for a year. It was emotionally painful to walk out in the middle of a local disaster relief operation. You train for this; you plan; you prepare mentally . . . but you don't prepare for having to leave. But things went well without me, and that in itself is an important learning experience.

Today I will attend a meeting concerning recovery, and tomorrow I'll spend time at a recovery session at the local mall. So I'm back in the grind. It almost seems like I never left.

Passenger trains

2010-07-11T09:32:00.002-05:00

Zack's recent blog post about Amtrak made me realize just how sad it is that we don't have a US passenger rail system. Yes, Amtrak is out there, but it's a pale shadow of a real rail system.

I returned recently from two weeks in London. This was another of the series of trips to introduce the joys of international travel to a niece/nephew who just graduated from high school. We spent the entire time based in London but we got outside of the city on three day trips.

By European standards, Britain’s passenger train system is mediocre. Margaret Thatcher dealt it a serious blow when she broke up the single system into separate companies; we all know that competition is always better than having a single system. Just look at the great improvement in our telephone service when Ma Bell was split up.

But by US standards, the UK system is phenomenal. The trains are comfortable, fast, and relatively cheap. By and large they run on time and make the travel to your destination a pleasant part of the experience.

Our train system died here when our politicians became pawns of the automobile and oil lobbies. Outside of America the countries manage to support an automobile infrastructure and a train system, but here in the US we've been convinced that they're mutually exclusive. Maybe in a few generations this mindset will change. I hope so.

I hear occasional chatter about high-speed rail. Wouldn't it be great to board a train in one city and ride in comfort directly to the center of another? People in Europe and Asia do that all the time, but in the US we can't comprehend not having our land boat with us at the destination. Even people who support rail travel here think that the trains need to haul their automobile. It's a mindset we need to get beyond, but the car is so much a part of our culture that I'm not sure it will ever happen.

Passwords on sticky notes

2010-07-08T07:01:00.001-05:00

I had to laugh.

An article in Network World describes how one of the alleged Russian spy ring members wrote an important password on a piece of paper. Give people all the high-tech tools in the world, and they're still people.

I am amused by the contingent in the security industry that believes that long and complex passwords are “better”. From the standpoint of not being guessable, they're great; when the human writes them down on a sticky note they become a bit less secure. You can be absolutely assured that we humans will write down any complicated password because that's the only way it will be usable.

If you've got a few minutes for a quest-for-knowledge project, investigate the concept of steganography. Use the links at the end of the WikiPedia article if you want more. Here's a pictorial history.

Some things change . . .

2010-06-07T22:27:00.002-05:00

There was a convergence of articles this morning that demonstrate how computer technology is changing.

Hewlett Packard is fighting for their printer business. People just aren't printing as much as they used to. Will the time come when printers are as scarce as pay phones?

There's a company that you probably never heard of that's quietly manufacturing many of the popular devices for three of the four top US wireless carriers. This company dates from 1997 and its products are now indispensable for much of our population. Talk about being in the right place at the right time and having the right idea.

Then there's an article that brings back memories. When I read a few weeks ago that AT&T was moving away from unlimited data plans for wireless, I thought that was reasonable. After all, with an unlimited plan what you've got is the vast majority of customers who move relatively small amounts of data and a tiny segment who hog huge amounts of bandwidth. Why should the reasonable folks subsidize the pigs?

The memory that this triggers is the telephone plans in the Chicago area in the 80s. Calling from one suburb to another was billed in “units”. A certain number of these units was included in the base price of telephone service and if you went over your allocation in a month the additional units were billed at a premium rate. As I reflect on this scheme, it was a cash cow for the carrier and a no-win for the customer – either you paid for units you didn't use or you paid for units over your limit.

The alternative was an unlimited plan. This was especially attractive to the budding computer crowd who was using dialup to access computer systems. You could rack up vast numbers of units by being connected to a bulletin board system for an hour; the only viable way to do it was the unlimited plan. Luckily the price wasn't prohibitive so it was possible for these developing technologies to grow.

Then the carrier pulled the plug on unlimited plans. From a logic standpoint and a customer-service standpoint, this was reasonable – just as pulling the plug on unlimited wireless bandwidth is reasonable. But it killed the local bulletin board and chat systems almost overnight. No one could afford to use them.

Are the wireless carriers shooting themselves in the foot by dumping unlimited bandwidth contracts? Will people abandon bandwidth-intensive applications? Even if the actual cost is nominal, the perception may kill these applications. I hadn't thought about this potential side effect of making the charging algorithm more reasonable, but it's there.

GPS

2010-06-03T08:09:00.000-05:00

Years ago I had a chat via ham radio with a retired Navy old-timer. He was ranting about current Navy training and how much it depended on technology and how little on traditional methods. One of his rants related to not teaching new recruits Morse code, but another was GPS. His theory on modern warfare was that the enemy would knock out GPS and our Navy would spend the rest of the war cruising around in circles looking for someone to shoot at.

A recent incident reveals that it's not just the Navy. One wonders how much contingency planning has been done to address a world without GPS.

20/20 hindsight

2010-05-31T09:08:00.002-05:00

A New York Times article wonders why reforms at the Minerals Management Service were so slow. With 20/20 hindsight, it points out that these problems were known and date from the previous administration.

The question is answered early in the article:

The answer may have as much to do with the workings of business as usual in Washington and the long-entrenched influence of the oil industry in Washington politics as it does with anything more sinister. (my emphasis)

Rather than wringing our hands and bemoaning the fact that government “regulation” was in the hands of the industry being regulated, let's look forward, open our eyes, and see what other industries write their own regulations. Finance? Health care? Pharmaceuticals? Transportation? Food processing?

Maybe an effective Minerals Management Service wouldn't have prevented the Gulf oil spill, but there are many examples of how the regulated, not the regulators, are running the show. The health care reform bill that was passed was remarkably friendly to insurance companies. The finance reform bill that emerges from Congress might take a few feeble steps towards protecting consumers but you can be sure it won't harm the companies in the industry – their screams of anguish notwithstanding.

What do we expect when the regulators have no power and no staff? But hey, it's a free market, right? Think about that the next time you pay 30% interest on a credit card, pay more and get less health care than the rest of the world, discover that the dosage of cold remedy that you just gave to your child might be incorrect, can't take a high speed train, or get food poisoning from bad hamburger.

Perspective

2010-05-30T09:35:00.001-05:00

Here's a news item that is intended to make you appreciate how good things are going.

On Friday night there was a fire in a rural part of the county. The good news is that the homeowner wasn't at home. When this happens in a rural area the home is usually destroyed because by the time someone notices the fire, reports it, and responders arrive it's too late. That's what happened in this case.

The homeowner wasn't there because he was helping his girlfriend finish moving out of her apartment before the end of the month. She and her daughter had made the decision to move in with him, and had already moved their possessions into the house that burned. I have to admit that my imagination would fill in the blanks in a story like this with young starry-eyed lovers; suffice it to say that this isn't the case.

So if things don't go quite right for you this holiday weekend, you now have something that you can use to put your woes into perspective. Here's wishing everyone a great holiday weekend.

We depend on complex systems

2010-05-29T11:06:00.001-05:00

I recommend this Op-Ed piece from the New York Times. It discusses risk analysis for complex systems and makes several good points. One of the quotes that jumped out at me: “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”

The end of an era?

2010-05-27T08:20:00.001-05:00

Interesting. Here we have two reporters who have been waiting for a conjunction in stock prices so that they could report the momentous event that Apple is now “worth more” than Microsoft and pronounce “the end of an era and the beginning of the next one”. I'm not quite ready to toll the bells for companies that manufacture computer equipment that I can't hold in my hand.

“Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.” Say what? Consumer tastes shape consumer technology. That doesn't mean that the market for business technology is dead.

I wonder if the authors of this article have any idea how it got published. Do they think that the New York Times' computers are Great Big iPods?

Mushrooms

2010-05-15T08:37:00.002-05:00

Kudos to Slate's “Big Money” series for the phrase, “Federal investigations of Wall Street continue to pop up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm.” Not only are we seeing the regulatory agencies recovering from their stupor and opening their eyes to what is happening in the financial sector, there's some evidence of actual bipartisan movement in the Senate on financial reform. I think that Congresscritters have finally heard the insistent clamor of their constituents who are fed up with the partisan bickering and overwhelmingly want something done to prevent another meltdown of the financial system. There's movement in several areas:

Financial reform

No reform legislation can be perfect, and Congress is hamstrung by two big obstacles – partisan differences and the lobbying effort of the financial sector.

Partisan differences are real, and have been around since the founding of our democratic system . . . but I hope that the legislators don't end up in the same maelstrom of deal making that tainted the health care bill. There appears to be some actual cooperation between the political parties now that the Republicans have realized that their constituents dislike of Democratic ideas is trumped by their desire to have something done. The “just say no” philosophy seems to have run its course at last. I was beginning to wonder if our legislative process had bogged down completely, and what I'm seeing on the financial reform bill gives me hope. But it's not out of the Senate yet, and it's far from “done”.

