And now for something completely different

Typealizer (thanks FMH) has performed a Myers-Briggs personality test on my blog:

Typealyzer

ESTP - The Doers .... The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Umm, right. That's me. Chipper, joking, a real ESTP people person.

I wonder if it's some kind of random selection. Unsurprisingly my real Myers-Briggs profile is INTP/INTJ -- depending on my mood.

It's kind of sweet to be considered "play-ful" though.

Are we experiencing a complexity collapse in software and finance?

At the same time our economy is collapsing in mysterious ways I've been fighting a personal software war at work and at home on OS X and XP and the iPhone.

It's been one software bug atop another. I've seen emergent bugs from the interaction of different data models on an iPhone app and a Cloud data store, bugs in servers, bugs in clients, bugs in desktop apps, bugs in authentication, bugs related to digital rights management, bugs related to old fragile Outlook plug-in infrastructure, bugs from security fixes driven by relentless viral attacks, bugs one atop another in infinite combinations.

Swarms of bugs.

It's not as though these bugs are coming from amazing new functionality. In many cases my software environment is regressing -- losing functionality.

Bugs aren't new; but they aren't always this bad. I remember how bad things were with DOS 3.x and TSR apps and expanded/extended memory. This feels like a similar cycle -- on a grander scale.

And now we add to this computing chaos the Flight from the Cloud.

Which leads one to wonder what the collapse of our finances might have in common with the collapse of my computing environment. Do the six or so finacial collapse contributing factors have some underlying cause?

One common cause might be the problem of the sustainability of complex systems - in computing and in finance.

Thanks to my extended cybernetic memory, I see that I've made this software and society complexity connection before. What I can't find is any mention of a lecture I attended a very long time ago.

The lecture, which might have been at the old Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) conferences I once attended, was about Complexity. It might have been related to this 1983 book. What I recall were intriguing charts of the trade-offs between complexity and risk.

Maybe the near-collapse of my personal computing environment and my family's financial security share some common roots in the instability and incomprehensibility of rapidly evolving complex systems.

Update: via Krugman, Keynes during the early years of Great Depression I ...

... But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time—perhaps for a long time...

I didn't know people once spelled to-day with a hyphen, it's not like it was a new word in 1929. Nowadays hyphenated words rarely last more than a few years before they lose the hyphen. Faster times, greater understanding, still greater complexity.

Update 11/28/08: A similar theme in a nov 2007 post of mine.

Update 12/3/08: See also

Dan's Data: Lemon-fresh power supplies

... When sellers know how good their product is but buyers can't tell, you have the all-important asymmetric information" that makes a lemon market possible. (Akerlof's study of this phenomenon won him a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.)

Lemon-market rules applied to a lot of stock-market crashes. Look at the dot-com bubble, or the Enron collapse, or the crash of 1987, or the recent US subprime mortgage debacle - which is having cataclysmic effects on the US economy even as I write this....

and the details that convince me this really is a complexity collapse.

Update 12/21/08: More people are picking up on the complexity, resiliency meme.

Update 4/4/10: I've been looking for twenty years for a book I heard about in the 1980s. It was about complexity collapse. Recently Clay Shirky wrote about it, the book was written by Joseph Tainter in 1988 -- The Collapse of Complex Societies. It's $36 on Amazon at the moment - probably print on demand. I think I attended a Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) meeting @ 1988-1990 when someone walked through the arguments in this book.

Why price cuts won't sell a Mac to me

Dear Apple,

I see that you would like to sell some Macs ...

Apple sale! All Macs must go! - Apple 2.0

... Apple (AAPL), which keeps the tightest reins on list prices in the business, seems to have loosened them significantly this holiday season. Authorized resellers who normally wouldn’t dare chop a nickel off Apple’s suggested retail are cutting prices, offering rebates and plastering the Web with gaudy ads....

Maybe I can help. I would like to replace my G5 iMac.

The problem is, you aren't solving my problems. So I don't want your machines at any (plausible) price.

So if you want to sell me a Mac, or sell my family a 2nd iPhone, you need to make your basic personal information management software (calendaring, tasks, notes, etc) grow up. A lot.

You need to make the 2008 iPhone the equal of the 1998 Palm Vx.

You need to improve the quality of your products, so I don't lose 3 evenings of my life every time you do a major software update.

Maybe, after six software releases, you could enable Library import on iPhoto.

Maybe you could restore more of what you stripped out of iMovie.

