The Daily Parker - Software

Ten years ago today...

David Braverman — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:05:04 GMT

...nothing happened. And I spent all night in a data facility in New York watching nothing happen. Fun times, fun times.

Happy new year!

David Braverman — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:09:08 GMT

Happy 22!

That's a little geek humor. See, 01/01/10 is 22. Get it?

You know, like, "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't"?

Right. Starting off the year well, I can see....

Good thing I'm a Cubs fan

David Braverman — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:00:10 GMT

This may actually be funny.

My CCMBA class includes students from 30 countries, in every part of the world. Consequently, Duke has created a Flash-based Web portal, through which we take exams, submit assignments, attend classes, and keep in touch. The thing has worked more or less as advertised since we arrived in London two months ago.

By tomorrow at 23:59 EDT, we must hand in our Accounting and Management exams. We have 24 hours from download to complete the former, and 90 minutes to complete the latter.

Can you see where this is going? Of course you can:

See, as a Cubs fan, this doesn't bother me so much. There's always next year.

Update: Tech support just emailed me back. Apparently they had a hardware failure in one of the server rooms, and the infrastructure guys are on it.

Update, 13:30 CDT: The platform is back up. Here we go...let the exams begin.

Update, 13:35 CDT: They did a fu@!ing upgrade! During exams! Unbefu&@ingleivable.

Final update, 13:55 CDT: OK, it looks like they did a rollback to a known-working version of the platform, not a upgrade. That makes a lot more sense. I will just assume that, because it's exam week and I've had a little more caffeine today than usual, I might have some extra nervous energy that caused me to jump to hasty conclusions. I will now walk the dog, take some deep breaths, and start the first exam.

Hunting wabbits

David Braverman — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:32:21 GMT

(By way of explanation why I'm being wery wery qwiet today.)

Actually, I'm hunting financial accounting (Duke) and bugs (client). Like this one, which shows one of the perils of refactoring. See if you can spot my stupidity (after the jump).

Baffling usability

David Braverman — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:11:48 GMT

The following photo shows a programmer, a usability expert, and an IT manager struggling to figure out how to add players to a bowling game using AMF's scoring software. I don't even remember the sequence we had to go through, but I do remember thinking (a) on average, we were sober; and (b) software that makes something so simple take so long should be punishable...in some appropriate way.

On the other hand, one doesn't go to a bowling alley because of the software they use. On the first hand, however, bad software makes everything less fun.

Oy, mein altekaker Kindle!

David Braverman — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:23:14 GMT

Via Sullivan, I suddenly feel very old:

We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older.

So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters.

Wait! I'm not 40 yet! And I see just fine, with a little help.

This, on the day that I took a final exam in a class (Introduction to Microeconomics) in which every other student was younger than half my age. Yes, there were about 50 of us in there, and the day the Berlin Wall fell down I was older than they are now.

Sigh.

What to do, what to do

David Braverman — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:44:53 GMT

I had thought about writing a long entry on another technical aspect of the new version of Weather Now, but for the first time in weeks it's sunny and 20°C, and I just finished a final exam in economics. So, off to the dog park.

All y'all waiting for the lengthy technical stuff will just have to wait until it rains again.

Update: In the meantime, why not scratch your head, as I did, over meat business cards? Hmmm....

Welcome home from your RSS reader

David Braverman — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:19:07 GMT

Arriving home this evening, after three days in San Francisco and frequent email checking while there, Outlook presented me with 295 unread messages (not counting the hundreds of messages in my spam filter). Of these, almost all were on my RSS reader—75 Facebook status updates, 50 posts from Andrew Sullivan, etc., etc.

It's amazing how much better you can feel after hitting <Ctrl>+A, right-click, "Mark As Read". Problem: solved.

Still, I hate feeling like I missed something....

Spring into the Weather Now beta

David Braverman — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:52:54 GMT

The vernal equinox happened about two hours ago. Typical of this time of year, though, it's below freezing this morning in Chicago. Nature nerd Naomi has more from the wilds of northern Lake County.

Of interest to possibly no one, for the last two years I've worked on the innards of my flagship demo project, Weather Now. I'm now putting together a new user interface for it. The new version 3.5 UI, which you can see at http://beta35.wx-now.com/, looks a lot like the old one—for now.

