My question is how did DHS match a twitter account with a single individual and a boarding card?
The only things close to personally identifying on my twitter account would be my rough location and my email. But even with my email you would need to get twitter and then hotmail to cough up some details. Plus you would then have my name which matches the name of many other people.
Unless this guy has posted his UK equivalent of a SSN or passport # on his twitter account I don't understand how they were so able to link the person to the twitter account. This would require complete cooperation from a number of US Internet companies and ideally his UK ISP.
Even if this guy used his name on the account it still would match a zillion names.
Think of the steps: Scan all of twitter for Anti-american blather. Go to Twitter and get user details. Go to hotmail, gmail, etc for more details. And possibly go to ISP for billing information. This would ideally require that Twitter and Facebook, hotmail, gmail regularly hand over complete data sets or have given DHS a backdoor.
This is a huge opportunity for any company that is willing to operate somewhere they can ignore US pressure and US court fatwas; as you could create the ultimate privacy policy. "We don't give your info to the US as the other guys do."
No longer does the federal government get to guide what we see or read, and thus think. Nor are Toronto and Ottawa being culturally overfunded having any effect outside of those two areas. Eastern Canada is now free to resume its natral cultural relationship with the east coast of the US and into the Caribbean. And BC can continue its natural relationship with Asia. Alberta can resume pretending to be Texas. And central Canada can focus on themselves without dragging the rest of us along.
If anything this will make Canada more culturally diverse as there is no One Canada. (A single nation under two official languages.)
5 Plumbers might but probably would not be able to solve the same tough pipe related problem as an engineering professor. But the 5 plumbers working around the table with the engineering professor will just annoy the engineering professor.
This is assuming average plumbers and a good professor as I have met well below average professors and well above average plumbers.
The two problems with the lone genius in an organization is that they make others look bad along with the fact that people with poor people skills don't usually play the politics correctly.
Then there is that lone genius who only has everyone convinced they are genius but their lack of genius causes disasters. I'm thinking about you, "Buffer overflow" Mike, who programs web "scripts" in c++ with inline assembly.
First, what is the goal? The goal is not well documented code, what use to anyone is well documented code by itself. What you are looking for is a product that works and is easily maintained. Good code and any documentation is a huge part of easy to maintain. But where many people go wrong is that they see code documentation and commenting a critical part of a project. To the point where it starts to interfere with the creation of a good product that is easy to maintain.
So when looking at documentation it needs to make sense for the endgame. Who is going to use it? When are they going to use it? How much effort is going into its creation? I have seen projects where thousands of pages of documentation were generated where the only thing ever read again(other than by the document review team) were the few pages that documented the steps for configuring the server. When the next version was created nobody referred once to the old pile of documents that had every detail in the universe.
The next question is: what is documentation? This might seem odd but documentation can be the very directory structure itself. I wonder where the client code, maybe it is in the directory named client_code.
In agile or XP programing you don't tend to look too far into the future. So two critical documents that would be very active are your todo list for this cycle and a wishlist for future cycles that eventually turns into a todo list. The todo list, when done, can be chopped up into a crude set of documents that show the past if anyone were to be interested.
Lastly the code itself is an excellent place for documentation. A quick explanation of what it is about and why it exists can be useful if the file isn't already named verifycreditcardnumber.c.
So I don't think the criteria is so much poor or good documentation; so much as it is about useful documentation. If non programmers are intimately involved then lots of screen shots, text, and flowcharts are needed. If programmers are the only parties then it might almost all hide in the codebase with the exception of the screenshots mockups.
The mist trails are all wrong. The car changes from when it is in the hand to when it is on the track. The lighting is wrong. The movement is wrong. I am not even sure the track is real.
I have now left more than one movie because of groups of people shouting "You go girl" along with much other advice to the characters on screen. I get my refund but the theater does nothing.
First I will say that I have met a couple (and I mean two) IT department heads who were normal and ran their IT world well. But...
I would say that the lines you disagree with are perfect descriptions of nearly all the IT heads that I have ever met and I have a good test. In all the straight-laced companies where you know their head(s) of IT how many had a "unique" style? That is long hair in a company full of crew cuts. (Or worse long hair on a receding hair line) Or were morbidly obese in a company where that wasn't the norm. Or just dressed like slobs (ironic t-shirts etc.) Or at least minimally didn't wear a tie in a company of tie-men. Also how many female IT heads have you ever met? Me... None. People like to fit in. So when someone sticks out you need to ask why.
How many IT heads had really strange hobbies? I have found nearly every head of IT lacking mentally in some seriously flawed fashion. I can see how a physiologist taking a look into the word of IT would wet his pants with this sea of disfunction.
A badly structured IT department will end up being a bad IT department. A typical scenario is that nobody knows what exactly the IT department does and ignores it until it explodes. Then they rain fire upon the heads of IT. How many IT people have done the heroic all night'er putting out some huge fire because the company was basically non functional while some system was down. These IT departments then become highly risk adverse and become the "Department-Of-NO!!!" This is a reasonable reaction to this structure.
The problem with this reaction is that you end up with IT departments that get locked into IE6 and other legacy problems that only increase the risk and effort required to make the leap into the modern age. Also you end up with the staff doing end runs around the IT department such as outsourcing their own solutions. I have witnessed a situation where a local cable internet connection was secretly brought in on a weekend as the Internet policies were so completely bonkers.
