The recommendation I received to protect my wallet was “adaware then followed with spybot search and destroy“. I ran both and they both found some nasties on my system.

Thanks for NOT helping me out Computer Associates. Forcing me to find alternatives to your product saved me some cash. I think I’ll donate some to these two apps.

One presenter at Mesh proudly stated they have over 700 RSS feeds they watch. Do they read them all? No, do they skim them all? Sure, and if you don’t get their attention with your title or first sentence, well you’ve lost them. I say great. I hope to lose skimmers with my writing. Maybe I’ll add a mandatory fluff sentence at the beginning of any story in order to filter out the fluffers.

RSS is doing to writing and books what mp3’s and digital downloads have done to music and the album format. People feel like they’re reading without actually having to read. It’s destroying people’s ability to patiently sit down with a book and read it from cover to cover. That is reading, and reading a book is an entirely different act than reading blog posts. It’s not the same thing to skim the titles of 349 RSS feeds.

Do I use an RSS reader? Yes. Do I publish RSS feeds? Yes. RSS is a useful and effective tool. I spend more time these days, however, trying to remove feeds from my RSS reader than add. I’m trying to strive for less not more, and if I do add a new feed then I remove at least one feed I’m currently subscribed to.

Skimming RSS feeds and marking them “read” is not reading but sometimes I find myself mistaking it for that. I get sucked in and have to cleanse myself with a good book. It’s exciting to have access to all these sources of opinions and information. The problem when I get sucked in is that I find myself becoming an aggregator of opinions. I like, or don’t like, something not because I’ve experienced it, or have in depth understanding, but because I’ve skimmed other people’s opinions of it. I fear that RSS and it’s ilk will leave me without my ability to acquire that deeper level of understanding on my own.

Or not, time to find a new feed….

Tad and the StoryStream kids have put the videos they made for Mesh available on their site under the ‘work’ link. For those not there, these videos were played prior to the main keynote presentations.

Ok, so my credit card was apparently stolen digitally. I grabbed some cnet recommended spyware scan software, spyware doctor, in order to scan my system. It will scan for you, however, you have to purchase the software to run any removals. I removed the 4 high rated infections by hand.

I’ve been using CA’s ETrust suite for virus scanning so it made sense to add spyware into that as they have pestpatrol now. I tried to download the trial but of course they require your credit card information. I don’t have that because my credit card was stolen and hence canceled. I went to the effort to call them and after some back and forth they informed me there was nothing they could do for me.

“Does it not make sense that someone who has had their credit card information stolen, and therefore canceled their card, would be calling you to use your spyware product?”

“I’m not sure, we need a credit card.”

“Ok. You do realize that I’m currently a customer of yours, I need your help right now, and you’re forcing me to go find another company’s product to help me?”

“Yes.”

“You’re ok with losing me as a customer?”

“There’s nothing we can do, we have to have a credit card number.”

While at mesh yesterday afternoon, using the building’s wifi, I purchased a domain name I’ve been meaning to grab. I received a phone call later that evening from a software company wanting to validate my $249 purchase of their software. I obviously informed them I hadn’t made that purchase and I verified that they had indeed been given my credit card information to make that purchase.

I got on the phone with my credit card company and the only purchase I hadn’t made was a $1 paypal purchase. I cancelled the credit card at that point and they are reissuing me a new one.

I’m obviously not sure where the information was stolen from. I purchased the domain through my host, qwk, using flock. I’ve been in contact with qwk and they assured me their systems are secure. I have no way of verifying that for myself but I’ve been with them for years and have a lot of faith in them.

I scanned my machine for spyware and found 4 high ranked entries, all *.wmv files located in the temporary internet files. They’re in “Content.IE5″ and dated about a week ago. The only other issue I’ve noticed is that I’m having to login to all my usual sites like my wordpress admin, feedburner, etc.

If anyone has any recommedations on preventing this in the future, please add to the comments.

Based on Chris’s recommendation I’m giving wp tiger administration a try. It’s nice, certainly a lot cleaner and simpler to use than the base wordpress admin.

