Some notes I am still compiling. Source for information on custom reports.

Version 2010-02-10

Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Clever challenging of the recent SCOTUS decision that confers some rights of citizens upon corporations.  The ad, itself, I don’t find very clever, but the concept, definitely.

It’s too obviously satirical, and yet Murray Hill Inc. actually set up a paypal “support” link with the text “Murray Hill Inc. video program. This is NOT a federal campaign account or a tax-exempt donation.”.  So, they *will* accept money, but admit it’s *not* a campaign. Odd.

Links:  Murray Hill Inc. is launching the campaign with a website, Facebook page and YouTube video, products.

Paypal Images:

Murray Hill Inc PayPal

Murray Hill Inc, Support Paypal

Posted to the PragProg January Magazine (PDF epub mobi) forum

re: Andy Lester’s NY Resolutions
I find that my sense of contentment rests on having a combination of hope for a brighter future, a reasonable plan for getting there, and and reasonable standards in what I consider success at any given stage.

Let’s say I hope and plan on having my dream job by the end of this year. But, by relying on an idea of ‘dream job’, I am setting myself up for disappointment. My standards are too high and not well-enough defined. I would better serve myself by making a goal that is more specific and attainable. For example, I may decide that my goal is to have a new job or be in a more marketable place through developing my Ruby on Rails skills and getting involved in my local community. And so forth.

I may then say, that I would prefer a place that is more challenging, more social, has more room for creativity, and is good for my career, at an acceptable salary increase. But of these wishes, how much can I ‘settle for’ or achieve and still be happy? Setting reasonable goals and standards is key to feeling content about my progress.

Lastly, the well-known axiom “How does a project get behind? One day at a time” has a reverse corollary—that I should try to make regular progress towards my goal before time slips away, one day at a time.

Note: This applies to any kind of goal, not just vocational goals. Having reasonable standards is the key.

Far too many people still use easy-to-guess passwords. Admittedly, keeping track of multiple passwords for every occasion is difficult, but at least one’s universal password should not be easily guessable!

A lot of people like KeePass (portable) to securely manage their passwords, though I have my own system.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”

Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

…

Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou…  The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it.

…

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

One commenter also suggested this tool:  http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

January 12, 2010

On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life

I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives. That's how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december.

via On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life – This is so Meta.

I’ve noticed this as well, that Google Wave is excellent for collaboration.  A well used wave is hard to describe in comparison to email, IM, or other electronic communications.  A persistent asynchronous chat that can be played back or edited at any time.

However, Google Wave is still in preview and has serious Access Control issues.  Right now, anyone can edit any part of a wave and invite anyone else, or even make it public.  This makes it dangerous for any sensitive communications.

Have you tried ‘Mingle’ by Thoughtworks?

“As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”

While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.

via When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com.

Wow, a clinical psychologist that focuses on environmental issues.  I suppose I’m not surprised as my first experience of meeting a vegan was getting yelled at.

Mikey Hicks is 8-years old, was born shortly before 9/11/01, and is on the terrorist selectee list for extra screening when flying. Story: Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List

There are two problems with this type of screening that are well-illustrated in the article.

1) That the list’s only criterium for flagging a person is a name match. There are no other factors taken in account: not history, demographics, nor other intelligence. In one case, someone managed to avoid the list by changing his name. In effect, this renders the list totally useless in that it captures very high false positives and can easily made to result in false negatives.

2) There is no reason that this child has spent eight years, his entire life, on this list without some sort of effective recourse.

It points to a complete lack or interest or inability of our government to design an intelligent system.

My guess, is that it is designed this way so that no one actually needs to be trained. A computer flags the kids, and a TSA staff member does the computer’s bidding. There is no apparent place for the assessment of the TSA agent him or herself.

What a poorly thought-out use case.

Yehuda Katz recently posted “The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source“. His take on preferring MIT/BSD-type licenses over GPL-type licenses is interesting in its own right, but it is well-worth delving into the discussion in the comments.  Yehuda writes:

Starting out with the easiest, my first desire, to have my software used as much as possible, is most easily satisfied by an extremely liberal usage policy. Adding restrictions on the use of software I write reduces its adoption almost by definition.

Much more importantly, the same can be said about exposing code to real world stresses. By far the most important way to achieve this goal is to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to use the code.

If only 1% of all proprietary users of the source ever report bugs, that’s 1% of potentially thousands of users, as opposed to 100% of the zero proprietary users who were able to use the software under a more restrictive usage scheme. In practice, this number is much more than 1%, as proprietary users of software experience and report bugs just like open source users do.

The only real counter-argument to this is that by forcing users to contribute, some number of proprietary users will be forced to become open source users, and their contributions will outweigh the smaller contributions of proprietary users. In practice, proprietary users choose proprietary solutions instead when they are forced to choose between restrictive open source usage schemes and other proprietary software.

There is also much to be said for exposing open source tools into proprietary environments.

An article in the New York Times today battles a common meme that it is more ethical to eat plants than animals because they don’t feel pain.