The solution is actually quite easy. The IT department needs to realize that they aren't management. They are a utility. Thus they need to provide a basic set of services such as internet and working machines. Like a real ISP the assumption must be that the customers are going to screw up as much as they can. Thus you create a bulletproof internet connection/email system/whatever common systems available where the individuals can't ruin the whole system. Then when a department wants to switch to Apple products you tell them that they won't be able to turn to the IT department for help as IT doesn't know Apple. The department will make this decision themselves. If a department wants to install a new accounting system the IT department should give advice and maybe a quote if the system is going to be say difficult to back up. If the department doesn't like your quote then they might make a different decision or decide to proceed anyway. That is why companies hire people to run other departments; the company trusted them. Companies don't hire the IT staff to run the company they hire it to run IT.
A great example of this sort of paternalistic crap is why RIMM is dying. I was using a CEO's blackberry the other day. I clicked on twitter to see how the app worked but it said that that I needed to ask permission from my administrator to run this app. Holy crap this was the CEO's phone. I can see IT departments loving RIMM if it allows them to reach their power tripping right out into people's pockets. I can also see why people want iPhones for work to replace their Blackberries. Freedom.
I hated OLE ActiveX COM so so much. It would be one the main reasons I left windows programming. I must have spent 1000's of hours fighting with those technologies either in trying to make them do something or trying to build an install package that worked. So anything this guy has to say is instantly discounted to zero. ActiveX was one of those classic silver bullet technologies that got you to 90% on the first day of development and the other 10% took months and often resulted in rebuilding whatever the ActiveX part did from scratch.
Oddly enough if you hand out a device that happens to be an excellent toy to a bunch of kids things won't go as well as you might expect. Yet I have a simple solution. Move your desk to the back of the classroom. Unless your educational software looks like angry birds one glance will tell you if little Johnny is screwing around.
I am the creator of Learn French by LessonStudio (shameless self promotion) which is a singleminded app that teaches basic French vocabulary and Grammar;. It follows some pretty basic modern educational science and personally I believe works rather well. Handed out to a class of kids they could probably absorb some French pretty quickly as compared to an equivalent textbook. But again I wouldn't hand the app out to the kids and leave them to their own devices(ha ha).
At the same time I don't think that there is any complete end to end teaching system out there. Moodle is a mess for teaching. It does what it does well but it certainly is far far away from being some replacement for teachers. It is really only for administering a classroom. But great administration does nothing to improve the teacher. I pick on Moodle but all the systems that I have seen are aimed squarely at the bureaucrats that run the schools with only a nod to actual improvements in teaching. So based on the state of the art right now if I were a teacher I would not look for something where I could go home but a series of tools that enhance individual lessons.
I am so gone as soon as I can find an organization I can trust but first why I am going:
SOPA holy crap! Godaddy should be blasting with all guns on this one. I would suspect that 99% of their customers would be fully against SOPA if they knew what it was about. At this point I wouldn't really believe any Godaddy anti SOPA talk. I get this feeling that if some organization didn't like my use of the word "the" that Godaddy would shut me down and hand them my domains in a second.
Godaddy girls... have zero interest from a technical point of view.
Upsell, upsell, upsell STOP IT!
That case where the guy lost his domain out of the blue and Godaddy didn't do squat about it. They probably thought $9 per year who cares. But that scared the crap out of me.
When am I going? I am not going to rush this. I won't be part of the 20,000 per day this week but within a month I will be moved. I am only around 10 domains with influence over another 20; but off I go. Of greater loss to Godaddy will be my recommending against them. There are probably around 200 domains held their directly because of me.
Where am I going? Looking for:
Good prices. Anything much over $10 a year is gouging.
Basic multidomain hosting with near unlimited subdomains and bandwidth that need not worry me(2000GB)
No upselling!
Clean interface. I have been using Godaddy for around 10 years and their interface still confuses the crap out of me.
Fast. If your site isn't fast then what chance does mine have?
Fast DNS. Some DNS types are faster than others. The lookup time for my sites with Godaddy is fairly slow.
A site with a reputation of protecting their customers against the lunatics now running the US.
This last one seems to push me out of the US but for some reason the Europeans seem to think that it is 1993 when it comes to pricing.
Some history. Nothing with less than 5 years of profitable operations. It would be a disaster if the registrar went under and got trapped in a vortex of stupid.
For years people have been crapping on Godaddy for various good reasons but my billing has been reliable, the hosting quite reliable, costs have been low, basically it just worked. Annoying but functional. But with SOPA support and screwing that guy out of his domain means that Godaddy is presenting a clear and present danger to my business. Loss of any functionality would be ruinous. Hiring lawyers to deal with domain shenanigans would be doubly ruinous. But while other registrars are probably thinking "Yay the techies have seen the light" the US regisrars should be thinking, wait a second we will be living in SOPA or son of SOPA's playground; how many customers will we loose just because we are in the US?
