I get this every couple of weeks. The NAS itself seems fine - SMARTS healthy and so on, still some free space on the partition, etc. It's a ReadyNAS Duo, with upgraded 2TB drives. Starting a new backup seems to work, but I've been a bit too busy lately to test the backups, especially trying to restore something old from before creating the new backup.
Am I okay, or do I now have placebo backups only?
When I got my old passport I was living in a different country, I had not even asked my wife to marry me, and I had no idea of the many wonderful ways in which children can upend your life…
Since then, I asked my then-girlfriend to marry me, moved to another country, bought a house, married my lovely wife, had a wonderful little boy, moved house again, and had a delightful little girl. The passport accompanied me on my honeymoon and on many many business trips. It contains stamps from (in page order) Morocco, USA, Turkey, Bahamas, Anguilla, Cayman Islands, Israel, South Africa, Singapore, Russia, Saudi Arabia1, Australia, UAE, and St Maarten.
Now I have to unlearn the old numbers and start to make friends with the new passport. First trip will be to the USA in ten days' time!
Yes, both Saudi Arabia and Israel in the same passport. The trick is to do it in the right order2: go to Saudi Arabia first, because they won't even let you in with an Israeli stamp in your passport. Then for a palate-cleanser, go to Israel, where the most reaction I got when I presented my passport with the Saudi stamp at Ben-Gurion was a raised eyebrow. ↩
In point of fact I would argue that the correct order would be not to go to "Saudi" Arabia at all, and just spend time in Israel instead. I love travelling, and I generally find something good everywhere I go: the people, the climate, the landscape, the art, the architecture, the music, the food - something! Saudi Arabia is the first place to score a perfect zero in every single column. Israel, on the other hand, scores very highly in all categories. I will be very happy if I can avoid getting any Saudi stamps in my new passport for its entire decade of validity. ↩
My big focus at work lately is the SecOps gap, the breakdown in communications between IT Security and Operations groups. The problem here is that the infosec group comes up with some policy that is great in theory, but runs into issues when the poor sysadmins try to apply it. Either the policy is too vague, or it is contradictory, or it would break some application that the line of business depends on, or it is simply too cumbersome and time-consuming to implement properly.
At work I talk about this in the context of enterprise IT, but the exact same thing applies in consumer IT. Case in point: there was recently a breach of Starwood's SPG loyalty programme - see Brian Kreb's report. Sure enough, I got an email from SPG entitled "Protect Your Information by Updating Your SPG Password".
SPG should be applauded for being so proactive, and the breach does not seem to be due to any gross negligence on their part. The only thing they might have done differently would be to have more aggressive back-off policies for repeated authentication attempts, but let's not forget that this is a generalist site, and one that is probably not used that frequently by most people. Users may legitimately forget their credentials between one login and the next. No, my problem is with Brian Krebs' advice:
far too many people re-use the same passwords at multiple sites that hold either their credit card information or points that can easily be redeemed for cash.
Well yes, this is true, and I'm as guilty as anyone - but on the other hand, there are simply far too many passwords out there! When every website I visit wants me to create a profile and secure that with a password, of course I'm going to reuse those credentials!
The trick is not to reuse credentials on anything valuable. Don't reuse the credentials for your online banking, for instance - those have to be unique. But for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants a password? They can all get the same one, and that's if I don't simply introduce myself as Ann Onymous, with this handy email account at mailinator.com.
This is why using central login services via Facebook, Twitter or Google is so popular. The problem there is that I don't necessarily want any of that unholy trio tracking my every move, nor do I entirely trust random sites with my Oauth creds, so there's a problem there too. I did like OpenID as a concept, but it's pretty much dead now in practice.
Berating people for poor password security practices won't cut it. We as an industry have to make it easy for people to do the Right Thing, not set up obstacle courses and then point and laugh when people trip over them.
Image by Keith Misner via Unsplash
The #SuperBowl is a #NoDroneZone ! Leave your drone at home! http://t.co/UU2NNDDHxd #SB49 #SBXLIX pic.twitter.com/oC7YBZfd1f
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 28, 2015
Okay, we are totally living in the future now.
Then again, I'm on the cusp of an important milestone, so it makes sense that things would start to seem NEW and CRAZY.
BRB, off to get a lawn so I can tell kids to get off it.
I complain a lot on Twitter about open-plan offices, but they are not the worst working environment. Every time I spend any length of time in a US-style cube farm, I long for an open-plan office. Cubes are the worst of both worlds: enclosed enough that you feel hemmed in and cannot see daylight, but without any meaningful sound isolation.
