After reformatting my desktop (and installing the world) I was bitten by the “too many activations” error while trying to register my Adobe-ID. I lost about an hour chatting to the web support staff, with no sucess. I resorted to Adobe forums, where Jim Lester provided a helpful answer:
Support through ADE is not offered via phone or Web Chat support. It is only offered through submitting a web case (http://www.adobe.com/support/digitaleditions – click on ‘Submit a web case’). Avereage resolution time for these cases runs about 3 days.
Note: you have 6 activations (for computers, and then 6 seperate activations for devices) and each time you reformat you lose your activation
I submitted my web case and in less than 24h I got a friendly email informing me that I was OK.
The Rule of 200
2010/09/28
One can eat an elephant bit by bit, but sometimes defining the size of the bit helps too:
“The Rule of 200 works like this: my document word count must increase by 200 before I am done for the day, no exceptions.”
With minor variations, this can be applied to other activities too (like writing code, etc).
[via]
Being Geek
2010/09/27
I finished reading “Being Geek” by Michael Lopp. I am sure that Panagiotis (one of my “Your People“) will appreciate it more than me. For the first 20 chapters or so I got increasingly bored (to the point that I switched to reading another book). Then in the middle the book changes pace and provides valueable advice on how to prepare yourself before delivering a presentation. The author argues that there exists no good advice on how to write a presentation, I urge people to read Tufte‘s work, or at least “The cognitive style of PowerPoint“. Then the book becomes boring again.
While the book tries to be a personal growth / career book, it deals so much with interdepartmental politics and intrigue that it is no wonder people work overtime. Their regular worktime is spent not on what they are supposed to work on, but on forecasting fault and making sure it is delegated to others. I’ve got two more issues with the book. First, either it is full of grammatical and syntactic errors, or it makes use of so many American idioms that it is difficult to be read by someone for whom English is not a native language.
Second, I am highly irritated by the liberal use of the word engineer and its interchangeable use for computer scientist and programmer. There are people who are none, one, two or even three out of three, but the terms are not interchangeable. My absolute worst was when the author implied that engineers are not good project managers. Oh really? An Engineer knows his science, understands deadlines, knows that has to deliver a withing the budget solution and can manage people. Sorry Rands, I have an army Engineers to prove this. For example, Civil Engineers do this for a living in Greece and in the process manage people (and teams of people) of multicultural, multilingual and varying educational backgrounds. The fact that one can engineer solutions, does not make one an engineer.
I should have listened to Ozan. So why did I buy the book? Kudos to O’Reilly for providing cool bargaining deals on their eBook offers! I bought it in a buy one, get one free offer. Then why did I recommend the book to @stsimb? The book is not without value. I simply found it hard and tiring to decipher it. On the other hand I know @stsimb for ~15 years and can understand that there exist books that he might like while in fact I definitely did not. Given that I read most of the book while in the bus, this was not a total waste of time.
The (n-th) return of the Database Machine
2010/09/26
Once there were Database Machines. Talk to your favorite database person and they will tell you that this is an outdated idea. It is so old, that it can be served again as new and innovative. @mperedim remembers that I predicted that right after Oracle bought Sun. I am neither a market analyst nor I have predictive powers. It is just that Oracle has tried this before: Unbreakable Linux just a few years ago and with Sun hardware and Solaris in the 90s (It also happens that they had tried a lot of things with Sun before, like trying to move all their development desktops to Solaris x86. Or working with Sun on the NC which is no different than today’s netbook paradigm, or the X terminal of the early 90s or even the dumb terminal). So with a 20-year amnesia cycle in CS why not reintroduce the idea? Enter the Sun Oracle Database machines.
Oracle wants to sell such machines. It eliminates support (contract) complexity. Oracle needs a base Operating System that it can control its development and a hardware platform that can be optimized for what Oracle does best. Now clients can buy turn key solutions from Oracle just like they do when they buy IBM. Picture this: Two Linux machines, with Oracle 10g installed exchanging every kind of traffic except sqlplus. Whose fault is this? Oracle’s? The Linux vendor’s? It turned out to be a weird combination of the hardware. And this was discovered because the DBA and the System Administrator under the same employer decided to solve the problem (I was the System Administrator involved). Imagine two different vendors and the client trying to solve the problem: I would expect a lot of finger pointing instead of actually finding the solution and/or workaround.
