Nothing to See Here

You Need to Adjust Your Feed!

2010-02-27T09:18:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this, you need to know that I've had to rearrange my site. After more than eight years using Blogger to publish my site, they have stopped supporting SFTP. Since I publish in my PASS space and do not run a server of my own, I've switched to using the Blogs at Penn State tools

The new root is:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/mhl100/blogs/

The new feed is:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/mhl100/blogs/index.xml

If you want to continue reading, you need to adjust your feed now.

Disappearing into the Fire

2010-02-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

The Monster In Your Head » Disappearing into the Fire:

David Whyte—a brilliant poet who, among others things, speaks to and consults with large corporations, describes well an aspect of why the burden is so keenly felt:

There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.

How many of us create companies, create products where our blood and bone fuse with the glaze to create something so exquisite as to never have existed before? How romantically seductive is the image of giving one’s all to the fire? After all, as Whyte says:

Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.

I have to understand this viscerally if I’m going to be of service to my clients. But I have to be mindful, too, of the cost. In disappearing into the kiln, the potter created the most meaningful thing possible. But in the end, he ceased to exist.

(Via @fredwilson.)

DHCP is Not a Security Mechanism

2010-02-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

You cannot use DHCP as a security mechanism. If a DHCP client elects not to follow the protocol, a network administrator can do little, other than to track down the offending device and shut it off. A malicious user who wants to access the network can always simply make up an IP address, send an ARP request for it, and then, if it does not get an answer, use the fabricated address. Access control based on client identification can be very convenient, but it does not prevent unauthorized access to a network. [Droms and Lemon, 2002, p. 16]

Droms, Ralph Ph. D. & Lemon, Ted (2002), The DHCP Handbook, Second Edition, Indianapolis: Sams Publishing.

You'll be a Man, My Son!

2010-02-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Poems - If—:

IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

It goes on

Title Style

2010-02-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

Mac Dev Center: Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Text:

Title style means that you capitalize every word except:

Articles (a, an, the)

Coordinating conjunctions (and, or)

Prepositions of four or fewer letters, except when the preposition is part of a verb phrase, as in “Starting Up the Computer.”

In title style, always capitalize the first and last word, even if it is an article, a conjunction, or a preposition of four or fewer letters.

Division of Labor

2010-02-19T08:00:00.001-05:00

If caveman A is strong, swift, and accurate with a spear, and caveman B is weak and slow, but patient, this distribution of talent can be most efficiently used if A hunts and B fishes.

McConnell, Campbell R. and Brue, Stanley L. Microeconomics. 13th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996.

It is Unwise to Stray

2010-02-18T08:00:00.001-05:00

Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers :

It is unwise to stray far from the obvious and simple, lest untoward effects result elsewhere.

Procrastination as Comfort Zone

2010-02-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

Seth's Blog: Modern procrastination:

The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn’t ship and most of all, busywork.

These represent safety, because if you don’t challenge the status quo, you can’t be made fun of, can’t fail, can’t be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything…

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

The Parable of the Ham

2010-02-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Dining & Wine > At My Table | Nigella Lawson: An Inheritance of Flavors and Colors:

I remember once hearing a radio program about how recipes are passed on from one generation to the next, in this case, from grandmother to mother to daughter.

The daughter was talking about the pot roast she always made, beginning with the instructions: “Cut the ends off your piece of meat.” Asked why she did this, she said, “Because my mother always did.” The next interview was with her mother, who explained why she followed this seemingly important initial step: it was how she had seen her mother do it.

When the radio host asked the grandmother why it was necessary to cut the ends off the joint of meat before making a pot roast, she said, “Oh, it was because I didn’t have a pot big enough.”

So we credit recipes with much more authority than they necessarily deserve. It might be better to regard them really as more of an account of a way of cooking a dish rather than a do-this-or-die barrage of instructions.

Delegated vs. Federated ID

2010-02-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

Introducing ‘Sign-in with Twitter’, OAuth-Style “Connect” « hueniverse:

It is important to understand that there are two different kind of single-sign-on solutions: delegated and federated. All the recent comparisons between OpenID and Facebook Connect failed to appreciate this fundamental difference. Facebook Connect is a delegated authentication service, while OpenID is a federated authentication service. They might offer very similar features, but they are very different.

A delegated solution means that one site is simply outsourcing its authentication needs to another pre-selected site. If your site uses Facebook Connect, you are delegating your authentication facilities to Facebook. Visitors to your site cannot use any other accounts, only accounts from the vendors you have pre-selected.

