I’m sometimes frustrated about the low comment traffic on this blog. Of course, it’d help if I actually posted relevant, interesting stuff. But then I might end up with the huge problem of information overload. Take, for example, one of my favorite lefty political blogs, Daily Kos, whereupon, just this morning, seven blog posts generated over 4,500 comments (as of about noon). I had headed over there to read the reactions to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (finally!) but I quickly gave up when I realized I didn’t have two spare days to wade through all those bytes.

It’s really too bad because often the comments on blog posts are more interesting and insightful than the original article. In fact, four of the seven posts on Daily Kos today were quite content-free and served merely as an open slot for the comment discourse.

I used Cut & Paste Word Count on one Daily Kos post with 654 comments and got a result of almost 75,000. If I remove the metadata (approximately 14 words per comment, or 9156) we end up with close to 66,000 words. Assuming 250 words per printed page, that single Daily Kos post is the equivalent of a 264-page book.

In scrolling through the comments, however, I find that a fairly small percentage of them are insightful. But I’m honestly not going to sift through a mid-sized novel to find them.

The way I see it, there are three possibilities for blogs to exercise better “comment control.”

First, Slashdot has an interesting system whereby frequent commenters are awarded points they can then assign to other comments. Furthermore, they can tag comments as “insightful,” “interesting,” “funny,” etc. On the plus side of this rather formal system, registered users of the site can adjust their filters to, for example, display only “insightful” comments rated +2 or higher. On the downside, it’s sort hard to break in, there still is a human/semantic factor (who’s to say if something is really “insightful” as opposed to “interesting”?), and power can be wielded by a very few with a lot of time on their hands.

Second, over at Metafilter, a pretty solid set of unspoken rules govern commenting. The community self-polices to the extent that excessive “Me toos!” and off-topic snark are met with considerable hostility and usually result in swift moderation. On the plus side, the comments actually end up being largely worthwhile to read. However, the community standards are unpublished and it’s is pretty intimidating for newcomers to feel comfortable commenting on anything.

The third possibility is one I have yet to see, but it would involve using something like Bayesian analysis to automagically do what the Slashdot community does. This is how spam filters work, and the algorithms can probably be adapted to do some level of content analysis of comments to give a first pass at “insightfulness” or “interestingness.” Flickr has an “interestingness” quotient for photos; I’d like to see something like that available for blog comments.

Comments? (Interesting or insightful ones only, please.)

I did a guest lecture gig for an Information School class on Saturday. The topic was “online information delivery.”

I started out by talking about my film studies background and how my hobby is thinking about ways in which screenwriters have to deal with the problem of “magic” technology (to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke). I’ve blogged about this before.

The example I always go to is how, in Die Hard, the terrorists can effectively sever the Nakatomi Plaza’s communications by cutting some wires with a chainsaw. Had that movie been set just five years later, the screenwriters would have had to account for cell phones. And, sure enough, in Spike Lee’s Inside Job — a more recent film with similar plot elements to Die Hard — there’s a scene of the hostages tossing their cell phones into a bank robber’s bag at gunpoint. In that film, the issue of “Well, what if someone just doesn’t throw theirs in?” is also dealt with in a fairly graphic manner.

The example I gave in class involved the 1941 film Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Cooper is a stodgy professor holed up in an old house with a group of other stodgy (and much older) professors working on an encyclopedia. It’s a 10-year project and they are doing all the research and all the work themselves. Each is an expert in some field. Gary Cooper realizes his entry on “slang” is outdated, Stanwyck’s tough-talking nightclub singer and gangster moll, Sugarpuss O’Shea, enters, slang problem solved (oh, and she and Cooper fall in love, naturally.) The film’s energy comes from Stanwyck’s “ball of fire” entering the cloistered community of the professors and upsetting their stodgy ways. If I recall, the film never even moves outside the old house.

