rant

Email Confidentiality Footers

> This email message is for the sole use of the intended > recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged > information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or > distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended > recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy > all copies of the original message.

Ah, where to begin…

How about the fact that email works by making copy after copy. If you sent me this, then there are a jillion “copies of the original” between your computer and mine. I simply can’t reliably destroy them all. (Well, maybe…)

If it may contain confidential information, then why are you sending it via email? And without so much as PGP encrypting it? I know that PGP’s only been around for like 20 years now, so it’s pretty new, but still. Get on that. It’s integrated in every email mail client, and it’s not too hard to use.

But even more worryingly, this little footer just seems profoundly odd. It’s asking me to do something based on the sender’s intent. How am I supposed to know if I’m the intended recipient? Should I guess that the sender doesn’t know how to use email, and just whacks the Reply-All button like a drunken ape?

Sorry. We’re 10% of the way through the 21st century now. You’re expected to know how to use a technology that’s been around for 40 years. It’s not my responsibility if you send something to the wrong person.

In the end, this is just a bit of unenforceable legalese that makes people feel more official, and it’s complete trash. It’s the digital equivalent of tossing your Starbucks cup out the window on the highway.

Wed 2010-04-28 21:43:24 | 0 notes
poempalindrome

Explode

Beloved and pure, turn, face her.
See emotional spilling.
I am rapt.
Explode!
Rapt am I, spilling emotional.
See her face turn pure and beloved.

Sat 2010-04-10 22:20:12 | 0 notes

MozyHomeUnlimited - Not for OS X Server

When I got the error message telling me I needed to upgrade to Mozy Pro, I was a little annoyed. I figured that I’d have to shell out $200/year instead of $100/year or something. Oh, well. Still a good deal, I guess.

Then I saw the price.

$3.95/month (ok…) and $0.50/GB (WTF!?)

50 cents per GB. Per month. That’s like $100/month for me (or more). I thought for sure I’d read something wrong. I asked someone on their chat support if there was any way around this restriction, and was told that there wasn’t. “It’s the way the software was designed,” Mubarak said.

Ok, fine, I thought. I’ll email support. Surely someone will understand the lunacy of this policy, and agree to do business with me as the home user that I am.

But here’s the response I got:

X-Mailer: Kayako SupportSuite v3.30.00
X-Priority: 3
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:43:26 -0600
Message-ID: kzf1ge.31h66x@supportdesk.mozy.com
Subject: [MozyHome Windows Support #RNC-455427]: Mac Mini Server Support
From: “Judy Priyanka Asher” support@mozy.com
Reply-To: support@mozy.com
To: i@izs.me

Hi Isaac,

Thank you for contacting Mozy Technical Support.I would like to inform you that only Mozy pro is compatiable with the Mac Mini Server, to access mozy you need to purchase the Mozy pro account.

Thanks Judy Mozy Support

Ticket Details Case ID: RNC-455427

So, I felt compelled to respond:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: isaacschlueter@gmail.com
Received: by 10.142.154.13 with HTTP; Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:03:32 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: kzf1ge.31h66x@supportdesk.mozy.com
References: kzf1ge.31h66x@supportdesk.mozy.com
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:03:32 -0700
Delivered-To: isaacschlueter@gmail.com
X-Google-Sender-Auth: 06365dbeee9d860b
Message-ID: aaedcef51003170103y184f669l3bf864e0ecf26275@mail.gmail.com
Subject: Re: [MozyHome Windows Support #RNC-455427]: Mac Mini Server Support
From: Isaac Schlueter i@izs.me
To: support@mozy.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Judy,

I want you to do me a favor. Stop what you’re doing for just a moment, and think really hard about what your employer is doing. Because it’s really silly. Like, you should laugh about it, probably.

I could get a Mac Pro computer, put 8 giant hard disks in it, and upload the entire library of congress to Mozy’s servers for a hundred bucks a year, but a Mac Mini with a single 500GB drive is going to cost the outrageous sum of $0.50/GB/month (about $100/month in my case) simply because the operating system has the word “Server” in the title.

If you were a good corporate citizen, you’d probably do well to inform the people who make decisions over there at Mozy that this is simply boneheaded in all kinds of ways. We’re talking about a single-user machine, which probably has less storage overhead than most of your other MozyHomeUnlimited users.

Yet, rather than do business with me, and host my modest single-user backups, Mozy is setting the price more than TWELVE TIMES as high, simply because of the name of another piece of software running on the device.

Sense: this makes none. It’s like McDonald’s charging $800 for fries, and demanding that you cannot have a burger without fries if you drive a red car. Seriously, it is exactly as insane as that. I am shocked.

Please refund my credit card purchase and cancel my account. It appears that Mozy is run by lunatics, and I simply cannot trust such unhinged folks with my data.

— Isaac Z. Schlueter

Don’t use Mozy. They’re fucking crazy over at that place. And that’s just not trustworthy.

Wed 2010-03-17 01:22:16 | 0 notes

Steak and BJ Day

Happy holiday, everyone! http://bit.ly/QPkQ8

Tue 2010-03-16 05:26:54 | 0 notes
writingcode beauty

4 Step Writing Process

Whether it’s an essay or a program, writing is not about what you put out, it’s about what you take in. The purpose of life is to learn, and that is why writing is important.

I don’t follow this process with everything, because it’s a bit slow. But for complicated subjects, it’s sometimes the only way to get something useful.

Step 1: Sketch

Write as quickly as possible, as dirty as necessary, giving no thought whatsoever to the quality of the output. Just get it out of your head and into the real medium. Make the code run. Put sentences on the page. Don’t worry if it’s ugly or slow or badly worded or whatever. That’s the point. Just the act of getting it out of your head is important and necessary.

Step 2: Discard and Rewrite

Don’t revise your rough draft. Throw it away. Maybe it had some good parts, fine. You can look at them, but you’re not allowed to copy and paste anything. Type it out again. You want it to filter through your brain and your hands so that every character is re-evaluated.

Go slow here. The goal is to make it as elegant as possible, to really carefully consider each part’s relationship to the whole, to enforce balance and symmetry and consistency of intent. This is where the vision takes shape.

The goal isn’t to end up with something clever. It’s to end up with something obvious. The solution should simply seem to grow out of the problem and attach to it, like its natural symbiotic twin. Reading your program or your essay should be easy, and should leave a reader with the understanding that you gained in your sketching and meditation.

Occasionally, you’ll learn something, and have to return to step 1. And that’s great.

Step 3: Test with Absurd Aggression

If it’s code, then find or write a test suite that goes over an absurd amount of edge cases. Try really hard to make your program break. And then make it pass every single test case. Write some more test cases to cover areas that the suite doesn’t.

If it’s text, then read it over and over. Scrutinize every word to make sure it means exactly what you want. Go to bed and wake up and read it again. Have other people read it and push them to be really critical. Ask them what they thought, and make notes of where it’s different from your intent.

Return to step 2 as necessary.

Step 4: Optimize

We always want to put this step earlier in the process, but that’s almost always a mistake. Certainly, you don’t want to be structuring your code in ways that are always going to be slow, but if you’re writing for elegance, that’s not likely to happen anyhow.

Profile your program, and find the parts of it that are slow. Make them fast, even if you lose a bit of beauty in the process.

If it’s an essay, try to remove everything that does not enforce the thesis. Any word that can be removed should be.

Keep returning to step 3 after any changes.

It’s never done. You just reach a point where you decide to study something different.

Wed 2010-02-10 13:07:00 | 1 note