Dec
28
2009
Having security “systems” that aren’t used correctly are like doors that aren’t locked. You don’t need another lock, you just need to use the lock you have.
I say this because this latest incident will most likely result in additional security checks at airports and it might not have happened had the existing checks been used (such an approach might have made 9/11 turn out differently as well, but I digress).
Comments Off | tags: airport, Security, securitytheater, terrorism | posted in Security
Dec
27
2009
I’ve mentioned my RSS reader issues that have come with the advent of syncing with Google Reader before. It remains a nightmare, and not just performance-wise.
Over the holiday, NetNewsWire on the Mac decided to go haywire when syncing and created hundreds of bogus feeds. I can’t delete them. Now my subscriptions are messed up on my Mac, my PC and in Google Reader. Attempts to fix this have proven time-consuming and frustrating. Sometimes Google Reader will read the OPML file of my subscriptions, sometimes it won’t. If it manages to read it, it makes errors and doesn’t bother mentioning it.
But most Google apps are like that, they fail in mysterious ways and you don’t know it’s happening until you realize some of your data is missing. I can see why there is reluctance to just dump your data into “the cloud”. It may be cheaper but that’s because you’re losing so much security and data integrity. There’s a reason so many Google apps have “beta” in the title.
Google the company obviously has a mindset of a software developer. Software is fun to create but annoying to make work correctly. Fixing bugs is boring, so software developers avoid doing that. Google would rather come out with something new than fix what’s broken in the stuff they’ve already released.
What bothers me about all of this is that my Droid phone is so dependent upon Google. My Treo was directly synced and while data issues cropped up due to my use of a Mac and a PC, it was never so bad it was unusable.
So I managed to get Google Reader (only) set up correctly, but none of my desktop readers is quite right. I’m going to surrender to the obvious. Syncing RSS with Google Reader just doesn’t work, on any platform, and the software developers aren’t going to get it right because they can’t.
Comments Off | tags: desktop, Droid, Fail, Google, RSS | posted in Fail
Dec
24
2009
Comments Off | tags: Patents, precedent, Software, USPTO | posted in Link
Dec
23
2009
Comments Off | tags: 2009, Christmas, comic, Insider, Rochester | posted in Comics