I'm re-reading Red Storm Rising because it just feels appropriate about now...

I don't know about you, but while I read about record heat everywhere, I find myself in the San Francisco Bay Area where the temperature has peaked at 70F and not really gotten past that all "Summer" so far.

"Summer" in air quotes.

Sure seems to me I should relocate and be working from a beach somewhere.

Just a quick note on the current AI kerfuffle - the genie is out of the bottle. You can attempt to regulate AI all you want, but those who wish to use it unethically will do so. When you can stand up your own stack in your machine room, you can do what you want.

What's needed right now is immediate pushback on the USE of AI. In the context of entertainment, for eample, writers should demand in their contract that AI may not be used by studios without consent. Actors should be contractually guaranteed the right to their likeness and voice and that AI cannot be used without proper compensation. And there should be penalties for misusing AI (and this is a huge depate on what "misuse" is). 

Treat it as a tool you can't control, but focus on what is done with it. Lock that down now or it, too, will get away.

My official position - tools like ChatGPT fall into three buckets for me:

1. Factual generation is a complete fail. I ask for a list of "five things that happened on this day in history" and it just makes stuff up, but insists that it's factual. Nope.

2. Assistance with code and design. Moderately useful. It eliminates a lot of grunt work and is good at templates that I can then customize. Things that I would usually look up in a reference (and I know where to look) are now at my fingertips more easily. Properly used, even buggy code is easy to polish. But don't ask it for architecture. That's not ready for prime time yet. This is, more or less, at the function level. It's good at things like "give me a function implementing the best sort for this kind of data."

3. Creative assistance. This simply rocks. Given a good prompt, I've gotten multi-page creative articles that simply blew me away. Laugh-out-loud funny when I want humor. It actually feels like it understands comedy. It gives me writing prompts that my human friends don't come up with. This is where the technology really shines for me.

Open Office floorplan is a conspiracy. That's a hill I'll die on!

You know you're really back in the domain name industry when your registration for NamesCon is secured.

Somehow I can't seem to quit this frothy industry! :-)

Well, the domains were available, so a parody site is being created.

https://trumpsantos.com and https://trumpsantos2024.com 

They're directing here for now, but soon... :-)

When I'm asked which modern (or in-use, or non-obsolete) programming languages I can code in, I sometimes feel like I'm playing an ego card when I say, "all of them."

Sure, I have operational experience (meaning I've written real, customer-facing projects) in C, C++, C#, Java, Go, Python, Scala, JS... and I've played around doing PoC in Rust, Dart and a few others.

More than that, though, I could pick up pretty-much any in-use language in a long weekend. So can any developer who has the years of experience in place. And then figuring out a platform for any given language is just a case of skimming the documentation so you know where to look. Nobody memorizes a whole platform any more (I think the last one I did was MFC? Maybe?).

A more accurate gauge of a developer, to me, would be to hear about their approach to design. What patterns did you use? Which did you consider and then eliminate, and why? What pivots did you make during development, and how did the final product compare to your initial vision. What got you up in the morning in terms of problems to be solved?

Once a certain threshold has been crossed, the keywords become irrelevant.

This thought process brought to you by the number of pitches I get for jobs that are based 100% on the keywords of which languages I've used in the past. These pitches pay zero attention to what I actually did. They just want to see the "[language]" or "[platform]" box checked (ticked, for you Europeans :-)).

It almost makes me want to take a week off, learn *every single modern language* in an "I've been exposed" way, and literally list them all.

Would anyone believe me?

Am I off base here? Or is this a legit position?

#programming #languages #platforms #development #experience #KaleIsNotAFood

Why do I have to pay monthly to be verified? Does my identity change every month?

I looked up, thinking it was noon, at most. It's 2:30pm and this explains why I'm hungry. I sent my assistant out to get lunch, but since my assistant is a cat, I'm not hopeful.

I get the idea of software subscriptions. Back in the day, you'd buy software, get a CD (or a stack of floppies if you're that tenured), install the package and away you'd go. After a while, a new version would be available and you'd either get it as part of your original purchase or have to decide if you wanted to pop a few bucks for the new version, almost always at a discounted price.

These days, most software now costs a monthly fee to use. Stop paying that fee, and some packages lock you to the current version while some go as far as to just stop working at all. That is, you get to use the software as long as you keep paying. It's almost like renting the package.

Now, in the case of something like, say, Adobe Photoshop, I can see this model as viable. Adobe regularly pushes not only performance improvements, but refinements and new features as well. Consider what the suite used to cost, including the typical 12-18 month update cycle, and the subscription comes pretty close. Adobe provides value to the. model.