Maybe you could get the bitter taste of Bento out of my mouth by providing a FileMaker useable interface to your system data repositories.

Maybe you could make your software faster, instead of selling machines by producing the world's least efficient code.

Maybe you could start listening to me. Your would-be paying customer -- if you had anything I could use.

Just saying.

Dapocalypse now. Grab your data and run. RUN.

This is not a drill.

Repeat, this is not a drill.

The sky is falling. Ragnarok of the nerds has come. Gabriel's horns a blowin. There's a hole in the hull. The banks a failin' and there ain't no FDIC. There's a time for all things, and this is the time to panic.

It's Dapocalypse Now -- and I was kind of joking when I wrote that three months ago.

Look on my works ye mighty, and note the increasingly impassioned wikipedia donation requests.

Here ye can read the scrolls of the dead. Dead like AOL's xdrive [FAQ] and photo service, Google Lively, Yahoo User Profiles, Yahoo webcam feeds, MSN Groups, and perhaps most impressively, Digital Railroad (emphases mine) ...

Startup firms rely on their investors' continued interest, and boards are often dominated by venture capitalists and others who might choose to pull the plug for their own reasons, as they have no specific relationship with a company's downstream clientele.

Digital Railroad, a stock photography site that let professional photographers manage their own inventory and sales, had said it was shedding costs in mid-October, but posted a note on 28-October-2008 that the plug would be pulled within 24 hours.... Digital Railroad believes the files will remain intact on servers that are no longer active, and if assets are purchased, photographers may be able to get more data back in the future.

What Digital Railroad's photographers lost is not their images; I can't imagine any pro not having many backups of whatever they uploaded. Rather, the time invested in coding their images to the company's specifications--the metadata. Some photographers reported having spent hundreds of hours on this task....

I trust you get the picture.

*cough*

Everyone needs to do a personal data risk inventory.

Clearly, anything with AOL is walking dead. Kiss your email archives good-bye.

Yahoo Flickr is unlikely to die with Yahoo!, but they'll use Flickr's data lock to hold on to customers until the very end. It won't be pretty.

Most other Yahoo data is toast.

A lot of MSN data will be gone.

So what are our family risks and how will we manage them?

1. SmugMug: I've been worried about them for years. I don't put new images there, but we have a lot of archives that I pay cash to maintain. I wouldn't lose the images of course, they're in iPhoto. I would lose the album organizations and image choices. I need to study if there's any metadata I can extract, perhaps using a personal spider.
2. Toodledo: Holds my iPhone Notes and Tasks. I pay for this service too. I've run into issues with Appigo/Toodledo integration but now I'll start archiving my table data every other day. In theory one can subscribe to a Toodledo .ics file from iCal, but when I do that the due dates are empty. If the subscription worked that would be quite reassuring and would make me happier staying with Toodledo. (iCal doesn't have categories incidentally, it really is a miserable application.)
   
3. Evernote: Probably will survive, I don't store any critical data there. Certainly a risk.
4. Google: See below.

Google's the big one. This blog, for one thing -- and I recently grew beyond the ability of Teleport Pro to back it up on my local drive. Gmail for another, like the ex-Lively it's "beta". Calendars. Google Apps. Our Picasa web albums. Huge.

Of course Google's too big to fail ... like Citigroup, for example.

Oh. Maybe that's not so reassuring. I guess I should get more regular about archiving my Google email.

Winter's here. Time to dust off those desktop apps. The great data-bank run of '09 has begun.

Update: I didn't have anything of interest on my xdrive account. I figured I'd delete the account, but that's no longer an option. I do recommend removing all data and account information from unwanted accounts, there's no guarantee that the data will truly be removed. Since I could not delete the account I changed my xdrive password to a random string that does not match any other of my passwords.

A quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space

It's time for your morning exercise ...

FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News

.... The arrow of time finds a plausible explanation in a 'Heraclitean universe,' described by a quantum state eternally evolving in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space....

Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance fame has entered an essay contest on the nature of time.

I've asked Sean to tell us what the other good ones are.

The wikiepdia entry on Heraclitus might be of assistance.

Now is not the time for anti-materialist Solstice celebrations

I have heard rumor that Celebrators of the Solstice are advocating spiritual observation rather than greed and materialism.

I fear our times of worry are fertile ground for such sentiment.

