Book Review: Jack Black's You Can't Win

Fascinating, rough-and-tumble glimpse into the underworld, circa 1900

First published in 1926, the autobiography of infamous criminal Jack Black quickly became a bestseller. Black's tale is fascinating. In turns, it describes a transformation from choir-boy, to bill-collector, hobo, burglar, hold-up man, safe-cracker, prisoner, "hop" (heroin) addict, fugitive, parolee and -- finally -- reformed citizen. In fact, the tragic irony of the tale is that Black's entire criminal career began through a police mistake: rounding him up in a brothel crackdown though he was simply collecting on a milk bill.

With a spartan yet captivating voice, Black describes the turn-of-the-century Old West. Bat Masterson, Salt Chunk Mary, Foot-and-a-half George, and other memorable characters make appearances as Black travels through hobo settlements, small towns, mining camps, and bustling cities like Vancouver, Frisco, Seattle, and L.A. All the while, Black uses his creative mind and adroit skills at thievery to pull off a wide range of capers.

The book's undercurrent is a criminal code of ethics that is every bit as honorable as that of a law-abiding citizen. While the law routinely meted out brutal punishments, including 30 lashes in a Canadian prison and a horrific three-day bout with a straitjacket -- all ostensibly for corrective purposes -- Black's point is that it served the exact opposite purpose. It hardened his resolve and created within him a furious urge for revenge against all of society.

Though the majority of the book is autobiographical, much of it is designed as a cautionary tale for youth who might otherwise be attracted to a life of crime. In addition, Black serves up advice for society as a whole: namely, that ratcheting up punishments for first-time offenders causes more problems than it solves. Black offers suggestions that society treat disadvantaged children with more care and urges job creation as alternatives to criminality among youth.

Interestingly, the book's afterword hints that many of Black's escapades were omitted or glossed over. He was sentenced to 25 years for shooting a man (not described in the book) and he seemed to be the drug kingpin during his later years in prison. Nonetheless, Black's tale is a captivating glimpse into a side of the American West that is seldom seen.

Vista Delays - Best of the Mini-Microsoft Comments

The comments just keep on coming over at Mini-Microsoft, which featured a post entitled, "Vista 2007 - Fire the Leadership Now!". A blistering series of responses -- many from current or former MSFT employees -- pin the blame on Vista's continuing delays to Ballmer, middle management, the coders, outsourcing, the Dalai Lama, and everything in between.

To spare you -- my dear and valued reader -- from having to wade through hundreds of comments, I've highlighted several of the most interesting remarks below.

...by exercising their absolute power, Ballmer and Gates have created a company culture in their own image. One that is renowned for its delusionary arrogance: its self-serving adoration and its reactive petulance. They treat their partners with absolute disdain: encouraging them to invest on their platform to in the attempt to create successful markets, where substantial success will be crushed by a Microsoft imitation that is both cross subsidized from monopoly revenues and often pushed on customers via the OS distribution channel... Comment

I wonder what Eric Sink thinks about that?

Regarding the planned Vista availability for corporations by 12/06 (while consumers must wait 'til '07), another commenter posits:

You guys are missing the point. This is all about software assurance, the MS plan where enterprises buy our s**t in advance. A boatload of SA plans expire 12/31/2006. Many of these accounts purchased SA under duress, BUT were promised that LH would come out in their 3 yr window. IF we do not deliver them bits before the end of this year and fulfill our wink-wink SA commitments made by the field, we are toast. They will sue the crap out of us and they WILL win, and we WILL be making a HUGE adjustment to our earnings. This IS THE ONLY explaination. There is NO OTHER reason for delivering to enterprises early... Comment

Sounds a little odd, because if you sign an SA agreement, it's etched in stone. If MSFT delivers before the SA expires, you're good. If not, you're out in the cold. It's a contract. But what do I know? I'm not a lawyer...

Here's a person who recommends a new strategy to delivering an OS:

It's very simple... the quickest way to get something out the door is to build a proprietary windows desktop ON TOP OF a BSD/GNU underbelly... with your own custom win32 compatibility libraries to run existing wincode on... come on guys... you know it makes sense... Comment

In other words, build subsequent versions of Windows on top of a Posix (UNIX or Linux) core. Indeed. That's something I've advocated for years (e.g., Visual Studio for Linux).