On the other hand, I'm looking at a package that automates an Internet task. For the most part, the package is very static. Now and again the producers have to make a small change to adapt to changes in third party integrations, but those are few and far between. Further, they support eight platforms and charge $29.99/month for one, and $59.99/month for all of them. Those are the options. Yet knowing how this software works, the differences are almost non-existent. The configuration considers all platforms and it's just an upload task that differentiates them. 

There is absolutely no value added in paying monthly for this software that not only doesn't change, but has very little differentiation and uses zero resources provided by the author. That is, it's not even a web service. It's a reasonably robust automation engine. That's it.

Further, this is the kind of package you'd use initially, and then would likely sit unused for months until you had another need for some automation. You'd be paying a monthly fee for no updates and just the option to have it available should you need it.

But people are conditioned now to pay a subscription, even for software that doesn't justify it. Thus, almost all software now carries a subscription model.

I believe this is where I say, "get off my lawn!" :-)

Have you noticed that in science fiction movies made decades ago, electric cars had a particular noise? That whining-whirring noise that everyone thought electric cars would make? And have you noticed that, sure enough, that's exactly the noise that they make now?

Maybe it's just me, but I think that's kinda cool and interesting. 

Or I'm just killing time before lunch ;)

My first real software development job out of college was with Microsoft. The year was 1997, and the boom was in full swing. Enthusiasm was high, parties were epic, and it was a time we've not seen since. It was also the era of "everyone has an office," and nobody really questioned it. Indeed, the only place on campus that I can remember not being this way was a large room in which something like the "open office floorplan" was used for contractors. And I remember thinking it was counterproductive, even then.

As a developer, I liked having my own space. Shelves for my reference books (and I'm still old-school that way). Some posters on the wall to set the nerdy mood. A huge white board that was all my own. It was my space, and the mindset that went with it had a direct impact on my morale and productivity. Of course, the real benefit was the door. It was open 90% of the time. Anyone could come by, and collaboration never suffered. But I could also close it, meaning that if I wanted some "in the zone" time I could have it. I could even put a sticky on the door, letting people know that I was unavailable except in emergency.

You simply can't do this with an open office plan.

Headphones are an invitation to be tapped on the shoulder. A "quick question" never is, and even when it is, pulling someone out of the zone means that quick question cost a half hour, at best. White boards are shared, so you can't keep a design up for weeks while refining it. And the chocolates on my desk seem to mysteriously disappear overnight. That one is still a mystery.

Open Office in the Age of COVID

What I've discovered, though, is that for the past 18 months, "working from home" has reinforced these beliefs and given some concrete experimental evidence to support them. So what have I discovered?

Working from home has the same issues

A private space to work provides the same benefits as an office in the building. I can close the door. I can socialize to family members that when the door is closed, I'm concentrating, and please don't interrupt unless you have to. This is generally respected in my household, with the notable exception of the cats. But cats are jerks. Working from home means I can have that private space that isn't afforded in an Open Office building. My point here being that I believe we've all experienced this, now. Has anyone, working from home, not found it better to have your own private space? Do you honestly work in the common areas all the time because the distractions are something you seek out? I doubt it.

Asynchronous Communication Works

When working from home, if someone needs you, they have to get in touch electronically. They don't get to walk over and tap you on the shoulder. Or, worse, stand there and wait for acknowledgement. But with the exception of a ringing phone (who calls unannounced these days?), all communication can be asynchronous. Emails can be read and returned in their own time box. Slack allows you to mute notifications except when urgent if you want. Even chat applications let you set your status as "busy" if you want. I wish Slack had a status called "In the Zone," but that's a feature request. I truly hope this understanding persists once we all return to the office.

Working from remote locations also works (at least for me)

I confess, I have a remote work habit that sounds ludicrous but actually functions at the highest level: I work from Las Vegas. Yes, I live in the San Francisco bay area, but, at least when the pandemic has allowed, I will often travel to Las Vegas for a week. I get a nice hotel room at my favorite center-strip resort, usally complimentary, and work from the comfortable hotel room where I have good Internet connectivity, a decent sound system, and a desk. I honestly get up at the start of the day, work without interruption, and put in a full day. My productivity is even more than at home, as there are no family members (or, as I said, cats) to interrupt, even legitimately. Meetings for the past 18 months have been on Zoom anyway, and the worst I got from those who didn't know my plans was a comment that my artificial background looked like a Vegas hotel room. In the evenings, I got good food, perhaps saw a show (nothing refreshes the mind like Penn and Teller!), and got to play some poker or roll dice. I don't really drink much, so I got up the next day refreshed and ready to go.

This may or may not work for you. You have to have the discipline to actually get the work done. For me, the enjoyment of my evenings wouldn't be there if I knew I had work piling up or people suspicious of my work ethic.

