Saturday, November 22, 2003

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"Jihad" in Dune I first came across the term "jihad" in Frank Herbert's "Dune" trilogy. The "Butlerian jihad" was a war by humans to destroy robots and computer intelligence, which were becoming animate and independent and threatening human supremacy. It was presented as old history, part of the exposition, which allowed Herbert to introduce interesting substitutes for machine intelligence. Anyway, when the term started cropping up, most unhappily, in real life, its meaning was obvious to me. 5:35:23 PM    comment []

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I have an idea for a weblogging-tool feature that could help mitigate the problem of linkrot, both the intentional kind and the unintentional kind. When I post to my weblog, for each link in my post, my weblogging tool should do the following: 1) Traverse the link. 2) Copy all text on the resulting page. 3) Store said copied text “under the covers” somewhere (call this “SourceNotes”). That way, when linkrot sets in (and is discovered), I have some options. First of all, I can consult the SourceNotes, and maybe that will give me a strategy for searching, finding and re-linking the item of interest. Second, copyright be damned, I can choose to post the full-text of the linkrotted source, myself. Of course there are all sorts of considerations for fine-tuning: configurability, limiting the length of copied text, perhaps having an interactive mode (specify what you want copied). But this gives the basic idea. 5:34:46 PM    comment []

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Minimalist Approach to Filing Email At one end of the spectrum, some people reproduce the (by me, hated) world of paper filing, by maintaining an elaborate system of subject-oriented folders in which to file messages. If you must do this, that is what Outlook categories are for, but I really think it is unnecessary. At the other extreme, some people decline to save any or most of their email. I think a super-lightweight system can provide all the benefits of the former, at a fraction of the effort. I mindlessly file ALL email in the READ folder. Then, if I need to find it later, well, searching is one of the things computers do best! I've been doing it this way for years, but have found it slightly inconvenient, on occasion, due to Outlook's slowness in searching. However, as mentioned before, X1's lightning-fast full-text search removes this final impediment to the lightweight method. 5:34:02 PM    comment []

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Distinguishing Internet Legends The #1 distinguishing characteristic of internet legends seems to be the lack of a link. This is immediately cause for great suspicion, since the web makes it SO easy to provide a link. The interesting thing to me is that it would be very easy to make up a link. And they often do have detailed contact information (Sgt. Brian Murphy, Chief Detective, New Orleans Police Dept., 111-222-4444, ext. 9999). At a bare minimum, a completely fabricated (non-existent) link would improve the credibility by its mere apparent presence. Lots of people wouldn't bother to check it (think about all the dial-up users still out there). An easy improvement would be a link to the home page of some credible news source (a city newspaper, for instance). So then it would appear, to the casual reader who did click the link, that the author of the message had simply failed to make a correct, permalink. Taking it to a new level, a hoax site could be put in place to link to. Doing this well would be orders of magnitude more effort than the minimum approach. But still not that hard for someone with motivation and skills. A somewhat easier approach would be to create a fake weblog/personal site for this purpose, and have the personal site include the fake kind of link posited as the minimum approach. Many more readers would be satisfied by drilling one level down, would consider the weblog entry to be sufficienct validation, without clicking on the link contained in it. 5:32:30 PM    comment []

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13 months at my new employer and zero business trips! 5:31:49 PM    comment []

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This article in Software Development magazine almost perfectly describes the Requirements Analyst (aka, Systems Analyst, Business Analyst, Business Systems Analyst) role as I see it. 5:30:20 PM    comment []