LookIt

Overweight lies

"Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus " is a short and completely-understandable read. Bad math passed down from the government is still bad math.

Another OS, this one for real

Five years ago I said I wanted my GoogleOS. Maybe I'll see it next year.

This could be huge. It could overtake Linux on the laptop in less than two years if done properly with good licensing. Ubuntu has done a good job making Linux-with-Gnome a desktop environment as stable as Windows XP was, but I suspect that Google Chrome OS will be at least as good as that from day one. As long as the set of initial work tools is good, Google's lack of half-baked, never-finished Gnome-based apps will actually help it, not hurt it.

If done well enough, it could hurt Apple if a $700 would-have-been-Windows laptop has the same ease of use and shininess and stability as a $1200 MacBook (and ditto for a $1100 / $1800 split for the higher end). For many PC users, Google's brand impression is better than Apple's; if nothing else, this could dampen the rate of switching.

I am excited, to say the least.

Popular culture, 2009-06-26 version

This could use a dallop of Neda Agha-Soltan and Ed McMahon, but does show what the week in popular deaths feels like here.

One bit of security theater bites the dust, finally

Those folks who will let you go through airport security in the US more quickly if you pay them a bunch of money? They have gone out of business. It's about time.

DSL modem fail: Motorola/Netopia 2210-02-10NA

I changed DSL providers for my home, and wanted to get the modem the new one was most comfortable with. For $50, I got the Motorola/Netopia 2210-02-10NA. What a mistake. I plugged it in, and got all four lights green, so I thought I was good to go. But then I looked at the IP address settings on the PC I plugged in to test, and DHCP had given me 192.168.1.1 from the ISP.

Tech support was quite helpful. "That's not the address we gave you; the modem is set to do address-translation firewalling by default, but I can walk you through changing it." After I picked my jaw off the desk, I asked if this was a huge pain in the ass for tech support and he replied "oh, yeah". We had to drill down three menus of the web GUI to change it to be a normal bridge.

(If you're not sure why this is so bad, remember that most home users will hang a NATed router on the DSL modem, and the vast majority of NATed routers have 198.168.1.1/24 as the default addresses on the NAT side. Those routers will go into serious conniptions when they see the same frigging address space on both the internal and external interfaces.)

Dear Motorola: This has to the stupidest thing I have seen on a modem. Does no one in the Netopia division understand the first thing about routing? Can you fire whomever thought that this was a sensible default? The current setting is only useful when attaching a single computer to the modem; anyone else will be silently screwed by your default configuration.

Obama the nerd

Props to John Hodgman for outing our pres on this one.

Another NIST guide

Another of the documents that that I have assisted NIST on, Guide to Enterprise Telework and Remote Access Security, has just been published. This was a revision to an older guide, so some of the previous material is still there, but we did a lot more than just freshening. Like many organizations, the US government is quite concerned with how to give remote workers secure access to internal networks, and how to keep those networks secure after giving that access. This new guide has a ton of guidance on how to find the right balance of access versus overall security.

I believe in teenagers

My oldest niece, Alexis, graduated from high school recently, and the family all went to the ceremony. Her school, Pacific Collegiate School, has about 60 people per grade, and we knew that she was friends with most of the people in her graduating class, so we thought it might be a fun graduation.

There was lots of enjoyable student-created music, poetry, and talks. Then, the first of the two talks given by teachers blew away a large portion of the audience. She believes in teenagers, something that many of us have forgotten to do. If you're looking for the typical speech that tells kids what they can look forward to or what they should do next, this isn't it. Instead, it tells them that they're already fine, and this is already their life.

Microsoft and naming failures

Bing. Oh, please.

"Hey, that's a cool web site you found! Where did you find it?" How many people of any age will want to say "I used Bing"? I would bet that most people who used the Microsoft product will instead say "I used Google" because it sounds much less lame.

Similarly, which sounds much more stupid: "I Googled it" or "I Binged it"?

Microsoft has a terrible track record with names. Oddly, the least horribly named product of the last decade, Vista, is one of their worst from a user experience standpoint. ("Excel" isn't a bad name, but that was an entire human generation ago. And it came at the same time as "Word", which was competing with "WordStar" and "WordPerfect". Yeesh.)

Where does this content come from?

Compare and contrast this YouTube video and the one that is likely to be the original. YouTube has clearly ripped off the video, including the overlaid ad for the original site. Over 50,000 people have watched it. I found the video from a link to the YouTube version, of course. If YouTube put garish ads on the page (or, worse, on the video itself as they seem to like to do these days), will they share the revenue with the originating site? Note that I cannot flag the video to tell YouTube that they are clearly stealing someone else's material: I can only do so if they are stealing my material (or it's pr0n or violent or the like).