Experiences with Bluetooth

I've been keeping my distance from Bluetooth devices, less from a lack of interest and more because I've been busy and the thought of getting all new devices and synching them (however seamlessly) via Bluetooth seemed a little daunting.  Now I'm taking the plunge.  By the end of next week, I'll have 1) a Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson T616 phone (already in hand), 2) a Bluetooth Palm Tungsten T3 (also already in hand), and 3) an Apple Powerbook (on order). 

Tonight, I'm going to get the phone and the Palm in sync (for those of you wondering, I did consider the Handspring Treo but I like a phone I can keep comfortably in my pocket).  I'll have more to report in the coming days.

Paper clips in your IT toolbox

Scott Rosenberg has a darkly entertaining (though not to him) post about his recent travails with a motherboard replacement:

Thanks to the amazing support resources on the Net I eventually figured out that what I had to do was hold a paper clip to a pair of solder points on the motherboard in order to reset the CMOS. I am not kidding. It's 2003 and we're still poking paper clips into our computers to get them to work.

Paper clips and solder points?  Are we talking Heathkits here?  These kinds of stories make me seriously doubt the future of autonomic computing, at least for technology devices that aren't sitting in a highly-regulated data center environment.

Why buy desktops?

It's hardly surprising to me that IDC is predicting that laptop sales will far outstrip analysts' previous predictions.  In most companies comprised mainly of "knowledge workers," a desktop is really just a laptop waiting to happen.    Almost everyone needs to work at home occasionally and almost everyone has to work while traveling at some point, so anyone with a desktop ends up requesting a "temporary" laptop eventually (often followed closely by a request from that employee's manager to keep the laptop because the employee is working on a "special project" of some sort).  In looking at InfoWorld's desktop needs for the current fiscal year, I'm planning to replace any retiring desktops with laptops.  It's time to remove the desktop shackles!

Sometimes, IT can't win

In this week's InfoWorld column, I write about the simultaneous thrill and agony of "successful" IT projects:

You you need a thick skin to work in IT because some people will complain about anything. This is because IT sometimes operates in a reality distortion field, where the definition of “success” depends on who you talk to.

The IT staff goes into a major integration projects all wide-eyed and excited. We get to replace cranky old legacy systems with more streamlined systems, thrilled at the prospect of finally retiring the old system and delivering something more usable and productive to end-users. For successful projects, metrics are established early on, and when the project is done, IT reports back to the business side that the goals have been met or exceeded. All objective measurements indicate success, but there’s one problem: The end-users hate the system and complain that the old system was better. In a strange twist, the users who hated the old system the most often herald its wonders once it’s gone. [full column]

Existential errors

Some error messages in IT would make even the most morose French existentialist philosophers fall just a little deeper into despair.  Just this morning, I was working with Kevin Varley, one of InfoWorld's developers, on a problem with one of our development systems (a Solaris machine).  A filesystem wouldn't mount and we were puzzling over what was wrong with it.  When we tried to mount the filesystem, we got this message:

mount: the state of /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s4 is not okay

Well, yeah.  Kevin and I already knew the filesystem was "not ok"!  After some fiddling, we realized that we had a simple permissions issue and we corrected it quickly.  In the end, though, the system did not step in to reassure us that the filesystem was now "ok."  We just knew that it was not "not okay" anymore and moved on.

Getting real about SCO

Up until now, I had decided not to write anything about SCO and Linux, but in the end, the subject proved too irresistable -- my take on that drama is the subject of this week's InfoWorld column:

While the technology world focused on the SCO vs. Linux fiasco over the last few months, I sat quietly on the sidelines waiting for a development that would actually spur me to action.

So much has been written already that I feel like there isn’t much else to say about it. Still, I’ll feel remiss if I don’t address it at some point, so here’s my point of view on the whole mess: yawn. Thanks for all the entertainment and the drama, SCO, but I’ve got work to do and I’ve already figured out how to do it regardless of what happens. And I don’t need SCO to do it. [full column]

Thinking more broadly about security

In this week's InfoWorld column, I write a bit about some security areas you might not have considered:

Warning: While you’re hanging around the IT water cooler fretting about wireless security, critical corporate data could be walking out the door hanging from someone’s keychain. The smiling stranger in the hallway you just asked for the time should have responded, “It’s 10 a.m. Do you know where your data is?” [full column here]

Technology Review launches weblog

The folks at MIT Technology Review (to which I subscribe) have started a weblog, including posts from folks like Simson Garfinkel, who I've been reading for a long time (if you've never owned Simson's PGP book from O'Reilly, where have you been?)   In one of the first posts, Simson notes my recent switch to Mac OS X, writing: "The Mac is offering a really interesting niche to the technological elite."  I actually just installed X11 on my Mac this weekend.  For fun.

My only polite request to the Technology Review folks would be to add an RSS feed and permalinks to the individual posts, but having tangled with content management systems too many times, I'm not going to get too preachy on how easy that might be, because maybe it isn't.

In the Beginning was the Command Line

Working on a recent column, I remembered Neal Stephenson's short book In the Beginning was the Command Line and wanted to reference it, but I couldn't find my copy.  Lucky for me (and all of you), there is a downloadable ZIP file of it.

There is so, so much in this long essay (published in 1999) -- it's a must-read.  There's very little writing out there that maintains technical authority while addressing larger cultural / intellectual / social / philosophical issues, but Stephenson's essay does all that and more.  Here's a small excerpt that hints at what you can find in the larger work:

Though Linux works for me and many other users, its sheer power and generality is its Achilles' heel. If you know what you are doing, you can buy a cheap PC from any computer store, throw away the Windows discs that come with it, turn it into a Linux system of mind-boggling complexity and power. You can hook it up to twelve other Linux boxes and make it into part of a parallel computer. You can configure it so that a hundred different people can be logged onto it at once over the Internet, via as many modem lines, Ethernet cards, TCP/IP sockets, and packet radio links. You can hang half a dozen different monitors off of it and play DOOM with someone in Australia while tracking communications satellites in orbit and controlling your house's lights and thermostats and streaming live video from your web-cam and surfing the Net and designing circuit boards on the other screens. But the sheer power and complexity of the system--the qualities that make it so vastly technically superior to other OSes--sometimes make it seem too formidable for routine day-to-day use.

Sometimes, in other words, I just want to go to Disneyland.

The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.

(Now that's a flashback -- remember BeOS?  Even now, they're not totally out of the news. When I read that last paragraph sitting here in present-day 2003, I was thinking Mac OS X. )

If you like Stephenson's essay, you should read the following as well:

• Salon's Andrew Leonard (full disclosure: also a close personal friend) has written many definitive pieces on open source culture, including the Free Software Project and dozens of other pieces absolutely worth reading.
  
• Ellen Ullman (also in Salon):  here and here.
  
• Thomas Scoville's Unix as Literature essay.

If anyone out there knows of any more writing in this tradition, let me know.

Dirty little IT secret #2

Another response to my recent column, this one from a person I'll call "Bedeviled in the Basement":

First off, let me say I'm happy to have read your article.  Now I know that my company isn't the only one who has Daily Prayer listed as one of our security measures for our network.  My list of dirty secrets could be it's own article, so I'll just pick one of the best.  I'm the head of techsupport, and play a major role in engineering for a major ISP.  Currently, our server room is in the basement of an old bank, which has no ventilation OR air conditioning system, our DNS servers are running on Pentium 1 desktop PCs, our main firewall is run on a Pentium II HP Pavillion, and the rest of our servers sit on your average everyday folding table.  This table is an upgrade, as the previous table they sat on collapsed one day.  At least your server room has SOME sort of fire supression system!

Oh my.