So what's new? I've rewritten from scratch the core framework, geography and weather code, and the basic UI framework. The beta (version 3.5) looks nearly identical to the current (version 3.1) application, except that the trained eye will notice new features where the ground-up re-write peeks out.

Sometime before the end of July, I hope to finish the next version (4.0), which will have an entirely different database structure. (Version 3.5 uses the same database as the current version through a façade.)

Exciting? Probably not. But it's how I keep my saw sharp.

About this blog

David Braverman — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:41:59 GMT

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 3-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page two years ago, so I thought it's time for a quick review.

More on the Kindle

David Braverman — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:26:59 GMT

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen takes a look at Kindle 2 usability in his column today:

[T]he device is best for reading long linear material, such as novels and some non-fiction. Kindle's best user interface feature is turning the page; the reading experience you design should require no other interactions.

Writing linear books simply requires a skill that all good authors already possess: the ability to keep readers immersed in the plot.

Kindle also works well for the long, narrative articles common in certain literary magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. No surprise that The New Yorker is currently the best-selling magazine for the device.

... [But] it's awkward to interact with the device through its 5-way controller. Also, after every selection, you're doomed to wait for a sluggish response. And, once you finally get something, you get very little because of the small screen. Setting aside the header and footer areas, Kindle 2's content area is 525x650 pixels, or 341 kilo-pixels. In contrast, a mid-sized PC screen is 1280x1024, offering 999 KP of content, or the equivalent of three Kindles.

Given these constraints, navigating non-linear content on Kindle feels much like navigating websites on a mobile phone. Kindle content designers should therefore follow mobile usability guidelines for many user interface issues, including the presentation of article pages.

Two on technology

David Braverman — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:49:11 GMT

The first, from the Poynter Institute, concerns how Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's staff made Twitter into journalism:

I tuned in an Internet broadcast of ... Granholm's annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State).

To my amazement, the hashtag had been established by the governor's staff—who were tweeting major points of Granholm's speech as she made them.

Meanwhile, many, many, many other people used this hashtag to challenge points, support points, do some partisan sniping, question assumptions, add perspective, speculate about what was going on, and provide links to supporting information—including a transcript of the speech and the opposite (Republican) party's response.

(Emphasis in original.)

The second, Mark Morford musing about technology in general:

To paraphrase a renowned philosopher, we just keep making the pie higher. This is the nature of us. It is, in turns, both wonderful and terrifying.

It seems there are only two real options, two end results of our civilization's grand experiment. Either the stack becomes so high -- with our sense of wonder and integrity rising right along with it -- that it finally lifts us off the ground and transports us to some new realm of understanding and evolution, or it ultimately topples over, crashes and mauls everything that came before, because we just didn't care enough to stop and smell the astonishment.

You have but to remember: How many ancient, advanced civilizations have collapsed under the weight of their own unchecked growth, their own technological advances, their own inability to stay nimble and attuned to the crushing marvel of it all? Answer: all of them.

Both are worth reading in full.

Annoying software design (professional edition)

David Braverman — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:48:13 GMT

Developers generally don't like third-party UI controls because they're generally frustrating to use. Case in point: in the Infragistics Windows Forms controls package, the UltraGridColumn has sucked a substantial portion of my day away.

If you don't write software, you still appreciate it when it works simply and intuitively. You want to search for something, you go to Google and type in a search term. Brilliant. When you go to some company's website because you want to call the company, you look for something called "contact us" and click it. If you don't get the address and phone number of the company after clicking that link, you get irritated: the simple, intuitive thing didn't work. Jakob Nielsen is all over that stuff.

So. I have a simple problem, which is how to make a column in a grid grey out so my users don't inadvertently edit something they shouldn't. What I expect to write is something like this—or I would, if the member existed:

theReadOnlyColumn.Enabled = false;

Sadly, there is no "Enabled" member. So how about using a member that actually does exist?

theReadOnlyColumn.IsReadOnly = true;

Interesting. That member doesn't allow you to change its value. In fairness, the particle "Is" suggested it was a read-only member (ironic, that), but still, it looked like the right thing to do.

