The Sixth Layer

Links for 2012-01-22 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

Address 1AEHteJ8bpnz9RivaxgEW4omuS7xqP2U8d - Bitcoin Block Explorer
3.22BTC Incoming

Links for 2012-01-10 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

Links for 2012-01-01 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

OWC Mercury Pro SSD - Solid State Drives using High Performance SandForce Processor solution

Links for 2011-12-05 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

Links for 2011-12-03 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

Links for 2011-11-26 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 PST

Download 40 Android Applications [September 2010] | HambyaH Techno

Links for 2011-11-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 PST

Drop all tables in a MySQL database

Second E-mail post (from alpine-1.10)

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:10:38 PDT

The Office Plan:

The WinXP machine on my desk is full of files. It has 3 partitions.
First I'll empty one of the partitions, and copy all of its data away to
some other location. Then, I'll prepare the system's drive to hold an
Elive partition -- I think it will not be necessary to install Elive, just
to root the machine and make WinXP irrelevant.

OK, so it's not going to be irrelevant. But, it's full. It's what the
clients are going to be using. And, it's not in any position to replace
one of their machines (if they needed a new one, I certainly couldn't sell
this one... just look at it)

So, that makes it a development machine! Go elivecd!

The last unstable ISO for Elive that I have right here is 1.9.39_unstable,
remember that the special feature in Unstable distribution is that no $15
activation fee is necessary. The software could activate itself.

(I hope the web service distributing these codes is still around... maybe
I underestimated, and I will be out of luck when it comes to installing!)

I just deleted a superfluous backup of C: from J: (same disk) and, what's
left in Jupiter, is pretty cool. The Cranberries! Full discography, I
think. Some "Fundamentals of Physics" torrent I downloaded before passing
University Physics III, I think it includes the full text at 1334 pages,
plus instructor's solution manual. Not sure I have the same editions,
looks like my solution manual is 7e and my textbook is 8e. Oh well..

XenServer 5.0.0 plus XenCenter Manager for Windows, I think there have
been releases 5.5.0 and 5.6.0 already; plus, a copy of CentOS 5.2, which
has been advanced to 5.5 since the last time I was in that cloud...

An old kubuntu, VisualSVN server, and WinPcap plus the manager for my 24+2
port ethernet switch is also here, plus a reminder: make more diagrams...
http://delicious.com/yebyen/diagram

3GB accounts for the remaining downloads, and the remnants of an Apache
server are here extant as well... possibly one that was configured to run
VisualSVN. From the software I have installed here, it appears that a
person is making PDF documents, and tracking them, and possibly selling
them over Skype. Does anyone really do that?

E-mail Posty Goodness

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:42:13 PDT

I'm compiling wget on the macos :D sweetness

I'm also going through my old billing system and clearing out all of those bogus invoices that never had a destination, or never got mailed or paid because they were too ridiculous...

It's going to be a herculean effort to clean out my e-mail inbox. Fortunately, I have more of them. Mailing the backup of my old data to XULRunner42@gmail.com and blogging about it as I delete posts out of the "invoice queue" which is really my dream GTD system.

Unison — I always wanted to use a Unison+FAM client. The tricky part would be to know when the files are done changing. There is always a danger that some file which registers a change in FAM has still more changes to come, and it's not appropriate to replicate it to everyone else. This project is on hold until I outgrow my new Time Machine backup system.

OpenAFS — This is not on hold. I would like to have an OpenAFS implementation back up and running within two weeks. This is a cross-platform folder sharing technique that uses the highest in security technology, Kerberos, to authenticate users. If you can maintain OpenAFS, you are a super-duper server administrator, and your users will love you.

Windows XP — I'm not using Windows anymore. I removed all of my Windows installations, save the old laptop that sits in my office, that I never ever use. I'll send pictures soon, and you'll understand why (it's in shambles... the case cracked, so I stripped it off.) However, I still need to maintain a list of "good" windows software. (Ed: Today, 6/1/10, someone told me they need help setting up the office's free Color Laser printer on their Windows machine. I have done this before, should be able to do it again no problem.) Enough people are using Windows that I'm foolish not to keep a Win7 VM lying around somewhere. That reminds me, <a href virtualization... but yeah, some people pay $50-100 for someone to look at their computer for two hours and "make it go faster." I'll do that.

