The WarMouse, also called the OpenOffice Mouse (which seems to be how they’re branding it), falls into the monstrosity category.

No, this isn’t some joke mock up.  At least, as far as I can tell it isn’t a joke.  If it is, then even Wired got fooled.

Can you imagine trying to work with that thing?  How many times a day do you think you’d hit the wrong button?  And that joystick on the side – exactly how many hours of practice would it take to become proficient with that?

Sometimes, I come across a page with interesting ‘comments.’  For those who might not know, most languages have a function where you can enter snippets of information that won’t be executed – they’re basically cheat sheet notes for the coder, or also used to help other people who might need to work on the code later on.  You’ll find all kinds of gems in code comments.  I’ve seen code with Haikus inserted, bits of poetry, rants against ex wives…  I even know a website where the author maintains his personal Blog within the comments of the website.  It’s un-viewable to anyone who doesn’t read the code of the site.  However, that site is a well known, widely used forum for web developers, so there’s probably a lot of people who read it.

Anyway, I was reading the code of a web page today, and came across some comments that reflect a certain, personality, of the developer.  It’s a big commercial site, so I think the coder was probably exercising a bit of “freedom” by inserting one or two extraneous comments.  I’ll share a couple of them here.

// Look!  A clock.  Niiiice.

(someone is proud of their spiffy clock generator code)

// Yay for Suckerfish!

(actually, this is a nice little tip of the hat – Suckerfish is a well known and widely used chunk of code used to generate those spiffy drop-down menus you see all over the web)

// Let’s define the innumerable global arrays that Javascript will use to keep track of things.

(someone’s a little bored with grinding out variables)

// …that’s a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think? there might be a lot, but innumerable?!

(someone’s boss is reading their code comments)

// Various data arrays.

(yup, they’re still bored with grinding out data chunks and variables)

Ok, maybe that’s only interesting to me.  I dunno.  Seemed kinda cute at the time.

One thing I should mention.  If you’re a sensitive type who’s easily offended by foul language, never, ever, read the code for the Linux kernel.   Linux kernel writers have issues with cuss words.

Right now, I have both an iPhone (personal) and a BlackBerry (business – paid for by my company).  I have them set up to manage email and my appointment calendar.  I even have RDP and VNC installed on my iPhone, so I can remote manage several computers from anywhere I can get a cel signal.

I have big data packages for both, and they get used.

And I  hate both of them with a rare passion.

They’re like electronic leashes.  Everywhere I go, I emit a steady dribble of beeps, bloops, and musical ringtones – (my iPhone in particular, I have a number of custom, “unique to me because I made them” ringtones, so I can determine what kind of call is coming in, or who is calling without having to even look at the caller ID).  Again, the level of customization and personalization I’ve commited to the devices might fool you into thinking I’m enamoured with the devices.

But let me stress again how far that is from the truth.

I customize them because I have no choice but to deal with them.  I go to lengths to make them less annoying.  Mostly, it fails.  I mean, it works to the extent that a snippet of late 70′s, early 80′s garage punk is a way better way of being notified of an incoming call than some chirping blip-bleep.  But it doesn’t make dread the call itself much less.

Half of my calendar year (excluding holidays) is spent “on call” – I can be no more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (and thank god for mobile 3g sticks…  Does that count as a phone too?).  when the phone rings, there’s a good chance that something has gone wrong.  It’s going to be complicated.  It’s going to eat my time.  And it’s come at an inconvenient hour. Say, dinner time, or when a sane person should be comfortably in bed.

I also have to monitor pages and emails that are automatically generated by a mass of servers when they auto-detect something out of norm.  Given that we’re talking about hundreds of servers, it’s pretty much a given that the automated stream of error spam is pretty constant.  And even these are segregated by priority.  Some are more informational “Hey, Mr. On-Call man, I got a little busy at 8pm.  Try and figure out why when you get a chance.”  These come as emails.  A low tone bloop on my phone that I can (and usually do) sleep through.  Some are more urgent, of the “Hey, Server X isn’t responding to pings, and it’s IMPORTANT!!!” These come in as pages, and the noise is…  Well, let’s just say I’m not likely to sleep through it.

