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For those who asked: this sign is apparently real, at Ball State, caused by new wall. They put on a new C.http://t.co/GgjeLWteUV
— Jeff Speck (@JeffSpeckFAICP) January 30, 2014

Idiocracy is real, you guys!

We live in a cosmopolitan world, in which crazes and fads can spread around the globe as fast as the bits can get through the pipes. You can make friends (or enemies) of people on the other side of the world, and speak to them more often and more meaningfully than people on the other side of the street. Every day we move closer to a world without borders.

Unless, that is, you are trying to buy or sell content.

I have never watched the Godfather films (I know, I know), and with some intercontinental travel coming up, I thought this would be a good time to load them up on my iPad and finally catch up - forty years late, but who’s counting?

Since I no longer have any truck with physical media, my first stop was iTunes. At first I thought they did not have the films, but this turned out to be because I live in Italy, and so they are listed as Il Padrino. Fair enough, except that it’s not just the title card that’s Italian; the only soundtrack available is an Italian dub. It’s not even the original, it’s a re-dub, and the reviews are all one-stars complaining about the new dub.

Of course iTunes has all three Godfather films in the US store, but Apple in their wisdom tie your iTunes account to the country your credit card is registered in.¹ This means I can’t simply download the English-language version from the US store.

We don’t get Netflix in Italy, because we have crazy regulations here in Europe, but there are any number of video-streaming services. Unfortunately, I want to watch the film offline, in an aeroplane, so they are no use to me.

Back when I still did physical media, what I would do is buy the DVD from Amazon - which, infuriatingly, was often cheaper than the download versions. DVDs all come with original-language soundtracks as well as whatever dub applies, so I’d just rip the DVD (thank you, DeCSS) and watch it that way. However, I no longer own a computer with a DVD drive, so that’s out.

I tried shopping around for other options, but ended up torrenting the blasted thing², promising myself I will buy it once Apple actually deign to accept my money.³ This is a bit like my recent efforts to buy albums I used to own on (copied) cassettes. I’d rather you didn’t think of it as theft, more as deferred revenue.

Seriously, would it not be easier just to let me give you money? When piracy is not only free, but actually the quickest and easiest way to get the content, what is the point of walls? For every dollar you make by forcing someone to jump through your Ultraviolet hoops, you lose thousands to people who refuse to have anything to do with you - this time, or in future.

Well done.

UPDATE: In a nice coincidence, Facebook reminds me that region locks aren't just for movies by releasing their new app, Paper, for the US only. Because of course nobody outside the US wants it.

Let's break this down. It's not a volume issue, since most FB users are in the US. It's not a language issue, because plenty of people speak English outside the US.⁴ It's not a content issue, because the content is people's FB streams.

So: why?

Especially when it’s easy to jump the fence.

Image by Martin Wessely via Unsplash

There was some excitement when it seemed that 100.000 "smart" devices had been corralled into a botnet used for sending spam. While Ars Technica says there’s more (or less) to that story, I think the situation is both worse and better than reported.

Bad first: of course those devices are vulnerable! Think: once we get past the early adopters, these things are going to be in the hands of people running unpatched Windows XP, who want to call the fire brigade if you mention firewalls, and whose oven (or their VCR, heaven help us) has been blinking 12:00 since it was installed.

The manufacturers will also stop updating the things after about two months of shelf life. Most of the apps on my four-year-old "smart" TV no longer work, to the point that I never even bothered connecting it to the net when we moved house. I threw out a Skype phone because it was never updated for Windows 7, never mind any other platform. And I could go on...

Even after we have accounted for incompetence and laziness, there’s always malice. What happens if the low-powered smart devices that are going to be running the Internet of Things are actually hiding out inside other Things?

We’re doomed, then? The Internet of Things will actually be an Internet of (Even More) Spam?

Well, smeg.¹

Well, no. Most of these smart devices will never be connected to the internet in the first place, because the owners won’t be bothered to do it. They will just keep using the TV as a TV and the fridge as a fridge, without worrying about the extra feeping creatures.

Saved by sloth. Result.

