The Blog of Harald

I know my priorities are messed up.

My biggest nagging worry about global climate change is that Americans are going to flee northwards. Into Canada. Bringing their ideology (and idiocy) with them.

Wouldn’t that keep *you* awake at night?

Man, it was hard getting out of bed this morning. To make matters worse, I couldn’t get to sleep at any reasonable hour last night; probably fretting over the lost hour of sleep :)

I’ll bet that the people who are complaining about DST in April won’t remember in July and August when they’re enjoying an extra hour of afternoon/evening sunlight.

For 22 years, pundits have been predicting the demise of Apple (and in particular, of the Macintosh), because Apple never be #1 against Intel, Microsoft, and HP+Compaq/IBM/Dell.

I’ve been trying for almost as long to convince people that there’s nothing wrong with being content “owning” 10% of the marketplace (Apple’s consistent share of the personal computer space). But it’s a hard sell.

Now people are starting to talk about one factor contributing to Apple’s success:

Seth’s Blog: Thinking about the Long Tail (part 1)
“Seth’s blog: Where is the rainbow? (long tail, part 2)”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/where_is_the_ra.html

There are perfectly reasonable business models out in the Long Tail. And in the long run, I think companies working out in the tail will be more successful than those searching for the next “big hit”, or competing to stay on top of the puppy pile…

I received my monthly phone bill today.

Does anyone else think Bell Canada’s savings breakdown is absurd? This month, I saved $114.40 on my $135.60 phone bill! Wow, I feel priviledged that Bell is giving me such a deep discount!

Well, they’re not. Not really.

I’m on their basic (First Rate) long distance plan. A minimum fee of $4.95 gets me up to 60 evening/weekend minutes. The rest are 10¢/minute, but with a maximum total fee (including the minimum) of $20.00 for the first 800 minutes.

Fine, so far. But the report they generate compares this plan with the _maximum_ I could have paid for the call. This is misleading two ways:

1) It ignores standard time-of-day discounts, which are applied across the board to everyone, even poor schmoes who don’t have a Bell long distance plan. (It doesn’t apply to operator assisted calls, though :-). So I’m not really _saving_ on those, am I?
2) It ignores the fact that everyone with two brain cells to rub together purchases a long distance plan from _somebody_. The actual going rate for long distance is well below 10¢/minute, not the 38¢/minute or 43¢/minute they are comparing my rates to…

I’m not sure why they’re allowed to do this. Ah well; laugh at the poor sucker who would have paid the whole $135.60, I guess…

I had a short chat this evening with a fellow curler, who said (if I remember correctly :):

* Now that Ontario has privatized the driver testing program, the wait for an examination is a couple of days, not months.

* The problem in Ontario really is driver skill (well, the lack thereof), and not congestion; European roads are much more congested than ours, but their accident rates are lower.

* As for the money, it turns out that we (Ontario) spend about 95 million dollars a year on hospital care for the victims of non-fatal accidents. That’s a whole lot of money to apply to a) retesting, and b) other parts of the healthcare system…

It’s all moot, however, since “McGinty came out and said no”:http://ottawa.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=ot_returns20040406.

bq. on Tuesday, Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters that mandatory retesting was “just not on” for Ontario drivers.

I’ve always had a somewhat idealistic view on things like driver retesting. Any skill that is not reinforced can suffer; driving is no exception. So theoretically, it should be a good thing, right?

So when I read (in CBC News:Alberta, Ontario mull retesting all drivers)

bq. Drivers in Alberta and Ontario could soon be forced to take periodic exams to make highways safer, transport ministers in both provinces have said.

bq. Ontario Transportation Minister Harinder Takhar said on Friday that his province would also consider driver testing, if the government sees evidence it would improve highway safety.

My first thought was “and how are they going to manage that?”. When I took my drivers test (only a few years ago) there was a 10 month wait to get a test, at least here in the Greater Toronto Area. Add mandatory retesting and the load on the driver testing system would skyrocket, which means either completely unmanageable delays, or hiring a whole bunch of new examiners.

And where are we going to get the money for _that_?

“David Brake” mentions an “Interesting row underway about the ethics of private schools”:http://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_uk.html#000935 in the UK. I was going to add a short comment, but as it got longer and longer I decided it would work better as a blog entry of my own :-)

David and I met at private school (St. George’s College in Toronto), so maybe we’re biased. He ends with:

bq. I and my wife have no children but if we did and could afford it we would probably send our kids to a private school if the local public school was not good. I know she would insist on it and precisely because private schooling has not been banned I would have a hard time penalising my own child in order to benefit his or her classmates at a failing public school.