Cashboard — I still love Cashboard. I haven't got any Substruct clients yet, but that still seems like a good idea. All of this data
is coming from a review of my old Cashboard notes, which they graciously did not throw away when I stopped paying the bill... that bill goes away when I learn how to interpret their XML format and generate my own PDFs. Is it worth it? I'd rather have SubImage LLC on my good side.

DNS and Web Hosting — I'm starting to think that Cherokee is the tool to get people away from Apache. I don't know how many people
really know what Apache is, but the configuration files are powerful. If you didn't need them, you'd have Cherokee. Look up Cherokee Project for web servery goodness.

More to come... time to head out.

So, Kingdon...

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:53:49 PDT

What kind of crap have you got on that machine? You sure spend a lot of time on it!

Today is the day, I'm cleaning out my computer so I can give it up, I'm really not sharing it very well... that is, whenever anyone comes to use it, I am in the way! That's almost worse than paying money to use the machine.

I used to say I'm a programmer who avoids programming at all costs. What does that mean? Most of these toolkits have lots of bells and whistles, and it's very hard to sell to a non-programmer. People use this computer, and I write software, but my audience is sometimes very small. At the same time, I'm part of a much larger audience of users, and a member of many highly fragmented communities. Some are millions, most have never met.

I wanted to write this post without a web browser. Google tells me there are two options; I'm sure that there are more, but reallistically there are two paths: Windows Live Writer and Blog.gears, both of them use Web components, and one must actually run in a web browser (though supporting offline operation.) I was planning to document all of the software that I've installed, so that I can find it again after I've lost it. I'm deleting it... the computer is nearly full, and I want to make sure that people can use it without running out of space.

Plus, I have too many development environments and backup schemes. There's something to be said for redundancy, but when it impacts your productivity, you need to take a hard look and make some decisions about what needs to go. On Jupiter alone (10GB) I have DriveImageXML, BitTorrent, CoLinux with ArchLinux, the FactorCode VM, a Ruby environment with some gems required by Substruct and whatever else I've been testing on this machine (Python has already been deleted), SSH clients for Git and for personal use, as well as Subversion, with finally Groovy, Griffon, and Apache Ant.

I also forgot to mention WatiR, the Web Application Testing in Ruby framework... and this fabulous collection of software known only as VENUS-736, for the size of the archive at the time the release was fixed, 736MB. I'll be totally honest, it was only 208 until I added a movie. You like movies, right? I think you ought to watch more movies, that's why I included it.

10GB is about half of the largest quota I've allocated in my new schema for system backups, so I'll stop the listing there, and post again once I've got it all copied somewhere safe. Somewhere safe is the RAID5 array at the office. It's especially safe today, since the bootloader failed, and nobody else in the office is trained to bring it back up. (Nobody that I would trust, anyway.) So, I'll go turn the crank a few times and say Hi to my friends at Venture Creations, and my 11 readers at SixthLayer (you must know who you are?) will hear from me again pretty soon.

The Mall Store Promotion

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:53:19 PDT

You've got $80 in your pocket, and you don't need a telephone-phone? I want to offer you my promotion. Meet me in the stairwell in half an hour. Take your phone with you and I'll take your money, you can get another one for a hundred bucks if you pay the contract. Keep paying the contract, after they raised the price. It's my insurance policy. You've got deep pockets, right?

Do you wanna call me, if I'm only gonna take your money? No, you're expecting me to call you, and you think I'm gonna need a phone for that. So, give me your phone and I'll pay the bill. Tell them I already paid it, and they'll go away. Tell them to take your name off the list. Then, ask for more help, and see if you get.

They already got your social security, and you can't ever have it back. Go ahead and throw my phone in the river when you're done with it. It's prepaid.

Thanks!

File Sharing Distro Round-up

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:27:13 PST

I'm overextended, I've got computers in too many places, none of them are secure server cages, and I need to protect my data. This computer under my desk is protected, but my desk is in a partially secure area; someone can walk by and shut off my machine, and I'm dead in the water until I get back to the office and turn it on. Worse, they could steal it!

They probably won't steal it.

