Geek Practitioners Blog

Not the nuclear one! Great and detailed sense and information on what is actually happening, what dosages mean, and the media and anti-nuke industry reaction have been. It’s not nothing, but it’s not Chernobyl and can’t be, nor is it Three Mile Island. But then, from what I understood, seemingly refuted by all the references to it, is that Three Mile Island wasn’t even “Three Mile Island.” In the sense of an “OMG we’re all gonna die and let’s no never again build plants” event that, hey look, the media and the anti-nuke industry again, wanted us to believe. Yes, I said “industry,” since any such reasonably organized and financed cadre of people for a cause, non-profit or not, amount to an industry, and will tenaciously cling to and attempt to expand upon their mission. Witness the MADD rush from drunk driving awareness to neo-prohibitionism.

I fear for the nuclear renaissance and the pending explosion (poor choice of word!) of new and vastly improved reactors, leading us away from our excess dependence on wood coal whale oil petroleum.

Rob May has a great post at the company blog at Backupify on trends driving cloud backup. It sounds right to me, particularly the parts about data portability, it being managerially smart to prepare for black swans, and users being vastly more the problem than permanent data loss by a cloud provider is likely to be.

It has always irritated me when vendors try to “own” your data. It still happens, but I’d love to think it’s on the wane. In my ill-fated business, one of the key elements and benefits of our not-quite-finished document management software (and associated law firm case management, but the package could be used in other environments, or as a generic/personal doc manager) was that you owned your data and your documents. There was no lock-in. There was an easy ability to locate and access documents directly should the software not be available.

Thus I’ve always loved the data portability angle Rob brought to his startup.

This is a test of posting with BlogDesk.

Yet I can totally see it happening, based on my experiences with people and buildings and companies. Server room is a unique location.

I have run into the scenario of checking an end user’s computer for signs of p0rn, or surfing p0rn sites, and seen ambiguity introduced by popups from sites that are not p0rn per se, or clicks that were unintended and aborted. Obviously, malware can not only cause popups, but also download files nefariously.

This is an extreme cautionary case, in which a worker was fired for child p0rn, had his reputation ruined, faced criminal charges, and was found to be innocent. Tech support completely failed and even helped persecute him. That’s bad.

What could be geekier than cosmology?

It’s amazingly cool that we seem able to detect Hints of ‘time before Big Bang’, which explains entropy and the apparent one-way orientation of time. It’s as if the Big Bang were the zero on a numberline, in which we are on the positive side, while what came before was on the negative side.

Ever think about switching to a Mac, or adding one to your stable of computers?

Phillip Zannini has written a cleverly named book and transition guide: A Mac Eye for the Windows Guy – The Complete Guide to Software for Your Mac!

It’s worth a look, if you’re thinking about expanding your horizons.

If I had more money and less else to occupy me, I would consider going to the Providence Geek Dinner tonight. Oh well.

That and I don’t always do well jumping into a crowd of people I don’t know and socializing.

Desktopple sounds like the thing for me. I work centered mainly around the desktop, but that leaves me having to clean it up periodically. Usually that’s a dramatic sweep every couple months, with “running out of space” sweeps of the easy to move stuff in between.

Talk about feeling watched. No sooner did I remove the rogue links than they were replaced with similar ones off a different college URL.

I dropped everything to upgrade WordPress. Seems to be working so far.