I went through the DBA programme at SAIT.  I'm rather proud of what I've accomplished, I only wish I got to use it a lot more.

I really love Oracle, it sings to me for a whole bunch of reasons.  The structure is beautiful.  Laying out a tablespace across spindles is the sort of thing that makes my heart cry out with joy.

Sure, it's a pain in the ass.  I particularly love the ORA-03113 error.  The fact that I didn't even have to look up the damn number says I need to get better with my tools.  The pain in the ass of Oracle is that you have to set each parameter and you have endless settings to get right.  The beauty of Oracle is that you have a gazillion parameters and settings you can tweak to get perfectly right for your particular situation.

The one thing I'm going to talk about tonight is found in many more places than just Oracle, but that's where I first encountered it.

Here's the situation:  You're entering a date into a database.  Without thinking, you just happen to type in, "22-Aug-2011."  Or maybe you typed in "22/08/11."  Or perhaps, let's go completely wild and crazy and type in "08/22/11."  You are a wild party.

Here's the thing, if Oracle is expecting a date and you're giving it a string of characters, it will look at the input and, if it makes sense, do an automatic conversion of what you typed to what it expected.  It's called an "implicit conversion" and it can figure out - in certain cases - what it got and what it expected.  "22-Aug-2011" is pretty clearly a date, so is "22/08/11" and, if you're a North American bend of mind, the same with "08/22/11."  It happens with all kinds of computer languages where the system figures out what it was supposed to be getting and just does the translation for you.

Ahh, but what if I wrote this entry ten days ago?  Then it would have been  12-Aug-2011.  No problem when I write it like that, but if I write it 12/08/11 we can already sense a problem.  Should I write that date as 08/12/11 I shifted our timeframe out by four months.  There's no way for a computer to know precisely if the date is August or December.  It could be either, depending on your convention.

So to counteract the ambiguity of the implicit conversion, we have an explicit conversion.  It's more work, but there is absolutely no doubt as to what you meant.  You hand-hold Oracle (or whatever) through the translation and you are very precise to ensure it's meaning is perfectly correct.

What's this got to do with me?

I've been suffering from a whole string of implicit conversions lately.  (No pun intended!)

I'm a very straight forward, practical guy.  I'm horribly vague, I dance around a subject a lot, but if I get confronted directly I'll take the time to at least try to explain myself.  In reality, this whole series of blog posts are one, long, run-on sentence that will culminate with one great big post that will piss someone off.  I hope.

It takes me a while to develop my thoughts.  It takes effort for me to explain myself step by step.  Much of the time I have to go back and explain twenty or thirty years of history to explain why I just made the decision I chose.  But I try to be consistent in my thought process and rational in my decisions.  It just doesn't always show through.

The other problem is when I use those "tidbit" soundbites that has a deep meaning to me but doesn't necessarily have full relevance to someone else.  I try really hard to not use those conversation shortcuts when not everyone knows what they mean, but they're often really useful to me and slip through.  You'll know when I use one - they seem strange and out of context.  I'll talk about "Loading the truck" and I'm really talking about pretending to throw my anger over my shoulder, but I'm really just throwing it into the bed of a truck I'm dragging behind me - and I can drag a dump truck, no little pickup truck for this guy!  It's a bad thing, eventually that truck has to get dumped and you don't want to be the one dumped on.  See?  Easy, short, logical, and pretty much impossible to figure out without having it explained to you.

Implicit conversions often need to be made explicit.  Implicit conversions work okay for a while, but explicit conversions leave no room for error.  They're a lot more work, it's not always worth it, but when I find I am getting misunderstood I need to go back to explicit conversations.  Explicit conversations can sometimes be risky, or hurtful, but they are worth the clarity.

So a couple of helpful hints about conversations with me:

My entire life is dedicated to meeting my cornerstones as a person.  If I'm not honest, trustworthy, fair, and respectful I am nothing as a man.  If my conversation runs counter to those principles we need to have an explicit conversation and I need to either apologize or explain myself.  And probably apologize and then explain myself.

I have an overdeveloped sense of humour, and my entire life is a huge inside joke.  If you don't get the joke, I can try to explain it but it's going to take a while.  Laugh along if you can, we'll talk explicitly about it later.

I am absolutely an unhurtful person.  If you feel hurt by anything I've said, please, let's immediately have an explicit conversation over coffee.  Hurting someone else is utterly unacceptable to me.

Apparently I'm flirty.  Yay me.  It's going nowhere.  Trust me.  For the full explanation of that one, see "This is (Really) Why I'm Single."  Oh wait, Firefox crashed and I lost that post.  Just trust me on this one for now.

