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Friday, December 3, 2004 |
Writing simple requirements
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2119.htmlA reference on how to use the words "may", "should" and "must", "may not", "should not" and "must not".
Seems simple, but I often find myself in requirements meetings that lead to formal bids, and some of these are traps. Particularly tricky is "must", because in the formal bid process, it really does mean that, if a product doesn't do the "must", we really are unable to buy it, no matter how good it is otherwise.
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Thursday, March 4, 2004 |
hope alone
More bullshit on gay marriage:
San Francisco has ignited a "wildfire" of same-sex marriages across the country that must be stopped by amending the U.S. Constitution, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist declared Wednesday in prelude to a Senate hearing to explore doing just that.
The hearing was packed with lesbians and gays with children as witnesses declared that activist judges and renegade mayors are sending traditional marriage into a tailspin, creating a "legal domino effect'' that will force the entire nation to accept same-sex marriages barring a last stand by changing the nation's founding document.
Of course, it was the hearing's audience that was packed with lesbians and gays with children. The witnesses that got invited were "African American and Latino religious leaders, many of whom are lining up with conservatives in the marriage debate". The rest of us just don't count. Rev. Richard Richardson provides a fair example of the lying bullshit that the right wing is resorting to:
"As an African American, I know something about discrimination," Richardson said. "The institution of slavery was about the oppression of an entire people. The institution of segregation was about discrimination. The institution of Jim Crow laws, including laws against interracial marriage, was about discrimination. The traditional institution of marriage is not discrimination. And I find it offensive to call it that."
Of course, no one has called traditional marriage discrimination. We're calling denying other people the right to marry discrimination.
[from the San Francisco Chronicle]
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004 |
Fear Factor
Fred Langa, in InformationWeek, tries to run a test of email reliability and claims that 40% of his email did not get through. He emphasizes how he had thousands of volunteers participating in the test. Sounds good, yesno?When you read through to the mean of his article, though, it turns out that up to 40% of his eager volunteers did not successfully respond to an email from an email address they didn't know. Right off the bat, this is flawed: he's not actually testing if email gets delivered, he's testing if a random group reads unsolicited emails from unknown addresses, and if they then actually successfully respond to it.
Additional problems: Langa claims that "The subject line also would be plain and general, neither designed to trigger nor avoid spam filters. " but then goes on to say that "The E-mails carried a totally generic subject line of 'Hello'."
Many people routinely delete email with subject lines like this - I've got six emails in this morning's "Junk email" folder with the subject of "Hi" or "Hello" out of the hundred or so pieces of spam I got overnight, and I deleted all of them unread. If I don't recognize your name, you're probably a spammer. Then, to reply, you must follow his directions:
Please do not--repeat do not--simply reply to this E-mail! Instead, please create (or forward) a NEW E-mail to [target address was placed here]. Again, please do not--repeat do not--hit "reply." That will not work.
So now, we've got a case where he's introducing a new source of failure into the design, without accounting for it (for example, by trying to send an email from his Fred Langa address and seeing the comparable compliance rate with his directions).
Years ago, I TA'ed experimental psych for three semesters. Anyone who brought this design and methodology into class as a proposal would have received a very poor grade. Why Information Week chose to publish it is beyond me (except the obvious reason that many publishers believe that "Fear Sells", and don't care about the actual truth of what they publish.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003 |
ho ho ho and a bottle of rum, Santa is off to the Ca-rib-eee-yun
From Inner Bitch, a site I picked up via a friend's blogroll, and check out occasionally: Subversive cross stitch kits. I have several friends who would enjoy the "Happy Fucking Holidays" cross stitch kit.
Says it all, really.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003 |
man in the street says, "security comes first", but the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
[Via Slashdot] Last August, the Nachi worm hit ATMs built by Diebold.
Diebold also builds voting machines, and keeps maintaining that we can trust elections to their very security conscious practices.
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Monday, November 10, 2003 |
stop, hey, what's that sound -- everybody look what's going down
A bit of news for alumni: this week, Chancellor Wiley announced a 15-year plan to radically rebuild the east end of campus into a new, arts-oriented district. Buildings slated for demolition in the 15-year plan include Humanities, Ogg Hall, Peterson, the Extension Building, Student Services (the old bank building on Park Street), and University Square. I normally dislike announcements like this, but (with the exception of the old bank building) this is a collection of ugly, fortress-mentality buildings that campus will be well rid of. Every friend I have who ever attended UW will understand this sentiment:
"I want to be the first person to swing a sledgehammer at the Humanities Building," said Wiley, who studied physics and taught engineering at UW and who compared the feel of the classroom space in the Humanities Building to a prison.
New building includes a new dormitory on the University Square site, and another just south from where Ogg Hall is now, in a green field near the SERF and the old railroad tracks; a new consolidated building for humanities which would have room for the art (currently scattered in 8 buildings) and music departments. Also, perhaps building on the unique success of the State Street pedestrian mall:
Creating a pedestrian mall with greenspace and an outdoor sculpture garden and an outdoor performance space to run from the Memorial Union Terrace to Regent Street. The point, Wiley said, is not only to create a better living environment, but also to encourage walking, bike riding and alternative transportation in the congested campus area. "It will compare with the Union Terrace as an experience every student and alumnus remembers."
