Mr. Grump

I had a grumpy day today, start to finish. And it sucks. I should have felt better about things but I did not.

My work day started off with a bang as I discovered my laptop had a virus or two on it. I spent the majority of my workday carefully getting rid of those viruses and trying to determine how they got me. It made me curse the Windows laptop I have to use instead of the far more secure Linux one I’d prefer.

Though I finally got that problem solved, I spent the rest of the day stressing about all the other things I’ve got going on. This upcoming week has meeting after meeting and it’s got me looking ahead to next month’s vacation. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a big deal but the kids’ being out of school has upended our home’s usual schedule and thrown me completely out of my comfort zone. This is the first summer we’ve had two working parents in the family and it’s taken a while to work things out.

Tomorrow is another day, however. The sun will come up, and I will find reason to sing again. I always do, you know.

Letters to Grandma: 3 February 1990

[Note: Read this post first for an introduction.]

This letter to Grandma was sent at the start of my first deployment. By “rocky start” I believe this refers to the loss of most of the ship’s freshwater making capability, leaving the crew showerless and shaveless for two weeks. I was dreading six months of those shenanigans but we got things patched up during our visit to Pearl Harbor.

What strikes me about this short letter is the enthusiasm it contains for what I’m doing. I believe I was sincere with my “getting paid to do this” remark. In spite of this, though, it’s clear I’m still looking forward to attending college, though returning after college as a junior officer was still something I was considering.

Saturday, 3 February 1990 [age:21]

Dear Grandma,

Thank you so much for your card for my birthday, and for Charlie’s letter in it. His handwriting is so much better than mine. I bet he’s really grown. I remember seeing the tape Dad took when the family was at your house last summer – but it really has been a while since he’s seen me.
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On the anti-government crowd

You’ve had your tax breaks for 10 years, where are the jobs?

I shared this provocative photo on my Facebook page on Tuesday and it sparked a spirited discussion drawing over 25 comments between my friends who see the value in government and those who don’t. I woke up with this on my mind and the whole debate drives me nuts.

I used to buy into the whole libertarian outlook over a decade ago and admit on paper it makes a lot of sense. One of the problems is that it assumes that everyone starts on a level playing field when they most assuredly do not. The other problem is that it’s predicated on some Pollyanna world where everyone can be taken at his word and as we’ve seen time and time again that does not match reality. Let’s take a look at the lying scumbags problem first.

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Letters from Grandma: 5 Nov 1989

[Note: Read this post first for an introduction.]

This letter to Grandma came near the tail end of my 3 month deployment for PACEX 89. That was the first of my three deployments and included Japan as the sole port visit. Long after that deployment I marveled at how my ship seemed to leave a series of major earthquakes in its wake as it sailed counter-clockwise around the Northern Pacific.

The visit to Nagasaki, where the world’s second atomic bomb was used in anger, was heartbreaking. More recently I’ve come to understand just how fanatical many Japanese were during the war and that the invasion of the Japanese mainland surely would’ve resulted in a million or more deaths. There is no doubt in my mind about the insanity of nuclear war, but I don’t know if I were President Truman that I would not have made the same choice.

This deployment gave me a really good taste of sea life and I think I took to it. I would have two, six-month WestPac deployments ahead of me before I left the Navy.

Oh, and fortunately my shipmates were wrong about me being UNC or Duke material!
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Great coverage of the Duke Energy – Progress coup

I’ve really been impressed with the coverage of the Duke Energy merger fiasco done by the N&O’s John Murawski, such as today’s story on Jim Rogers’s talk with Progress employees. Murawski’s been churning out story after story on this and has even managed to write an especially colorful feature on the Eno River festival in between.

I also enjoyed today’s commentary by N&O editor Dan Barkin, who all-but-laughs at the lame excuses Duke CEO Jim Rogers gave to the N.C. Utilities Commission on Tuesday. If after all the merger’s due diligence Duke was somehow surprised by Bill Johnson’s leadership style and the sad shape of the Crystal River plant then it ain’t Johnson who needs to needs to be shown the door. No, the only ones who got taken for a ride here are the ratepayers and the justifiably-angry commissioners at the NCUC.

This is why I still subscribe to newspapers. Keep it up, boys!

KVM upheaval continues

Back in May, I got an unsolicited email from a consulting firm who had been hired by the main competitor of a company I used to work for in “the KVM space,” as business dweebs like to say. The consultant had been hired to “understand the current KVM market” and my post from 2007 predicting the death of KVM had caught his eye. The consultant wanted to pick my brain about the post and whether I had any other insights to share.

Being that he was working on behalf of a former competitor, initially I was reluctant to respond. I blame that competitor’s long-running lawsuit against my former employer for me getting laid off from the best job I ever had. Eventually, though, I decided to chat for a bit as it had been 5 years since I had written that and five years since I’d worked for that company.

I didn’t have much more to add to what I had written in 2007. I have worked in large datacenters in the meantime and my prediction has held up in every instance. The KVM market is dying if not already dead.

Earlier this week I received news that one of the employees I hired at my former employer just lost his job. While I don’t know all the details I have to wonder if that shrinking KVM market is to blame. Sad.

Cheap thoughts: digitally-signed images

Why aren’t cryptographic signatures wrapped around digital images in order to bolster their authenticity? Such a scheme would be strong proof that an image taken with a digital camera did in fact originate from that digital camera. Thus, if someone claims to have photographed E.T., we could at least say that the image hadn’t been digitally altered.

This would also be useful for protection against phishing. A image’s signature could include the website an image is supposed to be viewed from. Any scammer including a logo from the FBI in their email would raise flags in the recipients’ email client, which would compare the image’s source to the source encoded in the signature. If the FBI logo was intended to be served from www.fbi.gov, the email client could immediately warn the recipient that something funny is going on.

Yes, there would be ways around it but faking a legitimate image would be challenging. A scammer could always design his own, unsigned image or remove the signature through a screen capture. However, without the FBI’s cryptographic key being used to sign the image, the scammer could not fake the image’s signature as being from the FBI’s website.

It wouldn’t be a perfect solution to prevent fraud but it would be an important tool to prove a digital image’s validity.

Thunderbird 13 is buggy


I’ve been a fan of Mozilla Thunderbird for a while now but a recent upgrade to Thunderbird 13.0.1 has shaken that faith. Since I upgraded to this latest version, TB has been slow, the message preview pane has never correctly shown the email it supposedly is displaying, it never cleanly exits, it has unexplained CPU spikes, and overall it’s basically is slow as Christmas.

I Googled “‘thunderbird 13’ buggy” and came upon this post from a fellow Linux user who seems to have the same issues:

Florian Monfort
Jun 29, 2012 – Public
Question for all of you guys !

If there is any of you using Fedora 17, is Thunderbird 13 buggy ?

I have to end the process ALL THE TIME to close it, because after a few minutes it would just keep on “loading message” forever…

Sometimes also I have to wait for ages for my sending message to be copied to the “Sent” folder…. So I have to cancel…

Thing is I used to have Evolution but Evolution is no better …

Can someone help me ?

I’m considering downgrading to a prior TB version to fix things, because the current version frustrates me more than pleases me.