I compared the film’s main premise of a small group of experts locked in a house producing a “knowledgebase” (to use a trendy term) with that of the Wikipedia model — or the web in general, for that matter. How could Ball of Fire be re-written to account for crowdsourcing? Could it be? Has the Urban Dictionary made slang “experts” such as Sugarpuss O’Shea obsolete? Has the Internet made it impossible for stodgy old professors to be swept away by beautiful young dames?

Discuss.

This has got to be one of the most brain-dead Windows XP error messages I’ve seen (click to enlarge).

It reads:

It crops up if you try to drag an item (an icon, a piece of mail, a block of text) and drop it on a window button in the taskbar. When would you do this? Well, when dragging text from one application to another (which I was doing when I first saw this) and the destination window is minimized. I thought: “I’ll just drop it to the window button.” But nooooo.

This is a classic example of a developer realizing that a user might want to do something — in fact, that a user even seems encouraged to do something based on interface clues — but for some (unknown to the user) reason, cannot be permitted to actually do it. An issue like this crops up in usability testing; in other words, this error message exists probably because a significant number of users actually tried to do this in testing.

So, rather than do the work to build in the desired functionality, the developers crafted an incredibly wordy error message explaining how they’d like you to do what you want to do. How about: instead of popping up the error on the mouse release event, you actually maximize the targeted window, drop the item, and minimize the window again? Which is exactly what happens if you do what the error message tells you to do.

I suppose they could have just left the action alone to fail silently, in which case I wouldn’t know that I could (almost) do what I wanted.

It’s also the only error message I’ve seen that uses the word “however,” so that’s something.

For the last several years, I have been gradually building up this inordinately complex, highly sophisticated Excel spreadsheet to track every last aspect of my personal finances. All my investments, all my expenses, all my tax liabilities, even projections into the next couple years … everything. With one keystroke, I could see the effect of, say, changing my withholding or increasing my retirement contributions.

When I had three computers (work, home, laptop), I saved this spreadsheet to my GMail space using a Windows extension called GMail Drive. GMail Drive lets you mount the GMail file system as a networked drive. You can open it in Windows Explorer, see all your files, double-click them to open them, etc. I installed it on all three computers and never had to worry about keeping the file in sync. Also, it was already on a networked drive, so it was just like it was backed up, too. Right? Right.

Do you see where this is going yet?

Yesterday, I opened up the file, tweaked some stuff around, saved it, and closed it. As GMail Drive was copying the new file from the temp directory to GMail, something went horribly wrong.

“Unable to create file,” it said.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just open up the temp version and re-save it.

No temp version.

Never mind; I’ll just open up the original from GMail and re-do all the changes I made. There weren’t that many.

No original.

No biggie, I thought. I’ll just cry and bang my head against this large wooden table right here for about an hour or so.

OK, now Gmail Drive is an unsupported hack job, so I was probably stupid to trust it, but I figured the worst that could happen is that it would simply stop working once Google finally decided to block it, or restructure their file system, or something. I could always get to the file via GMail itself. It never occurred to me that it could be in some way responsible for losing data.

But I guess that’s why my employer doesn’t trust me with any information systems of my very own….

I’m back from an unintentional hiatus from blogging. I wonder what percentage of blog posts are focused on explaining why the blogger hasn’t blogged in a while? I’ll bet it’s pretty high.

In my case, I don’t really have a good reason. I can’t say that my new job is to blame as my blog-life is pretty neatly distinct from my work life. In other words, I usually don’t blog from work in accordance with University of Washington Administrative Policy 47.2 (hear that, HR?!) so I generally have the same amount of time for blogging regardless of how busy I get.

I have been trying out some social networking sites, however, and tweaking my profiles has been using up what little screen time I’m willing to invest when I’m not in the office.

Some colleagues of mine are getting into Facebook, which I always thought was more for the under-25 crowd so I never gave it any attention. Plus, after having played around with MySpace and its dreadful interface and population of young, hot, horny “women” (bots) wanting to be my “friend,” I didn’t think much of the social web phenomenon. But, I was invited to join this Facebook experiment, so I created a Facebook profile.

