05/13/2011

Seen on a Linux newsgroup:

You know you are a geek when you use big-O to describe why you use virtual desktops with a direct keystroke for each desktop O(1) rather than one desktop and alt-tab to change windows O(n).

Personally, I’m an O(1) guy. It’s so much more efficient to have a quick key combination to hop between my ten desktops and do stuff than to poke around menus and windows…

05/06/2011

Seth Godin strikes again, this time with a list of things he thinks we should teach all high school students:

Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:

* How to focus intently on a problem until it’s solved.
* The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.
* How to read critically.
* The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
* An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
* How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.
* Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.
* Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.
* An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.
* Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.

Amen, brother. There are a lot of adults that would benefit from this sort of education, methinks.

05/02/2011

It’s like internet armageddon these days. Amazon’s cloud services went down hard last week, taking several major web sites with them. They were very close-lipped about what happened, and it turns out that maybe the Amazon cloud isn’t quite as cool as they’ve hyped it up to be. Then Sony’s Playstation network took a nose-dive, remaining offline for over a week while Sony engineers dug through the databases and learned that the account information for 70 million users had been stolen. Today Sony revealed that a few weeks ago their Online Entertainment network was also hacked, and the bad guys got away with 25 million more accounts. In all, nearly a hundred million people had their name, e-mail, mailing address, phone number, gender, and birthdate stolen. There’s credit card data in the mix as well– Sony’s already admitted up to ten million credit-card numbers have been stolen, and I imagine they’re going to fess up to some more pretty soon.

All in all, it’s a pretty dark day for the consumers who trusted these services. But hey, we’re all realists here: we recognize that despite a lot of hard work on the part of programmers, bad things sometimes happen. I think a lot of people learned a very hard lesson through all of this. However, I’m shocked by the basic response offered by both Amazon and Sony.

“Oops, our bad. Sorry!”

That’s pretty much it. Oh, Amazon agreed to offer a few days of free service to the customers whose sites were down for days. And Sony is giving customers a 30-day free subscription to their premium service. Wow. Really, guys? You compromise entire companies and the identities of nearly a hundred million people, and that’s the end of it?

I’m not a big fan of lawsuits or legislation, but this seems like a good time to take these guys to task. They screwed up big time here.

What does it mean for me, personally? Not a whole lot– I’m not in Sony’s database, and I didn’t really miss the web sites that crashed and burned at Amazon. But it’s made me rethink some of the security practices at Zing, and I think it’s time to make some updates. I haven’t compromised any of my clients’ data yet, but it’s never too soon to review and rethink what I do to protect it.

04/27/2011

Kyra just got back from Walgreens, where she went with a friend to shop for… well, who knows what teenage girls shop for.

But she was thinking of me, and bought me a whole bag of one of my favorite candies:

What a great daughter.

04/23/2011

This morning Laralee, Alex, and I ran the Longmont Mud Hen 5K. April is always sort of dicey around these parts, but I was a little surprised when I woke up at 6:30 in the morning to see snow! By the start of the race the ground was pretty well covered and it was still coming down, albeit not quite as hard as earlier.

It’s a run around McIntosh Lake in the northwest corner of town, and it’s pretty low-key. I guessed maybe five or six hundred runners participated.

I finished in 28:34 which isn’t really all that impressive a pace, but at least less than thirty minutes (which was my objective: sub-30). Considering I never train for these things and the weather wasn’t very cooperative, I can’t complain too much.

The old man still has it. Well, has something anyway.

04/22/2011

Yesterday I went to the dentist. It’s been two years since my last cleaning, so the guilt had built up to the point where I felt like I should go. I figured I’d have a mouthful of cavities, including several spilling out of my lips like drool or something, but as it turns out I don’t have any. Yay!

During the visit, the hygienist gave me the Standard Lecture on Flossing, which they’re required to memorize as part of Dental Hygienist School. I admitted that I only floss “occasionally”– although the fact that I floss at all is a big step up from, say, ten years ago.

After that uncomfortable conversation I couldn’t help but think of the classic Oatmeal comic called the Cycle of Flossing:

04/15/2011

I’m writing a proposal for a new project and found this gem in the RFP:

Provide site optimization with key phrase linking to maximize search engine optimization based on best practices.

Wow. That’s a long sentence with a lot of words that don’t really mean anything. How does one maximize something that’s optimal? How many times can “optimize” be used? Why would anyone not use “best practices” when building a web site? (“Yeah, we thought about it, but decided to use our crappy practices. The fee wasn’t large enough to justify our best ones.”)

Ahh, corporate speak. Gotta love it.