Symphonious

Berin Loritsch:

I've discovered why I'm lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It's tedious. It isn't the creative part of the effort. It's boring!

The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they're boring to write, they're boring to read as well - so noone does.

In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it's Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit's good and bad points - complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.

Behind the humor though is real user actions, requirements and UI design, just done using a more interesting setting than "the user".

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

I've seen this argument come up a couple of times recently but it seems to be seriously underrepresented in my opinion. This is the key response to the "you only care about privacy if you've got something to hide" argument. Essentially, we all have something we hide from various people and even if we don't mind them finding out, just the fact that we know someone is watching makes us behave differently.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

"The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive," one of the boys' parents told the paper.

"One of the boys typed in a Holden and then this image came up of the woman as a screensaver. We are furious that the boys were suspended."

This whole concept of hacking being getting access to anything you weren't intended to is ridiculous. There really should be some kind of requirement that a conscious effort was made to get there. I would be okay with it even if the conscious effort involved something like a dialog that said "Access only allowed to Adrian Sutton. Are you Adrian Sutton?" and if you click yes it lets you in. At least it lets you know that you're not supposed to be there even if it's horrendously bad security.

Society really needs to find a way to calm down about "cyber-terrorism" and start focussing more on script kiddies and viruses.

If by any chance you happen to be trying to get a Ubuntu system (or probably any Linux system) to talk to an Apple Airport (in my case the original 802.11b UFO style), don't try to use the plain ASCII password for the WEP key - Linux and Apple seem to have different algorithms for converting the password to the actual HEX key.

Instead, open the Airport Admin Utility, double click on the base station in the list to open its configuration interface and then choose "Network Equivalent Password…" from the "Base Station" menu. Enter the hex key it gives you into the Ubuntu networking dialog as a Hexadcimal key type.

Alternatively, just enter the HEX password as the value for wireless-key without prefixing "s:" in /etc/networks/interfaces

The same technique will also be very useful for problematic Windows boxes which seem to have a different text to HEX algorithm to Apple as well.