I am reserving judgment on Facebook so far. The site is well-presented and neatly arranged. It has avoided MySpace’s ghastly aesthetic problems by preventing the user from customizing the styles of his or her profile to a large degree. Facebook has a concept of “Groups” and “Networks,” which MySpace largely lacks (AFAIK). And there is a vast array of “applications” available to help meet new friends through common musical, movie, or other interests (or to just wile away your time trying out new gadgets).

It’s somewhat disturbing, however, in that it logs and reports everything that any of your friends does — from befriending you, to installing a new app, to updating their status (“I’m at the beach!” or “I’m just chillin’!”). Of course, you can modify how much of your own activity you want reported, but I’m still a bit weirded out by its omniscience.

The whole “UW Facebook” endeavor was kick-started by a group interested in seeing how social networking can be used in professional environments. There’s a discussion going on now about it in one of the forums, but I find myself here on my own blog writing about it rather than engaging with my colleagues because it’s 7:30 on a Sunday night and I don’t really want to think about “work stuff.” I expect, therefore, that this experiment will be a non-starter for me unless Facebook can play a useful professional role during the work day — more so that email and phone calls, which seem to do the trick.

After all, the separation of personal business from work goes the other way, too.

I recently helped a friend and fellow blogger deal with a lingering Google cache issue. The search behemoth still listed a page from her blog that she thought she had deleted, but had merely “delinked.” Even if she removed the page now, I warned, the cached version would still be available unless she contacted Google and asked them to remove it (Note: Google’s page for webmasters describes how you can do this).

This reminded me of a similar incident I dealt with a couple years ago.

When I played baseball for the Madtown M’s, the manager used to follow up each game by writing an amusing recap on the team’s web site (a graphic-less archive of which can be found here). The recaps were all written in an over-the-top sportswritery style complete with tortured nicknames for the players, egregious verbing, and wild exaggerations of our on-the-field accomplishments.

After one of our games, a number of team members announced that they were heading to a nearby Hooter’s restaurant for some post-game festivities. The manager derided them in his next recap by writing a fictional account of how they were arrested for disorderly conduct after mashing on one of the waitresses.

Two years later, one of the team members implicated in this fictional scandal contacted me in a panic. He had been applying for jobs at law firms and one of his potential employers found the humorous piece during a routine background check (read: Google search). Taken out of context, it was difficult to determine that the piece was satirical on its face. He was able to convince them that it was a joke, but he worried (understandably) that other employers might not be so forgiving.

I promptly removed the offending section from the page and contacted Google to remove it from the cache. I’m happy to report that it was gone within a couple days.

One of my student assistants pointed me to this new service from Google. I can’t wait to try it.

In case you hadn’t heard, a few months back we launched 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) in the U.S. It’s a free telephone service that lets you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free.

Today, your GOOG-411 experience just got better: during your call to GOOG-411, just say “map it”, and you’ll get a text message with the details of your search plus a link to a map of your results right on your mobile phone.

I also hear they are rolling out a service where, if you are in physical danger, you can call 1-800-GOOG-911 and they’ll dispatch an platoon of heavily armed robots to your rescue. The only drawback is you have to listen to a 15-second commercial before they’ll save you.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Washington Mutual’s misleading error message on their online banking site. They later admitted that their Bill Payer upgrade did not go as planned, and plastered apologetic notices all over their site.

The mishap has been widely reported by the media. A later WaMu press release, quoted here, stated: “We began communicating to our customers as soon as the problem was discovered.” I can say that the statement is utter bullshit. Reports say the site was down as of July 22nd; my calls took place on the 26th. The “communications” on that day == four days later — took the form of an irrelevant error message on their site. WaMu claims they provided “telephone bankers with updates and options to share with customers” yet the two reps I spoke to seemed clueless about the nature of the outage and only offered assistance after I begged for it.

