How do you know that?: August 2002

Hard Disk Necrophelia continued

Just an update... R-Studio NTFS appears to be working. It's been running all night and it seems to be digging up all the files off the failed drive. At this point, it's just entertainment for me, Andrea found all the files she neeeded elsewhere on her functioning hard drive. I'm actually very impressed.

Call Me Paranoid

We had discussion yesterday re Instant Messaging. A lawyer has indicated that he likes to use IM while on a conference call. Sidebar conversations mostly. This sounds great, but does he understand the security risks he's exposed to? I think not.

My impression is that most of the legal staff is treating e-mail and IM as if it were sealed mail. They are assuming that it's confidential and that the material that they are sending and attaching can only be read by the recipient. This has me terrified. The technology staff has published and 'acceptable use policy' which everyone has agreed to. But WHEN we get hacked and client information is divulged due to hacked e-mail, I'm sure that there's going to be a blame fest.

The answer is to push/require encrypted e-mail/IM. The problem is that our messaging and infrastructure people don't seem to be up to the task of putting decent decisions in place. It would be well worth it to hire the appropriate resources to do so.

Call me paranoid, I may be wrong.

Web Services

Playing with ServiceObjects FastWeather service. Very cool. Fast, easy way to pull weather info. Example to follow, as soon as I figure out their licensing model.

Only the names have been changed...

From: Administrative Assistant

You got me on that one!! Clever, very clever... Pun initially unintended, but, hey, it's too good to let "float" away... :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Some Manager
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 4:48 PM
To: Administrative Assistant
Subject: RE: water leak at home

Pun intended?

-----Original Message-----
From: Administrative Assistant
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 4:36 PM
To: Some Manager
Subject: FW: water leak at home

Chris -
I'll note xxxx's absence today as a floating holiday....

-----Original Message-----
From: Unfortunate Employee
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 9:10 AM
To: Some Manager
cc: Administrative Assistant
Subject: water leak at home

Hey there. I just wanted to let you know that I have a leak in my ceiling and water is coming in pretty steadily. I have called the super to come in and look at it so I will need to stay home to get this taken care of. If we can get this sorted soon, I will come in after its finished. I don't think its anything too bad but this needs to get fixed asap as it is supposed to rain all weekend and I don't want my living room turning into a swimming pool. :)

xxxxx

Fun with Javascript

MS Access does a wonderful job of letting a user create intelligent combo boxes for data entry. Unfortunately, it spoils clients. They absolutely have to have it in their web apps.

In the maintenance utilities for our Internet monitoring application, we've got a table of about 12K separate entities that we want to want to associate with IP Addresses. The better referential integrity we have the better.

The problem is, we don't want to have a 12K combo box in the world. Hello XML Data islands. Awesome things stuff. I'm going to toss the code up on my site in the near future. But what we have is essentially a javascript/XML based type-ahead combo box. Very cool, if I do say so myself!

KM - what if?

Jim McGee has write on track with his response to 'we can't make people smarter'. Actually, what if we wanted to make people dumber! No jokes please. I blog to get my thoughts out of my head. I can assume that they'll be there for review in the future. So I've allowed myself to clear out some memory for new ideas. Effectively - I've freed up extra space in RAM..... hmmm - re-stating the obvious.

she's a Man, Man

I'm sorry. I'm sure she's very nice and all. But are we the only ones that think Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a man in drag? Check out today's photo on msn. Are we wrong? I think not.

Hard Disk Necrophelia

Ok, so the hard drive died in the xp machine. I'm going to try and mount it on my win2k pro machine here at home. I'd like to extract whatever data is on it. I install the drive, and the machine recognizes it as a 'foreign disk' allows me to import. But the OS reports a bad block. I'm going to see if I can use some tools to fix the block. This is fun in a perverse sort of way. It's also nerve racking - I don't know if my machine is going to boot after each shut down. fun!

Thomas Crowne?

Watching the original on "Thomas Crowne Affair" TCM today. Very dated. Bad seventies pop song sound track.... Fun.

Important going forward

Ray Ozzie has taken a cut at the paradox of web-logs. Encouraging people to be honest, but not stupid in their blogging. I've thought about this quite a bit. I'd like to think that most of what makes it to the web log is unqualified. But I do have to consider who might be looking at this stuff.