The finance sector lobby is as strong as the health lobby, and we saw what happened with the health care reform bill. The only reason that anything is happening with finance reform is that there is a huge anger in the general public that they were royally screwed by the bankers and Congress is hearing that. We couldn't say the same about health reform; there wasn't a dramatic hue and cry for it. The moral of this story is that we, as constituents, must keep our Congresscritters' feet to the fire; the lobbying effort won't slow down. Be sure that you've made it clear to your legislators how strongly you feel on finance reform – they'll hear from lobbyists, and they need to hear from us, too.

Rating agencies

I see that there are all kinds of formal investigations popping up and questions being asked about the agencies that rate financial instruments. The general public doesn't see this aspect and doesn't really understand it, but the influence of these agencies was key in the recent meltdown. By providing their stamp of approval on what turned out to be toxic, the rating agencies fueled the process that finally blew up.

Two interesting tidbits: The issuers of these instruments pick the rating agency and pay them to create the rating, and a lot of the individuals who create the instruments at the issuing company are ex-employees of rating agencies so they know the tricks of structuring things to get the best rating.

Merchant credit card fees

This issue is creeping into the financial reform legislation. An aspect of the financial reform bill being debated by the Senate includes controls on charges to merchants for credit card use. This is a $20 billion cash cow, so the bankers are lobbying furiously. The fact that the Senate acted in the face of threats from the lobbyists, and in a bi-partisan way, is heartening. Our legislators listening to us instead of lobbyists? What a revolutionary idea.

Asparagus

2010-05-10T19:12:00.002-05:00

This blog entry isn’t really about asparagus. There’s a picture over there of what I cut on Saturday night for Sunday dinner, and there’s really nothing like fresh asparagus. In fact, I usually start the water boiling and then walk down and cut the asparagus; that’s fresh. I deviated from my regular procedure because I was afraid that the asparagus would freeze on Sunday morning, and I was probably right. We had a frost on Saturday morning and a freeze on Sunday. I think we’re making up for no snow in March or April. The months seem to have been reversed. I’m confident that it will warm up eventually.

The real topic of this blog entry is how Red Cross disaster workers do what they do. You may find it interesting. You may not. That’s the wonder of blogs; you can read what you find interesting. But just to be clear . . . I am not an employee of the Red Cross; I am not speaking in any official manner for the organization. I’m just presenting my personal experiences and insight, for what they’re worth, for your information and entertainment.

Remember Apollo 13, the movie? Remember how many people were involved in getting those three people home safely? It strikes me that the effort of getting the right people in the right place to recover from a disaster is like that.

I want to illustrate this by building an example. Let’s say that you think you might be interested in helping the Red Cross in disasters. Maybe you saw some TV coverage of a recent operation like the Tennessee floods, or Mississippi, or Kentucky, or Arkansas, or Alabama. You look up your local Red Cross chapter and contact them.

You’ll complete an application to volunteer and have a background check. Then you’ll chat with the folks at the chapter to figure out how you fit into the picture. It might not look like it, but disaster recovery operations are carefully organized. Individuals have specific jobs to do, and are trained to do those jobs. For example, someone who is sent to the operation as a Client Caseworker (to interview clients and help them recover) would not be used to drive an Emergency Response Vehicle, or provide Health services. Everyone has their specialty.

In this chat, the volunteer coordinator at your local chapter explores your life experience and how you can best contribute to the team, taking into consideration how you want to contribute. Based on this, a training plan is prepared. Everyone who assists in a Red Cross disaster recovery operation has training specific to the assignment that they are given. Sometimes people have completed training in several specialties and offer the flexibility to be deployed in different jobs – but a person is always sent to perform one activity.

Once you’ve decided what you want to do and completed the training to do that job, this information is placed into a computer system. This system keeps track of all the volunteers and staff for the organization, what positions they’re qualified to fill, and when they’re available to travel to a disaster operation. It keeps track of a bunch of other stuff, too – emergency contact information, health status, training history, job history, address, and so on.

When disaster strikes, the first step is to get a leadership team into the area very quickly. These are experienced people who are able to size up the situation and know what resources to are required in addition to what the local Red Cross organization can provide, including people. Their requests, after review and approval, are placed on an online system that is available to every potential participant so that they can see if help is needed for their specific job.

This is where it really gets interesting. The goal at this point is to find the best qualified and closest person who can be deployed to each needed position. Why closest? Because it’s much more effective to find someone within driving distance, both in terms of cost and time to arrive. Thus the online system facilitates recruiting in an ever-expanding geographical area based on the need of the job and the availability of people.

