Justindz

I've been disenchanted with Blogger for a while (and mentioned this a few times on Twitter as well). I'm switching over to Tumblr and picking up from there. I hope you'll expend the minor effort to update your bookmarks or whatever and continue to follow me. Note that if you consume via my feed, that will be automatically pointed over to the new location. Consider it a reward for being efficient.

I am working on importing my old content, but there are limits to that sort of thing, so we'll see. I'm also working on the design. My goal is to keep it very simple and as widget-free as possible. Comments will be online shortly. Hope to see you there :-)

Love,

Justin

Scanners that see through clothing installed in US airports - Yahoo! News

"the images made 'will not be printed[sic] stored or transmitted'"

How long before some of these start showing up on the Internet? Seriously. I wonder if it's somehow impossible to take a picture of the picture? Doubtful.

Choose the pat down.

I've been thinking about how to stem the spread of malware programs (spyware, viruses, trojans, key loggers, etc.) across the Internet user community. Originally, I was of the opinion that educating people on how they work, showing them examples of sneaky distribution methods and encouraging them to use protection would be the best method for preventing the spread of such diseases and preventing the related weighing-down of computers than is inevitable with these riders taking up space. But, I've changed my mind and I think the only solution is 100% abstinence-based malware education.

Showing people silk-roaped trojans attached to what appear to be innocuous shareware programs will just encourage them to share files by making them think they know everything and giving them a false feeling of invincibility. Likewise, it will seem like we're silently endorsing piracy by talking about it without clearly condemning it outright. Abstinence-based browsing solves all of these problems.

We should teach all Internet users to stay off the Internet, avoid reading about it lest the temptation lead them to go about unprotected online and we should stop creating and distributing free and/or open-source sweepers, blockers and anti-virus because these tools will only encourage people to download Snood and BritneySpears.jpg.exe all the more. If people want to feel like they are using the Internet without engaging in any risky and immoral behavior, we should help them set up LANs at home so they can just play with themselves.

Petition your local representatives. Abstinence is the only solution. Nothing else has been proven effective.

And Now, A Message From the Religious Right

Hilarious. Not tasteful, but hilarious.

I've been having DSL issues the last few days. There have been some storms and I figured there might be general service disruption in my area. I was getting errors on the modem at times and rebooting to return service, albeit slow service. Some complicated web pages were slow or timing out (Gmail, HuffingtonPost, stuff like that) and news video streams were loading extremely slowly if at all. It was also making access to my company VPN and intranet problematic which is great fun for working from home.

So, I finally bit the bullet and called Verizon tech support. Now, this will come as a stunning revelation and I'm sure you've never thought of this before: script-based support is horrible. The gentlemen I was connected with basically could not answer any of my unscripted questions like "Is there a general service issue in my area?" or "Can you look up my account by my contact number instead of my dry loop number?" He proceeded to take control of my machine via Citrix and demonstrate that my connection to Verizon was strong using a speed test site and informed me that I had too many Internet Explorer temporary internet files which he deleted. He did a great job. It's just unlikely that it had any bearing on what needed to be done.

I tried to explain to him that I have a Windows laptop, Mac mini and two Linux machines which were all going slowly. I also tried to explain that I only use IE to access my company's internal SharePoint and use Firefox for everything else. The solution there was to finish up his script and then connect me to Macintosh technical support.

What's the secret? Get connected to a "special team" like the Mac team. The guy listened to my deductions, checked the service outage registry and informed me that there were three current issues affecting my area code and that it'll probably be about another day. He suggested cycling the modem off for about 20 minutes to see if I get an improvement but otherwise to hang tight.

I should have remembered this. I called in once, got connected to the Linux team and it went something like this:

Vz - "Do you know much about Linux?"
Me - "Yeah, I used to do some Linux sys admin."
Vz - "Okay, throw out the CD we sent you. It's useless. What distro?"
Me - "Ubuntu. I'm running Gnome. The CD was IE-only, so I just laughed. I basically just need a few fields that weren't in the install guide."
Vz - "Okay if I go pretty quickly? Just tell me to slow down if needed."
Me - "Oh, for the love of God, go quickly."
Vz - "Are you using a router attached to the modem?"
Me - "Yeah, the famous WGRT54, but I swear it's not hacked."
Vz - "Hah. Sure. What's your setup?"
Me - "DHCP LAN. Pretty standard. I'm locking IPs in to a few MAC addresses that live here."
Vz - "Okay, do the following..."