My next computer is this laptop. This laptop is falling apart; I used to take it with me everywhere, now I just don't go anywhere. I've got this desk, nobody else wants it, I just leave the laptop here and work out of a single desk. It's not a reliable server. I used to run Subversion off of this machine by VisualSVN, but I shifted some data around, and now it doesn't work. The ports aren't listening, they'll have to take the disk home to get access to that.

Finally, there's my house machine; it's running Debian, it's got several chroot'ed environments, there are a handful of system services that don't come up unless I determine to use them, some of them run on conflicting ports, and most of them have issues stemming from the fact that the machine runs behind two firewalls. Not a big deal; we can forward ports left and right, but it should really connect with a VPN so there's a single point of contact in case the node vanishes from the network. If I go, it probably comes with me.

Or who knows, they might even buy it?

Great, I have lots of computers, but we need to tag assets, so they don't get lost, or accidentally misplaced. My buddy Pete has got a machine that he wants to put in a cage upstairs, the server cage, exactly the perfect place to put a safe backup data store. He's pretty sure we're going to have to run Windows. I'm still jockeying for Xen, so we can save on licensing and keep our hardware maximally utilized, but VMware has this concept of infrastructure machines that are not workstations, and I'm planning to run with it.

We're going to have to prove a list of assets and an automated collection process for the backup server, or Pete's not going to be interested. He's definitely not interested in buying a car that's got a little hole in the gas tank, and he's probably not thrilled about the idea of sharing such that his resources could become unavailable on-demand by someone else's request.

Who would want to have that? Today's business is built on downloadable, freely available systems with promotional, marketing, and educational materials supplied by Accellion, T-mobile, UserScape, VMware, rBuilder Online, cryptographers at large, and the many generous donors that are part of the Open Source community!

Listen, OK Here...

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:27:37 PDT

I'm gonna be straight with you. I've got a certain budget for food and entertainment (and if you talk to the starving people in Nigeria long enough they'll tell you, "We are very bored! Food is our entertainment!") and just because I spend it with you does not mean you're special.

I'm not Will Smith. No man is an island. I've got to get done the things I've got to get done, and to some extent doing extra past that level is not going to deliver any tangible benefits to me. Sure, there's speculation and I might get something incredible accomplished by working long hours...

But come on! You only live once, and I could die tomorrow. So, it's better to document everything thoroughly, or they're going to have a hell of a time untangling my mess after I'm gone... right?

Lets have some fun with this. You don't have to join the Debate club if you haven't already.

Could Be Worth a Lot

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:40:30 PDT

Remember: this information could be worth money!

So, I was trying out Fedora Core 9 on my new USB stick, which I can take anywhere and use at any computer to boot Linux without necessarily affecting the contents of the hard drive.

The mouse cursor was not showing up. This is a neat problem. Without two computers, it was a struggle to get into the forums and find the details of anyone with a related problem: the mouse is connected and when it's moved around the screen, it highlights selectables just like if it were a mouse pointer... but, you can't see it, and incidentally since its invisible, it also doesn't ever change shape.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Option "HWCursor" off

In a college full of smart people, some of them using Fedora Core, and certainly many of them using nVidia and HP computers, and still nobody in my office had ever seen this problem before, or was prepared to offer a solution.

This information could be worth money!

Career Coders get Tracks

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:11:50 PDT

I heard that Rentacoder.com has real money up for coding tasks, but I don't know how hard it is to please those escrow judges... assumedly, if they want to keep the programmers coming back, they will pay them. This is not necessarily a given! There are so many competing todo lists, I just heard about GTD Tracks from my buddy Brandon, I hope these tasks find their way to the top of my doings and may I please don't get distracted by shiny features or anything else!

This program called Tracks is all about David Allen's GTD methodology and implementing it into your working patterns, I've seen those programs come and go, the last one I liked a lot was actually called Trac and I still have a deployment of that kicking around on my network somewhere. It's about project management, yes, but Tracks acknowledges that it's actually about context management too.

My buddy Dan wants to put together a website. It's for an entertainment company that he's interested in starting, he wants to sell tickets to shows and maybe music, maybe online distribution vectors, maybe t-shirts, well there are plenty of people doing that kind of thing and it would be good to have some examples for him when we go and talk on Monday. I'll put together a document, which I hope he'll read.