Alas, we're like the heroin addict about to receive open heart surgery. This is not the time to kick the habit. This is the time for a metered dose of morphine, until the critical point has passed.

Then there will a time for withdrawal and balance, though, alas, by then such sentiments will seem dull and unappealing.

Happily, there is a middle ground.

Those who have income and employment should buy liberally -- but give the goods away.

So get that HDTV, but then donate it.

Alas, I need a real economist to tell me if donating cash would work as well. Since cash is fungible donations may be a less effective economic stimulant (ok, so the opiate analogy breaks down) than toasters, coffee makers, and televisions.

Incidentally, in 86 days, on Feb 17 2009, analog tv is supposed to end.

There's a reason why that date was chosen -- after an election. The transition will not be a happy one for a nation in early stages of the Great Recession. On the other hand, it will force a significant jump in television and/or converter purchases.

So maybe we really should be buying digital broadcast ready televisions this Solstice -- for donation.

The best next generation?

My generation gave the world Bill Clinton and George Bush.

The first was, and is, a brilliant man with deep flaws. The second is flawed to the bone.

Obama is effectively post-boomer. It couldn't happen soon enough. It's time for us boomers to quietly shuffle off onto our icebergs.

That's good news, but maybe there's even better news ahead (emphases mine) ...

Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich

... Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you're so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you're sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.

This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever -- and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don't roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 -- the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That's an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.

These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward....

To borrow a very tired phrase, Generation Equality has skin in the game. If civilization endures they have a reasonable shot at a 100 year lifespan.

They'll see the arctic melt, they'll live with rising sea levels, they'll see the end of oil, they'll see human genetic modification and post-modern eugenics, they'll see America become a normal nation (we hope), they'll live in a world of ubiquitous machine translation of English, Chinese, Sanskrit, Spanish and a dozen other languages, they'll see the salvation of Africa (or else).

I sure hope they don't see artificial sentience, but they could.

It's all yours GenE. I'll help however I can, but probably the most I can achieve is to neutralize the more harmful members of my generation.

Enlightenment 2.0 is up to you.

Closing Guantanamo - the stupidity

Here's where the stupidity factor comes into discussions of closing Guantanamo ...

Editorial - The Price of Our Good Name - NYTimes.com

...Does this mean that truly dangerous men will be set free, to go back to plotting more attacks against America? No...

Argghhh. The stupidity rayzzz ... they burnzzz...

Yes. Some of these men will be "dangerous". All men are.

Yes some dangerous men will be freed. If they weren't dangerous before they were stuck in an American prison for 8 years they'd be dangerous now.

Yes. Some of them will try to kill Americans. Wouldn't you?

Yes. Some of them will plot attacks? Wouldn't you?

What do we expect - gratitude?

We did a stupid thing. There's a price to pay for stupid decisions.

If they were prisoners of war, and the war was over, they'd be released. Even if they were possibly "dangerous".

The "war on terror" is, like the "war on evil", not a war. It's an eternal process.

We can either kill them all now, keep them forever (roughly equivalent to killing them all), or close Guantanamo and send them back to do whatever they choose to do.

The latter is the least evil act.

Stupidity has its consequences. Next time, America, don't elect someone like George Bush.

Obama YouTube - Minnesota can expect some bridges

We're the state who's bridge fell down a couple of years ago. Looks like we can expect some accelerated bridge maintenance ...

Obama Vows Swift Action on Vast Economic Stimulus Plan

...Mr. Obama’s address, a video of which was made available on YouTube, was the keynote of an effort to calm tumultuous financial markets roiled by an apparent leadership vacuum in Washington before he takes office in two months...

No joke about the vacuum. Gail Collins made a semi-serious plea for Cheney and Bush to resign, so Pelosi could turn things over to Obama.

Our 35W bridge didn't fall for lack of maintenance of course. It had an egregious design flaw. Still, there are a lot of roads, bridges, bicycle trails, walking trails, school grounds, state parks, national parks and other public spaces and facilities that could do with a refresh.

Looks like we'll get that.

Incidentally, these YouTube addresses are amazing to me. I can actually watch my leader speak and not feel nauseous and horrified. It's like balm on an old wound.

The museum of American slavery and national emancipation day

Yeah, it's because we're in the post-civil war era. And because my morning exercise history class is discussing emancipation.

Slavery is on my mind.

America was founded on two enormous crimes. One, the extermination of the aboriginal Americans, was partly accidental. Millions died of disease before the creation of internment camps and before the massive ethnic cleansing campaigns began.

