Today, it was the Special Counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, Robert Tanner. Apparently, out of a great many people, i've managed to gain the interest of a member of the Strategic Analysis and Negotiations Division under the International Bureau.

i've also been solicited for friendship by several CEOs and others of reasonable importance, even though i can honestly say, i have little idea who the heck they are.

A reasonable amount of effort went into doing a quick background check on good Mr. Tanner before i accepted his kind offer of association. (i checked that the email listed in his profile matched the one on record for his 2005 registered website, as well as a few other details.) Still, the incident does get me thinking…

Do we really know who wants to be our friend?

Think about it, let's say that i'm a nefarious individual. i want to discover private details regarding a group or individual of great interest to steal identity / infiltrate organization / grief / etc. For around $15 i can create a vaguely correct domain of interest like "fox-inc.com" and register a personae as the associate producer via a gmail account. i then send out a bunch of friend requests to various individuals to see who i can net with these vaguely correct bits of information. Some folks ignore, but every "confirmation" lends credibility to my fake personality and soon, others will accept because others have accepted.

While i'm sure that services like LinkedIn would move quickly to disable fake or malicious profiles like this, it's also a case of whack-a-mole. Likewise, once you've established a connection, it's often quite difficult to figure out how to break it, particularly if done cleverly and the nefarious individual is patient enough.

Yes, this is a bit of a strawman, but we've already seen apps take advantage of gaining people's trust in order to access information about that user. We also know that "friends" are generally granted greater access than apps, so what's to stop someone from escalating to the next level, other than diligence on the part of people who accept friend requests and constant reminders to "only accept people who you know" (or really want to know, or are flattered by their attention, or…) Even if you're fastidious, can you be reasonably certain that others are?

At work, we're in the process of moving a lot of things from big iron systems to a more distributed architecture. What's generally counter-intuitive when doing something like that is things break a lot more. Machines and services go up and down all the time. The absolute worst thing one can do in that situation is to provide a boolean "All or Nothing" approach. If you do that, your customers may wind up a good deal like the passengers aboard a certain spaceship awaiting packets of lemon soaked paper napkins. In spite of what those of us with OCD insist on telling ourselves, ours is an imperfect world, and the sooner we adjust to that fact, the better.

As an example, right now i'm prevented on fixing a bug because a system that a system that a system i rely upon is down for unfathomable reasons. Said system provides a single element of data that while useful, isn't really critical. The data could be zeroed (so that folks that are looking for it don't break) or faked (since there's no dependency issues) with few the wiser.

Chances are, if you really reduce the set of data you absolutely have to send (and i don't mean "You absolutely need to send the user's background graphic otherwise the world will end!", i'm talking the absolute smallest data set you can send and have the site be tolerably functional), you'll be amazed by what little data you really need. Heck look at Twitter as an example. While they can provide a huge pile 'o data, ultimately the smallest set is the message, who sent it, and when.

Why pare down to the base essentials? Because it's easier to focus on three or four items and make sure that set of data is critically available. The nice thing is that once you've done that, it's fairly easy to tackle the next set of less critically available data while knowing that should that fail, you're not off the air and so on. When you build things to fail, you're ensuring that your stuff will work as well as possible. That makes your system more robust and reliable, which means that services that rely on you are more robust and reliable.

And thus, this is how you get to Yahoo/Google levels of reliable services, because both of those folks absolutely build things to fail.

John: (sitting next to me) What, did you feel it?

…

Why yes, it was a lateral movement quake with a thrust vector of .01, brown shoes and from it's stance, hailed from Cotsgold on the Hampshire.

Excellent deduction, Watson, but you failed to note the fact that the quake had a limp! Mwah-ha-ha!

i really like the folks i work with…

But the question stayed with me – What is the essence of "the Web," or "The Internet"? Does Apple's approach to the world we've built together over these past 15 years qualify as part of the Web? i've argued in the past that it does not. But perhaps i'm being too dismissive. Perhaps, after 15 years of noise, and dirt, and half steps, perhaps we all really want the Web packaged and delivered to us in neat Apps, ready for consumption.

It's an interesting question, but one that's a bit too narrowly focused. In truth, Apple is merely trying to do the same thing that Facebook and AOL have tried to do. They want to be the Internet.

Not part of it, they want to be it.

Sure, they may use bits of it, and may even duplicate things that look a lot like stuff you see on the web, but ultimately, they don't want you anywhere near the web. They want you where they can control you, feed you what they want, when they want it. They want you dependent on them because that's where all your friends/peers/celebrities are. This may sound hyperbolic, but it pretty much lays out exactly the way things were before the web.

Consider the pre-web days of Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie and the like. The web was a dirty place you had to work at to get to. If you were lucky, you might have gotten a way to send an email to someone on another service, but again, you usually had to work at it. That's because you were worth more to them playing in their sandboxes than you were playing somewhere else (even when you were ponying up bucks to use them).