Tl;Dr

I remain of the opinion that Open Office Floor Plans are a drain on productivity and morale, and in light of 18 months of solid "work from home" data, I see no reason to change this opinion. And now I have some solid experience to back it up.

You go, Tuesday! You're so Fetch!

Day 1 of the new job: Holy crap, I have Imposter Syndrome!

Day 5 of the new job: I’ve seen this all before and done this all before. Holy crap, I have Dunning/Kruger Syndrome!

There's a commercial that plays on satellite radio with a jingle that's a really annoying earworm (no, not Kars-4-kids, but just as sticky).

I am about to sign up to use the service.

Dammit! The annoying jingle worked because when I realized I needed this, it's what came immediately to mind.

I feel... icky.

To have an application autopost to Facebook requires that you give Facebook access to your web site and allow their "engineer" to log in and test your app. These are, without exception, clueless and underpaid non-technical people in third-world countries.

I've gotten all of my applications approved after much angst.

What I didn't do was turn off Facebook's access after. Now they are asking that access stay open and they pop in every month or so and post a test.

1. This test gets on my production web sites, cluttering it. They don't remove the post afterwards.
2. This test goes to all of the pages and groups that get the autopost, again, creating garbage. They don't remove these, either.
3. The last time they did this, I didn't even notice. They did it wrong. It broke the auth token and my system hasn't been autoposting for over a week now.

I'm beside myself with distain.

With billions of users, Facebook owns this market. There won't be a "MySpace Event" that unseats Facebook. Ever. The only way they'll lose their dominance is if we get decentralized social feeds, much like we have a decentralized web of HTML sites.

We need a social protocol like HTML and browsers that support it.

We then need unassailable identity verification (or proper anonymity) and a protocol for creating a social graph (think "your friends" or "your followers" and such).

At that point, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, et. al. become obsolete and the users take back their content and control.

It'll be another 3-5 years.

They aren't conspiracy theories. They are conspiracy hypotheses. A theory actually requires some intellectual rigor.

There have been more than just a few instances where interactions "at work" have gotten a little too personal or awkward for my tastes. Nothing with me, thankfully, but I've seen it in meetings.

Now that we're all working from home, I think I know what it might be - we're working in the same place we live and play. To me, this often makes work feel more informal. We work in our pajamas (or less). We can get up and go into the bedroom to get something. Lunch is from our kitchen.

I think, perhaps, it's natural to feel more informal while working, perhaps subconsciously, and this leads to violations of work protocols and professionalism.

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but it just occurred to me ;)

You know what I'm missing? Improv comedy. Not that I got to go all that often, but now that there's no theater at all, I miss comedy shows. When things start up again, it's high on my list to re-engage.

New year, new logo, same place for those of us without our science fiction and fantasy conventions.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/concellation

https://www.concellation.com

Protip - before you cancel that meeting because you're just so busy, ask yourself if anyone else is likely to be in the same boat. Is that meeting really going to happen? Especially during the holiday time, odds are that someone else will be the person to cancel or postpone it and you'll get the time back without being "that person."

Or maybe it's just my experience ;)

This is what they call art, right? ;)

One Insight

I travel a lot for work. Often, dinner is going to be at whatever the hotel offers, and a lot of the time, that's getting food at the bar. It continuously amazes me how much people will say, out loud, during a conversation in such a venue. A lot of the time it's office gossip, which is fascinating. Some of the stories would curl your hair, especially when the participants have had a few drinks. But sometimes the conversation is all work, and just paying attention turns me into a fly on the wall of the company meeting room. I know how projects are doing, which initiatives are getting traction and which aren't, what's likely to be canned, and who's on the up or down as far as promotions go. Potential mergers have been mentioned, with the people talking presuming that they're just sharing information with each other that they already know or should know. Now I know. Something to keep in mind if you travel, yourself (from either end of this dynamic).

One Hint

Speaking of traveling, I'm often asked what my number-one top travel tip is. I'll give it to you here as one Thing, but look for an expanded post on it in the future. The tip is this: stop thinking about leisure travel in terms of "here's when I'm going, and here's where I'm going, now how can I get the best deal?" That's a trap. The options, once you've locked yourself into a time and location are often very limited. Instead, invert the model. Make a list of places you'd be interested in going. Make a range of dates you could travel. Then start looking. Be flexible and look for sales to destinations or drops in prices when you can go a week before or a week after your first guess. Last year I wanted to get away for Thanksgiving, but chose to not fix my sights on any particular location. I looked at prices in the time range I was considering and ranked them based on both the price and the attractiveness of the destination. One morning, for whatever reason, Japan went on sale. I mean a big sale. I booked it then and there, and spent an incredible week in Japan for next to nothing.

One Bit of Humor

President Trump just said that he's now going to start calling the "Fake News" the "Corrupt News." This is his new term.