When the upgrade was finally completed (so they said), I tried to use it but was greeted with an obtrusive Javascript error message whenever I tried to change the date of a scheduled bill payment. I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, so I am used to sites skirting the web standards and presenting tools that only work in Internet Explorer. So, I dug around my file system until I located IE, fired it up, and experienced the same issue.

I then tried to send a “secure” message to Washington Mutual. The link I clicked prompted me to log on again, so I did, and I was promptly dumped back to account listing. I clicked the email link again only to redirected to the logon page. Ad infinitum.

I resorted to sending a regular email to them, first complaining about their messaging system and then about the real issue: the bill payer. A few days later I got a response that the message problem was due to my browser settings (bullshit) and that completely ignored the issue about the bill payer. I have a number of other complaints related to their web site, so I figured: What the hell, let’s send some snail mail around. I targeted the President and a couple of relevant-sounding EVP’s with a letter [PDF].

A few days later, I got a fairly generic reply that referred to the problems with the upgrade but that basically side-stepped any of the issues I raised, especially the one about site security.

Today, a woman who knows a former lead worker on WaMu’s online security team told me some interesting information. It seems that he once wrote a white paper detailing the security flaws of a certain vendor’s product and posted it on a web site. WaMu turned around and purchased that product from the vendor to use for a component of its web site (I don’t know if it was related to the bill payer). The vendor complained about the white paper, and WaMu fired the security guy. Out of loyalty, his entire team resigned. This, she remembers, was about two months ago, meaning that it probably happened right in the midst of the roll out of their disastrous “upgrade” to their bill payer system.

Doesn’t that make me feel safe?

Writely is an online word processor currently in beta. It supports all the common formatting you’d expect from such a program, plus direct posting to blogs, so I’m trying it out. If you can read this, then I’ve succeeded in configuring it.

In general, I find I have little use for a word processor. In about 90% of all cases in which I need to write something, email or some other plain text outlet suits me just fine. Word processors were designed for producing print output, and there’s very little that I need to print these days.

I also have have issues with most web-based WYSIWYG editors, such as the one I’m currently using in Writely. For some reason, they generally insist on inserting errant spaces and doing funky things with line and paragraph breaks. I’ve tried incorporating some into the Movable Type interface, but the resulting code always seems to break my validation. We’ll see how you perform, Writely.

Upon inserting the hyperlink for the first word of this post, I became annoyed. I selected the word by double-clicking it, and the program un-helpfully selected the space after the word as well (grrrr). Then, upon applying the hyperlink, three spaces popped in afterwards that I then had to delete.

Upon checking the code, I am pleased that in-line formatting is applied via the span tag (though the style attributes are in ALL CAPS, for some reason), but I’m annoyed again now I see that two line breaks are used in place of a single paragraph break. Granted, it’s hard for software to determine when you’re going to hit Enter once or twice and then do the right thing, but it’s not impossible and ignoring the basic “p” tag has the potential to mess up my existing styles. Oh, and I just noticed that it inserted a superfluous line break at the start of the text.

There are some collaboration options that might be nice. I can invite other Writely users to see and/or edit this document. And that’s really the whole point, I guess. Writely is not just a word processor, but a document management and sharing system. I wonder how good it is at tracking changes? Oh, I see a “Revisions” tab that lists the changes made to this document as I’ve been working on it. That’s sort of cool. I’ll have to find some more people I know who use it and try out the sharing functions.

Many see tools like Writely as a potential Microsoft Word-killer. It’s been demonsrated that the vast majority of people use only a small fraction of Word’s capabilities, yet the software has become the de facto standard for word processing. Everyone seems to need it, but mostly for writing basic documents with minimal formatting. Given what I use word processing for, I have to say that, minus a few glitchy annoyances, Writely could meet my needs pretty well.

After posting this to the blog, I made a few corrections. The document title did not map to the blog post title, and the XHTML-compliant “<br />” tags I saw in the preview were replaced with non-compliant “<br$gt;>” tags with spaces in between them (I removed all of them and replaced with paragraph tags). The weird ALL CAPS formatting I spied on the inline span styles, however, were converted to lower case by Writely.

