(not that I really have a topic to be off of):

Town of Allopath

I for one believe that most of the health care industry in this country have their heads where their thermometers should be. The worst are out to make a buck at any cost to our health; the majority are treating symptoms without looking for root causes; and only a handful are trying to see the big picture.

I didn’t forward this to anyone via e-mail, because I hate anything that resembles SPAM or chain letters, but I figure you can easily ignore this in your feed reader if you choose.

A little brand shifting at the places where I hang my HTML, just to make myself feel more at home:

- Changed the description of this blog (in case you hadn’t noticed).

- Changed the subtitle of Chip’s Tips to make a pair.

- Rewrote camdensoftware.com in the first person singular and cut most of the marketese. I used to sub out some work, but that hasn’t happened for a while. My only employee resides within my body, so it’s high time to drop the pluralis majestatis.

There, I feel better now.

In a previous post I told you everything I didn’t like about FeedDemon. Well, I continued to use it anyway, and it has grown on me. Better yet, version 2.0 was released on Monday, and brought some welcome news with it.

First of all, it gave me another 30 day trial period (I was down to my last 3 days). That may not have been intentional on Nick’s part, but I’ll take it as generosity. It makes the $29.95 seem even more worth it.

The biggest problem I had with version 1.5 was that it would steal window activation when alerting me that new feeds were incoming. That seems to be fixed in 2.0. Woo-hoo! Big points on usability just for that simple correction.

As I mentioned in an update to the earlier post, the problem I had with one feed reporting every item as new was fixed by fixing the feed itself to include a guid element. I’m just glad that the web is still a friendly enough place that you can get that kind of thing to happen with a simple e-mail to the head geek (in this case, a world-renowned doctor and author who just happens to enjoy playing with Perl).

So that takes away all but one objection: it is still outside my browser (Firefox), and uses Internet Explorer for its own contained browser. I can live with opening external links in Firefox and just using FeedDemon as a feed aggregator/navigator. I think I’ll probably register FeedDemon 2.0, unless somebody shows me something better.

Guess who is piling stumbling blocks in the path of Internet access? BellSouth, invoking a law they helped legislators craft (Louisiana’s Local Government Fair Competition Act).

One day, I believe that Internet access will be as commoditized as water and sewer service, but in the mean time the Telco’s are trying to squeeze every dollar they can out of their aging networks. In the process, they are positioning themselves to be the evolutionary relics in the progress of communications.

UPDATE: New Orleans technology chief Greg Meffert tells BellSouth and Cox where they can lay their cables. Go N’Orleans!

Scoble spent a lot of time last week rebutting, again and again, a shocking report from Smarthouse that 60% of Vista’s code needs rewriting.

While I think we can all agree with Scoble that rewriting 60% of an operating system just isn’t going to happen without some serious additional delays (triggering a massive revolt among the peasants of Windowstan), that assertion only answers half of the question. Namely, “Will 60% of Vista be rewritten before it is released?” I don’t think so.

The other half of the question, which scares me to the point of causing echoes in my underwear drawer, is “does 60% of the Vista code need to be rewritten?”

“Need” is a relative term. I need Internet access. People on the street couldn’t care about that, they need food and shelter. When you talk about need, you’re implicitly talking about the “or else”. I can live without Internet access, but I need Internet access or else I can’t conduct my business. With software, when you say code needs to be rewritten, the “or elses” probably include issues with usability, support, and extensibility. In Smarthouse’s follow-up article, it appears that the biggest problems in Vista revolve around the Media Center Edition, but it’s hard for me to believe that those issues could even touch the 60% of code mark.

As a software developer myself, I worry that the 60% number that the “insider” tossed out to Smarthouse may be pretty close to the truth about how much code needs repair in order to be truly reliable and maintainable — but that a large portion of that 60% will be stamped “good enough” by Microsoft in order to avoid further delays in shipping Vista. I fear that only the critical issues are being addressed now, and that the rest will be left for cleanup in service packs.

Back in 1990 (after the release of Windows 3.0), I was one of those who predicted that Windows would take over the market as the platform of choice for business applications. Windows was very buggy then, and many of my clients scoffed at me when I spoke of their future conversion to Windows as a certainty. Now all of those applications are running on Windows platforms. Over the years, the quality of the Windows releases has improved (most notably with the NT architecture and its descendants), with a few bumps in the road along the way. As quality has improved, so has the length of time between releases of the OS. It seems to me that Microsloth has gradually adopted a more “enterprise” (read “red tape” ) culture in order to avoid bugs, but in the process they have not only lost their agility (ability to rapidly deliver quality innovation) but have also created a software development bureaucracy in which the focus can be lost, ultimately causing more problems than it evades.