See this is what you've got to understand first and foremost: your one big project may have several components, and you might not be able to convince all of your clients that they should foot the bill for each and every one of them. And, you might not be able to slip it past them in an extra fee, sometimes there is unpaid work that no paying clients will own up to having generated, and sometimes there is work that just doesn't get done for lack of time, funding, or interest.

Back to tracks: you should track it all if it's not too much trouble, for some contexts might eventually have to be cut, and this could result in alterations to the quality or delivery date of your final product. Maybe Dan's entertainment website doesn't need Java or Groovy for scripting, maybe it doesn't even need PHP! If all of the model content providers and sellers have outsourced the scripty functionality of their own websites, then maybe you're really just working on a design and a layout, and implementing it into pages of HTML and templates of CSS.

Maybe Don has been here before, where Dan and I are about to go... "all I know is, I hate writing press kits!" Time to get creative, and it should look nice.

There are also totally online communities where information is exchanged as currency, like ProZ.com, and RentACoder.com, even Dice.com and Monster.com fall into this category.

Can't I bill someone for all of this work? Who says there's not any money in Free Software? I heard about Inkscape and Scribus who both address this problem of layout, like Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Somethingorother, except these pieces of software are in the public domain and licensed under GPL, so there's not any Anteing Up to get started playing the game.

The output is the same around, Portable Document Format (PDF) except that predictably, Microsoft has declined to support the standard that everyone else is using. And who's to say they're wrong for doing that? They almost sold me a copy of their software, I had clients sending me files in Publisher format, am I going to tell them "no! take your proprietary files and green money somewhere else."

Maybe some day...

For now, I'd better work on my presentation. I don't think we need to clear the cache, if they want to steal my work from their cache, I think the browser has made it hard enough to do that, I should reward their labor with my data. There's nothing really stopping me from shooting back with a lawsuit, or some slanderous sounding remarks, much much later, when I find out they're using my copyright and they haven't paid the fee.

This should all be worked out on paper and ironclad before anybody asks too many questions, they could even reveal just how much you don't know and well that would be pretty embarassing wouldn't it? To my adoring fans, til Saturday when we speak again.

Jyte Claims: Kingdon Did Not Travel to New Zealand

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:46:19 PDT

There is a way to create digg buttons on this page, but it's not built into the interface in an obvious way, and now I can't remember how to do it. I think I created some files on my hobo11 server a long time ago, and I think I might even still have them, but at this point even Thursday is not being maintained regularly, I guess I'd better spend some time on my infrastructure.

I can show you instead, the Jyte service which was introduced to me by Korean MyID.net OpenID provider service. Here, I can claim that I am the person referred to by http://kingdon.myid.net/ and also http://jackthemac.myid.net/ -- it might not mean anything, because most Jyte users don't know who "I" am, and safe bet that most Jyte users also don't speak Korean, so they wouldn't gain any information by visiting either URL.

These URLs are known as OpenID providers, and by entering them into a web page that knows how to authenticate against an OpenID account, I have just offloaded the job of keeping Kingdon's identities by using some servers in Korea. By posting them to this page, I might have "signed" it or "tagged" it. The mechanics of OpenID are much more complex, and beyond the scope of this article.

DNS is a layer that counts as the world's central "claims broker" on names, it really obsoletes Trademark for the Internet community, except as a means of arbitration. DNS is wholly undemocratic. If you think that you have a claim to a name, your choice is to either pay a fee to the person who already owns the name

(hopefully, the common pool, otherwise the fee will be inexhorbitant or "negotiated")

OR you can escalate the matter to the International Convention for Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN) who will undoubtedly charge at least as much to provide an opinion. Which, could go either way.

The Domain Naming System is a cog, which could be a golden cog encrusted with diamonds, but instead it is a simple cog. The DNS infrastructure is an example of technological feudalism, where Jyte is an example of a social democracy for deciding truth and value of a "fact," such as ownership of a name.

Somebody has traveled to New Zealand.
Somebody named Jack has traveled to New Zealand.
Somebody named Kingdon has traveled to New Zealand.