Cross-posted to my work blog

There's an old joke that in China, it's just food. The main thing that will happen in 2014 is that it will be just computing.

Cloud has gone mainstream. Nobody, whether start-up or enterprise, can afford to ignore cloud-based delivery options. In fact, in many places it's now the default, which can lead to its own problems.

The biggest change in 2014 is the way in which IT is being turned inside out. Whereas before the rhythm of IT was set by operations teams, now the tempo comes from users, developers, and even outside customers. IT operations teams had always relied on being able to set their own agenda, making changes in their own time and drawing their own map of what is inside or outside the perimeter.

The new world of IT doesn't work like that. It's a bit like when modern cities burst their medieval walls, spreading into what had been fields under the walls. The old model of patrolling the walls, keeping the moat filled and closing the gates at night was no longer much use to defend the newly sprawling city.

New strategies were required to manage and defend this new sort of city, and new approaches are required for IT as well.

One of my first customer meetings of 2014 brought a new term: "polyglot management". This is what we used to call heterogeneous management, but I think calling it polyglot may be more descriptive. Each part of the managed infrastructure speaks its own language, and the management layer is able to speak each of those languages to communicate with the infrastructure.

That same customer meeting confirmed to me that the polyglot cloud is here to stay. The meeting was with a customer of many years's standing, a bank with a large mainframe footprint as well as distributed systems. The bank's IT team had always tried to consolidate and rationalise their infrastructure, limiting vendors and platforms, ideally to a single choice. Their initial approaches to cloud computing were based on this same model: pick one option and roll it out everywhere.

Over time and after discussions with both existing suppliers and potential new ones, the CTO realised that this approach would not work. The bank would still try to limit the number of platforms, but now they are thinking in terms of two to three core platforms, with the potential for short-term use of other platforms on a project basis.

When a team so committed to consolidation adopts the heterogeneous, polyglot vision, I think it's safe to say that it's a reality. They have come down from their walls and are moving around, talking to citizens/users and building a more flexible structure that can take them all into the future.

This is what is happening in 2014. Cloud is fading into the background because it’s everywhere. It's just... computing.

Image by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash

If you’ve ever found yourself alone in a datacenter, with the white noise of the cooling fans lulling you into complacency, you may have caught a movement out of the corner of your eye, or thought you heard something go "feep" back in the rows and racks of machinery. You didn’t dream it; there are creatures back there, wandering around and occasionally feeping softly to each other.

From the Feeping Creatures Tumblr

Actually, the truth is far more prosaic. "Feeping creatures" is just a spoonerism for "creeping features", a disease of software products where they sprout features for no good reason. This would not normally be a problem, except for the pesky relationship between code and bugs. Basically, the more features and code you put in, the more bugs you will have.²

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. -- Edsger Dijkstra

However, even assuming your code is perfect, with no bugs whatsoever, the rapidly multiplying creatures, all feeping away madly to each other, are probably not doing your users any good. Implementing features that users don’t want or can’t use is a bad idea even if those features are implemented correctly.

Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. -- Louis Srygley

Users by and large don’t want features. I’m a nerd, and I geek out on new features, but most people are not like me.¹ Most people don’t know how to find geotags in Instagram and ask for locations in comments. My own wife sits watching YouTube videos on her phone screen or in a default-sized window, rather than full-screening or streaming them to the big TV with AirPlay. She’s not multi-tasking, she just can’t be bothered to start messing around with features.

The same thing happens with enterprise tools. These are famously infested with hordes of creatures, their incessant feeping deafening users. In fact, people have to be forced to use these tools, and if there is any workaround, they will take it in a shot.

If people can’t find the feature or use it once they have found it, it’s not useful. Get rid of it and/or figure out another approach.

People have a certain model of what they want to get done with your tool. Since it’s rather unlikely that the models will be the same from one person to the next, one of two things will have to change: either the model they have in their heads, or the usage model for the tool you built.

