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The Australia exposes a secret Customs report into security vulnerabilities and criminal activities at Sydney Airport which is completed in September 2004. Qantas, and Sydney Airport did not know the report existed. John Anderson suggested in Federal Parliament today that the Labor opposition should have sought a briefing on this report that it did not know existed (well done 7:30 report)

The report contains information that’s more than a little disturbing, though nothing that directly supports the case of Schapelle Corby.

The report, obtained by The Australian, details serious security breaches and illegal activity by baggage handlers, air crew, ramp and trolley workers, security screeners and cleaners.

It says baggage handlers have diverted bags containing large amounts of narcotics from incoming international flights to domestic baggage carousels, sometimes changing baggage tags, to avoid Customs examination.

The war on terror was heralded by fridge magnets in Australia yet our awareness of our vulnerabilities has not been aided by tip-offs to the magnet-herladed terrorism line. We’ve been been aided, it seems, by a tragic court case in Bali that’s ironically unrelated to the terrible night club bombing. And our fickle press.

This is a screenshot from the Add/Remove Programs interface on a Windows 2000 PC I’ve used for 18-24 months as my primary work machine. I’ve changed to a laptop, so I’m gradually cleaning it up for backups and its inevitable acquisition as a testing asset. I was almost all the way through removing my Java SDKs when I thought “that’s a long list of…”

In fact, that’s quite a hunka-hunka burning Java love! That’s almost 700MB in assorted Java Runtime Environment (JRE) goodness.

I realise that disk space is getting cheaper by the minute, but that’s still quite a number. It’s entropy in action. Write once, run anywhere there’s a compatible JRE (that’s usually installed along with the application you need to use) in action too.

Sun recommends that “…you keep older versions of the JRE on your system. If you are running low on disk space, you can uninstall older versions of the JRE.” I’m not running low, so I’ll take their advice. After all I run two “HTML runtime engines,” — they take up plenty of space and one of them can’t even *be* removed.

I saw this at the Opera House last Friday. Written by John Kani, it’s part autobiography, part state of the South African nation.

My one word review is “awesome.”

I was fortunate enough to see John Kani interviewed on The 7:30 Report before attending.

KERRY O’BRIEN: When celebrated black South African playwright and actor John Kani travelled to England with a white theatre director in 1973 in the days of apartheid, he had to describe himself as the director’s gardener to get a passport. In following years, as his international career flourished, so did his role as a leading arts activist against repressive white regimes. One brother was jailed on the infamous Robbin Island. Another was killed while reading poetry at a grave site. He himself spent time in jail and was savagely stabbed in one assassination attempt. Post-apartheid, still one of the most respected figures in South African theatre, he confronted a different challenge. John Kani is currently on tour in Australia, performing in his own powerful post-apartheid play Nothing But The Truth, and I spoke with him on set at the Sydney Opera House. John Kani, can we just briefly flash back to your life under apartheid. For instance, when you came back to South Africa not long after winning a Tony award on Broadway for Best Actor in 1975, you were arrested and held for 23 days without charge. Why were you held and how did you get out?

JOHN KANI, PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR: We go back to South Africa, performed the play in the rural communities of South Africa. The police came just as we did the curtain call, grabbed us both and we disappeared. We were charged because the play was deemed political and that it promoted hatred amongst races, inciting people to public violence, furthering the aims of Communism and the banned African National Congress. We were released after 23 days because of immense pressure and demonstrations all over the world.

KERRY O’BRIEN: In 85, your role in the play Miss Julie provoked a walk out in the audience. Why?

JOHN KANI: I was tired of doing kind of protest theatre. I wanted to do some classic and I wanted to do Johan Strindberg’s Miss Julie. We cast South Africa’s leading Afrikaner actress, Sandra Prinsloo, who was seducing me, a black person, and that was also the first kiss on stage of a black man kissing a white woman. So, the play opened in Baxter Theatre, 660 people. I touched her breast. I perked my little lips on her lips. Two hundred and eighty people walked out.

Nobody walked out of this performance.

At the end there were tears of sadness, happiness, and a standing ovation all at once.

I’ve decommissioned tedious-soporific.blogger.com and copied my favourite 2% of posts to here.

It’s warts and all, but I’m with Edna Mode — “I never look back darling.”

Oh that 80s music collection? I’m minding it for a friend.