It's still true today. Facebook doesn't want you wandering off, so they've either duplicated things you might want elsewhere or made it so that the only place you can get things is on their service. That's not how the web is supposed to work, and is a huge step backwards. Thing is, most folks don't care. i've said that i consider Facebook a "roach motel of information". Stuff goes in easily, but never comes out. Open Graph is merely taking that one more step, and i have no doubt what-so-ever that it's Facebook's goal to sweeten "search" results with folks that swallowed the blue pill. (It does mean that search results are going to be heavily gamed in facebook by commercial interests rather than academic ones, but that's not important to facebook.)

i'm fairly sure Apple is playing a similar game, only their's is App based. Apps, that only run on their OS on their devices, under their strict control. They introduce things that work in that world alone and discourage you from going elsewhere. (Heck, a great example is the fact that the only supported emulator for iPhone developers only runs on Apple equipment. It's not possible to release a VM image folks could use?)

i'm also fairly certain that any company that reaches a particular level of user engagement will pull the same sort of crap. Google has to a certain extent with the development of Docs, Base, and similar things, but i will admit they're being a bit better than many in also allowing you to take your data and leave.

Ultimately, the web is open, and as such, can't do things like cut off facebook or other groups that don't want to play fair. That's not what the web is. Still, it's the open web's responsibility to do the same thing that it did when folks were using Prodigy, GEnie and Compuserve. Make the open web so much more compelling than what's available in the closed web.

Right now, we're not doing a really good job of it.

We need to fix that.

http://foursquare.com/venue/0xBEEF is not a butchery.
http://foursquare.com/venue/0xFFFF is not a terminus.
http://foursquare.com/venue/0xDEAD is not a funeral home.

i expected better.

Still, we have a while to go before we hit venue 3,737,844,653, but i expect it to go somewhere better.

They're charming, wholesome folk from North West Connecticut. He worked in a factory most of his life. She worked in a pharmacy. They were born, raised, lived and will most likely die in the same small town, surrounded by the same people they have know most of their lives.

So, naturally, i like to perform experiments on them.

Recently, i've heard a fair bit of discussion talking about how the prototypical techno-phobe "Mom" is horribly wrong. Moms are pretty darn tech-savvy. Heck, there are plenty of Grandma's that are equally versed in the digital realms and are the first to tell you. My inlaws, however, are not those people.

They are quite content to passively consume media from the Big Three Networks, because they always have done that. They might watch a few shows on the cable, but the most daring they'd stray is watching Food Network. i've asked them questions about the shows they've just finished watched they couldn't answer like "Where was that restaurant?" or "So, what was the lead characters name again?" i don't really want this to sound derogatory, but they have the intellectual curiousity of a bottle of aspirin. Right now, my wife is explaining to her parents the concept of on-line TV guides. They are far from stupid. It's just that they have little to no interest in technology or advancement.

So, whenever i try to gauge if a given technology is simple and "mainstream" enough, i immediately think of them. It's not simple unless they can understand it. It's not useful until they think it's valuable. When i slam the iPad as being incomplete, they're the ones i have in mind (my answer may change once it's possible to create and print mailing labels from an iPad). Of course, they would still need a keyboard, mouse and a stand so they can keep it on the computer desk.

They have a laptop with a 7 hour battery that they brought with them so i could set it up. When they wanted to check their email, they asked to use my wife's computer.

What's important to realize is that there are a LOT of folks that are exactly like this. It's not an age thing either, since i have younger cousins who are like this. We are a nation of 300,000,000, and a planet of 7,000,000,000. Only one in ten people in the US are Netflix subscribers. Only about one in seventeen people on the planet has a Facebook account. As far under the bleeding edge as we all may be, there's an equal if not greater population of folks that are not. Even 40 years into this, we're still pioneers.

Thank you! Thank you all! What a great night this is for America!

[more cheering]

It is with great honor and pride that i accept this position which i have been tirelessly spending vast sums of money to acquire!

[Cheers!]

i'll have you know that just prior to coming out to speak to you, i received a gracious call from my opponent conceding this election.

[Lots of cheering]

And though i spent the last five months telling you that he eats babies and regularly worships satan, i accepted his courteous offer before telling him that i was the one who slit his dog's throat last Tuesday.

[a bit less Cheering]

Let's face it, i slung more mud at that bozo than BP's pumped into the well. Heck, the past few weeks? i was just making crap up. You can't imagine the kind of glee i felt watching that maroon trying to calmly discuss why his grandmother was not smuggling Mexicans north in a hot air balloon during World War II. Honestly, there are jukeboxes that are harder to play. But that's not what we're here to talk about tonight! No, tonight we talk about the future!

[Ok, the cheering is back]

A future where you realize that you elected me on groundless promises that had you stayed awake for ten minutes in civics would have shown as impossible!

[And, the cheering is a bit less again]

A future where i will come to the stark realization that politics means other people, and i get to live out the repeated failings of countless others who have held this office ahead of me.

[clapping]

People You hated. People you wanted out so that you could get this fresh face in charge. People who wouldn't think twice about condemning your neighborhood for a strip bar if it got them that much closer to a more powerful position or at least a decent kick back.

[POST EFX:insert clapping here]

And furthermore, a future where you realize that the slim number of my policies that have the best chance of actually passing are the ones you skipped over because they were boring. Policies like cutting funding for community programs, infrastructure, and permit oversight. So i wouldn't park anything better than a Pinto under any trees in the area.

