Outlook late and repeated reminders

Outlook just flashed a reminder, telling me I had missed several meetings by 2 days to 22 hours.

Second time it has done it today, for the same meetings.

There was a crash in between.

Annoying.

Better a crank than a cog!

On 7/17/2010 2:08 PM, nedbrek wrote:
> "Andy Glew"<"newsgroup at comp-arch.net">  wrote in message
> news:BsedncmAl52kRdzRnZ2dnUVZ_oOdnZ2d@giganews.com...
>>
>> Now, please don't get insulted when I say you are a crank.  Cranks are my
>> people.  I'm a crank.  Cranks occasionally come up with good ideas.
>
> Hehe, reminded me of this cartoon:
> http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-and-babbage-vs-the-organist-pt-1/
>
> I can be a crank, as long as I am not the "Itanium crank".  Anything but
> that, please. :P


Better a crank than a cog!

(Hey, that's my new motto.)

A Poor Manager of Engineers...

I once asked manager 1 at company 1 about manager 2 at company 2, who had worked for manager 1 at company 3.  Manager 1 said "manager 2 is a good engineer, but a poor manager of engineers".

I didn't think much more on this topic until recently, when I wondered "Wait, manager 2 is managing a team of engineers at a VLSI engineering driven company.  How can it be that he is a poor manager of engineers?"

And then I realized: at companies like Intel, most VLSI engineers' first experience of management and team leadership is (or at least was, until recently) NOT managing other engineers.  It is managing technicians, specifically a team of layout, physical design, specialists.  Amazing as it sounds, 20 years after silicon compilers, Intel still largely accomplished chip layout by hand.

I posit that managing a team of mask designers is different from managing a team of design engineers.  In the former the tasks are supposedly known: convert schematics into layout. In the latter, there is more backing up and retrying, more experimentation.  More and more so as the level of abstraction rises, through microarchitecture and architecture.

FLOSS, Larry Augustin, VA Linux IPO, one of my many missed opportunities...

One of the bet things since I joined IV was discovering FLOSS Weekly, the podcasts from Leo Laporte's TWiT network with Randall Schwartz (and originally Chris DiBona) on Free, Libre, and open Source Software.

I'm going back and listening to old podcasts as well as new ones.  While driving between Seattle and Portlamd, or while exercising on the elliptical machine at the gym.

Today listened to old Episode 6, with Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux, SourceForge, etc.

They mentioned VA Linux's IPO, and how Chris DiBona ran the program... heck, quoting wikipedia:

Many authors of free software were invited to buy shares at the initial price offering as part of a friends and family deal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet

I'm not sure why I was one of the 1500 Open Source developers invited to join the IPO.  The invite letter did not say.  Chris DiBona said he went through source code control history records.  Probably something I had contributed to RCS (-I. / -I$) or CVS (although I don't remember anything getting into the CVS distribution).

I was at university at the time. I was invited to buy shares at 30$ - I don't remember how many, maybe 1000$ worth, maybe more.  But I do remember was that it was more money than I had at the time.  I remember discussing with my wife, saying that it might double in a year, but I didn't think that VA Linux was making money, so the money might be lost.

The IPO price was 30$.  Trading opened at 299$, peaked at 320$, closed at 239$ on the first day.

Sigh.  If I had purchased the IPO...  but then, I would have probably held on too long, riding the stock price until it was essentially not worth the IPO price.

--

There is a moral here:  I was right about the overall poor prospects for VA Linux. (I think.)  But riding the wave can be very profitable, even though it ends up as nothing on the beach.

New cygwin problems

I have depended on cygwin for years.  For years my main development platform has been cygwin emacs, writing Perl and C++ and Python to be uploaded to various Linux machines and run.

I just upgraded to CYGWIN_NT-6.0.  Running on Vista.

And I am plagued by instabilities.  Emacs running out of resources, vfork failures.

And everything is much slower than the older version of Cygwin on same Vista machine.  E.g. I may no longer be able to run git - too slow.

Microsoft OneNote grows on me

I almost hate to say it, but I am growing dependent on Microsoft OneNote.

Don't get me wrong: I hate OneNote.  Its user interface sucks.  There are so many improvements I could make to it...

But: it is really useful just to have something that I can drag and drop bitmaps into.  Screen Clippings.  That makes the bitmaps searchable via OCR.

E.g. today I made OneNote notebooks as I was (1) moving my NoIP accounts, and (2) shopping for a better wireless phone plan.  With OneNote, I could just grab screen dumps of the various windows - that can't be cut and paste as text at all well - and can search the result.

Sure, I would like better.  E.g. I wish OneNote's automatic recording of attribution worked more often. E.g. I have had OneNote cxrash and lose data, when using it at work, more times than I like to remember.  But neverr

But what there is, is a start.

I tried Evernote as well today.  I like the net centeredness.   Haven't really used it another to now how it compares.  One immediate problem: it doesn't work properly on my USB displays, only working on my laptop LCD.  I also can't get screen clipping working outside of a web browser.  But I'll probably figure that out evenntually.

Certs and virtual hosts - multiple signatures

Messing around with webhosting setup on my vacation.

Wikpedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication):

Since 2005, CAcert has run experiments on different methods of using TLS on virtual servers.^[4] Most of the experiments are unsatisfactory and impractical. For example, it is possible to use subjectAltName to contain multiple domains in a single certificate, but as this is one certificate, this means all the domains must be owned and controlled by one person, and the certificate has to be re-issued every time the list of domains changes.

While I understand the motivations for SNI, I think the above statement is an indication of bogosity - if not in the statement, then in the structure of a certificate and signatures.

What I want is

     ...

     ...

     ...

     ...

I.e. I want to be able to have multiple certifiers attached, post facto, to a certificate.

(as well as I want to be able to have the certifier statements and signatures stored separately)

Certifier statements and signatures are metadata.  Metadata can be both adjacent, as above, or non-adjacent.

There can be an integrity code on the certificate_carrier, signed by the certifiee.  since the certifiers have themselves signed, protecting the integrity, of the enclosed certifiee statement, this enables the certifiee to add more certifier statements over time.

I.e. the certifier certifies the certifiee statemnt, not the entire certificate carroer.  Although we could have tghat, too:  the certifier could say "I certify this only if Verisign has also certified it", etc.