Yeah, totally “leet”

First, it’s called “cron”.

Second, if this is true, and your efforts were upset by your inability to check the crontab, boo fucking hoo. It would seem reasonable to me to have a “self repair” method in place. Self-repair is a legitimate function in an appliance. (If only my toaster could repair itself!)

If it turns out to be a cron-job, you’ll have no sympathy from me. If you can’t disable a cron job, you’re not that much of a “hacker”. (Not disabling launchd is acceptable, who the fuck knows how it even works.)

Payment Card Industry Security Standards are a fucking joke

46 Million credit card numbers stolen:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The retailer that owns the T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s clothing chains said nearly 46 million customer card numbers were stolen from its computers over an 18-month period and said the total number of stolen cards may never be known.

A couple years ago, a number of our merchants - who have not in their decade of business made even 4.6 million total sales - were required to implement lots and lots of new business practices to adhere to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards, else they lose their merchant accounts.

Obviously this whole industry-wide push has yielded incredible results. I said it at the time, and I’ll say it again:

• PCI compliance is a shakedown
• Only small merchants were “targeted”, no large retailer will ever suffer the wrath of Visa/Mastercard/Amex
•  Nothing in PCI will do much to stop security problems, anyway

The entire system is a giant CYA and has nothing at all to do with genuine security. But great PR is better than real work.

In which I succumb to the peer pressure

I have a twitter account thing. So now, you can learn just what I happened to be doing that last time I bothered to update my stupid twitter account thing. So “friend” me or whatever the hell it’s called.

Beware screen height

Google Reader now supports authenticated feeds?

Daring Fireball’s linked list has magically appeared in my Google Reader list … Has Google Reader opened up support for authenticated feeds?

(Update: DAMMIT.)

Underpromise, overdeliver

Scoble made a quick comment about AppleTV, that Apple in general tries to underpromise and overdeliver.

It occurred to me that one of the chief sources of frustration I have in helping our customers is, I am rarely (if ever) even given the opportunity to underpromise/overdeliver. We have a common cycle: rather than shoot for simple, defined milestones along a critical path, they want the world out of the gate.

“We’re competing against thousands of other sites!” they say as rationale for why. “20 different competitors so something similar, so we must as well!”

My latest project is a perfect example. We have so many requirements, that when we cut-and-pasted his requirements document into the estimate, we got reamed out that we “left out a bunch of things”. Um, dude … that was your text.

I never get a chance to overdeliver, throw in extras, show off.  It’s all I can do to get it done, only a little late, and only a little over budget. It’s a perpetual death march. (See also)

My Apple TV notes

Got my Apple TV. As noted by Rogue Amoeba, it works with my standard-def-but-has-component-video TV; it isn’t perfect but it’s better than a little 17″ monitor.

I also note that the device does not have its Airport MAC address on the case: since I filter by MAC address, I couldn’t add it. I had to disable filtering for it to connect. That seems like something worthy of a bug.

I’m effing overjoyed with it so far, esp. since I don’t have to drop a grand on a TV. It isn’t perfect but it’s a step up from where I was, TV-wise.

As long as you don’t call me late for dinner

USA Today has an article about men taking their wives names after marriage, the hassles, etc.

I used to give a shit, then I worked hard to not give a shit, and finally came to a certain acceptance; the sidebar gives a pretty clear picture of why I really don’t give a shit any more (ie, “It’s just another dumb American cultural norm, give it a fucking rest”). As far as kids, I dunno, give ‘em whatever name you want. Be all Latino and give ‘em a giant name (first name, middle name, name of a saint, grandfather’s middle name, mother’s uncle’s saint name, mother’s last name, father’s last name, day of the week, “de” + intersection of nearest Starbucks).

The only real problem is people on the phone or whatever think something shady’s going on when I talk about my wife, whose last name is not the same as mine (see “give it a fucking rest”, above).

Everything old is new again: BrowserOS

ca. 1997: “Browsers will reduce Windows to an unimportant collection of slightly buggy device drivers” Marc Andreessen (attributed, source)

ca. 1998: Mozilla Foundation “spun off” from Netscape

ca. 1999: Netscape sold to AOL (source)

ca. 2007: “Hey, let’s make it, so, like, Windows is just, like, a bootloader. Or maybe even, like, boot the Linux kernel or something.” (source)

Safari nightlies work with (most) Google apps now (kinda)

The Safari nightlies are working (nearly) flawlessly with Reader and Calendar. Reader hasn’t worked for some time (really screwed-up rendering issues) and Calendar had lots of cosmetic problems, making it ugly to look at. Both seem to be working well.

No love for in-mail chat, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever be at a Mac sans iChat or Adium; and Spreadsheets still kinda only barely renders (but Docs seems to work fine). And still no ad-blocking natively, of course, but this CSS file helps a bit.

It’s good to see things working; the WebKit/Safari team has fought hard for love, and I look forward to them winning me away from Mozilla.