Ramble On

So Hugh MacLeod, over at gaping void, has challenged his readers to write their manifestos. in 500 words or less. Using less than 500 words is a particular challenge to me. But here’s mine.

In one hundred and fifty.

====

We technologists are a funny lot, we build hierarchies, workflows, containers, complex rulesets of code and instructions to carry the customers of our tools from point A to point C, but only through point B. We ask them to trust our black box, to plug their questions in, crank the widgets in the direction we thought they should, and trust the magic sums they get as the answers.

Somewhere lost in this byzantine maze of computational instructions and complexity of the systems we build both the technologists and the customers forget the fundamental. That no matter how good our codes and our cascaded logic gates are…

The human brain is the greatest computer of all.

Designing our systems, and expecting the ones we use to be based on that fundamental premise would change and open our carefully constructed self-contained virtual worlds as we know it. For the better. Much better.

Perhaps my most favorite Colbert Report clip I’ve seen yet

2:41:25 PM jayoung@chat.extension.org: so I did go to Google Reader
2:41:30 PM jayoung@chat.extension.org: I'm happier now
2:41:40 PM jerobins@chat.extension.org: welcome to the collective
2:41:44 PM jerobins@chat.extension.org: you have been assimilated

I had to remove some work feeds, but Google Reader is working out quite nicely, better than forgetting to unison my NetNewsWire data all over the place.

NNW is one of the best applications I’ve ever purchased, but it was just time.

I just had to send 3,351 emails to our registered users list.

Ruby and Rails made this remarkably easy, and that’s really scary.

It took 3 hours for my email server to breathe again. I had to process about 3% of the emails as bounces, which generated another 2 mails per bounce from our support tool.

I feel so dirty.

For years, it’s been the conventional wisdom in userid/password based authentication systems that the system provide the same error message for an invalid userid and/or invalid password. The idea being that you don’t want to let on to the “bad guys” that they guessed a valid userid and then proceed to repeatedly try passwords with the valid userid.

Well poppycock.

I watch the logs. And it turns out that while I’d really, really love for people to learn how to remember not one, but a combination of two, not-random strings, they often don’t. Or do, just the wrong combination for that particular tool.

userid/password authentication schemes are already bad from a security perspective - it’s not like obfuscating the result of mistyping a not-random string improves upon that much at all, and by golly, it should would save the users some time “did I mistype my password? did I forgot my password? WHAT DO YOU MEAN INVALID ID?”

So from now on, goodbye conventional wisdom, I’m actually going to start telling people in every uid/pass dialog I write which string they got wrong.

Kathy Sierra Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?

Our educational institutions–at every level–need drastic changes or we’re all screwed. The generation of students we’re turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. [...] We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster (”yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it’ll kill you.”)

The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

I don’t agree with all of the article - but I do agree with the above.

( although honestly, I’m sick of the word “Agile” being thrown around in all kinds of circles like it’s some prayer or holy incantation of great promise of all that is good with software development. The ideas behind agile development are certainly an evolutionary leap, representing years of both university research and actual practice beyond the requirements gathering, design, “coding”, waterfall model of software engineering and development - but there’s as much crap that’s labeled agile as there is crap labeled waterfall. I think Sierra personally gets the reality of that though. )

I’m not so sure about “metacognition storytelling” or “anthropomophorizing” - but she’s right, we dang sure need to teach people how to learn and unlearn.

Whether it’s the cutting edge physical sciences, engineering, the life sciences or computing - yes computing - even if computing is just a means to your own area of specialty, and not a specialty in and of itself, we absolutely have to get it across that the assumptions you made last week have to be questioned with new information this week and to be prepared with a solid base of fundamental concepts, and a healthy dose of logic to be able to rapidly adapt to new tools and techniques, whether that’s some kind of new statistical model, an rna sequencing technique, upending the financial conventional wisdom, or something as base as editing another’s web page using some tool that will go away in six months, replaced with something faster, stronger, etc.

Technology has finally gone too far. Shirts that recognize air guitar arm movements

Anyone have a good cave in south dakota or something for sale?

But he’s far more entertaining describing it

I won’t give away the punch line, but it gets really good starting with the “she believes” part

Because often, people can take your work and make it far better than you ever could (yes that is a good thing) - or do new things in surprisingly interesting ways, like make a Office Space trailer that makes it look like a comedic thriller

(Yes I know that wasn’t creative commons based work. It might be fair use or parody or it might be illegal, but I seriously doubt Mike Judge is going to sue. The RIAA might, not because they have anything to do with the IP, but they like to do that anyway. That might sue me for saying that)

My web hosting provider provides web stat summaries using awstats, which is something I’ve been pretty happy with from a “trending” perspective for some time and use at work for system administration purposes. It’s still kind of geeky.

It was looking at the search terms for this site - combined with a pretty big increase for my piddly little site that led to me posting for the google detectives that I wasn’t the same named guy that’s been in in the Raleigh news recently. I mean - here’s the top 25 search terms leading here:

[my name] raleigh
[my name] raleigh nc
[my name] nc
[my name] ncsu
the parable of the two programmers
raleigh [my name]
ants pixar
waiting for leopard
[my name] nc state
rambleon
cyradm os x
the shawshank redemption institutionalism
squirrelmail pam single sign on
[my name] and raleigh nc
managers pep talk
bar
icbm/geo.position tags
date comparison bash
parable of the two programmers
kernel arplookup failed
[my name] and north carolina
syncservices path long symlink
[my name] and raleigh
parable two programmers
use treo as pager

I mean, good grief. But I spent a few minutes looking through the other ones, skipping all that other stuff. And the great thing about looking at those is that it reminds you that search really matters - the stuff you want people to find, they’ll find (they might find the stuff you don’t want them to find too, but that’s another post).

But distilling down the search results to those other non-newsworthy terms - I went looking myself at some of them to see what they’d find.

It’s good stuff (well to me). Searching Google for “the shawshank redemption institutionalism” leads to an essay I wrote last April (2005). It’s still as true today as it was then.

I’m not sure we are ever going to change the culture until enough people have some idea of what kind of place we want to see us be at. Where we want the equivalent of Andy’s Zihuatanejo to be for us? And how do we make a place along the way? What are our arias, our chess pieces, our prison libraries? Even more fundamental - both Zihuatenejo, the arias, the bohemian-style beer, the chess pieces, the library - they were all outward manifestations of an inward passionate belief in something. Enough belief for Andy - and the seemingly-institutionalized Red also.

What do we believe in?

Searching Google for “managers pep talk” leads one to the best pep talk for 2005. That’s good stuff too. And so are the links. It’s those kinds of things that I believe in.

Search matters. Today it just reminded me a little of where I’ve been, and hopefully where I’m going.

(p.s. The funny thing is that the searches for [my name] all seem to land on my April fool’s post from last year. Now that’s the really good stuff )

Why, yes I have. I ran for student council in 5th grade (I was at a feeder elementary school, and we were running for the office to be held in 6th grade at the middle school). I ran on an empty platform of better cafeteria food, more recess, and less homework. And my “campaign workers” started various gender-based smear tactics (my opponent was female) - where they pressured every guy in the grade to not vote for the girl.

I, thankfully, lost. Jodie was smart, talented, hard-working, and just a great kid - and made a far better representative than I ever could.

My only position after that was doing the budget for my city at Boy’s State after my junior year in high school. Along with Lee, who he and I both were going to the Governor’s School that summer for math. I also learned that you don’t put math people into trying to do government budgets. Even kid’s pretend government budgets. We spend too much time trying to make the math work and balancing the budget.

Thankfully I went into computing, and learned that real leadership was about being the best you could be at something, knowing as much as you could, developing the wisdom to know when to apply it, and making the tough decisions to not do the popular or requested thing if it meant that it wouldn’t work (still working on that), but doing it with a servant’s heart (definitely still working on that) To learn from failure. To be comfortable with “I don’t know” - and to learn that you don’t have to control everything, real leaders know when to let go (still working on that last one too).

The world would likely be a far better place if the kids that ran for student council on empty promises or popularity all lost, and that those that want real change, and propose real “for things” not “against things” solutions won. I’m so very, very, very thankful that happened to me in 5th grade.

So I voted - here’s my sticker - right next to my “I Love NC State Ice Cream” sticker that I got at the fair (stuck on my wallet, seemed appropriate enough )

So it’s completely weird to me that the poll workers don’t check any ID at the polls. How do they know I’m who I say I am? It’s just odd that they don’t really ask for any verification. After talking with wife and brother-in-law at dinner, it sounds like it’s generally because Voter ID initiatives have apparently been struck down as disenfranchising voters, particularly poor voters who might not have ID. I’m not sure I really buy that argument, but it probably doesn’t matter really, checking ID probably wouldn’t end up any better anyway (not that it makes it better at the airports) Googling (yes, I googled at yahoo too) turns up a few resources: electionline.org, ncsl.org, fairvote.org.

I’m just amazed it works well at all. It seems like the left-leaning groups tend to be involved in their fair share of“irregularities” with registrations. And I wouldn’t trust a Diebold voting machine for anything (and Diebold has been rumored and reported to be a bit cozy with the Republicans). Maybe the fraud cancels itself out and works more often than not.

At the very least it’s highly entertaining, maybe more mostly from watching all the folks on both sides get completely bent out of shape by it all. Representative Republics - gotta love ‘em

Hi. You may have found this blog by trying to search for “Jason Young” in Raleigh, North Carolina. I understand that’s the same name of a gentlemen who lost his wife in what has turned out to be a homicide investigation in Wake County, NC. Maybe you are a member of the media, or just highly curious, or maybe you fancy yourself a junior amateur detective flexing your Google muscle.

If so, you can move along now. I’m not that guy. (there are about a half dozen Jason Young’s in Wake County and at least 30+ on the voter rolls in NC, such is the life of a common name)

I hope and pray everyday that I’ll never be that guy. That my wife and I will never experience the evil and violence of the world that has touched his family. I don’t really understand what causes someone to take the life of another person - not unless that person was directly and immediately threatening the life of my wife or my immediate family - I can’t understand or comprehend it. I know all about our human attempts, whether religious or psychological or scientific, to rationalize and attempt to explain evil and violence, but they are but little comfort and more than a little meaningless to the reality of it.

If you are searching for that guy today, do us all a favor and just go out and walk your dog, or hug your kids, or call your family, maybe plant a seed of kindness that somehow will make somebody remember that there’s good in the world still. Let your thoughts be with that guy or even more, his daughter, for their loss.

If you found this blog searching for something about system administration, or what vaguely counts as funny, well, I’m glad you aren’t searching there. But maybe you can do those things too: walk your dog, hug your kids, call your family, or just smile at the cashier at the coffee shop that’s having a rough day, or the harried election worker tomorrow when you vote. Make someone laugh.

So, back to implementing OpenID into my Rails-based identity/authentication application. Or thinking about it at least.

Andrew McAfee on what today’s students are learning and expecting (via Kevin Gamble ) As a seminal “Yeah But…”‘er - I even get this one

Rands. Bright, Patient, Design. I have used a crap-ton of editors throughout the years, and I’ve never been more productive than with TextMate. And I don’t use any keyboard macros because I haven’t learned any of them. I just wish they’d improve Find…

Joel. What’s a SQL Injection Bug?. This is what we spin our wheels on preventing while trying to keep down the complexity

Damien Katz. A Ghost Story. We are so in for it when the legion arrives. I reserve the right to say “I told you so.”

So the TextMate Halloween theme has more than a few people bent out of shape, whilst others like it

For my part, I just got a bit tired of it after a day. But I can replace my own Macintosh application resources while I wait for a patch.

The best part, though, is that I managed to discover that TextMate has themes (because I failed to do what should be required of every Macintosh application owner - explore the preferences).

And better yet, a colleague of mine in North Carolina did his own theme

I like it.