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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: February 2005 (page 1 of 7)

Simple truths

Here’s a simple truth when it comes to security, courtesy of Bruce Schneier:

Security systems fail in one of two ways. They can fail to stop the bad guy, and they can mistakenly stop the good guy. The TSA likes to measure its success by looking at the forbidden items they have prevented from being carried onto aircraft, but that’s wrong. Every time the TSA takes a pocketknife from an innocent person, that’s a security failure. It’s a false alarm. The system has prevented access where no prevention was required.

Everyone working in security knows that the first case is a failure, it seems like almost noone sees the second case that way.

Hibernate 3.0 released

Hibernate 3.0 was released today. I hadn’t realized that it was coming out so soon, I guess it’s time for me to at least start looking at what it brings to the table and what’s going to be required for me to migrate to it. I’ll need Spring to support Hibernate 3 before I can even get started working with it — that looks like it will happen by the end of March.

Deflation

One performance test shows Ruby on Rails to be 8 times slower than the equivalent application written using Java, Spring, and Hibernate. I expect a response from the Ruby community, but I’ve read that Ruby is slow in other places as well. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, Ruby is a lot younger than Java. Companies like Sun and IBM have committed countless developer hours to improving Java’s performance.

Update: Bruce Tate explains Ruby on Rails’ compelling value proposition.

Jef Raskin, RIP

Personal computer and interface design pioneer Jef Raskin passed away yesterday.

Librarians on librarians

This week’s tempest in a teapot here in the weblog world arrived when Michael Gorman, the president-elect of the American Library Association fired a broadside against weblogs in general as a counterreaction to a vicious response from bloggers to an op-ed he wrote about Google in December. I really have no desire to attempt to defend weblogs or the people who write them from these kinds of attacks; it should already be ovious to anyone I’m interested in communicating with that blanket attacks on all webloggers based on the worst characteristics of some of them is just another form of bigotry. What I’ll bet Mr. Gorman didn’t know, though, is that some of the best and oldest weblogs are written by his constituents, other librarians. I was curious what they had to say. Jessamyn West, the dean of librarian/bloggers, responds and has rounded up some interesting responses from other librarians as well.

The politics of ignorance

For all the handwringing after the last election about why Democrats failed to do as well as they’d hoped, not enough attention was paid to the fact that the Republicans profited from outright ignorance among the electorate. How many of the 47% of Americans who think that Saddam Hussein helped plan and execute the attacks on 9/11 do you think voted for John Kerry?

Plug and pray

I fixed the problem with my new hard drive. When I installed my hard drive controller, Windows XP detected it and installed it without even a hitch. This, unfortunately, gave me a false sense of security. I knew that the controller supported large hard drives (that’s why I bought it), and Windows knew exactly what it was, so why worry. I actually tried to download and install the latest driver from the manufacturer’s Web site, but I had no idea whether or not it had worked (the controller seemed to work as always).

Someone suggested that I make absolutely sure that I had the latest driver for my IDE controller card, so I went back and looked into it in more detail. Using some kind of Windows voodoo I found the driver information, and the version number did indeed look old, so I told Windows to update the driver and pointed at the driver I had downloaded. It told me the driver that was already installed was the best of all possible drivers. I uninstalled the driver completely and reinstalled the device. Windows still used the old driver. So I told it to update the driver, and then told it exactly which file I wanted to use. At that point it warned me that I was begging for disaster by not installing a driver that was on the special list of drivers that Microsoft has endorsed, but I ignored that advice, installed the new driver, and everything has been peachy since then.

Seems like a lot to go through to put in a hard drive.

And the thing that really kills me is that Knoppix, a Linux distribution, managed to autodetect my new IDE controller and install it properly with no intervention on my part at all. This despite the fact that the hardware maker doesn’t even provide a Linux driver. Astounding, really.

The politics of organ donation

Want to see where a mainstream journalist can pick up where weblogs leave off? Take a look at this item from Boing Boing. A guy posts a plea about needing a kidney transplant on the Web, he manages to find a compatible donor (not via the Web). Some kind of group that has something to do with hooking up organ donors with people needing those organs blocks the surgery because he wrote about his case on the Web. Why do they have the authority to do that? Are they the ones who would pay for the surgery? What’s their rationale? I’d like to see 2000 words or so really digging into this from someone.

Update: Jason Levine sends along a link to a post by Alwin Hawkins explaining the rationale behind this policy. I can appreciate why they do it, but what gives them the authority in the first place? If a recipient has willing, compatible donor available, then how do these organizations get involved? Is it a compact among transplant surgeons?

Another update: Another reader emailed and explained that these rules are set by local organizations that coordinate transplants or professional organizations of transplant surgeons, and that not adhering to these common standards is likely to get you kicked out of the nationwide network that of organizations that help match up donors with patients who need donated organs. Here’s an example of a memo that explains one such organization’s position on soliciting donations.

The first podcasting startup?

Evan Williams has started a new venture related to podcasting. I’m generally a laggard when it comes to jumping on with new trends, so it shouldn’t surprise you that podcasting leaves me cold. Here’s why: if I’m can’t skim it, I’m not interested. I don’t like to watch the news on television, or listen to it on the radio, and I’ve never listened to an audiobook in my entire life. For me, the ability to proceed at my own pace is the key to the experience. I must also confess that I have not actually downloaded any podcasts. Maybe actually trying them would change my mind, but I doubt it.

Bill Keller on weblogs

So here’s what the Editor in Chief of the New York Times has to say about weblogs:

There are, of course, blogs where you encounter intelligent, provocative debate and reflection, and I value them, but it seems to be a world in which people quickly harvest the stuff that conforms to what they already believe, where there’s a lot more pronouncing and cheerleading than listening and reflecting, and where the market has little tolerance for ambiguity and complexity.

There was a time when nobody who sampled the weblogs that were available could have come away with this impression. That was a long time ago.

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