Stuff

In Office Space, I realized the “people guy” Tom Smykowski was probably a very important person in their software development team and it was a play on managerial ignorance.
Went to San Francisco and met some cool people at the Mozilla Foundation. I learned about their build process, got to meet people face to face, and we had some great discussions about UMO and Bouncer.
I got to see Sarah and Harri. Their cat has worms.
Businesses don’t get ‘open source’. Neither do most open source people.
Community development tools need to be created to manage distributed development.
Junior is meowing all the time and I don’t know why. I think it’s puberty.
How someone plays basketball is a reflection of who they are in real life.
Bush is going to make ignorant people in this country forget about the war that wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place. Unfortunately, having an election doesn’t mean much. Helping a country establish a government that can operate on its own, has electricity and provides for its people is another thing. Don’t be so proud yet …
In regards to Social Security, the “New Deal” will become the “Raw Deal”. Privatizing social security benefits people who have enough money and hurts just about everyone else (probably).
It always rains within 4 hours of washing your car.
Picasa2 is pretty cool.
Static variables are not global variables. If you think this, you need to sleep more.
Scott Kveton can traverse highway overpasses like a champ. He “don’t be needin’ no stinkin’ footbridge, sucka!”.
Beefy cheesy macaroni is a good soup. You can try it at Tommy’s (4th street, Corvallis) on Saturdays.
Don’t ever buy this heater from Black and Decker because it’s a piece of shit and will break.

If there is too much crap going on, just make a list.

Big Fish, Big Story

Big Fish is a story about stories. In the same vein as Picasso’s El arte es una mentira que nos acerca a la verdad (art is a lie that makes us realize the truth) good storytelling grips you, changes you, and lets you touch a world you would never reach following more conventional paths.

It’s a father and son story, really. The father reaches the end of his road, and having lived a rich life full of strange events, he always told the best tales. His son resented him for it; dismissed it as his father stealing the show with his lame-ass stories time and time again. And his son, realizing that he hardly knows the man he has called dad, sets to find out the truth.

And — I don’t really want to ruin it for you. The movie reminded me that fiction helps us define our world just as much as facts. Without it, we wouldn’t have non-fiction. Where would that leave us?

Sometimes fiction is just more real than what is real.

And There Johnny Was

Johnny Carson inspired many over his 30 years as host of the Tonight Show. I remember watching him when I was a kid, Ed’s stupid laugh, and above all that crazy fortune teller hat he used to wear.

In a way he’s a hybrid between today’s late night talk show hosts. He had the goofyness of Leno, the wackiness of Letterman, the sarcasm of Stewart and the self-depricating humor of Conan. He was a funny guy.

Not all of his life was laughter, though. He had his shitty times just like the rest of us. It’s probably why he put so much into his show, why he smoked, why he had to laugh. The human condition is enough to break you and lift you up at the same time. He saw it at its worst, and smiled at it. He made us laugh when we didn’t think we could.

Was Johnny great? I wouldn’t say he was a superhero or anything like that. He didn’t have one crowning achievment that sparkled like a firecracker and faded away in a second. He was a man who had a gift, and he used that gift to bring joy to others. I guess what amazes me is that he did it so well for so long.

Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing, you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined. – Johnny Carson

Mitchell on the Firefox Release

Mitchell Baker recently published a great recount of what happened during the Firefox 1.0 launch. It’s a good read if you have the time.

Like I’ve said before, it was a great community effort and it was encouraging to see everyone working together despite the divisiveness of our time. There is a lot of hard work to come, though.

Stop to smell the flowers, but don’t smell them so much that you get high and forget to keep going.

It’s-Over Time

Overtime is what people do to get the job done when 40 hours a week is not enough. Often times I’m not the first guy to claim overtime unless it occurs in 3-hour blocks or more. I don’t count minutes and think dollar signs. I count goals. Sometimes I have to give up some of my time to meet them. So be it. The money, when I deserve it, is a bonus. It’s a microcosm for darwinism in the economy. Bust your ass, get a little extra.

At least — that’s how it should be. It isn’t always the case. There are many people who don’t qualify for overtime who probably should as it is — and now we’re tightening the ropes? Huh?