That’s pretty much where I sit. I support the public school system in principle, and yet my children attend private school. In fact, we chose the school _first_, and then found a house reasonably close by…

Unfortunately, 30 years of political agendas have systematically gutted the Ontario public school system, and even if the majority of motivated parents were involved, it would take at least a decade (if not two) to fix it. Now it can be argued that private schools don’t do any better than public schools at teaching the basics (the “three-Rs” of education). There are certainly still pockets in Toronto where the schools are extremely good.

The important differences for me (and our school) is in other areas:

* “soft” subjects like music and languages, and critical thinking skills
* smaller class sizes (compared to Toronto)
* more adult supervision and encouragement
* a good physical education program (including skating in kindergarten and skiing for grade 1 and up!)
* many extra-cirricular and after-school activities
* a high level of community involvement.
* compacting (something I’ll blog about later, probably)

These are all things that for various reasons have diminished or disappeared in our public schools. We decided that since we had the resources to do otherwise, we were not going to make our children “test subjects” in the current political scrap over public education. And so our children attend private school.

Are you an Accidental Techie? I know a few of them.

My wife started out doing document processing in the 80s, and became a sysadmin out of self defense (read: no one else would do it; they were afraid of the computers :-). Then she had to teach everyone else… She discovered she was good at it, and eventually went into “business for herself”:http://www.qa-consulting.org/ doing technical training and training development. It turns out that she has two related talents; understanding technical gibberish, and translating it into realspeak so that it can be taught to others. Ask her to explain IP netmasks sometime…

My friend Michelle (who hosts persephone.cfrq.net) is currently a syadmin, and also more-or-less fell into the job; now she’s responsible for a large, geographically dispersed corporate network (and is currently in London, England setting up a brand new office :-). Her formal training is in environmental sciences…

There are others. I think it is the case that I know more women than men are “accidental” techies. However, we have even more women with formal technical educations. I’m not quite sure what to conclude from this :-)

I found a comment on Train of thought [dive into mark] that struck me (no, I didn’t strike it back):

bq. You may not have a normal night’s sleep, maybe for the next 5 years, by which time, you may not remember how to sleep for 8 hours in a row.

How true! Well, ok, I usually manage uninterrupted sleep, but I’ve forgotten how to sleep _in_. Left to my own devices, I’m up by 8:30 at the latest on most weekends. (Of course, now that winter has returned we’re back to 7AM breakfast for 8AM hockey games :-)

I have vague memories of sleeping in past noon on Saturdays and Sundays, but I’m beginning to wonder if they’re real…

Young girls? Sex? Multiple partners? great, here comes another Google-sourced firehose of traffic :-)

I took my car into the shop this morning for routine maintenance. While I’m waiting for the courtesy shuttle (that’ll take me to take me to the subway), I was forced (yes, strapped to a chair and forced!) to watch a day-time “shock” talk show.

Today’s story was about five 14-year old girls who are having lots of (unprotected) sex because they want to have babies. Some of these girls were having sex up to 12 times a day, with multiple partners.

I’m not going to comment on the serious issues here; there are many of them, and they should be obvious. But three things occurred to me while I was sitting in the waiting room:

# You _reduce_ your odds of getting pregnant by having sex with the same partner more often than once every two days; it takes him that long to generate new sperm.
# You _reduce_ your odds of getting pregnant by having sex with multiple partners; male sperm will compete with each other, blocking each other or killing each other off.
# You _reduce_ your odds of getting pregnant by contracting STDs; many of those STDs (especially if left untreated) cause infertility. For cetain, if you’re having sex that often with multiple partners, you’re going to catch one.

In short, these poor kids can’t even get “getting pregnant” right… *sigh.

Speaking of information warfare…

I can’t find a primary source right now, but Google certainly asserts that carrots aren’t as good for your night vision as we’ve been taught.

During the Second World War, the Allies didn’t want the Germans to find out about radar (but see update). They needed a way to explain how RAF pilots could “see” in the dark. Someone came up with the story that the pilots had a diet high in carrots, and this allowed them to see in the dark…

*Update:* Propaganda, propaganda everywhere, and nary a drop to drink :-).

