Devin on Earth

I just did a very difficult thing: I withdrew from an overdue RPG writing project that I thought would easily be within my capabilities and that turned out (for many reasons) not to be. I should have done this months ago; I did not because of pride (I’m a writer; I can do this, no problem!), unwillingness to give up on a dream (but I’ve always wanted to write for this company!), and fear of further corroding an already tarnished reputation with this company. On the other hand, I had to do it tonight because it has been hanging over my head for months and I start three days of vacation.

The whole point of this vacation is to take a few days where I don’t have to worry about my day job so I can take a running start at the massive piles of unfinished personal projects. It didn’t seem right to put off the inevitable and keep this project hanging over my head when I’m hoping to wake up tomorrow and start on the projects that I can get done. I was originally going to take five days, but it turns out I’ll be heading to an Exchange conference here in Seattle all next week.

While I’m not happy about facing up to the fact that I was not a suitable author for this project, I’m not totally destroyed. The Cookbook finished the copyedit phase a few days back, we’re heading into QC1 next week (we read over the PDF mockups and have our last chance to correct errors), and the book’s page on the O’Reilly website is finally up. I’ve resolved several logjams in my fiction work and now am reasonably free (once I get the pile of pending projects shortened) to jump into those stories, including the next few chapters of Silicon Cats.

Here’s a question for you: should I just leave the first three chapters up as a teaser, or should I post them all until I manage to sell it to a publisher? I’m inclined to post the whole thing in three-chapter chunks as I get them finished.

Alaric has joined what is now a three-generation tradition for male Gangers: shaving our heads. See the results here. My note to school on Monday (so they didn’t call CPS and file a complaint that we’d joined a cult) follows:

Just a note to let you all know that Alaric has not joined some space surfpunk band, nor has he announced his intention to relocate to Dagobah and use the powers of the Force to raise X-Wing fighters from the swamps where confused Tatooine farmboys landed them.

He has been begging me literally for months now to shave his head just like I do. He has been needing a haircut lately, so last night, he assured me that he still wanted to be completely shaved.

I never knew I was raising the Dalai Lama!

If we’ve joined any cult at all, it’s the “Women will pet my head when it’s bald” cult.

Treanna has joined our little blogging community with a gripping tale of kites, Nature, loss, and recovery. I’m really proud of her; she wrote the initial draft of her entry in Notepad.

Once she’d finished, I went back through it with her to suggest improvements and grammatical corrections. In the process, she started mastering the use of a dictionary as a tool for finding out how to spell words and made some important decisions about her authorial voice (the word choices are all hers, based on her responses to questions I asked her about what she wanted to say and what she wanted to leave unsaid). This is incredible work and we’re really pleased at her level of interest, her ability to concentrate, and her obvious pride in the results.

I don’t brag about her nearly enough.

Remember my previous post about Microsoft Data Protection Server? Now I can talk about it a bit more in-depth. Heck, even The Register is talking about it. Microsoft has changed the name of the product; it’s now Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). Because I’ve been working on a DPM project, I’ve known about the name change for a while. Now that DPM has gone beta, Microsoft updated the site with the new name. This is the first application, to my knowledge, that requires Windows Server 2003 SP1.

Paul wrote the overview paper that’s on the DPM site. I worked with Paul and the incomparable Jim Boyce to produce the papers that explain how to integrate DPM with assorted backup systems. As usual, we got to work with the talented and dedicated folks at Microsoft; they gave us excellent support, technical expertise, and feedback all through the project. I worked primarily on the DPM and Veritas BackupExec paper and the DPM with Yosemite Backup paper. Although I helped with some minor touch-ups, Jim wrote theDPM and Windows Backup paper.

I found an unexpected but welcome perk with this project: getting to work with the fine folks at Yosemite Technology (hello Daniel, Alan, and Ken!). I’d never used their Yosemite Backup product before this project, but I’m definitely going to be giving it a closer look in the upcoming weeks. Through my years as a sysadmin, backups and restores have always been a chore; something you do because you have to, not because it’s sexy or fun. I caught myself having fun with their product and their people were always a pleasure to work with. Alan deserves special mention for going above and beyond the call of duty; he actually returned my calls from the beach on his day off. More about Yosemite in upcoming posts.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, DPM is a client-server product that allows you to define protected volumes and shares on your production file servers. The DPM agent replicates protected data to the central DPM server according to the schedule you define (as often as hourly); the DPM server stores these replicas. This replication happens at the file block, so only the data that is actually changing gets replicated. Once the data is safely replicated, DPM creates snapshots of the replicas according to a separate schedule. These snapshots can be used for end-user point-in-time recovery of files. Not only do you protect your data from loss events, you gain file versioning capabilities on all of your DPM-protected servers. When you want to archive your data to tape, you use a DPM-aware backup system (like Yosemite) or the included utilities to create a special backup snapshot of your replicas. The backup happens directly from the DPM server, which means you can do it in the middle of the day. DPM is the backup window killer.