Taken from Tedious Soporific 17-11-2003

I purchased a Seiko Kinetic watch in NYC in 1998 or 1999, and I’ve been very pleased with it. It keeps the time. Although it’s chunky it looks plain. It is waterproof to 100m, though I’ve never been more than about 2m under the waves with it.

The intriguing part of kinetic watches is that they are analog, and self-winding. They have some way of turning tiny amounts of kinetic energy into stored electric charge. It’s a watch you need to wear constantly or the charge leaves the watch and it stops. You can theoretically leave it stationary for up to a week without it running out of go juice, but that was enough to stop my father from buying one as he has (for no reason I can determine) 3 watches that he wears in a kind of seasonal/situational rotation. Another drawback a work colleague pointed out was that the watch draws its energy from my movements that it was effectively sapping my energy for its own ends… Anyway, they’re a bit like The Ring from LOTR, in that their owners don’t mind or notice the sapping of energy much, and are strangely obsessive about them - often to the point of blogging about them.

Apart from the crown, that allows the time and date to be changed, the watch has a little button you can press which advances the second hand to show you how much charge is left in the watch. If the hand advances 5 seconds you have 3-24 hours of charge. If it advances 10 seconds, that’s 1-2 days, 15 seconds is about a week, and 30 seconds means it has maximum charge - which is good for 1 or 2 weeks of operation. Where I work we have a name for features that add nothing to the functionality of a product that help sell it: tradeshow features. This button is the only tradeshow feature a Kinetic watch has… and it’s not much of a demo. Proud Kinetic watch owners use it (in vain) a lot to impress other future Kinetic watch owners - so it’s important.

Time passes. 4 years of immersing the watch in hot water each day to bathe the kids has eroded the waterproof seals and condensation is visible inside. I take the watch to the local Seiko repair shop.

Two weeks later I pick up my reconditioned watch and they charge me about 15% the cost of the original watch for “reconditioning,” though, when Seiko say “recondition” they mean “replace everything except the exterior.” My new watch comes with a little note that’s apparently designed to head off a stampede of returned “reconditioned” watches. The “power reserve indicator button” which tells you how much power you have in your “E.S.U. (Electronic Storage Unit)” now only goes up to 20 seconds! There appears to have been something of an advance in self-winding watch technology in the last couple of years… the indicator setting of 20 seconds, the new maximum, indicates between 30 and 120 days of reserve power.

Thank goodness for the release note. No really.

** Updated: 22-May-2006. Bad spelling. Bad! **

Taken from Tedious Soporific 22-9-2003

“The team’s original charter, and it was reiterated when the decision to bring in KentBeck was made, was to learn how to use object technology, to learn how to manage projects that use it and if we built a new payroll system, that would be gravy.” - Chet Hendrickson

It’s easy to see why C3, the seminal XP project, is seen as both a success and a failure. If you’re a process change advocate it was a success because processes were changed, documented, and propagated. If it helped the company learn about OO development, then C3 was evidently successful. If you wanted a payroll system at the end of the project, then it was a success. If you wanted a unified payroll system that would sustain the business for a long time, then the project was probably a failure.

What intrigues me about XP is how much heat and passion it creates. There’s a kind of franchise with XP. You’re either signed up or not. Critics of XP (and there are far too many) are themselves questioned whether you adhere to the original text or not, and whether you believe/understand or not seems to be a test of faith – and whether you’ve checked the Wiki in the last few weeks.

I’m not saying anything controversial when I note the large emotional investment by progrmmers in their processes and practices. If you’re an XP advocate, you have faith backed by scriptures and the scriptures are quite damning of old world thinking. If you have been involved with creation of use of your own working processes and methodologies then you’ve probably invested emotionally in them and have enough faith in them to go toe to toe with anyone that tells you that you should “get with the program.” XP/Agile vs other debates are a lot like Macintosh vs Amiga vs PC AT debates of a previous era.

I have a theory that because XP is sexy, accessible, and well-documented, people with an opinion about software-related processes can argue with each other because they have a common vocabulary and frame of reference: what is and isn’t XP. Who can argue with a term like eXtreme Programming? It’s got bubble-boom-era capitalization, no mention of engineering - just the money shot - “programming.” And the INFP’s are going to love the quiet rebellion of their work being suddenly extreme. Hey, maybe someone like Aaron Sorkin will make a TV series about programmers now they’re exciting!