Lastly, you may think I'd be fun at a party, I'm not all that much fun at a party.  You may think that I'm more fun with a couple of beers, I'm pretty much the same after a couple of beers and I'm a lightweight anyways.  You may think that I'm just a super nice guy, I'm really the same old asshole I've always been but I'm trying to be more tactful about it.

I should be exactly the guy I appear to be.  If I'm not, it is time to shift from implicit to explicit.  I'm more than willing, let's sit down and discuss it.

I love Twitter.com.

No, really, I love it.  A whole lot.  I love the people I've met there.  I love the ideas I've shared there.  I love the things I learn and the links I dig up.  The whole environment is exactly what I like.

The only thing that will make me fall out of love with twitter is... Twitter itself.

I tweet long and often.  I retweet any time I read something interesting or like something or laugh at something.  Some people think I'm there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because I always seem to be about.  I'm not, but with my ridiculous schedule you never have the slightest of ideas when I'm actually reading your tweets and following up with something interesting I spotted.  The reason twitter works for me is because I strictly trust it to NOT be private (and therefore anything I say on twitter is spewed to the world with a "No Genie Back in the Bottle" guarantee (tm).  And also because I have found a huge network of friends-I've-never-met (also tm).  Counterpoint that with a service that I loathe.  My experience with privacy on Facebook has been atrocious and I refuse to use it actively.

Now, there's a few secrets I haven't told anyone until now.  The reason I can manage to appear to be on twitter continuously and always be ready with a reply or a joke comes from two things.
 1) I can type quickly.  I'm probably not at the 140 words per minute range anymore, but I'm guessing I can still probably pull off 100 wpm.
 2) I'm really good at using the tools at my disposal.

Lists are essential to me.  If you're on one of my lists, it's a good thing and I want to be certain you know it's a good thing.  I'm at 12 lists (the maximum) and I use all of them on a regular or semi-regular basis.  I have to use them well or I'd never manage to stay sane.

I was once told, "You know, you'd have a lot more followers if you limited what you talked about and focused on one or two things."  I just slightly regret not splitting the political with the astronomy-and-the-rest accounts because they are somewhat separate and apart.  In the process, I've found so many of my politically-oriented friends are interested in the science that interests me, or ask me questions about the cool stuff I RT.  I've had dozens of space tweeps ask me about curling when it was on during the Olympics and I was able to make the point that curling looks graceful and easy for Olympic athletes, but for us league curlers do it for fun and exercise and we'd get slaughtered if we played against any of those teams.  Forming relationships in the minutia of day to day life is where twitter has excelled.

I don't care about my follower count, I care that I'm communicating with cool and interesting people.  I care that I'm discovering awesome ideas and learning new things.  I don't care if you're put off that I'm talking about space and then my kids and then curling and then local politics and then the latest security software for your computer and then the clouds going overhead.  These are the things that make up me.  The total of all of this (and more) makes up the whole of me.  You get a window into the person that I am.

So what's happening with the diminishing love as of late?

It's going back to last March, really.  Twitter has been going through some internal changes with the way it operates with outside software.  Part of this has been twitter saying a few select clients are to be blessed as official and they don't want a pile of new clients confusing the ecosystem.  It was a terrible mistake from twitter and it severely hurt a large component of the good will and community that made twitter great in the first place.

My favourite twitter client is (was) called Nambu.  It was built specifically for Macs - not for Windows or Linux, although it could have easy been moved over to other platforms with enough time and money.  By being specific to one platform (ie "Native on a Mac") it performed as a twitter client exceptionally in a Mac environment.  It looked great, it behaved great, but most importantly to me, it allowed me to use my tools in a way that was extremely productive.

I used it as shown here:

You can change the layout, but this is the one that really works for me.  On the left are my two accounts: @Zarquil and @BetterYYC.  I can see instantly through the tree how many unread messages in each category.  Lists open up like the searches have in the photo and it's no time at all to flit from interesting thing to interesting thing.

But the real magic is that Nambu has built in translation.  I literally follow people from around the world, some of my favourites are @Miu___ and @geeky_teacher who are not from English speaking countries.  Nambu makes it easy to stay in touch even when they're tweeting in Japanese or Spanish.  A tool that works *for* me, that makes my life easier and more complete.  Awesome.

Except the Nambu team gave up on twitter.  Presumably the changes became too onerous and they no longer felt welcome in the twitter ecosystem.  And it's a shame.

I understand where twitter is coming from.  They want all their users to feel comfortable and have everything feel pretty much the same no matter which tool they use.  They feel that there's enough interesting projects on the fringes that they don't need a hundred thousand twitter clients with their own unique ways of presenting tweets.  Twitter figures that they are going to eventually create the perfect interface and all the other clients are "filling in gaps" that twitter itself will eventually get around to.

And there, they are now dead wrong.