But no, here's the intuitive, simple, gosh-how-didn't-I-see-that-right-away thing to do:

theReadOnlyColumn.CellActivation = Activation.Disabled;

<rant>

This sort of thing happens when developers create software based on how it works, rather than what it does. It's sloppy, it reflects an inability to think like the person using the product, and it's compounded by a criminal lack of clear "how-to" documentation. (The Infragistics documentation site appears to have no way to search for concepts, requiring you to figure out how Infragistics developers organize things on your own.) This really, really annoys me, and is why I avoid using their products.

</rant>

Unbelievable cold in Alaska

David Braverman — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:19:12 GMT

The weather has cooled off a bit in the interior of Alaska:

Friday marked day six of the worst cold snap to hit Fairbanks in several years and there is no relief in sight for residents who live in Alaska’s second-largest city — or the business owners they call to bail them out when their cars, pipes and septic tanks freeze.

The temperature in North Pole dipped to 55 degrees below zero on Wednesday night, the lowest temperature recorded in the greater Fairbanks area during what has been six days of severe cold. It was “only” 46 below at 4 p.m. Friday in North Pole, but the temperature was “dropping by the hour,” meteorologist Austin Cross at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks said.

Friday marked the fifth day in the last six the temperature at Fairbanks International Airport hit 40 below or colder; it was only 38 below at the airport on New Year’s Day.

Forecasters expect temperatures in Fairbanks this weekend will likely touch 50 below and there is no indication the cold wave will dissipate anytime soon.

Since I don't read Alaskan newspapers often, and I'm used to seeing cold Alaskan temperatures on the Weather Now extremes page, I actually first heard this when ten people emailed me to complain about a bug in Weather Now. It turns out, the news story above linked to Weather Now and drove 2,400 unique visitors to the site in six hours.

I should know better. Fortunately my servers easily handle 10,000 page views per hour, but still, seeing a traffic spike like that caught me a little off-guard.

Turning Japanese

David Braverman — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:08:26 GMT

I've given up for the evening attempting to configure a recalcitrant firewall. To cheer up, I turn to Paul Krugman, who reminds us that a 0% Fed rate means we're in trouble:

ZIRP!
That's zero interest rate policy. And it has arrived. America has turned Japanese.
This is the thing I’ve been afraid of ever since I realized that Japan really was in the dreaded, possibly mythical liquidity trap. ...
Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

At least I think I've figured out where I mis-configured the firewall....

LINQ to FogBugz fun

David Braverman — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:21:00 GMT

Most Daily Parker readers can skip this (long) post about software. But if you're interested in C# 3.0, LINQ, or FogBugz, read on.

Down the memory hole

David Braverman — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:08:57 GMT

Every so often, one must wipe and reinstall his main computer. This is not fun. Even Parker finds it boring, and he sleeps all day.

Still, my main box (a Dell D620) now runs so much faster it's making me cry. So, several hours of boring work will save me several dozen hours waiting for the damn computer.

How the Web Was Won

David Braverman — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:09:20 GMT

Via my dad, Vanity Fair has a long article this month about the history of the Internet. It's worth a read.

Microsoft Visual Studio bug

David Braverman — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:25:19 GMT

I'm living a geek dream: I've found a confirmed bug in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

I've detailed my findings over at the Inner Drive Software blog.

Heading home

David Braverman — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 19:55:38 GMT

Ah, family. I'm glad I got a chance to unwind with the Ps after my conference. But I do miss my dog.

Tomorrow: or, rather, tonight after 7pm CDT: check out Weather Now for, well, something appropriate to the season.

About this Blog

David Braverman — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:23:06 GMT

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 8-month-old mutt.

Happy New Year!

David Braverman — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:26:57 GMT

Weather Now is all new.

We're ecstatic to roll out a completely new visual design by Katie Zoellner. It's actually been lurking as a Beta site for several months. We didn't roll it out because not all of the features from our old site (see http://old.wx-now.com/) are complete. But today is the first day of a new year, which we thought an appropriate moment to finally give Katie's design some exposure.

User interfaces in film

David Braverman — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 16:21:35 GMT

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen takes on the remarkable UIs that appear in film:

Break into a company—possibly in a foreign country or on an alien planet—and step up to the computer. How long does it take you to figure out the UI and use the new applications for the first time? Less than a minute if you're a movie star.