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

I, personally, find arguments regarding sustainability and environmental impact as more convincing arguments for vegetarianism than the ‘animals feel pain’ argument. Perhaps it’s the scientist in me that daily remembers that that I exist in an animal body and have animal needs, and that, regardless of ‘higher’ impulses, I am constrained by my physical being and my evolutionary nature.

I am an omnivore. I have nutritional needs that perhaps can be met on a vegan diet, but it requires effort that I consider unnatural. However, I think people eat too much meat, and I still do not understand how a burger at McDonald’s can cost less than a salad.

Historically, for most people, meat-eating was reserved for special occasions. For better and sometimes worse, refrigeration and mass transit have changed the immediacy of eating a just-slaughtered full animal.

I think I would feel better about eating meat if I slaughtered my own animal, but until I get there, I am comfortable eating it rarely, but for health and other reasons.  It does not make sense to elevate one animal kingdom above another as more worthy to live just because we belong to it.

An ancient thought that captures the difficulty of our duality as self-conscious animals.  Psalm 8:

5 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
6 Yet Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
7 Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
8 Sheep and oxen, all of them, yea, and the beasts of the field;
9 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea; whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

Great Article From Testing, Testing
The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?
by Atul Gawande

At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.

America’s agricultural crisis gave rise to deep national frustration. The inefficiency of farms meant low crop yields, high prices, limited choice, and uneven quality. The agricultural system was fragmented and disorganized, and ignored evidence showing how things could be done better. Shallow plowing, no crop rotation, inadequate seedbeds, and other habits sustained by lore and tradition resulted in poor production and soil exhaustion. And lack of coördination led to local shortages of many crops and overproduction of others.

You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked. Farmers relied so much on human muscle because it was cheap and didn’t require the long-term investment that animal power and machinery did. The fact that land, too, was cheap encouraged extensive, almost careless cultivation. When the soil became exhausted, farmers simply moved; most tracts of farmland were occupied for five years or less. Those who didn’t move tended to be tenant farmers, who paid rent to their landlords in either cash or crops, which also discouraged long-term investment. And there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as “book farming.”

…

Things were no better elsewhere in the world. For industrializing nations in the first half of the twentieth century, food was the fundamental problem. The desire for a once-and-for-all fix led Communist governments to take over and run vast “scientific” farms and collectives. We know what that led to: widespread famines and tens of millions of deaths.

The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study “The Reluctant Farmer,” it all started with a pilot program.
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Knapp had discovered a simple but critical rule for gaining coöperation: “What a man hears he may doubt, what he sees he may possibly doubt, but what he does himself he cannot doubt.”

…
The program had no shortage of critics. Southern Farm Magazine denounced it as government control of agriculture.
…
As Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, points out, the demonstration-farm program was just one of a hodgepodge of successful U.S.D.A. initiatives that began as pilots…. The U.S.D.A.’s scientific capabilities grew into the world’s greatest biological-discovery machine of the time.
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(In 1927, Republicans, prompted by aggrieved New York speculators, managed to prohibit the U.S.D.A. from releasing the forecasts; the program was reinstituted three years later, following an outcry from farmers.)
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What seemed like a hodgepodge eventually cohered into a whole. The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn’t leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop of experiment and learning and encouragement for farmers across the country. The results were beyond what anyone could have imagined. Productivity went way up, outpacing that of other Western countries. Prices fell by half.

….
Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results.

…

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front. Government has a crucial role to play here—not running the system but guiding it….

….To figure out how to transform medical communities, with all their diversity and complexity, is going to involve trial and error. And this will require pilot programs—a lot of them.

Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf through it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

….

There are hundreds of pages of these programs, almost all of which appear in the House bill as well. But the Senate reform package goes a few U.S.D.A.-like steps further….

Which of these programs will work? We can’t know. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t credit any of them with substantial savings….

…

Cynicism about government can seem ingrained in the American character. It was, ironically, in a speech to the Future Farmers of America that President Ronald Reagan said, “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” Well, Lewandowski is from the government, and he’s here to help. And small farms in Athens County are surviving because of him. What he does involves continual improvisation and education; problems keep changing, and better methods of managing them keep emerging—as in medicine.

…

My parents recently retired from medical practice in Athens. My mother was a pediatrician and my father was a urologist. I tried to imagine what it would be like for them if they were still practicing. They would be asked to switch from paper to electronic medical records, to organize with other doctors to reduce medical complications and unnecessary costs, to try to arrive at a package price for a child with asthma or a man with kidney stones. These are the kinds of changes that everyone in medicine has to start making. And I have no idea how my parents would do it.

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We’ll also need data, if we’re going to know what is succeeding. Among the most important, and least noticed, provisions in the reform legislation is one in the House bill to expand our ability to collect national health statistics…

….

…At this point, we can’t afford any illusions: the system won’t fix itself, and there’s no piece of legislation that will have all the answers, either. The task will require dedicated and talented people in government agencies and in communities who recognize that the country’s future depends on their sidestepping the ideological battles, encouraging local change, and following the results.
…