Explosions Lose Their Charms With Dog Ownership

The population of my hometown enjoys the explosives holidays of Independence Day and New Years Eve. I've certainly enjoyed a loud booms and the smell of gunpowder in the past myself. It is different now that I have a dog. Every distant pop and bang must be answered with a bark. Her acute spaniel ears detect even the most distant detonation. When the occasional big boom shakes the house the supposed gun dog comes running to my lap for safety. Consequently I get to spend these holiday nights alternately comforting and chastising the her. It can be stressful for both of us.

Lotus Notes Indeed Sucks

I feel somewhat vindicated. There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing happening at work today and as I perused the Internet I found a story about some jerk petitioning IBM to make Notes and Domino open source.

I usually try to stay away from the comment sections of news sites like Slashdot or Digg because they tend to just piss me off. I think they're dominated by students, academics, the unemployed, Mac and Linux fanatics, and other ne'er-do-wells, slackers, and agitators who don't actually have to make technology work in a large business environment. I do have a deep dislike for Lotus Notes and IBM in general though and a few emotion has gotten the better of me and I have been moved me to post comments on various technology news sites when a Lotus Notes topic appears. In the past though, my justified rancor has been met with counter posts extolling the virtues of that wretched product. Today though, the comments from other anonymous people on the Internet were mostly anti-Notes, and that felt nice.

On a mildly humorous note (no pun intended) I discovered that my company blocks Google searches for "Lotus Notes Sucks" (with the quotes), but not for Lotus Notes Sucks (without the quotes).

So why does Lotus Notes suck so much? Why does it arouse passionate ire in me? Here are a few reasons.

• The client sucks - It is very very slow and the interface is ancient and counter intuitive. And don't try to tell me the version 8 client fixes all that. It's still slow and it needs over a GB of RAM.
• Domino servers don't scale, but only big companies use it. Domino servers can only use 2 GBs of RAM. That's just silly in modern times.
• Notes "databases" don't scale, and suck in general. Performance sucks when they get over 2GBs, and since they aren't relational databases, it is more like a document collection, than a real database. It is like a pile of papers on the floor instead of papers in an organized filing cabinet.
• Notes "applications" and "databases" don't play well with others. Big companies end up with lots of data in crappy notes apps that should be in a real database. It makes it hard to get the data out and do anything with it in any reasonable amount of time.
• Notes and Groupware in general encourages rampant amateur development. "Almost anybody can make an application" sounds cool, but then 10 years later you have hundreds of poorly written Notes applications with unknown dependencies, some of which are business critical, and which were designed with no forethought for future size and complexity (see the "doesn't scale" complaints).

I'm sure I am leaving out lots of stuff. I'm going to avoid the temptation to take on IBM in general.

Times A Changin' for the RIAA

Last week I read that the Recording Industry Ass. of America will stop their lawsuit campaign against supposed music theives, little old ladies who don't even have computers, and sick children.

In case you don't know how this was working, the idea was to stop online music sharing through fear and intimidation by creating a cottage industry for especially evil lawfirms. They would subpoena your ISP for a list people using IP addresses that they identified through nefarious quasi-legal means as illegally sharing music, usually on one of the P2P things that only the ignorant still use, like KaZaa. The Internet being what it is though, often they would identify the wrong people, but our legal system being what it is, when you get a demand letter from some lawyers saying settle for $5,000 or we'll sue you for $500,000, you pretty much have to pay because defending yourself would be a lot more expensive than the $5,000 no matter how innocent or right you are.

I thought it would never end. It didn't really discourage enough people from stealing music online to make a difference, but it was a making a lot of money for those lawyers. I thought with congress, being beholden to the big media companies for campaign contributions, and judges not understanding the technical aspects of how this works, that nothing could stop them. Then they sued the sick transplant girl and that got on a local new show in Pittsburgh. I think that did more to stop them than the legal system ever could.

Now they're going after ISPs. They want your Internet Service Provider to monitor you and turn off your Internet connection if you're doing something they don't like. Some ISPs already aren't taking kindly to that. Apparently they aren't excited about doing the RIAA's dirty work for free.

In other Music Industry news, Gartner, 500page report to tell you what you knew already company, has pronounced the death of the Music CD.

Larry Ellison on Cloud Computing

I can't say that I'm a big Oracle fan. At least in the environment I work in the word "Oracle" means an application is going to be complicated, fragile, and there's a good chance no one knows how it works. However, Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO may not be such a bad guy. I ran accross a link to a little three minute monologue he gave on 2008 IT buzzword of buzzwords, "Cloud Computing." It is rare that you hear the CEO of a technology company declaring in public that the new Emporer of Meaningless Marketing terms has no clothes. Maybe Larry is worth his 72 million dollar salary afterall. You can listen to it on YouTube below.