...

Countless scenes involve unauthorized access to some system. Invariably, several passwords are tried, resulting in a giant "Access Denied" dialog box. Finally, a few seconds before disaster strikes, the hero enters the correct password and is greeted by an equally huge "Access Granted" dialog box.

At least we no longer have large bipedal robots shouting "Danger! Danger!"

How difficult is an "off" button?

David Braverman — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:21:22 GMT

A member of the Windows Vista team explains (via Joel Spolsky):

I worked on the "Windows Mobile PC User Experience" team. This team was part of Longhorn from a feature standpoint but was organizationally part of the Tablet PC group. To find a common manager to other people I needed to work with required walking 6 or 7 steps up the org chart from me.

So after 12 years, you still have to go to the Start menu to stop the computer.

Something has changed

David Braverman — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:37:44 GMT

I'm David Braverman, and this is my blog.

This blog has actually been around for nearly a year, giving me time to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Initially, I called it "The WASP Blog," the acronym meaning "Weather, Anne, Software, and Politics." It turns out that I have more than four interests, and I post to the blog a lot, so those four categories got kind of large.

Accurate title; couldn't put it down

David Braverman — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:39:06 GMT

Over the weekend I devoured the aptly-named The Best Software Writing edited by Joe Spolsky. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in software.

Missed an anniversary

David Braverman — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:44:57 GMT

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Star Trek's debut. Live long and prosper, indeed.

Why servers sometimes crash

David Braverman — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:04:41 GMT

I just found out about a server crash at a friend's old company. It seems one of the staff members sent a 2.7 MB graphical file (wrapped in a PDF, wrapped in a MIME email) to 900 people. For some reason, that crashed the Exchange server creating 8.5 GB of transaction logs in just under 20 hours, which overflowed the system drive, which caused the entire server to collapse. At last report, a consultant had cleaned out the transaction logs and most of the message queues, but Exchange was still re-trying some of the addresses.

This problem was, therefore, between chair and keyboard. Whose chair and whose keyboard is difficult to tell.

Two quick hits

David Braverman — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:38:28 GMT

First, I just put a major project to bed. It was my first time out doing litigation support, meaning I wrote software to crunch a whole bunch (= about a billion) of numbers for a law firm who represent a large (= about 350,000) class of plaintiffs. They got the results just now, so unless the defendant chooses not to settle and I get subpoenaed, I believe I'm done.

Second, at least one petty little man on the South Shore Line apparently doesn't "get" the whole idea of bikes on a train:

A day trip to South Bend ended up costing a Lincoln Park man $150 in cab fare after a South Shore Line crew member told him he would have to get his bicycle off the train.

What startled Alan Forester, 34, was that he had taken the South Shore Line to South Bend earlier in the day Sunday and no one said anything to him about his bike. Even more puzzling, he said he had followed the bicycle policy that he read on the railroad's Web site.

I had a similar problem about two years ago, when, after bonking on a very long ride, I attempted to board a Union Pacific North Line train at Highland Park, and got turned away by a conductor who thought my bungee cord was too short. (I think I may have told him at least I had a bungee cord, but we won't go there right now.)

The CTA largely gets it right. All CTA buses have bike racks. This means people can get out of their cars and save the environment by biking without worrying they'll be stranded because of weather or traffic. Why is Metra so opposed to the idea?

Best laid plans

David Braverman — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:03:40 GMT

I was going to have action shots of my new bike this morning, but I decided to take the bus to my office instead of riding for some reason.

What a dumbass

David Braverman — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:36:24 GMT

I picked up my new bike yesterday. But that's not the subject of this post. No, the unfortunate real subject of this post is, "I am stupid."

Judge takes away our DVR

David Braverman — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:26:49 GMT

A Federal judge has ordered Dish Network to disable almost all of its customers' digital video recorders after parent company EchoStar Communications lost a patent-infringement suit brought by TiVo:

Thursday's ruling from U.S. District Judge David Folsom in Marshall, Texas, demands that within 30 days, EchoStar must basically render useless all but 192,708 of the DVR units it has deployed.