Like the Mac guy. Took me into account, which scripts don't do, and very quickly got me the information I needed. So, the moral of this story is that you should call in and ask for the Mac or Linux team potentially even if you are running Windows. Now to go set Firefox back to my default browser. I winced when the operator hit "Yes" on that little dialog.

Of course, this could all have been avoided if the Verizon system status page weren't "experiencing technical difficulties."

YouTube - John Bush McCain vs. Himself: Lime Green Speech Mashup

The "dehydrated babies" bit is a little... awkward out of context. If you haven't been following this, the "Lime Green" bit is taken from the horrible pairing of McCain and the lime green background being commonly referred to as the "Lime Green Monster Speech" or the "Cottage Cheese and Lime Jello Salad."

I need to find a link to the whole speech. The excerpts I've read so far were either excoriating (Democrats) or highly critical (Republicans).

The Vista file replace dialog. MUCH harder to read than it used to be. The buttons are also very non-standard for OS/browser buttons.

Bonus question: what is the difference in behavior between the "Don't copy" option and the "Cancel" button?

[edit: ScribeFire has some issues. So much for that. Adding image now...]



[edit again: "Click the file you want to keep?" - that has nothing to do with the options on the screen? wtf?]

Here's a random thought. First, here's some less random back-story. I have a Vista laptop (work), a Mac Mini and an Ubuntu desktop. The Vista laptop dual-boots into Ubuntu via Wubi as well. I use these things for different purposes, so while it might seem like a glut it actually fits into my usage patterns pretty well.

But there's this problem of downloading or creating content on any one of the given machines and then using it on another. Starting with a simple case, I can easily download a video on Vista, boot in to Ubuntu on the laptop and watch the video. I can't easily go the other way around and watch content in the Ubuntu area via Vista.

Another aspect of this that has been annoying me of late is working with Google App Engine. Their operating model has you download the SDK, develop an app locally and submit it to the service. But, you can't download it from the service so if you want to develop from multiple locations then you need to either manually move files or introduce yet another level of complexity by working in some user-driven approach to source control.

Now, there are a lot of strategies for solving this problem:

I'm sure this is not an exhaustive list. But all of these have their own unique problems in addition to having a serious core problem: they all require a significant amount of extra work and/or expense by the user. Meaning, they just won't happen in most cases. Buying drives and storage, using cloud data synch services, all of these things are far from seamless and have tech or accessibility barriers that make them unattractive.

What would fit the bill? At least for the dual-boot laptop problem, the major operating systems (either natively or via some magical plugin) could be designed to cleanly separate user content from OS files such that OS files are sequestered where they would not be mixed with user files. User files would be generically accessible in any of the local OS environments in one representation.

That doesn't solve the multi-machine synch problem, but it does make that less complex. Programmers would have new work to do as they would have to, when generating something like a preference file, determine whether the file in question should be shared or not. And the sequestration wouldn't be by "putting things" (logically) in /OS versus /User or something, because that would be hard to enforce. It would have to actually classify the content differently as well.

I don't have time to flesh this out at the moment and I also don't feel like my approach is going anywhere, intellectually. It's a good, hard problem to solve and I don't think the answer will ever be "Only use one OS and one machine." It's not a problem that affects a vast majority of people, but it's a headache for us legitimately multi-platforming nerds.

Incidentally, I wonder if this is the problem that Windows Live Mesh plans to solve. I've tried reading some of their PR and it comes across as new age nonsense. I've tried to watch some videos I downloaded regarding Mesh, but I can't find them. Just kidding. They were just too boring.

In the short term, what are you guys doing with Google App Engine to work across machines? In this instance, I really like the Heroku approach better.