ThomasCantrell.com Tech Blog

I love this Intel ad:

This is a great take on the techie world. The people who are famous in my world, for example Whitfield Diffie, are people who the rest of the world has never heard of.

After five glorious years with my old laptop, it finally became too slow to do much of anything. Finally, I decided it was time and bought a new one. Today I type this blog from a new vanilla ThinkPad. Getting a new laptop is nice, but it also allows me to do something I have been putting off for a while: starting fresh. Here’s what I’m planning to do now I get the opportunity.

Operating System: Ubuntu 9.0.4 (Jaunty)

One year ago I found my old ThinkPad was running very slow under Windows. I ran across Ubuntu’s dual boot installer and fell in love. Ubuntu ran so much faster on my machine that I almost immediately switched over. However, I found that I still needed Windows for a few tasks, most importantly synchronization with my iPhone. This is why I am not just installing Linux on my laptop, but I’m taking advantage of virtualization.

Virtual Machine Environment: VirtualBox

I chose VirtualBox because it is nicely full featured and cheaper than VMWare Workstation. One of the key features is it’s support for remote USB devices. I use this to sync my iPhone on Vista.

VM 1: Windows Vista Business

I have Vista running in a virtual machine for things like iTunes that don’t work on Linux. It performs fairly poorly as a guest operating system, but it gets the job done. Still, it likes to consume 100% of one of my CPU cores at all times.

VM 2: Windows 7 Beta

I figured I would use the excuse to spinup Windows 7. To be honest, it’s not terribly more exciting than Windows Vista. So it’s sitting around my computer chilling. Maybe some day I will spin it up again.

Dilbert:

My experience is unless engineers and their management are careful, testing always gets the shaft. However, towards the end of the project it becomes clear that testing is still essential. Therefore it must be forced into the schedule. Once that happens there are two options: push back the release date or sacrifice your health.

I’ve worked on teams that chose each of those options. While neither is preferable, I would prefer work on the team that doesn’t cause health complications. However, it would be far better to hire people and schedule time for testing.

A few years ago I attended a talk given by Ross Anderson on the Economics of Security. In the talk, he asserted that “software companies should hire more software testers and fewer but more competent programmers.” However, testing is typically disconnected with marketing and sales revenue. Programmers, on the other hand, create the products and are directly connected to revenue. Therefore, companies are incentivized to hire few testers and many programmers. Then when testing starts getting the shaft, the only course of action is to ask the programmers to do testing in addition to their other responsibilities.

I can’t help thinking about IPsec VPNs as I read this Dilbert:

For those of you who have ever tried to set up a VPN for the first time, you’ll know what I mean. I don’t mean one of those wimpy VPNs that your network administrator sets up, but a real IPsec VPN with all the settings and proposals.

It’s often hundreds of settings that have to match identically other VPNs in order for the VPN to work. If a single one of these settings is off, the negotiation fails and the VPN does not come up. True, it’s not hard after you’ve done a few. However, that’s if you survive the pure frustration of setting up the first one. You could easily end up stabbing yourself.

Is the IETF IPsec working group just a shim for a secret government military plot designed to drive it’s enemies insane? You decide.

Wise business advice from a friend’s, Roy Goble’s, father:

…. And that’s when I received some of the best management advice I ever heard. He said, “Remember, this is not a popularity contest. There is nothing wrong with being a friend with customers or employees. Look at me and Rocky Malvini — he’s been a customer of mine for 30-years and we’re fast friends. Nothing wrong with trusting employees or believing they’ll fulfill their commitments. You don’t want to become paranoid and bitter about the people you work with. But you also do not want to be driven by your desire to be popular. That will get you into trouble. Eventually, you have to make tough decisions about some people, and if those decisions are driven by your desire to be liked, you’ll create a lot of pain for yourself and do nothing to help the people around you.”

Yesterday one of my co-workers was chatting with a member of the sales force about product schedules. While I like our sales force, I always have to worry that things like the following happen:

I really appreciate it when managers are honest about layoffs, instead of simply blaming it on economic conditions. Dilbert explains:

PowerPoint animations reduce retention, from ARS Technica:

Seems turns out to be the key word in that sentence, at least according to the study. The authors created a single PowerPoint presentation, and then eliminated the animations from it (on average, there were 3.4 animations per slide). They then recorded a single sound track and synched it to both presentations, so that the class would be identical except for the animations. Five weeks before the experiment, the class was given a quiz on the topic to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge on the topic (which was information security and privacy issues); the quiz was given a second time following the presentation.

Both presentations dramatically improved the students’ scores, which were a bit below 40 percent correct in the first administration of the quiz. But the animated presentation brought scores up to 71 percent, while the animation-free version got them to 82 percent. Of the nine questions, only one saw the animated group outperform their static peers.

This is facinating. I’ve been guilty of teaching using effects to reveal each bullet point. However, it seems like our brains like the data up front. In the area of PowerPoint, it appears that less equals more.

This is incredible technology:

I apologize for the length, but the material is fascinating. Even once in a while I wonder if we will ditch the metaphor of “mail” (e-mail) on the Internet. This emerging technology looks interesting.

And for those of you who want the quick summary from Google’s Site:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

As I wrote about earlier, there is a risk that reports will hyper-analyze their manager’s non-verbals in a bad economy. Dilbert explains: