scott.hodson.blog

The political party you belong to, or not (Independents), may influence what kind of car you drive, according to this NY Times article. In summary:

Among their findings: buyers of American cars tend to be Republican - except, for some reason, those who buy Pontiacs, who tend to be Democrats. Foreign-brand compact cars are usually bought by Democrats - but not Mini Coopers, which are bought by almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And Volvos may not actually represent quite what you think.

This entry was already posted on Slashdot but it’s too funny not to pass around. Read the IRC chat as a malevolent hacker threatens to hack someone in the IRC and asks for the IP address of his enemy. “It’s 127.0.0.1″. The comedy then proceeds as he hacks 127.0.0.1, causing his own system to reboot or crash and keeps re-entering the IRC room to hack again. The best line is after he crashes his own PC the first time, he comes back into the IRC and threatens his enemy again: “dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone”. He eventually deletes all the files from 4 of his hard drives and 30% of his C: drive before dropping off for good.

Read the entire story here.

This billboard off the 605 freeway is good timing considering what’s going on in D.C. this week and what’s moving through Congress.

Stardock has released a beta version of a new desktop collaboration tool called ThinkDesk

The Multiplicity product allows you to have 2 or 3 PCs, each with their own monitor/keyboard/mouse (unlike like a KVM switch) and as you move your cursor off of the screen you then are controlling the computer on your left or right, but without having to switch keyboards or mice. It’s basically the same as having 3 computers on a KVM, but you don’t have to press a button to switch over to control another PC. Additionally, you can see the monitor views of each computer simultaneously.

This could be an interesting solution for those who like to do their builds/tests on one machine while still getting some work done on another machine, without having to flip a KVM switch between machines that are sharing a monitor. Or, in a pair programming environment, each programmer’s PC could be side by side but controlled by just one of the programmers: the one with the keyboard and mouse in hand, but both programmer’s computers are active and on display.

I was invited to a Microsoft Insider meeting yesterday at the Fox Sports Grill in Irvine. I appreciated the invite, nice dinner, bowling, swag, and the presentation about the Windows Mobile platforms and various Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices they were showing off and demonstrating. There were a few “NDA” items they asked us not to share, so I won’t, but I had one curious observation.

While talking about Pocket PC they started talking about ROM updates of phones. The gist was basically if you buy a phone where the manufacturer hastily released the Windows Mobile/Pocket PC OS on it without enough testing, that if you have problems don’t call Microsoft, call the manufacturer and/or the carrier, but either way, don’t expect to get any help or support, and especially don’t expect to get any ROM updates to your phone. So, unlike a PC, you most likely can’t upgrade the OS and the only recourse is to buy another phone. Microsoft encourages the OEMs to thoroughly test their devices with the OS to make sure everything is compatible and washes their hands of it if it’s not.

While that doesn’t necessarily surprise or bother me, I was struck by the comment that one Microsoft sales/marketing guy, who had a Windows Mobile phone, was bragging that he hadn’t rebooted his phone in almost 6 days, as if that was a great milestone. Now, my Motorola V60 phone is a few year old, so it doesn’t have cameras, color, much in terms of games, Java, etc., it’s a phone, and very good at being a phone I just keep in my pocket with a long battery life. I’ve never needed to reboot it for any reason ever, though I have turned it off sometimes for various reasons, like when I don’t want to receive any phone calls or I want it to recharge more quickly.

So as my V60 ages and is not 100% incompatible with T-Mobile’s newer voicemail service (thanks to Paris Hilton), and as I shop for a newer replacement phone, I wonder if I need to spend hundreds of dollars for a phone that’s going to reboot at least once a week. I guess it’s not a real annoyance, I mean, it’s not like I’m going to lose all kinds of data (code, documents), but I’d hate to have to call someone back to tell them “I’m sorry, my phone had a core dump, had to reboot.”

I chose Wordpress as my weblog software of choice. Why? It’s free, it’s cross-platform (PHP and MySQL), easy to install (PHP) and seems to work pretty well. Just as I start using the software I read about a new book called Google Hacking for Penetration Testing and find on the author’s Google Hack DB on his website that hack #943 mentions SQL injection problems with Wordpress.

While I am assured that Wordpress 1.5 has fixed the SQL injection attacks mentioned in the hack database, this brings up a good point: Should people be writing books about how to exploit other people’s software?

While the book review mentions that the author holds back from giving details on how to perform serious attacks on critical information, I think the exposure of our software’s weaknesses can make us all more aware of vulnerabilities we all have with the software we build and run. I’m glad I was made aware of the situation with Wordpress, which apparently has been fixed. You might want to check the hack DB for any vulnerabilities with your software.

Well, my TV-B-Gone has finally arrived! Time to go down to the gym and experiment with the cluster of 12 TVs they have there. Ferris would be proud.

Much has been made about recent musings of China (hardware) and India (software) teaming up to dominate the techinology world. I’m not sure what to think of this. Maybe this will be the USA’s 21st century version of “Sputnik”, the clarion call that awakens the imagination of youth everywhere to take interest in science, math, and technology, if we can just get them away from the game consoles and reality TV for a few minutes.