Another founding crime, slavery, was a choice.

We Americans, of all ethnicities and birth places, are the inheritors of these crimes. Just as modern Germans, born since 1945, are the reluctant inheritors of the unfathomably vast crime of the Holocaust.

Germans, not entirely happily, have studied and learned from their crimes. The Holocaust museums make a difference. I visited one in Jerusalem over twenty five years ago. It left an impression.

So why, I wondered, does America not have a Slavery museum and a Genocide museum? Why isn't there a national emancipation day? Why is it that only American historians now remember that January 1 used to be celebrated as emancipation day?

The first of these questions isn't hard to answer. The United States National Slavery Museum has been slowly moving to birth for quite a while. Very slowly; the web site is "copyright 2006" and the "Events" entry has a single undated item. The last issues of their newsletter is Spring/Summer 2008. I can't tell from the web site how far they are from opening in Fredericksburg Virginia.

Which brings us to an opportunity.

We're going to be doing some very serious spending on public works over the next year.

Maybe the museum can pick up some donations at the inauguration, and maybe Virginia will soon get some funding for a very memorable museum.

The Museum of the American Genocide? Yes, that too will come.

Wisdom always hurts.

iPhone 2.2: Great phone. Great toy. Not for business.

My iPhone 2.2 hasn't repeated its post-upgrade reboot during phone call, so it again qualifies as an excellent cell phone and a decent iPod [1].

It's also a lot of fun. The kids love seeing what kind of silly nonsense Google's speech recognition engine produces.

Alas, it's a long way from being ready for business. Apple, frankly, doesn't give a damn.

Business people always stick travel itineraries into calendar item notes. I stick text versions of CVs into Contacts. The iPhone truncates the text display of my itinerary (what hotel?) and my contact note. It doesn't actually truncate the data, only the display.

Right there you know Apple isn't serious.

There's more though. Compare Google Calendar to MobileMe. It's not even close. It's like comparing Rembrandt to paint-by-numbers. The business problem is that Apple will do over-the-air (OTA) sync to MobileMe, but they won't provide a calendar API that would let Google implement OTA to Google Calendar. [2]

No tasks [3]. No memos/notes. No cut, copy, paste (will never see it at this rate). No background notification management that would enable business friendly spam-managed instant messaging. Contact search on names only.

Corporations and small business may be feeling some pressure to enable iPhone use. Heck, I'd like to use my iPhone on our corporate LAN -- but this is the wrong time to give in. The iPhone is not ready for corporate or small business use.

Wait until Apple is serious.

The (rather dim) bright side of Great Depression 2.0 is that it might concentrate Apple's mind. Maybe they'll decide they need the iPhone to be a great phone, a great toy, and a great business device.

[1] Navigating within a podcast is much inferior to an iPod and you still can't set the alarm to a playlist. Nice video though!
[2] I'm watching Neuvasync closely. Getting there ...
[3] Much as I like Appigo's work, their back end sync to Toodledo has been a mess.

Update 11/24/08: A recent TUAW post referenced this July 2008 list of enterprise shortfalls. I like my list better, but I forgot to mention the persistent lack of support for an external keyboard. It's not just unready for the enterprise, it's unready for work. Period.

Update 1/14/09: The business problems will not be easily resolved.

Melamine in Minnesota cookies - but where were they made?

So where these cookies made in China -- or Vietnam?

Warning expanded on tainted cookies

... State officials are expanding their warning about contaminated cookies being sold in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is warning consumers to avoid eating any Wonderfarm brand cookie-type biscuits due to melamine contamination....

... State officials are urging consumers to immediately dispose of any Wonderfarm brand cookie products, which are made by Interfood Shareholding Co. in Vietnam.

There's no particular reason that Melamine, used to counterfeit protein, should be limited to Chinese products.

It's impressive how little interest there is among consumers in this topic, and how feeble the reporting is. This report doesn't tell us how these products came to be sold in Minnesota.

Most bizarre Obama effect: David Brooks is readable

This is truly weird.

An anomaly in the NYT's RSS feed means I don't see who's writing editorials with interesting titles. So I am running into David Brooks on occasion.

That sounds bad, but here's the weird bit.

Now that he's not trying to excuse the inexcusable, Brooks is actually readable ...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Insider’s Crusade - NYTimes.com

... This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition...

