Al Hoang

The New York Times has an article about Japanese cel companies combatting spam and viruses today. With the impending standardization of cel phone software this could prove to a nasty ground for virus writers as bascially today’s cel phones are basically computers.. just with specialized software. However, if the software becomes semi standardized then affecting lots of phones just got easier.

On a side note. Microsoft wants to get into the cel phone / PDA market with their OS. And looking at their fabulous track record for getting nailed with viruses AND also the prolificness of their development toolsets what do you think is going to happen? Thanks M$! We need more viruses. (not)

Link to Story

This story has been running on Slashdot which linked to a fortune article about Google and a little bit about Google and its pre-IPO state. Right now before it IPOs the founders seem to be very level headed people and try to “Do no Wrong”. Here’s some excerpts:

On Google’s website, under the heading “Ten things Google has found to be true,” No. 6 still reads, “You can make money without doing evil.” Not doing evil is a common concern around Google and loosely translates into avoiding anything that mars Google’s user experience, “even at the expense of revenue,” says Cindy McCaffrey, Google’s marketing chief and an early employee.

….

For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon?America’s top engineering schools?even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average.

…

But the fight to stay at the top will be brutal?a sobering thought for those waiting to buy in. After an IPO, Google will have mounds of cash, but money alone won’t hold off the likes of Microsoft. It’s easy to picture Microsoft using its Windows monopoly to lasso people into using its search?even if its search is slightly clunkier than Google’s. That scenario won’t happen, says Brin.

WHile I definitely find Google really cool and would really like to apply to work for them. The statements about their academic snobbery in the hiring process completely turn me off to even trying. As much as I understand academic credentials can mean something. They can also mean a lot less than you think sometimes. The other thing that is sobering is to hear about their talk pre-IPO. Since they are privately owned and Brin and Page get to have a large say in how the company goes right now they can steer the company. However, once you IPO and sell the company to the public stockholders most of them are going to be looking at the bottom line from quarter to quarter and demand results. While I find that attitude annoying and determinental to many companies long term benefits it is the way things are run. So I find Google about to head into a quandry if they IPO. The founders will probably get frustrated once they try to do something the stockholders don’t want to do (especially if it doesn’t make money for 2 quarters) and probably eventually just sell out their holdings and do what many other geeks that have made it big with an IPO. (Do stuff they find interesting without having to worry about money). But it’s their unique stands that make Google the way it is so without the founders to steer the company Google stands to lose a bit especially if many competitors jump in.

However this is all theoretical. I could be completely wrong. But I have a feeling if the Google founders don’t manage their IPO carefully and manage their stockholders strongly they’re in for a world of disappoint and pain and eventually bailing out and leaving a very neat idea rudderless.

Link to Story

Slashdot carried this story and I was very curious to read it. My thoughts are that if you want more awareness on putting REAL broadband to people in the states the government right now is not the place to look. Maybe in 5-10 years they’ll see this as a perception problem. But for now I don’t think so.
Larry Lessig has a great idea. Let people own the fiber. Once you put it in the realm of the people on an area who will probably be using the fiber you’ll see a bit more care for it.

Most economists would leap from the premise of a natural monopoly to the conclusion that such a monopoly must be regulated. But regulation is not the end that McAdams seeks. Ownership is. If a traditional network provider owned an AFN in a particular area, that network provider, acting rationally, would charge customers a monopoly price, or restrict service to get its monopoly benefit. But if the customer owned the network, then the customer could get the same access at a much lower price and be free of use restrictions. McAdams is pushing – and Burlington and other cities are actually deploying – customer-owned AFNs.

The point is obvious when you think about corporations. Boeing, for example, has installed a massive AFN on its campuses. That AFN enables the company to offer itself extraordinary network capacity at extremely low cost. Technically, Boeing is the monopoly provider of network services to Boeing. But as McAdams nicely puts it (so nicely that we might call this the McAdams theorem), you don’t monopolize yourself. Boeing gets cheaper services than if a network provider owned the same natural monopoly – indeed, vastly cheaper, McAdams argues, when you look at the efficiencies of AFNs.

Gee here’s a new perspective on the fact people don’t like cleaning up after themselves if given the chance to avoid it.

Bob Maderious will never forget the lease he brokered for property advertised as “plug and play” – only to find that it wasn’t.

“Cut it and left it,” said Maderious

Link to Story

Bram Cohen (Maker of BitTorrent) takes on Joel Spolsky (A well known software developer) on Joel’s Article on Leaky Abstractions. Some of the thoughts Bram has on the leaky abstractions article are well thought out and I think point out some of the dogma of the article and how Joel uses the example of TCP to try to prove something that Bram doesn’t feel it proves much of anything. I suggest you read both. I like Joel’s articles on software. Most of them are very pointed but tend to be right on the mark. However, as I’ve looked through more of Bram’s writing he offers a different viewpoint but also pointed and many things I agree with here. I have some more thoughts on both of their viewpoints but I think I’ll leave that to later. One difference in their viewpoints is of deployed softawre infrastructure thoughts (neither says it outright but if you read in between the liens you’ll see it)

Here’s an excerpt:

This is overly dogmatic – for example, bignum classes are exactly the same regardless of the native integer multiplication. Ignoring that, this statement is essentially true, but rather inane and missing the point. Without abstractions, all our code would be completely interdependent and unmaintainable, and abstractions do a remarkable job of cleaning that up. It is a testament to the power of abstraction and how much we take it for granted that such a statement can be made at all, as if we always expected to be able to write large pieces of software in a maintainable manner.