And it goes beyond that.  Because email is so important to the modern workflow, the fact that I can respond to it from anywhere, to a certain degree means the expectation is to actually do that.  I’m one of those guys you see who parks his car, steps out, and whips out his smart phone to read and respond to emails while he finishes walking the last couple of blocks into the office.  Distractedly missing his floor on the elevator (or absentmindedly walking off on the wrong floor), face buried in a BlackBerry.

From my side of that picture, it kinda sucks.  “Always on” is, well, draining.

When I have time off, I tend to turn my phones off.  Completely.  For days at a time if I can.  And then my mom ends up getting annoyed that I don’t return her calls (sorry mom, it’s not you – it’s the phone).

I dunno, I guess I just needed to get that off my chest.

And, well, the dang phone’s incessant reminders and nagging me with problems is the reason I missed the last two days’ worth of posts.

As a teenager, it became a time for late night horror film sleepovers.  Later, it was costume parties, and then as a young adult, all night costumed dance-a-thons at the “in” club of the moment.

But when it gets right down to it, for me Halloween is, and always will be, about those younger kids and that gleeful, chaotic, sugar buzzed night.

This year, the weather was pleasant, and the trick or treaters were out in force.  I stayed home and handed out candy to what was a record for us in this house (where we’ve lived for the past 7 Halloweens).

My wife bundled up our 10 month old and took her up and down the street, because you only get one first Halloween.  And even though our toddler likely won’t remember it, that’s no reason for her to miss it.

And she brought back some news that really surprised me.  Nearly 3/4′s of the houses in our neighbourhood were dark.  The residents either out, or pretending they were out. No decorations.  No carved jack-o-lanterns.  No spirit of the day.

For some reason, that just made me sad.  Obviously, the families with children were still participating.  Like I said, the kids were out in force.  But what about everyone else?

It’s about community spirit.  It’s about doing something for the next generation, so they’ll have fond memories when they grow up.

Come on people, quit being such spoil sports and grinches.  Set aside the origin of the holiday.  It’s not about witchcraft and superstition anymore.  It’s about sharing a fun night with friends and children.  It’s about showing those children that people are basically good and generous, even if you don’t know them.

I present this year’s pumpkins:

I think I’ll stick with the tech theme of the past couple of days, as it’s what’s on my mind.

In a couple of unrelated events, Open Source Software has apparently made some giant leaps forward in U.S. Government circles, with two significant announcements within days of each other.

First, we’ll cover something that’s highly visible to the outside world.  On Saturday, October 24th, the official White House website launched the new Obamacized version.  While some might be thinking “about time” – it actually takes a while to accomplish a major redesign of a large website.  Add in typical government political/bureaucratic “issues”, and I’m surprised it got done this quickly.

Mostly, I could care less about the White House website.  It’s not like I’m an American, or really care about the info the site contains.  What’s interesting to me, from a technological standpoint, is that the site has changed the underlying technology from a closed source, commercial, content management system (CMS), backed my Microsoft IIS servers, to an open source CMS backed by Linux/Apache servers.

Under previous administrations (and no, not just Bush, but Clinton before him), the U.S. Fed has been notoriously gun-shy of open source projects.  Big Business and Big Government likes the comfort of buying from Big Business.  They have trouble, culturally, figuring out why people would donate their time to create a fundamental technology, and how such a “movement” could produce good, reliable software.

Whichever side of the Open/Closed source argument you may find yourself, what it comes down  to, in a lot of ways, is whether you have more faith in “the masses” or more faith in “big business.”

For the Obama Administration to make such a public site Open Source, is a strong indication of where they place their faith.  Not surprising, given how he ran his campaign.

Related, the U.S. Department of Defense Deputy CIO Dave Wennergren has signed and released “Clarifying Guidance on Open Source Software.”

Reported by both O’Reilly Radar and NetworkWorld, the “clarification” is a big deal, and should allow for open source software to make inroads into DoD procurements.