I have worked for, or consulted for, many tech companies. The best had IT departments that saw themselves as ISPs. They made the assumption that the individuals were going to bring in viruses, dud devices, etc and built their network much like the cable company built theirs bulletproof. Connections to internal services were made in the same way as over the Internet secure as possible. Most workers were handed a workstation assembled by IT and it just worked. But if people had special needs or devices either they obtained their own bits or got help from IT obtaining special bits. At the time things like Macs didn't get much support as the IT would claim that they knew little about them. It worked well. Interestingly enough the head of IT usually had some bastard collection of old bits as his personal machine.
The worst had a convoluted proxy system, a wonky DMZ setup, Novell shared drives that nobody used, and the oddest selection of software that was mandatory on all machines; machines that they picked largely for their compatibility to Novell. Needless to say the head of this IT department had the best damn desktop machine in the company. Plus the best laptop that money could buy. Where programmers had trouble getting machines that could barely run the software they were building let alone a modern IDE.
The best company didn't trust their employees at all and designed their system around this. The worst company pretended that they could design a system where they could pretend to trust their employees.
The layers of stupid in the bad company were many. One good example was the dedicated email machine had a raid with a few terabytes of space. Yet in a 100 person company employees were limited to 3meg attachments (two floppies) and 10meg email account total. Plus many attachment extensions were banned such as.zip files.
I am willing to bet that the bad IT company cost 3 or more times as much to run.
The hardest argument to beat with these toads is "Security".
i.e. we don't support anything after windows 95 because of Security.
C++ has too many "Security" holes.
We don't support iPhones as they aren't "Secure"
The key to beating this is to present the security holes in the existing system over time and the time that they were open (almost all systems have holes that might have been open for years) and then you present your case to management showing how the existing system was secure for less than 50% of the time and then show the multitude of cases where very bad people did very bad things to systems using the exact same technology. Also if they try to defend with their rapid patching you point out the average time between the hole being widely known and the patch release. The idea is that this is a relentless powerpoint presentation. Slide after slide after slide of TJ Max stories. You show that the existing "Security" is a farce and then you bring up the technology that you want to introduce and if the IT ogre tries to counter with security concerns you just laugh along with everyone else. They will want you dead but they will be seriously on the back foot. Your next slide show can be a bunch of white papers showing that the TCO of whatever system they are using is a money pit (there is a white paper that will crap on all systems if you look) You can pick the entire system apart bit by bit. Then after using your white papers you warn management to ignore the whitepapers by the salesmen of the existing system as they are just corporate shills. (even though that is exactly where your white papers come from).
Lastly you can always make a case for outsourcing IT (again lots of white papers for that) that will freak the shit out of any IT manager and make them cry themselves to sleep at night.
The key is that any IT ogre will use technobabble to defend the indefensible; so counter with technobabble to attack the indefensible.
This would be like jailbreaking a 1979 calculator wristwatch so that it could do gradians. This company is sliding into the same hole as Novel, Nortel, and Sun.
The only way I could see a jailbreak useful would be if they were able to wipe out all the BB crud and make the device useful. The only problem with that would be what is the command line that makes your screen physically bigger?
RIM devices are in so many technical ways better than most other devices yet due to the company being way out of touch with what their customers really want they have lost the point. Most people that I know who have a BB are corporate types so they didn't benefit from this $100 coupon for the recent mega outage. Also most BB people that I know forgo many device upgrades because they are used to the old and the new offers nothing they want. Again due to their company covering the bill it is not a financial issue. I seriously doubt there are 1% of iPhone users who would forgo a free upgrade.
If robots are able to make it way cheaper to house a prisoner then politicians will have little to restrain them from passing more laws that can send you to prison. It is very hard for a politician to make much headway reducing penalties but it is a no-brainer for them to be "tough on crime".
TOS violation 10 years.
Download music 10 years
Take a picture of a cop 10 years
Insult a politician 10 years
Parking violation not paid on time 90 days.
Kid misses a day in school 90 days
Insult your neigbour 10 years
Not feed your cat on time 10 years
You think that some special interest group wouldn't push for the above stupid penalties?
Take a jungle river in some remote part of the world and it would probably be at least 5 degrees just to get to the guy at the mouth of the river. Then another for a well connected trader(6). Then he deals with some river side guy(7) who treks deep into the jungle to a remote village that has a guy (8) who knows of an even more remote village(9) that otherwise runs from all outside contact.
Think of those people videod last year firing arrows at the helicopter flying over their village. My guess is that they haven't met anyone who met anyone who uses facebook.
Unless you count the missionaries they ate last week.
Great now they can point to any weird weather and say see climate change. Where I live in Nova Scotia there was a mile of ice above where I am now 12,000 years ago. Did the cave men and their camp fires melt all that ice. Millions of years ago it was also hard core jungle. I guess that was caused by dinosaur farts. The climate changes all the time. Get used to it. (Evolve or die.)
I have visited a few Canadian Navy ships and I saw some pretty old crap. Lots of RS232 and whatnot. The newest tech was all in the private hands of the sailors in the form of iPads to keep themselves sane. The main tech skills that the sailors seemed to have developed was how to select computers that won't die in the harsh environment and how to run cables through this nasty environment. So if you are wiring a building where you have a magnitude 5.5 earthquake 9 times a day and your server room has a salt water swimming pool then these Navy Guys might be for you.
Also looking at how the various systems were wired together I could see layer upon layer of upgrades where various proprietary systems had been hacked into the older systems. So if you need your sonar system upgraded then the Navy could provide you with a guy who understands what all the pins do in that 183 pin plug that someone thoughtfully painted gray.