The problem is that twitter has the hubris to believe they (and only they) can get it right.  They haven't, they cannot.  You cannot be all things to all people.  You shouldn't even try.  You cannot protect your business interests if you are driving away your customers with a substandard experience.

Nambu works for me because the interface is laid out perfectly for the way I use twitter.  Twitter's interface looks nothing like that and it is much, much harder for me to effectively participate at the level I did before.  I have to click and search to get lists.  I cannot flip rapidly between searches to keep up with what's happening in real time.  Twitter does not have a button to click (or more ideally, a keyboard shortcut) I can use to translate foreign language tweets from people I love to read.  My replies don't autocomplete usernames, I have less control of retweets, I can't mute topics of disinterest, the entire experience is substandard.

We're not talking gaps in the twitter interface.  We're talking huge, massive gaping holes you can lose a Narn Heavy Cruiser in.  Things that are essential to me, but may not matter to you at all.  It's an obscenity of hubris that they believe I can only use twitter in the fashion they imagine.

Harming the relationships with your users is what will eventually destroy your service.  My relationship with twitter is not only with twitter, but also through Nambu.  By harming twitter's relationship with Nambu, twitter has harmed their relationship with me.  Hopefully another service such as identi.ca (where I've been establishing more of a technical relationship) may be able to step forward and my friends from twitter will find ways to re-establish their relationship with *me* through a medium that is more respectful of it's diverse users.  The relationship between the users - my friends - is more important than our relationship with twitter itself.

Why am I mentioning this?  Am I threatening to leave twitter?  Am I building a new service or a new client?  No.  I'm happy, for now, but my productivity has dropped significantly and I'm missing some of the connections I used to make easily though a better user experience Nambu brought me.  Now I have no other option I'm happy with.

The reason I am mentioning this is that twitter is just the example.  The same hubris is happening all over the place.  Firefox has went to a rapid release cycle - not a bad thing in and of itself, but the side effects are killing me and the user experience is worse than ever.  The bugs that are affecting me are not getting fixed and some are actually getting *worse*.  My former bank has the hubris to feel that I need to fit into their new style accounts rather than the account they won't let me have any more because it doesn't fit their business goals.  My experience is horrible and I found a bank that offered a better experience.

Any time our choices get restricted without good alternatives is a bad experience.  When your users or your customers are complaining about the bad experience we perceive and you treat us like we're wrong and our concerns are unimportant, you are setting yourself up for spectacular failure.

There are two take home lessons here.  If you are outright ignoring a segment of your user base, no matter how small it may appear, you risk alienating the most influential segment of your user base and risk failing to improve, failing to succeed, and quite possibly the failure to even exist into the future.

The other lesson is that if you are a user and a service is providing you with a diminished experience, it is your duty to complain and complain loudly.  If the service is unresponsive and you have exhausted your options and your patience, it is time to look for other options.  Other options are always out there.  Even when they have to be built up from nothing.

Last Thursday or so, my Lady-love brings in her laptop and says, "It's wrecked.  Fix it, you sexy geek of +3 studliness."* 

"Uh-oh," I think to myself.  She pulls it out of her bag, I see a hinge standing straight outwards and a shower of broken plastic bits where the outer shell used to be. 

Crap.  I hate fixing laptops.  It's bloody impossible without just getting entire new parts.  May as well just go buy a new one that's modern and up-to-date rather than fixing it or you're guaranteed to be toting around a decrepit piece of junk that's patched together with bailing twine and horse gum.  It's impossible to properly fix anything with broken plastic.

Laptops are the one and only thing for which I strongly recommend getting an extended warranty.  I never get an extended warranty for anything else, but I expect a laptop to last me three years before I get a new one and if anything busts on it, I damn well don't want to fix it on my own. 

Furthering the complication, she didn't buy it on her own so I had no idea if it was still covered under warranty.  Okay, before I permanently destroy it, let's call Asus.  Dial them up.  Get a tech on the other end.  Explained what happened.  Provided the serial number.  Got an RMA.  Asus shipped us a box to pack the laptop into for return.  That's it!  Most painless return I've ever endured.  Good customer service, a decent tech who knew what he was doing, what a great experience.  I'm not at all concerned with having problems with an Asus laptop again. 

So how do you top a good experience like that? 

Sunday night I'm flipping though some tech sites and my screen hashes out on me.  Think something along the lines of "blue plaid shirt" screen effects.  "UH-OH!" I thought.  "Looks like my Mac overheated."  Well, it was late, it was easier to shut it down and take a shot at troubleshooting on Monday. 

