shawnbass.com - Random Things blog

Microsoft makes $44.6 billion dollar merger bid with Yahoo

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:30:23 GMT

According to Microsoft's Press Pass website, Microsoft has extended another offer to Yahoo for a corporate merger. From the sums of money involved, it would seem that Google is a bigger threat to Microsoft than VMWare is. The question is, would this truly position Microsoft in better territory to fight Google? I'm not so certain of that, but they would definitely get a higher chunk of the advertising revenue that's out there.

My Macbook Pro keyboard WILL live to see another day thanks to a Software Update

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:21:14 GMT

If you've been following my blog you'd know that I'm a recent Mac ~~convert~~ trial (can't call it a convert when I have 15 other Windows PCs in the house). Anyway, when I bought my Mac it came with OSX 10.4 on it, but there was a 10.5 Leopard disc that was shipped in the box as a free upgrade. Well, you can't go sticking a free software upgrade in the box and let it sneak by me without immediately installing it. So I've been using Leopard since I first got the MacBook Pro. Generally I've had a lot of success with it, aside from a minor nuance with the wireless that never seems to work unless I reboot my wireless router (seems to be Mac related though since other Windows systems are able to use the wireless router during this time). The inexcusable problem though has been a frequently occuring loss of keyboard functionality that varies from 30 to 60 seconds. During this time, the touchpad continues to work but no keyboard keys register (including the function keys). For a while I considered that maybe my inept ability with Mac left me in some weird function key toggled mode, or I had a stuck key or something like that. Or even that my usage of VMware Fusion was somehow leaving my keyboard in a VM-controlled state or some such nonsense. However, a quick Google search tells a different story. TONS of Mac users are experiencing the issue since their upgrade to Leopard. Anyway, I finally spent a few cycles today investigating this issue and I found out that Apple has released a patch for this two days ago. You must have upgraded to 10.5.1 in order to use the patch. I've applied it and so far (crossed fingers) I haven't had any keyboard loss.

shawnbass.com RSS feed is moving! Please update your feed readers...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:46:38 GMT

I'm moving my existing RSS feed as I'm changing modules out that supplies my RSS feed. To prevent this kind of thing from happening again, I've setup a 301 permanent redirect of http://www.shawnbass.com/rss.aspx which will permanently link to my RSS feed no matter where I decide to relocate it in the future. For now, it will move to FeedBurner, but the above link is what you should point your readers to.

I feel dirty...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:34:41 GMT

So my Toshiba laptop started acting up this past week while I was teaching a class in Orlando. I didn't want to risk the laptop locking up on me while in class, so I went out one evening and picked up a new laptop. I'm writing this blog entry from the new laptop. Here's a quick photo of it:

Now do you understand why I feel dirty? I can't even begin to tell you how much crow I'm gonna have to eat when my sister-in-law (longtime Mac bigot) finds out that I bought one. It'll be never ending "I told you so"'s

Where's that Microsoft 'insert team name here' team blog?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 05:08:15 GMT

Microsoft has definitely embraced blogging as a means of providing feedback to their partners and customers alike. It's often difficult to know whether or not a particular team within Microsoft has an official blog or not. Brandon LeBlanc over at The Windows Experience Blog has created a list of the known official Microsoft team blogs. Check out the list here.

Skywing on "Never wake a PC without user intervention"

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:43:54 GMT

Skywing's debugging/reverse engineering blog is one of many RSS feeds that I ~~keep~~ try to keep current on. He posted an entry a few days ago titled "Never, ever, EVER wake a computer from suspend without user consent" regarding a situation where the Windows Update service woke his PC from standby at 3:00am on a Patch Tuesday. While waking a PC to apply patches isn't a horrible situation, it definitely becomes one when your laptop is zipped up inside a backpack or laptop carrying case. I personally have had this happen to me only once, but it wasn't related to Windows Updates. It was related to a failed standby that I didn't notice for an hour or two (when I finally pulled it out of the bag, the laptop was ready for egg frying). Anyway, the fact is this is a legitimate issue that should be handled by the operating system. The most surprising part of the article for me was the comments that some people left. It seems that some posters believe that this is all Skywing's fault and if he had disabled Windows Updates, or changed the way he was suspending, etc. then this wouldn't have happened. Guys, you're missing the point! The point is that the operating system should be intelligent enough to not wake on it's own to apply patches as the laptop could be in an area that it shouldn't be powered on (i.e. airplane taking off). Bottom line: Windows Update needs to not wake a PC to apply updates without receiving user confirmation, or at a minimum it should force the system back into the same power state that it resumed from after the updates are complete.

