The Blog of Harald

An internal news clipping service led to a Google search, and I eventually found the original article “Information Security ROI: Not Every Expense Is an Investment”:http://www.metagroup.com/cgi-bin/inetcgi/jsp/displayArticle.do?oid=41867 by Tom Scholtz of “the META Group”:http://www.metagroup.com/.

bq. “Organizations should not consider every expense to be an investment,” adds META Group analyst Chris Byrnes. “Many security expenditures are completely valid and necessary and even legally required, but they are not investments that will produce a quantifiable return. In many instances, ‘What is the return on investment?’ is simply the wrong question to ask.”

This is true of many more things than Information Security, or even IT. Money is not always the right measure; sometimes it’s completely misleading (this is particularly true of environmental issues, but that’s a separate rant).

I’m glad to see someone “official” saying this for a change…

(The META Group article was originally published on 17 July 2003; why is it making the news in September?)

That last post was premature. The wind died overnight, and there was a bit of rain. About 5 minutes after we left the house this morning the storm _actually_ arrived; lots of rain and wind. I can hear the rain pounding on the office windows.

Still, we used to get weather like this all the time. We’ve had a sunny and warm (but not hot) summer here; I think people have forgotten what rainy days are like :-)

The wind is supposed to pick up later today as what’s left of the eye passes to the west of us. Maybe I’ll hang something from the ceiling and see if we can detect the building swaying in the wind…

I saw “Russell’s post”:http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1004309.html that discussed adding an XSL stylesheet to the site RSS feed, so that people who click on it get a pretty display instead of the ugly raw XML.

In the process of copying this to my blog, I re-discovered that “SmartyPants”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ was spitting out “HTML entities”:http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/ in decimal, which look ugly in XML. (HTML entities in their text form don’t look any better). My blog has been XHTML and UTF-8 since I started reading “dive into mark”:http://www.diveintomark.org, so I modified my copy of SmartyPants to spit out UTF-8 sequences instead of HTML entities. In the process, I had to:

* turn off HTML entity processing by movable type, by setting @NoHTMLEntities 1@ in @mt.cfg@. Otherwise HTML::Entities was converting my UTF-8 sequences back into HTML entities…
* explicity set my movable type charset to utf8 (set @PublishCharset@ in @mt.cfg@). This gets used in the Movable Type edit pages, so I can now paste non-ASCII characters into entries and have them come out the other end as UTF-8, instead of as the raw ISO 8859-1 bytes (which aren’t valid UTF-8 characters).
* get rid of a couple of leftover @”charset=iso-8859-1″@ tags in my templates.

Only the “RSS 1.0 feed”:/chk/index.rdf works so far; I don’t have a corresponding XSL stylesheet for RSS 2.0…

“Perverse Access Memory”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/004315.html → “Comfort Foods Switch Off Stress, Scientists Find”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/health/nutrition/16FOOD.html?ex=1379044800&en=6c0e824ae3f4800a&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

Bad news for those of us that turn to food when we’re stressed out, and thus tend to be overweight…

bq. Eating calorie-rich food seems to calm the nerves, but eating too much can lead to obesity, depression and more stress.

bq. This is the first time it has been shown that the tendency to overeat in the face of chronic stress is biologically driven…

And the kicker:

bq. “If you use sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll instead of high-energy food to get stress-reducing pleasure, you miss out on the metabolic feedback,” he said. “You don’t shut down the chronic stress system. You just seek more cocaine. Things like saccharin won’t cut it. You need the real thing or the system won’t stay in balance.”

It’s starting to get windy outside… no rain yet, though. I’m impressed, though; the hurricane was still in North Carolina when it clouded over here in Toronto. That’s a large storm…

I’m going to bed.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and longer articles about the state of IT jobs in the US recently. Between the tech bubble bursting, general recession, off-shoring, and rapid technological change, it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on. Alas, with two small children I _want_ to be able to plan more than a year in advance…

Anyway, my thoughts on the subject haven’t really gelled yet, but I wanted to link to the articles:

* “Halley’s Comment: What’s Up With Work?”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_09_14_halleyscomment_archive.html#106366311798894147
* “What Labour Shortage?”:http://rss.com.com/2030-1069_3-5075799.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
* “Getting By In A Wal-Mart World”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/09/13/21380807 (discusses productivity and the jobless recovery)
* “Protesters Mourn Tech-Job Drain”:http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60471,00.html claims that offshoring will make more money for US organisations. But will that money go to R&D staff, or to CEOs and their shareholder buddies?
* “Bidding Your Job Bon Voyage”:http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60495,00.html

There are others (particularly a long one on off-shoring); I’ll go hunt them down and add them to the list…

“Halley”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/ has a couple of “entries”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_09_14_halleyscomment_archive.html#106366535915388637 about people who are lucky vs. unlucky Including a pointer to “a book on the subject”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0786869143/.

