One of the things I love most about science fiction is it’s ability to take an idea like “legal reform” and extrapolate it into a meaningful, personal story to illustrate the need for changes. How would you explain to your ten year old daughter why someone is suing her for the things her ancestors did? Or why she can’t sing along out loud without permission? How would you like it if your baby was sued before he or she was born? If the lawyers get their way, that’s our future.

That only includes receipts that I’ve kept; I have no clue how much I’ve actually spent. Triple the figure if I’d had to include labor costs.

It makes me sick to think that people who bought in stupidly at a peak and don’t have steady employment are getting breaks. Shouldn’t people who work hard successfully get rewarded?

(This post brought to you by NeatDesk, which has managed to collate and report on an unbearable number of receipts in the past few weeks.)

Lesson to all the kids in the audience: Homeownership isn’t for everyone. If you’re not willing to lift a hammer and you have no savings, it’s a trap you’ll never get out of.

• Part One: In which they silo everyone and nothing is anyone’s responsibility.
• Part Two: In which the corporate trolls gain power, and actively drive out anyone who’s trying to get work done.
• Part 3: Hunger can be an asset.

Now we’ve got the iPad — which resembles, even in name, the PADD from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (We’ve got a lot of other things, too, including flat panel TVs and room controls, voice recognition…) Chris Foreman of Ars Technica wrote a great feature about the similarities.

The article ends on an interesting note: What’s really going to happen next? Unfortunately, Star Trek stopped innovating in the technical set design that’s guided our tech for the past thirty years or so.

Obviously, the “Minority Report” style of motion detection is probably going to start developing further. You’ve got the Wii’s motion input controls, and the coming Microsoft Kinect, not to mention the multi-touch interfaces that are in development for various purposes.

Voice control isn’t a very efficient method of input. However, one place I can see voice control used is for brief instructions — such as the household “lights: dim” instructions in ST:TNG — and in places where the other “input devices” on the human body are already in use, such as for helicopter pilots or in industrial applications. Another issue with voice control is privacy. We’ve got the Jawbone inductor microphone headsets, which work well when they’re in contact with your jawbone. We’ve already seen (literally) bleeding-edge scientists implant chips in their own bodies — and now they’re working on implanting computer chips in individual cells. How long before you can implant a Jawbone in your … jawbone?

Here’s the first one: Whatever Happened to Programming @ The Reinvigorated Programmer, and here’s it’s second part: It May Not Be As Bad as All That.

Pay special attention to the addendum in that second article. The money quote for me was in the big pull from a comment by jdeitrich on HackerNews:

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

It’s the death of the hobbyist programmer. There’s a new framework release in Symfony or Zend Framework every time I re-surface a week or two later. Even with 10 years experience with programming, unit tests, and a decent level of comfort from the experience with 0.x versions and up of these frameworks, I spend all the time I *should* be coding with my nose in the docs updating code that’s been deprecated or migrated. Just keeping up in one framework can be a full time job.

How can anything get done like this?

Sun has some of the best ideas in the world. From a creativity point of view, they’re pretty amazing. From an implementation point of view, with some notable exceptions (ex: Fishworks), they’re pitiful. Sun couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a suit made of hundred dollar bills.

Half of Sun’s ideas were half-baked. (Either go fully baked, a’la Steve Jobs, or lay off whatever writes you make bad haiku, mmkay?) The x45xx line of servers is a wonderful idea and a wonderful form factor, and Sun overcame significant engineering challenges to develop it. Unfortunately, the first gen fell down hard under load and were practically unusable. The second gen is still suffering from some high replacement part and add-on costs that don’t justify the price in many cases. The integration of ZFS and SSDs as ZIL/L2ARC is wonderful, but there are a ton of technical problems that customers keep running into and Sun keeps refusing to acknowledge. It took three months to solve the problem I was having with SSDs and ZIL. I place the blame for the former on poor management controls, and the latter on excessive outsourcing of core competencies. Both are failures of management to execute the brilliant ideas that engineers come with.

It’s nice to see a company with a reputation for being able to execute and capitalize on new ideas come in. Oracle’s already started to cut, and all of the cuts I know of so far in my various interactions with the company have been well-justified. I’m really excited, from the point of view of someone with several relationships with the company, to see what comes of this merger.

RHN Fail

Yeah, that’s what you see when you visit rhn.redhat.com — which you need to use to administer redhat subscriptions. I can’t get my servers to subscribe while the site’s down, and I can’t manage my entitlements or buy new ones.

One of my consulting projects has been on hold for days while RHN sorts itself out. Worse, you can’t even log in to report the problem. If you click on the “contacting us” link, you get taken to a page with a couple of mailing lists. Well, why join a mailing list? I know the site’s down. I want to file an engineering report. I click the last option, which is supposed to allow me to file such a report. It says I need to log in to file a report. FAIL.

It does seem that there’s some awareness of the problem. Poking around in the rest of the redhat.com domain, I got messages like this:

Why’s Redhat losing market share? They can’t even run a website well. Who’s going to trust their server distro when they can’t get a website right?