DPM is a joy to work with. The actual protection process is extremely simple: install the DPM client on your file servers, define your protection groups (a collection of shares and volumes that have the same policies defined), and start synchronizing your data. This product really makes you sit up and take notice of the Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology, as it extends it across the network to allow you to effortlessly create and manage point-in-time copies of your data (even if it wasn’t originally on a Windows 2003 server).

I found that it was actually harder to install DPM than it was to use it, and then only because it has some hefty dependencies. DPM requires SQL Server 2000 (plus service pack) and the SQL Server Reporting Services (plus service pack). It makes for a long install process, although the wizard-driven installer does most of the heavy lifting of configuration. If you’re having flashbacks to installing the MIIS Feature Pack, don’t worry; DPM installation is a lot less work. You owe it to yourself to grab the beta and look at this product.

It seems I’m not the only one who recently Switched. John Scalzi has succumbed to the sweet lure of OS X. It’s funny that e-mail was his killer app, because as I stated previously, Microsoft Entourage (their answer to Outlook for the Mac) was one of my main motivations for wanting an OS X box.

Not my weekend for computer issues, so far.

• My Mac mini has been experiencing some weird display problems — the ViewSonic LCD flat panel I have would randomly lose the display and not be able to get it back again. At first, I thought it was related to the KVM switch (allows you to share a single set of keyboard, video display, and mouse with multiple computers; many machines can be picky with lower-end KVM switches), but I kept having the same problem with a direct connection. The problem appears to be heat-related and seems to be centered in the DVI-to-VGA converter the Mac ships with (it only has DVI output but comes with a converter so it works with regular monitors). Luckily, my display accepts DVI input, so a trip to the office later, I have the ViewSonic and the Mac talking directly over the DVI cable. So far, so good, and I not only got some necessary server upgrades done at work, but we snuck in a trip to Costco as well…


• …only to find the DSL line had been down for about an hour when we got home. I’ve been having some ongoing troubles that the upgrade to 3.0Mbps was supposed to solve. Indeed, I no longer have the packet loss and latency issues that I’d been seeing, but my DSL modem has been losing synch with the DSLAM (the equipment at the telephone central office) for ever-increasing amounts of time. My ISP has been good about tracking it down and got Verizon to send out a technician earlier this week. This particular technician, Bob, has been here before and he is one of the best they’ve got. We pretty quickly determined that my DSL modem was of a model with known issues (even though it’s techncially compatible with my line speed) and swapped it out for a different model, and all seemed good. Nope. Neither my modem nor my spare would re-synch the line. It’s now about an hour later and my ISP finally did something (after a reboot of my firewall) to get my connectivity back up, but I’ve got another ticket in with Verizon. I am starting to hope they once again managed to fry the DSLAM card; they went through quite a few of them on my old DSL line because a manager got it stuck in his head that my inside wiring was faulty when it really turned out to be mistaken wiring in the central office. (In point of fact, Bob tested my wiring while he was here. He’s never seen a line as clean as mine. Hah!)

We slept in late but I still feel like I need to head for bed early. Too much to do; miles to sleep before I go.

Update (Sunday 1:27AM): The DVI cable seems to be doing the trick, and we’re back online after a few stern calls to my ISP got me in touch with someone at Verizon who knows what they’re doing, who was able to research and figure out that they were doing some emergency replacements for the entire DSLAM shelf (holds a bunch of DSLAM cards; each card handles 12 lines) in my central office). So I’ve got Mac *and* Net. Life is good again.

Okay, after my first three days as a Mac user, I think I’m ready to
start commenting on my experience so far. General impression: the Mac
doesn’t have nearly as many sharp edges. I mean that literally, BTW;
almost every native Apple control has rounded corners, the fonts and
graphics all look like they’re anti-aliased, and stacks of windows on
the desktop have successively deeper layers of shadow. Everything just
feels smoother, including the animations. It’s a very polished, hip,
craftsy kind of feel. Jumping back to a Windows box already causes a
few seconds of cognitive dissonance with a small part of my brain
wailing, “Why’s it so ugly?”, which is not at all fair because XP actually does a lot of the same things (2003, on the other hand…is chunky).

I’ll break my detailed list into cool stuff and annoyances.