Monday night I got home, opened the Mac, and...  core dumped.  Notwithstanding the incredibly fortunate pun of a Mac core dumping, I was wondering what the hell was going on.  Rebooted.  Opened Firefox.  Screen gibberish all over my Firefox tabs and then my computer hangs.  That can't be good.  Reboot.  Open Safari, see the same junk on my screen and the computer crashes again.  At this point I'm really happy I got AppleCare. 

So I call Westworld and ask for service.  I didn't even get that far, the woman I spoke with tells me to bring it in for a tech to diagnose.  Oooookay.. 

Take it in, their service tech takes it to the back, returns less than 30 seconds later and says, "It's the logic board.  Three to five days."

Now, not being one to speak Applease, but being one who's just thrilled that it's covered under AppleCare, I'm happy to leave my laptop behind and have it repaired.  "Logic board" means "motherboard" to most people, and the long and the short is my MacBook needed some expensive love and care.  $1,236 plus labour, thank you very much.  I feel smarter for wasting my $300 or so on an extended warranty. 

So tonight - Wednesday - I get a call just as I'm leaving work.  It's Westworld and I'm feeling the dread well up inside me considering what WON'T be covered by warranty.  Excess dog hair in the fan?  Unapproved music in iTunes?  Dead hooker in the trunk?  How much extra is THIS going to cost me right now?

"Sir, your MacBook is ready to be picked up." 

It was fantastic.  The timing was perfect.  All I had to do was go get my laptop.  Easy.  Easier than easy.  Absolutely painless. 

When I picked it up, I'd left the work order at home.  I wasn't expecting it to be ready until Thursday at the soonest and possibly next Monday.  I had to present my drivers licence and...

Well, I had to wait for her to clean my computer.  Yes, my computer is officially as clean as the day I bought it.  And normally it's the same texture as my stove.

Sooo....  That's it!  Customer service that's been a complete joy to deal with.  No messing with stupid, recite by rote service droids.  No incomprehensible accents.  No scrambling to find original packaging.  No hidden charges.  No panic.  No problems.  No issues.  Except, of course, our original issues, which were resolved.

Well, mine was resolved.  My Lady-love's are still in process.  Westworld wins the speed race, but there was no shipping involved.  We'll see how Asus does in the next week or so.  It's a long, long ways away from the bad old days of craptastic service.  Yay.



*All conversations may have been filtered through the brain of a man and may not be exactly as represented.

Hey Claude, I've got good news, good news, and more good news for you. 

1.  The way that conficker works is by attacking a bug that was known in Windows but was not patched by the computer's owner.  Fortunately, I've spoken with the bozo that patched your computer and he assures me that he did, in fact, patch your system with all patches that were available on the day that he worked on it.  Sometimes when you install programs on your computer it uses new components that weren't used before.  Those components might have patches too.  When I updated your computer, I made sure that I rebooted and checked Microsoft Update as one of the very last things that I did.  The end result of this is that I know your computer was fully patched when you got it.  The bug that conficker uses was fixed with the patching I performed on your system.  Yay!  You're probably covered.  (I *never* speak in absolutes.) 

2.  A whole pile of smart people figured out a way to find it.  I won't bore you with the details, but most of the antivirus programs out there are busy jamming it into their products to protect you.  I've been told AVG 8.5 does include conficker protection, so once more, you should be safe. 

One small warning:  One of the things this sucker does is turn off some of the things that keep you safe such as:  Windows Update, Windows Security Center, Windows Defender and Windows Reporting.  It also may block some antivirus software websites!  Hence it could be blocking your antivirus.  In the unlikely event that you have been infected, and you notice odd behaviour from your computer, use one of the removal tools listed here. 

3.  Last of the good news is that it's April Fools Day in Australia right now and so far it's looking okay.  That's not to say that 12 hours from now the servers are going to wake up and cause havok.  But as of this moment right now, we're going fine.

  - Mark

---

Most important is to not panic.  Second most important is to use some common sense. 

Patch your system by using Windows Update or Microsoft Update.  That would have stopped this in it's tracks.

Unfortunately, many people object to Windows Update because of the check they employ to test for pirated copies of Windows.  Please go patch your systems!  Microsoft gives access to critical updates to avoid this exact scenario.  If your copy of Windows is pirated, then get a proper licence, install a distribution of Linux (I prefer Ubuntu) or get off the internet.  If you're one of my clients, call me immediately because something requires immediate attention.

In my opinion, Microsoft has done a truly horrible thing by linking WGA to Microsoft Update.  It gives the impression that you're under the magnifying glass for piracy instead of focusing on it's job to keep you safe.  I would like to see it offer critical updates first and then push out the WGA.  But I'm not majority shareholder in Microsoft yet.

Second on the list of common sense is to have an antivirus program installed.  There is a lot of hype about Conficker right now, use an anti-virus program I trust.  I personally recommend the free versions of AVG, Avast and Avira for home users and there is always the Open Source ClamWin - based on the technically excellent ClamAV.  There are several other reputable anti-virus companies available, although I do not believe there is any reason for home users to pay for anti-virus solutions any more.

