Bailout is Codependency in Action
Sep 21st
I don't normally post about topics in the political arena, as most of my thoughts expressed here tend to revolve around technology. I just cannot resist though the urge to comment on this abhorrent plan proposed to bail them us out of the economic trouble they we are in.
I'm no economist, but I really don't think it takes one to see that the state of our economy isn't really brought about by some outside force that we didn't really have control over. It has been brought about by, as George Bush called it, a drunken Wall Street. Do we all share in this blame to some extent? I suppose, but your average working citizen doesn't have much ability as a single individual to influence the behavior of large corporations and investors, so any guilt that would be applicable may only be by default association.
Investors got greedy. CEO's were driven, above everything else, to raise their stock price. Not for the benefit of the company or it's services, but strictly for its investors. This is what is supposed to happen, right? Investors should be the primary beneficiaries of a company's success. If the drive is so large for that success and the pressure so high that it encourages executives to make bad long-term financial decisions though, can we really say that's in the best interest of the investor, or the economy at large?
And then we have the bailout. A fund of over $700,000,000,000.00 dollars (looks bigger when you use the 0's, doesn't it) to purchase up bad debts and toxic mortgages that should have never been made, and fund banks that made bad decisions that are now on the brink of bankruptcy. In plain terms, this is lunacy. It's no different than the gambler who tells his family that they just screwed out of their life savings that with just a bit more money, they can win it all back. If ever we needed an example of codependency, this is it.
How can we go along with this bailout plan and still fit within the spirit of the constitution and the free-enterprise market system? We can't. There's no way to justify it. Giving food and aid to people hit by natural disasters is one thing, bailing out people who made bad business decisions is entirely another.
If the wound inflicted by one of the most negative aspects of the human condition, greed, is not allowed to bleed a little, the infection will simply be contained, only to spread again.
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The 80/20 Rule on Credit Card Security
Aug 2nd
Our web hosting company, OCS Solutions, like any other hosting company, has to deal with one of the highest rate of fraud orders in business. For some reason, web hosts are targeted more often than most other types of vendors.
Because of this, we often require new customers from overseas to fax or securely send us a copy of the front and back of their credit card. While most of them are used to this policy (we are not the only ones that do this, many online merchants now require this), some are not, and it can cause quite an uproar.
Ironically, asking for a photocopy of the front and back of a credit card is no different than handing a credit card to your waiter or at a convenience store. You're proving you have the card in your physical possession. But, when conducting online commerce, most people are actually more cautious than they would be in conducting real world transactions, where the opportunities for fraudsters and criminals are actually greater. It's a classic manifestation of the 80/20 rule, putting 80 percent of effort into securing something that is likely 20 percent of the threat.
I'm not saying that there aren't security risks in online transactions, because there are. Consider this though – most people wouldn't order from a site that didn't have SSL (i.e. https://), but give their credit card number freely over a cordless phone that can easily be listened to with over the counter supplies and little to no expertise. Ironically, it's considerably harder to “listen in” on a non-secure web connection than it is to tap a phone.
So when I see someone have a problem with sending in this sort of verification, I do understand where the fear comes from, but am puzzled as to society's consistent misapplication of security. One customer called their bank and the representative said that it 'sounded suspicious' and recommended them not to do it. They said that this policy made it sound like we had a “credit card copying facility” behind the scenes. That same customer would not have been able to order from many online retailers now that require this proof.
Unfortunately, these myths make honest retailers trying to avoid getting screwed by credit card fraud and protect their own security look like xenophobic paranoids.
Does Breaking News Excite You?
Jul 31st
If breaking news excites you, you may not be alone. It apparently brings an indescribable emotion to this woman:
There’s not many things that would bring this expression to my face. Most of them won’t involve breaking news though, I can promise you.
I ran into this graphic by ending up on a landing page promoting the “Alot” service.