Working from the living room table is good, but I really need to sort out the connectivity to my home office so that I can use it properly. A project for my copious free time!
I can tell when jet lag is starting to bite because I make more typos. What I really need is a wearable caffeine delivery device that supports remote control. That way I could instrument my spellchecker and set a threshold for automated delivery of a jolt of caffeine.
Next order of business is to figure out how to do real-time lexical analysis of human speech and trigger the caffeine jolt when I stop making sense. "Hey Siri, light me up!"
The challenge will be to remember to take the device off before going to the bar, or risk a potentially life-threatening caffeine overdose some time after midnight when you are busy solving all the world's problems…
Incidentally, my recommended method of jet lag mitigation involves self-medication with melatonin and gin & tonic; repeat as needed until symptoms pass or no longer seem important.
An interesting observation from the reliably-fascinating Ben Thompson at Stratechery:
In other words, while the old Dish Service – and every other pay-TV service – was delivered to an address, Sling TV is delivered to a person. It is Mobile First.
This reminds me of an observation I read a few years ago: before mobile phones, you called a place and hoped that the person you were looking for was there. Now, we have the ability to call the person directly. It is a fundamental shift.
People who moved around a lot would regularly call back to base - home, office, or wherever - to check who had called for them. Travel meant creating a contact schedule: "from the 15th to the 17th I will be at Grand Hotel de Oooh La La, then from the 17th to the 19th I move to the Dump Motel", and so on. Less organised travel meant being entirely out of contact for days or weeks at a time.
I am barely old enough to remember these days. For my high-school graduation, I went interrailing with a good friend. If you're not familiar with the concept, an InterRail pass grants unlimited travel across Europe1. Then and now, summer equals scruffy yoofs with huge backpacks zigzagging their ways across the continent.
The difference is that today they mark their progress with social check-ins and photographs uploaded from café wifi along the way, commenting on each other's trips and planning rendezvous in this city or at that music festival. Back in the Pleistocene when I was on my own InterRail trip, neither of us owned mobiles, so plans were extremely vague and communication back home almost entirely limited to occasional postcards. A key part of our itinerary was literally telling someone "we'll be in Kiel some time in the second half of August, set up something cool" several weeks beforehand and then just showing up, with no further communication or even knowing whether we had anywhere to sleep.
I'm not going to wax nostalgic about "living in the moment" (that time we slept in the squat in Prague powered by an illegal tap off the street lights?) for fear that my children might read this one day and use it against me. I just wanted to point out how different it is that today we can call up a person wherever they may be, without knowing or caring about their precise location.
"Mobile first" is all about this shift away from connecting places to one another, and instead connecting people with each other. I think we have another generation to go before we truly understand what has happened - and indeed, is still happening to us.
Image by Aurélien Bellanger via Unsplash
At the time of my trip, Europe was divided into "zones". Now, it seems to be either pan-European or per-country. ↩
Airbus is in the news, and analysts doubt that the company will pull ahead of its archrival Boeing.
I have only the most indirect relationship with the aerospace industry - basically, I fly a fair amount - but the whole idea of Airbus is off-putting to me. Airbus is a conglomerate of interesting companies that manages to be far less cool than the sum of its parts. Even the name implies disdain for its customers. Air… BUS? I don't want a "bus" experience of air travel, and I don't like the association of those ideas.
Even the logo manages to be desperately uncool and off-putting:
Compare and contrast with one of the constituent companies:
Could there be a more awesome name than "Aérospatiale"? The logo is pretty cool as well, although a bit retro now.
Since we're on the topic, let's talk about Boeing as well for a moment:
Another cool logo, reminding us that Boeing is not just about a big bus that takes passengers between cities, but also about rockets that go to space.
This is not just theoretical marketing won
kery, either. The whole concept of the big A380 "super-jumbo"1 fits into that bus model of thinking: not the fastest, not the most innovative, just a way to stack as much self-loading cargo
as possible
in one bus and ship it to its destination as cheaply as possible (for the operator). This concept has largely failed to resonate with the market, and the A380 programme is in serious trouble, with Reuters calling it ["poor-selling"](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/13/us-airbus-orders-idUSKBN0KM0VO20150113 "
Airbus to juggle jet production, defends poor-selling A380" ). Compare and contrast with the Concorde, which is still used as an image of technological success years after the termination of maintenance contracts - by Airbus - killed it as a commercial proposition.
I mean, just look at it!
Nobody is going to sell posters of the A380 after the end of its service life. No airport will want to park one on its apron, and no travellers will gaze at it longingly from the windows of their more pedestrian aircraft.
Surely it says something that they even define themselves in relation to categories that are already owned and defined by their arch-rival? There is only one "jumbo" jet, and that is the Boeing 747. Calling your own plane the "super-jumbo" just makes you look like Homer Simpson designing a car. Maybe they should just call the next one the "Airbus Homer", with gratuitous fins, bubble domes everywhere, and shag carpeting throughout the cabin. ↩
Uhoh, This content has sprouted legs and trotted off.
Sorry, sorry, just a little something in my eye…
There, I'm back. Isn't it noticeable that even if all the logos were covered, like some TV shows do, we would still know right away that this is an Apple ad?
Partly it's that they have the confidence not to fall back on speeds and feeds, like many other manufacturers. They remember that people don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
But mostly it's because this ad was obviously made by a real human being, someone who cares. This is why Apple ads actually get views on YouTube - 1.6 million for the video above, as of this moment.
UPDATE: Someone still didn't like the ad, though - and got righteously skewered by the Macalope for their pains.
No ad Apple produces will be considered up to the standard of the serial jerks who judge Apple ads. And every year someone proves that for us.
I should really wrap up some alfalfa or something for the Macalope, given the amount of entertainment the Horny One has given me over the years.
The 451 Group might not have the name recognition of some of the bigger analyst firms, with their magic quadrants and what-not, but there is a lot of value in their approach to the business. In particular, they have the only "cloud economist" I know, in the person of Dr Owen Rogers. Dr Rogers actually did his PhD on the economics of cloud computing, so he knows what he is talking about.
Dr Rogers also defies the stereotype of economists by being fun to talk to. He's also good on his personal blog - see this recent post for instance. I'll let you read the setup yourself - it's worth it - but I just wanted to comment on the closing paragraph:
Moving to the cloud might make cost-savings. But actually, it might just mean you consume more IT resources than you might have otherwise. This isn’t a bad thing in itself - just make sure you’re prepared, and that this extra consumption is deriving something real in return.
This is something that I have seen in action time and time again - although not so much recently. Certainly in the early days of cloud computing, when it was still widely seen as "virtualisation 2.0", many people jumped in thinking that cloud would substantially lower the cost of IT, by keeping the volume constant - or even shrinking it by controlling virtualisation sprawl - while lowering costs.
Unfortunately for people who built their business cases around this model, it didn't quite work out that way. Done right, cloud computing certainly lowers the unit cost of IT - the cost to deliver a certain quantum of IT service. Note that the unit here is not "a server", otherwise straight virtualisation would have been sufficient to deliver the expected benefits. People outside of IT cannot consume "a server* directly; they need a lot more to be done before it is useful to them:
Doing all of this in a pre-cloud way was expensive. Even if all the IT infrastructure was in-house, it was expensive in opportunity costs - all the other tasks that those various teams had on their plates - and in the simple time necessary to deliver all of those different parts. Worse, it wasn't just a one-off cost, but an ongoing cost. This is where another term from economics gets introduced: technical debt, or the future work that IT commits itself to in order to maintain what they deliver.
All of this translated to a high barrier to access IT services. The only applications (in the business sense, not the App Store sense) that could be implemented were ones that could clear the high hurdle of being able to justify not only the initial outlay and delay, but all the future maintenance costs.
Cloud computing changes that equation by lowering the barrier to entry. The most expensive component of IT delivery, both in resources and in time, is manual human action. By automating that away, the unit cost of IT drops dramatically.
This is where Jevons' Paradox comes in. Instead of lowering the total cost of IT, this reduction in the unit cost unlocks all sorts of applications that were previously unthinkable. The result is that instead of delivering the same amount of IT for less money, companies end up delivering much more IT for the same budget.
How to ensure that this flowering of IT delivers business value? In yet another intersection of IT and economics, let us turn to the Financial Times and an article entitled "Big service providers turn to the cloud":
According to Forrester Research, technologies with a direct impact on a company’s business, such as customer relationship management services and analytics, eat up only about 20 per cent of IT spending.
That is where the value of cloud computing comes from: the good old 80/20 rule. Done right, cloud computing acts on both parts of the rule, making it easy to increase the 20% of IT that actually delivers value - by lowering the barrier to entry - while automating or outsourcing the keep-the-lights-on activity that consumes the other 80% of the IT budget.
So much for the dismal science!
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