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Archive for May, 2008

Rumour Mill: Blogger to be offered in Google Apps?

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Short and sweet.  I was browsing Google Help today to find the article on the differences between a Google account and Google Apps (a topic for another time), when I noticed this little tidbit:

For any product available through Google Accounts but not currently available in Google Apps (e.g., Blogger), you can use your Apps address without any issues. But in the future, when we add more products to Google Apps (hint! hint!)…

So…is Google inviting the rumor mill here or are they telling us that they’ll soon offer Blogger as a Google Apps product (as well as a Google Accounts product)?  If the latter, how will the Blogger product fit in with the existing Google Sites product for organizations? 

Hard Disk Crash!

Monday, May 19th, 2008

hard drive insides   When I got home, on a Saturday night…well, I did not see “the Englishman who could last till three” running out my back door, but I did sit down at my laptop.  Then I heard it.  The slight clicking, like tapping your fingernail on the window.  You guessed it.  My hard drive was toast.  Sure, I could have tried to fix it and maybe (but not likely) squeeze out another day or two, but the sign was ominous, even if the sound wasn’t:  My hard drive was toast. Gone. Dead.  I had exactly until the OS tried to page something in or out of memory time to continue what I was doing, then my computer would die.  So what to do?  It’s not like I could save any files!  And the more I did, the more likely the thing would page out.  Say goodnight, go to sleep. Deal with it tomorrow.

So my hard drive was dead.  Sixty Gigabytes of data gone in the span of a few short “clicks”.  Catastrophe?  Not at all.  I had started backing up with Time Machine a few weeks ago, and just last week I attached my backup drive to the network (using Airdisk on an AEBS).  I knew I had a full backup, and more importantly a recent full backup.  How recent?  I didn’t know yet.  But I slept well.  

Fast forward to Sunday.  My options were to take the whole kit to the Mac store or to get a new drive and go to town.  I dismissed the former option: first, I was out of warranty.  Second, there’s a tiny hairline crack …
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Simply, Hello

Monday, May 5th, 2008

My plan, sitting down to write this log entry, is to present some philosophy about technology, redundancy, simplicity, and human error.I’m still battling the tense: not sure if that is my plan, or if that was my plan: I’ve realized that of more immediate concern, or at least more civilized priority, is an introduction. So allow me introduce: Me! My name is Mickey and I am the new co-author of WCDC. Hopefully I can help make this discourse between us a little more frequent.

“Discourse,” I say? And “us”? Sure, I maintain that this is a conversation. Certainly between you, the reader, and Ernesto and me, the writers. But the “us” still remains unclear: Is it between you and me? Ernesto and me? You and Us? Us and Them? Besides bringing more frequent updates, what is my role here? Am I the ying to Ernesto’s yang? Am I the Mac to his PC? (Yes, I do use a Mac, and no, Ernesto and I don’t always agree.) After a little thinking about all that, I decided to take my own advice, the one that I meant to write about before the whole introduction business confused things: I decided to keep things simple. Forget about playing a role against my co-author, who is after all the originator of this blog and therefore has last say. Forget about keeping in costume. Just say what I have to say. Practice the fine art of spouting. Isn’t Spouting what blogs are all about anyway? And what better way to start spouting than with a bit of philosophy. So here is my spout about simplicity. And this being a technology blog, I will talk about simplicity in technology.

In deductive sciences, we often follow Occam’s razor and accept that the simplest explanation is the best. This is common practice in areas where we observe a phenomenon which we subsequently try to explain. In technology, however, we often create the phenomenon. And we quite often overcomplicate it. The problem with this is not the creation or complication: computers and technology will perform their assigned tasks regardless of how simple or complex this tangle of tasks may be. The problem is that we assume that technology might fail while failing to remember that people fail as well. In fact, people fail more frequently. We take great pains to create fail-proof technology that is self-healing, doubly-redundant and fail-safe. We add spares, and spares to the spares. We double our servers, and add redundant channels and pathways. And things work. You take down part A and the Thing stays up. You bring A back and take parts C and B down and the Thing still stays up. That’s the beauty of technology: It does what it’s supposed to, no matter how complex its design. A technology architect can design a very complex system that performs exactly the way it’s supposed to, down to the last specification. Whether by assumption or by mandate from the customer, the design can be completely redundant with every piece independent of any other. And it works. The technology, that is, works. (more…)


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