I am totally amazed at the way Hugh MacLeod has created a movement at Microsoft around a doodle. He simultaneously captures the best and worst things that there are about Microsoft in a way that is thought provoking. It’s funny how many companies spend millions of dollars to create a brand or an internal vision only to have something that is far less meaningful than what Hugh created on the back of a business card. I am not that fond of Microsoft but I want this on my business card.

I was stunned to read that Sun bought MySQL AB for One Billion dollars.

Sun is one of my favorite technology companies. If faced with having to choose a commercial UNIX system I would choose Sun hands down. I love the tool set especially some of their latest hits like DTrace, Open Office and their T2 processors.

MySQL is hands down my favorite database to develop code with. It’s fast, it’s easy and it scales. I’ve worked with the software on both a free and commercial basis and I have been very happy with the product and the support offered by the company.

Why was the marriage so shocking? I simply can’t believe the price tag. How will Sun recoup a billion dollars from this investment. It will take a lot of consulting and support contracts to return that much money to it’s stock holders. I admit I’m happier than if a competitor had scooped them up and buried the product deep underground.

Who benefits most? I’m willing to bet Tim O’Reilly makes more money from this acquisition than Sun ever will. Hopefully, I’m wrong.

I’m half way through this O’Reilly book and it is inspiring. I can tell you from experience that looking at well designed code is a real pleasure. This book is a collection of essays about computer code. Most of the essays do a great job at taking a particular piece of code and explaining something about that code that makes it stand out as beautiful for one reason or another. If you care about the craft of creating computer programs you will probably enjoy this book. This book had me hooked immediately when it’s first essay was by none other than Brian Kernighan.

Bruce Schneier, in his latest newsletter was talking about how to protect data on a laptop. He suggest whole disk encryption combined with encrypted archives for sets of older documents. He then added this gem.

“The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.” — Bruce Schneier

This is both brilliant and obvious. I am a digital pack-rat and am professionally employed to think about creating more copies of data, so it goes against my natural tendencies, but it probably wouldn’t hurt me to start chucking more data. That would make an excellent holiday project!

Speaking of security, the same newsletter pointed to a link indicating Britian never installed PALs on their nukes until quite recently. The had bike locks on their nukes. Given how easy it is to pick a bike lock, I can’t believe the world is still here.

I’ve followed Larry Lessig’s writing on the topic of copyright for sometime. I share his concern about the RO (read-only) aspects of culture forced on us by the extension of copyright laws beyond their original intentions. If you would like more info, I suggest you check out a speech he recently made at TED.

Even if esoteric points of copyright law are not interesting to you, consider watching the video as a great example of how to do a presentation. It’s so spare and zen like, yet the words on the screen serve to completely enforce all the points that Larry makes. I would love to take my game up to that level some day.

Here is a great list of “Software Engineering Proverbs” My favorites were these two.

Q: How many QA testers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: QA testers don't change anything. They just report that it's dark.
-- Kerry Zallar
Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Just one. But the house falls down.
-- Andrew Siwko

I have to have a t-shirt.

Two really interesting data visualizations.

Visualization of the U.S. President’s State of the Union speeches. It shows two word frequency graphs for the State of the Union speeches, education level of the speech and total word count.

We Feel Fine – a visualization of the feelings of bloggers at certain points in time for the last few years. This one is a java applet and takes a long time to load. The interface isn’t terribly efficient or intuitive, nor does it really mean anything since the data is poorly categorized but it is fun.

I installed a new firewall at home this weekend.

I had been using Smoothwall. I liked it when I first installed it, since it was flexible, linux based, easy to administer and had regular updates. Lately, though it seemed a bit like abandon-ware with very few updates. I decided to switch to the forked version of the smoothwall project, ipcop, mainly since the security updates seem to be more frequent.

I like ipcop much better. The interface is much easier to navigate and it seems better maintained. If you have a always on internet connection and an old PC you aren’t using you should try it.

I have never really liked trusting other people with my data. I make some exceptions. One exception in particular is gmail. I really like having ssl access to my email everywhere I go. I really like the interface. I really like the nearly unlimited storage. I really don’t like them having security holes that expose my data. I hope the smart folks at google stay on top of this stuff and work to build trust with their users. Their lack of a timely public announcement is the part of the story that worries me the most.