holy crap!

Holy crap, life is good! Life is top-quality, best-ever good.
I spent the morning reading the first chapter of Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, which traces the history of the operating systems that eventually became or influenced Mac OS X. All mac geek friends should read the first chapter of this book, or the extended version available online. The mega-cool things about Mac OS X were apparently developed twenty or thirty years ago. Protected memory, preemptive multitasking, microkernels, gigantic virtual memory spaces, vector graphics. To which I say: Holy crap!
God, it is such bliss to sit in my warm apartment with my cats and read really good technical books. It is such bliss to take a break from work. Green tea lattes. Financial security. Plans with friends for dinner. Financial security. (Yes, I said that twice.) The freedom to nap if I want to. Heat. Thumbs! Socks! Hats!

signal to noise

A few days ago I sent a request to co-worker saying "please do XXX -- but not until friday." He handled the request immediately, and when I asked him about it, he said, "You think I read all your mail?" It would be ridiculous to complain about a request being handled too fast, and that this co-worker is way on top of his game, so probably the miscommunication came from me. I send so much email to internal and external team mailing lists that it is entirely understandable that a few important nuggets would occasionally be missed. Could I send less email and be a more effective team member?
Andy van Dam is legendary for his use of ultra-compact email replies:

• tnx -a


• ack. -a and ok -a


• see me -a and its more intimidating cousins see me pls and call me.


• tmrw and do it and ask lsh are also frequent fliers.

With these eight-letter messages, Andy runs several small empires. What can I leave out of my email compositions to be more effective?

policies are useless

A few days ago I blogged about personal behavioral codes I call "policy," as in, "I have a policy that I don't talk on the phone while driving." The stupid thing, though, is that I sliced up the tip of my thumb while cutting rock-solid bread with a large but crappy knife. I didn't have an explicit policy "be careful when using knifes" but would it really have helped me? Of course I should be careful when using knives, but a policy about it would only provide an illusion of awareness. Like a mission statement: either you have a mission, or you don't. Putting a mission statement into words and up on the wall or for that matter tattooed on your wrist is no substitute for actually having a mission. Missions are felt and acted upon. Safety is a way of acting not just a policy. The most important conduct is how I act hours before a hard deadline, the day before going on vacation, before the sun is up, before I've had coffee, after a night of tossing and turning. "Policy" is how I think I should act, but "history" is how I do act. "Policy" is a comforting illusion.

clean slate

I love a clean slate. I have gotten in several really bad conflicts with people over the last year or so in which I recommend starting over from a clean machine, they prefer another strategy, and I then refuse to have anything to do with their machines.
This behavior of mine is excessively rigid and decidedly non-agile. Why do I get so upset? Why do I get so upset over other people's computers?
Well, computers do accumulate cruft. (Yesterday a co-worker ran out of disk space on a fairly new macbook pro; he soon discovered that iMovie had been making duplicate copies of all of his videos. 30 gigs worth.) Cruft is nefarious and hard to detect, but it usually slows down the machine. Maybe you installed twenty dashboard widgets and forgot about them. Maybe you installed a system extension that looks up dictionary definitions for all words over eight characters. Maybe you turned on a "run real slow" option somewhere and forgot about it. On the PC, system degradation is often the result of malware. Then in a boiling-the-frog way, system performance degrades... until I sit down at your computer and freak out over how slow it's acting. "I have the same hardware / worse hardware and it's way faster than this." or "This machine is made of nice components; it should be faster than this." That assertion is very difficult to support with hard facts; it relies on my subjective experience of the hundreds of computers I've spent time with in the last twenty years. It doesn't matter if I'm right that the current machine performance is much worse than the hardware's ideal speed; it matters that the frog is just warm but not cooked. A warm frog and a slow-ish computer are not catastrophes for normal people.
Now, I could go off into self-justification here, and claim that I get so upset because of the future of doom that I foresee for a warm frog, and the machine/frog's owners coming stress and regret over a dead pet. That's not it, though. I get upset because I don't know how to save the frog. I don't know how to go from a slow-ish computer to a fast-ish computer. I don't know how to diagnose why a slow-ish computer is slow. My answer is always to start over, wipe the disk, and then the trouble goes away for a while. I think it's kind of fun to get a new environment set up on a clean machine; most people regard setting up a new environment on a clean machine as a major diversion from actually getting work done. And, in truth, people who let me wipe their machines usually end up with a set of new problems; not slow problems, but configuration problems. Most people will experience this as going from a warm frog to a paralyzed (albeit cool) frog... and when considering my recommended course of action, wiping the machine, they foresee the paralyzed frog, a computer which completely prevents them from accomplishing any of their tasks.
This explains the conflicts: we are both predicting doom as a result of following the other's recommendations, but our definition of doom is different. For me, a slowish computer right now is doom; for others, a slowish computer is preferable to an unconfigured computer. We have different values. And it's not my computer so I should keep my frog-related-fears to myself!

[Postscript: This has absolutely nothing to do with my reinventing my entire life every five years.]

national "change your passwords" day

January 17th, 2007, is hereby declared as National Change Your Passwords Day. Get your tools together and get ready! There are dozens of password management tools, including a moleskin notebook. A low-tech strategy that has served me extraordinarily well is writing the accounts and passwords out longhand on paper, then laminating the paper, and storing it somewhere safe. For extra points, xerox that and put it in your safety deposit box with your passport and your offsite backups. (No, even I don't have a safety deposit box with offsite backups.) For casual passwording, I use the Mac OS X Keychain Access application. Once I used a Palm Pilot password vault, then discovered that sync'ing the application did not also sync the data. Whoops.
Over the next few weeks I will post more suggestions on getting psyched up for National Change Your Passwords day.
A parting thought: Over the past year, to how many people have you revealed a password? Common reasons for revealing a password include "I'm offline and I need that email message," "tech support needs to log in to my computer," and "my boyfriend's going to the ATM so he's getting cash for me too." Has your relationship with any of those people changed since you revealed a password? How about your relationship with any of the people who might have overhead that conversation? If your passwords were compromised, how much money could an evildoer steal from you in one day?