The basic premise appears to be that people make their own luck, essentially by expecting and anticpating opportunity.

Sounds like several people I know, on both sides of the coin. Me, I like to think I’m lucky; despite the roller coaster ride that inserts itself into my life, things generally work out for the best. Is it fate, or my positive outlook? Only the gods know for sure… <grin>

According to “this article”:http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html in “Tech Central Station”:http://techcentralstation.com/, it is legal to copy music for the private, personal use of _the person doing the copying_. Fascinating; if this is true (and I have no reason to believe that it isn’t), it significantly lowers my objections to the blank media tax…

“Apple – PowerBook G4 15"”:http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index15.html

bq. Fully loaded with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 512K of L2 cache, AirPort Extreme Card, megawide display, Radeon graphics and a slot-loading SuperDrive, the 15-inch PowerBook G4 boasts jaw-dropping features – including its price: all this is now just $2599. And models equipped with the Combo drive start at just $1999.

I still can’t justify it right now though…

Fascinating. As soon as I figured it out, I read the rest of the paragraph as fast as I could, which was pretty close to normal speed.

bq. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The implications for my son are, well, frustrating. He’s seven, and he’s left handed, so learning to read and learning to spell are both slightly harder for him than for righties (according to unspecified research :-).

There was other research recently that shows that dislexia doesn’t manifest in other languages the way it does in English; I wonder if this spelling result holds true across languages, or if it too is a property of English?

(I got it from “Joi Ito’s Web”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/09/14/ordering_of_letters_dont_matter.html).

This week’s WISH 64: Deities and Demigods asks:

bq. Name three gods or religions that have appeared in games you’ve played in. Were they good, bad, or indifferent? What made them so?

In my very first D&D campaign ever, we were on our way to the dungeon when we passed a statue dedicated to some god or another. Some of the party made appropriate offerings to the statue, others did not. However, when _I_ walked past without an offering, the statues eyes suddenly flared red, and I found myself cursed… it took quite a while to get rid of that one!

The gods are quite active in our current campaigns. In “Adanflaen”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/adanflaen/”, there is an ongoing battle between followers of the Old Religion, whose gods demand human sacrifice and give power to their followers, and the new kinder gentler Three. The Gods are active in this world, and one is advised to remember that (unlike my first character all those years ago).

“Aedor”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/aedor/ also has an integral and active god in a strongly religious society, which makes me wonder why my aetheist/agnostic friends would want to create and/or play in highly religious fantasy worlds <grin>…

The ideas in “David Brin”:http://www.davidbrin.com/’s “Transparent Society”:http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html are interesting. On the other hand, “This article on identity theft”:http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030911.html is a major reason why I am a privacy advocate.

Next week is “Banned Books Week”:http://www.ala.org/bbooks/ again; the annual event that “celebrates the freedom to read and reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.”

Once again, “Harry Potter tops the list of most challenged books”:http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Press_Releases&template=/contentmanagement/contentdisplay.cfm&ContentID=9404. That’s four years in a row! Sadly, I have not made _any_ improvments in my score on the top 100 banned books list since last year when I mentioned it (other than keeping up with the Potters, of course). Maybe I’ll try to get through some of this year’s top 10:

* Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
* Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for being sexually explicit, using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
* “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier (the “Most Challenged” book of 1998), for using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
* “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.
* “Taming the Star Runner” by S.E. Hinton, for offensive language.
* “Captain Underpants” by Dav Pilkey, for insensitivity and being unsuited to age group, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority.
* “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, for racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
* “Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language, sexual content and Occult/Satanism.
* “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor, for insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
* “Julie of the Wolves” by Julie Craighead George, for sexual content, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.

Oh wait! I’ve read the Captain Underpants books, thanks to my seven year old. At this point, I’m happy to encourage him to read even if it requires doses of Booger Boy and Hairy Potty…

(That ALA press release URL is ugly; if it stops working, you can get there via http://www.ala.org/bbooks/ )

A continuation of the “SF is not dead”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/000398.html meme…

I went and looked at my book list, and yes, I have been buying and reading more SF than fantasy these days, and it _is_ because there’s more of it being written these days. Like so many things in the publishing industry, it’s a computer-generated feedback loop. If publishers _print_ more fantasy, then readers will _buy_ more fantasy, at which point the pretty spreadsheets will say “fantasy sells!” and the cycle continues.

