Cleaning out the cellar, I found a box of complete financial records, 1984 – 1988. Packed away when I left Massachusetts and never touched again. Taxes, car registrations (my beloved Daytona!), apartment rent, BBS telephone bills, Navy discharge paperwork, identity theft, divorce paperwork, custody battle, paycheck stubs, Sears Roebuck (!) bills. And nearly every page has my full SSN on it. I’m planning a week of sitting in front of the shredder, an hour a day… Great nostalgia, sweet melancholy.
Author Archive | Ted Roche
The Last of the Cockers of Contoocook
Max supervising the office from his window bench
We said goodbye to an old friend this morning. Max lived to the grand old age of 15½, a hundred and eight in people years. He was the last of the Cockers of Contoocook: http://www.tedroche.com/homepage/~tedroche/Photos/dogz.htm
In fifteen and a half years, Max accumulated a fair share of stories. He was a whiz at attention classes, getting clicker training almost immediately. In dog agility, he was wickedly fast on the ‘dogwalk’ but never got the weave poles. Ted mistakenly messed with his food one day and got a valuable lesson in dog handling, along with four stitches. Max was a regular at the veterinarian, where he more than once was the subject of back-office chatter. He survived and rebounded from a splenectomy, multiple lumpectomies, the mange, and an emergency surgery or two.
He was a character. He was always a wilful dog, but with a good heart. He stoutly defended his house, his yard and his people against all possible threats, be it the UPS man or the boy cutting through the backyard on his bicycle. He enjoyed his walks in the park.
Max lived well. We are better for having known him, and we shall miss him.
SSH Shell as a Google Chrome app
Getting Windows to securely log in to a Linux/UNIX/OS X computer is a challenge. Typically, I have installed PuTTY or the CygWin shell for POSIX utilities. Now, with Google building Chrome and extending it with an App Store, there’s a new possibility: ssh as an applet within Chrome. The current version is beta, and it has numerous limitations: many keystrokes are intercepted by the browser or OS, and there’s not yet a facility for public key authentication, but it is a good start. Check it out: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!category-topic/chromebook-central/discuss-chrome-os/7lKTTlttkLo
Tip of the hat to Gina Trappani for sharing the link via Google+
On The Origins of Foo, Bar and related terms
The IETF writes the Requests For Comments (RFCs) that are the rules of the road of the internet. They include an RFC http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt explaining the significance of foo, bar and related terms for those unfamiliar. I can’t have anything but respect for such a thorough engineering effort.
Calculate your BMI using Wolfram Alpha
Harness the power of the Wolfram Alpha computational engine to see how your height/weight ranks against the currently-accepted BMI calculations and populations:
[wolframalphawidget id=”bd2271d0eb320a2e2f27536bce47b91d” ]
Wolfram Alpha provides a WordPress plugin that allows the WordPress author to use a shortcode to place a widget in a post. There’s also (separate) support for putting a Wolfram Alpha widget inside a WordPress sidebar or widget. There’s a gallery with lots of pre-created widgets and an interface to create your own. Pretty cool.
Note that you need to specify the units (“lb” for pounds, “in” for inches, or 5′ 7.5″ for typical foot-inches height expressions) otherwise the widget seems to make some really poor choices, deciding that weight of 67 means aged 67 years.
The Web is about People, if we let it be
I was recently contacted by a company interested in having me consult on their development efforts. As I usually do, I did some background research to figure out who they are and what they do. I was appalled: their web site is one of tens of thousands of generic business sites, pretty but empty. All the buzzterms were there, the generic stock photos of the properly demographically-disparate team meetings, leaning over shiny laptops not wired to anything and pointing to pie charts with no labels. The ‘About Us’ page is filled with slogans and buzz words on how awesome “the team” was, without the single mention of who the team is. The “Contact Us” page is a generic web-based form, with direct links to “sales@example.com” or “info@example.com.” Want a job? Jobs@example.com or hr@example.com.
What is it “About Us” you don’t understand? If you have a link saying “Who We Are,” you had better be ready to name names. Who are these people and what are they hiding? There’s no excuse for a web site like this. Are these people in the witness protection program? Do these people stand behind what they build? There’s no reputation to worry about losing because they never tell you who they are.
You can have the stiff corporate “Who We Are” of black and white pictures of the “Leadership Team” in suits, “Our Advisors” to name-drop your VCs or Directors, or a more playful site of caricatures and off-beat bios. Kudos go to the sites that include your Twitter and Github accounts, and let folks share their passion for mountain biking, marathons or matchbook collecting. But denying there are people behind your web storefront tells me you’re not proud of who you are, you’re uncomfortable putting yourself out there, or you’ve got something to hide.
And that’s the real problem with a “Who We Are” site like this: the publishers are telling us much more about themselves than they intend. In a customer-facing industry where personal service and attention is a key determinant in the success of the project, they’re stating they are not comfortable with that level of contact.
Food for thought.
Free Ubuntu Fonts
Ubuntu has released their own custom-designed fonts with all the bells and whistles: bold, italic, condensed, proportional and monospace. Released under the Ubuntu Font License (vice the earlier Red Hat and Oracle Liberation fonts [ed: updated link, note newer version], released under the GPL with a font exception – embedding the font is ‘non-viral’). Check them out at: http://font.ubuntu.com/
Tonight: WordPress Backups at Seacoast WordPress Developers Group
Tune in tonight at the NH-ICC for the meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group. I’ll be talking about WordPress backups. See my slides (and outline) with complete notes and links at http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html.
Want to attend tonight or a future meeting? Meetup details here.
Stuff Ted Says #7: Source code control
The folks on the ProFox mailing list liked this one: “Source code control is a necessity when the number of programmers exceeds _zero_.”
Dead links, what to do?
Reviewing my blog’s access logs, I see a miscreant application was denied access thanks to the BadBehavior plugin. Curious, I followed the link as, truth to tell, I don’t recall all my posts, especially one seven years old. When I reviewed the post, I tried to follow the links, and 4 out of 6 are dead. What should I do about old, dead links? The post was pretty much a “look at this” piece, pointing to content mostly gone by now. Should I just kill the post, prune off the dead links with an editorial comment on what used to be there, or ignore it?
I don’t consider this blog to be much of an historical document, so I’m not concerned about defacing it. Google searches are likely finding the keywords on that page and redirecting folks here, which is unfortunately, as the page has really lost its value. Just deleting the page hurts the Google page rank of the domain when the crawlers can’t find it any more. Properly curating the page with editorial notes that summarize what the links were about, that they are dead now, and what the whole point of the post was, would be very nice, but is really more effort than is reasonable to ask, especially when you consider there are likely to be 2,000 other posts needing curation.
The best lesson to take away from this is not to write posts just saying “Check this out” and instead summarize what’s there to be seen, what it means, and why it’s important enough to point out to your readers.