All the clarification says, in essence, is that when considering procurement, Open Source Software should be considered no different from Commercial software.  And that actually means a lot.  The U.S. Military has long held great cultural faith in Big Business to supply it’s needs.  Established, if bloated and expensive, Defense Contractors (Think Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc.) usually seem to edge out the “little guy” in most defence contracts.  Which is not surprising, really.  The military is a naturally cautious organization.

Overall, these two events should not be underestimated.  For two such conservative, staid, government entities to consider open source a viable option, speaks greatly to how far Open Source has come in the past two decades.

For those of you contemplating upgrading to Win7, or making any major OS upgrade (be it Mac, Linux, Unix, Solaris, whatev…), here’s some advice i posted on a forum, I thought I’d repost it here, on the off chance somebody reads it.

When a new OS comes out, if your current one is working, keep using it until the following:

3 months bare minimum have elapsed since release, preferably 6 months. This gives others a chance to uncover any hidden bugs and come up with solutions.

You have researched a clear migration plan for all critical software. Some will work, some will need to be updated, some will need to be replaced. This is a good time to figure out which ones you can live without. Use the 3 to 6 months after the OS’s release to figure out which is which. (Sounds tough, but thanks to google, you can figure this out usually in a couple of hours).

You have backed up all your data files. Not just the critical ones. ALL of them. If you don’t, then that one spreadsheet you thought you’d never need is the one you suddenly can’t live without 6 months after you’ve killed it.

Pull your old system hard drive and set it on a shelf. Hard drives are cheap. New OS, New Hard Drive. I can’t stress this last point enough. Don’t do an “upgrade”, failure rates are really high for any OS. By pulling the old primary drive and setting it aside, you have an instant fall back point should things go horribly wrong.

Disconnect any secondary hard drives/storage, but leave in place.

Install that spanking new hard drive you bought for your new OS. Install new OS on said new hard drive. If everything goes according to plan, start reconnecting the secondary hard drives/storage.

One by one, install your software according to your migration plan.

If things go wrong, try a second time just in case you fat fingered. After the second failure, re-insert the old hard drive you had with your previous OS and software. Go back to Google and try and figure out why it all went so wrong.

It sounds time consuming and labour intensive, and… well, it kinda is. But if you do it right, “transition day” is far more likely to succeed, and has a much lower stress level.

And the above advice applies to any significant OS upgrade. Mac, Linux, MS, Solaris, whatever.

Joe Consumer won’t do it. That’s why Joe Consumer isn’t making a good living in IT. Don’t be Joe Consumer.

But I just don’t really have much to talk about tonight.

I suppose I’ll talk about Windows 7.

I haven’t actually installed it on a system yet.  But, oddly, I’m really looking forward to it.  I played around with the beta version in the spring.  I installed it as a virtual machine on my laptop using VMWare, and I have to say, what I saw, impressed me.  It had a really nice, clean interface, was really easy to manage and set up.  And VMWare allowed me to compare load against XP Pro (I had a very comparable XP VM already set up), and it was pretty much on par, in terms of processor and memory load.

What I didn’t get a chance to do was really work with the Aero interface. But since Win7 was released the other day, a couple of co-workers have installed it, and I have one thing to say about Win 7 Aero:

Slick!

Man, it looks pretty.  And it has a lot of nice, intuitive features for people like me who are constantly juggling a mass of open windows on multiple monitors.

Sure, turning on all that gloss will suck up some processor, but it totally looks worth it.  If it saves me keystrokes and mouse movement, then it will more than offset any minor losses in computing performance.  Also, my laptop is a beefy dual core with 4G of RAM and a decent Radeon graphics card (well, decent for a laptop, I suppose).  My desktop is an even beefier Quad Core with 8G of RAM and a state of the date Nvidea graphics card.  Whatever Win 7 throws at either machine, I feel safe they can handle it.

The one thing that concerns me is the migration factor.

I’m going to have to completely burn both systems to the ground before installing 7, and then re-install, bit by bit, all my software.

