Why Do I Own That Item?

Posted on April 5, 2007 by Brian

Some events in life are making me reconsider what physical possessions I lug around in life. I’ve pondered what would make me get rid of something. A new thought has been rattling around in my head today: “Why do I own that item?”

There are some obvious answers, such as you own clothes to be publicly discrete and conform socially. You own a car to commute to work, so you can earn money to fund the rest of life.

Okay. Why the second car? Well, for me, I tend to own older cars, so maybe it’s to provide backup or reliability in case one is out of service. If that is the reason, then the economic cost to compare with is renting a car instead. Pushed into the corner, I think renting would be cheaper since cars breaking down is more a fear than a reality for me.

Or, maybe there’s a mission need for another vehicle. For example, you purchase a truck to augment your car because it tows your tailer. I know it seems sterile and offensive, but consider the cost of whatever you’re trailering. If it’s a boat, the cost of operating that boat just went way up when you factor in the truck. ..if that’s the real reason you bought the truck.

I’m a system engineer. I think it would be instructive to draw a causal tree diagram, and force myself to consider what possessions I have for their own primary use, and what ones are second layer items. I have a suspicion that I’ll own fewer things if I actually figure this all out and let numerical comparisons drive my decisions.

  • Why do I own the 17th dress shirt?
  • Why do I own that mantle-piece decoration?
  • Why do I own a second vacuum cleaner?
  • Why do I own the second pair of boots?
  • Why own blankets and sheets vs a single sleeping bag?

To bracket the problem, here is one extreme to consider: Yes, I’ll keep the hand drill. It’s cheap enough and ownership burdens are few enough that it’s just not worth calling in the repairman to drill a hole. I purchased a $9.34 drill bit last month. Still a lot cheaper than alternatives.

On the other extreme is the house trailer I owned. Considering gas mileage for the tow vehicle, insurance, licensing, etc., I calculated that if I drove more than 520 miles a day while vacationing with the trailer, it was a money looser compared to renting hotel rooms. In otherwords, it’s cheap to park and use it. But it’s not cheap to go cross-country with it. Most of my trips are the cross-country type. I owned it for emotional fantasy reasons that were’t real, so I sold it.

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Web Page Pillar Fluff – We Need More “Ought to”

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Brian

A friend gave me a paper copy of Jesse James Garrett’s “The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams”. You can get the just of the material in a web posting. It’s a decent article. Okay. Kind of fuzzy mumbo jumbo. For example, why 9 pillars, not 8 or 10? No reason. It’s just what he thought of as he wrote. Missing is the significant “And Therefore…” conclusion. People who include the conclusion are the brave ones.

Two thoughts.

The first paragraph says Project Management is the hub that binds all the tactical competencies. Hub? How come Abstract Design shows in the center of the graphic? How about saying Project Management is the adhesive or glue that binds.. Mixed analogies made me question the rest of the writing.

When I rolled down the to the bottom, I had the light bulb realization that made reading the article worth while. “User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think and how they behave — and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.”

I realized the recursive nature of the web design industry. Not just web design, but any design, these days. Any industrial design. Even $1B aircraft designs. It’s all about surveyed and marketed user opinion. What ever happened to designing things the way they ought to be designed? Remember the original Boeing jet? Why? Because air travel was suppose to be done with jets, that’s why.

When web technology was conceived as a hypertext system, serving content and information, rather than an application portal, it wasn’t based on what the users wanted. Someone had a vision, and did it regardless of everybody else storing sequential documents.

Consider breaking the feedback loop with your users. Socialized creativity doesn’t work. If you want to be a web technician, go for it. If you want to be an innovator and creator of the future, you’ll need to break the feedback loop and do something new. Consider providing some absolute solution or capability because you know it ought to be done.

And Therefore… Don’t run around with the whims of others. Choose your path. Your insight. Your creativity. Do the thing you know has value. Get this right, and you’ll be a technology leader rather than another tag along.

Posted in Computers, Spirit & Heart | 2 Comments

Self-declared Security Classification Handling

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Brian

I found he July 2004 USAF Science Advisory Board (SAB) report on Networking to Enable Coalition Operations. You can download a copy from the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), to which the SAB submits their reports. Search using the SAB Source Code 317900 to locate their reports.

On Page 9, an introduction of Data Management techniques for restricted information says,

“Information release in the network of the future should be based on the concept of metadata-derived releasability (MDR). In this approach, releasability will be determined based on the content of the information, how it is to be used, and by whom, rather than its classification level alone. Elements in the databases will have meta-tags that describe their content, based on a standardized ontology of metadata tags. Automated rule-based foreign disclosure guards are created that use these tags to determine what may be moved from national networks into the coalition network and dynamically update the coalition network as information in national networks changes. Access to information will be determined not simply by the nationality of the intended recipient, but also by the role that a participant plays and the content of the information, again using rule-based guards that examine the meta-tags to determine releasability of coalition network information to individual participants.”