Cool Stuff:

1. Exposé. Oh, my. I think this feature alone is
   worth switching. If you’re like me and have a ton of windows open at
   the same time (and the way the Mac works, I think more average Mac
   users work this way than the average Windows user, who in my experience
   has maybe one or two windows open at a time), this lets you press a
   function key (or move your mouse to a specified corner of the screen)
   and have the Mac show you thumbnails of all the windows. Click one, and
   boom, that window is now active.
2. This gift from Trent Reznor. GarageBand is a kick-ass app for creating music and it came with my Mac.
3. Having a decent version of Unix underneath a
   nice-looking, stable GUI. BSD rocks, and the OS X GUI so completely
   kicks CDE, GNOME, and KDE all hollow. They even manage to do some
   really complicated stuff in a relatively clean and simple fashion, like
   X.509 certificates (used for SSL and digital certificates).
4. The Dock. It’s a combination Quick
   Launch/application switcher; you drag programs to it so you have it
   available for a one-click launch, but it will add currently active
   programs. Made even better once I figured out the equivalent of the
   Windows Alt-Tab combo, so I can switch between apps with a keyclick.
5. Having files that are smart enough to associate themselves with particular apps without requiring specific filename extensions! What a concept!
6. Microsoft Entourage rocks. I want Outlook to grow up and become Entourage. WebDAV rules, MAPI sucks. ‘Nuff said.

Annoyances (yes, there are a few):

1. The Mac mini requires a USB keyboard and mouse.
   Unfortuantely, the only ones I have handy are a Microsoft Office
   keyboard and a Microsoft mouse. I like some of the extra
   features (the rollers, the back/forward buttons, etc.) and even with
   the Mac OS X drivers from Microsoft, they flat-out don’t work right.
   Worse yet, keys like Home and End
   don’t work (except in Microsoft applications). I’ve lost access to all
   of my keyboard shortcut skills, ones that I’ve nurtured through Windows
   and every version of UNIX I’ve tried.
2. Speaking of keyboard skills, why the aitch
   can’t Macs use the same damn Control-key shortcuts everyone else does
   instead of Command and Option? Having to retrain my fingers for
   Command-C and Command-V for copy and paste is pissing me right off.
3. And another strike against Microsoft — why
   does Entourage have to use the same separate certificate store that the
   Mac version of IE (which sucks!) does? And then, why doesn’t it get it
   right? After figuring out the right combo of tools to run to import the
   intermediate CA certificate, IE will open the given HTTPS site without
   issues. Why the hell won’t Entourage?
4. The Dock is nice, but I really want a
   simple way of seeing just the programs that are open. That’s all.
   Command-Tab switches between them, but sometimes I just want to see
   everything running without having to upset the status quo.
5. Why the heck do I need to have every new
   remote-mounted volume added as a new icon to my desktop? I can open the
   Finder window and select it there. Can’t I shut that annoying behavior
   off already?

I’m sure there’s more, but this is just a start. Paul doesn’t need to worry about me losing my Windows skills anytime soon, but I’m definitely grateful to him for helping me start down the path.

Most famous Switch ever: Anakin Skywalker.

My mom made the cover of the Foothills section of the Arizona Star today. There was a photographer at their church last Sunday and Mom got captured on film.

It’s a somewhat charismatic worship service — they’re a Vineyard church. So if you think I’m weird, I come by it honestly. Way to go, Mom!

Okay, this is really cool and creepy at the same time.

My Mac mini showed up this morning, and I promptly installed Office 2004 so I could configure Entourage (the e-mail client that unlike Outlook allows you to have connections to multiple Exchange servers at the same time) and get to work. I’ve been poking around at Mac OS X during the day and discovered that Apple included a speech-to-text module in the operating system. This module is easily accessible from any application; just highlight text, tell it to start talking, and you’ll get a pretty decent reading. They’ve got a bunch of different voices to choose from, mostly silly.

One of the cooler ones is Pipe Organ. It’s a deep bass voice with low pipe overtones, and the sample text sounds like it’s singing a hymn. What I didn’t realize is that the voice always sounds like it’s reading from a hymn; it re-uses the musical inflections of the tune instead of trying to develop proper speaking inflections. The result is something oddly like computerized Gregorian chant.

So I promptly pointed Safari (the web browser) at today’s readings in the Episcopal daily lectionary, selected the text, and let ‘er rip.

There’s a new Exchange security update (MS05-021) out; there is a potential for remote code execution. There are updates for:

• Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 3 (update of MS04-035)
• Exchange Server 2003
• Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1

Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 are not affected.