The decision comes four months after a jury ruled that EchoStar should pay TiVo $73.9 million because it willfully infringed TiVo patents that allow the digital storage of TV programming.

Crap. This could be inconvenient. All those Lost episodes we've saved could be...um...yeah.

Update, 3:43 pm CDT (20:43 UTC): The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington has granted a temporary stay of injunction to give Dish Networks time to work something out with TiVo. (I couldn't find the actual order online.) So we get to keep our DVR for the time being.

Inner Drive will be happy to help

David Braverman — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:00:28 GMT

The FBI spent $170 million on broken software, which it has since scrapped. Now it's planning to spend $450 million on, one hopes, working software:

Because of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, [San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp.] reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly. The company continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed, according to people who were involved in the project or later reviewed it for the government.

David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president who did not work on the program but closely watched its development, said the company knew the FBI's plans were going awry but did not insist on changes because the bureau continued to pay the bills as the work piled up.

Along the way, the FBI made a fateful choice: It wanted SAIC to build the new software system from scratch rather than modifying commercially available, off-the-shelf software. Later, the company would say the FBI made that decision independently; FBI officials countered that SAIC pushed them into it.

Upton Sinclair's wisdom notwithstanding, consultants have an obligation to inform clients about problems before they become too large to solve. Consultants also have an obligation to make appropriate build-or-buy recommendations to clients; in this case, if SAIC made such recommendations, there doesn't seem to be any evidence.

On the other hand, the Post article suggests the FBI had almost no clue what they were doing, bolstering SAIC's claims that they told them so.

Still, even assuming the best possible facts in SAIC's favor, they should have done the right thing, whatever that "right thing" was at any point in the relationship. Like, for example, testing the software, even if the FBI didn't think testing was important.

When a project like that blows up, everyone looks bad. Sometimes the consultant just has to walk away before that happens.

Blog spam

David Braverman — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:32:49 GMT

I wonder what spammers are actually thinking almost as much as I wonder why they bother me.

I've had a blog-spam problem for about three weeks now targeting my referral logs. Spammers with robots use robots that act like people browsing the blog, but they appear to come from gambling sites so that the site URLs show up in the system logs. Some blogs' referral logs are searched by Google and other sites, so the theory here is that the referral spam will generate a lot of inbound links into their sites driving up their search rankings. Sadly for all concerned, this doesn't actually happen; Google is too smart.

Then there's comment spam, like this thoughtful thing I got from a vistor in India this morning:

Remember to let her into your bedbug, then you can start to make it partial.

I don't care about Christopher Fargis, he is vivid, pubescent, and anatomic and I am not going to refracture about it. Dyno-blast Jason Chan hunch our lettering. Our hydraulic corer guard a specious otherness Sammy Schenker is a scornful chelicera? Then Mazen Nesheiwat skyjacks a blurriest nunnery. We will commend on the glitter; we will generalize on the commissure; we will never flick.

My to go cardiograph overconcentrates in the hole. Harmonic Airy Phanhyaseng lip the ambidexter. Therefore unless Gerald Cheatham solemnify Minh Nguyen, she westernize my fattiness but disvalue him

The trick here is that someone is monitoring the spammer's email address, and the subject of the spam comment suggests that anyone emailing the spammer will get information about a gambling site.

Some actual person had to enter the comment, though. The IP address of the comment shows that actual person to be in India, where I can only assume he or she was paid a few cents to copy the nonsense into the comment and submit it to the blog.

It's sad, really. But, in an absurd way, interesting poetry.

Do walk buttons work?

David Braverman — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:03:57 GMT

Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevich channels Cecil Adams:

The actual answer is fuzzy, depending on the location, the time of day, vehicle traffic volumes, when the walk button is activated—and luck too.

Many pedestrians refuse to press walk buttons due to suspicions they are a trick or a placebo concocted by the traffic gods to keep walkers calm while breathing fumes from tailpipes as they wait for green lights at busy street corners.

Steve Travia, IDOT's bureau chief of traffic for the Chicago area[, says:] "The bottom line is that if you don't push the walk button, the walk signal may never come up."

Of course, if you're in New York, don't bother, because 80% of their "walk" buttons are disconnected.