The solution to an overloaded work schedule may be to add additional workers, but is it? Is the solution always going to be add another worker and pay them for 40 hours even if they only need to do 10 hours of work, or if they are not qualified for the job? There is a certain point where the overhead required to hire an additional worker, train them, then wait for a return on that investment (which isn’t always going to be realized) is worth the effort. Preventing all overtime should not be one of them.

The only reasoning behind the federal law passed is that in the long run it could force employers to hire more workers which may indirectly boost the economy.

That’s great if everyone has the same skill set, and any job can be accomplished by simply hiring another monkey. Of course, it sure seems like a certain job could be done by any monkey on the street. It requires no thinking, writing of speeches, judicious leadership — oh — and did I mention that you’d never have to claim any overtime?

Bush has some nerve supporting a bill that takes money away from people who work extra hours and are trying to get the job done and do the right thing. Worse yet, the bill doesn’t even really clearly state who it applies to. Human resources departments everywhere are scrambling to get a grasp on which workers this applies to and how to enforce it. Who pays for the confusion? Is HR going to work overtime?

This is one issue in a long line of things that piss me off about this administration. This labor bill is brought to you by the same assholes using the same backdoor methods as with the ironically named Patriot Act. Brought to you by the same people so concerned with their security they stuck the city of Washington DC with a $40 million bill for their inauguration celebration.

Yeah – I know – Clinton’s cost about as much. But he wasn’t at war, ran a good economy, and a certain national disaster hadn’t just happened. WTF?

And I read some bullshit talking about the celebration of democracy. Is this the biggest joke in the history of political government? We re-elect a failed administration because he caters to the ignorant, have an increasing debt, are in a war that was never justified, kill people who are different from us, hold a multi-million dollar party when the money could be spent on helping nations recover from what is one of the worst natural disasters in modern history, and we have a lot to be proud of?

On January 20th, think about what our country has done in the past 4 years to itself and to other nations. If anybody should be working overtime, it’s our leader. Instead, he’ll be on a ridiculous float. What a way to kick things off.

You could multiply my paid overtime on January 20th by infinity and you’d have zero. Regardless, I’ll still be at work after 5pm.

Oracle

I’ve been drumming on Oracle for a while trying to merge a PHP-MySQL application’s data with data available from an Oracle database server running on VMS.

I’ve learned about views, stored procedures, query efficiency and adodb as a result of my pains. I’ve been trying to use $db->Prepare() to do a query for a set of 351 local IDs as an alternative to using an IN() with 351 IDs as an argument.

So far I haven’t had much luck using Prepare() in a select, but I’ll keep working on it this weekend. Supposedly you should gain 20-40% performance over doing repetative queries because you are saving some overhead.

I had originally assumed that using the IN(), although somewhat costly, would be optimized on the database end and was a healthy alternative to doing 351 queries (because you save the overhead being wasted by doing multiple queries 351 times).

I do know this – that the view, which I don’t have access to, is terribly inefficient – each additional argument adds roughly .5 seconds to the overall query time using the IN() and if I do multiple queries I see a 1-second-per query situation. Seems fishy to me.

In other instances, PHP memory and database server cycles were saved when I used the IN() as an alternative to looping queries – which is something I almost always try to avoid. Both methods are killing my script, though, and the only difference is the view.

So – hopefully when I can get this thing figured out I will have learned a bit more about Prepare() and Oracle query efficiency. It could very well be that looping queries properly would be less of a hit than an IN().

IN() or Prepare()? More to come…

Amputated

“There was a time I could see. And I have seen. Boys like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs ripped off. But there isn’t nothin’ like the sight of an amputated spirit. There is no prosthetic for that. You think you’re merely sending this splendid foot soldier back home to Oregon with his tail between his legs, but I say you are… executin’ his soul! And why? Because he’s not a Bairdman. Bairdmen. You hurt this boy, you’re gonna be Baird bums, the lot of ya. And Harry, Jimmy, Trent, wherever you are out there, fuck you, too! ” – Lt. Colonel Frank Slade, Scent of a Woman

Some people will try to kill your spirit – but it only lasts forever if you let it.

Well, Maybe Not…

So maybe Peter Torr’s claims address some things that will never be resolved. Ultimately, you will never be able to fully trust anything. There is always some chink in the armor – which is why nobody ever guarantees that anything will be 100% secure.

