Category Archives: Technology

Vectors Hidden In Plain Sight

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virus cells
While walking back from the bathroom and sitting down in my office I looked around and noticed all the devices that I touch. We are currently witnessing a epidemic of influenza and because it’s a clear and present danger to our health I’m spending more and more time considering ways to avoid it. Obviously there are all the classic things one can do, frequent hand-washing, sanitization, Vitamin C (Placebo anyone?), Tea (Paging Dr. Placebo), supplements (Will Dr. Placebo PLEASE ANSWER THE PHONE!) and as I was sitting back considering all the ways you could acquire an active influenza virus it struck me. Much like wondering how invading Aliens were jaunting past the razorwire like it wasn’t there only to find out they were skittering along in the drop ceiling – a hidden vector of infection: Touch Devices.

Ever since Apple (and others, of course) developed tablet and phone technology in the modern sense, mostly iPads, iPhones, Nook HD’s and MacBooks people have been touching these things and not really paying much attention to what all that touching means. If you wash your hands then your hands are clean until you touch an object, then you have doubt. Did that surface that I touched harbor a virus or bacteria that could make me sick? You don’t know. Obviously life goes on merrily and has ever since these devices have been in our grubby little clutches, but still, just to think about it gave me pause. I was using the bathroom, washing my hands, then touching my iPad. Dirty, clean… dirty? I don’t know. It’s the doubt that grips me.

There is one chemical that I know will disinfect non-porous surfaces and most likely will not damage those surfaces and that’s isopropyl alcohol. So at work I have asked my S3 to follow a new protocol during these months when these viruses are on the loose and we’re in the trenches when it comes to being vectors ourselves because we touch a lot of things that others touch. So now, at work, whenever we see an iPad, an iPhone, or a MacBook we grab a microfiber cloth, wet it with alcohol and wipe down the entire surface. Each time. It’s a lot of wiping and a lot of alcohol, but what if we kill a virus that otherwise would have made the epidemic worse? Isn’t it worth the little bit of time and effort to kill a bad thing early on than have to suffer its effects once we’ve succumbed? I think so.

If you have non-porous surfaces that you touch very frequently, like we do, I strongly recommend wiping things with a rag soaked in alcohol. You may very well perform one action which could stem the tide and spare you and the people around you the danger and inconvenience of this particularly nasty influenza virus.

Blog Spam

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I hate spam. I really hate it. I don’t want anything to do with Casinos, cheating lovers, or SEO bullshit. In fact, I’ve developed a very acute loathing for the phrase “SEO”. I’ve started to mentally connect “SEO Specalists” with “Used Car Salesmen”. If you are one, keep it to yourself. Don’t come and talk to me about SEO. It’s just gaming the system and it’s both corrupt and dishonest.

To that end, I went back to look at Askimet and realized that the API token that I thought was for-pay only turns out that it’s free for personal blogs. What a surprise! So I installed the Akismet plugin (I had earlier deleted it because I thought it was pay-only) and applied my API token and so far, although it’s only been a few moments, my blog is blessedly spam free.

The comments are the source of the spam. There was a post in the WordPress Community Pool regarding Twitter that got me thinking about how my readership engages with my blog. People don’t really engage in Twitter much anymore and they don’t engage in WordPress comments either. All the engagement seems to be focused on Facebook. I’m not against any of this, but I find it very fascinating. This leads me to the topic of this post, which is that blog spam in the comments on my WordPress.org system is even more damnable. Nobody uses the comment system but I’m loathe to disable it. So, Akismet, at least so far, is riding to the rescue.

With that, I have a great Monty Python skit to share with you all on YouTube. Enjoy!

 

WOT: Matrim Cauthon’s Theme Song

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I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.

That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:


After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.

Infrastructure

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Limited Options

Today the city of Kalamazoo will be turning off the water to a series of properties that includes my workplace. The general statement is that the water will be off from 9am to 4pm today, although of course, they will endeavor to not let it be off for any longer than it really has to be.