Third, go get a home router and don't connect to the internet unless you're behind a firewall.  Bonus, you can easily hook several computers to your broadband connection.

Safe computing out there.

One of the weird things that's been happening the last few weeks has been the seeming implosion of people's computers around me. 

My philosophy is that people should feel free to use their computers without fear that they'll bust something or screw something up or do their banking on-line and instantly lose their life's savings.  I think you have to be in the stock market to do that still. 

The problem with this is that people get a very disjointed view of what I actually do at work.  I've been having a whole series of piecemeal conversations where I'm trying to explain what I do.

Yes, much of my time is doing updates.  Well, yes, it's sort of like running Windows Update, only more frequently and a whole lot easier.  Yes, I do backups.  Well, no, taking backups is not particularly arduous, but I have to think about what is being backed up, how frequently it's being backed up, and trying to make sure that the important stuff that gets created gets included in the backups.  And testing backups is critical - it's no good having a backup if you can't get the data back after you've had some kind of disaster.  Much of what I do is to try to learn new ways of being more proactive and averting problems in the first place. 

And sure, that's a lot like what I do when I work on someone's home computer.  But the scale is a whole lot different.  I'm never fixing viruses at work - in fact I'm quite annoyed when I have an infected computer.  Okay, I'm royally pissed off, but that's probably because someone did something stupid.  I'm never troubleshooting, say, a video card.  Suspect hardware usually isn't worth trying to salvage in a business environment.  You try to head off issues long before they occur, because inevitably you're going to have the question of "Why doesn't my email come in blue anymore?  All of it comes in as read now!"  You'll have to go try to figure out what changed, what crazy circumstance is different, and what it actually means.

On the other hand, although I can run circles around just about any Windows issue I get, I've been feeling really stressed out about some Linux issues lately.  Mostly I need to spend some time thinking things through and playing on my own hardware and trying to break things and then subsequently fix them.  Time invested means value returned.  Also true for your computer at home. 

I'm pretty good on the server side, but I'm not great and I want to reach that level of greatness.  It's harder with all the cruft getting in the way right now, but time + effort brings accomplishment and I'm really trying not to stress over not knowing everything.

So I'm talking about skill levels with a buddy of mine and we get comparing myself to my guru.  "Hey," I said, "It's not like I'm Trever or anything.  I'm sorta like Trever-in-training."

I get that deadpan look that indicates I've just said something stupid.

"What?  Did you just say you're T.I.T?"

"I feel the frustration 
In this funky old city tonight. 
There's a pack of dogs on the lawn 
And they're hung-a-ry for a bite." 

Ah, the new year.  Time for reflection on what's transpired and rumination on what is to come.  What did I do last year for my pseudo-contemplative musings? 

Oh, right.  Nothing.  I was going through the cold-soon-to-be-pneumonia with the side trip of "Does cancer run in your family?" and "Whatever happened to that blood clot in your lungs?"  I wasn't blogging much then. 

The year where I got fired from a place I no longer wanted to be and took the reins on a bunch of Linux servers just to get smacked around with how great the gap between what I know, what I want to know, and just what precisely it was I thought I knew in the first place.  You know? 

The year I turned 40 and realized that I still think of my father in terms of him being 30.  The year where I drove a honest-to-ghod race car and set my best time on a lap I made from a standing start.  The year I met my goal of 100 cache finds.  Wait, I didn't quite make it yet.  Next year.  The year I discovered the sweet intoxication of a Blackberry (my precioussss) Curve.  The year I recovered the photos of the kids I'd lost two years ago.  Remind me to back all those up to archival DVD's, okay?  Heh heh..

I get the impression most people are happy to see 2008 fall behind them.  For me, it wasn't all that bad.  Once I got past that really lousy few months.

I haven't been doing great on the Couch to 5k programme, but I'm significantly stronger in my lungs than I have been.  I took a hit with the cold weather and Christmas, but it's not about being perfect, it's all about improving.  There was a reason I gave myself six months to finish.  It's the year I got back into curling and I'm having the time of my life.  I genuinely like all the guys on my team, I'm learning how to be a better player and I'm adapting from the "player who doesn't fall coming out of the hack" to the "player who can adequately find weight about 50 percent of the time."

After a couple years of blah I've been more in touch with the music I love again.  I've actually got a little bit more than just the podcast of Dispatches on my iPod.  I need more blues, funk and jazz in my life especially after Iceberg reorganized again (sigh).  But riding home on the bus my mind flips over using one of those more obscure axes it likes to use, and I think of Danny Marks.  Damned if I don't dig up his website too!  Looks like birthday 41 is going to include some great music.