Santa-Saws

Continuing my tradition of buying excellent Christmas presents for myself, I purchased a 12" compound miter saw today. It is something I have been wanting for a while. I built a workbench thing and a book case a while back and all the bending over saw horses with a hand held circular saw hurt my back.

As you can probably tell by the black and yellow in the picture it is a DeWalt saw. It is the DW715 model. I was disappointed that it didn't come with the clamp attached to the fence like the floor model had. Apparently that is an accessory sold seperately. If I didn't have such an excellent collection of clamps at this point, I might have been hard pressed to use it right away safely. Other than that minor complaint, I am happy with it.

I chopped up some of my scrap wood to make theoretical boxes and what not, and it worked well. It is so much easier and faster than using a hand held circular saw. It is a lot more acurate too. When using my circular saw, the bottom plate would cover most of the board when cutting wood like 2x4s, making it hard to see where the blade was cutting. I really see me using it more like a chop saw than for fancy miters.

Something About the Future Smells Funny

Today an article caught my eye that was about a survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project of technologists and technology journalists. The headline read “Keyboards, DRM to become scarce in 2012.” That seemed a bit farfetched to me. The article was pretty brief and didn’t provide a lot of detail, but it did at least warn that the “computer journalists” are not “especially known for their prognosticative abilities.” That is definitely true. It did have a link to the actual report on the survey. Since it is a 138 page PDF document, I didn’t read the entire thing, and just skimmed the sections I was interested. I suspect the person who wrote the article did the same.

The report starts out with a summary of Pew’s findings, and then the bulk of the report consists of more elaborate explanations of the questions and their findings along with quotes from the journalists and technologists that comprised the “experts.” The questions/predictions I focused on and their results were:
· Few lines divide professional time from personal time, and that’s OK - 56% of “experts” Agree
· Talk and touch are common technology interfaces(the “No More Keyboards” one) – 64% of “experts” Agree
· Content control through copyright-protection technology dominates. – 60% of “experts” Disagree

I was really shocked that only 56% of the “experts” thought that the line between work and personal time will be blurred in 2012. I carry a blackberry, I am periodically “on-call” for work and even when not officially on-call I could be summoned for some crisis or something. I work plenty of overtime too. I suspect a lot of people are in my same situation, not just in my field (IT) but in others. The Internet really makes working from home almost as productive as working in the office, and that can’t help but erode the distinction.

The keyboard one, about talk and touch technology was pretty silly in my opinion. In the future people will have little projections of keyboards from tiny handheld devices that they will use instead of a standard keyboard when they are not dictating to their computers like Star Trek. That projectable keyboard thing exists today. It looks cool. I have never used one, and I am sure they will make even better and cooler looking ones in 2012, but I still don’t think they will be as fast or as pleasant to use as a standard keyboard. As for dictating to your computer, imagine how obnoxious an office full of people dictating to their computers would be. Many of us can type faster than we talk, and giving commands like “copy” with “ctrl+c” is easier than telling the computer to copy.

They lean slightly toward the utopian side of things when it comes to copyright. There were some nice utopian quotes like this one:

“Cultural forces are much stronger than corporate fascists, and whatever they seek now to block will simply arise from other providers in other sectors, even if it means a return to singing around campfires and pianos, or making homegrown media products. Here's a thought: maybe as the digital-rights-management Nazis kill their golden goose, they will also force creatives beyond excessive postmodernist remixing as an aesthetic, and artists of all stripes will start to value ‘originality’ over ‘derivation.’”

Stuff like that warms my heart, but I think big media has a lot of fight left in it. The RIAA will be suing old ladies and children for many years to come.

The experts were fairly divided on almost all the questions, which makes me wonder what value the survey really has. Basically it says “experts mostly disagree on the future of technology,” which boils down to “we don’t know what will happen in the future,” and that was exactly the state of affairs before the survey was published.

I am not a plumber

Well so far google ad-sense seems to thing that dylanbright.com is your plumbing destination. No doubt the algorithm picked up on my drain pipe story.

Selling Out

I added google adsense ads over on the left hand side of dylanbright.com. I was inspired by the $1.14 in advertising revenue the boatbuilding blog has generated in the past 6 months. Google doesn't send you a check until you have made $100. I should have my $100 check by sometime in the late 2050s.

I am actually curious to see what ads the google algorythm decides are context appropriate for dylanbright.com.