A federated solution means that visitors to your site can use any account they have, as long as it is compatible. It makes no difference to the site which account is being used, as long as it can interoperate. At its core, OpenID is a federated solution because its most important feature is the ability to use any OpenID account with any OpenID-enabled service.

(Via @cshirky.)

You Can’t Force Creativity

2010-02-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

idApostle: An Identity Love Affair / Why Design Can’t be Billed by the Hour:

You really can’t force creativity to happen. There are ways to encourage it and a process is there to help direct it, but in the end it has to just happen. So while a project may only take an hour at a desk, I can assure you more time was spent thinking about it.

(Via @smashingmag.)

The Real Work

2010-02-11T08:00:00.002-05:00

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Future Shock:

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

(Via iPhone Development.)

Do Not Read

2010-02-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia:

Having five more years of development experience under my belt, I no longer believe that classic Larson strip is specific to dialog boxes.

The plain fact is users will not read anything you put on the screen.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

It’s Not Always About You

2010-02-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

iPhone Development: Failure to Think Different:

I’m sure somebody has told you all this before, but let me point it out again: it’s not always about you. Products can be successful even if they aren’t right for you… I’m a techie, but I don’t need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don’t hate my dishwasher because I can’t get to the command line. I don’t hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system.

(Via Alan Quatermain.)

The Value of Abstraction

2010-02-08T08:00:00.001-05:00

stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been...:

When I learned to drive, my dad insisted that I learn on a manual transmission so I would be able to drive any car. I think this was a wise and valuable thing to do.

But even having learned it, these days I drive an automatic. Nothing is black and white — I sacrifice maybe a tiny amount of fuel efficiency and a certain amount of control over my car in adverse situations that I generally never encounter. In exchange, my brain is freed up to focus on the the road ahead, getting where I’m going, and avoiding obstacles (strategy), not the minutiae of choosing the best possible gear ratio (tactics).

Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It’s likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who drives.

(Via ranchero.com.)

Adapting to the Environment

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

stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been...:

Staying with floppies would have spared us the inconvenience of that transition but at what long-term cost?

Nothing is ever simply black or white. There was a cost to making the transition. But there was a benefit to doing so.

To change was not all good. To stay put was not all bad. But there was a ratio of goodness-to-badness that, in the long run, was quite favorable for everyone involved. However in the short term it seemed so insurmountable, so ludicrous, that it beggared the belief of a large number of otherwise very intelligent people.

For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being spent.

(Via ranchero.com.)

Holden Caulfield vs. Starman Jones

2010-02-04T08:00:00.001-05:00

From the Whatever Archives: “Holden Caulfield in Middle Age” « Whatever:

Fact is, I liked neither Holden nor the book. One can recognize the book has a certain literary merit without needing to like the thing, of course. But it’s more to the point to say that Holden has a certain fundamental passivity that I dislike — the desire for people and things to be different without the accompanying acceptance of personal responsibility to effect those changes. To go back to Heinlein and his juvy novels, his teenage characters are not very big on internal lives, but they’re also the sort who go out, do things, fail, do things again, and eventually get it right. Holden merely wishes, ultimately a man of inaction. He’s a failure — a particularly attractive failure if you’re of a certain age and disposition, admittedly, but a failure nonetheless. I remember reading the book as a teen and being irritated with Holden for that reason; I couldn’t see why he required any sympathy from me, or why I should empathize with him.

I always liked Heinlein’s characters and could never really relate to Catcher in the Rye. It never occurred to my to analyze why, but I think John nails it here.

Better Fooled Than Suspicious

2010-02-03T08:00:00.001-05:00

iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry:

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick¹. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The reference is from Chapter 5 of Howard’s End and is actually called the “want-of-confidence trick,” but the point is the same. ↩

“You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

No Other Way to Find Out

2010-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

Coding Horror: Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway:

Reasons for failure on a… project are legion.

At the end of the development cycle, you end up with [a system] that is a pale shadow of the shining, glorious monument to… engineering that you envisioned when you started.

It’s tempting, at this point, to throw in the towel — to add more time to the schedule so you can get it right before shipping… Because, after all, real developers ship.

I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake.

Yes, you did a ton of things wrong on this project. But you also did a ton of things wrong that you don’t know about yet. And there’s no other way to find out what those things are until you ship this version and get it in front of users and customers.

The View from the Dorkosphere

2010-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed - apple ipad - Gizmodo:

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.

(Via @Pogue.)

What are You Measuring?