This often comes to mind when I'm writing things I know would piss off some people in the firm. It's actually very useful and challenging to say to myself - do I believe in this enough to put it out there? What if the person I'm commenting on reads it? Friction is good sometimes, yes?

By the way - These are my opinions and do not in any way they represent my employer.

ARRRGGGHHHH!

Extranet security rears its ugly head! Yesterday I was checking some things and I removed the rsa authentication agent for an hour or two. During that time I tagged a login that looked suspicious. Passwords changed, system locked down.. All is well.

I was tightening things up even more today and it was most frustrating. We're juggling TCPIP, RSA Securid, NTLM, SSL, and custom code. On top of that there's always the funky stuff going on with MS application center, IIS and COM + identities. It's a lot to keep track of.

XP

It's dead Jim. I ran a check disk from the xp disk management tools and the system returned 'could not complete' I then did the same thing from the repair console and got the 'oh so encouraging' message - There is irreparable damage on this drive. That's XP for 'It's toast' AAARRGGHHH! I give up.

KM

Another vendor called yesterday regarding a technology to help lawyers identify expertise. I'm dubious. With Autonomy, Tacet, Tripplehop, Dolphin and others - this space is getting crowded. I haven't seen really spectacular results from any of them.

Because I need something else to do

I've decided to teach myself slang by using this site. I'm pumped to bust out un-reechy posts!

Please don't help...

I continued to wrestle with XP yesterday. The wierdness continued when I finally recovered the secondary hard disk. The checkdisk revovered most of the data. I quickly realized I was going to need some extra tools to recover the remaining files. I was actually very pleased with the tool I chose (link and name to follow) And I got everything back!

The fun continues as I try and get our Microtek scanner and HP Printer installed. The HP Drivers don't seem to like sharing the cable with the Microtek X6.

A slight rant - Microtek's software for the X6 for XP is a huge step down in terms of functionality. You're on my list Microtek!

XP ....

Continuing to work on the problem. I've got a checkdisk going on the offending ntfs partiton. It's been running for two and half hours so far... But it's running. Keep your fingers crossed boys and girls.

XP wierdness

I installed a second hard drive on one of our machines hear at home a few weeks ago. This machine was a Dell running XP. The install went fine. Everything was working well until we installed MusicMatch. Then, all sorts of drive errors and eventually a machine that wouldn't boot. I'm now in the throws of reinstalling the OS and trying to get the drive on-line. This is so frustrating.

The good news, after installing the OS again, the machine is much faster. The upgrade must have carried a lot of shit into the registry that it didn't need.

Google fallout

Looked up PJ's name in Google and came upon a film we did together a few years ago. I'm tickled. This was a great piece. True Confessions of a Sushi Addict

Take a look and rate it. You can see me in my non-km geek mode.

Old friends

PJ pulled the old gang together for a fund raiser at MOD.. It was great to see Beth, Mark, Tracy and John and Kathryn. Great time. Great memories.

The occasion was a fund raising for a film he's appearing in. They expect to shoot in Toronto in the Fall. Carry that flame dude!

Way cool site

Via Chris Pirillo... Diviant Art. Many great graphics.... Developers take note. There are non-boring graphics ideas here! Avoid creativity at all cost.

Bush Talks Market Drops

I don't know. There's got to be a strong correlation between the times Bush has tried to talk about the economy and the sinking of the economy.

You should have seen it - straight down the fairway

Way cool

Rick is doing very nice things with his format. Kudos tall guy!

KM - google mentality

You don't even notice it happening. But one day your hooked. That single textbox with the silly name is an awesome primary source. It's amazing how effective it is. When I'm looking for an coding answer I used to go to MSDN. But in the past year the fact that Google does a better job at indexing Microsoft's site than Microsoft had become hilariously obvious. I love this.

A by-product... More and more you hit a site at the point you care about rather than wading through a menu structure. Sorry design dudes, but Google loves words. This has been said over and over. But the message has staying power.

.Net debugging

Somehow debugging got turned off on one of my projects... The lifesaving answer was located via google and finally on MSDN.