I just registered corrupt.news

Happy Wednesday. ;)

Just remember, everyone has their fandom!

And, of course, if it bites itself and you die, that's voodoo.

Donald Trump not human? Cut me a little slack on that one...

Who knew that sperm whales are the noisiest animal on Earth?

I'm often asked about my personal productivity strategies, and the number one tip that I like to give out is the benefit of making habits of the things that you find valuable. It is said that it takes 21 days for form a habit, and that one must be committed to establishing it. I could argue that if you can remember to do something for 21 days, you've already made it a habit. If the habit I want to create is eating delicious cake every day, I suspect I could do without help. When it's remembering to floss, on the other hand, I might forget if I'm in a hurry, or even blow it off. In this case, I find that checklists help.

Applications like Todoist work for me, as they let me make a checklist of tasks and set them to repeat daily (or in some cases, on weekdays, weekends, or whatever schedule works for me). Initially, I had a single checklist, but I found this difficult to work with. Sometimes there are tasks that are expected on a given day but just aren't going to get done, often for very good reason. For example, one task I have is to make a daily journal entry about a particular topic. The problem is that the topic doesn't generate activity every day, so checking off this task when there is nothing to journal about is perfectly okay - but I get "credit" in the app for actually doing it. There is no way to mark it, as we'd say in the betting world, "no action."

My solution was to split out my list into two categories and then split those into two more. The two categories are health habits and all other habits. I treat health differently because many of the items are non-negotiable. Take my blood pressure medication, for example. That goes into the second split of "maintenance," which means that it's a "no excuse" task.

Tasks that aren't maintenance are improvement, and those are the ones that, more often than not, wouldn't get done if I didn't hold myself accountable. Improvement health tasks like working out or meditating (though that's becoming more attractive the more I do it). Improvement habits like committing to writing at least one sentence a day (hat tip to Stephen Barnes for this one).

In all cases, checking them off provides the dopamine reaction I'm after. I want to see, every day, 100% on maintenance tasks, and as close as I can get on the improvement tasks. If something can't be done regularly, I re-evaluate it to see if it must be dropped from the list or if I need to make adjustments to make it possible.

Bonus List: I have one for "Memorize." This is, obviously, anything I need to commit to memory. I put the text in a task and read it once per day and then check it off. After a time, the every-day repetition gets the job done and I can remove the task. Ask me to do some Shakespeare for you some time - this is how I memorized Dogberry's part in Much Ado About Nothing ;)

Do you think this would work for you? I'd love to hear thoughts and refinements! What would you add/change to this?

I recently signed up for MasterClass, as there were more than just a few people giving courses that I'd love to hear from. I started with Steve Martin's course on comedy. I don't think I learned anything specific that I'd call out, but I did get a solid overview of his thought process and I found it very enlightening. I then took Shonda Rhimes Teaches Writing for Television, and found it even more useful, as I'm working on a television screenplay (don't worry, it's for fun. It's going to suck. But I want to do it).

When I was in high school, in the 80s, I was part of a group that hacked into corporate voicemail systems so that we young hackers could communicate. Voicemail was pretty obscure then. You could find me, around lunchtime, at the payphone on campus, picking up and leaving messages. (Note for the young, look up "payphone" if you need to).

Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been all over the media trying to rehabilitate Uber's reputation by telling us that Uber cares and will make things right when they go wrong. This is great spin, but is it really true? If my experience with Uber, lately, is any indication, it's not. It's business as usual at Uber.

Have you ever contacted Uber's customer service? First, you can't do anything except send a message with the app, but even then, you are constrained in your topics and ability to do so. Often, to get someone to read your issue, you have to select an irrelevant topic.

Once making it past that hurdle, you then send your message and wait for the inevitable misunderstood response. I have honestly never sent a message to Uber in which the response was in any way relevant to my actual complaint. Once going back and forth for the better part of a day with Uber, one may get a response that is aligned to the subject, but there's no guarantee there.

In my latest interaction with Uber, I requested a ride while in San Francisco. The app told me the wait would be about 8 minutes, and I waited while watching the car make its way to me. Once it was near, it was clear that the driver was going the wrong way and would never be able to reach my location. Sure enough, as the app was telling me that the driver was arriving, the car disappeared and the app told me that the driver had to cancel. Just like that.

I had to start over, wait another ten minutes and then... same thing. Driver cancelled.

The third time was a charm, some half-hour after I'd requested my first ride.

I contacted Uber and explained the situation and the response to me was that I should be fine, I wasn't charged a cancellation fee.

Wait. What?

I explained that it was the driver who had cancelled and noted that had I cancelled, I would have been charged $5, but when a driver does it, there's no consequence.

The response I received asked me for a screen shot of the $5 charge I incurred.

After going back and forth, I finally managed to explain what happened and was then told that this is the policy and there would be no refund. Not even an apology.

So... Dara? How is this "making it right?"

One thing I've come to realize that really gets me down...

It's one thing to sign me up for spam. It's another for a company to do it and claim it's some kind of benefit.

One of the best things you can bring for your trip to Burning Man, if you're not going full-on generator, is an inverter to provide AC power from you car. This is something that can charge your USB devices, of course (and at a higher power level), but also provide standard plugs for AC power. 

If you're wondering what you might use it for, I have two words for you: coffee maker. Okay, yes, I also use mine to keep my laptop charged (writing while at Burning Man is a thing - just mind the dust!). I've also used mine to run an AC-powered air mattress pump and other random things that don't lend themselves to battery-powered alternatives. I have no memory of someone bringing a flat screen TV and feeding it from an iPad to watch sports. Nope, I'm sure that didn't happen.

No recommendation of an inverter would be proper, however, without a little background on its operation. The battery in your car provides 12 volts of DC power. Inverters take that DC power and turn it into the 110 volt AC power that you expect to find when you plug something in at home. But in doing this, it drains a lot of juice from your car's batter. In short, you don't want to use this without your car running. Think of your car like a generator - it burns gas to get you power. So especially at Burning Man, remember to pack in some gasoline to account for any time you're going to have your car running to provide power, lets you find you're out of gas when it's time for the great exodus home!

The unit I recommend, above, can plug into your car's cigarette lighter or be hooked up directly to the battery. When your car is running, it will be charging the battery while you're simultaneously using it for power. Make sure that your car's alternator is rated high enough to support the load the inverter will place on the battery. Determine how much power you will be pulling and just make sure your car can support that.

Considering that an inverter like this is cheap, it's a great thing to add to your packing list.

The failure at the Oscars demonstrates a good point to remember: $#!& Happens. My take is that after much analysis, we will find that there were duplicate stacks of envelopes on both sides of the stage, and the wrong envelope was given to the presenters (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway). Clearly, Mr. Beatty was confused and hoping someone would notice the problem and correct it. Unfortunately, it took a little longer. 

My son likes to think he's a lawyer and, unlike many children who ask the same question over and over will often ask the same question multiple times but with different angles. At some point, usually pretty early (I like to think I'm a smart guy), I realize he's doing this, and I shift into giving a response that I've found works well. I can't claim credit for it, I read it on a parenting blog.

The .mom registry is now open - thousands of new top level domains, and .mom is one of them.

Your.Mom is available, as it turns out. Of course, it's a premium name and the first year fee is a steep $2,600. Tell you what, if someone wants to drop that coin on the name, I'll do the content and we'll split the revenue. What do you say?

Oh, and I note that Stacys.Mom is also available, but she will cost $1,300. That said, I hear she's got it going on!

UPDATE, 26 September, 2019 - The FTC is suing Match.com for just the situation I describe in this blog post! 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/match-com-lawsuit-ftc.html

Match.com has a fake problem. That is, they have a problem with fake accounts and there is a clear reason why they have, for years, refused to do a single thing about it.

GoDaddy has revealed our first-ever company-wide salary analysis as part of our push to address gender diversity in the technology industry. The benchmark report delivers on a commitment made at this past summer's White House Demo Day.

Over the summer, GoDaddy conducted an audit of internal salary data, which analyzed like-for-like roles and compared how men and women were placed in the salary band for comparable roles. GoDaddy sets its salary bands by role and level based on industry-standard data, and on average takes a market-leading position, which puts GoDaddy's median salary generally higher than those in the industry. 

For every dollar a man makes at GoDaddy company-wide, a woman is paid roughly one cent more, which also holds true for non-tech women. Women in technical roles at GoDaddy make approximately 99 cents on the dollar, and in the management ranks, women are paid and estimated 96 cents on the dollar.

On the whole, women and men are paid close to parity – here is the specific percentage break down:

• Total Company: women paid .28% more than men
• Technical: women paid .11% less than men
• Non-Technical: women paid .35% more than men
• Management: women paid 3.58% less than men

Additionally, GoDaddy is releasing its overall diversity statistics, and now reports women represent 20 percent of its technical workforce and 25 percent of the company overall. It has increased its women in management roles to 25 percent. And a number reported over this past summer shows GoDaddy has increased its women interns and new college graduate hires from 14 percent to 39 percent, year-over-year, in both categories.

Disclaimers:

• I work for GoDaddy. I'm very proud of this fact.
• I'm male.

Optimizing your mobile site is more than just search engine optimization (SEO) or making sure your content looks acceptable on mobile devices. There are a number of specific areas in which a little attention to how your website’s mobile counterpart is created can go a long way towards improving performance as well as ranking. From the common sense to the not-so-obvious, these seven tips cover a cross-section of areas where you can make measurable gains.