Oracle now has the opportunity to market the product as a cost saver (“You only need an army of DBAs, not an army of DBAs and an army of systems administrators for different operating systems. Oh, and by the way our patching process just got simpler, you need to call only us”). While in fact a solution’s complexity is unaffected, support contract and communication complexity for the client is simplified. This looks better than buying IBM (or Microsoft) to the person that signs the checks.
Now if someone can make WebKit work with Emacs and we will have Lisp Machines resurrect…
PS: You do not believe in CS amnesia? In “Getting started as a PhD student” Matt Welsh writes: “you should never read anything from the 1960′s or 70′s or you will realize that it all has been done before”.
“Μπεμπέκα”
2010/09/24
ημέρες αγωνίας / security as an afterthought
OneWebDay
2010/09/22
Για φέτος ένα εξαιρετικό κείμενο που το διάβασα χάρη σε ένα tweet του @thedigitalbox:
το πιο διαχρονικό άρθρο του ελληνικού web http://bit.ly/atmleF
PS: Wikipedia on OneWebDay.
(previous)
Dimitris posted over at twitter a list of “Top funny source code comments” as compiled by Vinícius Krolow. Unfortunately /* You are not expected to understand this */ is not there. Fortunately, DMR explains it in “Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix“.
I am sure other lists of really cool comments exist and this thread over at StackOverflow seems to be collecting them.
Autism’s False Prophets
2010/09/14
I love “Cantor’s Dilemma“. In its final chapter (#22) a letter exchange between two powerful characters describes politics in Research in the most clear way. The book has one problem though. It is fiction.
“Autism’s False Prophets” by Paul Offit is not. It covers the various vaccines-cause-autism theories and provides scientific data that prove them wrong. Do you want to read about bad science? It is there. Do you want to read about non-repeatable experiments? It is there. Do you want to read about how people mistake correlation for causation? There too! Do you want to find out how charlatans of any background take advantage of desperate people? Read the book. People want to be heard and want (instant) relief. With science not having the answers (or answers they can accept and deal with) charlatans step in loudly and fill the void. As is written in the book, hope is the best fix, better than any drug on the street.
“An easy-to-read medical thriller about the consequences of greed, hubris and intellectual sloppiness” reads the back of the book. This is a a chronicle and a science thriller, not a science fiction or science-in-fiction work. It contains the best explanation of the scientific method and the Null Hypothesis for the general public. Thanks to the book I now understand why the most illiterate and unscientific show ever presented on Greek TV exists:
“Unfortunately, the motivations of scientists who perform studies differ from those in the media who describe them: one wants to inform, the other to entertain.”
People want quick answers and are easy to jump to conspiracy theories that can provide them. It is no wonder that the opinion of journalists, ministers, politicians and celebrities that “attended the University of Google” gets accepted as expert opinion by the general public while the scientists are hiding “The Truth” by being on the payroll of big corporations. After reading the book I still do not understand why some people (the very same people that subscribe to such theories) do not visit their personal-injury lawyer every time they have a headache.
While if one is not directly involved with autism the book can have a few boring corners, it is a guide on how to present the facts. It is no wonder that the author gets so much hate mail and is the recipient of death threats.
PS: Two very interesting web sites that the book recommends are neurodiversity.com and
JunkScience.com.
30 χρόνια επιτυχίες
2010/09/12
Kat was a Greek computer that dual-booted MS-DOS and Apple II
Ψάχνοντας για την ιστορία της Gigatronics και του Kat, έπεσα πάνω σε αυτό το PDF. Χρήσιμο ανάγνωσμα για όσους ενδιαφέρονται για την ανάπτυξη της Πληροφορικής στην Ελλάδα, τότε που ήμασταν παιδιά.
