July 2002 Archives

I just got a cryptic phone call from our REALTOR:

Janet: "Who was the last agent to show your house?"
Me: "agentName. Why?"
Janet: "I need her phone number."
Me: "phoneNumber. Why?"
Janet: "She's supposed to be faxing me an offer for your house."

So, I'll believe it when I see it, but we're cautiously optimistic. Think good thoughts for us!

UPDATE: the offer was legit. It was a bit low, so we'll be countering. However, I'm about to book Arlene a plane ticket so she can go househunting.

Microsoft's just released the Security Operations Guide for Exchange 2000. This is the definitive reference to how you should secure your E2K boxes, at least until my Exchange security book comes out :) The included scripts are mighty interesting, too.

There's a lot of bloviating going on here in the blogosphere. (Free translation: there's an unholy lot of self-referential navel-gazing going on among people who write weblogs). This isn't new, of course; one of the first things that people used the then-new AltaVista engine for was to ego-surf to see how many times they could find their names listed. This always reminds me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. However, there's precedent; after all, Google ranks pages in part by counting the number of links to particular pages, and academics have valued scholarly papers based on the number of following papers that cite them. Blogging just makes it easier to see who's linking to whom (case in point: the truly cool Internet Ecosystem).

This leads to the development of what I call an egosystem, where the value of blogs is perceived to be related to how many links a blog has and where they come from. In the egosystem, if you get linked by a blog geek (and I mean that in a goodway) like Dave Winer or Tim O'Reilly , your blogcred goes up. If you get linked to by one of the uberbloggers-- y'know, like Glenn Reynolds or Den Beste, well, you're a star in the making.

The interesting thing to me about this particular egosystem (as opposed, say, to People Magazine or the Democratic National Commitee) is that it superficially seems to ignore the value of content in favor of link count and weight. Really, though, it does just the opposite-- where a site like AmIHotOrNot presents context-free photos for you to rank, with a blog you get all the context you want-- possibly more than you want, as in Eric & Dawn Olson's continual blogged arguing. You can make decisions on whether something's worthwhile or not by reading it! What a concept. (Of course, having said that, I shall be crushed if my BlogHotOrNot rating stays down near the 1.0 end of the scale.)

NZBear has an interesting discussion about the myopia of some parts of the egosystem. Most bloggers in a particular topic area-- surprise-- tend to stick together, so that warblogs, or blogs about technology, or blogs by garbage collectors, etc., have lots of back-and-forth, self-referential linking. He says "Bring on the blogs by ordinary people!" Amen to that.

Julie asks how I like MovableType as a blogging tool. I started blogging the old-school way: HTML by hand, posted manually. Eventually I graduated to Dreamweaver, which gave me some site management and link-checking tools (see my old travel diaries for a sample.) This approach has its champions, notably Bob Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. However, the bad news is that this approach ties you to a particular tool (see Bob's many rants about FrontPage).

In the new world, we can use tools like MovableType that provide content management. These tools keep track of the posts, sorting and ordering them. The better ones apply styles to keep everything looking consistent; the best, like MT and Radio Userland, support protocols (like XMLRPC) that allow blogging tools to work together. I can drive MT from any web browser, or I can use purpose-built tools like BlogApp or BlogBuddy to quickly post items with better editing tools than Internet Explorer provides.

Overall, I like MT quite a lot. It's very stable, it has an attractive interface, and I can use it from any browser-equipped machine. (Note, alas, that you don't get all of the editing bells & whistles on Mac browsers; I'm not sure why this is yet.) Even better, it is inexpensive and very well-supported (not that I've needed any support yet). Once I get it set up properly, so that I can use BlogApp, it'll be even better. Honorable mention goes to Radio Userland, which does all kinds of cool stuff that I don't fully understand yet. Radio has a slick desktop client, which you are free not to use, and a powerful macro language. However, for my relatively modest needs MT is just the ticket. I give it two thumbs up.

The upgrade succeeded. I still can't tell if TrackBack is working quite properly or not; I can ping other people's sites, but I don't know if anyone can ping me. TrackBack is a little less automatic than I'd like, but it's a neat feature that I suspect will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

I'm going to be updating this blog to the new version of MoveableType in the next day or so. That may cause a bit of downtime, so don't be alarmed. Along the way, I have some cool new features I'm planning on implementing, too; you'll notice when the upgrade is finished.

Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is an editor for Tor Books. He also maintains a terrific weblog. However, so far I must say that I like his wife's blog better, primarily because on the left-hand side there's a list of other SF authors who blog! Some of my favorites include Steve Gould and James Patrick Kelly, not to mention Charlie Stross. Go there now.

Charlie Stross has become one of my favorite science-fiction authors. His short stories "A Colder War", "Antibodies", and "Lobsters" have all appeared in recent editions of The Year's Best Science Fiction, quite deservedly so. I just found out that he has a weblog, including a collection of stories available on the web. If you like science fiction, go there now.

A clever fellow got some useful help building his new computer. I guess it's time to go raid David's Lego stash...

According to this AP story, a man drowned in a vat of chocolate. The accident happened at Kargher Chocolate, which already has had at least one product recall. Somehow I think this accidental death is going to be fodder for every morning radio show and late-night monologuist for the next few days...

Thomas and I made it to New Orleans last night. Our flight was uneventful, but we had about a one-hour runway hold in Atlanta because of bad weather to the west. Now I'm sitting in what must be the world's most uncomfortable chair at the Morial Convention Center. The convention center boasts 1.1 million square feet, each one of which is air-conditioned to within an inch of its life. We're here for Microsoft's MGB, working in the competitive lab area. So far, no Microsoft people have shown up, so John, Peter, Sam, and I are working on various other things. In my case, I'm finishing the third book chapter so I can get it back to MS before my end-of-the-month deadline.

I accidentally found Herb Yeates' site. I have no idea who he is, but his site is beautifully laid out and has a wealth of interesting stuff (including a good layman's description of how nuclear weapons work). I think my favorite section is the one on the "bizarre glowing minerals of Franklin-Sterling"

What comes around goes around. John Magaw, former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), just got fired as head of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Magaw took over the ATF in 1993, after the Waco debacles. His mission was to turn the agency around; in the six years of his tenure, he didn't accomplish anything meaningful that I can detect. Naturally, his reward for his lack of competence was a promotion: he ended up as the TSA director in December 2001. Ever since then, passengers, airline employees, airline executives, and lawmakers have been united in their complaints about the TSA: too slow, too secretive, too inefficient, and too expensive. Now, barely six months after his appointment, he's getting the boot. According to the Wall Street Journal (registration required), Magaw got the boot today. Yahoo's story says that Magaw was fired for letting the agency spend too much money and for not working with lawmakers; according to the DoT inspector general:

of the 313 employees hired who were not passenger screeners, more than half were paid more than $100,000, including 31 of 39 lawyers and 18 of 30 criminal investigators.

One of the key pieces missing from Mac OS X, at least for me, has been a client that I can use with Microsoft's Terminal Services (TS). With TS, you can remotely log on to a Windows machine and operate it just as though you were sitting in front of it. Since I travel frequently, TS has been an invaluable tool, but it's required me to use a Windows machine. Now Microsoft's Mac business unit has released a Terminal Services client for Mac OS X! It's missing some features that the Windows XP client has, but so what? It's a lot better than nothing.

I am not a big fan of John Gilmore. That's not because of his accomplishments, which are many (including being one of Sun's early employees, founder of Cygnus, which was open source when open source wasn't cool, and driving force behind the Free S/WAN security project.) In general, he strikes me as obnoxious and overly opinionated. However, I have to give him his props: he has consistently defended the liberties of American citizens. Now he's suing the Attorney General. Why? He believes that the current requirement to show photo ID at airports is unconstitutional, since (in his opinion) it violates our constitutionally protected rights to travel within the US and to be secure in our persons and papers. It doesn't help that the TSA rule that requires this ID check is secret. See his lawsuit here.

The Sunday school lesson I taught this week was on David & Bathsheba. Quick recap: David, king of Israel, saw Bathsheba from his rooftop and invited her over, then impregnated her. To keep his misdeed from coming to light, he tried to get Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, to go home to her. Uriah, a good solider, said "Nothing doing", so David had him killed.

David put himself in a compromising position, and then, when he feared exposure, compounded his sin by doing something worse: murdering Uriah. Most of us won't ever face that particular combination of circumstances, but all of us can learn from his example. When Nathan came to chastise David, his first reaction wasn't to deny his sin or try to minimize it; he owned up to it, saying "I have sinned against the LORD". He had to suffer for his sins, but his sincere repentance for his wrongdoing helped him to get back on the right track and stay there. His prayer is simple: "Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me." Try it; it can work for us too.

Today the Washington Post had a live chat with WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore. Sidgmore was asked "Where were you Mr. Sidgemore when all this was happening?" His weaselly answer:

was Chief Operations Officer during 1997 and 1998. Since that time I have had decreasing involvement in the operations of the company and played primarily a strategy role in mergers and acquisitions since that time. Over the last 2 years my role has been almost exclusively speaking at Internet conferences on behalf of WorldCom.

Wow, I wish I could get a job as COO of a multi-billion-dollar publicly listed corporation so that I can spend my time going to Internet conferences! Where do I get a deal like that?

Frankly, I think the man is lying through his teeth. It is not credible that such a large-scale fraud could be perpetrated by only three employees.

I finished the first chapter of the Exchange security book, and it's now with the separate tech editor I've hired. It wouldn't be fair to describe him as an anti-Microsoft bigot, but he has substantial security expertise and he has been known to give Microsoft a hard time. If my book can live up to his standards, it should do well.

On Saturday, sometime after 3pm CDT, my DSL connection went down. My ISP has been super-reliable, which is why I use them. The problem appeared to be with the DSLAM , the gadget that takes a consumer DSL line and terminates it in the telephone company's central office. The link is back up now; evidently BellSouth or API Digital fixed it overnight. Good for them. If you sent mail over the weekend and it didn't go through, now you know why. Of course, since this blog is hosted by my web service provider, it wasn't affected by the outage.

It's official: I just signed a contract with Microsoft Press to write a book on Exchange 2000 security. The working title is Securing Microsoft Exchange, so that should give you some idea of its contents. The contract calls for me to finish it by 10/30 so it can be in stores by Christmas. I plan to post draft chapters online for review, and I will soon have a form that lets you sign up to be a reviewer. This is my first book in a while, and it's my first book with MS Press, so it's going to be like riding a bike for the first time after a long hiatus.

Over on Dave Farber's IP list, Dana Blankenhorn raises an interesting question about the Worldcom mess. John Sidgmore is now the CEO of Worldcom. Before the meltdown, he was the COO and vice chairman; he used to be the CEO of UUnet and took the current position when Worldcom bought UUnet. Why has the media given Sidgmore a free pass? Why isn't anyone saying "Hey, John, you were the COO. How come you didn't know this was happening?"

Timothy Smith, another IP contributor, says that Sidgmore was largely out of the loop-- after a falling-out with the CEO, "[Sidgmore] pretty much went off and did his own thing" from sometime in 1999 until the present. If I were a stockholder, I'd be outraged. As a consumer of the business press, it certainly makes me wonder why no one asked this reasonable question of Mr. Sidgmore. Maybe someone will.

Wayne Rash trashes ISS in a ZDnet piece today. He's got a very good point, one which was made in Brian Bilbrey's comment the other day: ISS jumped the gun, released a broken patch, and violated their own agreement. I suspect Brian still thinks MS put them up to it, but I am willing to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence; I don't think ISS has a very long track record in the OSS world. Not like this is gonna help...

As I was driving up I-75 on the way to Perrysburg, I began to wonder why the Marine Corps has been so successful, both as a fighting force and as a Washington constituency. Some of it is doubtless attributable to the heroic deeds for which the Corps is famed: Belleau Wood, Tripoli, Guadalcanal, Khe Sanh. Some of it is thanks to the Corps' legendary esprit de corps. Some is undoubtedly due to Marines' genius for self-promotion, whether intentional or otherwise. After the battle for Okinawa, James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy) is reputed to have said "The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five
hundred years". [thanks to Michael Wellman for correcting my quote error!]

I think it's more than that, though-- I think the major portion of the Corps' success has come from its focus. You don't see Marines lobbying to be the lead agency for theater missile defense, like the Navy and Army. You don't see them trying to take over strategic deterrence or control of space, like the Air Force. (Note to my blue-suited friends: the Air Force should own both of these missions, but the sight of zoomies back-stabbing the Navy is, shall we say, unseemly.) You don't see mixed-gender basic training. The Marines focus on doing what they do: expeditionary combat, mixing infantry units with organic air and logistics. It's worked well since 1775, although I admit that the Marines could learn some procurement lessons from the other services.

My pal Tyler Regas has been working on PDAHandyman, but I've only recently gotten around to visiting it. Nice site! I am certain that he'd like to hear from all you Linux folks who are using Sharp's cool-but-IMHO-impractical Linux handheld. Personally, I have a Treo pricing rant that I'm saving up to send his way.