This is where the teamwork and cooperation of the support organization comes out. You’ve got people at the relief operation who are looking for specific talent. They work with the people at the chapters who have that talent, facilitated by computer systems that keep up with what’s needed and what’s available. This doesn’t all just happen by magic and wonderful computer technology. There’s a lot of person-to-person interaction, a lot of knowledge that comes from experience actually doing the job, and great teamwork involved in moving from the need for someone to getting that someone actually on the job.

So the next time you see that 10-second video on the news of the Red Cross response vehicle or the rows of cots in the shelter, you’ll know that there is a host of people working behind the scenes to make this seemingly-trivial event happen.

EULA

2010-05-05T18:30:00.000-05:00

Are you like me, and when presented with the End User License Agreement, you just click “accept” without reading it? After all, the only other option is to not install the software, and you want the software.

There's a US-CERT article on EULAs that might give you pause. How badly do you really want that software?

One of the issues is automatic upgrades. It's wonderful when a product automatically checks for available updates and installs them, but the downside is that you're giving the vendor the right to install software on your computer, even if it compromises the security of your system. Everything is a tradeoff.

A dose of Spring

2010-04-21T08:18:00.003-05:00

We took a road trip for a couple of weeks, visiting the family in both Tampa and Chicago. One of our stops was in Knoxville for the Dogwood Arts Festival. While there we read an article that speculates that the dogwoods are particularly impressive there because of a specific soil makeup. I suspect the weather has a bit to do with it, also.

One of the things that the organizers of the festival do is define Dogwood Trails by painting arrows on the road. Once you find the beginning of the trail, you can drive through the neighborhoods without worrying about getting lost and knowing that they've picked the best vistas. The image included here is typical of what's there . . . a real dose of Spring for those of us who need it this time of year.

Cloud computing . . . and alternatives

2010-04-21T08:09:00.001-05:00

An interesting article in Wired describes the FBI's investigation of a spamming operation.

It brings up a point about cloud computing that I hadn't considered. “In particular, the 1986 Stored Communications Act allows the government to access a customer’s data whenever there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the information would be relevant in a criminal investigation — a much lower legal standard than the “probable cause” required for a search warrant.”

I hope that there are never “reasonable grounds” for a law enforcement agency to access my data, but the problem is that it's the agency that defines “reasonable”, not me. I hope that there are appropriate controls in these cases, but I'm inclined to keep control of my own data so it won't even be an issue.

That alternative isn't always attractive. From a personal perspective, I'd rather take the responsibility for protecting my own data. If I were running a small business, I would opt for using a service provider since presumably a company that does it for a living would be better able to safeguard my data.

Yesterday I was involved with malware on the web site of a local small business. When they called their service provider, the advice was to delete their entire web site and reload it. The hosting company was mum on how the malware got there, as one would expect. Here's a case where you're depending on the expertise of another company and they've failed to win that trust.

The bottom line is that there's no good solution.

Apple breaks Software Update

2010-03-30T08:11:00.002-05:00

I have seldom seen Apple make a bonehead move related to usability, but recent changes in the way that software updates are downloaded and installed certainly qualifies.

Apple has a nice check-for-updates facility that runs on a user-determined basis and pops up a screen if it finds updates that haven’t been installed on your system. It used to (until the most recent version) have the option of downloading, but not installing, the update. Since there are two identical laptops in this household, I used that option a lot – download large update files once and apply them twice.

With a recent OS upgrade, that option went away, replaced by "Go to Apple Downloads Page." That's not entirely bad; it adds an extra step, but provides more flexibility in where the downloaded file is placed and allows the use of a known tool to download files – the browser.

But here's the rub. This morning I see in the Software Update facility that a large patch has appeared. Version 10.6.3 of the operating system is 437.2 MB. This is certainly something that I only want to download once. So I invoke the new option to visit Apple's download web site. There, I see this entry:

Mac OS X v10.6.3 Update
The 10.6.3 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.2 and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.

March 29, 2010 - 719.23 MB

The 437 MB option available in Software Update is not listed.

So now I've got two choices. I can use the automatic update facility twice and download 437 MB each time, or I can manually download 719 MB once and apply it to two systems.

I suppose that the vast majority of people just used the Software Update facility to download and install updates, so they don't miss the option that was removed. But it this “improvement” is a big step backwards for those of us who maintain multiple systems. It wasn't broke . . . but now it is. And of all the things to break, making it more difficult to keep your system up to date is about the last thing that Apple should do.