Details:
The flaw allows remote SMTP sessions to run code in the context of the SMTP service if they exploit a buffer overflow in the proprietary Exchange X-LINK2STATE SMTP extension. On Exchange 2003, the vulnerability cannot be executed by anonymous users; attackers must be authenticated (and according to the bulletin) would need to be granted a level of trust normally given to other Exchange servers in the organization. The Exchange 2000 hotfix updates the level of authentication that Exchange requires.

ISA 2000 and ISA 2004 SMTP filtering/SMTP publishing can help mitigate this flaw, as will disallowing connections from anonymous SMTP sessions (this will, of course, prevent the bulk of incoming external SMTP mail). According to KB 812455, the X-LINK2STATE verb only requires a single reply and the maximum size for both is 1,024 bytes, which seems to fit the critera listed in Using the ISA Server 2004 SMTP Filter and Message Screener for allowing the addition of the X-LINK2STATE verb to ISA 2004 SMTP filter. [Editor: I have not tested this approach; if anyone knows of a reason why it won't work, please let me know via the comments.]

The bulletin also gives a procedure to un-register the XLASINK.DLL, which prevents updates of link state information over SMTP and requires Exchange to fallback to Active Directory for routing information. Because the flaw is in an Exchange SMTP extension, the underlying IIS SMTP service is not affected.

Get this now and apply it to your Internet-facing Exchange servers. Issues like this, by the way, are an excellent reason for not using Exchange on the edge of your organization, or for heavily restricting which SMTP extensions are active on your edge Exchange machines. If you’re running MSBA 1.2.1, you’ll be alerted about this patch. [Editor: Am I the only one who wishes that Microsoft would start linking some of the excellent tools they've got out there, like ExBPA and MBSA, without requiring MOM as a full-fledged management framework?]

Update: Thanks to the message forums at Tom Shinder’s isaserver.com site for all things ISA, I found out about the ISA Server Preventative Measures page at Microsoft. It gives clear, simple directions on configuring ISA to block a number of threats, including this brand-new paper on blocking MS05-021.

John Kerry may have exposed the identity of an undercover CIA agent during open testimony in Congress. Ace of Spades says “This will be the first and last time you ever hear about this. If it can’t be used against Bush, then revealing the name of a covert CIA agent just doesn’t matter.”

I’d like to think he’s wrong, but I don’t have much faith in either party these days, so unfortunately, I doubt he is. I’d love to be wrong.

I’d like to challenge my fellow members of the Indy 500 weblogs
to cover this with the same sound and fury that you covered the Valerie
Plame affair. This is a great opportunity to gain credibility by
showing we care about principles, not parties, and that we’re just as
willing to hold “our” guys accountable as we are the “opposition.”

Update:
This post from Michelle Malkin links to sources that show four previous media citations of the agent’s name. Sloppy reporting on the AP’s part, and we need to turn up the heat on them for once again mis-representing the facts. But this doesn’t change the fact that Senators Kerry and Lugar were not paying attention and need to be held accountable for their mistake, in light of the incredible shit-storm that was raised previously.

Fair is fair.

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Atom Bomb of Enlightenment.

Get yours.

Neither Stephanie nor I are pretty when we cry.

If you’re drawing a blank on why the above line makes sense in a post titled “It’s My Party,” you’ve obviously never seen the movie of the same name starring Eric Roberts and Gregory Harrison. This movie is not everyone’s cup of tea — the story is about Nick (Eric Roberts), has just been diagnosed with Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML), a condition that attacks the brain and quickly destroys the victim’s sight, memory, and other brain function. Brandon (Gregory Harrison) is Nick’s ex-partner, who broke up with him a year before when he could no longer face living with a boyfriend with AIDS. The movie centers around a two-day period where Nick holds a farewell party for his friends and family. Having seen AIDS claim the lives of too many friends, Nick is determined to say farewell to his loved ones before the PML reduces him to a vegetative state for another few days of life.

Lots of controversial issues in this movie: homosexuality, right to die, assisted suicide, religious beliefs, estranged relationships, and parents who think that life would have turned out differently for their son if only they’d done something differently. Yet the script does a deft job of weaving through these issues to present us with a picture of a man who, while frightened by the thought of dying, is more frightened of being unable to let those close to him know how much he loves them when he goes. There is a lot of tension surrounding Nick, but he moves through it all with a direct yet compassionate sense of humor, cutting the tangles of jealousy and bitterness while helping people to come to acceptance of their loss. The final scene with Nick and Brandon is one of the simplest and most touching goodbyes I ever hope to see.