[a random cough]

So thank you, one and all! Your votes mean the world to me. Not as much as the money i'll be getting from lobbyists and future speaking engagements, but it's sweet how the puppies come back after you kick them. Oh, wait, no that comes next week.

[ ]

Thank you and God Bless America!

This afternoon, my neighbor came to me in frustrated rage because the brand new HP c4750 she was trying to set up simply wouldn't work even after three days of constantly fiddling with it. The problem, of course, was that HP (which every passing day i'm further convinced is full of individuals of great malice) do not provide the simple driver files. Instead, they require the unwitting to run their "installation wizard" which has more in common with Sauron than Gandolf. Said "wizard" would start, hit a fatal error, and then remove all the needed files before helpfully rebooting the computer. (i found the pleasant "Sending an error report" lie to be very amusing. Having worked places that offer that service, i knew damn well that no programmer would see that "error report".)

Naturally, the solution was to start the "wizard" and then kill him with the digital crowbar that is Task Manager's "Kill Process". Once done, you look through various temporary directories for recent new directories and effectively loot the corpse looking for the actual driver files. Sure enough, two hours later, she had a working printer/scanner.

Of course, the "wireless" feature is broken by design because there's no way to change the printer's wireless settings, except for using the now bludgeoned corpse of a wizard, which, even reanimated, is about as helpful as it was deceased.

i provided a friendly reminder to my very nice neighbor that a cheap printer isn't always a "bargain", and that even though she is no longer able to return the immensely defective device, she might be able to fend it off on some sucker via ebay.

Still, as i left mumbling epithets toward Palo Alto, and increasingly aware that the former CEO of the company that produces the most costly substance on earth is now running for senate, i wondered if perhaps HP is doing more to promote Open Source than any other organization on the planet.

Really, what it comes down to is that if you want the least number of headaches, you get a printer that is network ready and use something like "LPR" to connect to it. If you can't, bring it back because it's obviously broken and defective.

i'd recommend getting an Epson.

You know the type. These are programs that make life "easier" and "assist" you in ways that might be useful once, but soon make you want to hunt down the folks that came up with the idea and beat them with encyclopedias. Like Clippy did.

Not all painfully helpful things are as obvious as Clippy. There are some that are far more insidious, specifically, IDEs.

Why the IDE hate? They're the GPS of Coding. They're useful, to be sure, but i'm not sure it's a good idea to learn how to drive with them, but folks are. Heck, i'm one of them.

With the IDE's, not the driving with GPS. Wait, i have one of those too. Damn, i'll start again.

IDE's biggest problem is that they don't teach you anything. In fact, they kind of keep you from learning. The reason is that with complex languages that need an IDE, you start relying on the IDE to do things like tell you what methods and object are available. This leads to a false sense of understanding about the language because, you can get a program running or fix things, but it's a false knowledge. It's a bit like saying "Oh, i know everything there is to know about Yellowstone. i drove by Old Faithful."

That's not really seeing Yellowstone. You've got to get out of the car, away from the well marked trail and concession stands, and out into the woods. Sure, there are wolves and bears and buffalo that haven't dated in a really, really long time, but that's how you learn important things. Like not to bend over when picking up your honey dipped pet chicken.

The best way to learn a language really is to just grab an editor, a compiler and a debugger. You may also want a Drill Sergeant Phrasebook, but that's optional. It's brutal, nasty, and about as much fun as grabbing a map from the 1960's and trying to navigate downtown Boston. Ok, with less gunfire, but it's about as deep a learning experience, and that sort of education will stay with you forever. Much like the scars from the beer bottle that someone threw at your head.

Ok, so that probably doesn't sound very appealing does it?

Tough, it's good for you.

According to the nice folks at mw.com it means: : having no precedent : novel, unexampled. In short: Nothing has ever happened like this before.

It's a rather staggering claim in this modern world, and it tends to be tossed around quite a bit, whether or not it's true.

As a society, we tend to hate history, usually because it disagrees with us. There's also a heck of a lot of it going on. Mind you, 1979 was also the year we were focused on Iran and conservatives coming into power in Britain, as well as a few other things, so if you happen to be younger than 35 or so, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was unprecedented. If not, you've been had. (i'll count myself in that number, since i had also forgotten about it.)

So, being an engineer and realizing that there's a problem, how can we go about fixing this sort of group amnesia? We're a highly connected hive mind, some of us should be big enough neurons to fire off a memory or two about this. Yet, we don't.

i'm starting to think that possibly the luddites might have a point that snippet conversations are bad. Hell, i used to update this blog daily, but it's been nearly two weeks since i wrote anything. Mostly, i've been popping info-zits on twitter or being a cyber potato soaking up random crap from Techmeme and Reddit. i miss writing here because it made me think. Perhaps that effort is what made me stop updating.

Well, enough of that.

Time to prune back the crap to historical levels and get myself back on a schedule again. Time to pay attention again and stop being so damn passive. i've got my well to scream into, but there's more to say and do.

Hi, my name is JR, and i'm a recovering info junkie.