(The same phenomenon on the retail side kills mid-list authors. Book stores order books based on an author’s previous sales record, but they don’t seem to track sell-outs and special orders, so over time, an author sells fewer books not because they are less popular, but because the book stores’ automated order systems don’t order as many books. See what happens when you remove human intelligence from the loop?)

But I digress…

There is still good SF being written. Here I present, in no particular order, a list of current SF authors that I recommend reading. Some of these authors have “fantasy” novels too, but they’re usually just as good as the science fiction.

* “John Barnes”:http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?John_Barnes
* “Lois McMaster Bujold”:http://www.dendarii.com/
* “James Alan Gardner”:http://www.thinkage.ca/~jim/
* “Steven Gould”:http://www.digitalnoir.com/s/write.htm
* “Robert J. Sawyer”:http://www.sfwriter.com/
* “Melissa Scott”:http://www.rscs.net/~ms001/mainpage.html
* “Allen Steele”:http://www.allensteele.com/
* “Peter Watts”:http://www.rifters.com/
* “Connie Willis”:http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ae.cgi?Connie_Willis

And yes, Spider Robinson is absent from this list. He wrote a bunch of really good books in the 80s, and he hasn’t done anything except regurgitate Calahan’s since. Defining Calahan’s as science fiction is a stretch, IMO.

But where is Larry Niven these days? <grin>

“pykrete”:http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/floatingisland.php sounds like cool stuff. It’s a slurry of wood pulp and water that when frozen becomes very strong (unlike pure ice). I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere before, but I can’t remember where…

Retail Alphabet Game

bq. you will be presented with 26 alphabet letterforms, extracted from product and corporate logos within the United States.

bq. Your job is to figure out the source of each.

I managed to get 9 on the first test, with 5 that I _should_ have known; 11 on the second test, with 2 more that I should have known; and 10 on the third test, with 3 more that I recognize but can’t place.

Most of the ones I don’t recognize are from US products or chains that don’t exist up here in Canada, so I may be excused for my poor showing :-)

From ryochiji’s blog:

bq. I accidentally ran over my PowerBook with my dad’s SUV today.

bq. It’s not very often that someone gets to say that. But perhaps what’s even more surprising is the fact that I’m writing this on that very same PowerBook. Hold a 12″ PowerBook G4 and you can just tell it’s sturdy. It’s thin, but not flimsy, and the aircraft-grade aluminum case makes it feel like a lump of metal, rather than a sophisticated high-tech gadget.

If I ran over my Acer, there’d be a pile of pieces on the ground. While the lid is wrapped in metal, the rest of the system is plastic case and layers of circuit board…

“Soundless Music Shown to Produce Weird Sensations”:http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3401200

bq. British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills — supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations.

bq. “Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost — our findings support these ideas,” said Professor Richard Wiseman.

Cool research. I must admit that I’m slightly surprised, only because I knew a long time ago that subsonic sounds caused anxiety in people. We even experimented with them in our university residence… <grin>

Spider Robinson has “a rant in today’s Globe and Mail”:http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030908/COSPIDER08/ about the dismal state of science fiction. The question:

bq. Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?

I think there are several reasons:

* Science Fiction isn’t fantastic anymore.
* Good stories are about _people_, not technology.
* Most of the interesting ideas have been used.
* pessimism and disillusionment.
* The distinction between “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” has been blurring.

Good science fiction is about creating a fantastic setting (Moon colonies, space empires, unusual environments, etc.), and then writing about how people coped with, and adpated to, scenarios in those environments. Many of those stories have been done already. The relatively small leaps in tech that used to be interesting aren’t so fantastic anymore; we’re absorbing so many radical changes in our real lives, and are often unhappy about them. Modern life is about recessions, and megacorporations controlling our lives, and war in the middle east; we’re not dreaming nearly as much as we did in the heyday of Science Fiction.

In some modern SF, the science or technology is so complicated that half of the book is spent explaining it (instead of advancing the story). Robert Sawyer’s books are a notable exception to this trend, IMO :-). Either that, or a minor technological gimmick becomes a critical plot point.

I’ve found myself reading more fantasy than SF recently. Partly because that’s what is _available_ these days (good SF writers are harder to find, and aren’t writing as much), anad partly because that’s where the good writing and character development are right now. The SF I’ve been reading are people like John Barnes, Steven Gould, Lois McMaster Bujold; people who haven’t forgotten that the science and technology are _backdrops_ for the stories, not the stories themselves…