When you try to come up with a list of competitors to XP (and competitor isn’t really the right word) you might start with Waterfall and RUP. I don’t think either of these are widely used though they are often presented as the alternative for contrast in debate.

From a very unscientific polling of my friends the state of the art in process is generic, incrementing, iterative, test-driven, requirements up front, design up front (or in the middle), peer-reviewed software - the methodology with no name. Not RUP, not Waterfall, not XP, not “documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes.” It’s a hybrid, an amalgam, a living memory of process advocates past and present. The methodology with no name gets no press other than bad press and tacit comparisons.

Most organizations have a collection of processes and practices that they find “habitable” that are drawn from many sources. Most organizations have no idea if they can improve their processes or not, beyond the workers having a suspicion, a dream, or a wanton desire to try something new. Most organizations implement process change without being able to meaningfully justify the change, or measure the effects to see if it was an improvement or not. Most organizations just don’t have the sample space to work out if a process is better or worse no matter what ISO9001:2000 demands. ISO auditors seem to be able to suspend disbelief and nod sagely as they are related non sequiturs about why this data shows an improvement. The real reason they changed the process is because they were unhappy with it - and that’s an Agile value of people over process. I’m not sure how an ISO auditor would take a popularity metric as demonstration of improvement but it’s the state of the art.

Occasionally an organization, or a development group is motivated enough - or drawn by management or a process sociopath - to try something new. Generally the new thing is something to do with whatever software process meme is out there. Agile and XP are today’s process memes. In the 70s and 80s the new methodologies were structured and incremental, then the 90s had iterative, then at the end of the 90s and bubble years the growth of mass-customization over shrink-wrap produced RUP, XP and Agile.

In any case the methodology with no name assimilates what it needs and moves on.

Taken from Tedious Soporific 27-11-2003

A new book review at HackNot!

One of my regular beefs is that developers should be less dismissive of UI design. I’ve often heard “developers shouldn’t design user interfaces” and “leave it to human factors to sort out” and what happens in the end is that the changes suggested are so painful that they never get made. I suspect this is because developers tend to design user interfaces using the programming language they’re padding their resume with at any given time.

How often have you witnessed an initiative to prototype a user interface that uses the target technology, the target methodology and the same developers that would eventually implement the final user interface? Do you find that the “quick prototype we can review and modify” ends up being the “half-baked UI that’s time-consuming and awkward to change… so just give me your top 5 complaints and I’ll look into it when I get a chance” …

Low-fidelity paper prototypes help with some of my personal criteria for UI design:

1. Love the one your with: unless there’s a compelling reason, your UI should operate the same way as all the other applications on this operating system or environment operate. You can determine LTOYW pretty easily from a drawing.

2. The B-Movie of user interfaces: The plot, actors and themes should be familiar. Your aim is to be accessible to a large audience, not critically acclaimed. I should be able to tell what the user interface does by looking at it, rather than by exploring it. Tricky is bad. Hidden is bad. Obvious is good. Change from the established format is generally bad. The B-Movie test is easy with paper user interfaces.

3. The outcome is always within reach: Traversing multiple windows or contexts to achieve one task are bad. Having to draw each of the user interfaces for a long task, and walk through it is a cheap way of recognising that you’re confusing people.

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed
without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely
and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world
he smelled good things to eat
so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go-
we’ll eat you up-we love you so!”
And Max said, “No!”

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye

and sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day

and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him

and it was still hot.

— Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are

Describing himself as the “ex-administrator”, Mr Bremer immediately left the US Green Zone in a helicopter for Baghdad International Airport. By lunchtime he had left the country after 15 months as the civilian chief.

The few witnesses to the ceremony said that five men had stood in a semi-circle - Mr Bremer and the Iraqi leaders, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, President Ghazi Yawar, deputy Prime Minister Baram Saleh and the Chief Justice.

Receiving the declaration, signed in advance by Mr Bremer, Mr Yawar said: “This is an historic and happy day that all Iraqis have looked forward to, to taking our place in the international community as a free and democratic country.”

— Handover of Sovereignty

Taken from Tedious Soporific 29-6-2004

Well I never!

I had assumed that furphy was an internationally known colloquialism. My bad.

