get your backstreet boys off my network!

If you're going to use a neighbor's open wifi connection, it's probably not a great idea to share your iTunes library. I opened my network a few days ago because I was having trouble getting my Powerbook G4 online; I couldn't get it to connect using any of the password-based security schemes. I thought I turned on MAC filtering, but the netgear router adminstration page was a bit confusing -- it shows a "Wireless Card Access List" but doesn't actually do MAC address filtering unless you've checked a box above the access list. So I thought I had a closed network, but I was wrong. Fine, I deserve to have neighbors find and share my connection.
And then I launched iTunes and saw "Ernesto's LimeWire Library" under the "shared libraries" tag. (Not really his name.) Bwahhahha! Apparently Ernesto found my open network! I bet he had no idea that he was sharing his music.
I returned to the netgear router admin, actually turned on MAC addr filtering, and bye-bye Ernesto! Whee! Now he's looking around going, damn, what happened to that open wifi?
This is a nice feeling -- I did something kind of mean but I had every right to do it. That is so rare!

nutritious syntactic sugar

Is syntactic sugar just tasty, or does it actually improve the language? Depends on your definition of "improve," I suppose. I just found a ruby idiom in Agile Web Development with Rails that can make a very common, wordy coding task short and clear. We often have to say "give me a thing, and if it doesn't exist yet, make one for me."
In Java:

public cart findCart() {
        if (cart == null) cart = new Cart();
        return cart;
    }

In Ruby, this can be expressed as...

def find_cart 
    session[:cart] ||= Cart.new 
end

The or-equals operator belongs in a dynamic language, where expressions that evaluate to booleans can also be very nice rvalues. These three lines of code show off a few things about Ruby that might be mistaken for syntactic sugar, but actually make the language better:

• Avoid unnecessary punctuation.


• Clean syntax for hashes make them almost as readable as member data accessors


• Most statements are also expressions.


• Implicit returns.

It's delicious... and nutritious!

Over-Preparedness Vindicated!

Last winter I posted the contents of my personal geek security pack: some money, some painkiller, some duct tape, a BART ticket, a snack, that sort of thing. Since then I've been carrying it around in my backpack.

In an incident involving an ice cream sandwich and an intra-pocket butter malfunction, I lost my wallet a few days ago. In Berkeley -- that's a large bay away from San Francisco. No problem! Well, okay, yeah, it was a problem, but the problem-ness was much ameliorated by having a BART ticket and twenty dollars cash in my personal geek security pack. I used the money to buy a bus ticket back to look for my wallet at the site of the ice-cream-sandwich incident, then retreated to San Francisco with the loaded BART ticket.

The wallet hasn't turned up, but I've got spare ID tucked away in a safe place (not at home!) and a bunch more cash on my refrigerator door. Over-preparedness: vindicated!

Now-- everybody go back up your data! And store the backups off-site! And put twenty bucks in a secret spot in your backpack! And for the love of Pete, don't put butter in your pockets!

Slow news is good news?

I rarely read news online. You might think that leaves me out of crucial blogosphere zeitgeist or military-industrial-political news, but nope: my co-workers filter the web for me, forwarding articles about OpenLaszlo, net neutrality, software-as-a-service, and media business models; and I read messenger-bag-loads of books and magazines. Each month, I read Harper's cover-to-cover, with a liberal (heh) dose of the Atlantic, Utne Reader, MIT Technology Review, San Francisco, and occasional forays into The Economist, and the Sunday New York Times. Then a year or two after things happen, I read non-fiction books: The Looming Tower, the Great Deluge, the Assault on Reason, the Shock Doctrine, that sort of thing.
Reasoned slow analysis with editors and proofreaders and fact-checkers, passages I can go back to years later (without the internet way-back machine), passages that authors will have to stand by for decades, footnotes -- yeah, I'll pay for that. What would the invasion of Iraq look like two years later? A fiasco. What about the Thanskgiving 2007 travel breakdown? Check back in two years and I'll have read some reasoned analysis, complete with footnotes.

TurboTax Wins Me Over

After I posted a complaint yesterday, TurboTax responded to me with superstar customer service. Bob Meighan, the VP of TurboTax, posted a response to my blog entry, and Becca from customer support wrote me a long detailed response, in which she offered to refund my fee for the online service. She explained that with a situation like that, real-time tech support would probably have been able to help me, and pointed out that perhaps my anti-virus software was the culprit. On my PC, I run an out-of-date version of Symantec Anti-Everything, which I haven't tweaked at all (assuming that I'm just hosed no matter what) so Becca might well be right about my anti-virus software interfering.

So, I'm getting my $109 back, and next year I'll use TurboTax Online again.

My original point, with all of this, was that sometimes RIA's can be better than desktop applications, even for single-user applications where security matters. By sending all the information over the relatively straightforward, universal https protocol, application developers can shield users from network vicissitudes, while still providing as much security as direct connections from desktop to server.

Granted, in an RIA model for TurboTax, I'm sending my financial information to Intuit, who then has the chance to do Evil Things with it -- but really, when I hit send on TurboTax Desktop, I have no more reason to believe that Intuit isn't caching and analyzing my data than I do with TurboTax Online. Once my financial information leaves my LAN, it's basically "out there," and I have no illusions about "privacy."