How evil are you?

This is me:


How evil are you?
It probably has something to do with the conflict between my libertarian attitudes in general (1) and my fascist attitudes towards software development (2).

Or maybe it is because of my love of charcuterie. I'm not sure.

David

(1) So long as someone is not hurting anyone else they should be left alone to do whatever they want.
(2) There is a right way and a wrong way to develop software and if someone isn't doing it my way, they are probably doing it wrong.

Sweet, Sweet Reason

Why, oh why aren't there more people like Radley Balko?

Who? Yeah, well, I'd never heard of him either. But based on this article over on FOX News and this YouTube footage I like him. These are two of the best counters to the UIEGA that I have heard.

And of course I had to subscribe to Reason Magazine after that introduction to one of its Senior Editors.

My thanks to Bill's Poker Blog for pointing out the articles.

Always remember: UISGE is good, UIEGA is bad. (I really need to get a T-Shirt of that made)

David

Oops

Apparently I need to work on my blog's readability. Am I supposed to stop using words like "apparently" and "readability" I wonder? I can only hack the algorithm if I know the algorithm. :-(

Scone Recipe

I had a request for my scone recipe. If I had a dollar for every time that I have been asked for this recipe, I would be rich. Well, OK, not rich, but I might have a nice watch or something. I am going to put it here so that I never have to answer the question again. :-)

Originally from The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham - one of the best and most used cookbooks that I own. This book is how I fell in love with steel cut oats (via the overnight double-boiler method) among other things.

The original recipe calls for dried fruit, but I omit that at least as often as I add it. These are the best scones that I have ever had. My only regret is that I have not been able to come up with a decent cinnamon chip adaptation (the Hershey's Cinnamon Chips are horrid - I don't want cinnamon flavored chocolate chips, I want something with more of a cinnamon-sugar lump consistency).

Cream Scones

• 2C All purpose flour
• 1T Baking powder
• 1/4C Sugar
• 1/2t Salt
• 1 1/4C (i.e. 1.25) Heavy whipping cream
• (Optional) 3/4C Dried fruit in small bits
• ---------
  
• 1-2T melted butter
• Some extra sugar (I like sugar in the raw for the topping)

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Mix all of the dry powdery ingredients together with a fork. Mix in the dried fruit if desired. Add the cream and mix with a fork until the dough starts to come together. Knead the dough 8 or 9 times.

Form the dough into a ball and flatten it out into a rough circle (on a floured board) 8 or 9 inches in diameter (hands are fine, you don't need a rolling pin). Brush some melted butter on the circle and sprinkle on some sugar.

Cut the dough like a pie into 12 slices (cut it in quarters, then each quarter into thirds).

Put the scones onto a baking sheet (separated by an inch) and bake for around 15 minutes. The edges are sensitive to burning, so watch them. I strongly recommend an air insulated baking sheet for this. Or double up on the sheets.

They are done when they are golden brown. Serve naked, or with butter and jam. And coffee of course. Lots of coffee.

These are amazing when fresh, but they don't keep for very long. Of course you won't be able to keep them for very long, so it doesn't really matter. Just don't plan on baking them a day ahead if you can avoid it.

David

Printer Economics

My venerable HP Deskjet 500 has finally died. I have had it since the early 90's I think. It was only the second printer I ever owned after my old Epson LX-80 dot matrix printer (which would probably still work just fine, actually, but whose output was no longer acceptable - even in the bad old days of the early 90's).

By died I don't mean that there is anything major wrong with it. The thing is a tank (like all things HP used to be). By died, I mean that little things have started to go wrong and it is most likely not worth the trouble and expense to fix it. The sheet lifter doesn't always work on the first try and for some reason the ink cartridges are clogging with depressing regularity.

I have two other printers. An Epson Stylus Photo R2400, which is completely brilliant for photography, but isn't really a general purpose printer, and some generic POS from Lexmark that I got for free when I bought my last computer, which is, umm, temperamental and very slow for basic printing.

The kind of stuff that I tend to print these days is very different from when I bought my old Deskjet. I want to print google maps and web content. Things that are mixed color and black and white. I want the color bits to look reasonable and the black print to be perfect. The only kind of printer that really meets this need is a color laser printer.

So I started looking at low end color laser printers to see if I could afford them yet, and lo and behold, I can. I settled on the HP Color Laserjet 2600n, which when I ordered it had a $100 instant rebate in effect, making the total 299.99. Less than half of what I paid for my Deskjet 500 way back when.

The cartridges that come with this printer are full new cartridges (not the crippled "teaser" cartridges that some manufacturers try to slip you) that should print around 2500 pages (mixed duty) before they need to be replaced.

Now here is where it gets funny. A set of replacement cartridges costs $323.96. That's right, more than the printer. So this printer is disposable. I can't believe that I live in a world where color laser printers are disposable.

The total cost for this printer works out to about 12 cents per page, which isn't bad.

I feel really sad for the environment, though. This kind of economic model is criminally stupid. Is there anything that isn't disposable anymore?

David

Staying On Track

This diagram says a lot. I started the year with South Beach and got discouraged when the losses flattened a bit. Then I switched to my current scheme of restricted caloric intake.

Are the losses starting to flatten again? How do I keep up the motivation for the last few pounds?

Enterprise 2.0

I have worked in informatics for the same giant multi-national pharmaceutical company for the last 6 or 7 years. In that time I have come to take it for granted that the corporation is highly resistant to change, that experimenting with new technologies is not generally seen as a high value activity* (or at least there are enormous barriers), and that technologies and conveniences I have come to take for granted outside the firewall are simply not going to exist inside the firewall.

Web 2.0 is one of those things I take for granted doesn't exist. What blogs there are inside the corporation are announced via email (!), don't have advertised RSS feeds (!), aren't generally searchable (!), and if you can find the hidden RSS feed it is often out of sync with the blog (!) and the RSS alert comes long after the email alert (!). I don't even know where to start with how craptastic that is. As an application architect I have often thought of exposing useful alerts and information as RSS or Atom, but the masses have tightly controlled desktops with no RSS reader, so really, what's the point? One of the applications that I work on at the moment has a huge mashup of RSS feeds as one of its key features, but everything remotely "web 2.0ish" about it is carefully hidden from view, so as not to frighten the poor user.

Well, one aspect about working for a giant corporation is that there are always things going on that I would be interested in if only I knew about them.

It turns out there is a fairly large underground web 2.0 movement that I had no idea existed. Simon Revell and Jason Marshall are colleagues of mine from across the pond and they are leading the charge. Yay!

There are tons of challenges though. I don't think critical mass will ever be reached if we don't have RSS readers on LOTS of desktops, means of exploring the blogs that exist (by searching, by directories with page rank ability, whatever), important feeds that carry extremely useful or critical information (whether from applications or individuals doesn't matter), means of searching blogs, including the ability to search for blogs that LINK to my blog (Joel has a long discussion about why this is better than blog comments here and here), good blogging software that supports not only individual blogs, but group blogs (and that doesn't require reams of paperwork to get started), and good mashup software that works inside the firewall (e.g. yahoo pipes).

David

* I am talking about large scale experimentation. Individual experimentation is, in many circumstances including my own, encouraged. Very large scale experimentation is required, though, to try out any kind of social software.