We're testing out the beta version of Microsoft office at work. Overall, there are some good improvements, for example, opening attachments in Outlook runs more smoothly. Some unordered thoughts thus far:
Outlook: Much improved control over folders. Now it is simple to remove excess Contact folders with the standard right-click-delete instead of having to hunt through settings and buried folders. The concept of multiple flags for reminders is good, the lighter layout nice, but the main screen is rather too busy. Dislike the default time and date in which older emails only have dates, instead of full date and time markers, and which needs to be reset at each folder level. Also I find annoying that when an email is deleted, the cursor moves up an email, regardless of whether the email is in ascending or descending order. Bonus for having the new program pick up the older version's user settings for rules, text mail, default fonts etc. Also useful: Outlook can be set to block HTML email or allow one to toggle HTML mail on, or display it.
Excel I've used basic manipulations for databases, but it does not appear measurably different than previous versions. Exporting and importing work well.
Access appears to be similar to previous versions although it is not yet possible to tab across a database in spreadsheet layout. Possibly the beta build. It picked up my ODBC settings nicely in the install.
Word has an added feature for opening document attachments so you can see them as they are stored, a reader setting. I'm not sure I particularly like the feature, but it definitely could be very desirable. Unfortunately, Word does not pick up user default settings for font, default margins and so forth.
About 4 years ago, maybe 5, my watch battery died, and I kept putting off replacing it. Over time I realized there were clocks everywhere: computers, phones at work, my cell phone. So I gave up the watch. So too has Phil Windley:
I don't wear a watch usually. I've found that clocks are ubiquitous. I'm almost never somewhere where I can't find a clock. No need really to carry one on my wrist. The reason that people carry watches harks back to a time when clocks were not easy to find and yet time was becoming more and more important. They needed portable time to work in the world in which they lived. I think the analogy to computing is interesting.
While I don't carry a watch, I do almost always have a computer with me of one sort or another. And a personal communications device called a cell phone. This is largely because I can't find these things conveniently (and certainly not with access to my information) as I move about. Perhaps as computers and connectivity become ubiquitous, we'll also find ourselves leaving our laptops at home and relying on the computing devices we find where we are. That's a twist from how I've imagined the future.
One of the original reasons for my acquiring a cell phone was the trouble I had finding a payphone, let alone a working one when I was out and about. Thus, I fell neatly into Windley's paradigm. I tentatively like the idea that, based on his availability argument, we should be back to carrying very little (no phones, laptops, PDAs). Just enough (a dongle, a thumbprint) to connect into where we store any useful information.
On why having smart devices connect over dumb networks is a good thing.
On the importance of looking for other viewpoints when reading blogs.
On another blog that looks appealing.
On blogs in the workplace (from Pierre's Web) as a form of knowledge management. More on thinking about weblogs at work
On languages to brush up and learn more about. (I'm also curious about Hindi writing based entirely on its looks and knowing all of two Hindi phrases.)
On the necessity of a little sunshine in life
On a survey of useful security tools for system administrators.
On revising the theory that only humans have descending larynxes.
On a novel description of Willow's work: foreach potential (@potentials) { $potential->canSlay = true; }
Now the battle becomes interesting. Novell asserts it, not SCO, holds the UNIX V copyright. Most interestingly, the press release refers to several requests by SCO to transfer the copyright from SCO to Novell. SCO responds. From the ignorance of the outside, it looks like SCO is maneuvering to hold on to a revenue stream. See this /. item to wade through this.
[And this news item in which SCO threatens to sue Linus Torvalds unless more companies pony up for SCO licenses. Huh? This helps: about one-third of SCO's revenue is from licensing.]
The United States is a religious nation, probably its most distinctive cultural marker among industrialized democracies, and a necessary piece to understanding its politics. While many are religious, one of the best predictors of party affiliation is attendance at services: Those who go vote Republican, those who don't vote Democratic. Here is a closer look at why that is. Vastly oversimplified, the argument is politicians at ease with religious rhetoric do better among voters than those who eschew it.
With all the media coverage of SARS, it hardly seemed worthwhile to continue posting on the subject. Until I saw this:SARS Digital folk art: Door Gods. And emoticons.
Sean Stickle noted his frustration in not being able to locate full texts in the original Greek on the web, despite being able to download genetic code sequences. It perhaps is an illustration of the different approach to collaboration within the scientific community and the liberal arts one: the scientific community is built around it, while liberals arts jealously guards its own. Curious, I poked around the web a little, and tripped across an interesting and organized collection of historical documents and links at Fordham. The same odd limitation occurs where not all texts are completely available for reasons of copyright. Presumably, the copyright refers to the translated version in these cases.