Link to article

Ask Tog has an amusing anecdotal letter on bad security practices and preaches the same thing about security is a process and must be all encompassing and not just focus on one small part.

But it is an interesting read just to review why you need to not think of just encryption or only part of the equation but the whole enchilda when trying to design a secure system. Here’s an excerpt:

They are fiercely into security, requiring no fewer than four sets of passwords to navigate their system. And why not? There are confidential patient records on those systems! By golly, they ought to have eight sets of passwords, and really make things secure!

So works the mind of a D’ohLTish security engineer, working feverishly away in his cubicle in the basement next to the steam plant.

But this is not just endemic to security. This is endemic to introducing a new system or tool. If you make the tool extremely difficult to use you’re guaranteed it will fail unless you try to cater to a small and specific audience that has enough background to take advantage of whatever features you throw on top of it. I’m always amazed at how people just don’t think about this aspect at all. If you want to make something widespread it has to be easily adopted by people the UI must be very simple to understand. Compare the earliest sets of VCRs or telephones to today’s button laden monsters. If the VCR folk decided to add all the features that you find standard on a $50 dollar one I’m pretty definite that adoption would have happened really slowly to non-existent. However, they made the right decision by making it very simple so people could pick up the technology and work with it for many years before adding more features than most people know what to do with.

Kudos to the Cincom SmallTalk Blog for this story

Ouch. But at least they’re willing to admit when there’s a problem. When you get high profile it’s not that easy to admit wrongdoing.

Some Debian Project machines have been compromised

This is a very unfortunate incident to report about.  Some Debian
servers were found to have been compromised in the last 24 hours.

The archive is not affected by this compromise!

In particular the following machines have been affected:

  . master (Bug Tracking System)
  . murphy (mailing lists)
  . gluck (web, cvs)
  . klecker (security, non-us, web search, www-master)

There’s an interesting article on how some company named Wallflower got started recycling LCDs from old laptops and adding some customizations and selling them as fancy picture viewers. However, once they got succesful they ditched the recycling of the older LCDs and went to more ‘traditional’ methods. Here’s an excerpt:

Left with nice cashflow from its rising order volume, and needing more certainty in its supply chain than Weird Stuff Warehouse could provide, Wallflower recently gave up on the whole recycled kick and started buying components from manufacturers, the way most computer companies do.

Frankly, it’s a little bit disappointing to me that they stopped recycling and just went to more ‘normal’ methods for acquiring components. That says to me that recycling products cannot scale past a certain number as it becomes too unwieldy if you’re trying to do business. Most techies have a passing interest in what happens to their comptuers when they said it to the big junk heap in the sky. However, most of them don’t really think about the whole cycle of that if they buy something use it and eventually toss it. That stuff must EVENTUALLY go somewhere. Most technology folks are too concerned with the imminent future (although I can say the way the market shapes things it makes it impossible NOT to be a techie and continuously look at the imminent future) and the gazillion variables that come with it than deal with the pile of stuff left behind.
Now that I’ve complained I can’t offer any good solutions myself. To recycle some of these parts requires a decent depth in understanding what the old hardware can do and the know how AND the extra equipment (yes it requires money and time to figure out what to do with these things) on how to take the components apart and use them in some new and hopefully useful way. And many times it will be a failure. And lots of failures tends to spoil hope. I know I’ve tried and failed to figure out what to do with these thing many times and I’m always disappointed. Each disappointment feels like an eventual buildup to just giving in.

I’m continuously thinking about the lagging end problem however friggin’ Moore’s law and consumer perception makes it nigh impossible to figure out what to do with these things as the type of stuff that keeps getting dumped on you is completely variable. But I keep trying because I choose to not dismiss it as a problem for ‘future generations to handle’. Hopefully, I’ll start coming up with something practical. In the meantime the best I can do is collect the parts and ponder and learn.

The Seattle Times has an interesting titled story called Reeling in what you want from the Web however at a brief glance all it really is about is about weblogs for those who don’t know anything about it.

I was hoping for more than just how weblogs work and how to use them as there’s more to the web than just the ever growing sphere of weblogging although quite a bit of new content does get thrown onto a weblog these days. But there’s more than flexibility in how the web works that weblogs aren’t the ONLY way to get information. It’s just that many news sites and journalists-wannabes or journalism-I-Want-to-
bypass-the-old-system-with-this-great-new-system-that-will-probably-end-up-
having-characteristics-of-the-old-once-it-gets-big-enough types are into the weblog thing now.

Link to story

I love how there is this impression that going to an Ivy League school is an automatic guarantee for getting a good job, good life, etc etc. While I won’t dump on that Ivy League schools tend to give an undergrad a very good education that’s not a free ticket to doing well. Now if you qualified going to an Ivy League school AND come from a family that has money then I’ll admit that tends to weigh the scales you’ll do ‘well’ in life.

Here is a story on what one Princeton grad is doing now. I really like her writing style. If you get the chance definitely get a look see. Sorry no quotes since I’m not sure what her standpoing is on excerpts.

Link to Story

Was just looking for more information on Mini ITX boards and saw a note about one of the contestants (Team LoGHIQ) accepted into the DARPA Grand Challenge. I poked a little more look to see what they had about the technology they were using when I noticed that the main contact person for the team is a RPI grad! Normally, I’m not utterly nutsoid about my alma mater. However, seeing folks who graduated from there showing up and doing something neat from the engineering perspective gives me that warm fuzzy feeling.

I mean when a majority of the tech news you read comes out from the likes of MIT, Stanford and all those big name schools it’s a nice break to see people from the Institution stake their claim in the world and make some name for it . God speed gentlemen in your quest to outgeek the geeks.

Update: Here’s a ZDNet Story on the DARPA Grand Challenge and Team LoGHIQ

Link to Team’s Web Site

Cnet has an interview going on with Bill Gates. As much as I’m adverse to Microsoft stuff I try my best to read what the head honchos are up to since it’s smarter to understand what they’re up to than stick your head in the sand.

I found this quote interesting. Especially if we pull it out of its context and put it in the context of offshoring and outsourcing:

The IT systems are your brain. If you take your brain and outsource it then any adaptability you want (becomes) a contract negotiation.

Some food for thought? Yep. Even if IT isn’t what your core competency is but you rely on IT to keep your business running these are words to think about. Sure outsourcing might save you a bundle now (and in some cases it’s the only way to survive certain situations) but in the future if you need changes that’s a renegotiation you’ll have to go through. (Most likely with a higher price).

Link to interview

Recently at an interview for a company I noticed that when they pulled out my resume and were using it as the standard template for what to ask me about. I noticed that all of my job titles were changed! They were interested in a UNIX Sys Admin type and it seems the recruiter I was working through ended up changing my job titles to pass through the keyword searches.

This ended up causing a lot of problems when the interviewer asked me about my job history and what I had done. For the past few years I have been working as a Systems QA guy for network equipment. I used a lot UNIX systems and administrated them for our lab on the side to ensure we could get work done. My main job was doing QA of course but I ended up picking up the slack of local network admin and UNIX admin on the side. When asked about what my job title was I honestly answered I was doing QA which caused the interviewer to backpeddle as they were staring at the title UNIX Sys Admin on my resume and wondering what was up. I ended up trying my best to explain I had nothing to do with changing my resume job titles and explained it must have been the recruitment agency that changed it. I do not believe in modifying something like your job title just to get into an interview however it seems the recruiter I work with does. This really got me annoyed as I like being up front with where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

It made me start thinking, “Do people do this regularly just to get their foot in the door?” If so, that really disgusts me. The job search/hiring process is not easy for both ends of the equation (for both the employer AND job searcher) without having to add in the extra variable of what I feel is dishonesty. I have warned my recruiter that if they do this again I will not work with them as this is akin to dishonesty. At first the recruiter didn’t think so however I really pushed the screws into them explaining that your job history is you. If you change around your job titles JUST to get an interview then that is dishonest to oneself and to the company you are applying for. This is not a valid way to try to get your resume through the door. Yes it is A way but if I have to start distorting myself just to get a job with company X. Perhaps, I shouldn’t work for that company since I’d like to believe that most people want to do GOOD working for a company not bad.

In the end I didn’t get the job because of ‘experience’ as a UNIX sys admin working on super large systems. I feel a little bummed about it but I guess they wanted to take the safe path and find someone who can claim they have UNIX sys admin on their resume for X years on large systems rather than take a chance. I find my skills section sometimes the hardest part to explain to interviewers that interview me since they want to compartmentalize me as one thing or another based on JUST my job title I’ve noticed and expect when I describe my work history to back up these conclusions. I guess there are people that do have that experience but how do you get started working on ‘large systems’? This isn’t something you can all of a sudden get without having worked in that type of environment. But I guess from the employer’s standpoint it’s easier to just match up the checkpoints and decide. Ah well…
Whatever happened to the job interview being a chance to show why you would work well in that position in spite of what might look like obstacles? Perhaps that is more my fault for not showing them?

In the end I still believe in honesty is the best policy. Leave distortions to the politicians.

Very cool 3d visualizations of the London Tube (that’s the subway for those not familiar with the Tube terminology). Enjoy!

Kudos to Black Belt Jones

The Harvard Business School requires that its students use an IBM ThinkPad if they wish to be enrolled at the business school. That’s REQUIREMENT not RECOMMENDATION. Seems one of the business school students decided a little differently and setup a weblog documenting his experiences walking in a Windoze universe with a Mac. So far it seems he’s been doing well and continuously questions the need for a Windoze laptop rather than a very strong recommendation. I wish you luck in turning the tide, sir!

Link to Weblog