As with all stories, the truth is a little muddier. The Allies, Germans, and Russians all had radar before the war (as Jeff comments). However, for the usual political reasons, only the Allies developed it for tactical use, building a network of radar stations blanketing the coast. Intel from several sources, including the radar net, was relayed “within minutes” to fighter squadrons. This rapid use of intel, combined with a tight command and control structure, is what tipped the balance in favour of the Allies during the Battle of Britain; radar was a relatively small component of this system.

Germany had better technology at the start of the war, but failed to capitalise:

bq. Hitler and Göring disdained [radar] as a mainly defensive weapon. Besides, they harbored a deep mistrust of scientists and engineers. Interservice rivalries and the hidebound traditions of the officer corps also hampered progress. It was not until 1944 that an air defense system as effective as Dowding’s went into operation in Germany.

There are ironies in the situation, too. The Germans tried to determine the purpose of the giant radio towers on the British coast, but since German scientists had discounted HF as “useless for radar”, they never figured it out. On the other hand, the Allies lost far more planes than they should have during the late part of the war. The Germans had finally started using radar defensively, but the Brits continued to deny German radar capabilities, and sent unescorted bomber squadrons straight into German defensive radar…

The fact remains, however, that the whole carrot story was deliberate mis-information to protect the secret of the British use of radar…

Some more references:

* “A Radar History of World War II: Technical and Military Imperatives”:http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-10/p82.html (actually a book review, not primary source material).
* “Deflating British Radar Myths of World War II”:http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/docs/97-0609F.pdf

Here’s an entry covering two of my favourite topics!

Today Sensity posted Coventry Cathedral. I love his photpgraphy! I don’t remember how I tripped over his photoblog; if I recall correctly, it was right around the time he built a new studio in the attic. Anyway, I’ve been reading (viewing?) it ever since.

“Coventry” is one of the classic stories of information warfare. To maintain secrecy, the Germans used a complicated machine called Enigma to encrypt their radio communications. They believed (with good reason) that Enigma was unbreakable. By the later part of 1940, the Allies _had_ cracked the code, thanks to the work of brilliant cryptologists at Bletchley Park. It is easy to argue that this project (codename Ultra) won us the war; it’s amazing what you can do when you know the enemy’s plans in advance.

Back to Coventry. On the night of November 14/15, 1940, German bombers substantially destroyed the city center of Coventry, including the 14th century cathedral. 545 civilians were killed; 4,865 were injured. The city’s infrastructure (buildings, gas mains, transit) was destroyed.

Thanks to Ultra, Churchill knew that the raid was coming, some say as early as November 12th. However, if the Allies had _acted_ on this knowledge, the Germans would have known that Enigma was broken, and changed their codes. In order to protect the secret of Ultra, Command chose not to defend Coventry. Many lives were lost, and a city destroyed.

It’s a good story, but it’s not true. The reality is both mundane and more plausible. The Allies knew a raid was coming, but they didn’t know exactly when, and had four different potential targets. The Germans used radio beams to guide the bombers to their targets; it was only shortly before the raid that the RAF determined that the beams intersected over Coventry. Jammers were sent out to disrupt the radio signals bit their equipment was incorrectly set. RAF fighters sent to intercept the bombers downed only _one_ plane (out of over 500). Some believe that this last point is what led to the myth; claiming that Coventry was destroyed to protect Ultra is better than admitting that the RAF completely failed to stop (or even slow down) the attack.

Still, the lesson is a valuable one. Intercepting enemy communcation (encrypted or not) is only part of the problem; the other part is hiding your interceptions from the enemy. If your opponent discovers that an important plan has been intercepted, he’s goign to change that plan (or worse, start deliberately feeding you false information).

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…

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…

Articles by “Brad Choate”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001480.php, “Tim Bray”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/17/FastAlwaysOn, and “Doc Searls and David Weinberger”:http://www.worldofends.com/ talk about wanting a big, fat bit-pipe with no additional services.

I agree with the sentiment; I want to be able to buy a cheap, reasonable bandwidth, always-on, completely unfiltered and unlimited connection to the Internet. Sadly, I also believe that’s a pipe dream (pun intended).

