Understanding the scale of Hurricane Katrina – This neat interactive map thingy from the Boston Globe gives some sense of proportion for those of us who don’t know how big things are around New Orleans. In this overlay, which only serves to demonstrate size, not predict what would happen in a flood of the Boston area, Wellesly and Harvard are under water, but Brandeis is just barely spared. Too bad about Brookline, though, I’ll miss eating at Zaftig’s.

Times change

Last night I got what was I guess my first late night call. My cell phone went crazy around 2:30am or so because one of our servers was misbehaving and the monitoring systems didn’t like that one bit, and didn’t think I should, either. It turned out that I didn’t actually have to do anything because my boss was taking care of it (yay!), but I poked around a bit and tried to figure out what was going on since one day son, this will all be yours. Anyway, I was up for less than an hour, fell back to sleep relatively quickly, and got into work at a reasonable hour. And then at around noon I got a headache, and it hasn’t gone away for the last eight hours.

Which makes me wonder if this late night stuff doesn’t agree with my delicate sleep cycles.

Anyway, only thing to be done about it, I guess, is learn as much as I can about how our systems work and figure out how to improve them so that I’ll get as few unpleasant nighttime surprises as possible. Which, really, is what my job is anyway, so the personal interest in sleeping and the professional interest in doing a good job definitely dovetail. So yay for that, I guess.

I’ve had a philosophy up until this point to avoid all gratuitous medications, and the first time I ever started seriously taking things like Tylenol was when I had mono back in February (hi Kelli!). That was the extent of it until a month or so into my job at Berkman when I started getting wrist pain due mostly to some bad ergonomics. My doctor told me that there really wasn’t an easy cure and it was more of a pain management issue, and prescribe ibuprofen both to reduce swelling and relieve pain. Ever since I’ve had a lot of those ibuprofen pills sitting in my drawer, and occasionally when my wrists start to hurt I guiltally swallow one.

But I think it says something about the extent of my willpower that I didn’t even *think* about taking an ibuprofen for the headache until about ten minutes ago, when it just occured to me out of the blue.

Argh, I feel so weak. And dirty. This better not become a trend.

Two residents at Brigham and Women’s don’t like the medical inaccuracies of House and Grey’s Anatomy. They discuss the initial rise of medical shows, when every script was vetted by the AMA and doctors were portrayed as dispassionate superheroes focused solely on the patients’ needs, rather than having problems of their own. I agree the pendulum has dramatically swung to the point where on some of these shows the patients are barely relevent. Of course I disagree with their yearning to return to a time of self-censorship, but I do understand their broader point. One thing they did not bring up but that I wonder about is whether people perceptions of doctors as the kind of emotionally messed up (read: human) people portrayed on Grey’s and elsewhere is partially responsible (in addition to many other factors, of course) for the dramatic rise in malpractice lawsuits.

People are finally catching on to the idea that posting lots of personal details on thefacebook.com can have consequences. Partially because people are being too forthcoming, partially because other people are taking entries too seriously (hey, I’ve been there with my blog). I just find this amusing because this is the sort of thing we were talking about back before thefacebook.com even came to Brandeis, and I in fact had an email discussion with one of the site’s founders at Harvard discussing some of my and others’ concerns.

Quite the turn around when Palm starts shipping phones with Windows. Palm has been mismanaged for years and stopped innovating a long time ago. At some point it was split into two companies, one of which made the operating system and one which made the hardware. Palm didn’t come up with anything useful and new to utilize the capabilities of new hardware, meanwhile Microsoft threw gobs of time and money at another market they felt the need to dominate, and succeeded. I’ve played a bit with Windows CE (Pocket PC?) devices, and just have not seen any appeal at all in running a Windows environment on a tiny screen.

Research at Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center believe that faulty design or construction, and not storm surges caused the breaches in the 17th Street and London Avenue floodwalls. They note at the levees themselves held, but the breaches are more indicative of a “pressure point” failure than the levees being overtopped and their bases being weakened by the resulting water.

Pizza Hut: a usability case study

Pizza Hut recently (apparently) rolled out a “new” online ordering system. Let me tell you why it sucks. I’ll ignore the obvious, like strange annoying fake pop-ups in the page, and go straight to the part where I select a coupon, it puts me through the process to purchase the items on the coupon, and then it forgets to actually *apply* the coupon to my order. Of course, when I call the store itself to correct this error I find out that they don’t have any pan pizza crusts (the hell?), but that’s not all. She then calls me back to let me know that they actually do not deliver to my house. The Pizza Hut that is 1.83 miles away (according to PizzaHut.com) and that PizzaHut.com *said delivered to me* and *sent my order to* using its sophisticated online system, *does not deliver to me!*

The only logical response to such a fiasco of a system is to go to Domino’s.

Booking it

Here’s a quiz question that might stump you…how can you tell the difference between someone who lives/works/plays/learns at Harvard Law School and someone who is just visiting?

Give up?

The people who stay are the ones with the PowerBooks and the ThinkPads. The ones who are just visiting have Dells, or Toshibas, or Sonys. You look around the room and every student has a black ThinkPad, and the “adults” are pretty evenly split between 12″ and 15″ PowerBooks and ThinkPads. That’s it. Nothing else.