I love this problem. I have been reading about P=NP blah blah blah but never had a solid mental picture. This is great. I get it. Thanks. I wonder how many other mathematical misunderstandings could be cleared up with something as simple as pancakes?
RIM keeps blah blahing about having billions in revenue. Revenue is great but profits are the only thing that matter in the end. RIM is probably one quarter away from being profitless. Then they will have to cut to the bone.
The best laugh I had was where they got this skateboarder type who was developing some "Rad" app for them. This was a baby boomer interpretation of being youthful. They might as well had they guy developing from on top of a surfboard.
RIM is following in the footsteps of Novell, and Word Perfect. Once they lost growth and market domination the end came far more quickly than you would have thought.
What I am waiting for is this moment when they realize that their numbers are so awful that they will be instantly ruined. This might be when they pull a Nortel and start cooking the books. Minimally I predict they will start noodling the books to the maximum allowed by the loosest of accounting standards. Hiding costs and somehow booking future revenues now.
It does work as sort of a Boolean sample tester. Hot or not. If something is hot you will instantly know. But as something to wave around looking for hotspots, forget about it.
Plus the streaks are cool to watch.
Here is a way to build your own radiation detector to check a sample. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVj69R66Agg
The coolant used is an air duster can turned upside down. Any self respecting slashdotter should have one of these.
So basically what you need is isopropyl alcohol 99%, a clear sided container with the bottom painted black, a bright flashlight, a small rag or tissue, and an air duster can.
Should be able to build it in 10 minutes. If you have a hot source you will see many streaks of radiation. With background radiation you will only get the occasional streak. Maybe one every 20 seconds.
I worked for an ISO 9001 company which had all kinds of procedures an practices in place. These were externally audited. Yet somehow the only programming language approved in the big books was C (which nobody used) and an old version of C at that.
It was here I discovered that there are two reasons for "best practices" one was just as it said, unit testing and whatnot to reduce bugs.
The other was a combination of power broking and make work. The company I worked for had a huge QA department. So when they were idle they would put QA people on whatever project had some budget. The QA people would lard on the procedures and practices. They would make sure that everything was as ISO as it could be. They would see nothing wrong with 5 or 6 QA people for every programmer. Projects would grind to a halt where the programmers were quickly sucked into providing materials (not code but documentation and whatnot) for QA.
Another company had one senior guy who made sure to do code reviews. A code review could be an all day affair while he and his lackeys would go through your (potentially in production) unit tested code and start altering it starting with removing all the unit tests as they interfered with the changes. Then they would hand back a broken set of code and smugly say they put you back on the right track. This same company had a custom complicated source control system that prevented you from checking out code without being authorized for it. After checking the code back in the authorization would be withdrawn. I would guess that manager spent nearly all day doing yards and yards of micro management.
But to partially answer your question what are the best tools? The answer depends completely upon the skill of both your best and worst programmers. GIT is a great system for great programmers. A terrible system for poor programmers. VSS is a great environment for managing a pile of crap programmers. You mentioned using an old version of Java. Is there a reason for this? Once in a blue moon there is a good reason for sticking with an old environment. Maybe it is being deployed to some crap embedded device. More often it is a spaghetti architecture where too many things break when you upgrade and without good unit tests it is hard to pin down the problems.
How mission critical is your system? If this is a navigation system then your code should have more unit tests than code by a wide margin. If it is a dating site then maybe you can be a bit slack about even things like data integrity and thus have a tiny set of unit tests that make sure that core functionality remains intact after changes.
What IDE? Eclipse is a big favorite of mine but most modern IDEs are good enough and might even be better depending on the language in question (even XCode).
But a sure bad smell is documentation. I would guess that 99% of documentation is never read. So people who create systems that somehow leave yards and yards of documentation behind are basically creating TPS reports. Good documentation is the sort that everyone will read or those who do will literally thank you for it. Something like a command by command document on how to set up a production server. That is a life saver. (Didn't know that you had to install the beta version of X).
Another bad smell is given off by meetings. Many people who don't code seem to think that meetings are productive. A Monday morning pow wow to see look at last week's progress and see that everyone has a plan for the week is good. Daily meetings or regular 2 hour meetings only serve to make some poor manager feel like they are contributing.
A great manager is barely there. They quietly make sure that progress is being made and quickly deal with roadblocks present and future, especially those created by the company itself. So the moment a programmer hears the words "Code metric" or some such trash then their manger is out of control. Maybe the manager uses code metrics but from the programmer's perspective all they should hear it as "Keep up the good work." Or "Why
First, what kind of car does your boss drive? Is there some useless employee that earns more than you but could be tossed overboard in a second? These things will tell you if there is some money around for you.
Second. Once those two juniors are trained up for less salary how useful will you be. Would you be first to be tossed in a cutback?
If they gave a crap about you then other companies couldn't match or beat your salary so easily.
Lastly don't negotiate from 7K down. If they offer you 3K to stay tell them yes if that is 3K over the 7K. Even then the new company wants you to start at 7K more whereas your company might resent your 7K demand. The only reason their feelings would be hurt by your "disloyalty" is if they have done something special for you. Exchanging work for money is not special.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is how did DHS match a twitter account with a single individual and a boarding card?