Simply put, there’s no profit in bit-pipes. No sensible business person starts a new project knowing that they’re going to be competing on price from day one. It’s hard to make money supplying pipes, whether they’re carrying electricity, natural gas, water, or bits; the people making money are the ones selling the content of those pipes (electricity, natural gas, or bits :-). So anyone with an Internet project these days wants to be in the content-for-sale business, not the business of delivering that content.

In the pipe market, one of two things usually happens. The first is a regulated monopoly; this is typical of electricity, natural gas, cable TV, and other commodities where physical constraints mean that a shared infrastructure makes sense. The second is fierce competition; in this case, basic service gets sold at a net _loss_, and the providers are forced to balance the books by trying to sell low-cost, add-on services with a larger profit margin. That certainly explains the current cell-phone marketplace, and describes current broadband internet providers perfectly.

The easiest way to sell “add-on” services is to introduce artificial restrictions, such as time-of-day blackouts, or bandwidth restrictions, or monthly usage caps. Then a provider can sell the same service _without_ one or more restrictions at an artificially higher price. Cable and DSL providers here in Toronto are already offering three tiers of service; -Lite (usually bandwidth restricted to 128Kbps in both directions), -Normal (typical high-speed with uplink caps, monthly caps, and the “no servers” AUP, and -SOHO or -Business, which typically give static IP addresses, allow servers, and have slightly higher bandwidth limits. (I’m not talking about true Business DSL here, that’s still a separate beast, and often provided by a different division of the corporation). -Lite is artificially restricted and priced to compete with telephone Internet providers, and -Normal is artificially restricted purely to justify a higher-cost service tier.

To make things worse, the tragedy of the commons applies. To make any communications service cost effective, resources have to be shared, and as soon as that happens, somone shows up to abuse the shared resource at the expense of everyone else. There’s always some guy who downloads every new game demo, or runs a music sharing service or a warez site; and that guy is congesting the network that I want to use for e-mail and web-browsing. So even if we could get rid of financially motivated artificial barriers, we’d end up with an under-provisioned network that wouldn’t function well.

I think there’s a market for fast, always on connections, but I think we’re going to have to accept the artificial restrictions put in by providers in order to differentiate themselves. Uplink bandwidth restrictions, or monthly bandwidth caps, or restricted access to HTTP or SMTP will continue to be unavoidable, in my opinion…

Well, porn anyway!

According to my “site statistics”:http://www.cfrq.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=blog.cfrq.net, the two most popular pages on this site are:

* “Trends in Playboy Models”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2002/12/20/trends-in-playboy-models/
* “Female Nudity”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/01/06/female-nudity/

(The second one is a distant second; I mention it because it supports my conclusion.)

It turns out that, thanks to the black magic of “PageRank”:http://www.google.com/technology/, the first one is number 2 on a search for “playboy models”:http://www.google.com/search?q=playboy+models right now (seven of the top 10 are links to the same news story).

I wonder how long it will take this entry to generate traffic! <grin>

I haven’t tripped over many interesting things in BlogSpace lately (everybody’s arguing about the Power Law stuff instead). My thoughts are mundane, like deciding what I’m going to have for lunch, or when I am going to have time to go sample those Reid’s Dairy one-point cheescakes :-).

Seems like a couple of months ago I had too many things to blog about, and now I’ve got too few. Ah well; it’s winter, and time for sitting by the fire[place] with a good book. Come spring the world will quicken again, and by August I’ll be rambling about anything just for an excuse to stay in the air conditioning.

Speaking of which, I just gotta love a climate with a 50°C seasonal temperature swing. Last summer the A/C couldn’t keep up with the 39°C afternoons, and yesterday my son’s ski trip was cancelled because it was -11°C (with a 45-65 km/h wind.!). The new high-efficiency furnace ran for 13 hours yesterday; good thing we replaced the old one in December!

Anyway, I’m off to play with Wiki technolgy some more; I might convert Adanflaen Nights over, and/or use 0xDECAFBAD‘s Wiki + MovableType combination. A Wiki makes more sense for static reference content like the game information pages, while a weblog makes more sense for the campaign notes stuff. Hmm…

Mark has hit the wall.

Mark’s posting inspired me to scribble down some random thoughts, which eventually turned into this rant.None of this is directed at him specifically; he’s a pretty smart guy :-). In fact, he’s unplugging for a few days, an excellent idea…

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen burnout over the years, among family, friends, and others. I’ve hit that wall myself, a time or two, and I know a few people flirting with the edge. These days, my answer is along these lines:

Stop complaining about how you don’t have a life. You “live” a life, you don’t “have” a life. If you really want to live a more balanced life, start looking at the choices you are making. You are not in prison.