If that is the case, they better turn things around before consultants like me start recommending other platforms for the desktop. Let’s hope that the recently announced restructuring helps. If Vista turns out to be another Windows95, I might have to defect from Windowstan to the United States of Linux.

There will come a day when this:

will seem as ridiculously bulky as the ENIAC.

Oh, the triumph! I managed to squeeze all of the garbage into just two cans — garbage that my wife had carelessly tossed into three cans, seemingly filling them up. But no! By careful compression of each bag, I was able to eliminate an entire can, saving over three dollars in pickup charges! Call me GarbageMan, TDavid!

I work at home as a free-lance software development consultant. I have plenty of work to do, and I can do it pretty much whenever I want to, so I suddenly can’t help realizing that spending fifteen minutes in the rain up to my elbows in garbage for three bucks doesn’t really help me meet my revenue objectives. That really takes the starch out of my cape.

But you can’t think that way. If you do, you start thinking of how much it’s costing you to walk the dog. You could hire someone to do that for you for a lot less than you could make in the same time period.

And how many hundreds of dollars in lost potential revenue does it cost to watch a baseball game?

You can’t think that way. If you do, you find yourself on the toilet thinking of how much money you could save with a good laxative.

No, don’t go there. Because why are you making money after all? To be able to live your life, that’s why. To be able to walk the dog and get some great exercise and outdoor air. To take an hour to cook and eat a wonderful breakfast. To take your time eliminating said breakfast. To spend time with your family. To watch baseball and football and any other kind of ball you want to watch. To play the occasional computer game — even to get good at it. To blog on and on about a topic nobody else cares about. And yes, to experience the thrill of victory in compacting three garbage cans into two. Count ‘em, two!

I just received one of the strangest SPAM messages I can ever recall seeing. It didn’t ask me to buy anything or visit a web site or update my personal information. It was in plain text format, and it read as follows:

Call out Gouranga be happy!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga…
That which brings the highest happiness

WTF? So I Google “Gouranga”, and of course there is a wikipedia entry. Excerpt:

Gouranga, or Gauranga, is said to originate in the Hare Krishna religious movement, whose founding father, Shri Krishna Caitanya Mahaprabhu, was also called Gaura, or Gauranga. In popular culture it is accepted generally as a word meaning simply ‘be happy’, although the literal Sanskrit translation is ‘light/golden-limbed’.

Now I know which super-hero I can be, TDavid. Call me “GoldLimb”. Or maybe that makes me a villain in the next 007 movie instead.

I wonder if having golden limbs helps at all with Breakable Butt Syndrome?

My seven year old son just got off the school bus, dropped his backpack by the door and said, “my butt is BREAKABLE I’m so bored!”, then added after a thoughtful pause, “maybe it’s a virus”.

I’m not sure exactly how an increase in boredom correlates to the fragility of one’s, um, hindquarters — but I think I’m gonna have to use that line sometime.

Unless they develop a vaccine.

I just resolved a “problem” with the feed for this site. Posts and comments use BBcode for markup, and that all gets rendered fine on my site. But the feed generator just dumped all of the BBcode as plain text. Besides the expected blah factor of dead links, no images, and no text effects, this also had the unexpected and potentially dangerous effect in some (okay, most) feed readers of interpreting any HTML embedded in the post as live code.

So, for instance, if one of my posts contained a javascript example enclosed in a “script” element, that might execute in your feed reader! Of course, I’m not that devious (at least I don’t think so…wait, what are the voices saying?) but I could certainly slip up and include something nefarious by accident — as I did here. In this post, I was exposing the practices of phishers. I included their e-mail as an image so it wouldn’t have the links, but I explored the code they used for their link to show how to identify the scam. In most feed readers, the image failed to render, but the evil link was live! Ouch!

So I plugged that hole. Now, the rendering of the “description” in the feed is identical to its rendering on my site. There has been some controversy over whether or not HTML elements should be allowed in the “description” element of an RSS feed. Unfortunately, that means that including markup in a post causes some issues with the RSS Feed Validator, but on the other hand previously the validator would have choked on embedded code in the text of the post. Whaddya gonna do? UPDATE: I found that the RSS Draft Specification says that HTML elements must be encoded as character data, so all I needed to do was call htmlentities() on the text prior to adding it to the feed. Tested it with Sage and FeedDemon, and it still renders the HTML elements as expected, and now it also passes the Feed Validator.