Thinking of Danny makes me think about this one time back on the Hum Line when someone called in and asked about a song that contained the phrase, "It's hot and it's sticky / Think I'll get myself a mickey / I'm so parched and dry."  And, in my mind at least, Danny shot out of his chair and said, "That's a song from a buddy of mine, _____ _______."  Now, I liked the song and hadn't heard it for years at that point and I was giddy to have a handle on who did it and what the album was and I rushed right out and searched for a couple of years and managed to dig up a casette tape (title and artist long since forgotten) which is probably out in Mike's basement right now.  And riding home on that bus, I dug out my trusty ol' Crackberry and spent the next 45 minutes chasing down the song, failing miserably.

Today, I'm messing around on youtube and I find it.  The Extras with "Can't Stand Still."  And he's got the video for "Jealous Girl" up there too!  Ooooooh, eightieslicious!  By the way, Danny's friend was Leon Stevenson who will also be getting a visit from my credit card in short order.

So yes, I still feel like I have too much to do and not enough time or brainpower to get it all done.  Yup, I've got a pile of clutter and hell stacked around me that drives my Lady-love crazy that I can't seem to get a grip on.  Runescape time has dropped from a couple hours a day to a couple hours a week on a good week.  The year I planned on shrinking my consulting business saw expansion.  I took a couple financial hits that I'll have to work on and probably won't see much improvement for a couple more years now.

All in all, the biggest plus in my corner right now is that I'm not standing still.  I still feel a lot of frustration, I can feel those dogs nipping at my heels, and it may be hot and sticky and on the edge of something nasty ready to break out, but I feel like I've gotten traction regardless of everything else around me.

The idea of keeping a finger on something from my past while looking forward to the future appeals to me.  Don't forget who you are and what made you the person you are.  Now just dig in, change what you can to keep moving forward and don't worry about the costs, focus on the benefits from your effort.

Here's a surprise. 

I'm a professional System Administrator.  My standard joke here goes, "Because I get paid for it, not because I'm any good at what I do." 

I have long and hard declared my own ineptitude along the way.  Yes, I forward spam.  Yes, I have the coding skills of a 1970's monkey strung out on polyester.  Yes, Virginia, even I can fail to count to three starting from zero. 

But all in all, you take the battle scars and you learn from them.  It's more than just not repeating the same mistakes all over again, it's also about being wise enough to foresee mistakes before they happen and avert them. 

If you have to choose patch or no patch, take patch.  Just don't patch your production server FIRST if you don't have to.  When you're buying a new computer, the first question ALWAYS needs to be, "What are you planning to use this for?"  I have four computers I use almost daily, and each is good at something and lousy at another. 

A couple years ago, my external hard drive failed.  It was a 250 GB drive formatted with FAT so I could haul it between all my various systems and plug it in.  I'm proud to say, I lost absolutely NOTHING of consequence because it was only my backup drive.

Well, except for those photos of the kids I only stored on the backup drive because I never bothered burning them to CD when I had the chance.

Number one rule of paranoia, never, EVER consider possibly not having a backup of your important files, and never EVER consider not having a spare backup in case the first one goes bad and never EVER consider not testing your backup once you've made it.  That's one rule.  Did you back up your files lately?  BACK THEM UP!  NOW!  DON'T WAIT!

Well, what keeps me running in the professional class is my ability to recover after spectacularly failing.  Sometimes it's trial and error.  Sometimes it's using a great deal of searching the web.  Almost always it's trying to find someone else's experience and following their solution.

I first hit the web.  There are hundreds of programs out there for data recovery.  A few dozen that look sorta promising.  Most are costing around $100, give or take.  Not a lot that look appealing.  For me, it's a real pisser to go through the effort of downloading a trial version which may or may not let me look at my lost files, then go through the effort of paying to hopefully recover the files I may or may not get.  I'm wary of the Symantec's of the world (where good software goes to die) that have this massive promo department but the software itself just isn't very good.  Sure, any of these *may* recover my files, but that's a lot of time, effort, trust and "if's" to wind my way through.

On the other hand, I trust anything licenced under the GPL.  Not because I can read the code and figure out what it does, but someone could.  (Not that anyone necessarily does, either, by the way.  Don't hang yourself with blind trust.  It's a paranoia thing.)

FAT-32 isn't an overly complicated file system, and magically losing the whole drive usually means the entire drive wasn't magically lost.  Think of it like a book with the Table of Contents ripped out.  The data's still there, you just have to go through it page by page to figure out where stuff is.  It just takes a while to piece it all together and you can re-create the Table of Contents later.