All of these are statements, and I would bet that all of these statements are also true facts. With Jyte.com, you can make claims and tie them to an OpenID. Since I can have more than one OpenID, I can actually contradict myself using this service!

The value of such course of action is uncertain. One possible application is to reflect a changing opinion. At any rate, that two servers in Korea say a thing is true does not make truth, and does not necessarily mean that Korea says such a thing is true. That the fact is proven, and that the proof is satisfactory to someone knowledgeable, well, that also does not mean the thing is true.

North or South?
I have no idea. All I want is an IP address of my very own, that people will recognize as mine when they see it. Can you recognize your friend's phone number without Caller ID? Caller ID (and lets not worry too deeply about the reliability of the numbers returned by that system) is an expensive database to maintain. This is not a difficult claim to substantiate: first accept that all databases are expensive, add next that yours surely does not do everything you want it to do.

Of course, that a claim is popular and that a lot of people provide an opinion, does not mean that the truth of the fact is unprovable, or that the claim is really important. It could just be thought-provoking. Some of these popular claims are serving to discourage me from wanting to use the service!

There should be no space between a function name and the paren that starts the argument list.

This claim demonstrates an apathy towards political issues. What? Yes, if you have time to argue about whitespace, I posit that you do not care about politics. Should I add this fact to the database? This is getting tedious now.

http://rochester-arabic.blogspot.com/2008/04/blog-post.html

Kingdon Did Not Travel to New Zealand.

Now, we have opened up a number of issues: it is possible for one person to have more than one identity, and it is possible for a person to make false claims. In Prolog language, you store a database of "facts" and you query asking, "is this fact true."

Back to the matter of the day: what is the effect of posing a claim in the negative? If I am taking a survey, and I am asking "did Kingdon travel to New Zealand" I am sure to generate a different response than if I ask, "is it true that Kingdon did not travel to New Zealand?" One of these may be a leading question. You could also ask, "Kingdon, how was your time in New Zealand?"

And if you do ask that, I'll do my best to keep from looking frustrated and discouraged. I'm sure that New Zealand appreciates your tourist dollars, and I don't want to discourage anybody from visiting that great island nation of New Zealand. And if I say "New Zealand was great," you can bet that it's still great as it was when I was actually in New Zealand. That was, never. I didn't go to New Zealand. For real, it's a made up story. I don't know where it came from.

Peace Out Folks

The City I Hate

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:43:51 PDT

So it's nothing against this particular city... in fact I like the city, the people look driven, on a mission, enough are friendly, outgoing, it's not like the place is anything bad in and of itself.

Moed Kattan 17a: If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there.

So it has kind of an effect on us. There's a room with a stove, but we've got to go out and spend money on food in restaurants. There's a laundry machine, but we're putting on extra layers of deodorant to cover the smell of a third day in the same shirt. I hope this is worth it.

The bag of potatos is more than half full, but it's cold off the bay, I don't know the route of this drafty breeze. Wrap your head in a towel, your hair won't freeze.

Our neighbor on the left has a huge house with a beautiful clay thatched roof, I guess he's some kind of Port-a-Potty Prince on Jamaica Bay. Humble yourself man! Shit's pretty big business.

Return Your Library Books

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:09:02 PDT

BarCamp is only 2 days away, and the Google Summer of Code is accepting submissions for 2 more days after that! Got to get on task and get some things ready for press, I can't even hand out my resume these days because it's not current.

Starting a new tag on yebyen, and reviewing the tasks laid out for me by JackTheMac (that's me, who sits at home figuring out what's good on the computer in all his spare time for the pure enjoyment of it.)

Google Summer of Code

VIM: it holds a special place in my heart

Notes about a Casino Simulator

A casino simulator? What's that all about? I don't know exactly, but for some reason VMWare Server Beta download is constantly getting hung at only 24% completed, and I can't handle that.

Career Fair Spring 2008 - RIT

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:38:16 PDT

Met some interesting companies at the career fair today! I spoke with Paul from Thomson West, he looked to be in good health and representatives from Microsoft, Paetec, NVidia, Melissa from Yahoo, a company that manufactures artificial spines called NuVasive, someone from the USPTO, someone from Delphi (the automotive company, not the programming language), and a local company called Siteworx that I think I might do business with, most immediately!

