Cox Crow

The latest dust-up over at Mark Pilgrim‘s place yielded some interesting product recommendations and a warning about Mail.app. Mark has switched his operating environment from the homogenous Apple orchard to free software on Ubuntu.

I like Ubuntu too, but what’s interesting about the switch is Mark’s reason: data integrity. Like any parent, he’s making lots of home movies, and is worried about long-term data integrity. It will be somewhat difficult to make fun of the children in front of their intendeds if you can’t play the video of them driving the car while wearing goggles and a swimcap — and that’s not even the embarrassing stuff.

When we moved last year, I uncovered a number of hard disks that I’d been saving for that time in the future when I would be able to move them onto long-term storage, but that time never came. So now I have a computer which won’t interface to disks in a format that it could read, and a computer that will interface to disks in a format it can’t read, and some miscellaneous floppies which can’t be read by the machines which still have floppy drives. That’s not uncommon. Bill has data on 12″ floppies which can only be read by one drive in one machine. What I’ve tried to do, not entirely successfully, since I was first bitten by the problem of data formats in college, is keep lots of copies of things, in lots of different formats, including paper, in lots of different places.

What kind of shoebox are you storing your photos in?

One of the things that Man can do — or maybe that’s Woman, since I’m not sure men learn from their mistakes — is learn from the mistakes of others. We can even learn from mistakes that are just written and then read. The government calls these “lessons learned,” but I don’t think the past tense is deserved.

Over at Subtopia they remark on the trend toward automated mechanized warfare.

Did we learn nothing from The Terminator, nothing from Berserker? From “Second Variety”? Or, even, from the Greeks?

The U.S. Census Bureau has provided statistics on how Hurricane Katrina changed the demographics of the Gulf Coast in what the Houston Chronicle called possibly the largest, fastest forced migration of U.S. residents in the nation’s history..

Most of the news I hear about folks who left the Gulf Coast concerns how they’re trying to get back. I’d like to see some analysis of where the migrants went who do plan to return. In terms of migration patterns, this event may be as seminal as the Dust Bowl.

I sent Rick a link to what appears to be a contract for concentration camps, he passed along a Metafilter thread about Spider-man’s revealing his secret identity when he endorsed the Super-Hero Registration Act.

I guess the Wal*Mart stopped accepting his Visa check card.

Denise Howell points out that Marty Schwimmer asks some tough questions. I have not been reading Marty’s work since he asked Bloglines to stop pulling his feed, and missed these.

But I’ve been wondering about these questions too. Let me know if you find any answers.

The Big Sister is doing puzzles in her coloring book. This morning, I happened to see what she was doing. The book is open to a page asking, Which one of these things is not like the others?

Instead of circling it, she wrote, This one.

There was a horrific hit-and-run manslaughter in New Jersey on the 18th.

The mother was walking with her 2-year-old son cradled in her left arm while holding hands with her 5-year-old daughter, witnesses said. They were hit by a westbound car from the left side when the mother stopped in the middle of the street and turned to say something to her daughter, witnesses said.

The mother and son were tossed to the side while the 5-year-old girl was thrown forward. The force of the accident knocked the children out of their shoes, which lay scattered at the scene of the accident.

Residents of the area have been asking for a traffic light for some time. I can’t help but think that if pedestrians were armed, then motorists might pause before barrelling over a blind hill.

What does it take to become a “New York Times best-seller“? The girls received A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children for a late Christmas present a few weeks ago. On the cover it claims to be a best-seller, and it is on the list, but this is the first printing. How was it known before the book went to press that it was on the list?

At work we are currently awaiting some answers to some questions, and I was explaining the delay over dinner in this manner. Suppose I wanted to talk to Great-grandmother. First I would talk to Mom, then Mom would talk to Grandmother, then Grandmother would talk to Great-Grandmother. And Great-Grandmother would reply in reverse. Or, if I wanted to talk to Grandfather, then I would talk first to Mom, and Mom would talk to Grandmother, and Grandmother would talk to Grandfather.

And the Big Sister said, If I wanted to talk to the Little Sister, I would just talk to the Little Sister.

Here’s a map of the Metro-North Rail Road lines. Find towns near stations on those lines with lower-than-average prices on their housing stock and which still have downtowns where critical services are within walking distance. Those services include groceries, banks, churches and schools. On the Hudson Line, I suggest Peekskill, Beacon, and Poughkeepsie; on the Harlem Line, Mount Kisco and Brewster.

via Planetizen, this BBC article on a Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace report listing failed states.

If they’ve failed, why do we not let them fall? Why does the world insist they fill their alloted lines on the map? Why is the territorial nation-state the sole acceptable political structure?

What next? War?

There’s absolutely no reason for your people to skulk about, electronically speaking. You can get all the information you need from us, probably a lot more accurately too. <snort>

from “The F.B.I.,” Lily Tomlin, 20th Century Masters – The Millenium Collection: The Best of Lily Tomlin

I’ve mentioned before that our new house is huge. The lawn isn’t as large as the last, but seems more so because it is less contained, surrounded by open space instead of walls and hedges. Last year the grubs ate the front lawn, but it looks like we’re bringing in a nice crop of crabgrass this season. And it’s time to harvest the dandelion greens already. Maybe there’ll be enough heads left for a batch of dandelion wine.