My drive likely had the File Allocation Table (that's the "FAT" in "FAT") or the Master Boot Record ripped away.  Sure, I had pictures that I'd rather not lose on there, but it wasn't life or death if I couldn't get them back.  Well worthy of taking a shot at it on my own.  Remember - I am a professional.

Well, I managed to dig up TestDisk from CGSecurity and figured I'd give it a shot.  Downloaded it to my good hard drive, scanned the bad hard drive and let it walk me through the recovery process.  For the record, the first pass found nothing, the second "deeper" pass found the backup FAT and restored using it.  Easy!  Fun!  A little bit convoluted if you don't know what you're doing.  But it worked fine - I got my photos back.

I didn't have to pay a dime, but I did.  They suggested 25 Euros, I donated 10 instead.  I doubt I'll hear harsh words over it, and I'll donate another 10 the next time I use TestDisk.

I recommend letting a professional try to recover your data rather than doing it yourself if you have the choice.  But sometimes the choice isn't easy to make.  Take your time reading the options, and feel free to put your trust in the program.  Christophe Grenier is also a professional and I justifiably put my trust in his abilities.  It's good to have smart friends.  That I've never met.

----

Zarquil Zonar's guide to what to do when your hard drive fails:

1.  Turn off your computer.  The more you write to the hard drive, the higher the risk that you'll overwrite a file you need.
2.  Don't panic.
3.  Remove the failed hard drive and put it into a working computer as a secondary drive.  Beware the gotchas:  Is it an IDE (older) drive or a SATA drive?  If IDE, do you have it as master, slave or cable select?  If you're not sure, disconnect your DVD/CD drive and plug the hard drive on a cable of it's own.
4.  Boot from your good drive, be patient.  I have seen a chdisk actually repair a failed drive when the computer booted.  It's not likely, but it happens.
5.  If your system finds the other drive but does not recognize the formatting, don't panic.  And don't format it.
6.  Download TestDisk or your favourite rescue program.  (Ideally, this happened before you put in the other drive.)  One of the reasons I like TestDisk is that you don't have to install it - just unzip it and run.
7.  Scan the bad drive.  Follow instructions carefully.  Usually the program will guide you with default settings so you only have to hit enter.  But be alert, and pay attention to the warnings.
8.  Don't panic.  Odds are you either recovered your drive or it's unrecoverable.

Remember, a good backup regime means never having to recover a failed drive.

And this, kids, is why we have to pay attention. 

SPAM, how I love thee.  I'm sure if you've ever used the interweb you've probably got one or two of your own along the way.  One of my tasks is to cut back on the SPAM that gets through to the rest of the staff, but in the meanwhile to try to minimize the number of false positives.  Fair enough, it is what we've brought upon ourselves with the underpinnings of email.  Spammers take advantage of how email was designed to work.  Our email system was put together years ago when most people on the net trusted each other - often because they actually knew each other as they met through conferences and collaborations, using email to work together from distant locations. 

I don't know the network admin downstairs, let alone the guy managing Shaw's network or AT&T's network or Reinhardt College's network.  Well, not personally, anyways. 

So you gotta think I'm pretty familiar with all the SPAM tricks and can spot them a mile away, right? 

*sigh* 

I get an email allegedly from Delta Airlines to a former employee.  Wanting to be nice and helpful I happily forward it back to him.  It's confirmation of a ticket, ferghod'ssake, so it's got to be important and get sent to him pronto, right?  I even laughed at the utter stupidity of Delta Airlines to include a PASSWORD in PLAIN TEXT in an email - that's just stupid kids, never, ever, EVER send a password in an email.  It's flat out idiotic.  People watch for stuff like that.

The truth:  It really was spam.  I got completely utterly sucked in by half-paying attention and trying to be helpful without cognitively processing the email.  Well, I certainly feel stupid after the fact.

If nothing else, it emphasizes the point that security is a process.  There is no one single thing you can do to be safe.  There are a whole lot of things you need to do to reduce the risk, but there are no guarantees.

Outlook Express and it's big brother Outlook has proven itself to be a massively huge security hole in the past and continues to have my scorn as my single most hated application.  I hate a lot of programs.  It takes a lot to make #1 on my list.  Not everyone can get off Outlook, but I certainly recommend you try to get off it entirely.  Is Windows Mail (the replacement that comes with Vista) any better?  I don't know, I have so little trust from past history I refuse to touch it.  Fool me once, shame on you...

If you have a safer email program, there's no guarantee you're not going to blow it and mistake spam for a real message.  It happened to me, and I'm a professional.  Think about your system settings next.  Are you hiding the file extensions on Windows?  It remains the dumbest default setting I can think of in Windows.  You need to be able to see what the real file name is ALWAYS.  Go to Windows Explorer (Windows-E for the short cut), go to Tools --> Folder Options, then the View tab and uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" in the Advanced options.  I don't care if you barely understand that sentence, if you run Windows you should be doing everything you can to find that setting and change it.  You're not going to have evil.jpg.exe sneaking onto your computer to do damage when you see it's an executable file pretending to be a picture.

