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Moral Operating System
“We have stronger opinions about [iPhone vs. Android] than we do the moral frameworks to guide our decisions.” To be fair the choices were selected to be ones most people would have to have taken a Philosophy major to understand, Kant versus Mill. There are other moral guides like Jesus, Aquinas, Richard Dawkins, Mohammed, Pope…
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Elemental Nuclear Threats
I was sequestered in a war room for a month during which the Japanese earthquake and tsunami happened as well as the meltdown of the nuclear power plant at Fukushima. We projected on the wall video of the stories over and over. It just occurred to me each of the Empedocles classical elements (air, fire, earth,…
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Duplicate Selective Release
Analyst asked me to look at the server logs for a case where students were getting system exceptions. Armed with the JSESSIONID, I found many cases in the webct.log of an error called: “Stack size too large”. In my old email, I found a September 2010 discussion with Rajini Prabhu and Mike Cooling about thread-dump analyzers. In it Rajini…
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Recommendations
There seem to be two ways to recommend something to others… Because the person making the recommendation likes it. Because the person making the recommendation knows the one receiving it and thinks that person will like it. The last time I looked, I am not anyone else. I like things others do not. Others like…
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Open Letter Re: Behind the Blackboard
Hi Blackboard Support, Today, without warning, you changed Behind the Blackboard. Clients dislike surprises. We like knowing how things work. Give us access to the new thing before we have to deal with it. That way we become familiar with it. Even if you do not give advance viewing of the service, then advance warning…
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Complex Policy => Confusion
There is a video of soldiers returning from Afghanistan irritated about having to pay out of pocket for bags they thought were allowed under the government contract with Delta Airlines. At the time, Delta’s understanding of the contract was First or Business class could carry four bags. Economy class could carry three. Because of this,…
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All Software Has Bugs
Humans are fallible. Humans write the code. Therefore, there will be bugs in the code. But that is okay. Humans are smart. Humans can try new ways of working with the software until they find the way the programmer intended it to work. … Or they hire people like me to help them. So it…
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Odd Mozilla Spellcheck
We maintain a wiki page with which DBA will do which maintenance. By convention, the months are the first three characters of the month’s name. In doing updates, I noticed only month marked as misspelled was Sep for September. So Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Oct, Nov, Dec were all okay spellings but Sep was not? Changing it to Sept made it…