This event got me thinking about the topic of infrastructure. How much of the first world lifestyle is possible because of things none of us see or notice until they are gone. It’s a curse of ubiquity and constancy, everywhere you go there is running water, there has rarely ever been situations where running water was not available, so then, what happens when it’s gone? There are so many pieces to modern living that we all take for granted and in doing so we have become functionally dependent on these things. This is a savage dependency, without running water, electricity, fuel, and information services how can the average of us cope? That’s both fascinating and terrifying. To see how average folk would respond to the sudden loss of first-world fundamental services, to the failure of first-world infrastructure is a possibility to see how we can cope and the terror that will descend upon us when we find we cannot cope.

Politics touches on so much of our lives, and even here in terms of infrastructure it lumbers along. How much time and energy have we invested in our roads, in our electrical systems, our fuel delivery systems and our water systems? We used to before we spent all our money on wars, but now? Ever since the I-35W Bridge failed the nation turned at least one wary eye to the conditions of our infrastructure. How much of it is rotting away, needs maintenance, needs money. How can we function without it? Can we?

The government, through their primary readiness website ready.gov has resources a-plenty, but really, how many of us are ready for any of it? At work we have fire drills and tornado-readiness drills, but what about other sorts of disasters? What about infrastructure failure drills? What do we do when we have to span a day at work without some fundamental service, such as electricity, information services, fuel, or water? That’s what has captured my attention currently.

Getting back to the topic of infrastructure, if there is failure, do the systems we have have enough robust redundancy to cope with failure and can we quickly recover function from the gaping maw of failure if it should strike? It’s clear and present, when it comes to water supply that we may be running too close to just-in-time delivery for comforts sake? What about having a large container of potable water in a gravity-fed system just in case we need it? There rarely is such a thing because the system has rarely failed and we don’t feel the need for the extra design or cost. Just because something has rarely failed does not necessarily mean it is proofed against failure.

So when will the water go out? Nobody knows. Maybe at 9, but it’s still running so I doubt that. What is our plan to cope with this loss of one part of the infrastructure? We don’t have one. We don’t need one, or do we? Nobody is really clear and instead of asking, we’re just sitting around warily looking at the sinks and wondering if it will work, and if it doesn’t, where are we going to go when we need to use the bathrooms? Good questions, all.

PAD 1/7/2013 – Helplessness

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“Helplessness: that dull, sick feeling of not being the one at the reins. When did you last feel like that –- and what did you do about it?”

I rarely have this feeling. Almost always I can either acquire control or I can find some way to escape the situation. There is one time, not really a matter of helplessness, but one of catastrophic failure that recently happened to me that I can write about. Several months ago I had a server, a Dell uber-tower that was 9 years old and suffered a total systems failure while I was actively trying to backup files on that server because I just didn’t trust the tape system to work properly. Turns out I was just a little bit psychic I guess, because half-way through my attempt to backup the machine, there was a catastrophic fault on the servers motherboard which pretty much hosed the entire machine.

I needed to get the data off the tapes and get a new server set up as quickly as I could. The realization of the failure hit me right in my gut. It’s where cancers always feel stress, like a knot in your stomach. Not nausea, but it felt just like I had been punched right in my gut and was short on air.  I arranged to get a new server up and running and got the system back on its feet but needed some of those files on the tapes in order to rescue everything. I called all around and nobody had that old technology still, so I had no choice but to resort to data rescue services. They got the tapes, and after a protracted back and forth regarding them I received the files that were written to the tapes on several DVD’s. Turns out that Backup Exec lied about making successful backups all along and that all my tapes had filenames and directory structures, but no actual data to any of the files. They were all zero kb. In many regards I had spent a lot of money for DVD’s with just the headstones of the files I needed, and no bodies.

Thankfully I had mirrored the system to another server a few months back and I was able to rescue a majority of the data that I really needed and only lost about two months of my coworkers work. It was bad, but it wasn’t heart-attack bad.