I’ve been contemplating trading in my lovable but slightly older PowerBook in favor of a smaller, longer-battery-having, cheaper iBook that I’d be less concerned about being banging around and possibly destroying. But I’m starting to wonder if having an iBook at HLS would make me completely out of place. Do I need to keep the PowerBook just to keep up appearances?

One has to ponder these things…

Weekly Elapsed Time

I’m loving this 35 hour academic work week, in theory. The last couple weeks, though, it has been just that — a theory. This week it looks like I’ll be clocking about 45 hours, last week was around the same. Now that does include a couple hours compensation for being “on-call,” but still. I’ve probably got to tone this down if I want to keep up my cheerful sanity.

I’ve never been a big fan of meetings, but I understand why they are necessary and useful. But with the number of things on my plate right now, I’m finding that I feel the need to make up for the time “lost” to meetings. I didn’t *need* to stay late after the meeting on Tuesday messing around some more with Active Directory, I just worry that if I stop working on it, it will fall to the wayside as I focus on more immediate concerns and it will never get done. So I’m trying to be good about task switching between immediate issues and my bigger projects, like doing work on the video conferencing quote, and then taking some time to set up some mailing lists and answer some user questions, and then diving back into the AD server for a little while. It seems to be working, and keeping me from getting too caught up in (or frustrated with) any one thing.

It is important, and difficult, to balance my various priorities effectively and figure out what users “need” and what I can hold off on giving them. These sort of value judgements, I think, can only become more clear with time and experience. I’m definitely finding that some things I feel aren’t top priorities really are, now that I’m the one theoretically responsible for them. On the whole, I’m still really enjoying getting settled into this job and figuring out what my role is, what I’m best at, and where I need improvement. I can just recognize that I need to figure out a way to be productive while also being able to leave enough time that I can set aside Berkman, go home, and have some fun.

Because feeling hyper-attentive about my three “free” hours before bedtime and being upset that I’m not using them productively and feeling like people don’t appreciate that I’m giving them my time…yeah, that’s no good.

I realized that a new TV season is approaching and since I don’t watch commercials I’m not really up on the new shows coming out. Not really knowing where to turn, I loaded up the websites of the major networks. Now, first of all, they need to make it a lot clearer which shows are new and give me short blurbs about them, rather than throwing me through stupid Flash animations. But the height of stupidity was when I went to CBS, which offered a thingy that lets you watch previews for the new shows.

Click, it pops up a little window, fine, click, it goes to load the preview, fine, it takes a while, fine, and then it tells me that this CBS video clip is brought to me by… And follows that with an *ad* an *ad* before I watch the *ad* for the new show. It is almost as if they are actively trying to get me to dislike them, to turn away as many visitors as possible. I have to watch a 30 second spot about joining the Army or getting prescription Ambien before I can watch the trailer for their new show?

Well, I’ll tell you one network whose shows I will *not* be checking out. Good job, morons.

Give me security, or give me embarrasment

Okay technical readers, I need some help here. Today I decided to clean up my .ssh folder and regenerate ssh keys for each of my machines. I’m going to use ssh-agent to keep them safe, and use passwordless login to all of the servers I access. I’ve also discovered that I can setup a .ssh/config file that lets me set different usernames per host (useful!) and give hosts aliases. So that’s all good.

Here’s my issue, and I’ll try not to compramise the super-secret Berkman security while talking about this ;). Most of the times I’m logging into these machines I need to do things as root. For obvious reasons root ssh is disabled, so I can’t do the easy thing and setup a keypair for the root account. This means when I login I have to use either sudo to do root comands (my preference) or su to root (my boss’s preference). I like sudo because it keeps my session variables, my boss doesn’t like it for precisely that reason, and is concerned that it is an easy vector for privilege escalation. I sort of get that. I also am really bad with passwords, and don’t really want to remember which password I’m using on which machine in order to sudo or su.

The ideal method for me would be a way to sudo and have it look at my local ssh-agent for credentials. Then I’d get rid of the password problem but would still have to worry about my session stuff…maybe it could read my local dot files instead of those on the server? I dunno.

Anyway, I’m sure people have thought about this and done things about this, and I really doubt my proposal makes much sense, so does anyone have any suggestions for, basically, secure, password-less root login which maintains my settings? Or other useful ways for multiple people to share a root account while maintaining their own preferences?

Different perspectives

Apple's iSight cameraYesterday I was setting up a computer for a colleage and showing him how to use Apple’s iChat program with the iSight camera to do easy video chats. He asked me how much the setup cost and I told him the program is free and the iSight itself is $129. He was astounded by how *cheap* it was, while I was busy saying that Logitech makes a perfectly good camera for $60.

Truth is, he’s right. I’ve been doing weeks of research on a new video conferencing system that, all told, is going to end up costing $15,000 or more. The Polycom PVX software, which is supposed to provide pretty good video chat, is $250. The cheapest set-top units are at least $3,000. That Apple could enter the marketplace with a hideously easy, amazingly wonderful quality video conferencing system, and give it away for free, and charge only $129 for a very nice little camera with stereo sound, ya know what, he’s right, there is something wonderful about that.

Yes, there is Microsoft NetMeeting and all kinds of other third-party video conferencing and collaboration tools, but Apple took something that no one had gotten right and gave it to the masses in a form that Just Works ™. There is much to be said for that. And it sure is difficult to explain to people why it is that the $15,000 unit won’t do everything they want and more, when a $129 system for Apple can do at least half of it.