The only things close to personally identifying on my twitter account would be my rough location and my email. But even with my email you would need to get twitter and then hotmail to cough up some details. Plus you would then have my name which matches the name of many other people.
Unless this guy has posted his UK equivalent of a SSN or passport # on his twitter account I don't understand how they were so able to link the person to the twitter account. This would require complete cooperation from a number of US Internet companies and ideally his UK ISP.
Even if this guy used his name on the account it still would match a zillion names.
Think of the steps: Scan all of twitter for Anti-american blather. Go to Twitter and get user details. Go to hotmail, gmail, etc for more details. And possibly go to ISP for billing information. This would ideally require that Twitter and Facebook, hotmail, gmail regularly hand over complete data sets or have given DHS a backdoor.
This is a huge opportunity for any company that is willing to operate somewhere they can ignore US pressure and US court fatwas; as you could create the ultimate privacy policy. "We don't give your info to the US as the other guys do."
No longer does the federal government get to guide what we see or read, and thus think. Nor are Toronto and Ottawa being culturally overfunded having any effect outside of those two areas. Eastern Canada is now free to resume its natral cultural relationship with the east coast of the US and into the Caribbean. And BC can continue its natural relationship with Asia. Alberta can resume pretending to be Texas. And central Canada can focus on themselves without dragging the rest of us along.
If anything this will make Canada more culturally diverse as there is no One Canada. (A single nation under two official languages.)
Politicians, welcome, I would like you to meet reality. His name is the Sheep With Gun and he is going on strike.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
5 Plumbers might but probably would not be able to solve the same tough pipe related problem as an engineering professor. But the 5 plumbers working around the table with the engineering professor will just annoy the engineering professor.
This is assuming average plumbers and a good professor as I have met well below average professors and well above average plumbers.
The two problems with the lone genius in an organization is that they make others look bad along with the fact that people with poor people skills don't usually play the politics correctly.
Then there is that lone genius who only has everyone convinced they are genius but their lack of genius causes disasters. I'm thinking about you, "Buffer overflow" Mike, who programs web "scripts" in c++ with inline assembly.
First, what is the goal? The goal is not well documented code, what use to anyone is well documented code by itself. What you are looking for is a product that works and is easily maintained. Good code and any documentation is a huge part of easy to maintain. But where many people go wrong is that they see code documentation and commenting a critical part of a project. To the point where it starts to interfere with the creation of a good product that is easy to maintain.
So when looking at documentation it needs to make sense for the endgame. Who is going to use it? When are they going to use it? How much effort is going into its creation? I have seen projects where thousands of pages of documentation were generated where the only thing ever read again(other than by the document review team) were the few pages that documented the steps for configuring the server. When the next version was created nobody referred once to the old pile of documents that had every detail in the universe.
The next question is: what is documentation? This might seem odd but documentation can be the very directory structure itself. I wonder where the client code, maybe it is in the directory named client_code.
In agile or XP programing you don't tend to look too far into the future. So two critical documents that would be very active are your todo list for this cycle and a wishlist for future cycles that eventually turns into a todo list. The todo list, when done, can be chopped up into a crude set of documents that show the past if anyone were to be interested.
Lastly the code itself is an excellent place for documentation. A quick explanation of what it is about and why it exists can be useful if the file isn't already named verifycreditcardnumber.c.
So I don't think the criteria is so much poor or good documentation; so much as it is about useful documentation. If non programmers are intimately involved then lots of screen shots, text, and flowcharts are needed. If programmers are the only parties then it might almost all hide in the codebase with the exception of the screenshots mockups.
The mist trails are all wrong. The car changes from when it is in the hand to when it is on the track. The lighting is wrong. The movement is wrong. I am not even sure the track is real.
I have now left more than one movie because of groups of people shouting "You go girl" along with much other advice to the characters on screen. I get my refund but the theater does nothing.
First I will say that I have met a couple (and I mean two) IT department heads who were normal and ran their IT world well. But... ... None. People like to fit in. So when someone sticks out you need to ask why.
I would say that the lines you disagree with are perfect descriptions of nearly all the IT heads that I have ever met and I have a good test. In all the straight-laced companies where you know their head(s) of IT how many had a "unique" style? That is long hair in a company full of crew cuts. (Or worse long hair on a receding hair line) Or were morbidly obese in a company where that wasn't the norm. Or just dressed like slobs (ironic t-shirts etc.) Or at least minimally didn't wear a tie in a company of tie-men. Also how many female IT heads have you ever met? Me
How many IT heads had really strange hobbies? I have found nearly every head of IT lacking mentally in some seriously flawed fashion. I can see how a physiologist taking a look into the word of IT would wet his pants with this sea of disfunction.
A badly structured IT department will end up being a bad IT department. A typical scenario is that nobody knows what exactly the IT department does and ignores it until it explodes. Then they rain fire upon the heads of IT. How many IT people have done the heroic all night'er putting out some huge fire because the company was basically non functional while some system was down. These IT departments then become highly risk adverse and become the "Department-Of-NO!!!" This is a reasonable reaction to this structure.
The problem with this reaction is that you end up with IT departments that get locked into IE6 and other legacy problems that only increase the risk and effort required to make the leap into the modern age. Also you end up with the staff doing end runs around the IT department such as outsourcing their own solutions. I have witnessed a situation where a local cable internet connection was secretly brought in on a weekend as the Internet policies were so completely bonkers.