Since then, I resolved that I would never again trust any data to tapes, and thankfully when that server died it took the last tape drive with it, so there are no more tape drives in use in my office. Tapes are very 20th century things and there are better ways to store and backup data now.

I will never forget that feeling of being punched in the gut. Thankfully now the relevant systems are under contracts and warranties and letters of agreement and whatever else we could find to properly cover-my-ass and ensure that this would never again happen to me. It might happen to someone else here, but it won’t be my fault, ever again.

 

Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

When it comes to installing things on your Macs I often times advocate a rather carefree attitude. One thing that has always been true, and this article just nails home the point, is that even the most secure system can fall if the person holding the keys is tricked or cheated into opening the door.

I have said to many people whom I’ve given computer advice, if you have doubts, please contact me and I can look at it and give you advice. It’s free, and I’d rather help in the vein of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Facebook Notification Autodisplay Trick

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I recently moved over all my old Facebook Notes entries from the past and copied them into my Day One app for posterity. In the wayback machine I found an entry from March 25th, 2009 regarding a neat little thing I found that makes Facebook a little more neat. The entry back then covered how I found a way to make my Firefox browser automatically open up Facebook notifications as new tabs in my browser window all on it’s own. So as people that are connected to me on Facebook do things that fire off notifications, those automatically create new tabs in my browser and I don’t have to worry about playing catch up with the notification system and then overloading my browser with 20+ notifications. As I do other things my browser can tend to Facebook all on it’s own and I can look over the notifications in a more organic and pleasing way. I’ve just found a way to do the same thing on my Chrome browser and for anyone who is interested, here’s how I did it:

1) Start Chrome
2) Find the Chrome Extension RSS Live Links and install it
3) Browse to Facebook and click on your notifications, then find the RSS link and copy that to the clipboard.
4) In the options for RSS Live Links, add the RSS entry to the extensions RSS list and make sure you set the refresh time properly to where you want it and then check “Automatically open new items” checkbox. Click Save.
5) Save the extension options and then you are all set.

The extension will scan the RSS feed from Facebook every five minutes and if it notices changes it will automatically open up those new items as tabs in your Chrome browser. When you are all done, you can minimize your browser and do other things and over the day your browser will automatically fill with all the little notifications that Facebook throws down all on it’s lonesome. Then you go into your browser, see the notifications and then close the tabs (Command-W) when you are done with them. Easy peasy.

Presenteeism

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For a very long time I’ve noticed something very peculiar about my job. I like to call it the “Cardboard Standee Effect”. When my clients run into trouble using their technology they do their level best to resolve the issue before contacting me, as is what anyone would usually do, but then they give up. They contact me and ask me to either control their workstation or come out to visit them. I walk in, make my greeting and ask what the trouble is and then have them do the very exact thing they did before, which didn’t work for them, and then it works and they are utterly flummoxed.

I’ve mused in the past that the office is populated with invisible naughty gremlins that love to cause mischief. For some reason, in this imaginary framework, I like to think that I scare them off. All I have to do is walk in and arguably, that’s enough for all the technology to suddenly start working like it’s designed to.

On a more serious note, it occurs to me that each one of us has a unique perception of the world. Some males are colorblind while I am not. This sort of example may be a part of what this is all about. Perhaps my presence, my observation of the situation causes a change somehow in how things turn out. There is a lot of deep explorations one could take involving things like a Schrödinger wave collapse which might also contribute to the explanation of this. That my presence, my observation of the situation is really all that is needed to pin down the randomness in these kinds of situations.

Depending on my mood I switch between these two senses, the fantastical and the scientific. I think the world is rich enough to hold both at the same time without any trouble and it certainly does make for some easy laughs – at least for me. My coworkers may feel otherwise, but so far nobody has tried to clasp me in manacles and pin me to one place – yet. 🙂

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