From Jellyroll to Jagger

Our seven year old is infatuated with the Rolling Stones circa 1965.

He has a vintage (read that, old) Sony stereo setup with a great vinyl turntable which has not stopped turning since the holiday school break began.

While listening to his favorite Rolling Stones song,Satisfaction, from the album Out of Our Heads for the six hundredth time, something dawned on me: that song is fifty. years. old.

Would anybody in 1965 have been listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Al Jolsen or Irving Berlin songs from 1915 on the hi-fi and dancing around the room? I doubt it and there must be some meaning hidden deep in the grooves of vinyl LP's that we just don't understand quite yet.

Puzzling us is the nature of the game.

Image: Songwriter Jelly Roll Morton ca 1915 and Mick Jagger ca 1965.


(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Words & Music Keith Richards & Mick Jagger, ©1965 ABKCO Publishing

(With a professional songwriter as a significant other, I am conditioned to add songwriter attribution wherever and whenever required!)

#rollingstones   #mickjagger   #satisfaction    #jellyrollmorton  

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Touching Enola Gay

Atomic Secrets
Who gets tossed out of a museum?

I'll admit it. Aside from me, I know of no other person tossed out of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I blame it on atomic energy.

Most folks traverse the wonderful exhibits at Air & Space maintaining a sense of decorum. And most are satisfied to admire the various aircraft and spacecraft from afar. But, not I on that particular day in 1998.

My downfall was the Enola Gay exhibit in Gallery 103. Somehow, standing next to the very airplane that dropped the first atomic weapon in history drew me to that decision point where bank robbers open bank doors and regular schmoes like me become willful scofflaws. I decided to touch the airplane.

I milled around the exhibit casing the joint and waiting for the crowds to thin a bit before making my move. I located the barrier with the least distance between me the plane's nosegear.(see the attached image)

I considered the length of my arm's reach against the fulcrum presented at my stomach as I leaned in and determined it could be done.

I looked at the nosegear, then I looked at the security guard standing in the shadow near the main entrance door. I narrowed my eyes, fixed my glaze upon him and he upon me likewise in the fashion of two cowboys facing off in the dusty street in front of the saloon. It was him or me now.

The guard took a step forward from the shadows never breaking his gaze on me. "You aren't going to touch the exhibit are you?", he asked. "Yes, I am.", I croaked in my best Harry Callahan voice.

Doing so, he informed me, would be sufficient cause for him to escort me to the front door of the museum and throw me out. I replied, "That's fine."

At that precise moment I leaned over, stretched out and touched the nosewheel assembly; the guard grabbed me under the arm the way law enforcement officers are trained to do, and we silently made our way to one of the entrance doors on Independence Avenue. He released my arm and pushed me through the open door and I landed back in sunshine. 

I turned around as he called out to me. "You can go around to the other side and come back in. I know why you touched it but I gotta do my do my job. Just don't touch any more exhibits today, brother." 

I thanked him then walked around the building and re-entered the museum on the Mall side with a scofflaw's spring in the step and atomic glint in the eye. I had touched history.

Current Enola Gay exhibit at National Air & Space Museum: http://goo.gl/x4iwmE

Image: National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC website.


#enolagay   #nationalairandspacemuseum  #hiroshima   #littleboy   #atomicenergy  #atomicbomb   #b29   #tibbets  

The Convenience Store War

....Why Your Quadrotor will be Banned

Seven-11/Nine-Eleven
The September 11th attacks on the United States changed the scope and scale of war forever. After centuries of set-piece warfare with armies massed along imaginary battle lines and supported with massive rear-guard supply chains, we entered into the era of the Convenience Store War.

The 9-11 attackers were few but they were able to establish a command and control system from internet cafes and public libraries on both coasts of the US; picked up wire transferred funds at the neighborhood grocery store; bought throwaway cell phones for field communications; bivouacked in weekly rental apartment houses; chowed down on nachos and beer from the corner convenience store then, lastly, rented four weapons of mass destruction from the airlines. The age of the convenience store battle had arrived.

Mastedon vs Mice
Like a scene from The Borrowers, the 9-11 attackers collected small items for their task with little or no notice. Individually, nothing stood out about these purchases, but in total, they added up to destruction on a massive scale.

Our response to this threat was simplistic: large scale conventional warfare and drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to deliver conventional weapons to conventional targets. So far, the success of our remote war campaign is not clear but this approach will not work in the future. 

What will be next? Think small; think mobile and add drones, quadrotors and small UAV's to your list of weaponry. And, if you believe that these small UAV's are incapable of carrying effective weaponry, you may need to re-think your position on that. 

Black Carded
That $300 drone on the internet may only have a fifteen minute battery life at its maximum all up weight, but a quick calculation of its operating range at its nominal flight speed can be a chilling thought.