There are a decent number of stories going around the Internet about how artists should push back on being asked to work for free. Let me state up front that I agree with this position to the tune of about 80%.

It happens every year about this time - the holiday slowdown. Lots of days off around holidays, people in the office taking time off meaning that projects seem to slide into January, comments like, "Yeah, let's just push that off until after the holidays..."

Same here, I suppose. I'm taking advantage of a lot of this time to catch up on loose ends, get a lot of reading done, and create planning specifications for things that, as I noted, won't really get started until after the holidays.

I hope you have a great holiday season and I look forward to more insightful (well, at least to me!) blog posts.

After the holidays ;)

My friend Rick shared a story with me this morning, about a seminar and a lesson. I quote it here:

Once a group of 500 people were attending a seminar. Suddenly the speaker stopped and decided to do a group activity. He started giving each person a balloon. Each person was then asked to write their name on it using a marker pen. Then all the balloons were collected and put in another room.

The people were then let into that room and asked to find the balloon which had their name written on it within 5 minutes. Everyone was frantically searching for their name, colliding with each other, pushing around others and there was utter chaos.

Dr. Gary Chapman’s book, “The Five Love Languages,” is a well-known tome on five ways that humans tend to express and experience love for one another. Of the five, one is “Acts of Service.” That is, doing things for other people. As it is in life and relationships, so it is in business. Often, helping others through actions can provide benefits not only for the recipient, but also for the helper.

I’m going to start off with a story, which, I promise, is relevant. I am a proponent of marriage equality. I can be flippant about it and note that I feel that everyone should get to experience the pain of marriage, but that’s not fair to my wife, who is one of the greatest people I know. I actually have my reasons for being in favor, which I will get to shortly. But first the story.

Donald Rumsfeld was the United States Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President Bush. He is known for many things, but will always be remembered for his statement of an old truism, as quoted -

By now you're aware that there's yet another security bug, this time in "bash," a "shell" used on many servers. For the non-geeks, the gist of the issue is that a very common and absolutely necessary part of the operating system could, in some reasonable circumstances, allow a malicious user to run any code they want on a server to which they should not have access. This is, of course, a bad thing. The bug, now identified, has been fixed and system operators are rushing to patch their systems with newer versions that don't exhibit the flaw.

It's been over 25 years, so I think I can come clean. I knew of such a bug when I was in college that gave me 100% read access to any file on any system. I couldn't modify them, and this bug didn't let me execute arbitrary code, but if I noticed that you had a file in your home directory called "ChrisIsADoodyHead.txt," I could read it. Even if it was in a closed-off directory and locked down, itself. While I never had a need to, I could have looked at all of your code for the computer science class we shared and cheat on my homework. And I mean every file on the file system.

I could read all of your email.

After about a year, the bug was discovered, and I was actually beta testing a version of UNIX (SCO - remember SCO?) that had it and I reported it. It took about another year to move through production and be deployed. Remember, these were the days before automatic patching. Most installs were done from a stack of floppy disks and new versions came out yearly. Maybe quarterly, at best.

The point I'm making is twofold. First, these bugs are everywhere and will always be around. Don't be shocked when they're reported. They happen, they get fixed, and the next one comes along. You're going to get burned by them. And yes, evil douchebags are going to exploit them to, say, illegally download nude pictures of celebrities. There's no victim-blaming when I say that you should acknowledge this reality and do what you can to protect yourself.

And my second point, which is the takeaway here, and the reason I've "come clean" after 25 years to make the point: These bugs are in the wild and known right now. Please stop and think about that. Someone, somewhere, is almost surely reading or copying your stuff if it's online. These bugs don't live in obscurity until someone discovers them and immediately fixes them. Someone finds them and uses them for years until someone else discovers them in a more public way. Remember the speculation and then confirmation that the NSA was exploiting a bug for years before it was ever discovered in public? You don't need to take my word for this.

And please don't shoot the messenger.

Full disclosure: I never shared this bug with anyone else in college as far as I remember. I never found anything illegal, and only once found something that, if disclosed, could have caused problems (someone was cheating something seriously in a number of classes). I never said anything. I honestly can't remember ever seeing anything on anyone that was even remotely bad. Email, back then, also was only something shared among geeks, for the most part. There was pretty-much no private social online usage. I mostly poked around administrative stuff. This being a time before digital photography, I never even saw any nude selfies :-) Some people may not believe this disclosure, and I'm okay with that.

Some of you (okay, two of you) may have noticed that this blog is now 100% on SSL. If you try to get to any page here normally, you will find that you're redirected to the HTTPS version of the page.

