Thank you, NetGear, for taking care of your valued customers. On July 1, the company announced that it would be shutting down the proprietary back-end cloud services required for its VueZone cameras to work – turning them into expensive camera-shaped paperweights. See “Throwing our IoT investment in the trash thanks to NetGear.” The next day, I […]
We spent a long weekend in southern Arizona viewing wildlife, with time spent at birders’ paradises in Ramsey Canyon, as well as two canyons in Fort Huachuca: Huachuca Canyon and Garden Canyon. Wow. We saw and photographed so many incredible birds and butterflies, including (my favorite shot) the Blue Grosbeak. The rarest sighting was that […]
In the “you learn something every day” department: Discovered today that there’s a plaque at Stanford honoring the birth of the Internet. The plaque was dedicated on July 28, 2005, and is in the Gates Computer Science Building. You can read all about the plaque, and see it more clearly, on J. Noel Chiappa’s website. […]
There are standards for everything, it seems. And those of us who work on Internet things are often amused (or bemused) by what comes out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An oldie but a goodie is a document from 1999, RFC-2549, “IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service.” An RFC, or Request […]
Thank you, NetGear, for the response to my July 11 opinion essay for NetworkWorld, “Throwing our IoT investment in the trash thanks to NetGear.” In that story, I used the example of our soon-to-be-obsolete VueZone home video monitoring system: At the end of 2017, NetGear is turning off the back-end servers that make VueZone work […]
Scammers give local businesses a faux award and then try to make money by selling certificates, trophies, and so-on. Going through my spam filter today, I received FIVE of this exact same message praising SD Times for winning the “2016 Best of Huntington” award. The emails came from five different email addresses and domains, but the […]
I wrote five contributions for an ebook from AMD Developer Central — and forgot entirely about it! The book, called “Surviving and Thriving in a Multi-Core World: Taking Advantage of Threads and Cores on AMD64,” popped up in this morning’s Google Alerts report. I have no idea why! Here are the pieces that I wrote for the book, […]
After more than a decade of near daily use, I still love my Steelcase Think chair. Today is cleaning day at CAHQ (Camden Associates Headquarters). That means dusting/cleaning the furniture, as well as moving piles of papers from one part of the office to another. As part of the gyrations, we flipped my trusty Steelcase Think upside down, […]
Eat real food. Avoid food laden with additives, or which are overly processed. My family has a few rules which we follow pretty closely when shopping: Always look at the ingredients. The fewer ingredients, the better. (Food expert Michael Pollan recommends no more than five ingredients.) If one of the ingredients is High Fructose Corn […]
Excellent story about SharePoint in ComputerWorld this week. It gives encouragement to those who prefer to run SharePoint in their own data centers (on-premises), rather than in the cloud. In “The Future of SharePoint,” Brian Alderman writes, In case you missed it, on May 4 Microsoft made it loud and clear it has resuscitated SharePoint […]
Isn’t it reassuring to know that this scammer’s loan agency is “owned by the Christian Church”? Yeah, right. Don’t be fooled by these sorts of emails. The scammer’s next step would be to request sensitive personal information (like bank account numbers), or ask you to wire over a “fee” for processing the not-to-appear loan. Or both. Your […]
If you are asked to submit a photograph, screen shot or a logo to a publication or website, there’s the right way and the less-right way. Here are some suggestions that I wrote several years ago for BZ Media for use in lots of situations — in SD Times, for conferences, and so-on. While they were written […]
Was it a software failure? The recent fatal crash of a Tesla in Autopilot mode is worrisome, but it’s too soon to blame Tesla’s software. According to Tesla on June 30, here’s what happened: What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across […]
Cloud services crash. Of course, non-cloud-services crash too — a server in your data center can go down, too. At least there you can do something, or if it’s a critical system you can plan with redundancies and failover. Not so much with cloud services, as this morning’s failure of Google Calendar clearly shows. The photo […]
What do you do when your 20-pound (5 gallon) propane tank is empty? If you are Alan, you go to a near-by filling station and refill the bottle. There’s a Shell station close by with gas-refilling capability. The cost is minimal. Filling a propane tank today (June 29, 2016) got us 4.7 gallons (20 pounds) at […]