.net tricks I'd like to see

Asp.net is truly interesting. As with any web technology, the real trick is partitioning the app to appropriately run on the client, server, middle tier and back end. I spent the last two days puzzling on the use of javascript to populate and order a listbox, only to realize that I couldn't right the changes back to the server. I'm sure I'm missing something... But I couldn't find any examples/reference material to find a more elegant solution.

I also have a case where I have a rather large listbox. The unfortunate side effect is that the page appears to blink every time a button clicks.. Yechhh.... But usable.

On the plus side. Once I spent some time looking at caching, this sucker is fast. Frighteningly so.

The scary thing is...

you can actually picture this in your mind... the AC / DC board meeting, courtesy of EmptyBottle

Captain Jack

Just spoke with the good captain. He's in from back to back charters, and goes out again Saturday. Pondering getting a Mac laptop.... hmmm anybody know the best Mac dealer in the Virgin Islands?

On going around and coming around

I'm amused. Our marketing director proudly announced to me that he wrote a scathing e-mail to several parties about our CRM initiatives. I was prepared for another one of his typical 'This is a waste of time because the lawyers will never share' rants. Instead he said that he just spend a week with two of his analysts rifling through rolodex cards, and other electronic equivalents in order to put together a client e-mail list for a specific geographic region.

I'm not sure what he was trying to say with the e-mail. In one sense it was 'why isn't this done already?' But he has gone on the record several times as wanting no part in the effort - yet he exposed his groups intense need for a decent tool and methodology. Some times things don't add up.

.Net: Stupid smtpMail tricks

I had to do a programmatic email distribution and the ran up a couple worthwhile tricks. First, we wanted to send the message with a display name that differed from the 'Reply-to' address. Documentation was scarce, but JB, our high priest of messaging, was able to help me discover that the syntax is as follows:
objMessage.From = "Bob Sled on behalf of the powers that bee"
This may be obvious to some, but I thought it was cool.
The other annoying thing was the inclusion of multiple recipients for a single message, simply concatenate the e-mail addresses and separate with commas NO SPACES!
This was my first time using the smtpMail and mailMessage objects in .net and I have to say that I like them. If I had found examples of the above in documentation - I would have liked them better still....

Shuffle off to...

James Roberston embarks on another KM initiative. Great paper on card sorting technique. Good reference.

Cycling

Yesterday went down to the New York Cycling Championships

with L & D. Very fun. World class racing two blocks from work. I took some video, but I'm having trouble downloading it to my computer because of driver issues with my agent 1eee 1394 card. I hate dealing with driver issues.

The Fire

Saw Philip Bailey at the Blue Note last night. Awesome stuff. It was so obvious he was loving performing in such a small room. When you think of the Earth Wind & Fire hey day, you think huge stage shows an pyrotechnics. Here it was just great music. Thanks Lou & Denise for the invite!

Required reading

Thanks to Column Two again for the good overview on requirements by Ryan Olshavsky.

I offer that the requirements document can/should also be used as a basis for a test script for the final application. The fulfillment of each requirement should be measurable and distinct. A test script document should start with each requirement and have explicit instructions on how this can be tested. For example, a requirement may be 'the system shall allow a user to delete a client record if and only if there are no matters attached to a client'. The test script should include creation of test clients with matters and without and instructions on how to use an application to delete them.

How do you know that?

Friday, August 30, 2002

Hard Disk Necrophelia continued

Call Me Paranoid

Web Services

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Only the names have been changed...

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Fun with Javascript

Monday, August 26, 2002

KM - what if?

Sunday, August 25, 2002

she's a Man, Man

Hard Disk Necrophelia

Thomas Crowne?

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Important going forward

Friday, August 23, 2002

ARRRGGGHHHH!

Thursday, August 22, 2002

XP

KM

Monday, August 19, 2002

Because I need something else to do

Please don't help...

Saturday, August 17, 2002

XP ....

XP wierdness

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Google fallout

Old friends

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Way cool site

Bush Talks Market Drops

Monday, August 12, 2002

Way cool

KM - google mentality

Sunday, August 11, 2002

.Net debugging

Saturday, August 10, 2002

.net tricks I'd like to see

Thursday, August 08, 2002

The scary thing is...

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Captain Jack

On going around and coming around

.Net: Stupid smtpMail tricks

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Shuffle off to...

Monday, August 05, 2002

Cycling

Friday, August 02, 2002

The Fire

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Required reading

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