Well here’s your head start for 2006… start memorizing now!
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… then Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda….
Sheesh.
What’s most amazing to me is that we grapple with energy crises on two fronts… not enough petroleum, and too much solar in the form of tropical storms. Seems like someone clever ought to be able to figure out a way to get that energy into a more usable form.
You know, a bus that’s five minutes late is a minor inconvenience.
A bus that’s five minutes early is worse than useless.
Well, the local newspaper is at it again, wielding statistics like a blunt instrument trying to support one of their pet theories.
To quote:
Five years ago, the Florida Legislature repealed a state law that required motorcyclists to wear helmets.
Three years later, according the the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motorcycle-related highway fatalities had increased by more than 81 percent in Florida.
Gainesville Sun, Jan 19, 2006
They go on to blame lawmakers, the insurance industry, and the guy behind the tree for not fixing this tragic situation, wringing their collective hands about the undetailed and undocumented surge of vegetative motorcyclists kept alive by machines at hideous public expense.
Talk about leaving some facts untold.
Here’s a brief list of the questions that must be answered before anyone can begin to understand, or address, the issue.
And most importantly, and always overlooked,
How many accidents were avoided , because a motorcyclist’s view and hearing weren’t impaired by wearing a helmet?
The last one can’t be answered, of course– you can’t measure something that didn’t happen. But the point is, one should always consider carefully any such slam-dunk arguments before accepting them.
And the bigger point is this. I’ve read pros and cons on the issue, and with very rare exceptions, I choose to wear a helmet, because I believe I’m marginally safer by doing so.
I am proud and honored to live in a state where that choice is mine to make, where that responsibility is mine to bear.
I’ve never had anything against shock-jock Howard Stern. He’s witty and most of the stuff he does is just show.
But a couple of nights ago he was on Larry King suggesting that everyone should subscribe to satellite radio.
His proposal was that, for $12.95 a month, you could get all this wonderful content. And you’d spend way more than $12.95 just to go to the movies these days. And there’d be no commercials!
I shuddered.
That’s almost the exact same argument that the cable industry sold us to get us off broadcast television.
Then the SuperStations came along, and the cable companies didn’t block their local ads. So more cable channels started running ads.
Now we pay way more than the cost of a movie just to watch television– and there are more ads than there ever were on broadcast. And we are paying for the “privilege” of watching them.
So, Howard, how long before an advertising-driven channel creeps its way into the xmsphere? Something really valid like NFL or Major League Baseball, or just a really popular talk or music program?
How long after that before there are as many ads on satellite radio as there were on broadcast radio?
This isn’t just complaining about advertisments. It’s a possibility that should concern everyone, and here’s why.
If advertising dollars move to the xmsphere (and the cable example suggests that, eventually, they will) then those dollars will not be going to independent broadcast radio. And advertising is their major source of income. The few that survive will be forced to join a conglomerate just to stay afloat.
That means that there will no longer be a delivery method for open, unencumbered, independent speech. You want to listen to your music and talk shows, but you don’t have the cash? Sorry, you’re out of luck.
And while your local broadcast station will still be around, they’re going to say-and-play what the home office tells them to… including the information that influences how you decide to vote.
So $12.95 a month for the privilege of listening to the broadcast that I now get for free? That’s a compelling offer, Howard.
But I have a better one.
Unfortunately I’d need to be on satellite radio to tell you what it is.
Well, days later we now have an Official patch for the .wmf vulnerability.
If the mere existence of such sloppy code doesn’t infuriate you, consider this: Every time you upgraded your Windows operating system, you paid again for that same busted DLL.
CTOs and CIOs shouldn’t be worrying about how to get past this particular crisis.
They shoud instead be considering two much more important questions:
First, what else is vulnerable that no one (yet) knows about?
Second, what would the impact on your business be if tomorrow you couldn’t run the OS you’re currently using?
My belief in the superiority of the open-source software model is no secret, so I’m going to pass on this opportunity to do some (well-deserved) Microsoft-bashing.
The most important point is this: If you’re overly dependent on a single point of failure– any single point of failure– you should be thinking about contingency plans.
In this case, a solution such as creating bootable Linux or FreeBSD CDs, or booting a small distro from the network, may mean the difference between hours of downtime and continuing to function.
As we wade into 2006 amidst a minor (or perhaps not so minor) Windows exploit crisis, one wonders at the plethora of clueless Web sites out there.
I’m stunned by the number of sites that are just absolutely broken for viewers without Flash. Big sites, too, sites that are paying for websters that should know better– sites like virginmobile.com, tlc.com, scifi.com, and hundreds more. These people have apparently never even considered that their sites should degrade gracefully.
The Flashers may well ask, “Why is this an issue for me?”
Well, first of all, you should generally try to avoid behaviors that are specifically denoted on Vince Flander’s famous “Web Pages That Suck” site. It’s just embarassing when someone sends that link to your boss because they’re frustrated with your broken site.
But much more important than that, you’ve created a single point of failure for your site.
Let’s say for the next zero-day exploit, Flash is the target (and a tempting one it is), and that there’s no easy patch forthcoming. Advice from the security gurus is simply, “Disable or uninstall the plugin until further notice”.
How long will it take you to rebuild your pretty, animated, multimedia site from scratch– in good ol’ HTML and CSS?
How long just to get a plain page up and working?
How many thousands of dollars of lost revenue will that cost your company in the downtime and will they take it out of your check?
Yes, I know it’s more difficult to work within the cross-browser HTMLspace. I know it takes skill and insight and experience and experimentation and compromise to get an attractive, intuitive design to work.
Guess what? That’s what you’re being paid for.
Since I write such myself, I have little patience for whiny excuses. And $DIETY help you if you ever have to defend a Flash-only site design from an ADA inquiry.
Putting the backup HTML version in place now is a win-win proposition– your non-Flash customers will appreciate it, and if Flash becomes an unexpected liability, you won’t have to scramble to recover.
But anyway.
You may have heard this before, but I’ll pass it on again:
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I have quite a few good rants built up, but I’m smack in the middle of redesigning and moving my Six Flags Atlantis Memorial page.
What brought that on was simple: Amazon.com didn’t send me a verification for my sister’s Christmas present.
Then I realized that Amazon was using my old Freenet address, which I rarely check anymore.
Then came the terrible realization that my Freenet account currently had no .forward file, and worse, hadn’t had one for some time.
So I logged in to the Freenet, and sure enough: Twenty-four thousand emails, 99% of them spam, 1% I that I really wanted to keep.
Well, normally this would be simple: use PINE mail to select on certain predictable (and usually naughty) words, and begin the mass deletion, right?*
Wrong.
I’m not sure if they have a governor that restricts cycles, or whether the machine is just so overworked that it’s not stable, or it’s just so slow that the threads are colliding.
But if you try to do any operation too big, it just kicks you out of PINE.
So over the course of performing a very large number of smaller batch deletes, I had time to consider whether it might be time to close up shop on the ol’ Freenet account and migrate the few remaining items (mostly the samples from the languishing but still progressing album Yellow Seven, the Atlantis Memorial, and maybe the Bad Poetry page) over to lucas-photo.com.
And that got me thinking that the Atlantis page is suffering from code rot anyway, and probably needs a complete overhaul in any case, lest someone see it and think I still write code like that (shudder).
So I’m rebuilding it.
So stay tuned.
* Now if you didn’t know PINE could do this, here’s the info: