There’s a new version of the ISO 9001 quality standard coming. The proposed draft, ISO 9001:2008, is an incremental evolution over the previous version, ISO 9001:2000. It should be out in October or November.

The ISO 9000 family addresses quality management. There are three specifications in the family, of which ISO 9001 is the biggie:

ISO 9000, Quality management systems — Fundamentals and vocabulary. Last updated in 2005, it defines terminology for talking about quality.

ISO 9001, Quality management systems — Requirements. This tells you what you have to do in order to have quality in your products and services.

ISO 9004, Quality management systems — Guidelines for performance improvements. This tells you how to continuously improve quality.

(In case you’re wondering, ISO 9002 and ISO 9003 were rolled into ISO 9001 with the ISO 9001:2000 update.)

Dilbert cartoons lampoon many aspects of ISO 9000, such as the insistence that everything be labeled, and every process be documented. In one set of strips, a character was putting a sign next to the coffee maker, saying “Coffee Maker,” in order to satisfy ISO 9000 requirements.

In large part, a company’s auditable compliance with ISO 9000 has to do with the thoroughness of its documentation: the standard is all about how you manage quality, not quality itself. To put it succinctly:

• It doesn’t matter if your products suck, as long as you follow well-documented processes to make them.

• It doesn’t matter if your processes are inefficient, as long as you carefully measure how closely you adhere to them.

What’s new in ISO 9001:2008? According to the ISO, not much.

ISO 9001:2008 will be the fourth edition of the standard which was first published in 1987. The third edition, published in 2000, represented a thorough revision, including new requirements and a sharpened customer focus, reflecting developments in quality management and experience gained since the publication of the initial version.

ISO’s rules for the development of standards require their periodic review to decide if they need revising, maintaining or withdrawing. Compared to the 2000 revision, ISO 9001:2008 represents fine-tuning, rather than a thorough overhaul. It introduces clarifications to the requirements existing in ISO 9001:2000, based on user experience over the last eight years, and changes that are intended to improve further compatibility with the ISO 14001:2004 standard for environmental management systems.

I can’t wait to see what Dilbert and Wally have to say about it!

Major newspapers and news services keep “file” obituaries for famous living people — celebrities, political leaders, business leaders, and the like. That way, if something horrible happens, most of the person’s life story is already researched and written. (Cue your recording of Dirty Laundry, by Don Henley.)

Every so often, one of those file obits accidentally slips out. That’s what happened Wednesday afternoon, when Bloomberg News posted its file obit for Apple’s Steve Jobs. While the file obit was marked “Hold For Release – Do Not Use,” it’s still bad that it got out.

Bloomberg retracted the story shortly thereafter — but not after the snafu became its own news story. Read the coverage of this in the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the London Times, for example.

The whole file obit is available from Gawker. It’s fascinating reading. They’re also the source of our graphic.

For the past week, every time I post on the blog, I’ve been told that Blogger has received my Aug. 19 request for a human review of the blog (see “Google Spam Blog update“).

Today, we’re back to square one. Blogger has again forgotten about the Aug. 19 request. Blogger has again told me that Z Trek appears to be a spam blog. I must again fill out a form to request a human review.

This will now be my fourth request for a review. For the fourth time, I’m assured:

Request Received

We have received your request for a review to verify that your blog is not a spam blog. Someone will look over your blog and respond to [my email address]

I haven’t received a response yet. What are the odds this time?

You can read the first post in this thread here, and learn about Google’s Spam blog policies here. This all started in early August, when Google accidentally labeled many blogs as spam blogs.

We experienced abnormally high CPU and memory utilization on our Web servers over the weekend, and were wondering why.

Now, we think we know: there’s a new SQL Injection attack making the rounds of the Internet. The problems we experienced were exactly as Greg Hughes describes in his Aug. 12 blog entry, “SQL Injection attacks in the wild.”

In our case, the attack did no damage, beyond sucking up CPU cycles (and utilizing memory). The effect was similar to that of a denial-of-service (DOS) attack.

If your Web apps aren’t protected against SQL Injection attacks, SHAME ON YOU, you naughty person. Your top development priority for this week should be validating all input before passing anything to the database tier.

MIT Press’s massive new tome is excellently researched, thorough and a must-have for your deskside bookcase. Just make sure the shelf is sturdy enough for its 1,322 pages: This is not a book to carry in your hand luggage for your next airplane trip.

“Design Concepts in Programming Languages,” by Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford, with Mark Sheldon, is designed to teach you how to design programming languages, and implement their functions. Unlike other books that I’ve seen, it emphasizes simplicity in language implementation, using a functional decomposition approach.

The book begins by covering foundational issues of language design: syntax, operational semantics, denotational semantics and fixed points. The discussion of recursive definitions is well written, and there’s a cheerful playfulness about the book that’s a breath of fresh air in such a serious work.

The second section of the book dives into dynamic semantics, covering such areas as call-by-name vs. call-by-value, state vs. stateless, and data structures.

The third section, static semantics, goes into data types, polymorphism, type reconstruction, abstract types and modules, and discusses how they affect program behavior.

The book concludes by digging into pragmatics, covering such minor details as compilation, garbage collection and metalanguages.

Summary: Recommended. List price is $75, but it’s under $60 from Amazon.

Separately: Here are some other books that I’ve reviewed recently and also our holiday book list from SD Times.

I’m playing with my new rare-earth element sample set, and loving it. The rare-earth set came in a nice wood base with cover. I bought it from Metallium Inc., for $125, and it arrived a few days ago.

The rare-earth elements — the 17 elements encompassing scandium (21), yttrium (39), and lanthanum (57) through lutetium (71) — are fascinating, both historically and chemically. I have several interesting element and mineral samples on my desk, including a large ingot of metallic silicon that I got in Nevada. But the rare-earth element set is my favorite.

The set contains sealed samples of all the rare-earth elements (except for promethium, of course). The samples weigh between .5 and 1 grams, and the glass ampules are vacuum filled. The photo is of my set, without the clear cover. (Click the picture to enlarge.)

I’m very impressed with the Metallium folks. They shipped out the set in just a few days, and it was well-designed and well-packed. The metal samples look great. I can enthusiastically recommend buying from them.

On the Metallium Web site, they show a set of time-lapse photos showing what happens if you expose the rare-earth elements to air. They start out looking nice. After four days, europium is visibly starting to corrode, and it’s gone in a month. After a couple of weeks, lanthanum is looking sad. They kept the experiment running for four years. Check it out…

I’m definitely going to purchase more from Metallium. What should it be: the 46 “coins” stamped from pure elemental metals? Some half-inch rods? A chunk of osmium? How about the 76-element set?

In a rule approved on Aug. 19, the U.S. government promises to reduce the number of automated recording telemarketing calls you receive. Those changes can’t come too soon.

Every day this week, my phone has rung with the same recording message: “Don’t be alarmed, but this is your final opportunity to get lower interest rates….” And there’s no way to stop ’em.

The new ruling from the Federal Trade Commission expressly bars telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer previously has agreed to accept such calls from the seller.

According to the FTC, the new rule — known as “16 CFR Part 310, Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR)” — “will not affect calls that deliver purely ‘informational’ prerecorded messages — notifying recipients, for example, that their flight has been canceled, that they have a service appointment, or similar messages. Such purely ‘informational’ calls are not covered by the TSR because they do not attempt to sell the called party any goods or services.”

You can read a clear summary of the new rules in a press release from the FTC. You can also download the entire 111-page ruling as a PDF.

When does all this happen? According to the FTC ruling,

The prerecorded call amendment has an effective date of December 1, 2008, for provisions requiring that all prerecorded telemarketing calls provide an automated interactive opt-out mechanism, and an effective date of September 1, 2009, for provisions requiring a written agreement from consumers to receive such calls.

The ruling also includes provisions for reducing the number of “abandoned calls.” That’s when a telemarketing company’s predictive dialing system calls you, you answer, but just hear a click and a dial tone. The call was disconnected because the telemarketer didn’t have a human representative ready to talk to you. According to the summary,

Inevitably, a call will sometimes connect when no sales representative is available. The TSR sets a limit on how often this can occur. It requires that at least 97 percent of a telemarketer’s calls that are answered in person — not by an answering machine — be connected to a salesperson within two seconds after a consumer answers. This is designed to minimize the number of “dead air” and “hang-up” calls that result when no salesperson is available to take the call.

I wish that percentage was 100%. If you don’t have anyone available, don’t dial. That would increase the telemarketer’s costs, or reduce their call volume, however, so the direct-marketing industry successfully lobbied the percentage down to 97%.

Watch BZ Media president Ted Bahr explain why our company is bullish about print publishing — even though we recently scaled back the launch of Systems Management News.

Earlier this week, Ted was interviewed on “From Print to Digital,” a Web-based television show from Scribe Media. This week’s episode focused on publishers bucking the Web-über-alles trend. We’re proud to be heading in the opposite direction from many of our competitors.

The description of the 34-minute show says,

What’s changed about launching a print magazine in a Web world? In the latest installment of ‘From Print to Digital,’ we pose the question to Mark Taussig, publisher of ecohome (35,000 circulation), which in February was introduced as Green Products and Technology, and Ted Bahr, publisher of Systems Management News (40,000 circulation), which rolled out in March.

Launching a print magazine even in good times is a gamble, but going to market with an ink-on-paper product amid an economic slowdown could be a real bear. For Bahr and Taussig, it hasn’t been easy; Bahr had to dial back the frequency of Systems Management News to monthly from biweekly and both publications debuted fairly late in the ‘08 budget season. However, they say they’re in it for the long haul and insist they have the data to justify the investments.

Still, the onus is on print products to now more than ever have rock-solid content (that differentiates itself from online content), high-quality photography and high-quality paper. As Taussig put it: “You have to maximize the experience that print can deliver.”

And while the younger crowd may be wedded to the Web, middle managers still appreciate (and rely) on print media, Taussig and Bahr say. The bottom line: as long as there is an audience that wants to receive a print product and advertisers want to support it, print products will continue to roll off the presses.

Watch and enjoy! I certainly did.

Blogger still thinks this is a spam blog — and the company forgot that it promised on Aug. 12 to have a human review the site. A warning page, appearing after my previous post, told me that I must request a review in order to have the site unclassified.

So, for a third time, I’ve requested a human review. Blogger now tells me that I first requested the review on Aug. 19.

I think Google needs a new algorithm.

See my previous posting, “Google insists that Z Trek is a ‘spam blog.’ “

This dialog in this two-minute Lego Star Wars parody video is a little hard to understand, but it’s wickedly funny. It’s probably funnier than the new movie, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

Yes, it’s from 2006. Yes, I’m a little slow to find these things sometimes!

Multithreaded development in low-level language can be tricky, in large part due to race conditions, deadlocks, and the like. For example, say you have two threads. Perhaps the first thread is waiting on input from the second thread — while the second thread is waiting on input from the first thread. Oops.

There are a whole bunch of problems inherent in multithreaded development. They’re compounded when the application is on multiple cores or multiple processors.

How do you overcome those challenges? There are many coding techniques, such as thread pool and message passing, but they are hard to implement without having the programmer bogging down in multithreading details, and losing sight of the application logic. Different concurrency platforms can simplify that task, such as OpenMP, or parallel languages, like Carnegie Mellon’s NESL, or libraries, like Intel’s Threading Building Blocks, or language extensions, like MIT’s Cilk.

Cilk Arts, the company that’s created a commercial version of Cilk called Cilk++, has just finished a well-written eBook, “How to Survive the Multicore Revolution,” that introduces the challenges of multithreaded development on multicore systems. Only a small part of the eBook, written by Charles Leiserson and Ilya Mirman, is a commercial for Cilk++. (You can download the document without leaving your contact info, which is greatly appreciated.)

While you’re at it, read about my Threading Maturity Model (ThMM), proposed in January 2007. What the heck, eh?

I haven’t lost a cell phone yet.

In the 1990s, I left a brand-new Sony Discman, on its maiden cross-country flight, in a seat-back pocket. It was never to be seen again.

Also, in that decade, I dropped my Day-Timer datebook at O’Hare Airport, but the airport’s lost-and-found department mailed it back to me.

I’ve also lost one spare laptop battery (seatback pocket), several AC adapters (hotel rooms, mostly), books (hotel rooms, mostly), and at least two pair of prescription sunglasses (rental cars)

The loss of a piece of equipment can be costly (iPod, digital camera, noise-canceling headphones, GPS), devastating to business (USB key, PDA, laptop, ID card) and threatening to personal identity (wallet, laptop, PDA, cell phone).

In her blog post yesterday, my good friend Amy Wohl makes a good point: Electronic tools need tethers.

Have you lost any of those items? Did you ever get ’em back?

Within the past few days, Google has suffered short-term e-mail outages on its Gmail service.

The company acknowledges one outage, but there were several periods this week when Gmail wasn’t accessible via its Web interface or through POP3. (I alluded to this in yesterday’s posting, “Google insists that Z Trek is a ‘spam blog.’ “)

How do I know this? I support a non-profit that uses Google Apps, and it relies upon Gmail. Throughout the day on Monday and Tuesday, I received calls from the non-profit’s staff telling me that they couldn’t get into e-mail through the Web interface or through Outlook. As far as I can tell, no mail was lost.

Google acknowledged one Gmail outage in a message, “We feel your pain, and we’re sorry,” posted to the GmailBlog on Monday evening. Unlike other online services, like Apple’s MobileMe or Amazon’s Web Services, Google doesn’t have a service health dashboard. Or, if they do, I haven’t found it.

We feel your pain, and we’re sorry
Monday, August 11, 2008 6:05 PM
Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Again, we’re sorry.

Google still calls Gmail a “beta” service — even though it’s a central part of their offerings. It’s also part of their paid Google Apps Premium Edition service, which costs $50 per user per year for commercial entities. It’s free for non-profits.

I am disappointed that Mr. Jackson wrote, “we don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog.” If Google wants customers to rely upon its services, it should be open and transparent about problems — publishing uptime reports, telling customers causes the inevitable problems, and what it’s doing about them. That builds trust.

Twice now, Blogger (owned by Google) has imposed limitations on my blog, claiming that it “has characteristics of a spam blog.”

Charming.

The first time came on at the end of July. An email from Blogger warned that my blog was locked, and would be deleted soon.

Hello,

Your blog at: http://ztrek.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at {link}

Your blog will be deleted within 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and you’ll be unable to publish posts during this time. After we receive your request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

I immediately clicked the link to request that human review. I also downloaded and backed up all of my blog posts, from September 2006 onwards, just in case.

For three days I heard nothing, and the blog remained locked. Suddenly, it was unlocked. I never heard a thing about it from Blogger — no email, no nothing.

Here’s what Blogger says about spam blogs:

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people’s writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

Well, maybe my site is irrelevant or nonsensical, but I don’t think it’s all that repetitive repetitive repetitive…

I felt a lot better when on August 1, the company blogged that a mistake had been made in a post entitled “Spam Fridays“:

Spam Fridays

While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake.

We’ve noticed that a number of users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can’t post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.

We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks.

They followed up with another posting on August 2, called “You Are Not Spam“:

You Are Not Spam

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you’d like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday’s bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

Great… but then, yesterday, my blog was flagged again! Now, whenever I go to post (including this one), I have to do captcha-based validation. Blogger says,

Blogger’s spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What’s a spam blog?) Since you’re an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on August 12, 2008. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

How often am I going to have to go through this? At least I can post, but this is very annoying. When you couple this with the recent service outages on Gmail, you have to wonder if Google is overreaching.

Apple currently offers two keyboards for its desktop and notebook Macs.

• If you opt for the wired standard keyboard, you get a full-sized keyboard with full alphanumeric keys, function keys, 22-key numeric keypad and 16-key cursor keypad. The benefit of the aluminum full-sized keyboard is that it’s less expensive ($49.95), doesn’t require batteries, and has two USB 2.0 ports. It’s also 17 inches wide, and is tethered to your Mac by a standard USB cable.

• If you choose the wireless Bluetooth keyboard, you may be surprised to realize that the keyboard is tiny — it looks like a laptop keyboard. It only contains the alphanumeric keys with function keys. No separate numeric keypad, and only four cursor keys. It’s also more expensive ($79.95), requires batteries (3 AA cells) and doesn’t have any USB ports. The benefit is that you have a wireless keyboard that you can easily take with you, or hold in your lap, or even use from across the room. It’s only 11 inches wide, so you can stuff it into your briefcase or luggage.

This change occurred last year, when Apple introduced its aluminum iMacs and matching keyboards. Previously, when Apple sold its white plastic iMacs, you had white keyboards in a clear plastic housing. In that era, the wired keyboard and the wireless Bluetooth keyboard were identical, both offering a full complement of keys. (You can use these new keyboards with older Macs; you can also use older keyboards with new Macs.)

If you buy a new iMac or Mac Pro, you can specify whether you want the wired or wireless keyboard. If you have a MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac Mini, you can buy a wired or wireless keyboard as an accessory.

What about typing? Both aluminum keyboards have small flat keys, like those in the MacBook. They take a while to get used to… but once you do, you’ll find them very quick and responsive. Note that some keys, like the caps lock, have to be held down for a moment for them to work; if you just tap them, they don’t function.

One of the places where it would be great to use the small wireless keyboard would be in a server room, when working with an Xserve. However, the Xserve doesn’t contain a Bluetooth transceiver, so you’ll have to use the standard wired keyboard to operate your server.

Can you use the Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard with an iPhone or iPhone 3G? The answer is… no. It’s a software issue. Apple could enable that functionality by providing the appropriate Bluetooth device drivers on the iPhone through a firmware upgrade.