Much as my best days are those on which I “learn a lot,” I find that some of my best days are also “totally scattered and almost devoid of billable hours.” In the last three days I’ve probably addressed ten problems for ten different people, and although I’ve billed out a good number of hours to a couple of clients, the majority of the others aren’t getting a bill at all. How do you feel when you’re in this kind of situation—is this extreme attention deficit disorder, or is there something useful to be learned from this kind of behavior? [Read more…]
Tough days frequently end with “I learned a lot”
My “toughest” days are those I spend solving some completely intractible technical problem or other — days when I feel like I’m beating my head against a wall and the problem just will not yield to either intelligent analysis or brute force. The problem just persists, and I keep trying different approaches, and each one leads me a little way down the path but doesn’t solve the problem.
With luck, of course, each step yields some piece of information that ultimately contributes to finding a solution. But sometimes there are dead-ends.
The key to not becoming frustrated is to learn something from each step along the way. It might involve learning something new about the programming language, or maybe DNS infrastructure, or about administering Ubuntu, or about SMTP interactions, or about cryptography. Depends on the overall project, of course. What is ultimately “learned” might not even turn out to be relevant to solving the problem.
But the key is to step back at the end of the day and say “I learned something really valuable today, even if it took me ten times as long to solve this problem as I thought it would.”
Don’t rely on governments to solve your security problems
Far from solving all your problems, if you rely on government to solve your cyber-security problems, I think you’re more likely to end up with restricted access to the Internet and someone other than hackers evaluating your communications. And I mean this is a possibility not only from your own national government but due to future international “cooperation” among governments.
Here are five reasons why you have to build your own cyber-protection capabilities rather than relying on governments to solve any of your security (and cyber-attack) problems for you. And you have to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on that might put governments even more in control of your online communications, reducing the options you have available to communicate privately with others as well as to defend yourself. [Read more…]
Hello, Are you still blogging?
I cleaned out my news reader subscriptions this morning[1. I use NetNewsWire on my Mac PowerBook and Reeder on my iPad, with the data being coordinated through Google Reader online] and found that of about 30 blogs I dropped, most of them hadn’t been updated in over a year, or even since 2006 in a couple of cases. Are people getting tired of blogging? (For that matter, are people getting tired of tweeting? I hardly ever do it any more…) To lay a motivational foundation, I was cleaning out my subscriptions because I now read them on an iPad and it has been taking me nearly a couple of hours a day to read them, so I needed to cut a lot of duplicates—seeing the same information several places, in blogs that are just “repeaters.”
Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):
- Too much time goes into writing a single article
- email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
- too busy reading other blogs
- watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
- iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
- 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
- don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
- started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
- quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
- got a real job. (Whatever that is…)
Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.
Are hungry searchbots eating your small web site alive?
I work with a dozen or so clients at any given time, and in the last three (or thereabouts) weeks I’ve noticed that some sites on small servers with limited capacity are being “eaten alive” by spidery searchbots. And not just the usual suspects—Google, Yahoo, MSN—but by specialized searchbots that exhibit a kind of behavior I haven’t seen very much before. It used to be that web site owners prayed for the searchbots to come by, and searchbots by and large were sparing in their examination of pages, not hitting a site very hard at all, but building an overall image of the pages on the site over a long time. [1. Illustration: “Spider & Crossbones” pirate flag]
But times are changing rapidly! Even a site with very little human traffic may be suddenly and catastrophically overwhelmed by searchbot traffic. [Read more…]
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