What's it all about, Alfie?

I was talking to a few guys around the office today - specifically about how they had not passed a test in their series of certification exams that several more people need to take around this place. I've written about the evils of these vendor exams - written by people that aren't professional educators, graded in the most cursory manner - computerized for the most part, and the resulting problems this makes for people in the workplace that need these certifications for their jobs.

But that's not what I'm writing about now. No, this is something I hadn't realized I'd picked up along the way to where I am today. I'm talking about understanding the difference between "testing" and "fact checking".

What I mean by the first is that anyone, at any time can make a test for someone. We do it all the time as parents ("Did you knock this over?"), we do this as developers ("Is this the problem with the system?") and as companies - in the form of these certifications. They aren't fair, don't really concern themselves with "right" and "wrong" - they are questions, challenges, and tasks that we must overcome to someone else's satisfaction in order to achieve what they have promised we'd receive.

"Fact checking" is all about the "right" and "wrong" - Can a 3kg spherical lead ball dropped from 1m crack a 1cm thick piece of glass? That kind of stuff. It's all something that that is by it's very nature objective. And for the most part, dispassionate.

"Testing" is all about someone's passion - I guarantee it. The person that wrote the material the test is based on... the instructor... the test's author - someone in this chain cares a great deal about this test. And as such, it's not about you, the test taker to tell them what's "right" and "wrong" - they already believe they have a firmer grasp on that than you - which is why you're taking the test and they are administering it.

What surprised me today was that I knew all this, and my co-workers didn't. Then I got to thinking about it and I realized where it all came from - grad school. I have to hand it to grad school, it really taught me this lesson. You sit in a class of less than a dozen grad students, and the professor knows you all by name. He's spending a lot of time trying to make this material understandable to you all, and so there's a lot he's got invested in the exams (tests). You need to make sure that when you take the tests, you give him what he's looking for. Period.

Maybe the university is an easy place to learn this, I don't know. But I do know that I have learned it, and I don't think of myself as cynical on this point. I think of myself as recognizing the concerns, issues, and feelings of the people involved. There's nothing to gain by making the test so simple it's useless as a gauge of the material retained. It's also equally useless to make it so hard that it's nearly impossible to pass - no one will pass it and therefore it'll have no value.

So there's a compromise there - an optimization of sorts. Again, grad school helps me there more than I initially realized. It's taken me 20 years, but I'm really starting to look back fondly to that place. Who knows... maybe we'll take a road trip and see the campus.

Last week I saw an interesting video making the rounds which included a few comments about the legal ownership of data available on the web. For instance, flickr is nice, but in order to put one of my pictures uploaded there on my blog, I have to make a link to the flickr page with that image.

Makes sense from flickr's point of view - it's how they pay for things. But it brings into question - Who's data is is anyway? I mean really... if they can make that rule, and Yahoo's music service can go dark, then what guarantees are there that my images uploaded to flickr aren't going to disappear? Or find their way into someone's photo gallery?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

This is one of the reasons I've tended to stay away from these "repository" sites - or hosted source control like SourceForge, hosted Subversion, etc. You never know what your rights are, and what theirs are. Even if you don't plan on having something of value there, are you opening yourself up if you put something up there, later decide to remove it and then try to claim it's really "yours"?

I'm certain there are some cases and some sites where you're out of luck the second the first upload it complete. It's theirs. and nothing you can do is going to change that. You just loose.

With the fact that license/usage agreements can include language that essentially says "subject to change without notice", you can't even be assured that you'll be alerted if the rules of usage change while your data is hosted there. It's almost impossible for the non-lawyer to know what they legally can do and can't do. And saying "Hey, it's a picture of me" doesn't count for squat in a courtroom.

So it's tough for me to see what the best course of action here is. I've decided not to post a lot of things to flickr even though it's a decent service, and could be really useful, but it's that like to the flickr page that causes me to pause.

Skitch is different - they might very well go away, and that would be bad, but I'd be willing to pay got Skitch usage/storage. No question. I might be willing to pay for flickr if they relaxed the rules, but I don't think I can trust that they will.

For the most part, I'm using HostMonster, and that I know I own the data. It costs more, but it's worth it. It's my space and my stuff. I've thought about the dotMac and MobileMe, and if they stabilize it out, I might be willing to go that route, but again, it has to be clear that it's mine for me to really depend on it.

I know someday there's going to be a shake-out and these "free" services are either going to have to charge or be a lot more up-front about the ownership issues. But until that day comes, you have to be personally careful. Better safe than sorry.

There has been stories of late talking about the possible end of USENET and the newsgroups based on the fact that certain states are asking ISPs to block large blocks of the binary newsgroups because of the concern of kiddie porn. Now far be it from me to advocate kiddie porn, but there's got to be a limit to the assumption of guilt as opposed to having it proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That is, after all, what we're all about, right?

In An American President, in one of the most eloquent speeches written, the President says:

You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.

You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free"

To me, the best our country is about is captured in those paragraphs. Sure, we've got liberty, but the best part about it is that I'm free from you imposing yourself on me. Majority rules, minority is heard.

Then someone decides that people are doing something wrong and they need to be stopped. Hey, I've got an idea... enforce the laws already on the books. When bank robbers moved from six-shooters to computers the FBI didn't need any new laws to catch them. They got smart and caught them. Period.

Don't take away the newsgroups because some one decides to use them illegally. Stop him (or her). Don't take something away from me. Don't ask to make your job easier at the expense of my freedoms. Lock the bad guys up, and leave the newsgroups alone.

I came across an interesting drawing app today on VersionTracker... it's called Scribbles and has an incredibly simplistic user interface, but at the same time, when I look at it, I can see a lot of utility in that program. Very interesting.

It's not Photoshop, and it's not a vector-based drawing app like DrawIt. It's more pixel-focused than that. It's got layers implemented very cleverly in the GUI, and yet the tools selection is purposefully simplistic. It's almost like you should be using it to... well... scribble. Little doodles - not mechanical drawings or fully rendered images. Just scribbles.

I've got Acorn for a lot of my image work, but it's more my Photoshop Elements replacement (even though I have PE as well). I use Acorn far more than any other graphics app, but there's still a place for something more, and I'm looking at Scribbles and thinking this is that something else.

Hard to say for sure now, but I'm going to register it and play with it a little. Can't hurt. It's certainly something to look at for a completely different, yet completely usable, GUI on the Mac. Very nice.

It's been a rough couple of days, as recent posts will attest. Plain and simple, it's been bad. But this morning I turned on my iPod and started listening to some of my music, and things started to seem not so horrible. It's an amazing thing with music - though I'm sure some research has been done to map the pleasure centers of the brain activated by music, I just know I feel a lot better when I listen to nice music.

I used to be a straight album (CD) guy - start an album listen to the whole thing. It's a carry over from the days when that's how music was delivered and that's how you played it. But a few years ago a good friend really got me into the playlist capability of iTunes, and it not only allowed me to stitch together my multi-album sets into complete 'volumes', it took a while but I started to really mix up the music and make real playlists.

Took a while, but what a difference. I used to run iTunes only when I need to rip a CD (I always bought CDs) - now it's running all the time pulling in podcasts and holding music, apps, and movies. Amazing.

While I never would have guessed it, this has really changed my ability to work in hostile environments. A little music can really fend off the gloom, and given the level of gloom I'm in, I need all the help I can get.

While I wasn't really unhappy with the v2.0 upgrade to my iPod Touch, I did realize that a lot of the original iPhone owners were saying that it was very slow, bug-ridden, and in general, a significant downgrade. So I was very interested in seeing what I'd find when I got the update.

One of the the things that really surprised me in the v2.0 update was the time. It probably took more than an hour to update my 32GB iPod Touch. I was stunned. Thankfully, one of the nice things I'd heard about this v2.0.1 update was that it was supposed to have a faster back-up functionality. Sure enough, it was significantly faster in this update than in the v2.0 update.

There are supposed to be a lot of fixes and improvements, but I'm guessing they aren't in the functions I've been using, as I didn't see a major issue with the old release. But it's nice to have something that loads apps faster, and fixes all these issues that the iPhone users have been complaining about.

That wonderful line from Office Space really hit home today. I have spent a lot of time with specs and documentation and very little time really coding or doing something useful. It's a lot of paper-pushing and very little meaty stuff to make the day pass quickly.

Consequently, I'm ready to get out of here and just enjoy the evening. I know it's in the middle of a (relative) heat wave - it's 90+ and very high humidity, but it's August in the MidWest - what can you honestly expect? This is what it's like here, and I've no interest in leaving. Misery loves company.

I'm hoping that tomorrow is going to be a day where I actually do more than I read or write. It's just that I'm feeling very managerial and if I wanted to do that, I'd have stayed in my previous job(s)... I'm here because I want to keep doing, but that doing is getting harder to find here. Sad to say.

Maybe things will pick up and there will be something that I have to dig into that takes half a day tomorrow - that would be sweet. Sounds odd, I know, but I really do hate the paper-pushing.

At home we've been having a real issue with Comcast where the speed was so unreliable that it became almost unusable. Huge pain in the rear. So we've gone through the Comcast angle and on Friday they came out and swapped out the cable modem and when Liza connected her machine directly to the cable modem it was fast, but after going through all the network in the house, it was slow. So it was clear that I had another issue to clear up.

All my tests in the house were showing me that the network wasn't the problem. Everything was fast, all tests showed things were just fine until I wanted to leave the house - then things got hit-or-miss. While I was doing some of these tests in my office I noticed that the LinkSys router's network port and the LinkSys 16-port 10/100 hub's network port were going offline and then back online. The router has only 4 ports, and I need the 16 for all the things in the office. But this was the first clue that there was something else going on.