Okay, so you've dumped Outhouse, you've changed your settings to be more secure, and you're still dumb enough to open that lousy email.  I laughed once I saw it, because it wasn't going to run on the Mac no matter what.  Woo-hoo, I am mighty and invulnerable on my shiny aluminum shield of impregnability!

Nope.  Sooner or later there's going to be a script written that's going to target OS X and punch through in a meaningful way.  Eventually there's going to be some program that runs in the background on Linux.  There already are, but for design decisions it's more difficult to run rampage across your entire computer in OS X and Linux.  Any computer professional that is honest with his or herself sees the benefit of not running as administrator (as found in Linux, OS X and Vista) and they also know that running as a limited user is not a panacea.

So it's hopeless and we should all turn off our computers and get off the net.  Perhaps not a bad idea, but a little cynical even for me.

It's an arms race out there and we all have to take our own responsibility for our computers.  Patch according to best practises.  Try to limit your risk.  Think when you open your email.  Never buy anything that came unsolicited into your inbox.

You'd think it would be obvious.  But if it was, the profit motivation for spam would have dried up years ago and we'd severely cut back our attack vectors.

No one is safe.  No one is immune.  The onus is on us all.  We all have to take charge and fix this.

Won't someone please teach me to be THIS wonderfully evil?

I have an affliction.

I am a geek. A nerd. One of those social dysfuntionals that loves freshly printed circuits more than the soft caress of life itself. Once I spoke with a recruiter who was supposed to be helping me fill out a list of my interests. She said something to the effect of, "You don't want people to think that after you go around at work for 8 hours that you go home and do more of the same." I'm a System Administrator / Network Administrator / Database Administrator. It's a little bit systemic, don't you think? There's a section of my brain that doesn't turn off, I'm always trying to improve myself and do my work more efficiently. 

Even worse: It's FUN! I still get a kick from sitting around learning how to do something new, installing a program for the first time, optimizing a computer, configuring a webserver, discovering a new piece of hardware, or some such. It's accomplishment in getting something new done. It's a great feeling knowing that I'll be able to use it someday in my job to great advantage.

My financial guidance counsellor has been making a lot of hay with my story. I made a plan and we've stuck to it through some divots and some road blocks, and at the other side I'm working in the IT field and I'm proud of the consulting business I've managed to slowly build. Without the work I put in to repairing, optimizing and restoring other people's computers I would never have had the confidence or show my ability to administrate on a professional basis. The plan was important, and actively working towards my goals has been the only way this could have happened.

So, let me mention another little plan that's going on. Nicholas Negroponte had a vision to put low-cost, quality built computers into the hands of children in the developing world so they could achieve a higher standard of education. Not everyone will be a geek like me - nor ought they. But I believe that everyone deserves a chance to find their talents and discover just how good they can become with the right tools, a little helpful encouragement, and a whole lot of drive to follow through with the dreams they conjure.

The result of Negroponte's vision was One Laptop Per Child and the XO laptop. Last year they had a program called "Give 1, Get 1." If you bought TWO XO laptops, they sent one to somewhere in the developing world and they sent one to you. I waffled for a while over it, but finally decided it was a very worthy idea I could get behind. The program is now ended, but I have hopes they will revive it again.

Last Friday I received my XO laptop. I was tickled green to get it. Like so many other parents who got involved in the program, I planned to share this computer with my kids and let them have at it to see how useful it was to them. They've been complete pros with it, messing about hither and thon, teaching me things I hadn't figured out on my own yet. I'll primarily use it as an eBook reader on the bus. Already I've found a ton of books via Project Gutenburg that I'm looking forward to reading. The kids can pretty much do whatever they want on here and all the power in the world to them.

But there is one aspect that's missing to me in this: This isn't meant to be a cheap laptop, it isn't meant to be just-another-charitable-donation, it isn't meant to be a toy to be neglected by the kids. I want to turn MY little corner of Negroponte's vision into my own little educational venture. Hopefully I'll be able to leverage this into learning Python and improving my programming skills. Or - dare to dream - actually write some fun and educational game that gets used by some kid half a world a way.

This computer is something special. It's comprised of hardware, software, and ideals.

---

Postscript:  Clearly the XO is not perfect.  It didn't send line returns correctly so I had one long run-on post until I logged on this morning and fixed it.  I didn't have the ability to embed links.  And I got as far as the first paragraph before I plugged in a USB keyboard so I could actually type at speed.  But as a learning tool, I'm more than impressed.