Some might be tempted to dismiss this movie as another film that proves Hollywood is out of touch with the lives of the majority of America. It is, after all, just a movie about a dying gay guy (yes, I have in fact heard someone describe this movie in just those terms). To them, I would ask what they were afraid of, if they are scared to see “a dying gay guy” facing his end with as much dignity and love as this movie shows. This is not a movie to watch in order to wage a philosophical or religious battle. This is a movie to watch to be reminded how deeply you care for those in your life, how much pain they would feel if you were gone and how much you would feel if they were gone. It is a movie that urges us — compells us — to reach out to others; it directs us to be peacemakers and bridge-builders rather than cling to our hurts and wounds.

There are a lot of people in my life that I love. I don’t think I tell them that enough. I hope that if I ever faced this situation, my party would be as full of people who loved me as Nick’s party. I hope that I would be as full of wisdom, humor, discernment, and ruthlessness as Nick was — able to help people let go of the grudges and disputes. I hope I would have made such an obvious difference in the world around me.

Since I’ve been rooting around for good example skins and skinning references for Community Server, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and start keeping a list of all the resources I found.

I’ve posted the result over on my work blog and plan on keeping it updated regularly.

(The new skin, BTW, is the Iroha gunjoh skin. Very tasty.)

I’ve taken the plunge into learning how to create skins for Community Server. My first attempts will be aimed at getting the basic aggregator pages modified to fit 3Sharp as part of our pending upgrade from .Text to CS, coupled with some custom blog skins. I’ve also got some work to do for my personal blog, which is going to be part of a larger community of blogs, galleries, and shared forums whose other members will include my wife. That’s a lot of skins.

The goal is to be able to start writing and posting some decent tutorials and references that will fill in the gap for the lacking documentation. That’s part of the fun of being a tech writer; you see great software that is missing equally good documentation and your fingers itch to start writing.

In the meantime, let me leave you with my current list of CS add-ons, skins, and tutorials since the doc wiki doesn’t seem to be updated that much. I really don’t like wikis to begin with; if I want someone to come along and edit my work, it’ll be someone like Phil in whose skills as an editor I have faith. I’ve done them as an article so I can come back later and easily keep it up-to-date.

I made a small and unintentional contribution to the Notes roadshow just now. John, Paul, and Greg are currently in Washington, D. C. giving a demo; I’m at home, working away on some papers when my phone rings. I can see from the Caller ID that it’s from Microsoft, and it turns out to be Paul.

Paul was talking to me through his Thinkpad latpop, having clicked on my contact info in Outlook to link up via a PSTN gateway (he was surprised to have me actually pick up since he wasn’t expecting the gateway to be live, but we rolled with the mutual surprise). There was a weird sort of lag where I could hear my voice being replayed in the background, but it wasn’t too bad, considering how really cool the whole thing was. Open your laptop, click on a contact, be talking to them even though they’re using a POTS line.

If you have a Lotus Notes deployment and are interested in getting the most out of it in conjunction with Windows and Office, you really need to see this event. I think you’ll find at least one cool and valuable thing to take away from it, and knowing the guys at the office like I do, you’ll find more than one. And if your surprise live demo person says that, you know it has to be true.

I’ve bragged before about having the best job ever, but it’s official. And why is that? Because my boss informed me today he’s put in the paperwork to purchase a Mac mini for me.

Drop-shipped to my house, since that’s where I’ll be using it.

Best. Boss. Ever.

Keeping up with Microsoft security and support information can be tricky, but Microsoft provides quite a few useful websites and tools you can use to make the job easier.

• The Microsoft Security Site. This site gives you links into Windows Update, Office Update, the latest security incidents, and even an RSS feed for the latest security updates.
• Pre-canned KB searches. This is probably my favorite tip, because I spend a lot of time digging around in the Knowledge Base to find the details I need for the projects I work on. I’m sure you already know about the Knowledge Base. It’s great when you know your problem and need a solution, but trying to use it to browse information is like drinking from a firehose. The Microsoft Support site offers a variety of pre-canned searches that help you save time. You can bookmark these searches and know that you’ll have all the relevant KB articles at your finger tips. Unfortunately, they’re somewhat difficult to find; the only one I currently have bookmarked is a list of post-SP1 hotfixes for Exchange 2003.
• Product Solution Centers. Microsoft provides a handy central hub for all of their product solution centers. You can go to the hub at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/selecthub or you can bookmark the centers for the products you’re running.
• RSS Feeds. Hey, I just learned this one myself! Microsoft offers RSS feeds for new KB articles, organized by product. Get the list at http://support.microsoft.com/selectindex/?target=rss and add your product feeds to your favorite RSS aggregator.

If you’ve got any more useful sites, tools, and techniques for staying current, I’d love to hear about them. And send me any of the KB canned searches you can find; I’m collecting them into an article that I’ll keep updated.

