Joe Haldeman — one of my favorite writers — recently posted some thoughts about luck:

“You make your own luck” is the American simplification, and of course it has a kernel of truth. We know people who continually sabotage themselves, and seem able to screw up any opportunity. And there are those (I think like me) who have a generally positive attitude and are willing to take a swing at anything that comes our way, and not be too disappointed if it doesn’t turn out.

So that’s a situational kind of “luck,” one’s response to opportunity. But there’s also a kind of baseline, call it accidents of birth, which would be the universe of potential opportunity that you start out with — genetics, the social situation of your parents, the political restrictions of your place of birth . . . a kind of matrix of opportunity, good or ill, that the individual may react to or against; use or squander or ignore, but does comprise an initial set of “luck” conditions.

And then there is the blind bullet. The life-changing catastrophe that you had no control over.

(There’s an unstoppable misapprehension that the Chinese character for “crisis” contains the character for “opportunity.” It’s evidently not true, but it has foma power — it so should be true that it sort of is.)

It’s not the same as a Panglossian feeling that everything will come out right in the end. What’s demonstrably true is that some people are floored by catastrophe, and others accept their changed circumstances and go wherever looks best.

- Joe Haldeman @ LiveJournal: June 17th, 2009.

Joe Haldeman @ Wikipedia

“I’m tired of that happening, tired of systems engineered just enough to make the sale. I want to see systems scale larger than the customers they’re sold to.”
- Dan Kaminsky

In a recent interview at TechTarget.com, internet maven Dan Kaminsky recently offered some interesting observations:

It’s 2009 and we don’t have secure email. When we get DNSSEC, we will be able to build secure email and secure technology up and down the stack and it will scale. How many people bought products that worked great in the lab for a few groups, and once they try to scale it out, oops it doesn’t work and they have to shelve it. I’m tired of that happening, tired of systems engineered just enough to make the sale. I want to see systems scale larger than the customers they’re sold to. That’s the problem with everything being engineered to single-organization boundaries. We don’t live in a single-organization universe; everything is potentially huge and boundaries are boring. The idealized corporation is dead. We need this one class of problem to go away.

- Dan Kaminsky @ searchsecurity.com, 25 Jun 2009.

Via SlashDot.

I recently installed WordPress 2.8 at my test server –

http://67.20.67.178/wp28/

– in order to experiment with it, in preparation for upgrading various projects that I’ve built using earlier versions of WordPress.

See Version 2.8 for a summary of new features, bug fixes, and so on.

A press release on WordPress Blog states that version 2.8 has “improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. We also fixed over 790 bugs.”

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

Sea Lilies

My latest thing — drawn, scanned, digitally edited.

Full-size image.

Patrick Watson writes about his experiences touring with James Brown in the summer of 2006:

I learned how to be a front man and let the audience conduct you. When James performs, all the musicians on stage watch his hands. He takes cues from the audience’s energy and conducts the show with finger movements. He’s flexible about his arrangements and pacing and he’s attentive to the crowds.

- Alan Williamson @ Sixeyes MP3 Blog: Link.

JustNiz makes some interesting observations about null as a programming concept:

Stroustrup’s “C++ Programming Language” book introduces a concept called “resource acquisition is initialisation” that was eye-opening enough to me that it forever changed the way I think about code, and also seems relevant to your point.

The basic idea is that an object is always meant to represent something tangible. As an example, consider the design of file object that abstracts file I/O operations. As a developer, I’ve come across this one several times, it is normal that such objects have open and close methods, however that makes the design of the object in contradiction with Stroustrup’s concept because open/close provided as methods rather than only called in the constructor/destructor means the object may be in existence yet be in a state where it is not associated with an open file. You basically have to grok that having a file object around that doesn’t directly map to an open file just adds overhead to the system and is basically bad OO design in that in some sense that object is meaningless.

Apply the same concept to a reference and you have your answer. If a reference is pointing at nothing, then what is its purpose? The only thing a NULL reference is good for is when the software design ascribes a special meaning to the value NULL. Instead of just meaning address location 0, it gets subverted to mean “variable unassigned” or the “tail node of list” or somesuch. Ascribing multiple meanings to a variable value (especially pointers/references that are only ever meant to hold memory addresses) is one example of bad programming practice known as programming by side-effect which most people agree should be avoided.

- JustNiz @ SlashDot: Link.

Wiredog and others have posted some words of wisdom @ SlashDot about backing up your data:

Long term:

Use quality DVDs. Redo the backup on a schedule such that everything is re-backed up every three years or so. Every month, say, you make one DVD. Keep the backups in a climate controlled, dark, secure place, such as a safe deposit box at the bank.

Short term:

Back up everything you want to save to an external hard drive weekly. Every three months swap it with a drive kept in the safe deposit box.

Daily:

If you have a Mac, use Time Machine. If Linux, some sort of cron job running a Python script that copies /home to an external hard drive. If Windows, I dunno.

- Wiredog @ SlashDot: Link.

David Parnas on software design:

… It is almost always incorrect to begin the decomposition of a system into modules on the basis of a flowchart. We propose instead that one begins with a list of difficult design decisions or design decisions which are likely to change. Each module is then designed to hide such a decision from the others.

- Wikipedia

Open Stage @ the University of St. Thomas
Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 2:00pm

University of St. Thomas
Brady Education Center

Lower Level, Room LL03

Campus Map (pdf) - Brady Education Center is building #31 on the map, Southwest corner of the campus, parking is usually available on Goodrich.

Ninety-four percent. Now that’s depressing.

Spam, that annoying but ignorable scourge of the Web, has finally recovered from the jolt it received last November, when Internet backbone providers cut off McColo Corporation, a California Web-hosting service that spammers were using to coordinate e-mail attacks.

The average seven-day spam volume during the latter half of March is now at roughly the same levels as October of last year — around 94 percent of all e-mail — according to the antispam company Postini, a division of Google.

- Brad Stone @ New York Times: Link.

Via SlashDot: Link.