Entries Tagged 'Miscellaneous' ↓

Gotta love this error message I got when trying to set a password that was "too long" on Intense Debate:

error messages, intense debate, xml

It’s been a really long time since I last blogged, and it’s all because I got totally fed up with my old blog software and vowed never again to blog until I replaced it with WordPress. Well as you can guess getting around to replacing it took far longer than I planned, but now it is finally here! I’ve still have other non-blog related things that were housed at my domain I still need to fix such as this but now that the domain is switched over to WordPress I’ll have a bit more urgency to get those fixed. I look forward to rejoining to ranks of the blogging community. 

What’s more, a lot has happened since I last blogged so I have lots of things to blog about in the coming weeks and months. Of course I have plenty of billable work that needs to get done so for all those of you who are waiting with baited breath for me to blog (LOL!), future blog posts won’t be coming as fast and furious as I’d like but at least with the new blog they can start to trickle out.

blogging, dasblog, wordpress

After 20+ years on Microsoft operating systems, I’m finally considering moving over to the dark side (or *away* from the dark side, depending on who you ask, LOL!). Yes, I’m considering buying a Mac. Actually a MacBook.

I decided to get a Dell 1405 because of it’s purported great battery life and I placed my order Friday night (and I got a 25% coupon, sweet!). Then two things happened on the same day; Dell held my order waiting for me to call to verify it, and I got a MacMall catalog in the mail and decided to read it. Hmmm.

I blogged about the Mac when I first heard of Parallels, and a friend of mine has a MacBook Pro that he runs Windows on so I’ve been considering it for a while. Well, yesterday I went to the store to check it out and it was pretty nice (except for lack of a right mouse button, doh!) but the guy at CompUSA couldn’t tell me about battery life.

No problem, I have another friend with a MacBook and I emailed him to ask about battery life. To which he replied:

I just googled for “mac book pro extended battery” and it
returned plenty of results…

Ouch, Busted! He did go on to relay his experiences, but point taken. :)

Anyway, though I still haven’t decided which laptop to get, I christen thee a new meme in my friends honor while I pay homage to that soon-to-be bygone era where a few people actually did read the manual:

GTFK: Google The F***in’ Keywords

Just to be explicit, there is a proper context for using GTFK. When someone asks you a question that requires a long explanation that they could have easily answered themselves, it is perfectly appropriate to simple tell them:

GTFK!

From this I’m sure they will get the message. ;-)

P.S. I know I don’t have to tell you what the *** stands for.

apple, dell, google, mac, macbook, memes, sociology

In October 2005 I blogged about the need for a Server for End Users. I guess Microsoft was listening. ;-)

From Larry Dignan over on ZDNet.

microsoft, windowsserver

Conventional wisdom is filled with assumptions. One of the things that makes conventional wisdom right most of the time is that those assumptions are usually valid. But sometimes they are not. One of my favorite little anecdotes that illustrates this is the tale of the pot roast:

A newly-wed husband noticed that every time his wife cooked a pot roast she would first cut an inch off either end before putting it in the oven. When he asked why, she said “Because that’s how you are supposed to cook pot roast.” Unsatisfied with her answer he pushed until she admitted that she learned it from her mother.

Waiting until a visit with his wife’s mother, the husband asked “Your daughter tells me you taught her to cook pot roast by first cutting an inch off each end?” to which the mother replied “Well of course, that’s how pot roast is cooked.” But the husband was not to be deterred, and after pressing his mother-in-law on the subject she finally admitted that she’d learned if from *her* mother.

This meant the husband had to ask the wife’s grandmother. When he finally got his chance he asked: “Your granddaughter’s mother told me you taught her to cut an inch off each end of a pot roast before cooking. She swore it was a requirement, but I’m dying to know why? Is there any sane reason to throw away two inches of perfectly good meat in order to cook a pot roast?!?”

Laughing, the grandmother said “Oh, heaven’s no! You see in those days we were very poor and didn’t own much cookware. I cut the ends off the pot roast so it would fit in my only pan!”

And so ends the story…

To me the moral here is that whenever someone starts quoting dogma you really should try and explore its origins. You may find that those firmly-held beliefs are based on mostly unconscious and invalid assumptions.

about, favorites, inc500, sociology, vbxtras, xtras, xtras.net

For many reasons I’ve not previously blogged about politics, nor do I intend to make it a habit. But in this case I want to address a burning issue that I believe should not be partisan-in-nature, and further that I believe the evolving processes in the tech community can uniquely solve. I am of course referring to the crisis in confidence regarding the vote counting process in the United State and open-source solutions development, respectively.

Rather than rehash the issues related to the voting crisis, let me simply reference numerous articles written by others who are much more eloquent:

• Count Crisis?
• Electile Dysfunction?
• A crisis of confidence
• Reliability of voting machines questioned
• Voting Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election
• Forget Flag Burning. Tackle the Real Issues, Like Voting Machines
• 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities

Clearly if the problem is not fixed and confidence is not restored in our voting process, it could cause the entire foundation of our democracy to fail. This is an incredibly important issue, and no one but a fool would argue that ensure out election process is accountable is essential.

However, given the events of the past decade,I don’t believe the public will soon trust either politicians or corporations to solve this problem. Frankly, I think that it can only be solved by the public. And by that I mean voting machines developed with the community via an open-source process on commodity standardized hardware.

Counting votes reliability and without the potential for fraud is a thorny technical issue but I believe that the tech community has probably tackled and beat far more complex challenges. I believe an open-source voting system could be designed and developed that would make it effectively impossible to tamper with the vote, and I personally think it would be great to be involved in designing the architecture for such systems.