The solution is actually quite easy. The IT department needs to realize that they aren't management. They are a utility. Thus they need to provide a basic set of services such as internet and working machines. Like a real ISP the assumption must be that the customers are going to screw up as much as they can. Thus you create a bulletproof internet connection/email system/whatever common systems available where the individuals can't ruin the whole system. Then when a department wants to switch to Apple products you tell them that they won't be able to turn to the IT department for help as IT doesn't know Apple. The department will make this decision themselves. If a department wants to install a new accounting system the IT department should give advice and maybe a quote if the system is going to be say difficult to back up. If the department doesn't like your quote then they might make a different decision or decide to proceed anyway. That is why companies hire people to run other departments; the company trusted them. Companies don't hire the IT staff to run the company they hire it to run IT.
A great example of this sort of paternalistic crap is why RIMM is dying. I was using a CEO's blackberry the other day. I clicked on twitter to see how the app worked but it said that that I needed to ask permission from my administrator to run this app. Holy crap this was the CEO's phone. I can see IT departments loving RIMM if it allows them to reach their power tripping right out into people's pockets. I can also see why people want iPhones for work to replace their Blackberries. Freedom.
I hated OLE ActiveX COM so so much. It would be one the main reasons I left windows programming. I must have spent 1000's of hours fighting with those technologies either in trying to make them do something or trying to build an install package that worked. So anything this guy has to say is instantly discounted to zero. ActiveX was one of those classic silver bullet technologies that got you to 90% on the first day of development and the other 10% took months and often resulted in rebuilding whatever the ActiveX part did from scratch.
Oddly enough if you hand out a device that happens to be an excellent toy to a bunch of kids things won't go as well as you might expect. Yet I have a simple solution. Move your desk to the back of the classroom. Unless your educational software looks like angry birds one glance will tell you if little Johnny is screwing around.
I am the creator of Learn French by LessonStudio (shameless self promotion) which is a singleminded app that teaches basic French vocabulary and Grammar;. It follows some pretty basic modern educational science and personally I believe works rather well. Handed out to a class of kids they could probably absorb some French pretty quickly as compared to an equivalent textbook. But again I wouldn't hand the app out to the kids and leave them to their own devices(ha ha).
At the same time I don't think that there is any complete end to end teaching system out there. Moodle is a mess for teaching. It does what it does well but it certainly is far far away from being some replacement for teachers. It is really only for administering a classroom. But great administration does nothing to improve the teacher. I pick on Moodle but all the systems that I have seen are aimed squarely at the bureaucrats that run the schools with only a nod to actual improvements in teaching. So based on the state of the art right now if I were a teacher I would not look for something where I could go home but a series of tools that enhance individual lessons.
I am so gone as soon as I can find an organization I can trust but first why I am going:
SOPA holy crap! Godaddy should be blasting with all guns on this one. I would suspect that 99% of their customers would be fully against SOPA if they knew what it was about. At this point I wouldn't really believe any Godaddy anti SOPA talk. I get this feeling that if some organization didn't like my use of the word "the" that Godaddy would shut me down and hand them my domains in a second.
Godaddy girls... have zero interest from a technical point of view.
Upsell, upsell, upsell STOP IT!
That case where the guy lost his domain out of the blue and Godaddy didn't do squat about it. They probably thought $9 per year who cares. But that scared the crap out of me.
When am I going? I am not going to rush this. I won't be part of the 20,000 per day this week but within a month I will be moved. I am only around 10 domains with influence over another 20; but off I go. Of greater loss to Godaddy will be my recommending against them. There are probably around 200 domains held their directly because of me.
Where am I going? Looking for:
Good prices. Anything much over $10 a year is gouging.
Basic multidomain hosting with near unlimited subdomains and bandwidth that need not worry me(2000GB)
No upselling!
Clean interface. I have been using Godaddy for around 10 years and their interface still confuses the crap out of me.
Fast. If your site isn't fast then what chance does mine have?
Fast DNS. Some DNS types are faster than others. The lookup time for my sites with Godaddy is fairly slow.
A site with a reputation of protecting their customers against the lunatics now running the US.
This last one seems to push me out of the US but for some reason the Europeans seem to think that it is 1993 when it comes to pricing.
Some history. Nothing with less than 5 years of profitable operations. It would be a disaster if the registrar went under and got trapped in a vortex of stupid.
For years people have been crapping on Godaddy for various good reasons but my billing has been reliable, the hosting quite reliable, costs have been low, basically it just worked. Annoying but functional. But with SOPA support and screwing that guy out of his domain means that Godaddy is presenting a clear and present danger to my business. Loss of any functionality would be ruinous. Hiring lawyers to deal with domain shenanigans would be doubly ruinous. But while other registrars are probably thinking "Yay the techies have seen the light" the US regisrars should be thinking, wait a second we will be living in SOPA or son of SOPA's playground; how many customers will we loose just because we are in the US?