My next test was to get on a machine on the hub and ping a machine on the router. When I did that and let it run, I could see that packets were getting dropped. HA! I was onto something. There seemed to be intermittent connectivity issue with the router and hub so off to BestBuy to see if they had what I needed. Thankfully, they did.

I picked up the NetGear WNR3500 wireless-N router and gigabit 4-port switch. I decided that while I was replacing the hardware, let's go gigabit and get a good wireless-N access point in the bargain. I also picked up a Netgear 16-port gigabit switch to replace the 16-port 10/100 hub, should that be the problem. Thankfully, it was just the router and when I got the new guy in and configured I saw marked speed improvements right away.

What a relief! I had enough evidence to think it was one of the two, but I'm glad it was the first one to replace and it means I can take my time replacing the other just to get to gigabit wired network speeds in my office. Nice upgrade, but getting a functional link to the cable modem was essential.

Well, there's certainly been a lot of noise on the net recently about Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch App Store. Good, Bad, Angry, Happy... all over the map. While I've only done a little bit of playing around on the App Store, I do have a few ideas on the App Store now. Overall, nat bad, but there's a lot Apple could do to make it better.

First, because I have the Touch, there's not a lot of apps that I'm going to buy because I leave the WiFi off most of the time to conserve battery power, also there aren't a ton of places where I'll have a Hot Spot and not pull out my laptop instead of my iPod. So it's got limited utility to me, but still, there are a few nice things, and as a sales tool for up-selling to the iPhone the Touch is a nice entry point.

So... the thing that seems to be the most significant issue is the fact that developers can't control the timing of releases to the App Store and then to the users. It's a nice idea to have the App Store handle all that, but the complaints I've seen and read certainly put Apple's speed of movement through the store as somewhat less than ideal. It's slow, and there's no way to give developers any idea of when their stuff will be out on the store and available for updating.

For someone who likes to make continual, small improvements to my code, this is a very bad thing. The delays in the publishing to the store require a different level of testing and certification by the developers. Face it, a lot of the Mac apps use Sparkle, or something similar to get automated updates out to their users pretty darn quickly. They control every aspect of the publishing. Now there's a publisher in the middle, and their speed isn't all that good. That makes a lot of the applications on the store look a bit dodgey. After all, what's it say to get an app that you and the developer knows is buggy, with a new release coming "soon" - whenever Apple gets around to posting it.

Not a good relationship builder.

I can see that there is the need for Apple to move more quickly, or allow for the direct downloading of applications from web sites - much like plugins and themes for Firefox. You download it and then it's there. Problem is, this allows for all those malicious web sites to download bad things and take over your phone... so I can see why they aren't too crazy about it.

There's also the unavoidable round of 'junk apps' - dozens of To Do apps and such. Hey, there's nothing you're ever going to be able to do about this stuff. It's new, it's there, and there are always going to be folks that are fast and trying to make a quick buck. Let it go... not even worth talking about. Darwin (natural selection) will weed them out and there's noting that solves this problem like time.

Then there's the legal battles over the simple act of talking about the SDK. This is something that has to be an oversight on the part of Apple and needs to be fixed to give developers a better feeling about Apple. Basically, some folks have read the SDK license agreement and said that GPL software can't be built for the iPhone because you have to be able to release details that are part of the NDA in the SDK license.

While I can understand this as a part of the initial SDK rollout, Apple can't expect to control people's conversations at dinner or over the net. They just aren't capable of doing that. But it's enough to scare people from talking about it in forums, etc. This is a very bad thing, and Apple needs to loosen up - like it has for the Mac OS X SDK. Let people talk. It's good for the platform. They have to know that they will get back a hundred-fold what they put out there - that's the way the developers are with Apple.

Yes, it's a new platform, and they don't want viruses, but they can't stop the virus writers, and so all they are doing is hurting those that can really help the platform.

So... it's got a lot of good things to like about the App Store, but a lot of things that need a little tweaking. I'm sure it'll get better, but it needs to make significant improvements in the publishing very soon or they will loose a lot of momentum they have generated with the launch.

It's been a bit of a day, as they might say. Plenty of issues from the Corporate Overlords (chat infrastructure group) about what I needed to be doing to shut off the requests my apps were making - going so far as to call it spamming... then there were several meetings that seemed to have marginal utility to me, but maybe they had more utility to others, I don't know.

Thankfully, there was a little coding in there, and I was kept busy with a new pricing infrastructure update that's on the way, but for the most part, I just found it hard not to think about a nice, beach vacation.

Yeah, one of those where you do a lot of sitting around... basically, a lot of nothing. Sure, I just got back from a nice vacation in Orlando, but that was a lot of work. Lots of walking, seeing, doing... not a lot of resting.

Next time - lots of nothing.