I've promised resumes to a lot of people and should be receiving a handful of replies back from the friendly people that I spoke with, props to both Yahoo! and USPTO for providing quality dog toys, a blinking red bouncy ball and a laser pointer/LED flashlight.

Better yet, speaking with the rep from Yahoo I was able to identify a problem with one of their existing software products, pitch a solution, and make contact with someone who will take an interest in both the solution that I can present, and also my resume! Thank the lord for open APIs, without them us developers would surely never get anything done.

Word of the Day

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:59:05 PST

We are in business to make an impression! Money is for bean counters. Business is more like idol worship than it is like chopping wood or carrying water. Or is it?

仁 - rén: humane
厚 - hòu: generous, thick
仁厚 - rén hòu: clemency, clement

Happy Birthday Clement Chan! :D

"I need a gardener more than I need a handyman." -- truer words were never spoken

The Professional Issue Tracker

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:17:45 PST

I wanted to provide a review for the Jira product, since the Atlassian company has done so much for me! However I can't be arsed to download and install the product even if it is better than our current issue tracker, see the problem is that we have an awful lot of time and data invested into the existing system, and a migration is very expensive indeed.

People can't be motivated to maintain two systems, and some people just don't believe things are going to get any better will never be convinced to change their ways. I think those people are called BSD users!

On a small scale we can begin to use a new product, and I've already converted a few of my friends to a workflow using Yahoo! Delicious product, though I think we haven't shaken any money out of the computer from just doing that. Patterns and scales of use will shrink and grow as long as they are not totally stagnating the system stays alive; this is the way!

I have seen some forums and now using some tools with a more free and fluent workflow such as RememberTheMilk, gmail, Subversion, but these days most people are convinced that their problems will not really go away if they simply change over to a new system. I'm not one who likes to beat a dead horse, so I think they can stay on their old systems for now.

Still I don't believe that obsolete is a dirty word, and sometimes I like to get things done in fewest number of clicks, I will remain a software evangelist as long as I am using these machines.

Try these apps for a good time:

WordPress, Subversion, RememberTheMilk
and if you get tired of making items codes and words:
try Gimp 2.4

I hope that you are an artist and you send me a pretty picture!
Kingdon

Word of the Day

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:38:27 PST

Today's word of the day, brought to you by a tight development schedule and a high-frequency release cycle, is the word complicit. An individual is complicit in a crime if they are aware of its occurrence, have the ability to report the crime, but fail to do so.

"While employed with those people, I was complicit in the greatest failure in the history of mankind!" I'm not just telling stories people, this one should be in the history books if it's not already. The name of the failure? I'm not sure if it has got a name.

Employment? The wager? Something like that.

Cheers to the American University System! On account of some non-disclosure agreements that I have signed along the way, I'm sure that I'm not at liberty to disclose the name of the responsible party. Worse, I'm not sure that it would mean anything if I did.

The crime? Well I don't think it was a crime exactly... and it's not even that I never gave a report, on top of that. In fact at the time I was actively flailing my arms and ever since I have had the impression this is no way to do business.

Word of the Day

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:28:13 PST

Intractable - Some questions cannot be answered simply without making a leap of faith, for example: what will this object be worth 10 years from now? These problems can be said to be intractable.

How much value is in a 10GB tract of disk space on a RAID with an interface to Subversion that is access-controlled? Does the value change depending on the particular data contained within? Are there conditions under which a lower "acreage" would actually have a higher value?

How much cost variation is introduced into the equation as disks fail and are replaced? Is it possible that a malicious user could introduce so much excess throughput into the system that this cost is increased? If a fault in security is experienced, what are the potential risks to data? (espionage, corruption)

What strategies can be used to minimize these risks without impacting well-intentioned users? Can these strategies be implemented without the necessity of employing any full-time personnel? What if the size of the user-base is especially small? Can a fair price for such a service be defined on a small scale, if there is no set billing cycle, and if billing does not recur?

This is also what I do.

Private E-mails

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 12:18:30 PST

I'm actually still in decompression, the company is Thomson Legal and Regulatory (West) and I get the impression it's your standard Big IP Corporation.

I'm pretty sure there are actually a lot of lawyers in the company and I could probably get the advice I want, but if I start asking questions like those and demanding answers, they're going to think I'm looking for trouble.