I’ll add that to my list of words to try (not) to use around Americans. Previous phrases that were met with silence and a polite sigh include:

• Fortnight
• One-off
• Ad-hoc
• Jumper (special case)

Though I noticed Joel used fortnight in a sentence the other day…

*Update 2004-07-02:
Alastair suggests that the word “grunt,” as in “this server needs more grunt,” is likely to baffle American friends.
“I’ll be out of pocket” is something I’ve heard from a couple of Americans referring to the July 4th Holiday. It means “I’ll be uncontactable,” whereas Australians would take it to mean “I’ll be incurring an expense I shouldn’t have to.”

Taken from Tedious Soporific 29-6-2004

I’ve posted before on sweet pop songs that I sing as lullabyes to my kids. There have been a series of, um, confronting moments while listening to some of the songs I like to play at home…

Q: What’s this song about? (Goldfrapp’s Utopia)
A: Eugenics
Q: Can we hear it again? I like it. What’s eugenics?

Q: What’s this song about? (Stranglers’ Golden Brown)
A: Heroin
Q: What’s Heroin?
A: …

Q: What’s this song about? (Simon and Garfunkle’s Scarborough Fair)
A: A man who has moved away from the woman he loved sending his love to that woman.
Q: [tears]
A: What’s the matter?
Q: Nina said she doesn’t love me anymore! (Nina is a pre-school friend)

Q: What’s this song about? (Beatles’ Yellow Submarine)
A: Is this a trick question?
Q: No?

Q: What’s this song about? (Mike Oldfield’s To France)
A: Mary Queen of Scotts
Q: Who’s she?
A: Um… actually I don’t know

Q: What’s this song about? (KLF’s Justified and Ancient)

They travel the world
In their ice cream van
They’ve voyaged to the bottom of time
They’ve been to the place
Where the Mu Mu mate
And the children still cry
“Mine’s a 99″

A: Um… see that thick book on that shelf?
Q: Yes
A: Believe it or not… that.
Q: What’s this song about? (XTC’s Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead)

Peter Pumpkinhead was too good
Had him nailed to a chunk of wood
He died grinning on live TV
Hanging there he looked a lot like you
And an awful lot like me!
But he made too many enemies…
Hooray for Peter Pumpkin
Who’ll pray for Peter Pumpkin
Hooray for Peter Pumpkinhead
Oh my oh my oh!
Doesn’t it make you want to cry oh?

A: Um… let’s put that Beatles album on again.

Taken from Tedious Soporific 3-8-2004

Dick has a telephone.
Jane has a telephone.

Spot has a p2p file sharing application.
Bad spot!

See Dick talk.
Talk, Dick, talk.

See router queue.
Queue, router, queue!
See router forward.
See router drop packets.

Bad router!
Bad Spot!

Jane can not understand Dick.
Spot has a big MP3 collection.
Dick is reading about DSCPs and PHBs.

Jane is unhappy.
Dick is unhappy.
Router is unhappy.
Spot is happy.

Say you’re the monopoly manufacturer of an operating system. You have a market (desktop computer operating systems, for example) locked right up, and perceive no threat to your dominance. Beyond seasonal fluctuations in sales volume, things are pretty sweet.

Your development activity has come to a state of maturity where it entertains developers by changing the name and the logo every 3-4 years, staffing standards bodies to encourage software-bloating, reimagining RPC protocols, and running a series of “Inside the development of…” interviews with captive technology journalists.

Your operating system has a couple of companies orbiting it that make anti-virus software and a couple of others that make backup solutions. The backup companies are harmless — it’s good to foster the niche software market.

There’s something bugging you about the anti-virus companies. Something…

You finally put your finger on it.

They keep telling the world how great they are for protecting users from the viruses, trojans and worms that exploit your engineering incompetence. They don’t come right out and say it, but you know the message. They owe their success, in part, to the holes you unwittingly leave in your operating system. They close them fast, because you don’t, or can’t. Every time there’s a new outbreak everyone moans about your operating system and whispers thanks to their anti-virus software vendor. Not fair!

You’ll show them! You’ll close those holes faster! You’ll implement a rapid response data-driven file-scanning/matching capability in the operating system and send a battalion of developers off to implement stuff that will stomp those anti-virus companies like the parasites they are. You’ll improve your inspections! You’ll improve your testing! You’ll improve the training of your developers! You’ll employ ethical hackers… you’ll… you’ll…

You get a call from product management.

They’re starting a subscription anti-virus and personal backup service and they don’t want you to compete with them.

I, for one, welcome our new Microsoft anti-virus overlords.