A guy walks into a bar and asks "What's the difference between a twitter, a blog entry and an article?"

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 01:41:31 GMT

Ok, so...

It's not a joke and it doesn't involve a bar.

But it is a burning question of mine. What exactly consitutes a twitter versus a blog entry versus a full-fledged "article". There are a variety of websites/blogs/article columns, etc. out there that have differing content. When does a simple twitter become a blog entry? When does a blog entry become an article? And finally how does one avoid joining in on the throng of bloggers who do nothing more than aggreggate content that's found on thousands of other blogs? While I find myself re-reporting some of the same content that may be available elsewhere, I should make it known that I only post information on about 1 out of every 20-30 things that I read elsewhere. Why is that? Simply because I feel that there's enough other people already reporting on a particular topic that it's really not valuable to increment people's RSS counters one more time for me to say the same crap. Seriously! I track (and sometimes even read, no really!) about 100 separate RSS feeds. I can't tell you the countless times that I see the same information repeated ad naseum on 10 different blogs. Obviously there's much truth in the "content is king" concept. At the same time, there's no sense in blogging/writing if there isn't anything worth saying. So my question(s) are this:

1) When is a twitter a blog entry?
2) When is a blog entry an article?
3) When is an article a book? (ok, I'm joking here)

Aside from all of that, how does one avoid the desire to repost the blog fodder from everywhere else to feel as though there needs to be something posted within this number of days?

Shawn

Google adds route customization to Google Maps

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 01:27:58 GMT

So how many times have you plotted directions between two points and thought to yourself, I really wish these directions showed me taking this highway instead of that, etc. While planning a trip to head down to Citrix's offices later this month, I noticed that Google had added a new option in Google Maps that allows you to do just this! While viewing a resultant map, you can simply drag and drop the designated highways to choose an alternate route path. How cool is that?

See the Google Maps help site for more info on this and other features (such as their traffic info that was recently added).

Shawn

Are you preparing for the pandemic?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:01:16 GMT

The Spanish Flu (aka 1918 flu) was a worldwide pandemic virus killing between 50 to 100 million people worldwide within 18 months. These numbers completely dwarfed that of World War I which was occuring during the same time. Arguably, World War I contributed significantly to the spread of the 1918 flu due to the increased mass movement of people worldwide. Mortality rates varied greatly between countries, but one thing is known for sure: Those countries that limited their maritime travel had significantly less mortality than those that did nothing to control the travel of people. For example, Japan had a 0.425% mortality rate from the flu due to restrictions in travel. Many other countries had mortality rates in the 5-10% range or more. With increased global travel is the world of today equipped to handle such a lockdown on travel?

The 1918 flu is also known as the Spanish Flu, but recently developments suggest that it actually first appeared near Fort Riley, Kansas and then spread worldwide. There are many parallels between the 1918 flu (H1N1 family) and the current H5N1 Avian flu. While the H5N1 seems to not be as virulent and does not transfer as readily as H1N1, there's the possibility that it may mutate in the near future and repeat the destruction of the 1918 flu. While many people have some built-in protection to the H1N1 virus, few people would have any built-in defenses against the H5N1 strain. The current estimates for % mortality if H5N1 turns pandemic is approximately 2-7.4 million worldwide. While this number is significantly less than the 1918 flu, it doesn't mean that the next pandemic will be the H5N1 virus. The next pandemic could be a more virulent strain equaling or even exceeding that of the 1918 flu.

With advances in medicine, isn't this a Chicken Little / Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario?
When I hear the term pandemic virus planning, the first thing that pops into my head is the movie scene from "Ice Age" where the young Moeritherium (baby elephant creatures) are playing in the mud (oil??) pits and are repremanded by their parents. They then say "We were only playing extinction". Many view pandemic planning as FUD exercises, but unfortunately we've already seen such pandemics happen. Also, despite advances in modern medicine we still don't have adequate protection against extremely virulent strains (like the 1918 flu). While many people get their annual flu shots, they are created for the flu strains that are circulating that season and may/may not be effective against a flu that mutates. In addition, current flu shots are derived from chicken eggs which would be in a reduced production during any bird flu spread. Technically flu vaccines are being produced today without the aid of chicken eggs, but to my knowledge a majority of them are still produced via eggs because of production costs/difficulties in the artificial methods (Note to self: more research needed here).

