Shaky Danny

 I moved to Blogspot from Open Salon. My hope was for permanence after Salon shut down the site, I know, it was because of me.  I think it may interest you what I, with all my foibles and faults, thought at the time.  These Blogspot entries don’t index in Google search. Since they don’t index in Bing as well, it must be Blogspot. I had ten entries that I tricked into indexing, but now they don't. It took me a while to get Adsense to work, so maybe it’s me. Others have complained as well. If you want to be on the dark web, publish on Blogspot. I imagine there is some corpocracy: someone at Blogspot might not want a free blog site. But why does Google find your page and then refuse to index it? Blogspot is owned by Google. Google has a tool, Search Console, that gives various obscure reasons. Whatever the reasons, Google has taken it on itself to screen pages. My blog pages obviously don’t break browsers.  Screening content is a mugs game. Say I wanted a list of everyo...

  Kind of ridiculous to post on the internet about what to do when you lose access to the internet. I intend this as preemptive. Maybe you can help someone else. I lost access to the internet with some obscure message about network service. When it breaks, turn it off. The message suggested that as well. Turned the provider gateway on and off, turned my PC on and off. Repeatedly. So, I called my provider and was trapped in the response tree. They even turned my gateway on and off themselves. Eventually I was in a chat text conversation with the providers Dennis who was also trapped in a response tree. It culminated with him sending me an email to confirm my identity. Since I couldn’t receive it on my PC, he was, in effect, instructing me to change providers. Dennis sent me back to the providers original help phone number. My next-door neighbor had service. She has a different provider. On reflection, it dawned on me that the problem was on my PC. Something like this once happ...

  A ridiculous amount of effort is spent criticizing Hillary Clinton’s character. When elections are that close, every infraction is magnified. There is a much simpler material explanation. It is pathetic how cheap Congress is. Most of their time is spent on phone banks raising money. There was a moment when it looked like Chicago’s alderman Vrdolyak would be sent to Congress. Imagine: -This is a billion-dollar appropriation? I get more than this for a zoning variance. Occasionally money rains on Washington. World War II was cost plus. Johnson unleashed Taiwan. When Nixon made the China deal, they had so much cash they were shoving it into filing cabinets. Reaganauts were Nixon wannabes. Bush Sr. held up the Saudis for Kuwait. Hillary Clinton was queen. She shook down healthcare so hard their teeth rattled. Everyone in Washington should love Hillary Clinton. The Saudis had to sit down, and Ross Perot complained about the service. Insurance and Pharmacy were in a bidding war t...

  The defaults seem the opposite of common sense. AdSense is pestering me about an ad.txt file. I finally get a custom one in settings. Then I just figure out to click the blog file in manage your sites to get it scanned. If they want a file why not just make the file? I can find my blog in Bing but not in Google. I hesitate to mention it because maybe Bing is in error. Is it something with indexing? I go to Google Search Console. The page is crawled but not indexed. So, I request indexing. They notify me they are thinking about it. Weeks later, still thinking. I finally found a way in search console to request another crawl, but that crawl didn’t show up on the report. Why is the default for blogspot to not show up in Google? How neat that I can request and control how Google scans my page, not. The reason Google surpassed Yahoo is because they didn’t try to control searches. What else is Google missing? It would be nice to have a table of contents. 

  In Another Data Processing Book I have an essay on affirmative action. I also have a blog entry In Defense of Privilege . In light of recent events, I am revisiting them here. Most people seem to believe that affirmative action meant that we simply instituted quotas. Affirmative action law was passed by whites. If you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, you didn’t have to have quotas. So, case by case, company by company, school by school, it was proven in a court of law that they had legacy, employees’ kids, preferences, that they did not select on merit. They had quotas and now the question was how big those quotas should be. This maximized work for the lawyers. That is why there are law firms devoted to civil rights law. Current arguments against quotas have a misplaced notion of fairness The arguments of the time focused on institutional autonomy. They used phrases like “academic integrity”. Invariably these institutions receive federal money. They recognize ...

  We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work. Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot. I task ChatGpt with revie...

  I recently learned about pistol compensators. These are vents you can install on your pistol to lessen recoil. Since the recoil is what drives the reload, you have to be careful the compensator doesn’t jam the gun. This is a variant of the gas operated action on assault rifles that allows them to be the small plastic toy looking guns that are so popular. Shooting guns used to be more difficult. You can find YouTube videos of people shooting old rifles that hit them in the face because they are not used to the recoil. There are also laser pointers you can attach to the gun. Fire a round into the target at the range you expect to use. Fix the laser dot on the bullet impact. From then on, within range, your shots should hit the dot. Eventually we will have the Tom Swift electronic rifle. The gun won’t need a hammer anymore because it will fire with a spark. This will allow the cartridge to be held still and contained with no blow back. The cartridge may not have a case. Even if ...

  It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions.   Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers.   The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out.   Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works.   Books have become video graphic experiences.   I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition. Except perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others. Authors have const...

  I spent a year in Dallas one week. Southern Methodist University had volunteered as the crash test dummy for the beta release of our library software. Wandering down the hall, I noticed a PC. I got on and brought up our company’s web site. It was 1995. When I attempted to reach our mainframe, a firewall stopped me. I knew it was possible to reach it from the internet so I called up our hex support and told them: -The only people you are blocking are customers and employees. Support graciously allowed me in. Normally we come back from these jaunts with scraps of paper trying to remember what we did. This time I put my changes in our source base and had it reinstalled. Monday morning, I hit the office clean. Then I made it a habit to check SMU for their dumps each day and brought them across the web. The same situation is happening for privacy. Let us review phone surveillance. In the American Civil War, soldiers realized that rather than knocking over telegraph lines it was ...