It was a good weekend. Between a wedding, church, and a long-overdue visit from one set of the kids’ godparents (who decided to take our family out to the theaters to see The Pacifier), got lots of non-computer stuff done for the first time in many, many weekends. I didn’t even read my blogs, let alone post to mine.

Without further ado, a grab-bag of stuff that jumped out at me as I was catching up tonight with three days’ worth of blogs:

 

• The death of the Pope. He’s been a strong leader for the Catholic church, but there have been some spectacular failures on his watch as well. I’ve been uneasy at all the glowing media coverage I’ve seen of his death; looks like I wasn’t the only one.
  
  
  
  • Patrick Nielsen Hayden shows us a couple of thought-provoking posts by Ken MacLeod (A canticle for Wojtyla) and Jeanne D’Arc (John Paul and Tom Friedman)
  
  
  • Christopher Hutchens of Slate offers a more critical look at John Paul II’s legacy
  
  
  • Mark A. R. Kleiman admonishes those who would nay-say the Pope to wait for a more opportune time. I disagree; it was practice of Roman emperors to have someone walk along with them to remind them that they were human and mortal even as they were being cheered and praised by the crowds. I think it more honest and healthy to remember a man fairly and without glossing over his faults and failures than it is. John Paul did great things during his years on Earth, but he was a man; as Catholic tradition teaches us, he also was a sinner, redeemed by the grace of Jesus Christ. Let us remember his good by honoring how far it took him from the times when he did wrong or allowed it to be done in his name; the contrast makes his accomplishments all the more astounding, as it does for us all, and gives us inspiration to rise above our own failings.


• Canada is taking it on the chin in the blogosphere and deservedly so. Their political leaders have apparently forgotten that politics are politics, even in the middle of secret hearings on corruption, and that bans are made to be broken.
  
  
  
  • Captain Ed tells us about a stunningly stupid move of censorship from our friends north of the border, in a vain attempt to prevent their own citizens from reading the testimony of Jean Brault.
  
  
  • Colby Cosh provides more detailed thoughts on the publication ban. (Both links thanks to the Instapundit)


• Two interesting non-political links from Ken Wheaton:
  
  
  
  • The Old Negro Space Program, an award-winning mockumentary of the space program that never was
  
  
  • Part 15 of the Nondating Life talks about the importance of punctuality in dates

 

Enjoy!

If I’d had any doubts about whether the right thing happened in the Terri Schiavo case, they are rapidly disintegrating. Teresa Nielsen Hayden recently posted a fragment from the Guardian Ad Litem’s report in which it comes to the light that the parents admit they would not have honored Terri’s stated wishes to not be kept alive even had they been aware of them.

Even more damning, though, Meredith Tarr posts this wonderful news in the comments. A fine grasp of ethics is now on display, as the many people who donated money to help keep Terri alive will now get spammed and bombarded with junk mail as their thank-you.

That’s class.

Thanks to Alistair (an old net.friend from the long-ago days when I was still a practicing BOFH and denizen of the Scary Devil Monastery) and Ken at Telligent (the fine programmers of Community Server), the problem has been cleared up and anonymous posts are once again enabled.

Thank you, Alistair and Ken!

Charlie Stross goes posthuman.

My favorite line is the crack about the temporal vortex and needing the combined efforts of Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Bear to free him, and not just because I’ve met Vernor Vinge in person (although he is my favorite science fiction writer and one heck of a nice guy.)

[Editor: This post was originally posted last night, but for
some reason wasn't reliably showing up in the outgoing feeds. Those of
you who have already seen it, I apologize to both of you.]

Pat Sajak, known to many as the host of TV’s The Wheel of Fortune, has a blog. It’s a damn fine one, too. He recently wrote a very good piece on why he no longer argues with Liberals. Read it now; he makes a very valid point.

Okay, now that you’ve read it, I’d like to point out that he doesn’t
take his argument far enough. Pat has his finger square on one of the
major problems we face as a nation today even while continuing to
indulge in the very behavior to a lesser degree. It’s called polarization,
or very simply, “us vs. them.” I don’t know who started it — and I
honestly do not care — but the American political process today is
filthy with the practice of polarization. Everything gets cast in terms
of black and white; you are either for us or against us; if you’re not
part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The Republicans are
all conservatives; the Democrats are all liberals. All conservatives
want mandated school prayer and evolution thrown out of the classrooms;
all liberals want the legal right to kill off their vegetative gay
spouses.

How did we get here? Good question. It would be tempting to give you
an easy black & white answer, but then I’d be doing the same thing.
In reality, there are quite a few factors.