Obama inauguration - this would be silly in a book

No writer with any self-respect would do it this way ...

The Hot Ticket to History, Unscalped - NYTimes.com

....The celebration for the first African-American president could not be more exquisitely timed. It occurs during the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, on the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, with the theme of the “new birth of freedom” foreseen by Lincoln at Gettysburg...

Reality (or at least our approximation thereof), is not nearly as sensible as fiction.

There are no inauguration hotel rooms in DC of course, they were all gone when I was there two weeks ago. So if you want to go, find a friend to crash with.

Maryland's fraudulent terrorism investigatons: a Bush/Cheney legacy

Imagine how miserable it would have been to read this with a President Palin on the way.

We'd all be thinking that the Soviets had won Cold War I.

Now we read it as the waning evil of one of the most wretched and incompetent governments of any democratic nation in the past forty years. Emphases mine.

Police spy on climate activist while global warming goes unarrested | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I'm not sure what's more shocking: the news that the Maryland State Police wrongfully spied on me for months as a "suspected terrorist," or that, despite surveillance of me, officers apparently wouldn't recognize me if I walked into their police headquarters tomorrow.

I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer, an Eagle Scout, church member, youth baseball coach, and dedicated father. I also happen to be director of one of the largest environmental groups in Maryland, a nonprofit that promotes windmills and solar panels in the fight against global warming. So imagine my shock to get a police letter last month saying I was one of 53 Maryland activists on a terrorist watch list that has been discontinued because — can you believe it? — there's "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime."...

... The mess all began last summer when astonishing evidence surfaced revealing that the Maryland State Police — under former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich — posed as activists and infiltrated an anti-death-penalty group, attending the organization's meetings and taking secret notes to send back to HQ. But what were they doing to me and my organization — the Chesapeake Climate Action Network — during this surveillance program in 2005 and 2006? Bugging our phones? Reading our emails? Monitoring me as I walked my kid to the bus stop?

I still don't know for sure. Yielding to public pressure, the police finally gave me a printed copy of my "file" on October 29. It raised more questions than it answered. Seven of the 12 pages were withheld without full explanation. And of the pages I did receive, at least half the words were redacted — blacked out with a marker.

There was a photo of me on the last page, lifted from my website. And on the first page, there were these words: "Crime: Terrorism, environmental extremists."

What terrorism would that be? My file — what little of it I have — makes reference to a morning speech given in Bethesda, Md., by then-governor Robert Ehrlich on November 17, 2005. A small audience of invited guests and journalists attended inside a classroom at Walt Whitman High School. Ehrlich wasn't doing enough to fight global warming, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network believed, and several of my staff arrived to peacefully demonstrate and hold up signs that said things like, "It's Getting Hot in Here, Gov!" But troopers with the governor's "Executive Protection Division" believed this was extreme, according to my file. For example, CCAN staffers invited high school students to hold up protest signs during the governor's speech. Pretty extreme, huh?

There was no civil disobedience at this event. No one was arrested. No county, state, or federal laws were breached. The entire affair was utterly peaceful, above board, and appropriate. Political demonstrations exactly like this happen a thousand times a day in America. There were no media reports of anything unusual.

Yet Ehrlich's security team considered this "aggressive protesting." Afterward, the troopers contacted the Maryland State Police's Homeland Security and Investigation Bureau. The result was creation of intelligence files on me and three of my staff under the crime category of "terrorism, environmental extremists." The real motivation, however, appears to be political spying. We were opponents of the governor's policies. We were organized and vocal about it. We wound up on an intelligence list along with dozens of other innocent, nonviolent opponents of the governor's policies...

... the state police say they've released everything to me that's relevant to me, but I don't believe them. Since July, the state police have made numerous public statements related to this spying controversy that have proved to be factually untrue. They initially said, for example, that the entire surveillance program was limited to anti-death-penalty activists. But we now know activists for peace, immigration, and the environment were spied on too. I believe more of the spying story is yet to come out, however. With the help of a heroic Maryland attorney, David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an equally heroic Maryland state senator, Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, I believe all the facts will soon surface and we'll see legislation in the state General Assembly in 2009 specifically banning police abuses like this....

This insanity involved state Republicans and state police, but the terrorism laws came from Cheney/Bush. They blocked protections that would have prevented this kind of abuse.

We don't deserve to have escaped the dark age of Bush, but somehow, inexplicably, it's receding into history.