Now, imagine the simultaneous launch of a hundred of drones each with a portion of the total payload. Scrambling jets or launching missiles to counter this threat will not be effective. Add open source availability of gps waypoints for complete autonomous mission operations to the mix and the safety of elected officials

Drone and UAV control technology is open source and globally available to anyone with a credit card or online bank account. After consideration of capabilities against market availability, we can expect governments around the world to call for an across the board ban on UAV's, and this will be futile and counterproductive.

The marketing convenience and near-anonymity of the internet opens the door for another episode of The Borrowers with a bad end. Let's hope we are ready this time.


The Borrowers: ©1953, Mary Norton
Image: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, ©1997 New Line Cinema.


#drones   #uav   #worldtradecenter   #smartbombs 

Google Glass Failed. I Blame Agile

Ok. Not every product is a winner for every company, and Google Glass is in the non-winning category, according to MIT.

http://goo.gl/vV0vYc

But there is a deeper issue in play here than Glass itself; a deeper problem in the system that is pandemic across the Valley: deliver early- others will finish it.

Deliver early is part of that larger, conceited, construct which idolizes failure as a totem and guide for arriving at the best product- a realtime Darwinism.

Delivering functionality incrementally to the user is now acceptable to developers (I doubt clients feel the same way.) but I hope this doesn't migrate into the car buying experience, though. "We're still working on that heater functionality, ma'am."

Failing early is now accepted as a development method because of its Darwinist weeding out of the bad things from the good. Of course, in the olden days engineers provided this same winnowing in a more erudite and predictable way.

Of course, now we can hoist up half-baked ideas like Glass and Google Apps for Business and then reward developers with a kegger.

This approach seems to work well in the marginally technical reaches of software development, but I wouldn't want to ride on a space vehicle created this way.

How did we arrive here? I squarely place the blame onAgile methodologies and practices.

Early attempts to deliver software solutions by mimicking conventional industrial methods (waterfall, Boehm, etc) failed, so we simply discounted the existing practices and created the dark-matter universe of stripped down development- XP, RUP, etc- which finally landed back to earth as Agile.


We couldn't figure out a way to deliver against classical requirements, so we invented the user story. We could never deliver incrementally against a calendar, so we invented sprints and a ship something, dammit mentality.

What we really created was an environment for throwing our spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. Hooray! Kegger!

No engineering. No examination. No peer review. Just crowd surfing software.

Applying this Agile mindset to product development, such as Glass, can produce unexpected results. Sometimes the product is a total failure, and sometimes the product provides some of the capability we intended.

For incomplete products we apply the final conceit oflet-George-do-it and proudly release an SDK with great fanfare then blame the third parties for failing to rise to the occasion.

I guess in a world limited to 140 character thought bites, this approach to product development should not come as a surprise. Kegger!!

#googleglass   #agiledevelopment   #waterfall  #boehm   #softwaredevelopment   #failearly  #disruptive   #conceit 

Do You Own That Apple Laptop?

It took only 60 seconds for Regis McKenna and Ridley Scott to cement the vision of Apple Computer as destroyer of evil empires with its 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial.

Judging by the drumbeats on the blogosphere, Apple may be within a few internet seconds of being unmasked as a member of the very Legion of Evil it sought to vanquish. Logging browser URLs into its servers? Storing your text documents on the cloud? Without your knowledge? Tracking your every move with its IoT apps?

Before we start tossing out the finger pointing apologetics for reading every last word of all Terms of Service agreements we come across, let us ask this: do I agree to some hidden TOS when I buy a piece of Apple hardware?

Using software these days is a Faustian Bargain. The creators of the software assume that they can never be recoup what it cost to build (a vanity thing, I imagine), so a little trade is arranged to help even the score: you give up the right to privacy in exchange for using the software- even if your bought it. Pride goeth before a fall.

We assumed that hardware did not fall into thisBargain and we may have been wrong. Apple seems to have now separated the user experience from the hardware itself and justified the data collection there with a Stalinesque argument about it being for our own good. Sound familiar?

Apple Computer never seemed to miss an opportunity to lambast IBM Corporation for its corporate persona and reputation. IBM's history of having complete control over its installed equipment base and how it would be used made them an easy target for poking and prodding in media campaigns. IBM knew what the customer needed and provided it for their own good. Freedom! Democracy of data! Independence! Privacy! Apple!

Look at Apple now: operating a walled garden ecosystem that becomes more difficult to leave with each passing day. Is this another opportunity for another rebel to stand up against an evil empire? Only this time, rebel may be the people themselves. For our own good.

#apple   #security   #walledgarden   #ibm  #ridleyscott   #regismckenna   #privacy  

Can Tesla Build 'em Like Hamtramck?