Guess what? Almost everyone will try to figure out a way to use your tool in a way that makes sense for them. Hardly anyone will Read The Fine Manual, or watch the video walkthrough you made, or access the wiki. Most will try to bash your tool into submission, and in the process develop a hatred for you and your tool that will last for years after they have moved to another job to get away from the tool.

Adding features may feel like you’re helping the users, but it’s not. Make a tool that does one thing well - and make sure that one thing is what your users wanted, and that they can actually get it done.

I’ve worked booth duty at my fair share of trade shows, starting back when I was still in high school. One of the constants is the presence of "booth babes"¹ at the shows, acting as eye candy to bring traffic into the booth. I had never actually worked in a booth which had booth babes until recently, but I really didn’t like it, not least because I have always had close female colleagues, and I felt that booth babes devalued their presence and professionalism.²

I just didn’t have the data to do more than roll my eyes and gripe about it in the bar after the show with those female colleagues. But now, someone actually did A/B testing on whether booth babes even work, and wrote up their findings: Booth Babes Don’t Work.

It’s a pretty indefensible practice. The hiring of young, college-aged females to dress as provocatively as possible to help promote… um, Ultra HD TV sets, Android tablets and Internet-enabled toothbrushes. It’s a relic of old enterprises, but that’s just the way they like their world. But what nearly every critic has failed to mention is a real concrete business reason to end the practice.

Well, I do: Booth babes do NOT convert.

Read the whole thing, but basically it boils down to the fact that nobody you want to talk to wants to talk to booth babes - and vice versa. Anecdotally, I have seen the exact same mechanism in action. Sure, there will be a queue to talk to the booth babes, made up of people drunk on their own inflated self-regard or actual booze - or both. Meanwhile, actual real prospects are hovering around the edges of the booth or even walking away, embarrassed or unwilling to waste time talking to the eye candy.

Wow, don’t I look comfortable…

If you are in charge of, or have any influence over, your company's presence at a trade show, leave the booth babes off the budget. Get people (including women!) who actually know the product and are passionate about it, and I guarantee you will get much better conversion rates on the leads, and probably more outright leads too.³

Cloud computing is getting to be pretty universal, but there is still an assumption in certain quarters that it’s only for startups, especially public cloud. As the market matures, however, that position gets less and less tenable. If the CIA can work things out to run (some of) their applications on Amazon, despite IBM’s best efforts, surely most companies should be able to take advantage of the cloud, right?

Well, apparently b
anks should never use the cloud, according to ComputerWorld. The post includes this quote, admittedly not from the author but "

an unnamed source within banking IT":

I would not bank with a firm using the cloud to operate my account or hold my details.

In one of those moments of serendipity, the last customer I spoke to was in fact a bank¹, and they wanted to discuss not only how they could move to private cloud, but how they could run some services in the public cloud and even become a cloud provider themselves for some of their customers.

This bank has been a customer for a very long time, with a large mainframe footprint and a good amount of distributed systems as well. In what is a fairly typical story, their IT environment is quite balkanised, which makes it hard for them to get a good view of what is going on, let alone enforce and document standards and best practices in a uniform manner.

Obviously introducing cloud into this mix would just risk creating yet another silo; it’s silos all the way down. What the bank is after is unified management, that will span across all their diverse technologies and let them deliver a high level of IT service to their users.

A key part of managing this sort of heterogeneous environment is knowing what goes where. The example ComputerWorld’s unnamed source uses of cash machines running in the public cloud or something is a perfect counter-example. The idea is to run payment systems and such on extremely reliable systems, almost certainly in-house. However, that sort of infrastructure gets expensive, not to mention the time taken to harden it, audit it regularly, and keep it secure over time. So why use the exact same standard for a marketing web site? Stick that in the public cloud! Put internal development systems on a free hypervisor to save license costs, and so on.

At AWS re:Invent we had two customers¹ from the banking industry in the booth with us. Remember, that’s banks who are not just using private cloud internally, but actually deploying services to AWS. The reason they were there is to explain how they were not deploying anything willy-nilly to AWS, but setting and enforcing policies.

The cloud is a tool. All you need to do is use it right.

Image by Martin Wessely via Unsplash

Check out what I found while looking for a cable!