The MEF recently conducted its second LSO Hackathon at a Rome event called Euro16. You can read my story about it here in DiarioTi: LSO Hackathons Bring Together Open Standards, Open Source. Alas, my coding skills are too rusty for a Hackathon, unless the objective is to develop a fully buzzword compliant implementation of “Hello World.” […]
I can hear the protesters. “What do we want? Faster automated emails! When do we want them? In under 20 nanoseconds!” Some things have to be snappy. A Web page must load fast, or your customers will click away. Moving the mouse has to move the cursor without pauses or hesitations. Streaming video should buffer rarely and […]
Despite some recent progress, women are still woefully underrepresented in technical fields such as software development. There are many academic programs to bring girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at various stages in their education, from grade school to high school to college. Corporations are trying hard. It’s not enough. We all need to […]
It’s not intellectual property. It’s not having code warriors who can turn pizza into algorithms. It’s not even having great angel investors. If you want a successful startup that’s going to keep you in the headlines for your technology and market prowess, you need a great Human Resources department. Whether your organization has three employees, […]
Today’s serendipitous discovery: A blog post about the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESC), produced by BZ Media in March 2010. I was the conference chair of that event; our goal was to try to replicate the wonderful SD West conference, which CMP had discontinued the year before. (I am the “Z” of BZ Media.) Unfortunately, […]
I am often looking for these symbols and can’t find them. So here they are for English language Mac keyboards, in a handy blog format. They all use the Option key. Note: The Option key is not the Command key, which is marked with ⌘ (looped square) symbol. Rather, the Option key is between Control […]
The costs of an automobile recall can be immense for an OEM automobile or light truck manufacturer – and potentially ruinous for a member of the industry’s supply chain. Think about the ongoing Takata airbag scandal, which Bloomberg says could cost US$24 billion. General Motors’ ignition locks recall may have reached $4.1 billion. In 2001, […]
This is one of my all-time favorite photos, taken during a week-long vacation in Redmond, Oregon, summer 2012. We’ve been visiting the Eagle Crest resort every few years since the early 1990s — it’s a magical place. Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EF 200mm f/2.8 L prime lens, shot at 1/1250 f/4.
Connected cars are vulnerable due to the radios that link them to the outside world. For example, consider cellular data links, such as the one in the Mercedes M-class SUV that my family owned for a while, allow for remote access to more than diagnostics: Using the system, called mbrace, an authorized M-B support center can […]
There are several types of dangers presented by a lost Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) smartphone or tablet. Many IT professionals and security specialists think only about some of them. They are all problematic. Does your company have policies about lost personal devices? If you have those policies, what are they? Does the employee know […]
“Would you like amps with that?” Perhaps that’s the new side-dish question when ordering fast food. Yes, I’ll have three pieces of extra crispy chicken, potato wedges, cole slaw, unsweet iced tea and a cell-phone charging box. New of out India is KFC (which many of us grew up calling Kentucky Fried Chicken) has introduced […]
This just in — literally, at 8:58am on June 21 — an $8.50 credit from Amazon, paid for by Apple. I am trying to restrain my excitement, but in reality, it’s nice to get a few bucks back. This payout has been pending for a few months. Well, a few years. This is Apple’s second payout from […]
It’s not the usual fisherman-in-a-yellow-slicker¹ look of a born-and-bred Yankee: Here I am in my Western duds. It’s a surprisingly comfortable style, once the boots were broken in. What’s the occasion? Why am I wearing a black Stetson, gray pinstripe suit, ivory shirt, turquoise bolo tie, cowboy boots, and a corsage? Delivering the blessings at a wedding near Phoenix. […]
WiFi is the present and future of local area networking. Forget about families getting rid of the home phone. The real cable-cutters are dropping the Cat-5 Ethernet in favor of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks, generally known as WiFi. Let’s celebrate World WiFi Day! There are no Cat-5 cables connected in my house and […]
I once designed and coded a campus parking pass management system for an East Coast university. If you had a faculty, staff, student or visitor parking sticker for the campus, it was processed using my green-screen application, which went online in 1983. The university used the mainframe program with minimal changes for about a decade, until a […]