No, this doesn't mean I'll be adding e-commerce any time soon (well, if the logo that my incredibly talented friend Shawn is working on for me is a hit, maybe I'll offer t-shirts :-)). What it means is that web sites being secure simply as a matter of course resonates with me. There's no compelling reason for this site to be SSL, but there's no reason not to.

And with Google's announcement that SSL sites will get more search engine love, there's a benefit. Google's plan is clear - offer some value for web site owners to go SSL and it will become more comfortable for everyone. Enacting social and technical change through positive reinforcement. I can get behind that.

Changing to HTTPS means a lot of the previous likes and shares won't track, but that's okay. With good change sometimes comes a little pain.

As will happen once or twice a year, we have a new social site that many are prematurely calling the death of Facebook. And as happens even more rarely, it appears to be getting traction towards overcoming the network effect. For those unaware, the "network effect," simply put, states that nobody will use a thing until enough people are using a thing. To overcome this seemingly catch-22 circumstance, you need a degree of interest and virality in a short period of time. It doesn't matter how good something is, if it relies on a critical mass of users, you'll have most people standing around waiting to see if anyone else jumps first, and nobody jumps.

In the case of a very few sites, if you get enough people to jump at the same time, you overcome the initial barrier. Chemistry geeks can consider this the activation energy threshold. Physics geeks can consider this the coefficient of static friction.

LiveJournal did it. Heck, Facebook did it to MySpace.

And yes, there are "tricks" to help. Artificial scarcity, for example - you need an invite to join, and you can ask for one, but you'll have to wait. Never mind that once you're in, you get 10 invites. The laws of simple math will make it clear that getting an invite from a friend should be no problem at all if you're even remotely connected. And this makes total sense to the site's owners, as it biases new signups to people who are connected. Using an invite code also gives you an initial social graph connection (to the person who invited you), thus bootstrapping the graph of the site.

In short, Ello is doing everything right.

And it may or may not matter, because once you overcome the network effect barrier, you still need to keep the users. Just ask Google+. That said, Wil Wheaton is already there. Consider that the low-threshold gating function: his presence doesn't make the site, but his absence would be a statement.

So, for right now, Ello is clean, crisp, simple, and pretty-much no better than a somewhat expanded Twitter feed. Friends/Noise has an appeal, but it's pretty basic. Many people want basic, but many more have come to rely on features that Facebook provides. Ello needs to find a way to provide these features, but in a non-cluttering way.

And, of course, the policy - transparency. You own your content. There's no curation and filtering happening. And, in an interesting (and dare I say refreshing) twist, everything is public. Anyone can follow anyone else, and all of your posts are public. It's wide open, and intended to be so from the start.

Some people have a problem with that. This morning, a friend of mine had a post on Ello, "Dear @person, please unfollow me, I only want friends here." Now perhaps @person will comply, but @person is under no mandate to do so. There's nothing my friend can do. Again, there are no private posts on your feed.

From last April: http://betabeat.com/2014/04/would-you-like-your-social-network-to-share-your-content-or-just-monetize-the-bejeesus-out-of-it/

The open question now is what Ello does with the current rush of early adopters. Will they roll out features that everyone wants and loves and maintain the elegant simplicity? Will they stick to their philosophical guns and will the fickle crowd agree? Will there be an initial rush, only to have the novelty wear off like Google+? Only time will tell. I'm keen to wait, watch, and see.

So I'm @dogberry over on Ello. Feel free to follow me.

I'll come right out and say it - password security questions are not only insecure, they're a blatant security hole. They're worse than not being there at all, and for any of a number of reasons.

My latest article is now up at the GoDaddy Garage. It's an overview of image optimization for web sites aimed at small business owners who are comfortable doing their own web work. Not advanced by any means.

https://garage.godaddy.com/webpro/design/best-practices-optimizing-images-websites/

Blake Irving, CEO of GoDaddy, sent an open letter to The Honorable Thomas E. Wheeler, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

In short, GoDaddy supports net neutrality. Full stop. It really is that simple. And (full disclosure), as a GoDaddy employee, I'm very pleased to see this. As I've said many times, this isn't the same company people remember from many years ago. Management gets it. In this case, it's the right position and the company is taking it. I continue to confirm that I made the right decision coming to work here.

Now... Mr. Chairman? It's Go Time.

https://garage.godaddy.com/godaddy/news/net-neutrality-american-dream-small-business/

And on social media...

https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/509746443783925760

https://www.facebook.com/8749090685/posts/10152294450960686

https://plus.google.com/+GoDaddy/posts/VmvZuzFSJVr

I've always wanted to say that ;)

Stephen Hawking is being quoted in the media as saying that the Higgs Field could wipe out the Universe. His point is that at a high enough energy, it could trigger what's called "vacuum decay," a state whereby a "bubble" of vacuum expands at the speed of light, destroying everything in its path. This could happen if the energy of the field is not constant and eventually changes or, as some media are reporting, if a sufficiently-advanced civilization were to experiment at such high energies.