Pity I no longer have a drive to read it, let alone a machine to run it...

I read a post by Lydia Leong today: Shooting squirrels from the roof. The phrase comes from a rental agreement:

This rental agreement had all the usual stipulations about what tenants aren’t allowed to do, but then it had a list of increasingly specific and weird directives about what the tenant was not allowed to do, culminating in, "Tenant shall not shoot squirrels from the roof." You just know that each of these clauses came from some previous bad experience that the landlord had with some tenant, which caused them to add these "thou shalt not" behaviors in great specificity to each subsequent lease.

This reminded me of a story of my own. Way back when, I still had an honest job running proof-of-concept exercises on a pretty technical piece of data center automation software called BladeLogic¹. A proof of concept meant installing the software on equipment belonging to a prospective customer, typically on their premises, and running through a series of real-world situations to demonstrate how our software could help them in their daily lives.

It was pretty much a given that out of the week that we typically allocated for the process, we would lose at least one full day to logistics issues. The galling thing was that we sent a document well ahead of time, specifying over many, many pages which ports should be open, what type of access we would need, which administrators would need to be available to us during installation (usually the DBA, maybe a network person as well), and so on and so forth.

As sure as clockwork, we would rock up to the client site bright and early on a Monday morning - and find ports closed, accounts not set up, and DBAs nowhere to be found. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth — but strictly on the inside. We are professionals, after all.

After this had happened a few times, I heard the story on the radio about Van Halen and the brown M&Ms. It seems that Van Halen were the first band to take such an extravagant live show on tour, and would regularly end up without enough power, or no room to park their fleet of vehicles, or whatever. Their rider grew more and more detailed, until in frustration they added the infamous Article 126. This clause specified that the band’s dressing room should contain a bowl of M&Ms from which all the brown M&Ms had been removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show.

Brown M&Ms? That’s IT! I’m outta here!

The truth of the matter is not that Eddie Van Halen gave a fig either way for the colour of his M&Ms. The M&Ms were there purely as a test. If there were brown M&Ms in the bowl, or no M&Ms at all, the tour managers instantly knew that they could not take anything for granted and had to double-check everything else.²

I lobbied hard to get our proof-of-concept requirements document to include a clause about "the software consultants require a bowl of M&Ms with no brown ones, on pain of forfeiture of the PoC". It would have gone right after the clause about the root password and right before the one about the network ports. Unfortunately, I was over-ruled. Boo.

There should be a law!

Why is that so often the first reflex reaction? Laws are brittle, inflexible instruments. To my mind, there is a distinction between something that is illegal, and something which is immoral.

For a start, laws must be universal, by definition. Morality is personal. If an act is immoral, but affects only the person performing it, why should it be illegal?

More generally, if we take freedom of speech, the classic example of the limits of that freedom is shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But how about shouting insults and disturbing the performance in that theatre? Should that be illegal? Probably not - although the theatre management and the other patrons may choose to eject the disturber.

Wind the ratchet back another notch; what about whispering, muttering, eating noisy foods? Definitely not illegal, and probably not even grounds for ejection from the theatre, but certainly frowned upon by other members of the audience. I would suppose that anyone behaving like that might also have some trouble getting served at the interval, and generally experience other consequences of their behaviour - which is as it should be.

What prompted this post was the case of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French "comedian" and rabble-rouser in the current European mould (see also Beppe Grillo in Italy). He has been saying thoroughly horrible and detestable things for more than a decade that I personally know, but recently there was a move to ban his show. This turned into a freedom of speech cause célèbre in France, which is still ongoing - yet another judicial pronouncement is expected today.

While I find his material
execrable and indeed dangerous, I am not comfortable with banning his show. On the other hand, I would certainly like to see him frozen out of polite society, struggling - and failing - to get booked for shows, and so on. Instead, because the blunt instrument of the law has been invoked, he and his supporters have been able to confuse the issue and claim protection under the banner of freedom of speech.

Monsieur, you are free to speak your mind, and based on your speech, we are free to conclude that you are an ass.