Oddly, that’s less of a problem on my desktop, which I use more.  I had to burn and build it in June due to a catastrophic MoBo failure.  When I did that, I got my sh#t together in terms of making sure all my key files were backed up.  Now, the only thing on the OS drive is applications.  All of my data is on separate hard drives, and backed up to a NAS drive.  That will make the migration a whole lot simpler, because I just have to worry about re-installing some applications, and transferring a few settings and configs from some key software (email, FTP, SSH, browser bookmarks).

My laptop is a whole different beast.  It only has the one hard drive, so I’ll have to be careful about making sure I back up all the data as well as transferring my settings.  Also, it’s my “company” computer, so my allowable downtime for it is very limited.

But, in the end…  Worth it.  Win 7 is turning out to be the OS that Microsoft should have released with Vista.

Although I’m still waiting for that database driven file system MS has been promising since the mid 90s.

I woke up with a head cold to beat all.  Tried to get some work done from home this morning but then just crawled back into bed.  I probably shouldn’t have tried to get some work done because I suspect I fat fingered some imaging in a vain attempt to be productive, and probably just ended up costing time for some other people in the long run.

Eh, the world will keep on turning.

That’s about all I have the brainpower to comment on today.

Should a writer be bound by ethical constraints?

The libertarian part of me says no.  I’m decidedly against censorship.

At the same time, I do believe in acting responsibly.  Maybe exerting a bit of self censorship.  But probably not in ways that most people think of when they think of ethical constraints. Writing about sex, violence, etc.?  No problem.  Those things are a part of the world we live in.  Reflecting them in art should be natural.

My problem comes about with authors who distort the truth, to intentionally incur a belief in something they know, or should know, is pure codswallop.

Dan Brown comes to mind.  In his initial interviews surrounding the release of “The DaVinci Code,” he presented as a book based on historical research, and as a strong candidate for an “alternate history.”

My problem with that claim is that Brown based much of his research on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which was in turn based on a bunch of forged documents created by a group of French con-men led by Pierre Plantard. Holy Blood, Holy Grail came out in 1982, and within months had been debunked by, well, anyone who’d ever picked up a history book and chose to devote some time to pointing out the silly absurdity of it all. Sure, a lot of people still bought into it, but by the time Dan Brown released The DaVinci Code, more than 20 years later, no one who had done any significant amount of research into the topic took the theory seriously.

And I really don’t think Brown did either.  He’s distanced himself from making claims about the “historically accurate, researched” aspect of the Code since then.  He basically uses the “it’s just a novel” line now.  When he bothers to discuss it in public at all, which isn’t often anymore.

What he did, by making claims about the research behind the book in the run up to it hitting the shelves and the immediate publicity afterwards, was marketing genius. And he knew it.  Controversy sells, and picking on the Catholic Church, at that moment in history, was kinda like shooting ducks in a barrel.  The Church had some serious image problems in North America at the time (and still does). I’m no fan of the Catholic Church.  And when it comes to debunking their claptrap, I’m all for it.

But don’t replace their voodoo with voodoo of your own.  And the Code, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Plantard, were all just selling a different brand of snake oil. Out of the three, I have the least animosity for the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.  From what I can tell, they actually believed what they were writing.  That doesn’t make it any more true, or them any less foolish for buying into a weak French con.  It just makes them more honest.

Brown can’t make that claim to honesty.  All indications are that he actually did his research.  And if he did, he would have come across all the info thoroughly debunking the theory he presented.  What he did was present a theory he knew was hokum as the truth.  And he did it to make a buck.  In the process, he convinced a lot of people that the lie was the truth.  The indications are that tens of thousands of people believed him.  For many, it literally “shook their faith.”

Part of the problem was that the group that cried foul the loudest was the Catholic Church, and they have some serious credibility issues of their own.  And that drove even more people to take Brown’s book seriously.

Now if Brown had of been clear from the beginning that his book was fiction, and people had chosen to believe it as truth anyway, that would be a different story.  You can’t cure stupid.

But you shouldn’t encourage it either.