 
– workplace writer Barbara Moses

Now that quote is worded harshly, but the idea is sound. If you let them, other people will absorb all of your time and energy. This is true of employers, family, friends, organisations you volunteer for, and so on. We each have to decide, for ourselves, the things that we believe are worthwhile expenditures of energy. Where do you draw the line?

Obviously, having a job is key; without a job, it can be challenging to eat and stay warm. And it’s important to do one’s job well! But that is no reason to let an employer (or client) bully you into burn-out. In this economy, some employers think that they can get more out of their employees because they cannot escape. I’ve heard about companies that routinely expect 10 hours (or more) per week of overtime. Spread across four employees, that is an entire extra person that company should hire! That kind of nonsense is why the economy is recovering even though unemployment rates remain constant. (Thankfully I don’t work for one of those employers.)

Somewhere in there we have to make time for our families, to see friends, for our health (physical fitness is the leading cause of longevity :-) and yes, even personal time for reading, meditation, or whatever else keeps us sane. Good employers realize that healthy, sane employees are more productive. But it’s hard to avoid spreading oneself too thinly, with all of the demands on our time. Multi-tasking and “efficiency” can only go so far; they merely postpone the inevitable.

I have worked crazy hours in the past to meet deadlines. Sometimes they were my deadlines, and sometimes they were other people’s. But there were fewer demands on my time back then, and so overtime was managable. I have a family now, my priorities have changed, and I think I’ve mananged to find a balance between work demands and the rest of my life. Thanks in part to a commuter train schedule, I work normal hours most days. With some exceptions, I’ve found that clients that demand a solution “right now!” will accept one, two, or several days provided that their expectations are managed appropriately. (In fact, we’ve found it’s better to deliver a tested solution in two days, than it is to deliver a “quick-fix” in one day.)

It certainly helps that my team and I have developed a good development discipline over the years (and across multiple employers). Management requests features, and (sometimes) a specific ship date. We estimate the work involved, then combine that with the programmers available and develop a schedule and an actual ship date. (It’s up to us to make quality estimates, since we suffer if they’re wrong). If management wants to move the deadline, they have two options; hire more staff, or drop features. We’ve trained them to understand this. :-) We still work late when the unexpected comes up, or when an estimate is a little bit off, but generally speaking, we all get to go home at night and avoid burn-out.

I too have a laptop and a wireless network. I still spend too much time in front of my computer, but now it’s personal play time. I maintain my servers, catch up on e-mail, look up the name of the actress on the TV show I’m watching, and so on. I can work from home if I need to, and I often do if the weather is bad (or I’ve slept in and missed the train :-). But normally I don’t check my office e-mail from home, and I don’t have a compiler (or the project source code) on my laptop so I can’t be tempted to “fix one more bug”.

This weekend I took my son to hockey, went to the Science Centre with family, had friends over for dinner, did some housework (but not enough), took both kids skating, and helped another friend move furniture. I was tired Sunday night, but in a good way. That’s how I avoid burnout…

I was reading discussions of news aggregators and RSS and lack of presentation in aggregators and webpage scrapers and trackbacks come-tos and on and on and it suddenly occured to me:

We’ve managed to re-invent UseNet, only instead of topic-oriented newsgroups, we have a system where each newsgroup is an individual’s (or a small group’s) personal playground. Only it’s been done poorly.

That’s a whole lot of effort to get to the same place :-)

This seems to happen all the time. We’ve spent the last 20 years re-inventing the OS security models that used to exist in mainframes. Web-forums are a poor replacement for e-mail lists with searchable archives. As has already been discussed elsewhere, the result of Trackback and friends is a bunch of people talking at each other instead of having a conversation, a poor replacement for both e-mail and usenet. XML? I could go on and on, I’m sure.

Which finally leads to the meta-issue: Once again we’ve reached the point where if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, the hammer is HTTP, and the nail includes e-mail, usenet news, FTP, WAIS/archie, RPC, and yes, even IP (see http-tunnel).

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning…

Update: In an amusing twist, I discovered today that DJ is Tinkering with RSS and NNTP, thus proving that we really have come full circle. (Thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link.)