I saw the Matrix and Matrix Reloaded back-to-back this week. Ice cream and two fun movies: what better way to pass a dreary Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the first movie is the better story because it doesn't have to surpass itself nor serve as the “continuing story” movie. Still the second movie was entertaining, especially the highway car chase scene. If only they had left some of the speechifying out. The ending raised the question, though, why the mathematics of the Matrix has to be pure and seem to exclude fuzzy logic and chaos theory. Perhaps this was intentionally left out as an illustration of the limits in the machines' thinking?
From Ad Rem:
A group of students at the University of South Carolina have written a paper, entitled Good to the Last Drop: Dimensions and Cultural Implications of Coffee Service in Libraries, as a final project for one of their library science classes. (Note to self: what am I really getting into?)
A library offering coffee? Add tea to the offering list and I'd be in heaven.
After much back and forth, I now have refinanced the house. It really was not time-consuming, but frustrating. Unless the settlement date fell correctly, the terms of the previous loan required a month's additional interest payments, something I wished to avoid. And a fact of which I only became aware after scheduling the original settlement thanks to the bank's research department (not the loan officer). But now ‘tis done and done well.
In thinking about weblogs in the workplace, Sean and I both came to the conclusion: categorization of entries would lead to chaos and buried information. I stumble over my own weblog categories (is this entry technical, scientific, or both? How did I store a previous entry on this? Do I need another category?). This bodes not so well for developing meaningful, lasting categories for work weblogs. Nor can we turn to a general classification system for logging like the Library of Congress system. But if everyone can search each other's weblogs, a formally understood classification system is not longer necessary. One less item to create, one more advantage in usability.
This brings new meaning to the term “power tools”: A Dutch scientist successfully coated steel with a diamond layer, opening the possibility for wear-resistant tools.
The wringing of hands over judicial nominees being fought over in the Senate returns. I was reading a closely argued blog describing the parliamentary techniques used to speed or slow or impede nominations. While the article nicely demonstrates the ingenuity of using parliamentary procedure, it stumbles by promulgating the common assumption that the nominating process ought to be impartial and apolitical. This leads to the second flaw: the remedying of the procedural hurdles will lead to a smoother, and presumably better, nominating process. (Which is not to disagree with the author that the procedural hurdles should be fixed, but to clarify that substance, not process is the essential problem.)
First, the assumption that the nomination process ought to be impartial and apolitical is absurd. Of course, a president will nominate candidates he considers worthy of the job, which includes of the right political bent. Hence, President Eisenhower's regret over appointing a conservative who turned liberal — Earl Warren — to the Supreme Court: “The biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made”
Second, the apolitical argument flies in the face of recent history. The nomination process reflects the battles fought in courts over issues such as civil rights, abortion, separation of church and state, equal protection, gun control and so forth. There are deep divides within the body politic on these topics. Or where a consensus has been reached, there are enough unreconciled to the outcome to mount a steadfast challenge. All this feeds into the nominating process. Those nominees when appointed will serve for life, issuing rulings on these very topics, so their nominations cannot be divorced from politics.
In such an environment, it is hardly surprising that a nominee's qualifications will include sharing (or not denying) the president's stance on these issues (which are often planks from his party's platform). So if the Senate is considering qualifications, it will be considering political stances.
The rancorous hearings and the subterfuges of senators to promote or block certain nominees are pure politics. But so is a president's intent to fill the courts with appointees reflecting his political philosophy, something he has every right to propose. But to then argue that the Senate must ignore this political move is naive or dishonest.
But it sure is in bad form. Microsoft intends to license UNIX from SCO. On the other hand if you own SCO, that is a nice piece of news.
OpenSource responds to the SCO assertion that it holds the intellectual property rights to UNIX and to the UNIX code contained in Linux distributions. OSI submits that these [SCO's legal] claims are uniformly without merit, and proposes to establish that in the remainder of this position paper.
Basically, the paper excoriates SCO for, well, partial truths, half-histories, blatant lies and pathetic self-aggrandization. It confirms my suspicions that SCO is using the courts to counter its failure in the marketplace.
Friends of mine are leaving Washington, DC's fine weather — rainy and humid — for Albuquerque, a place I've never been. Well, now it is on the list of places to visit, as they are nifty friends and will be sorely missed. The petroglyphs are intriguing.
In a wonderful moment of beneficence, a friend acquired tickets to the PEN/Faulker Awards for several of us. We all meet to quilt, but much of the conversation revolves around recently read books, so this was a treat of an evening. Now am armed with a list of new books to read ... mostly am curious about Peter Cameron's, The City of Your Final Destination as he read from the ending. Also quite tempting is The Ecstatic.