I hate the term blogging and all it’s baggage.

“I want a blog, I want to start blogging”

A blog is a tool, it’s a self-publishing system, that’s it. It allows you to easily manipulate your website. I forget, when word processors came out were we saying “I want to word process”?

Do we call someone who writes a book a booker, or a magazine a magaziner? No, we call them writers. While blogging is a fascinating new tool at best, in the end, it’s just writing. You don’t need a blog or even a computer for that. Stop by a convenience store, buy a pad of paper and a pen, go sit somewhere and fill it with words. Once you’ve done that for a few months then start worrying about where you’ll host your blog.

You want to blog? Great, start by reading lot’s of books and practicing writing. If you don’t have a love of the written word then you’d better develop that or not bother. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from blogging, I’m trying to encourage people to write and you need very little technology for that. Not having a blog is no excuse not to be writing. If you are going to blog, great, but please, treat it more like writing a book then using some cool new tool.

What do you need to start blogging? If you haven’t read it already, I’d start here with Brenda Ueland’s book. By the way, Guy offers a money back guarantee for Brenda’s book so it’s a risk free purchase.

I’m not even going to touch the term blogosphere….

Random notes from mesh.

I’ve touched on my love of bumper sticker marketing terms like web 2.0 in the past. I sat in a panel yesterday where the host and a presenter had a dialogue about whether blogging was web 2.0 or web 1.0. Someone please have the sense to stop conversations like this. How self-absorbed can we get in technology? It’s like flipping to FT and watching two designers arguing if grey is this year’s black. Who cares and how can that argument ever come to completion?

“Oh, ok, I see, that hadn’t occurred to me before. Ok, you’re right, grey is black. What now?”

You can’t define web 2.0 because it doesn’t exist. It’s an umbrella term meant to capture a shift within a community or the maturing of that community. Stop calling it web 2.0 like it’s an actual product. It’s confuses, and leaves people looking for the release notes.

So what do you call it? I don’t know but I’ve been calling it the internet.

A developer primarily talks to the Quality Assurance (QA) team in a meeting about code they’ve written, the ‘how am I going to test your code out’ meeting. Outside of those rare meetings, developers communicate with QA mostly through issues in a bug tracker.

Every software release contains a certain number of bugs. It is generally assumed that the number of bugs is a function of the lines of code written.

This is an oversimplification resulting in the belief that the only way to reduce the bug count is to reduce new lines of code. The real formula is something far messier like:

Where E represents the working environment. This mess includes the personalities of everyone involved in building the software, the level of trust between those people, the state of communications, etc.

Once something is measured it receives attention. The bookkeeping, and counting, of bugs related to the software development process contributes to the myth of the first formula. Posting and fixing bugs presents the appearance of work accomplished regardless of the reality. The goal of most QA departments is to find and post bugs, not find, post bugs and work with the rest of the company to keep a similar bug from appearing again.

The vast majority of bugs could be caught during the development process. They’re not bugs as much as they are change requests, often related to usability or product consistency. I have yet to work somewhere that has an ongoing, explicit goal of decreasing the number of bugs per release? In other words, write better code. I don’t mean finding bugs and making sure they don’t go out in the release, that’s a given. I mean taking it a step further and using bugs as a means of influence to the development process itself.

Position QA less as a quality enforcement department, more as a learning department. Task both the development and QA teams with improving as a single group from release to release. In this scenario, QA and development are very much part of the same team. QA members don’t simply point out what’s wrong with a developer’s work, they talk to each other and determine where things went wrong and if there’s a way that it could be done better next time around. QA moves into a role of teacher and source of learning for developers. It’s not perfect but it’s a start. It demands a certain type of developer, ie one with less ego than most.

Unfortunately I don’t think this learning process can be a formal one. It must be left to the overall project team to find ways to learn from the bugs that were found and fixed. Mistakes become tools to get better as a team.

If you’re interested in what blogs I frequent, I added a link to my blogroll to my about page.

“A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs.”