This lawn is what some would a “sales opportunity.” Back in my day we would be knocking — well, I wouldn’t; I would be reading, but my brother would — on the neighbor’s door, mower in tow, inquiring if any work needed doing. But the youth of today are shiftless, and prefer to leave such opportunities to the Mexicans.

In the past few days I’ve run across two new sites worth devoting some time too. And you have to devote time because they write long pieces, rather than these short snippets that I churn out.

First, via a comment at David Sucher’s City Comforts, comes Ipso Facto, by Eric Schaffer, a philosophy student at the University of Maryland. Mr. Schaffer covers a wide range of topics which happens to coincide nicely with my interests.

Secondly, via John Robb, comes Subtopia, a depressing chronicle of “military urbanism.” The articles examine the effect of military needs on the built environment, or, to put it another way, how the built environment is used to exert power.

Apparently the rest of the country is waking up to a small bit of information they conveniently forgot in their tizzy over the Dubai Ports World brouhaha. USA Today, and Good Morning America, and others have noticed that it seems the NSA is listening, and the telephone companies are collaborators, and, Holy Bat Guano, Batman!, it is 1984 here in Franz Kafka’s Castle. We await the trial.

Given my opinion of the competence of some of the parties involved, I expect something more along the lines of Brazil.

Last week there was a distributed denial-of-service attack against Blue Security. In response to that attack, the not-so-thoughtful folks there changed the DNS entry for the target of the attack to the IP address of another host. Specifically, they flooded SixApart.

First, I wouldn’t call this an “incredibly sophisticated” attack, since it simply followed the instructions of a DNS server outside of the control of the attackers. Secondly, the sysadmins at Blue Security apparently need to re-read their BOFH manual or return to the Scary Devil Monastery for instruction.

Changing the DNS entry to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 would have been much funnier [evil grin].

With either entry, the packets would return to the sending host, diffusing the attack back on the attackers. Some implementations handle the two addresses differently, but they are essentially the same. The former is the loopback interface while the latter is “this host on this network.” The change would not make the website available under expected name, but would remove the traffic from the network.

There’s a new restaurant on Disney property to try: Raglan Road Irish Pub and Restaurant. It is said that Irish food is from hunger. But I really enjoyed the bangers and mash, and what the chef did with the risotto my wife ordered. There’s more to the menu than breakfast and beer.

Last week’s theme appears to have been customer service. The following were all waiting for me in Newsgator.

• The Art of Customer Service, by Guy Kawasaki, via Meryl
• How not to inspire customer confidence, by Jon Udell
• Lazy Programmer, Didn’t Handle Exception, by Joel Spolsky

The latter two deal with programmatic oversights, where a simple step on the Company’s part would have saved tremendous headache on the Customer’s. As Jon puts it,

Imagine the behind-the-scenes drama: pointy-haired bosses, surly engineers, elusive vendors, tense meetings, recriminatory memos. Think about the poor soul who had to deliver this unfortunate message. And ask yourself: wouldn’t you rather just write one line of JavaScript instead?

Joel’s example I take personally, because my employer owns 60% of that mistake. But he evaluates the situation the same way that Jon did.

All of them suffer from hard working shlubs who are stuck in a situation created by incompetent managers, who have built esoteric mountains of complicated and brittle systems with a million moving parts, 3/4’s of them outsourced, where it’s simply impossible to get anything done.

Meanwhile, we had an interesting week at DisneyWorld.

We arrived in Orlando just before midnight. The last time we did that, it took almost two hours for Mears to find a vehicle to take us to the hotel. This time, Disney’s Magical Express whisked us from MCO to Lake Buena Vista is just over 30 minutes. The funny part there is that Disney’s Magical Express is operated by Mears.

At the hotel, we found that our reservations had been lost. (Though more likely they had been inadvertently cancelled by the travel agent.) They put us in a room for the night, and in the morning rebooked our trip. It will be interesting to see what happens on the credit card.

In the room, the carpet was soaked. The air conditioner was draining in the wrong direction. We were tired. We went to bed. We later mentioned the wet carpet; it was cleaned. It got wet again. We mentioned it again, and a night’s stay disappeared from the final bill. I mentioned it again at checkout just so the manager would have engineering check out the drip.

At the Magic Kingdom, we had fun!

On the way back from the park, I accidentally sent us on a tour of the monorail. By the time we got back to the correct bus stop, the line stretched back to the ferry. We waited, and waited. Eventually the bus coordinator called in a pair of buses and the line began to move, but it took almost two hours to get back to the hotel. Standing in line with two dead-on-their-feet kids is not fun, especially when your pregnant wife can’t hold one.

The next morning, we — and the other 5000 people in queue — mentioned that perhaps Disney Transport needed to plan better. A bit later someone called to discuss the situation.

After that, things ran smoothly.

And lest you get the wrong impression, the trip was a blast. We were on vacation, so how could it not be?