It starts with our two-party system. While we have far more
political parties than two, the stark facts are that there are now (and
for the forseeable future) only two realistic choices for political
parties: the Republicans and the Democrats. At times in our history,
there were significant differences between how the two parties acted.
You’d never have caught a Republican president enacting some of the
measures that FDR pushed through in his years in office, for example,
and even as recently as the ’80s, there was a clear difference between
Reagan’s politics and those of his opponents in the Democratic party.
As our politics have gotten progressively more polarized, however, the
differences between the parties have become harder and harder to
discern.

Add in the big media conglomerates. Quite frankly, polarization sells.
Bread and circuses have long been a favorite of those who would control
the masses, and polarization accomplishes that nicely. (Look at the
minsicule, nay non-existent differences between the various chariot
racing and gladatorial factions in Rome for a chilling object lesson.)
The more we make our target seem like the Other, the less time you
spend checking what we say. I don’t think there’s any malice involved
here; I think it’s simple human behavior. The less you have to compete,
the more likely it is you’ll stop working to your very best. Big media
companies have killed off their competition and as a result,
journalists have gotten lazy. This, by the way, is why bloggers piss
off the big media; we are lean and hungry. We’re willing to dig, we’re
willing to work, and we don’t have any editors to be accountable to.
Since most of us don’t derive a living wage from the sales of our
writing, we don’t work under the same imperatives. By and large, we
gain our following by finding and amplifying a common voice, not by
creating one from whole cloth. If we cheat or cut corners, we’ll lose
our readers.

Next cause? Information overload. We’ve got too many sources of
information, far too many bits of data being flung at us. Everyone is
clamoring for our attention. How do we respond? By looking for the
viewpoints that reinforce the way we naturally think. We want
validation and the comfort of knowing that we’re not standing alone in
how we look at the world. We’ve got a wealth of information available
to us, but to make best use of it requires the willingness to be wrong,
to hold final judgement on our opinions until we’ve weighed the matter
from all sides. Our educational system hasn’t been teaching us the kind
of critical thinking we need to do this well for years.

So, we end up with Skins vs. Shirts, Red States vs. Blue States,
Rocky vs. Apollo Creed. (Remember that Rocky and Apollo ended up being
friends? We should be so lucky.) Bloggers aren’t any better about
de-polarizing our communications; we’re just as likely to do it as the
next guy. Hell, it’s that validation thing again. You don’t see it
exactly the way I do? You must be an idiot, and a pox on your house!

Enough, I say. A pox on both your houses.

It’s time for everyone to spend five minutes in the corner, more if
you can’t learn how to disagree nicely with the other children. Don’t
get me wrong; I’m not against strongly worded disagreement. I’m more
than willing to call someone an asshole if I feel their beliefs and
behavior warrant it. What I am against is labelling everyone who is aligned with the asshole for that particular issue
an asshole as well. Our two political parties both need to sit the hell
down and shut the fuck up until they regain some common sense and
simple human decency. We need to relearn how to look for common ground
instead of searching for differences to exploit.

For some reason, comments aren’t working on my blog. This explains why I’m not seeing any.
I’m working to track down and fix the problem.

Steph has started indulging in a nice habit, now that I’m getting my home office more mucked out; she’ll drag her chair into my office, along with some craft project such as knitting, and sit with me while I’m working. We may not talk much depending on how hard I’m concentrating, but she provides a comforting presence.

Today I was writing up a reaction to CNET’s interview with ITU Director Houlin Zhao for my work blog and she made reference to the story thread with Peter and Valentine in Ender’s Game (written by Orson Scott Card. For those of you who don’t know (or remember) the plot, Peter and Valentine are the brother and sister of the protaganist. While Ender is off in space learning how to lead armies and kill things efficiently, they’re back on Earth building up a power base through eloquent punditry using anonymous accounts on the worlds’ information networks. Their most successful identities are those of Demosthenes and Locke, a virtual Odd Couple who are just about guaranteed to take opposing viewpoints on any matter.

Steph pointed out that between web forums and blogs, we’re starting to get to that stage. We’re a little more transparent than Card envisioned — as a blogger gets popular, the ability to find out who they really are (and more importantly, who is funding them) increases. Likewise, today’s bloggers are not nearly so dependent on corporate sponsorships to pay for their blogging, although there are a growing number of bloggers who are making money just by spouting their opinions.

[Editor: I'm down with that. Yo, phat cash deals for corporate blogging consluting? I am so there.]

What Card got right, though, is that more and more, a blogger’s real identity is less important than what they have to say and how they say it. You don’t have to be a law professor to be the Instapundit (hi, Glenn!)…okay, bad example, but you get my point. By the time the real identities of Demosthenes and Locke were unmasked in his book, they had such a loyal following that they were able to wield significant influence in global politics, even though they were children. Bloggers aren’t nearly that influential, but the constant clashing between big media and bloggers seems to prove that bloggers of all stripes are exerting more and more influence on the world around them.