Here's what I think: I'm going to keep a copy of EVERYTHING that I produce, and in case somebody asks, I'm going to claim it's my legal duty thanks to Sarbanes Oxley. They've shown me absolutely no evidence that anything I do is being backed up regularly.

I think that makes it my responsibility to keep an off-site backup. Of course it's not reasonable or necessary to assert ownership until "it" is worth money, and I'd better be fully disclosive and forthcoming about any associations I make outside of the company.

Another Critical Update = No Christmas

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:02:57 PST

About these computers: I have to say I got fed the biggest line of manure about how and what these things are supposed to do for me!

Another critical update from Microsoft and now all I know is my software repository is down, until the administrator comes back to his desk and flips a switch in the right order. And when I sit in front of this machine processing my task list, with each day that passes I tend to wonder to myself: where are my six-packs of rock-hard abs and washboard stomachs?

That's it! Tomorrow is canceled, unschedule my appointments and disable my spell checkers! Take everything important, wrap it up and put it all up in the Internets, because someone has got to take control of it all before everything becomes completely out of hand.

All I can say is that machines in my day ran with half as much memory at twice the speed, and they didn't complain about it either! Of course I don't think they had this sweet radio to listen to while they did, anyway remember while you do, these radios are sweet, and you have to guard them and protect them from invaders...

if those people get their hands on these radios, you don't want to know what they're gonna do! i am serious, and with all that you may now receive your quote for the day: the going rate for a sandwich and chips is three and a half dollars.

Massalam
Kingdon

Security < Performance

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:12:42 PST

Desktop applications in the same running session often have necessity to pass messages back and forth, to provide for a smooth and cohesive end-user experience, as well as to gather enough information to effectively manage process life-cycles. This necessity frequently runs at odds with the goal of information security.

Code and data carried on a USB key is guaranteed not to be accessed by anybody else, so long as the key is in your possession and any computers you use to access the key are not attached to a network. Firewalls establish network boundaries and proxy servers serve as access points by which such measures can be bypassed.

Passwords and encryption are sometimes helpful for this reason as well. Other times, we developers just build APIs so complex that the required cost of investing oneself to understand the goal of a project is actually higher than the value which can be extracted from within the boundaries of the development process.

Blogged with Flock

The Gap

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:10:01 PST

Currently spinning my wheels looking for the way to bridge the gap from software testing to increases in revenue. I'm not trying to say that there is no utility for software testers, or that software testers have no direct effect on revenue...

Actually this is exactly what I am saying. What is a software tester? If the software provided some benefit to the users that increased their bottom line, we would simply be called software users. If we were working on the API's and increasing the feature-completeness of our software, it would be called development. A software tester is something in the middle.

A person who doesn't know their software well enough to profit from use, or isn't smart enough to improve it directly... how discouraging that sounds! Rest assured, these jobs will still be here; software has faults just as people, and there must be someone underneath the productive developers to take the chopping block if the quality of released software is especially low! :-D

Anyway, we have got an especially low volume of distinct assignments from The Management since arrival and I'm taking this as a sign to mean that we testers had better know what to do with a code base. Word from full-time employees is that it can take as long as 3 months to get up to speed and really become a functioning member of a development team.

I can't stand the idea of spending 3 months as a useless living widget in a building full of widget makers, so I guess I'll have to work smarter and harder! The Blackjack project just got a new requirement for cross-platform execution, so I can continue development on my own time. That way I'll have something left to do when I run out of rooms to clean in my house.

FolderShare

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:57:56 PST

So my buddy Dan told me about this awesome program called FolderShare... and I don't know if I'll ever look at another Network File System again!

No seriously, that's how good this program is. You can build a network of your own computers that all replicate files back and forth automatically, you can set restrictive permissions for a user that allows addition but not deletion or editing of files, you can do everything remotely that you would do locally if you configure the app another way. Best of all, it seems to work seamlessly around NAT restrictions.

I doubt this will get past the Thomson corporate firewalls... and that's a damn shame, I sure hope the app works internally at least! It just does what it sounds like, share a folder, and it does it extremely well. Revision history is another thing, and I'm keeping Subversion around for this purpose... and the presentation layer is born! Sweet.

