Peterme: Abnormal American. `See, I lead a fairly simple life. I rent an apartment. I don’t own a car. I don’t make extravagant purchases on a bunch of different credit cards. And because of this, “the computer” doesn’t know what to make of me.’
Monthly Archives: August 2002
Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
Queued this onto my reading list: The Millennial Project. This is definitely not fantasy, some very hard nosed engineering thought went into the writing of this.
Code Escrow Is Not Enough
Brian St. Pierre has an excellent rebuttal of Prof Lessig’s proposal for code escrow. Lessig has been listening for far too long to people whose idea of software development lies in reimplementing stock protocols and IETF standards (not that there’s anything wrong in that stuff). Somebody should take Lessig around the code – and only the code – for a largish CRM system and tell him to make sense out of it. Code escrow is meaningless without docs, and specs, and the entire painful process of business analysis that’s so easy to get wrong that accompanies the creation of a large software system. And if you wish to escrow docs et al, you have just set foot on a slippery slope you cannot define. Me, I think Rahul Dave’s Loving Software makes sense. If only it had a better name. Good luck selling Lovin’ Software to your CFO 
Ever Upwards
I am now (and if only temporarily) the ninth Dutta on Google, sandwiched between Lara Dutta and the wonderful Mrs Dutta Writes a Letter, an early gem by Chitra Divakaruni. Inch by Inch 
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Netscape 7 Released
Netscape 7 released today. Topical slashpost
The browser war is over. We lost.The world has changed since those days. AOL is on the defensive now, even within its own company. It swallowed Time Warner and boldly promised a new era that never happened, so now the angry and vengeful Time Warner execs are retaking the company, relegating the AOL execs to “their place” and forcing them to be fiscally responsible and accountable. Launching a browser war is not fiscally responsible from Time Warner’s perspective; it’s just a suicidal waste of money to appease those zealots they believe screwed up the company in the first place. Web Browser War II is not going to happen. Not by AOL’s hand.
Lots More Fiber Laid in Mylapore
Bharti’s wiring of Mylapore continues apace. Lots of OFC (optic fiber cable) laid in front of my apartment. Yesterday my office got a line too, so we’ll soon have an alternative to good ol’ VSNL. The service promises a 300ms ping to the US in 4 hops when fully deployed — let’s see how it goes.
Accomodating Unreasonable Requests: Ray Ozzie's Take
Ray Ozzie on nondiscretionary controls:
For years at Lotus, when working on Lotus Notes, customers kept asking for a feature that would enable the sender of an eMail message to “Prevent Copying or Forwarding” of a message. We kept explaining that there was no practical way to implement it. We could block the Print Screen key. We could disable the Forward and Reply and Export and Save As menu items. But because we couldn’t block any programmer from writing a trivial add-in (using the API) to display or extract the email, we resisted implementing the feature for years. Ultimately, we relented due to the combination of competition and customer demand, and the feature exists in the product today.
MSN Messenger Display Names Have Hidden Stop Words
In addition to passing judgement on your MSN sign-in name, MSN Messenger now gets upset about Messenger Display Names. If you use MSN Messenger, try using the word “message” in your sign-in name. I’ve no problems if some words are reserved, but it should be documented and the error messages should provide a link to this document. As it stands, the error message (“Invalid display name…”) is uninformative in the extreme.
Against Complexity, the Gods Themselves…
Ziv Caspi‘s succint rebuttal of Cringely’s latest pulpit post: EDI didn’t fail because it was big and slow. It failed because collaboration is hard, and because there’s far more to passing semantics between loosely-coupled systems than just agreeing on the syntax.
'Back' button in DocExplorer is Borked
![[image: DocExplorer's Netscape 3-style back button vs. IE]](http://www.chaoszone.org/images/docExplorer.png "DocExplorer's Netscape 3-style back button vs. IE")
DocExplorer (the MSDN Help viewer) is into version seven but still cannot show a context menu on the back/forward button like IE did in version four.
Of course, one can read ms-help:// URLs through IE itself, but you lose the index 