I got a call today from someone at a completely different state university, which just happens to also have the name of our state in it. They were referred to me by a software vendor who told them I was the contact for the university’s site license for a particular product.

Not only did the vendor have the institution wrong, I’m not even the contact for my university’s site license anyway — in fact, we don’t have a university site license. I am the contact for my college’s license, which is a critical distinction. Today’s experience tells me that they really don’t care as much about me as they keep saying they do.

Most companies have some form of “CRM,” or Customer Relationship Management, software. The CRM business itself is enormous and highly profitable. But I have to wonder how effective the products really are.

Continue reading "Customer Relationship Manglers" »

In 2010, the sequel to the sublime 2001: A Space Odyssey, the motive behind the HAL 9000 computer’s killing spree in the first movie is revealed. The computer, it seems, was given conflicting orders and was just doing its best to reconcile them. HAL’s programmer, Dr. Chandra, explains: “Computers don’t know how to lie.”

Lucky for us, most computers won’t try to kill us if they experience an “unhandled exception.” They either pop up an error message or they crash.

People don’t generally realize this, but there’s no law that computer error messages have to have anything to do with the error that’s currently happening. In IT work, knowing this often leads you down unexpected paths toward solutions.

Continue reading "I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That" »

Following up on my “Save the Internet Today” post, “Rob” comments:

I certainly appreciate the energy behind this movement, but I honestly feel that there’s more to it.

The more government regulation we put into the business, and the more red tape we put in the way of developers, the more we bog down advancement.

It’s important to note that “Rob” links back to a site called “Hands off the Internet,” which bills itself as a grassroots, consumer-oriented, anti-regulation “national coalition of Internet users.” In reality, it is a front group primarily funded by AT&T and BellSouth. Their list of “Member Organizations” reads like a who’s who of the telecommunications industry. Where are these “Internet users” they’re talking about? There’s more information about this astroturf site at SourceWatch.

I also find it interesting that a lot of these “member organizations” are the same companies who benefited from government-sanctioned monopolies to build their communications infrastructure in the first place. (See also “The Phone Company Killed My Grandmother”)

I certainly don’t trust the government to do the right thing, but I trust corporations less, especially ones (BellSouth) who have already said that they will block certain types of traffic if they only could.

FreePress.org has a good piece explaining why the anti-regulation spin HandsOff (and others) are putting on this issue is bogus:

What is not true is that the Internet has never been regulated, or that the imposition of Net neutrality rules will harm the Internet….

With the removal of those common carrier safeguards, the telephone company, like the cable company, is free to raise rates at will, discriminate in favor of their own Internet service provider, favor their own content and services, and even refuse to offer you broadband service at all.

So, thanks, “Rob,” for providing me an opportunity to expose you for the fraud that you and your organization truly are. What are you gonna do? Block my site?

This weekend’s “Pacific Northwest” magazine, which comes bundled with the Seattle Times/P-I on Sundays, featured an essay by retired reporter Steve Johnston about a computer crash he recently suffered. He goes on and on about how he never learned much about computers except how to use them to write his articles, and describes his wacky, bumbling adventures getting a hard drive replaced.

“Suffered” is also the term one can use to describe my experience reading this article.

Continue reading "Isn’t It So Funny That I’m an Idiot?" »

The Seattle Times and Microsoft on the software giant’s plans to plaster advertising all over its future products:

Video games are unique in that players aren’t subject to the disruptions or distractions that TV viewers or people browsing the Internet have become accustomed to.

With its new [advertising company] Massive acquisition, Microsoft will be developing ways to insert advertisements into the games themselves.

“You can take your message and imbed it in that immersive environment,” Bach said, “and they get it and they may not even know they got it.”

Here’s a hint: if your business plan requires you to have a captive audience and then inject them with your “message” without them realizing it, then you’re a scumbag.

I just got back from a 3-hour panel discussion on information systems that was organized by this “task force” I’m on. Big-wig IT honchos from Seattle-area companies such as Washington Mutual, Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom’s, and T-Mobile were among the panelists.