But I’m not so optimistic. We are successful and powerful. Success breeds obesity and SUVs (guilty on both counts). Too many American kids are not as interested in science as they used to be, not sure why. That was OK when we importing lots of Chinese, Indians, Eastern Europeans, etc. to enter our country to pursue graduate studies in science and work in our top research labs. But 9/11 and the liberalization of China and India’s economies have changed all of that.

With 9/11 our visa process for importing intellectuals has backed up, many applicants told they have to wait more than 1 year to get into the country, too long to wait because class starts in less than 1 year! Also, with the Chinese and Indian economies growing and expanding so rapidly, economic progress can be found at home, not only in America, so many are opting to stay at home and pursue their research in their homeland.

This has left the USA with a deficit in the numbers of gradutes entering science and technology studies. So who will employers hire if there aren’t enough local talent to fill their jobs? You got it, overseas, and it will become not just about saving labor costs, but it’s about tapping into a supply of available talent no longer found in the USA.

But who are we to blame but ourselves? We are just not as hungry for science as we used to be, so we shall reap what we (don’t) sow. And remember, India and China combined are 10x our population, so even if 10% of their population become as educated as we are and the remaining 90% are dirt-poor and impoverished, we’re still screwed.

I am not anti-globalization or anti-oursourcing, in fact I have worked with and hired programmers in India and Pakistan to work with me. But if we agree to compete globally we have to be ready to compete, and we are not acting or thinking like a player in an international game, into which 2+ billion new participants are slowly entering the playing field. I don’t see our national leaders really addressing this issue, it’s business as usual, worrying about fighting culture wars and entitlements, and spend-spend-spend ourselves into foreign-financed debt.

Nevertheless, I am optimistic once we wake up from our slumber we can rise to the challenge, sacrifices will have to be made, and we have, in the past, made the necessary sacrifices to get where we are now. I just hope we all have the hindsight to remember what it took to get where we are.

In the middle of March I was invited to attend the “Microsoft Technology Summit” on their Redmond campus, all expense paid. I was fortunate to be 1 of 30 guests Microsoft had brought to Redmond to in order to “reach out” and listen to Java community leaders around the country. There were a few notable and influential people in the Java community at large (large community site owners, Java authors, etc.) as well as talented Java-oriented developers. MSFT pulled out many high-ranking MSFT product managers and development leads to talk to us and get feedback from the community.

I won’t go into too many details as the proceedings have been blogged by others quite thoroughly in the links below, but I will mention a few of my own unique takeaways.

1. Microsoft has lots of smart guys, and anyone who buys into “they are all Bill Gates borgs” mentality is ignorant. They are all pretty open-minded and weren’t shy about pointing out their past foibles (at least some of them).
2. Microsoft software is getting more secure. It’s not 100% secure, no code is, but it is increasingly getting more secure. The fact that there are over 660 million users of Windows users it’s no surprise they’re going to be a large target of attacks.
3. They are increasing the rate of progress and innovation of their .NET platform such that the makers of the JDK and Java IDEs should be quaking in their boots. Java is great and rich and does a lot of things that .NET doesn’t do so well but MSFT is closing the gap quicker then Sun and the Java community is at extending their “lead”. Some that say “Java is the next COBOL” have a valid point as long as they continue to be as complex, cumbersome, and slow to innovate the language and it’s runtime environment. Some of the demos of .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 had some of the Java developers drooling at the mouth and saying under their breaths “why can’t we have that in Java/our Java IDE?”.
4. Before you call me a MSFT rah-rah, many in the group had plenty to gripe about without too many happy responses back from MSFT, particularly in the area of interoperability. Much like how MSFT has told their hardware vendors to write to Windows HALs (hardware abstraction layers) they are telling the enterprise world the way to interop with MSFT is via Web Services, its de facto software abstraction layer of choice. All future MSFT products will have WS APIs into all of their products. This didn’t seem to make enough people happy, and the example of MSFT publishing a JDBC driver for SQL Server was example of what they’d like to see more of: MSFT providing compile time or dynamic libraries (Java, DLLs, etc.) to their products. But I can see how that is more cost-prohibitive for MSFT and having a common set of doors (WS APIs) into their products is easier for them then trying to write custom layers for all of their products (Java JARs, RPC APIs, DLLs, .cpp files, etc.)
5. Open Source: MSFT has backed away from “GPL is evil” to embracing some of the tennets of open source, but they still don’t like GPL because it’s too restrictive on IP rights. The minute something GPL-ed ends up in or even near Windows source code they fear all legal hell will break loose so they don’t want to touch GPL with a 10ft pole.

Links about conference

JavaLobby - Summary | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
MSDN Channel9 Wiki
Steve Raible - Day 1 part 1 | Day 1 part 2 | Day 2 | Pics
Jason Zander (.NET CLR Product Mgr)
Tim Heuer, Microsoft Developer Evangelist

My friend Tim posted on his blog a link to the latest updates on what will be depracated in .NET 2.0. It’s a link to a ZIP file, I went ahead and posted the filed on Ubero’s public folder. You can read the depracations by namespace here.