Heady stuff. Where do I sign up? I’d be a benevolent dictator, I promise.

[Editor: I see I'm not the first person to remark on this.]

It probably comes as no surprise that even though I am a geek, I am also very American in many of my opinions. What got me thinking about this? A recent interview with ITU Director Houlin Zhao on the CNET News site discussing the likelihood of increasing levels of ITU involvement in the governance of the Internet.

It probably doesn’t surprise anyone that I don’t really think this is a good idea. But before anyone dismisses my opinions as those of yet another provincial American intent on denying the existence of anything outside of my national borders, read on.

First, let’s start with a few quotes from Director Zhao:

“According to ITU’s definition of ‘telecommunications,’ telecommunications covers almost anything. Therefore according to our own lawyers, the Internet is one of these telecommunications mediums. Others argue that ‘telecommunications’ is too wide and it does not include the Internet.”

Maybe my instinctive distrust of this statement does come from my American-bred distrust of government….but maybe it comes from my simple acknowledgement of human nature. The farther up any power structure you go, the more pressure you get from the temptations of wealth, power, and prestige. It takes a successively stronger sense of morals and ethics to withstand these temptations. At the same time, the nature of such power usually discourages the very people who have that strong sense of morals and ethics from seeking out those positions. I’m not saying all high-level executives are crooks — that’s demonstrably not true — but I am saying that over time you’re far more likely to get leaders who have learned the fine art of expedient compromise than who are staunchly committed to an unwavering set of principles. (For one thing, people who compromise tend to stay in position longer.)

“Anything which concerns the future development of the Internet will be part of the question of Internet governance. It covers a very wide range of topics not just related to technology development, service development, but also policy matters, sovereignty, security, privacy, almost anything.”

I have no reason to distrust Director Zhao. I also have no reason to trust that I will be able to say the same about his eventual successor. Bitter human experience has taught me that his successor is more likely to be a sinner than a saint, and I don’t think it’s wise to let someone with good intentions gather up the reigns to such an ill-defined range of power and make it easy for someone less savory to take it all away.

“I do not consider ICANN an enemy. We are founding members of ICANN’s Protocol Supporting Organization. I myself signed that paper on behalf of the ITU. We tried to support ICANN as far as we could, but on the other hand you see that ICANN’s mandate seems to be a little bit unclear…”

Okay, I spoke too soon. If Director Zhao doesn’t consider ICANN an enemy, maybe I don’t trust him. ICANN has already demonstrated a distressing tendency to be the lapdog of monopolists and big business, and with the various U.N. scandals of late, I don’t trust the international community to get it any better. There is just too much money involved.

“In my opinion, freedom of speech seems to be a politically sensitive issue. A lot of policy matters are behind it. It’s not in ITU’s competence, but of course we can make some contributions.”

…

“On privacy, I think that a lot of things are not related to technology only; those are policy matters.”

Director Zhao — and the recent track record of the ITU — makes it clear that he wants the ITU to only consider technical matters. This is a highly optimistic course to take, one that speaks well of his intentions, but is ultimately unworkable. You can’t effectively separate policy, technology, and politics, not on the international level. Heck, I have lost count of how many times have I written technical security guidance for Exchange or Windows that boils down to “get involved in the process your organization uses to create policy” because a very real technical issue cannot be effectively controlled by technology alone.

When technologists refuse to consider the non-technical ramifications of their work, they’re leaving the door wide open for others to abuse their creations.

“Some people argued very strongly that ICANN’s establishment based in California gives people some worries. This issue should be addressed. If ITU were to allocate addresses, anybody could have a choice between their national assignment or a regional or international assignment. That would be good for the development of the Internet.”

No matter where you base your central governing authority, some people will get worried. Geneva is no exception, nor is just about any other site you can think of. Whether you like California or not, they’re a far less repressive regime than most in the world, which means it’s a lot easier for ICANN to get on with business. (I just wish they would.)

“People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.”

These would be the same governments that are trying to weaken security protocols so that they can eavesdrop on Internet communications, prevent the use of encryption, and grant monopolies to businesses that are clearly unable and unwilling to deploy useful Internet connectivity to their customers. Sorry, Director Zhao, but I think that rules from those governments should not be respected, nor do they have any place in deciding the governance of the Internet.

ICANN has shown itself to be a player in the political game, much to the detriment of the Internet. Bad as they are, though, replacing them with an international bureaucracy just slows the whole thing down even further. The ITU has a lot of expertise that would be valuable for Internet governance, but it needs to be one voice among many.