Playing with Stickcam

I replaced the little ftp'ed jpg dylancam over there on the right with the embeded flash thing from stickcam. I really wanted to use it to watch the dog while I was at work, but stickcam doesn't seem to perform well when the cam is on a wirelessly connected computer, such as your laptop in the living room where the dog is usually located.

Weekend Activities

I have been trying to create conditions in my office/computer/datacenter room that will allow me to spend more than a few minutes in it at a time. Historically it has been one of the most cluttered and ugliest areas of my house. An ancient hand me down particle board desk presided over a chaotic collection of archaic computing components. It was a big mess, and it pushed me out to the living room with the laptop as my primary home computing experience. The computer room does have some cool things though, such as large dual monitors and a wired Ethernet connection. This week I decided it was time to fight my way back in there.

The computing situation is a lot saner since I built the quad core ESX 3i box. The ESX box and my desktop are the only computers I need, and the FOUR others I had in various states of disrepair were ready to go live on a farm somewhere. The big L-shaped desk is a problem though. It served me well for many years and I am very grateful to the friend who gave it to me, but it is really showing its age, and it has these enormous hutch pieces with shelves and cabinets that I have fallen out of love with. I now just want lots of open surface area from a desk. I care not for drawers and shelves and cabinets. I have room for all that stuff in other parts of the room.

Friday night I went to Staples to look at desks. I was very disappointed.  The desks at Staples look much better as 360x360 jpegs on their website.  I couldn't find anything that didn't look like a cheap piece of crap or was close to the size of my current desk for under $500.  I just wanted something basic, sturdy, big enough for two monitors and a laptop and that looked like it was made out of actual wood, but of course, capitalism let me down once again. I sighed and thought "Why do I always have to do everything myself?" I guess I have to build my own desk. I went to Home Depot and looked at wood. I am still formulating a plan. It will be more work than I wanted to do. I think it is an excuse to buy a biscuit joiner though.

In the meantime, I cleaned a massive amount of crap out of the computer room. I filled three large garbage cans. I tossed ancient speakers, about a hundred CDs, boxes and manuals for motherboards I bought five years ago  tons of crap. I unearthed some artifacts. I found a journal I had kept in a little notebook in the late 1990s, which was somewhat interesting. It mostly seemed to be about drinking, roommates, and working in call centers. I also found some German homework from 10^th grade.

While doing all this work in the room, I watched Leo Laporte doing his job on live.twit.tv. I had listened to a couple of the twit podcasts fairly regularly when I am puttering around the house, but I never watched the video feed before. It is fairly entertaining.

Re-Architecture of DylanBright.com

Welcome to the 21st century!  Today I implemented a change to the website that I have been thinking about for a while.  DylanBright.com was probably the second ASP.NET thing I ever made, and it shows.   The code has always been ugly and it has always been powered by an Access database on the back end.  Now I'm not ragging on Access here, Access works fine for stuff like this.  Since I get one or two hits a year besides the search robots and me checking the page, it is not like dylanbright.com has to scale.

I never came up with a good mechanism for updating the "blog" portion.  I tried making an admin page with free text box html editor controls, but I never settled on something that I liked.  I also started looking at the blog applications on the net, like blogger and WordPress, and it became painfully apparent that dylanbright.com had fallen way behind the times when it came to content management features.  Standards were invented and came into popular use too, none of which I was using.  I added my own RSS functionality a while back, but it wasn't totally compliant with Atom, or anything similar.  It was kind of my own thing. 

Despite the superiority of the publicly available products, I didn't  want to just migrate to one of them.  They have a certain sameness to them, with their standardized themes and what not, and I felt like I would be losing my individuality.  I was also uncomfortable with relinquishing so much control to a big soulless company like Google or Microsoft. 

I came up with a hybrid approach, something that would give me the best of both worlds.  I would use one of the freely available blog services and then instead of pulling my data from my Access database, I would just pull the data from the RSS feed that the commercial product provided.  I would also backup the XML file from the free service, so I would always have the data in case I wanted to migrate it to something else.

I sat on that idea for about two years.  I started to try it a couple times, but I would lose interest and go on to something else.  Well today I sat down with the laptop to have another go at it.  I mostly do powershell scripts at work these days, and I hadn't done much ASP.NET wise in a long time, so I thought it would be challenging.  Then I found System.ServiceModel.Syndication which includes the Atom10FeedFormatter class.  Maybe this is new in .NET 3.0.  It made it very easy to implement my idea.

So there we have it.  There are other things I want to do to sort of flush things out, but the basic functionality is working (if you are reading this, anyway).  Of course this has no impact on appearance or features for you the end use, but now you can visit dylanbright.com secure in the knowledge that it is slightly less antiquated under the hood.