Though business is a far, far different world than higher ed (and I’m glad for that), we found commonality in that the strategic position of IT within either structure is remarkably the same. Our respective sectors may have different goals (profit vs. graduation rates, for example) but it has taken leaders in both a long time to recognize that IT has a strategic value and is not simply a background service or utility and is just a money sink.

Today, topic after topic kept coming back to, essentially, ontological discussions of the true meaning or strategic position of IT services and the fact that many CEO’s just don’t get it. Throughout my 12 years in this field, the hardest fights I’ve had to fight have been to have the work that I and my staff do be taken seriously by upper management and to be included in strategic planning discussions. Even the fact that I, as an IT professional, am on this task force was not a foregone conclusion; I had to make a case for IT representation in what is largely a discussion of business systems. Involving IT leaders in such business discussions is still not an automatic connection that even the most enlightened leaders make. Yet every panelist admitted he spends more time on business strategy than technology strategy.

Some of the other salient (and sometime contradictory) points I took away from the discussion are:

Continue reading "IT in Private vs. Public Sectors" »

This is a bit of geeky post, but I can’t help it.

We have a group scheduling program where I work. Anyone on the system can check my availability and “invite” me to a meeting. It’s handy for group scheduling, and even though it takes away from me a modicum of control over my calendar, it saves up for having to type up and email my availability around whenever someone asks for it. Plus, I can always decline to attend a meeting.

The main problem it has is a total lack of knowledge about geography. Here’s a typical problem:

Continue reading "What I Want My Calendar To Do" »

Counterfeiters Rush to Ensure Red Ink Cartridges Are Full

Forgers Set Aside a Couple Hours Next Weekend to Figure Out Ways Around New Security

The U. S. Treasury released new, colorful $10 bills into the wild on Thursday, according to an article in the Seattle Times. The Treasury Secretary said “the government plans to redesign the currency every seven to 10 years because ‘staying ahead of would-be counterfeiters is a top priority.’”

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for strong security measures. As an IT professional, a large chunk of my time is spent trying to prevent the theft and ensure the integrity of my users’ data. But security must be implemented as part of an overall system, and not via a couple new whiz-bang do-dads here and there. When a vendor pitches me a product he says will “ensure” the security of my data, I politely end the conversation. When the U.S. Treasury says that red ink will “thwart counterfeiters,” I have to laugh.

This latest gimmicky attempt to stymie counterfeiting is a textbook case is what not to do to ensure the integrity of the currency system, and is a cautionary tale for the implementation of any security system. Here’s a list of reasons why the current efforts of the Treasury Department will do very little to reduce the problem of counterfeiting U. S. money.

Continue reading "New Ten-Dollar Bills Roll Into Circulation" »

Yesterday, I reported that I felt unclean after ditching Mozilla Thunderbird and loading all my email into Microsoft Outlook. Why should this simple act of using new software have such a visceral effect on me? Read on to find out….

Continue reading "The Outlook is Hopeful" »

I feel so dirty.

I feel like scum.

I’m using Microsoft Outlook instead of Mozilla Thunderbird.

More later on why, and why this is a big deal for me.

Right now, I need to go take a shower….

Geez, how many “ph” -> “f” substitutions can I make in one day?

All day today, people were calling my cell phone — wrong numbers, all of them. It struck me as odd since my cell phone number isn’t published anywhere, and no one except my staff and Amy know it. Finally, this afternoon, a woman with a very thick accent stayed on long enough for me to ask her how she got the number. She claimed to actually want to talk to someone named Jim, but it wasn’t me. She read off the phone number she was calling, and it wasn’t mine. I couldn’t understand her enough to find out her name or where she worked, but I had enough to start digging into the problem.

I called the extension she gave me … and I got my own voice mail! (“The call is coming from inside the house!”) Could I have an alter-ego that I wasn’t aware of? A doppelgänger, perhaps?

Continue reading "Phone Phreakiness" »