Torr’s blog posts basically create fear, uncertainty and doubt about all binaries in general. But what is complete bullshit is that he pinpoints firefox as the source of this problem, when in fact he is merely questioning software distribution as a whole – which is something Microsoft has struggled with and still has not solved.

In the end, security is just an idea. It is even more a feeling than an idea. The sense of security is what gives consumers confidence in a product. The truth is that in most cases a reasonable sense of security is all anyone ever wants – true security is almost unattainable. You are always vulnerable to something.

To some, that is an alarming thing. But when you look at the definition of vulnerable, you begin to realize that the only way to be truly safe is to not be open. And, yes, in a way that philosophy is in direct conflict with the nature of the web and the nature of open source development.

Microsoft can safely assume that security means closing all doors, since that is what their business philosophy pretty much encourages. “Close all doors and capitalize on the bottleneck” would probably be their philosophy. Not only do they want you to be scared, they want you to pay to be safe. There is a lot of money to be made there.

I think the correct approach to security with software is the same as in real life. Use common sense, and when that isn’t enough make efforts to educate yourself. Don’t leave your keys in the car. Don’t leave your doors unlocked. Don’t trust strangers.

Of note is the fact that in real life most severe crimes are caused by someone you know. This is because trust opens you to harm. When discussing a central signing agency like Verisign, etc. you have to consider that if you empower a central point of trust it becomes a central point of failure. If you trust Verisign to handle all of your stuff, you become ignorant, and it becomes likely that something will fly in under the Verisign blanket and hurt you.

None of that means you have to live your electronic lives in fear of everything out there. Just be safe, man. Keep informed, don’t download random shit, don’t trust sites you aren’t familiar with, etc.

A part of that, ironically, is not trusting Microsoft, which is something Peter surely doesn’t mention in his article. Not using IE has been a great way to secure your computer. Not using Outlook Express is a great way to avoid complications with mail. Not using XP is the best way to avoid damage caused by viruses, etc.

Overall, you will never be safe, but you can do things to decrease the probability of being “attacked”. If you follow common backup procedures, then the worst case scenario is that you lose a night of reformatting your system drive. Surely it isn’t worth living in fear of the unknown for that.

Security is just a feeling, and if you accept that you are on the road to being secure.

Motivation

Peter Torr’s blog post on signing Mozilla binaries (Firefox, primarily) was a good article. Most people will flame it, but his argument holds some water. I respect his opinions and recognize the validity of his statements, especially considering his follow-up post, which responded to many of his Slashdot readers.

Overall, this is good stuff, it helps Mozilla become stronger in the long run and gives us additional motivation (there was already plenty) to “do the right thing”.

In the coming weeks we will be working on increasing the security of Bouncer in its coming version (v2.0) in addition to many other features (versioning, languages, statistics, statistical exports).

More to come, folks, doing the right thing takes time, and sometimes a little bit of pressure and criticism.

Late December

Today is the shortest day of the year. I’ll spend it all indoors at work. I’ve got no problem with that. It’s cold anyway.

It’ll be strange not being home. No NBA Live at Jon’s, no 25 ft. breakers at Waimea Bay, no fake christmas tree, no fireworks at Grandma’s. But sometimes going home is hard for me. It’s hard to see grandpa in his old age, hard to see my family for a little while only to leave them again, to see some of my friends a couple times and never really catch up.

It’s like a single serving of home; enough to feel familiar but not ever filling.

And I think this is frightening but natural at the same time. When you live so far from home you get desensitized to the holidaze.

It’s not so bleak. Not so fast. 🙂 Many times during the year I find cheer and joy everytime I call home, talking to Mom and Dad, talking to Grandma and Grandpa every other week even though I’m not sure if Grandma can hear what I’m saying, chatting with Kelly online everyday. My old friends, well, they’ll always be my friends. Next time we can almost catch up.

This year? A time for reflecting, really — a look back on where I’ve been and what I’ve been through and a long look forward at where I want to go and what I have to do to get there.

My mind is pretty full, and I know my family understands that. I will go home soon, just not right now.

Sad? Nah. Just thinking.

morgamic

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