MDR concerns me because it’s a paradigm shift where the data itself declares how it can be handled. Previous security classification has always been an external control on finite quantities of information (a report, or book, etc). Sure, the product has been labeled “Secret” or whatever, but this is more of a precaution for last-minute accidental exposure rather than the definition of what exposure is permissible. The Secret nature of a Secret report was known from where it’s stored, and how it’s handled, traceable back to a classification agency.

With MDR, the embedded data defines the handling procedures. Anybody who has handled an identity theft problem knows the insipid nature of this quandry. When the computer record includes faulty information, updated by some thief, no amount of arguing proves that you’re the real person and you want the information back to what it was. Think about it – How would you really, in the end game, prove that you opened the bank account rather than someone else? Same problem with MDR. How can anybody ever prove the classification authority says the handling should be different than what MDR defines? Compounding the problem is that there is no backup oversight to notice that the rule-based application programs are handling the data wrong. They’re handling it “right” as far as they’re concerned, because they’re using data in the compromised stream to define how to handle it!

If I get my bottle of white-out and cross out the word “Secret” on a report, the context of using the material still declares that it was Secret. With MDR, this is removed. A data file hack or mistake or oversight or software error immediately causes different treatment of the block of data or stream of data.

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Trusting your Social Security Number

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Brian

I used to try to protect my Social Security Number. You know… identity theft and all. But some time in the past 2 years, it became obvious that this number is as ubiquitious as my first name. Everybody who wants to already knows it. You might as well say, “Hey, 123-44-8789, I have something for you”.

My angst has been increasingly directed not at the collectors. I’m still upset everybody collected it so much until it was an abused number. The big Info Suck computers allow. But that’s history. The problem now is that anybody asking you your Social thinking that everybody else in the world doesn’t know it, has a problem. The user of your social has become the problem.

Bob Brown, in the 1/18/07 issue of Network World, wrote up an interview with Jeff Schiller, MIT’s Network Manager/Security Architect. Part 5 of the interview assertively supports the view I’ve slowly developed over the past few years.

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Puppy Linux ver 2.11

Posted on December 9, 2006 by Brian

[Update: ver 5.2.5 reviewed]

I’ve been using Puppy Linux Puppy Linux for about 3 weeks, and am pleased enough that I’d like to share my findings.

Executive Summary
Puppy Linux was first released in Summer 2003 as a solo project by Australian Barry Kauler. Architectural design choices are still done as a monopoly — and choices have been good. Puppy is good for your grandma. Puppy is good for a mid-life Linux user (I’ve dabbled with Linux since 1994 and have run it full time at home for 2 years). Puppy teaches. It’s convenient. No bloat. Huge repository of extra add-on programs. Live CD-ROM or traditional hard-disk install. Problems and bugs are insignificant.

From Barry’s web page:

  • Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media.
  • Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into RAM so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes.
  • Booting from CD, Puppy can save everything back to the CD, no need for a hard drive.
  • Booting from USB, Puppy will greatly minimise writes, to extend the life of Flash devices indefinitely.
  • Puppy will be extremely friendly for Linux newbies.
  • Puppy will boot up and run extraordinarily fast.
  • Puppy will have all the applications needed for daily use.
  • Puppy will just work, no hassles.
  • Puppy will breathe new life into old PCs

Two weak areas: Wireless is weak (limited card compatibility it seems). I took the disk over to a friend’s house and he had a Linksys wireless card in the back of the desktop. Although the card was recognized, we could not negotiate through the manual setup required when encryption is used. Secondly, printer support is weak (some selection of Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark). I have only a networked Brother multi-function printer and a Lexmark X85 that is not available over the network, so I haven’t done any printing.

For perspective, my stock system is a Mandriva 2007.0 running a KDE desktop, networked to Windows machines and other Linux boxes. I run a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server environment. I keep an old Windows 2000 partition around in case compatibility with the external world demands it.

I dabbled with the live CD-ROM version of Puppy for a few days, and as expected it runs quickly after loading entirely into RAM. I literally got Puppy Linux working on a Toshiba Satellite Pro CS400 Pentium 28 MB RAM 640×480 display laptop, but it was essentially useless due to limited graphics and slow performance. The Windows 98 I finally installed on the laptop ran no faster.

Soon, I decided to do a normal hard disk install. By “normal”, I mean with files distributed on the hard disk file system, not compacted into a single zipped file. Doing this with the Menu, Setup, Puppy Universal Installer was trivial. It took less than 5 minutes. One caution: Puppy Universal Installer is not available via the desktop Setup icon, and this confused me for about 1/2 hour, based on discussion forum references. I’m using a file system created as an ext2 journaling file system under Gentoo Linux. Puppy lists it as ext3. I’m not sure of the difference. If I loose power unexpectedly, I don’t know how the Puppy filesystem will respond.

[..post finished later, moving to Wiki if it gets too large..]

Browsing uses Sea Monkey, which also has an html editor if you wish. Screen Capture and image editing with mtPaint. SSH. Gaim. Skype add-on. Gxine player. Gnome looks simple but powerful. Abiword does Word files. FTP. Geany text editor. Ghostview/PDFs. One click fs imaging (but not checksum quality like the Helix Linux distribution) or directory backups.

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