MySQL Is Easier to Administer than PostgreSQL
Jul 29th
I wanted to title this article PostgreSQL sucks, but that wouldn't have been fair to PostgreSQL has it really doesn't suck, exactly. It is a very well featured database, and was the first open source database to have many advanced features. That said, MySQL from the start has been easier to administer, and generally easier to use as well.
Before I dive in further, I should warn that while I've used both MySQL and PostgreSQL for years and have extensive experience with both, I have dealt with MySQL considerably more. This is due mostly to the fact that most projects I work on tend to use MySQL as their database over PostgreSQL.
After years of using them both, I have had much fewer problems out of MySQL. Backups and restores, even the complex binary ones done with LVM have gone mostly without issues. I can't say the same with PostgreSQL. I've had MySQL problems for sure, but I seem to run into PostgreSQL problems with far more frequency over things that really shouldn't have been problems in the first place.
One could make the argument that since I spend more time with MySQL, I know it better and thus know how to avoid more problems than I do with PostgreSQL. I'll buy into that as well, at least in part. But I see far to many developers pulling their hair out on public forums and newsgroups over how to fix a problem in PostgreSQL that simply doesn't seem to be a problem on MySQL. That isn't to say that people don't have problems with MySQL as well, they do. But considering that more people use MySQL, you would expect more problems, but you don't really see that. In fact, it's the reverse.
Could a simpler path to administration and programming be why more people use MySQL? Probably so. Back when it lacked features that PostgreSQL had, it still was more popular. Its ease of use had to have been at least a significant factor in many decisions to use it.
Amazon S3 Outage
Jul 20th
Starting at roughly 11 AM Central Daylight Time, Amazon's S3 service went down and has been down ever since, even at the time of this writing. This 6+ hour outage is the latest in a string of outages that have plagued Amazon's Web Services since their initial offering.
The outage has affected Blingee, which we provide services for, in addition to other popular online services like Twitter, Second Life, Basecamp, and more.
This outage has seriously weakened our confidence in Amazon's Web Services. A provider of this size should not have these kinds of outages. I will be eagerly awaiting a detailed explanation. Our customers spend quite a bit of money with Amazon, and if I'm going to recommend something, I want it to be a good service. Unfortunately, right now, I can't say that Amazon's Web Services are.
An Uplifting Video
Jul 17th
I don't usually post “uplifting” things, as they generally are a bit too cheesy for me (read into that statement what you wish). That said, I think this is a genuinely positive video that really could make someone's day better. Check it out!
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
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Turn Hibernate on in Vista
Jun 22nd
If you find yourself missing the hibernation feature in Vista, you can turn it on easily by running:
powercfg -h on
on the command prompt. You must run this command on an administrator-elevated prompt. To do this, right click on the command prompt icon and click “Run as Administrator”.
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Can't activate rubyforge (= 0.4.5) problems
Jun 20th
If you recently updated your gems, you may see this nasty error:
can't activate rubyforge (= 0.4.5), already activated rubyforge-1.0.0]
or similar. If you do, the fix is simple. Simply run:
sudo gem uninstall -a rubyforge
Run the command twice just to be sure it’s removed. Then run:
sudo gem install rubyforge
This will clear up the issue.
Another Silly Vista Prompt
Jun 18th
Vista has a nice user interface, and I'll have to admit the more I use it the more I have grown accustomed to it.
That said, you see silly dialogs like this sometimes and it just makes you wonder what in the world they were thinking:
Do I want to move, or copy? This dialog is very misleading. It's really asking me for my confirmation before performing a move or copy procedure. But it seems to be asking do I want to MOVE the files, or COPY them.
I got this dialog while copying files out of a ZIP file.
It would have taken a few more lines of code to make a second dialog, asking “Are you sure you wish to move…” and rename the first one to “Are you sure you wish to copy…”, but that would have been time well spent in my opinion.
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Test Your Reaction Time
May 17th
Here's a neat little Flash game that lets you test your reaction time.