And here's another theory as to why Vista keeps slipping:

...As to why Vista's a trainwreck? I think it's API and Feature-itis. The alphabet soup of hardware requirements + reluctance to ditch things (why is PS/2 still on mobos, really?) + the mess of RPC/MAPI/COM/OLE/OLEDB/VB/VB.NET/.NET 1.0/.NET 1.1/DTC/COM+/WPF/WPF-E/Windows Forms/etc. 86 different technologies to do the Exact. Same. Thing., all of which become their own unique source of bugs and security holes, making matrices completely impossible to test adequately (and add to that the insistence that the Magical Automation Fairy, immense gates that stop code checkins and burden people with process, and outsourcing to India and Beijing will solve all our testing problems)... Comment

Here's someone affiliated with BestBuy who thinks the Vista delay is a good thing. And not for the reason you might expect.

...With the beastly requirements Vista has, what percentage of people who buy a computer today is seriously even going to be capable of running Vista without heavy upgrades? I work as a service agent at Best Buy's Geek Squad. Now and then a customer asks me if the computer they're buying will support the next generation operating system. Because of Vista's huge requirements, I've been telling them "probably not without massive upgrades." The system requirements I'm hearing for Vista are ridiculous. 2+ GIGABYTES OF MEMORY in order to have a gaming experience on par with 512mb on XP. HIGH END 3D ACCELERATOR required in order to have all the nifty new look and feel that Vista has, so you can count out the majority of laptops that only come equipped with those pitiful on-board i845, i915, and S3 chipsets, or name brand PCs built without AGP or PCIe slots. Thus, I'm glad that Vista's release date misses the Back-to-School and Christmas rushes. I'm glad that less people will be buying the boxed versions hoping to install it on their older computers. It means less customers will leave my precinct p***ed off because I had to tell them that the copy of Vista they bought (and are unable to return) won't work on anything less than a top-end PC bought in winter 2005, or a top end laptop bought in summer 2006... Comment

For a "Windows veteran but no longer an employee", it all seems like back to the future:

...In the mid-90's was a 3 year project called "Cairo" led by Jim that had around 150-200 head count. It was managed similar to Vista: pie in the sky technology with little focus on reality. After 3 years it was cancelled because it was dysfunctional - it couldn't move forward, couldn't focus on shipping. After that spectacular flop Jim was promoted to senior VP immediately afterwards. No accountability, and I think no understanding from above of the problem. I've been watching the Vista saga unfold, being reminded along the way of Cairo. Pie in the sky technology, inability to focus, and when it fails, no accountability. Sounds very familiar, just this time it's on a scale over 10x larger and much more important to the company... Comment

There you have it. And you thought everything was sweetness and light within the hallowed halls of Redmond.

Feingold's Embarrassing Censure Hearing

The oh-so-concerned-with-national-security Democrats are holding censure hearings over the President's act of wiretapping international calls between terrorist cells.

And, yes, the mediacrats continue to call these wiretaps "domestic". Let's see. The taps can only be called domestic if an airplane flying from Tokyo to San Franscisco is considered a "domestic flight".

Anyhow, Russ Feingold, John Dean, and a bunch of other hard-left barking moonbats -- that's the term they prefer, I believe -- are humiliating themselves in a forlorn attempt to censure the President.

Leave it to associate director of the Center for National Security Law, Robert Turner, to set 'em straight.

In wartime, the idea that the president should sit back and say, well I have the power to do this, it could save American lives, but I don't want to offend certain members of Congress so I'm not going to allow the National Security Agency to listen when bin Laden calls some US person who might well be a Saudi national who's totally committed to bin Laden's cause who lives in this country, he qualifies as an American under FISA. We know, we've got considerable evidence that FISA contributed to 9/11. We know Colleen Rowley, the FBI agent who was made TIME's Person of the Year in 2002 because she was angry the FBI would not get her a FISA warrant. The FBI could not give her a FISA warrant because Moussaoui was not an agent of Al-Qaeda. Moussaoui was a lone wolf. A lot of harm has been done by what Congress did in the wake of Vietnam. The president is trying not to seize new power but to take us back where this country was from 1789 to about 1975.

Can I get an indeed™?

Eric Sink's Ultimate Dog-Fooding Story

Eric Sink has a story that may be the best "dog-fooding" tale ever. For those unfamiliar with the term: it refers to the act of using your own product ("eating your own dog-food"). For a software company that makes email software, for instance, it would mean utilizing your own software to run all of your company's email. Microsoft, as an aside, is famous for dog-fooding its products.