I have worked for, or consulted for, many tech companies. The best had IT departments that saw themselves as ISPs. They made the assumption that the individuals were going to bring in viruses, dud devices, etc and built their network much like the cable company built theirs bulletproof. Connections to internal services were made in the same way as over the Internet secure as possible. Most workers were handed a workstation assembled by IT and it just worked. But if people had special needs or devices either they obtained their own bits or got help from IT obtaining special bits. At the time things like Macs didn't get much support as the IT would claim that they knew little about them. It worked well. Interestingly enough the head of IT usually had some bastard collection of old bits as his personal machine.
.zip files.
The worst had a convoluted proxy system, a wonky DMZ setup, Novell shared drives that nobody used, and the oddest selection of software that was mandatory on all machines; machines that they picked largely for their compatibility to Novell. Needless to say the head of this IT department had the best damn desktop machine in the company. Plus the best laptop that money could buy. Where programmers had trouble getting machines that could barely run the software they were building let alone a modern IDE.
The best company didn't trust their employees at all and designed their system around this. The worst company pretended that they could design a system where they could pretend to trust their employees.
The layers of stupid in the bad company were many. One good example was the dedicated email machine had a raid with a few terabytes of space. Yet in a 100 person company employees were limited to 3meg attachments (two floppies) and 10meg email account total. Plus many attachment extensions were banned such as
I am willing to bet that the bad IT company cost 3 or more times as much to run.
The hardest argument to beat with these toads is "Security".
i.e. we don't support anything after windows 95 because of Security.
C++ has too many "Security" holes.
We don't support iPhones as they aren't "Secure"
The key to beating this is to present the security holes in the existing system over time and the time that they were open (almost all systems have holes that might have been open for years) and then you present your case to management showing how the existing system was secure for less than 50% of the time and then show the multitude of cases where very bad people did very bad things to systems using the exact same technology. Also if they try to defend with their rapid patching you point out the average time between the hole being widely known and the patch release. The idea is that this is a relentless powerpoint presentation. Slide after slide after slide of TJ Max stories. You show that the existing "Security" is a farce and then you bring up the technology that you want to introduce and if the IT ogre tries to counter with security concerns you just laugh along with everyone else. They will want you dead but they will be seriously on the back foot. Your next slide show can be a bunch of white papers showing that the TCO of whatever system they are using is a money pit (there is a white paper that will crap on all systems if you look) You can pick the entire system apart bit by bit. Then after using your white papers you warn management to ignore the whitepapers by the salesmen of the existing system as they are just corporate shills. (even though that is exactly where your white papers come from).
Lastly you can always make a case for outsourcing IT (again lots of white papers for that) that will freak the shit out of any IT manager and make them cry themselves to sleep at night.
The key is that any IT ogre will use technobabble to defend the indefensible; so counter with technobabble to attack the indefensible.
This would be like jailbreaking a 1979 calculator wristwatch so that it could do gradians. This company is sliding into the same hole as Novel, Nortel, and Sun.
The only way I could see a jailbreak useful would be if they were able to wipe out all the BB crud and make the device useful. The only problem with that would be what is the command line that makes your screen physically bigger?
RIM devices are in so many technical ways better than most other devices yet due to the company being way out of touch with what their customers really want they have lost the point. Most people that I know who have a BB are corporate types so they didn't benefit from this $100 coupon for the recent mega outage. Also most BB people that I know forgo many device upgrades because they are used to the old and the new offers nothing they want. Again due to their company covering the bill it is not a financial issue. I seriously doubt there are 1% of iPhone users who would forgo a free upgrade.
If robots are able to make it way cheaper to house a prisoner then politicians will have little to restrain them from passing more laws that can send you to prison. It is very hard for a politician to make much headway reducing penalties but it is a no-brainer for them to be "tough on crime".
TOS violation 10 years.
Download music 10 years
Take a picture of a cop 10 years
Insult a politician 10 years
Parking violation not paid on time 90 days.
Kid misses a day in school 90 days
Insult your neigbour 10 years
Not feed your cat on time 10 years
You think that some special interest group wouldn't push for the above stupid penalties?
Take a jungle river in some remote part of the world and it would probably be at least 5 degrees just to get to the guy at the mouth of the river. Then another for a well connected trader(6). Then he deals with some river side guy(7) who treks deep into the jungle to a remote village that has a guy (8) who knows of an even more remote village(9) that otherwise runs from all outside contact.
Think of those people videod last year firing arrows at the helicopter flying over their village. My guess is that they haven't met anyone who met anyone who uses facebook.
Unless you count the missionaries they ate last week.
Great now they can point to any weird weather and say see climate change. Where I live in Nova Scotia there was a mile of ice above where I am now 12,000 years ago. Did the cave men and their camp fires melt all that ice. Millions of years ago it was also hard core jungle. I guess that was caused by dinosaur farts. The climate changes all the time. Get used to it. (Evolve or die.)
I have visited a few Canadian Navy ships and I saw some pretty old crap. Lots of RS232 and whatnot. The newest tech was all in the private hands of the sailors in the form of iPads to keep themselves sane. The main tech skills that the sailors seemed to have developed was how to select computers that won't die in the harsh environment and how to run cables through this nasty environment. So if you are wiring a building where you have a magnitude 5.5 earthquake 9 times a day and your server room has a salt water swimming pool then these Navy Guys might be for you.
Also looking at how the various systems were wired together I could see layer upon layer of upgrades where various proprietary systems had been hacked into the older systems. So if you need your sonar system upgraded then the Navy could provide you with a guy who understands what all the pins do in that 183 pin plug that someone thoughtfully painted gray.