(The part about Regent Street is either wrong or something got telescoped - closing Park Street from the Terrace to Regent would be a traffic nightmare. I suspect the pedestrian mall runs near the Union, and it's the sculpture garden that would extend in a strip down to Regent. There are more details in the article and I encourage former Badgers to follow the link. This will really reshape what UW looks like, and mostly for the better, I think.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003 |
i said be careful, his bowtie is really a camera
A google search on goldfish and Miles Vorkosigan also turned up The Government Warehouse List, which is an attempt to inventory all those things that movies and TV shows depict as hidden in government warehouses. The Ark of the Covenant. The Martian war machines from War of the Worlds. The dead alien from Alien Autopsy. And so on.
she said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
Via Gizmodo: CIA developed robotic dragonfly and catfishMiles Vorkosigan would feel so vindicated:
The agency also tested a 600mm-long rubber robot catfish named Charlie capable of swimming inconspicuously among other fish and whose mission remains secret.
"Charlie's mission is still classified, we can't talk about it," Toni Hiley, curator of the CIA museum, told Reuters on a tour of the exhibit. "All we can say is he's our work on aquatic robotic technologies."
(For those who do not read Lois McMaster Bujold, one of her Miles Vorkosigan stories features young Miles worrying that someone has put robotic goldfish into the fountain to eavesdrop on him.)
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003 |
If it makes you happy
Unbelievable:
In the end, Mr. Palermo was turned off from TiVo by the prospect of having to connect all kinds of wires and adding a new box to his home entertainment system. So, instead, he ordered a relatively new product that his cable company, Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner, has been pitching: a set-top box made by Scientific-Atlanta with a DVR already built in.
Where do they find these people? In wiring terms, a TiVo is hooked into your television in exactly the same way a VCR is; then you plug a phone line into it. Rocket science it ain't, but you wouldn't know it from reading the article.
The article doesn't say how Mr. Palermo's ignorance was chosen for implied endorsement by the times. Why do I suspect that they got his name from Time Warner?
From the NY Times: Can Cable Fast-Forward Past TiVo?
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Monday, July 14, 2003 |
Unwanted
[Via Dan Gillmor]: A refreshing comment in the Sacramento Bee, responding to complaints about their comics page."My basic philosophy," Rodriguez said, "is to let most comics run, even though some might make me, as well as some readers, cringe.
"I think we are no longer in an age where edgy comics only belong on editorial pages. When you think about comedy today, much of it has political overtones or is about an issue in the news. 'The Boondocks' sometimes pushes to the limit, but it has a strong following."
The offending cartoons were a series about Strom Thurmond, in Boondocks, offering such to the point observations as"... there's a powerful message for all of us to learn in the long life of Strom Thurmond ... that you can really, really, really, really, really hate black people ... and it's basically OK with everyone."
God bless our liberal media.
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Friday, July 11, 2003 |
i feel like a roadrunner
The NY Times has a nice story today, A Truck With a Life of Its Own, about a man whose old beater truck became a community resource.I've lost count of how many people have keys to my truck. It's more than a dozen, maybe twice that. Every Saturday, when a couple of thousand minivans, sport utility vehicles and station wagons visit the town dump, discharging trash, recyclable plastic, cardboard and the like into designated Dumpsters, my truck is likely to make several appearances. And any day of the week, someone might take it to pick up a new grill at Sears or a load of lumber at the Home Depot.
When I last visited Portland, I stayed with a friend-of-a-friend who participated in Flexcar, a program where you could pay a fee and get access to a pool of cars for shopping trips, etc. I'd love it if the car sharing movement
Very practical. Before Lucy's workplace moved and she became a commuter, we used to get by with the occasional rental of a van for tasks like getting ready for summer (we'd buy peat moss and such for the garden, lumber, haul stuff to the dump, etc., all in one day).
with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot
Mike Ivey thinks that "Chains won't bind State Street".
If national chains find downtown Madison an attractive place to do business and want to invest here, I say - in the words of George W. - "bring 'em on." Independents who say they can't afford the high rents on State Street will find their own niche, creating hip "off-State" business nodes to be searched out by the trendiest urbanites.
Who knows? Maybe having a Crate & Barrel or Eddie Bauer Home Store on State Street would attract a few more whitebread visitors to the downtown where they might even expand their world by tossing a coin into the case of a long-haired fiddle player.
Madison is one of the few cities with a healthy downtown left in this country, yet somehow we should repeat the mistakes of the past and drive out everything unique in favor of making our downtown look like Schaumberg.
And how the heck did The Capital Times end up with a reporter who can approvingly quote George W. Bush at his most idiotic? "Bring 'em on"?