But...but...everyone knows already

David Braverman — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 01:17:08 GMT

The ACLU's case over AT&T sharing its phone records with the government got dismissed:

"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.

Any adversary of this country who can't figure out what phone records went to which agency is probably too stupid to be much of a threat, in my opinion.

I was all set to rant that Kennelly was a Bush (either flavor) or Reagan appointee, but no, he's one of ours. Still, the whole thing smells bad, not least because the judicial branch really ought to stand up to the executive, since the legislative isn't.

Would you like an upgrade, Mr. Bond?

David Braverman — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:40:54 GMT

I don't know whether this is funny or sad. The Italian government is using the frequent-flier records of several CIA operatives to build their prosecution:

It is unclear whether the operatives intended to take advantage of the free flights garnered at government expense—CIA personnel on such assignments are permitted to fly expensive international business class—or whether they simply were attempting to bolster their covers as private-sector executives.

So keep this in mind, all you road warriors: Someday someone may track your movements based on your quest for Executive Platinum.

Unintentionally funny domain names

David Braverman — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 17:58:24 GMT

Found over at Action Squad: http://independentsources.com/2006/07/12/worst-company-urls/.

No computer security secretary yet

David Braverman — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:05:04 GMT

The President (922 days, 4 hours remaining) still has not yet appointed an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Cyberterrorism, despite computer security problems up the ying since before the post was created.

Still beavering away

David Braverman — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:14:24 GMT

I've spent the past few days drafting an analysis of my business. It turns out to be a lot harder than writing software. That is all.

Over-engineering

David Braverman — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:44:23 GMT

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."—Jan L.A. Van De Snepscheut

We only hire the best

David Braverman — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 17:52:18 GMT

The designer that I've hired a few times for Inner Drive projects will be on VH-1's World Series of Pop Culture tomorrow night. If she's as knowledgeable about pop culture as she is about XHTML, her team should kick butt.

Canadian Privacy Commissioner reports to parliament

David Braverman — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:34:26 GMT

Bruce Schneier links to the Annual Report of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. It's possibly more relevant to Americans than Canadians, as almost everything the Commissioner points to in Canadian law, and more, exists in U.S. law. And our government uses the same rationales as theirs.

Feeling a little testy despite the gorgeous weather

David Braverman — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:33:48 GMT

I have a bit of work to do today, but Chicago has the kind of weather this morning that makes people skip out for lunch at 9:30. So, by way of mentally preparing to ignore the clear skies and 22°C (72°F) breezes out my window, here's what's going on this week.

Yes, that is a new photo

David Braverman — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:53:13 GMT

I changed the thumbnail for the blog just now. Here's a larger version...

My new favorite time-wasting site

David Braverman — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:05:22 GMT

The Daily WTF: http://thedailywtf.com/

Big Momma is watching you

David Braverman — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:07:03 GMT

Ma Bell, risen from near death like the hydra, now says they own your phone records and will disclose them however they see fit:

The new policy says that AT&T—not customers—owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service—something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service—a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers' recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

I will now begin the process of switching our home-phone service...

Net neutrality in the Senate

David Braverman — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:21:14 GMT

Yesterday I sent Illinois Senator Dick Durbin an email asking him to support S.2917, the "net neutrality" act currently working its way through the Senate. His office responded quickly, but I have no idea from reading it what his position is. Can anyone help?

Senators and Net Neutrality

David Braverman — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:46:40 GMT

Talking Points Memo has a list of the Senators supporting, opposed to, and dithering over S.2917, the "Net Neutrality" legislation currently winding its way through the Senate.

Illinois Senator Obama is a co-sponsor; I've just sent our Senator Durbin an email asking him to do the same.

Dowd on bloggers

David Braverman — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 17:31:35 GMT

I read every word in her column today, and I still have no idea what Maureen Dowd thinks of bloggers (sub.req.):

If I had to be relegated to the Dustbin of History, I'm glad it was in Vegas.

I, Old Media, came here to attend a New Media convention of progressive political bloggers aiming for a technological revolution that would dispatch mainstream media to the tumbrels. It was the journalistic equivalent of mingling with your own pod replicant in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Bemused, perhaps? I truy can't tell.