With that, I would like to issue a challenge to the tech and business community. Let’s:

• Take back our democracy!
• Pull together a group of qualified people and create an open voting machine,
• Design and develop voting software that is 100% auditable and verifyable,
• Design an inexpensive hardware reference platform using off-the-shelf components,
• License the hardware and software via an open-source license so they can be widely manufactured,
• Find people to fund a foundation, if possible, to make this thing official (though let’s not make funding a requirement), and
• Let’s put an end to voting machine tampering and help minimize voter fraud (worldwide.)

If both software and inexpensive hardware were made available to all democratic jurisdictions and municipalities that any local company could install and service and the public is made aware of these machines so as to put pressure on elected officials to adopt them, I see little reason why the machines wouldn’t be widely adopted in relatively short order. That is except to perpetuate the ability to perpetrate election fraud.

Having open voting machines would also teach a lesson to those companies such as Diebold that did not proactively ensure we could be confident in the results of our elections. Plus it would allow jurisdictions (the world over) the ability to guarantee the integrity the vote.

With that in mind I registered the following domain and I will donate it to this initiative assuming I can find other like minded people to make open voting machines a reality:

www.openvotingmachines.org

Note that www.openvotingmachines.org just redirects to this blog post at the moment.

If you find this idea compelling, even if you don’t have the time to participate, please pass it on to your friends, relatives, and/or colleagues that you think might be interested, as applicable. And if you happen to know someone who might be interested in funding a foundation to make this happen, or provide fund for such a foundation, all the better; please forward this post on to them too.

Now I don’t know if this post will gain any traction. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t but I sure hope it does because there are few other things that could be as potentially devastating as loss of confidence in our elections. Post a comment if you want to become actively part of this initiative, and let’s get the ball rolling!

P.S. I didn’t see this post until after I had conceived of mine, but it sounds like this guy had similar thoughts although he has not made any call to action. Maybe those commenting on his post could be some of the first to join this initiative? I unfortunately don’t have the time to drive this initiative as I need to focus on generating revenue or I would pursue these people, but I wanted to put this call-to-action out into cyberspace in hopes that enough people who do have the spare time will be inspired to pursue it (OTOH, if this initiative were funded by someone, maybe I could be active in driving it?)

opensource, politics, voting

Since I left Xtras several months back, I’ve finally had time to spend learning once again. I’ve focused my attentions in two primary areas:

1. That which can be called Web 2.0 technologies (especially related to RSS and Mashups), and
2. Things related to .NET development.

One of the true gems I’ve come across in the latter area has been Scott Hanselman’s blog, but even better has been his weekly podcast hosted by Carl Franklin entitled Hanselminutes which you can find at http://www.hanselminutes.com.

I met Scott several years back early on in his blogging career at a .NET-related conference and thought he was a great guy but honestly had no idea how incredibly bright the guy is! Listening to his postcasts and reading through his blog I’ve been amazed at how prolific Scott has become on .NET and related subjects, and how he has been able to learn as much about so many technologies and use them all, it’s just amazing! What’s more, as someone who has focused most of his career on knowing the third-party development tools market I especially appreciate Scott’s deep knowledge of both commercial and open-source components and tools.

So if you are into .NET development and have not come across Scott’s Hanselminutes podcasts, it’s worth buying¹ yourself an MP3 player even if you don’t have one just to be able to listen to them during your commute or other downtime. Check ‘em out: Very Shiny²!

carlfranklin, dotnet, people, podcasts, scotthanselman

If you’ve not heard of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) you should listen to this presentation Nicholas Negroponte gave about his $100 laptop at the February 2006 T.E.D. conference which I found over at the T.E.D. Blog.

I learned of the T.E.D. blog by reading If your idea is worth spreading, then presentation matters over at Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen, which I learned about by reading A few more Presentation How To’s at Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users whose RSS feed I subscribed to at the time.

Anyway, Nicholas is the former director of the MIT Media Lab and he stepped down from running the lab to found this non-profit organization and focus the rest of his life on OLPC’s goal of ensuring that every child in developing nations has access to a laptop for educational purposes. While some people have fixated on the "$100" price tag or the "laptop" aspect of his project, Nicholas explains that they are missing the point:

"This is an education project, not a laptop project"

OLPC plans to sell laptops to education ministries of nation-states and have those ministries distribute the laptops on the basis of one per child (ages 6-18). Evidently Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand each have ordered 1 million. The OLPC website claims they are also in discussions with China, India, Egypt, and Nigeria (although this article claims India has begged out, which is a shame.) As someone who strongly believes in education’s ability to transform a society’s circumstances, I find this endeavor truly inspiring! While watching it also occurred to me just how many times the course of human history has been changed because of the dogged perseverance of a single individual. I really hope to see Nicholas achieve his goal.

economics, favorites, olpc, onelaptopperchild, people, politics

On last Friday I blogged about my new Saleforce.com blog that I recently launched. Now you might ask why didn’t I just post my comments about Salesforce.com here on Miscellanous Ramblings? The simple answer is I’ve learned over the past several years of blogging that, aside from being a vanity play, unfocused blogs really don’t benefit anyone least of all the author. And I find it rather ironic that I in hindsight chose "Miscellaneous Ramblings" as a moniker because that’s what I’ve done here; ramble on and on about miscellanous topics with no obvious direction. Well, they do say hindsight is 20-20.

Moving forward I’m going to expend the vast amout of my blogging effort on blogs that focused on specific topics. And I do plan to keep this blog online, at least for the foreseeable future. If I feel inspired to blog about a topic for which I have no other place to blog, I’ll do it here. Otherwise, you’ll be able to find my thoughts at my other blogs, and you’ll be able to find a list of my blogs here: www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/

blogging, salesforce.com

Last week I mentioned I had several new projects on the burner, and one of them is my blog about Salesforce.com:

Thoughts on Salesforce.com

blogging, blogs, salesforce.com