BlogSpot just created a beta software update for statistics. BlogSpot used to pollute my view count with my own visits.   It offered an option to turn that off but then it didn’t keep it clicked. Why would someone want to count their own visits? Now it throws me into Analytics which seems overly concerned with Google users. I used to be on Open Salon.   When that closed I chose BlogSpot believing there would be permanence. It was tedious cutting and pasting my entries. Who thought there would be so many? I lost my dates and comments. You would think that there could be an easier transition. That may be working now. Why is it so difficult to have an index or table of contents? I had AdSense on Open Salon. BlogSpot sent me over to AdSense with a new ID which AdSense rejected. I am now trapped in a perpetual user ID embrace from which there is no release. Please don’t send any scripted solutions unless you have tried them yourself.   AdSense sucks as well. You ...

Sorry don't know where else to post. Lot of bloviating. There are probably a lot of reasons for this dumb message and the messages are similar. Good argument for better messaging. What seems to be happening in my case is that Avast, what do you want, it's free, is pushing out a software upgrade for windows 10 using its windows 7 program. This breaks everything better than a virus could.  If you can bring up Avast there will be a message that a program upgrade is waiting in the software updates section, pushing that through, restarting each time it asked, fixed it for me. Then it broke again. Guessing Avast is trying to tell me something, perhaps pay them. Uninstalled Avast then things worked again. Avast sent me a very nice email explaining how to uninstall. If you don't want their web service then troubleshoot program(right click) gets you to control panel. Hello defender.

Password restriction rules  are Vogon . The initial problem is that people choose simple passwords that are easy to remember. It’s like locking the screen door to let in the breeze.  But when you restrict the universe of passwords that people can choose from you make it easier to hack.  The fallacy is to apply the tougher passwords to the original universe of all passwords.  People are still going to use passwords that they can remember within the more difficult rules. If you dumped the password files in the more restrictive environments you will find the same amount of redundancy. Before you start counting up the permutations, consider your own passwords, hopefully you have more than one. I’m sure that several of them are clever phrases that you believe are unique and fall within the restrictions. mIright?  

The major task in marketing is categorization.    For instance once you have categorized groceries you can compare the UPC codes sent against the categorized items you have and kick out the ones that are new.    Assuming that you have correctly categorized the current ones and no one complains then only the new items are subject to human review.    Automating the process utilizing their item description seems like a tempting application until you consider the coffee problem.    What is coffee?    It is a product, a flavor, a color, and an appliance, at the very least. Cross referencing to the UPC manufacturer code gives an indication but you get the idea. The general solution to the coffee problem as mentioned above is one that humans routinely use. We cheat.    That is we make use of other information, such as the UPC manufacturer code. Open Salon has its own version of the coffee problem, the spam issue. How do we distin...

As we watch the prosecutions of all the people swept up with  Blagojevich   the fundamental question obsessing every Chicagoan becomes: -Why were all these people talking on the phone? We are perfectly willing to write off Rob himself as a hopeless mouth with his skirt over his head, in the middle of Madison and State.     But some of these people are connected. They sit on the right hand. They’re not supposed to get caught, even in their seventies, even as window dressing. What’s going on? I believe these people were victims of technological change. To understand let us go back to when everything started: the sixties. Some poor telephone line man in Hyde Park was coming down from the pole with all these gadgets he’d taken off the line.    Ma Bell had enough. It wasn’t that they were patriotic; they had to protect their equipment.    They purchased these fancy switches from a German company that recorded all the calls that passed thr...

Wired recently described the computer nightmare:   http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/ Like most disasters this started with good intentions, to cripple Iranian enrichment for nuclear weapons. To do this they, whoever they are, used professionals in a project.    Instead of a small clever piece of code making use of social engineering, they wrote a system that exploited network distribution vulnerabilities.    Just like malaria crossing from one species to another, their programs crossed operating systems.    They sent instructions to Siemens controllers from Windows.    They also spoofed site authentication. We have spent tremendous time and effort getting systems and hardware to communicate, now each portal is a hazard. It is the use of professionals that is the most terrifying.    We professionals have gazed into the pit of despair, we know how infuriating intermittent resu...

In 2007 I got a peculiar diagnostic on my PC, which led to my replacing the battery on the motherboard.    It was slow booting up as well.    The two primary choices were getting another PC or a laptop.    With a laptop, you don’t need an UPS (uninterruptible power source) since it comes with a battery.    It also has a much smaller footprint.    Still I would feel like a chump when something broke and I had to send it in for fixing.    Lap tops have even tinier little connections and all sorts of gotchas when you take them apart. Usually by the time that happens, it’s time for a new one.    There is the possibility that I might actually carry it around with me.    I determine to get a lap top. There are two choices Dell or HP.    They both have nice web sites.    HP is offering 64-bit machines, Dell isn’t.    Why would I want to have fewer bits?    I’m an American;...

USS Uhuru on a secret peacekeeping mission to the Lambda quadrant suddenly drops out of warp. The captain is speaking: -Why is it always the Lambda quadrant?    What’s their problem?    What happened? -We are out of warp. An officer replies. -I know that, why? -There’s a diagnostic. -What does it say? -It says:              14357-e, Early end DATECNVT\seclib system ended. -What? -It says: -I heard you.    What does that mean? The captain interrupts. -I don’t know. -Life support inactive. Says a second officer. -What do you mean inactive?    Computer, override life support.    I said computer…Are we under attack? Asks the captain. -All the computers are down. Replies the officer. -What do you mean, down? -They’re not working. -Why? -Permission to be on the bridge. Jones, a black human, from maintenance and first...