Author Archives: Danny Silverman

SvN tells us that interruption is not collaboration. 100% agreed. Whenever I’m at my most productive is inevitably the time when I receive that phone call or someone comes up to ask me something, and it is very frustrating and difficult to recover. No disrespect to my colleagues, especially since its impossible for them to know when I’m at my most productive (and the same goes for me talking to them), but I find the best communication to be email or an IM *not* followed up by a call or visit (as some people are prone to do if they don’t get a quick enough response). I think a good rule of thumb is “if the headphones are on, don’t interrupt.” Now if I could just stop breaking the rule myself.

Mounted on the wall right next to my desk I keep a card, printed by the office of the Harvard University Technology Security Officer that outlines in clear language how I should respond to any requests from law enforcement or others for information. Perhaps if New Jersey had a similar card, this librarian wouldn’t be faced with suspension for trying to do her job, which includes keeping patrons’ records private until served with a proper subpoena signed by a judge.

Meg Hourihan’s article about making strawberry jam with her grandparents, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” makes me wish my family had similar traditions. While we suburbanites never did much in the way of jam making (or, equally exciting, maple syrup making, like Jeremy does!), I guess there are some other traditions I could learn about, like the secret to good corned beef and chopped liver and salad dressing and potato latkes. It would be fun to do jam, though.

Four years ago a student, investigating the security of campus computer networks for a proposed student government online election system, discovered that grades, financial aid data, and Social Security numbers were readily available. When he reported his findings, he was punished for trespass and the computers were left unsecured. Now, the Unversity has managed to lose over 367,000 student records to more malicious hackers. There’s got to be a lesson in here somewhere about…something. Punishing people for revealing security problems rather than fixing them is a good way to react? No, that’s not it. Hmm…

I think its cool that Georgia Tech geeks are developing a system to neutralize digital cameras in a non-destructive way. I find their assertion that pirated “cam” versions of theatrical releases costs the movie industry $3 billion per year to be ludicrous, and I am suitably unnerved by the prospect of having infrared lasers shooting around a movie theater (and, presumably, into theatergoers eyes) while I’m trying to watch a movie that I would take measures to avoid any theaters using the technology, or, if they’re all using it, of avoiding theaters completely…

CBS is fighting back against the idiots at the Parents Television Council, a right-wing lobbying group that makes it easy for people who have not watched and know nothing about TV shows to submit indecency complaints to the FCC. A repeat of an episode of _Without A Trace_ that contained a flashback to a teen orgy scene was the subject of over 4000 complaints. After reviewing all of them using an FOIA request, CBS believes that not a single one came from someone who watched the show. Their evidence is compelling. The $3.3 million fine is outrageous and idiotic to begin with, but with additional evidence that no one who saw the show actually complained, the FCC doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in this instance.

Incredible depth

In an office discussion of Pixar’s latest, _Cars_, Jason and I professed our mutual live for _The Incredibles_, which I’d count as Pixar’s finest and most complex work to date. But Christina had a different take, coming away from the movie with the message that some people are more “super” than others, we must accept our lot in life, and personal growth, struggle, and achievement are not meaningful substitutes for innate abilities. The villain of the piece, Syndrome, was entirely self-made, and obviously incredibly brilliant, but of course along with such brilliance inevitably came insanity, as it does for all of our villains, who have psychological illnesses or physical deformities and are getting back at society and super heros for casting them down or for some other harm, real or perceived, done to them, rather than ever being in the position to use their cunning and intelligence towards *good* ends. In contrast there are the Incredibles, among others, superheroes who spread destruction and chaos on their quests to right the world’s wrongs. Were the actions of society in _The Incredibles_ of banishing super heroes to live out their lives as normal members of society an embracing of mediocraty and spurning of innate talents, or was it rather the dismantling of a fundemntally out of control institution?

In _The Incredibles_ society doesn’t fear the super heroes — it loathes them.

These questions echo the _X-Men_ movies: there society fears super-powered freaks who may or may not be well meaning but who certainly have the ability to inflict far more destruction than any “normal” human, and who are very difficult to predict and contain. In _The Incredibles_ the supers are well-meaning but bumbling and annoying and destructive. They serve to bring evil master-minds to the fore rather than pushing them to more productive and socially beneficial pursuits. They cause untold property damage, they disrupt lives, they add unpredictibility and choas to an already chaotic world. In _The Incredibles_ society doesn’t fear the super heroes — it loathes them.

But in the end, the super heroes, who, we musn’t forget, are fallible, are forced back out of hiding to save the day once again, and, as the film ends, are again, at least for the time being, thoroughly embraced by society. And of course, within minutes, another super villain has appeared to wreak additional chaos, and the heroes must once again spring into action. What is the message here? What is the theme Brad Bird and the other creators of the movie are trying to convey? Certainly the message is not a simple one, and I must confess that as of now I cannot decipher it. This deserves some more thought. And also another watch of the movie — this time with the DVD’s director’s commentary track turned on.

Geeking Out

Virtual thinking

I’ve been reading a bit over the last couple days about virtualization solutions for servers, specifically VMWare’s Server product. These sort of solutions allow you to run multiple “virtual” machines on one actual physical server, which in some cases means you can take better advantage of under-utilized machines while at the same time creating completely seperate environments (even running different operating systems) that will not conflict with each other.

What strikes me in reading over the VMWare blogs is that the people who seem to be having the most success with the server, in terms of consolidating from 10 machines to 1, or whatever, are those who have large Windows Server installations. They have taken to heart the idea of “one application per server,” which is pretty much what it sounds like — each major application, be it your accounting system, your virus scanner, your mail server, whatever, sits on its own server, completely seperate from everything else. This helps keep things secure and stable, but the trade-off is that you have to get a *lot* of servers, many of which are generally underutilized. Replacing them all with one powerful box and VMWare makes a lot of sense in that case.

In our case, however, we have several machines that *are* well-utilized, and so the propsect of virtualizing, say, a heavily loaded web server or an important database server does not really appeal to me. Thus the inflated performance numbers you might find in the Windows world are somewhat dulled in the Linux world where, I think, its a bit more common to have a few or several different services running per machine, in a fairly secure and stable fashion (or, in the case of our web server, running things in “jails” so that they can’t talk to each other, a much more lightweight form of virtualization that is fairly effective in certain instances).

Still, I’m intrigued, and I’d like to investigate this further, but I don’t really have any machines to spare right now on this sort of thing. It doesn’t help that I can’t find much in the way of peoples experiences with VMWare Server in Linux or UNIX environments, not to mention the complete lack of published benchmarks. I’ll keep looking, and if anyone has any suggestions, do pass them along.