We already have a Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plan. Why is this any different?
Assuming that the Avian flu (H5N1) is capable of becoming such a killer virus, how long do you have to prepare a plan of action to continue your corporate operations? The answer is nobody knows. The Avian flu could mutate and begin worldwide spread tomorrow, or it may never happen. To properly prepare an adequate pandemic plan, the average enterprise would need between 6 and 18 months. If you haven't started planning already, get to it. Why pandemic planning is different from a DR plan is because of the scope. In a DR exercise, you're usually planning for a particular site failure. In case of failure, you have IT processes and people processes in place to arrange for the technology to operate out of an alternate data center, and in many cases for your people to converge at an alternate place of work. In the case of a pandemic scenario, having many people report to an alternate location would not be conducive to minimizing the spread of the virus. In addition, there's guaranteed to be a large amount of fear and uncertainty on behalf of your employees to show up to this alternate facility when there's a killer virus on the loose. Some organizations have adopted a work from home strategy for their DR/BC plans which fits in nicely for a pandemic scenario as it allows the employees to be close to their family/homes and at the same time be able to perform most of the duties of their jobs.

Employee Absenteeism and Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs
During a pandemic scenario, there is going to be massive confusion and uncertainty for a company's employees. Many employees will be fearful of going to work the next day. Many people will be more concerned about their families more than their jobs. Employee absenteeism is something that companies will have to expect in the days/weeks following a pandemic outbreak. Depending on the severity of the outbreak, many people many not even have the sanity to call in their absense. Abraham Maslow proposed a psychological theory in 1943 called the Hierarchy of (Human) Needs. In Maslow's pyramid of needs, he states that human beings will attempt to obtain basic physiological needs first and then will seek successively higher needs as the lower needs are met. At the lowest level of needs are basic physiological traits such as the ability to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, etc. It's your basic survival necessities. Only after satiating these basic survival needs, would a person become concerned about the safety of their family, home, work, etc. While I generally agree with Maslow's pyramid, I personally think that most people would separate their need for security of their jobs from the need for security of their homes and families. I believe that only after security the safety of your family and home would someone start worrying about their job security, etc. However, once that does enter into a person's mind, they will seek a minimum common ground with their employer so as to not risk the safety of their loved ones. Because of this, you have to assume that a number of employees would be absent from work. The absentee ratios would have everything to do with the media reports of the spread and mortality / effectiveness of the virus. Since no one knows how deadly a virus will be, you have to make rough assumptions at how many people of a particular job function will be unwilling to come into work. The only mistake commonly made in calculating this is assuming a linear percentage of workers based on their role. What I mean here is that some people may be less willing to come into work if their job role involves a greater amount of personal interaction with others (specifically I'm referring to people in retail, and especially people in healthcare since they are even more likely to be exposed to the virus). Rather that make assumptions about what percentage of people will be absent for a given role/job, what's probably more effective is to assume everyone could be absent and identify whether or not their jobs could be performed remotely. You're much more likely to receive cooperation from an employee who is told that they can operate from a remote site / home and perform their duties. This secures your ability to get the work done, and still provides the employee with a sense of control over Maslow's 2nd tier of the pyramid of needs.

This is the first post in a series of blog entries that I'll be commenting on pandemic planning. This is stemming from some pandemic planning exercises that I'm providing input on for a client of mine. I hope you've enjoyed my thoughts on this, and if this topic interests you, you might enjoy some of these links for further reading:

Phases of Flu Pandemic
Human Mortality of H5N1
Global Spread of H5N1
Social Effects of H5N1
Bird Flu in India
Pandemic
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Hugh Tonks: Maslow and Organizational Needs

Shawn

Google Maps adds Street View functionality

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:41:25 GMT

Via Scott Hanselman's blog I learned that Google has recently added Street View support to Google Maps (basically it's stitched together photos at street level view of major cities). While this type of technology is going to take a while to provide this kind of detail for many of the major cities, I think it's a really cool concept. Of course, the REAL value of something like this would be to have it available in a mobile form with good network bandwidth and a GPS unit. You'd never get lost

Here's a URL to part of Times Square in NYC to get the hang of it. I really love how you can use the arrow keys to basically walk around the city. Again, really fascinating stuff.

Shawn