Tesla gets a lot of press for their electric vehicles, but are they really a car company?

Before we get too carried away with this company, let's consider what Tesla has not yet done:

• Has not built autos at the rate of hundreds per hour, 24 hours a day.
• Has not yet defended itself against any wrongful death lawsuits from users of their products.
• Has not managed a federally-mandated safety recall of its vehicles.
• Has not established a clear parts and repairs implementation model.
• Has not yet addressed a significant warranty claims program.
• Has not responded to and recovered from a sudden, unexpected drops in car sales.
• Has not met my finicky neighbor, Ed 'Stay Out of My Yard' Postelwhaite.

In short, Tesla is not really in the car business yet. 

Building cars on an assembly stand in NASCAR fashion certainly offers a charmed existence for a manufacturer but that is hardly a way to service market demand that looms large in the near future. 

Dealing with the 360 degree customer experience requires factories; not guildhouses as Tesla will soon find out.

#tesla   #electriccars   #warranty   #autoparts  #autoservice   #guilds   #manufacturing   #automobile 

Forrest Gumping OneNote

I have been to a number of rodeos in this IT business over the years and most of them weren't very pretty or particularly useful over time. Or, liking OneNote a lot!

Yes, necessity is the mother of invention and I tilted at my share of windmills trying to make software tools work in ways never intended.  No, Lotus Symphony 2.0 didn't turn me into an early road warrior as I had dreamed it would. And Lotus Notes could have been the killer app had the internet not come around.

After ten years in the Mac world, I moved back to Windows and discovered a different Microsoft than I remembered and OneNote.

I decided to give OneNote a real try and set up a Notebook for syncing. Expectations were low but I soon became the information age equivalent ofHoarders meets Extreme Couponing.  Clipping, copying, linking and syncing! I was doing it all on multiple devices.

During my Mac adventure, I recall no face-clamping wow moment over any tool I discovered there. MS Office for Mac was, well, MS Office.

But, here is OneNote offering to become the portal for virtually every facet of my business endeavors. Unstructured data and information goes in for consideration and organization and is immediately available to all the team members, wherever they are located. I was sold.

It’s not often that I go to the rodeo and actually like what I find. Borrowing from Forrest Gump, life is a bunch of corn dogs and you pick the tool that works!

#onenote   #microsoft   #lotusnotes   #lotussymphony  #forrestgump  

The Internet of Things is a Bad Thing

 internet of things is a terribly bad idea. It's fun prognosticating about the shapes of things to come and the excitement level rises when we describe that democratic world where all devices and all people are connect, as one.

There is one major problem with this IOT concept: the internet. Much as we love the reach and appearance of democratization on this global network, it's security is frail, sieve-like and mostly broken.

Before the internet, distributed systems in the corporate world were robust, impenetrable and secure. And expensive. The deep layered security model of Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes comes to mind.

Enter the internet circus. Purchase internet access from a service provider in somebody's basement and the flower shop downtown could be as connected and present as the largest corporation. We lowered the deep security models and raised up beacons daring people to exploit us.

Now we come to that IOT thing which offers to connect mostly devices built with simplistic architecture- they are bit and clock aware to the extreme- that offers little or no security. Who would want to hack a stove? Unless one is designing life critical devices such as heart pacemakers, security is not there.

Connecting insecure devices opens the door to exploitation and invasions privacy which will surpass anything we have experienced to date. 

If we want to prognosticate about the shapes of things to come, let us imagine a world where one's heart pacemaker or one's electrical distribution system can be ransomed to the highest bidder. This is not going to work out well for us.

#security   #internet   #internetofthings   #lotusnotes  #securitymodel   #embeddedsystems   #devices  

Apple: Chipped and Shopworn?

This has been a rough couple of weeks for Apple with iCloud security breaches, bend it like Gumby iPhones,it's now a brick iPhones, tax woes with the European Union- oh, where does it end?

As a kid, I went to a carnival once prepared to denounce my citizenship in Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class to become a roustabout.

I was really smitten with the lights, polished brass, the unusual people and that sense of excitement surrounding the whole carnival adventure. I was ready to set out on a new career.

I arrived just ahead of opening time and sneaked in somehow. The place was still quiet as I threaded my way through the maze of motionless rides and shuttered sideshows looking for the boss's office. 

Padding quietly, I began to notice that the folks who were so interesting the night before were pretty average looking in the daylight. And, the vivid colors that shimmered in the wake of flashing colored lights at night were pretty much dirty, chipped and shopworn.

I never made it to the boss's office that day. But I left with a stronger sense of how reality can be subverted- even distorted- into something it is not.

We may have arrived at daylight for a slightly chipped and somewhat shopworn Apple.

#apple   #iphone6   #iphonebending