The primary machine tool in any well-equipped woodshop is a table saw. Basically, it's a polished cast iron table with a slot through which protrudes a circular saw blade, ten inches in diameter. Wood is cut by sliding it across the table into the spinning blade. A table saw is an extremely dangerous tool. My saw can cut a 2-inch thick piece of hard maple with no effort at all. Frankly, it's a tool which should only be used by someone who is a little bit afraid of it. It should be obvious what would happen if a finger ever came in contact with the spinning blade. Over 3,000 people each year lose a finger in an accident with a table saw. A guy named Stephen Gass has come up with an amazing solution to this problem. He is a woodworker, but he also has a PhD in physics. His technology is called Sawstop. It consists of two basic inventions: * He has a sensor which can detect the difference in capacitance between a finger and a piece of wood. * He has a way to stop a spinning table saw blade within 1/100 of a second, less than a quarter turn of rotation. The videos of this product are amazing. Slide a piece of wood into the spinning blade, and it cuts the board just like it should. Slide a hot dog into the spinning blade, and it stops instantly, leaving the frankfurter with nothing more than a nick. Here's the spooky part: Stephen Gass tested his product on his own finger!

Democrats hold a national security workshop

Erudite pearls of wisdom from EIB. The Democrats will hold a workshop on National Security to figure out -- apparently -- what their position should be. I'll be honest -- that's just taunting-the-tiger-with-raw-meat scary.

The Democrats -- 36 of them, 36 Democratic candidates -- are scheduled to gather in Washington Monday for workshops on national security and military issues... [they] say they are going to catch Osama bin Laden, the same Osama bin Laden that Bill Clinton let slip through our fingers two or three times. They're going to increase the number of spies. They're going to double the number of troops and Special Forces, and they're going to be "tough and smart," says their Senate leader, Dingy Harry. Nancy Pelosi over in the House said we're going to be "strong and smart." She left out tough. So they say they're going to get Osama. Well, how they going to do this? It might serve us well to examine their track record, because they don't want to do any spying on terrorists who are phoning into America or phoning out of America. They have no desire to find out what terrorists are up to. They want to impeach and censure the president. Oh, by the way, the big censure hearing today. They had more witnesses than they had senators, and at the end of it, it was just Specter and Feingold. Feingold finally got fed up and walked out of his own hearing... ...Can you believe this? National security. It's like having a meeting behind closed doors to figure out what they believe... Forget what they come out of their workshop and say. Forget what their battle plan is. Never forget what the last three years have been like.

EIB: Democrats hold national security workshop

Fundrace 2004 Neighbor Search

Interested in seeing your neighbors' contributions to the 2004 Presidential campaign? Fundrace Neighbor Search will do the trick... though I must admit that it's a tad voyeuristic.

Methinks Customscoop Needs a Security Assessment

I was checking this blog's referer logs yesterday and came across an interesting listing. It was one I hadn't seen before.

Definition: a referer log describes how visitors reached your site. When a user clicks on a link -- say, a Google search result or just a conventional link on a page -- the original address information is often, but not always, recorded at the destination site. This information is termed "referer" data and it designed to let a publisher analyze how visitors located the website.

Here's what I saw in my referer log (sensitive data redacted):

http://enterprise.customscoop.com/index.cfm?username=******&password=******&Is***

In other words, CustomScoop uses a simple HTTP GET request during its authentication step. This allows a referer log (like mine) to unintentionally capture CustomScoop credentials: user-name, password, and other sensitive arguments.

What this tells me is that CustomScoop probably (a) doesn't have a security-savvy technical professional on staff; and (b) hasn't had a serious, independent security assessment performed.

I contacted CustomScoop earlier with an abridged version of this post. And I sent along some recommendations for triage (i.e., use an HTTP POST for operations where credentials are submitted... not exactly rocket-science here, folks) as well as the obligatory, "for the love of... have a real security firm perform an assessment!"

Hopefully they get the message. They don't make it easy to contact them.

Referer Logs Can be Fun

This reminds me of some situations where I've used referer logs to freak out the less technically sophisticated among us.

My brother, for example, is a prominent attorney and truly brilliant in every respect. But I really blew his mind the other day when I came across a particular referer entry on my blog. The refering site was Google and the user was searching specifically for my brother. The searcher happened to find a worthwhile hit on my blog and visited. The information left in my log-file indicated the search term and user's IP address. Of course, I deduced the location and company performing the search (it was some law firm in California). So I wrote my brother the following note:

[Company name redacted] Know anyone there? I noticed they were Googling you... don't ask me how I know these things :-)

His response?

How do you know these things? I actually got an e-mail from someone at [Company name redacted] earlier today. Amazing.

Actually, not so amazing - once you know how to leverage a referer log.