To do this would require a linear accellerator, as we understand them, the size of the orbit of the Earth. Not something we're about to build any time soon.

Here's why everyone is wrong, at least about the second part: if it could have happened, it would have by now. Indeed, anything that any civilization could do to destroy the Universe would have resulted in such destruction long ago. The Universe is huge. If something could have happened, it would have. To think that in the 13.7 billion years that we think the Universe has been here NOTHING capable of destroying it has happened yet, but just might any day now is the pinnacle of self-importance. The odds just aren't there.

So relax. The Universe will be here tomorrow. I'm prepared to bet on it, in fact ;)

I tend to peruse the job openings posted to LinkedIn and other such sites. There is some value in keeping up with who is doing what by watching hiring needs (don't worry, GoDaddy, I'm not on the market). Something I've noticed lately, though, is that a lot of companies are starting to add statements like this to their listings:

"Anyone with 'Ninja' in their title need not apply."

Now I get the sentiment - companies aren't interested in people with inflated egos or a disproportionate assessment of their abilities and worth. But that said, lighten up, Francis.

If you check my LinkedIn profile, you'll see that I list "Powerful Internet Ninja" as my title when I worked at Demand Media. As I said in my profile, there are those who look down at using "Ninja" in a job title. To those people, I say lighten up. I did some pretty cool things at Demand Media, many of which were, while completely moral and ethical, somewhat sneaky in terms of strategy and competition. "Ninja" describes what I did sometimes, and it just sounds cool. If you think that detracts from my skills or makes me somehow pretentious, I will politely smile and disagree.

In other words, it's pretty clear I don't take titles seriously. Anyone who is disqualified from consideration based on the fact that they get a little humor out of their self-claimed title (along with, let's be honest, self-claimed experience) probably doesn't want to work at such a company, anyway. That's a pity, because some of the best technologists I know have senses of humor that make mine look absolutely pedestrian.

Then again, maybe such a line in the sand is a good gating function for everyone.

I spent the evening last night at an Irish Pub (yes, I know, this blog entry can just stop here) watching the Seahawks game. Remember, though I live in Silicon Valley, I'm a Seattle transplant. Go Hawks.

As I and the 50+ fans were enjoying a convincing victory, a commercial came on. It was entitled (and captioned), "The Call," and depicted a woman getting a phone call. She says hello, and her face drops as she listens, clearly being shocked at what she is hearing. I, the viewer, know only her shock - there is no indication of what's actually said.

And then the commercial ends with the call to action to go to a URL to find out what happens next.

No. Just no. Clickbait online is one thing. Doing it in a broadcast television commercial? Sorry, that's farther past a line that's already been crossed.

I encourage everyone to refuse to go to any URL presented in this manner. Please help send a message to advertisers that this simply won't work.

Oh, and get off my lawn.

My friends over at Media Temple have promoted a fantastic guide to DPI, and so much more. This article really covers it all and in an outstanding way. I can't recommend it enough. Thanks to Media Temple for pointing it out, and thanks to Sebastien for writing this. Bravo!

http://sebastien-gabriel.com/designers-guide-to-dpi

Well, not really, but just as stupid. As reported by Ars Technica, Facebook is now placing a [SATIRE] tag next to links that go off to The Onion. Clearly, Facebook is ruining the fun for those of us with enough brain cells to recognize satire when we see it, and is making the presumption that most of you are idiots.

Rumor has it that next week they'll be threatening to disclose the true identity of Santa Claus to anyone under 13 who lied about their age to get an account.

Hey Facebook? You want to do a little editorializing? How about you flag all of those linkbait sites as [DOG CRAP] while you're at it? Now that would be a non-abusive use of your power.

Today I revisited some code I'd written about a month ago and reduced the time it takes to run a data loading job from 52 minutes down to sub-10 minutes by replacing a relatively slow API call with a direct call to local code. This is something that was "good enough" until now, but was on my radar as being eligible for improvement. Since I had a new data loading job that would take over 10 hours using the API call, I had to write the new job a better way. Copying this better code back where it could make a difference meant that all of my data loading jobs were now refactored and much faster.

The takeaway here for developers is to periodically revisit your code and refactor it. Find new efficiencies. Examine how your code has been working and consider what you might have learned since the last time you worked on it. You may notice something now that you didn't notice the last time you were in the code.

A small amount of time doing this can pay off in huge improvements.

As reported by Gizmodo, Facebook is banning (in 90 days) the practice of requiring a user to like a page in order to see or have access to content.

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app's Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

Source: https://developers.facebook.com/policy