I love this problem. I have been reading about P=NP blah blah blah but never had a solid mental picture. This is great. I get it. Thanks. I wonder how many other mathematical misunderstandings could be cleared up with something as simple as pancakes?
RIM keeps blah blahing about having billions in revenue. Revenue is great but profits are the only thing that matter in the end. RIM is probably one quarter away from being profitless. Then they will have to cut to the bone.
The best laugh I had was where they got this skateboarder type who was developing some "Rad" app for them. This was a baby boomer interpretation of being youthful. They might as well had they guy developing from on top of a surfboard.
RIM is following in the footsteps of Novell, and Word Perfect. Once they lost growth and market domination the end came far more quickly than you would have thought.
What I am waiting for is this moment when they realize that their numbers are so awful that they will be instantly ruined. This might be when they pull a Nortel and start cooking the books. Minimally I predict they will start noodling the books to the maximum allowed by the loosest of accounting standards. Hiding costs and somehow booking future revenues now.
It does work as sort of a Boolean sample tester. Hot or not. If something is hot you will instantly know. But as something to wave around looking for hotspots, forget about it.
Plus the streaks are cool to watch.
Here is a way to build your own radiation detector to check a sample.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVj69R66Agg The coolant used is an air duster can turned upside down. Any self respecting slashdotter should have one of these.
So basically what you need is isopropyl alcohol 99%, a clear sided container with the bottom painted black, a bright flashlight, a small rag or tissue, and an air duster can.
Should be able to build it in 10 minutes. If you have a hot source you will see many streaks of radiation. With background radiation you will only get the occasional streak. Maybe one every 20 seconds.
I worked for an ISO 9001 company which had all kinds of procedures an practices in place. These were externally audited. Yet somehow the only programming language approved in the big books was C (which nobody used) and an old version of C at that.
It was here I discovered that there are two reasons for "best practices" one was just as it said, unit testing and whatnot to reduce bugs.
The other was a combination of power broking and make work. The company I worked for had a huge QA department. So when they were idle they would put QA people on whatever project had some budget. The QA people would lard on the procedures and practices. They would make sure that everything was as ISO as it could be. They would see nothing wrong with 5 or 6 QA people for every programmer. Projects would grind to a halt where the programmers were quickly sucked into providing materials (not code but documentation and whatnot) for QA.
Another company had one senior guy who made sure to do code reviews. A code review could be an all day affair while he and his lackeys would go through your (potentially in production) unit tested code and start altering it starting with removing all the unit tests as they interfered with the changes. Then they would hand back a broken set of code and smugly say they put you back on the right track. This same company had a custom complicated source control system that prevented you from checking out code without being authorized for it. After checking the code back in the authorization would be withdrawn. I would guess that manager spent nearly all day doing yards and yards of micro management.
But to partially answer your question what are the best tools? The answer depends completely upon the skill of both your best and worst programmers. GIT is a great system for great programmers. A terrible system for poor programmers. VSS is a great environment for managing a pile of crap programmers. You mentioned using an old version of Java. Is there a reason for this? Once in a blue moon there is a good reason for sticking with an old environment. Maybe it is being deployed to some crap embedded device. More often it is a spaghetti architecture where too many things break when you upgrade and without good unit tests it is hard to pin down the problems.
How mission critical is your system? If this is a navigation system then your code should have more unit tests than code by a wide margin. If it is a dating site then maybe you can be a bit slack about even things like data integrity and thus have a tiny set of unit tests that make sure that core functionality remains intact after changes.
What IDE? Eclipse is a big favorite of mine but most modern IDEs are good enough and might even be better depending on the language in question (even XCode).
But a sure bad smell is documentation. I would guess that 99% of documentation is never read. So people who create systems that somehow leave yards and yards of documentation behind are basically creating TPS reports. Good documentation is the sort that everyone will read or those who do will literally thank you for it. Something like a command by command document on how to set up a production server. That is a life saver. (Didn't know that you had to install the beta version of X).
Another bad smell is given off by meetings. Many people who don't code seem to think that meetings are productive. A Monday morning pow wow to see look at last week's progress and see that everyone has a plan for the week is good. Daily meetings or regular 2 hour meetings only serve to make some poor manager feel like they are contributing.
A great manager is barely there. They quietly make sure that progress is being made and quickly deal with roadblocks present and future, especially those created by the company itself. So the moment a programmer hears the words "Code metric" or some such trash then their manger is out of control. Maybe the manager uses code metrics but from the programmer's perspective all they should hear it as "Keep up the good work." Or "Why
First, what kind of car does your boss drive? Is there some useless employee that earns more than you but could be tossed overboard in a second? These things will tell you if there is some money around for you.
Second. Once those two juniors are trained up for less salary how useful will you be. Would you be first to be tossed in a cutback? If they gave a crap about you then other companies couldn't match or beat your salary so easily.
Lastly don't negotiate from 7K down. If they offer you 3K to stay tell them yes if that is 3K over the 7K. Even then the new company wants you to start at 7K more whereas your company might resent your 7K demand. The only reason their feelings would be hurt by your "disloyalty" is if they have done something special for you. Exchanging work for money is not special.