2010-01-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

We = (what we eat) – (what they eat) « Jon Udell:

We have traditionally measured the energy content of food by comparing input (the food we eat) and output (the feces we excrete). Burn both in a calorimeter, subtract, and the difference is the energy that was extracted from the food.

Yes, but extracted by whom? Or rather, by what? The energy that we humans take from our food has almost all been extracted by the time it reaches the end of the small intestine. But it has a long way to go yet. It must also pass through the large intestine, where dwell a myriad of gut flora. And they, Wrangham says, are hungry. If you eat a raw banana you only get some of its energy, and they get most of the remainder. If you eat a cooked banana, though, you get a lot more of its energy and leave less for them. The end result looks the same, but the internal distribution is quite different.

So you need to compare the energy in food entering the mouth to the energy remaining in the digestive products leaving the small intestine. Only then does the dramatic difference between the energies we get from raw versus cooked food become evident.

This is a great parable about instrumentation, measurement, knowledge, and epistemology. What other profound errors of basic understanding arise from misplaced instrumentation? And what might we learn by making simple — and in retrospect obvious — adjustments?

(Via kottke.org.)

What is Your Flight Distance?

2010-01-28T08:00:00.001-05:00

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution:

We are puzzled, because our own risk aversion (or that of our safari guide) keeps us firmly inside the Land Rover even though we have no reason to think there is a lion within miles. This is because we have nothing to set against our fear. We are going to get our square meals back at the safari lodge. Our wild ancestors would have had much more sympathy with the risk-taking zebras. Like the zebras, they had to balance the risk of being eaten against the risk of not eating. Sure, the lion might attack; but, depending on the size of your troop, the odds were that it would catch another member of it rather than you. And if you never ventured on to the feeding grounds, or down to the waterhole, you’d die anyway, of hunger or thirst. It is a lesson in economic trade-offs.

The bottom line of that digression is that the wild wolf, like any other animal, will have an optimal flight distance, nicely poised — and potentially flexible — between too bold and too flighty.

Enough Smart People

2010-01-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

A Little Less Conversation:

As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.

(Via Joel on Software.)

Free Yourself

2010-01-26T08:00:00.001-05:00

Seth's Blog: No, everything is not going to be okay:

Finding the bravery to shun faux reassurance is a critical step in producing important change. Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it's a lot easier to launch work that matters.

Life’s Constants

2010-01-25T08:00:00.001-05:00

“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” — Woody Allen

Beyond death and taxes, there are few things in life that you can count on:

The Speed of light in a vacuum, c
The Newtonian gravitational constant, G
The Planck constant in quantum mechanics, h

There are other things in life that never change:

If you work for a living, you will have meetings

Meeting or Coffee?

It helps to know why you are having a meeting. Your meeting should have a goal. You should probably decide on the goal of your meeting before you even start working on an agenda. Here are some typical meeting goals.

Foster relationships — It is important to have understanding, respect, and trust between professional peers. If the workplace does not provide sufficient social contact, it may be necessary to dedicate a specific time to fostering relationships. Meeting for coffee or lunch may be appropriate. A meeting with a different purpose may serve as an excuse to foster relationships, but do not expect it.
Elicit information — One reason you want professional relationships is to provide a knowledge base to test your ideas. You can take advantage of the experience of others to identify technical, political, cultural, and procedural issues with your ideas early in their development.
Make a decision — Once you have possible approaches to your idea, or possible solutions to your problem, you might want to hold a meeting to decide which one to pursue.
Receive feedback — Having selected an approach, you probably want to find out what others think. This feedback can help you refine your approach to avoid potential pitfalls.
Make a plan — Now that you are confident in your approach, you can meet with your team and develop a plan of attack.
Get status — If you have been working through your plan, you will want to find out how your team members are doing. There are many ways to do this, but some people like to use meetings for this purpose.
Solve a problem — At some point, one of those status items will be the identification of a problem. A meeting can be a good place to work quickly and cooperatively to find a solution to a problem.
Produce a work product — Occasionally the goal of a meeting will actually be to do work. This can be the case when the output from your team is a document like a specification, a report, a recommendation, or a business proposal.
Report information — When you have worked and worked and finally accomplished something, you might want to tell people about it. A meeting can provide a venue for that.

In a healthy work environment, you may be able to accomplish all of these things without holding a formal meeting. Would that we all had healthy work environments.

You should decide on a single goal. If you cannot, you might want to think more about the question. If you still cannot, you may need more than one meeting. Holding a productive meeting is hard enough without trying to accomplish multiple goals.