I like computers as much as the next geek. But I'm not under any illusion as to their reliability or perfectibility. So yes, using computers to tally votes is an excellent idea as long as there is a way to validate the program and the votes and a backup system in case of well, the inevitable programming bug, power surge, whatever. Unfortunately, the industry representatives are not being very sensible: for example a Mr. Radke of Diebold is quoted in the NYT as saying “that voters have more, not less, confidence in electronic machines.” And what does this have to do with Diebold ensuring the computers are more reliable and voter confidence is not misplaced? From the article, it appears the software is proprietary and no backup systems are in place, a situation which the companies selling the software and the voting officials buying the software think is perfectly acceptable. Yet, the Washington Post reported (in a now archived article) Maryland used computers in the last election: software patches were applied the night before the election without being tested (not a confidence-building measure) and a computer error was uncovered only thanks to a suspiciously odd shift in voting patterns in one region. This is the Post article: New Voting Systems Assailed which lists enough examples of odd voting situations to give pause. Examples include lost votes (unrecoverable), mislinked names where selecting one candidate from a touch screen resulted in a vote for another (some caught by voters), and, in one Florida precinct, not tallying votes (caught by the significant discrepancy between recorded voters and votes. Fortunately, the votes were recoverable from the voting machine).
None of this suggests avoiding computers. Rather, this means having the good sense to put appropriate measures into place to prevent tampering and miscounted votes, and installing backup systems so when the inevitable happens, no electoral disasters result. In other words, good practices for any system. And these are the kinds of practices that actually build confidence, not just sell it.
Yesterday: SCO claims commercial use of Linux may infringe upon the company's Unix intellectual property rights. The company finds Linux is an “unauthorized derivative” of UNIX, which SCO owns. (It filed suit in March against IBM for violations.) No one apparently has identified the infringement outside of SCO in its suit, according to the news.
Today, in an interview, an SCO senior official says an independent panel will convene to evaluate the SCO claim that Linux is riddled with post-BSD UNIX code, but provided no specifics.
The dust up should be humorous: SCO wants to protect its intellectual property from alleged infringement all the while it committed the same infringement: SCO distributes open-source Caldera Linux under the same GPL as all those other distributions. And if SCO released Linux under the GPL, did this affect the — allegedly — more strictly protected code? Evidently, two distinct bodies of law could come into play in the case, intellectual property (copyright) and trade secrets, which take into account very different and often contradictory arguments. So I look forward to seeing the violations. And I want to hear the argument that while the company knowingly and freely gave away its trade secret, it should be able to sue others using that secret, even when they were doing so under the company's own license.
I wanted to explore the notion of security, particularly in the context of computers given the attack at work last month and as a way of working through several issues.
One is how to balance security and usability. After all a computer without floppies, modem, or network cards has very little vulnerability. Not much usability if information-sharing is desired, however. Here is a humorous illustration of not recognizing the tradeoff: someone buys a copyright protected Norah Jones CD which will not play in several computers. The only way the user can figure out how to play the CD is to copy it, thus defeating the security measure.
So part of the issue of security is figuring out how to provide security without interfering with likely uses of the data and creating incentives to undermine the security measures.
This may be a funny example, but the user's perception of the measure also matters, leading to two different problems: one is developing security measures that do not block expected use, although they may need to interfere by, for example, requiring a user name and password to access data.
The really tough problem in some ways is perception of security, the issue of hidden versus obvious security. In the CD example, this made for ridicule, but still, showing something is secure matters to people. It responds to the assumptions of safety that people need to have to go about their daily tasks unfettered by worries, as quoted in Sean's piece. And so he raises the excellent point of how does one demonstrate a secure network. (One thought could be listing the number of days since last successful attack? Or length of uninterrupted network up time?). Of course the tough part about perception is whether security and perception of security even overlap.
Risk assessment experts remind us that we tend to ignore commonplace dangers — driving or riding in a car — and focus on rare and dangerous risks — anthrax exposure. So while protecting against the network equivalent of car crashes is truly important, we also have to provide a reasonable security against the rare problem.
Possible steps: a list of what we generally do to protect data posted somewhere internally: backup systems of data, network alerts going to Sean, storing data off-site, using open-source, operating systems to permit fast restores of compromised systems. What worked well in the last network failure, and what didn't (that email server) and how we are addressing it (new email software). That and the best evidence: lots of boring uptime.
Then the next step is continuing the silent vigilance, at least from the user perspective, of behind the scenes network maintenance.