Download it here.

Blackjack Simulation

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 07:53:43 PST

I'm working on a simulation of Blackjack to remind myself of how a program with business logic would be constructed. There are a couple of simple classes in package casino, including Dealer, Shoe, Card, Table, Player, Hand, Chips (aka Bank), Door, and optionally Cashier for converting from one type of currency to another.

Players enter the casino through the Door with a certain amount of money in their personal Bank, case the Tables which each have a single Dealer and Shoe, and a finite number of seats. Player joins a Table and places a bet. Each Player Hand is dealt from the Shoe, then a brief exchange between Player and Dealer decides whether any more cards are dealt into that Hand. The process is repeated with the next Player until the value of each Hand is determined.

The Dealer then completes the transaction by dealing out his own Hand, comparing the value of each other Hand on the Table to his own Hand, and making any necessary adjustments to each player's Bank. Players decide whether to play another Hand, either placing a new bet or leaving the Table, and for as long as this pattern continues another Hand is dealt for every bet. When a Player has had enough, he can proceed to the Cashier and/or leave out the Door with his money.

With the assumption that not every Player is smart, we can fairly assume that the casino will not run out of money and it is almost pointless to maintain a central bank; you can only watch as the balance increases, and as it rises, so does the number of Players who have been bankrupted by the house. This is not the goal of a good casino, and such a statistic would only serve to make the owner feel guilty! Adjust the scenario to allow smart players who can count cards, adjusting their bets based on the probability of winning each hand, and your casino owner may begin to feel compelled to introduce door guards and pit bosses.

The simulation results will tell us if the reasonable casino owner has real cause to be concerned.

My Thoughts on Drugs

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:06:13 PST

As long as drugs are here you better pay the electric bill!

I mean, there are two ends for a drug vendor, either dead or in jail. As for the rest of you...

Personal Area Networks

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:52:15 PDT

Going to invest a little time to learn a radical new network and the code that backs it: the BluetoothTransaction (or HiptopTransaction) is all about Personal Area Networks. The only connections that are established are between paired devices that are each zero hops remote, meaning the whole network generally has one hub (the computer or the phone) and connections are not usually routed from machine to machine, though data may be.

This introduces all kinds of new opportunities to obsolete protocols in small-scale networks where technologies are exploited to their fullest potentials, including potentially such notable protocols as DNS, DHCP, and even perhaps TCP. More reading is necessary to say whether I am talking out of my ass or saying something meaningful with this. The address space is seemingly more like MAC hardware addressing and IPX protocol, and less like IPv4 or IPv6.

Some links are included in my Del.icio.us feed and there is a lot of background information on the Danger Developer Zone. The first article in the series is going up here on the KPB Code blog. From the Danger docs, this one looks like the biggest mess of difficult information to process.

Hello My Business Student

kingdon@tuesdaystudios.com (Kingdon Patrick Barrett) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:21:51 PDT

This is a note from a student who says he's working on some projects he intends to monetize. What should I tell him? I think it's OK to allow for-profit usages in academic contexts. He paid his tuition, so technically he has paid the bill for access to the software.

So is there line crossing that mandates another new purchase after graduation? I think that the answer is no, and I think that software licensing fees are enforced on developers through obsoleting libraries.

If that is so, then it's also true that a steady flow of sales for new computers running Vista is necessary to keep Microsoft in business. And yet adoption is not happening in academic Computer circles!

Upgrading a computer's operating system is expensive, and can result in the loss of your private data. The same student who hand-picks every component of his computer and purchases them unassembled is likely to run a pirated retail copy of Windows XP. Without purchasing a DVD Writer, he is unlikely to ever pirate Windows Vista of his own volition.

It's my passion in life to deliver a copy of Windows Vista to that wonderfully frugal, self-amused, possibly also piracy free, long-term Microsoft development technician, and show him how to use it. If he reads the license agreement like he's supposed to do, then I'm sure he'll know he's supposed to pay Microsoft some money.

Microsoft, are you as smart as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com? When did we buy their software? Every time it didn't cost us anything but a click. How do we pay for that? This is another question altogether, and I'm still looking for a good answer myself.

read more | digg story