The layout, even for such a simple text page has yet to strike me as quite balanced, so here's another version: reduced white space at the borders, bolded, instead of underlined links, and darker text in the blog. The pop-up box for comments is eliminated for accessibility and aesthetic reasons. I dislike pop-up boxes and prefer commentary to flow together with the text, rather than be visually separate. That and my brain is too foggy for useful work, much to my frustration. So I occupy it with the mundane.
My colleague has also turned up in weblog form. (He found me first.)
The Western States Information Network is deploying blogging software to archive email for law enforcement task forces today. This has great potential, because the user is not changing habits, as the work continues to be email, but now old email is archived and searchable, rather than either being automatically deleted (a policy in many organizations) or buried, half-lost, in someone's email box.
Richard III served up a fine evening's entertainment yesterday of blood, treachery and a surfeit of curses: “Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!” “Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins!” Perfect for the next unwashed villainous lout who dares cross my path.
And such a fine piece of propaganda is the play that we remember a long ago king as a monster, another way of saying the storyteller trumps the historian.
Salon reports a federal jury awarded a permanent injunction (and $16 million in damages) to Earthlink against a spammer. The injunction is key here, given there are similar, pending lawsuits to the one Earthlink filed.
This is significant, given early mortality estimates were much lower. Of course, the age factor and presence of other conditions, not surprisingly, is a major contributor. From the WHO:
The likelihood of dying from SARS in a given area has been shown to depend on the profile of the cases, including the age group most affected and the presence of underlying disease. Based on data received by WHO to date, the case fatality ratio is estimated to be less than 1% in persons aged 24 years or younger, 6% in persons aged 25 to 44 years, 15% in persons aged 45 to 64 years, and greater than 50% in persons aged 65 years and older.
Actually a good movie, and what came to mind when searching for an entry title. Interestingly, when I created this blog I had two goals: work on my RSS skills and vent my thoughts. Neither has really been moving along. The RSS will eventually; I've been sidetracked by other worthy projects, of more immediate need.
But as to the not venting, I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps because I'm cursed to live in interesting times: tracking the news on subjects that fascinate me (SARS, archaeology) has absorbed the time I might otherwise have given to blogging. Busy-ness at work and at home too have had their effect: less time for reflection, not to mention an outlet for venting my particular political thoughts.
And a third reason: I've perused many blogs, and am not entirely convinced that I have the time to create one matching the writing and thoughtfulness of the impressive ones.
As an aside, NPR did a story on audio web logs.
From Language Hat: M. TRUDEAU EST EN ROGNE. Today's Doonesbury is a brilliant example of language as politics.
(Mr. Trudeau is pissed off: the subtitled version.)
This weekend included two trips to the movies, the second one to see the latest X-Men movie. Men is an apt name, as the women hardly had any lines (one had none, although she provided a good knife-wielding match for Wolverine). But there were plenty of good fights, fun character interaction, and special effects to provide two hours of nice, escapist entertainment, precisely what the comic books provided.
It turns out SARS comes in two flavors according to Scientific American. Issues of concern: whether the virus acts alone to infect people is unknown; only 40 percent of specimens from Toronto's SARS cases have the coronavirus; and 14 percent of those quarantined for potential exposure, who do not meet the clinical case definition of SARS carry the virus.
Also of note, a common detergent is ineffective against SARS, which lives for several hours on some surfaces.
Finally, the CDC reports a death rate of 5.9 percent.
After this week, it is good to be reminded of the service computers provide. Rapid information sharing over e-mail and then posting the results allowed scientists to decode the SARS genome and share the knowledge quickly and efficiently.
This article contends weblogs are too much like unsorted laundry piles to serve as a knowledge management tool in the workplace. Perhaps, although personal sites are often poor examples by nature for workplace blogs. But Radio UserLand and Movable Type provide features, categorization, archiving and multiple authors, which permit sorting of data into usable chunks. Most usefully, RSS feeds of weblogs turn them into portable, machine manipulable content (XML), which begins to address portability and scalability concerns.
We're going to attempt the Radio workplace web logs. As Tienan Ray, the author, notes, categorizing this information in meaningful and enduring ways is a challenge. (We're too small to worry about storage issues, fortunately, a huge problem for a large organization.) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff is my relevant reading assignment.
Lastly, the ease of use is a necessity, otherwise no one will change work habits for the technological toy of the week, another point Ray raised. While no HTML skills are absolutely necessary to creating and maintaining a weblog, an improvement over webpages, still the skills remain useful. We're attempting to create a front end reminiscent of HTML email for the work weblog, in hopes of inducing more participation and reducing the barriers to use.
A quiet roll of chatter and clacking moves through the office: people are working away, systems hum along, and all is happily dull.
Another piece on how the chewing gum and rubberband construction of the web has been fundamental to its success, from Clay Shirky.