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Hurricane Irene is tracking towards NYC metro area. Already MTA, NJ Transit are shut down. So far it’s just been some rain. Looks like over the next few hours it will start to become more intense.
Earthquake and Hurricane in under a week for those keeping track.
I didn’t get a chance to post earlier about the earthquake. It was just a tiny earthquake for 15-20 seconds, but still extremely rare for this part of the world. Being 17 floors up the building definitely rocked a little bit. Hard to miss, but it wasn’t violent or anything like that. I was on a conference call which continued through it with no incident.
My first thought was construction in the building or across the street, but about half way through I realized without noise that wasn’t possible. My next thought was the fault lines near NYC, which I’ve heard about a few times before. I knew seismic activity is not unusual for NYC, but to the degree that we can feel it is very unusual. I suspect most never knew about those faults, but I like science š . Oddly enough I wasn’t 100% wrong.
An immediate search of Twitter turned up reports of vibration in the city. A few seconds later turned up reports of the same thing in Philadelphia 94 miles away from NYC (which confirmed seismic activity in my head). Meanwhile my inbox had a bunch of reports about Pentagon evacuations and other happenings. A perk of working with a large news organization is being fed news 24×7 (it’s also a bad thing). Confirmation of an earthquake came what seemed like seconds after that. This all took place in a matter of a minute or two.
All together it took just a minute or two to find out the full story. I actually had the full story well before building management had it. They didn’t even know what happened and I knew it was about a 5.8. Amazing if you really think about it. Back in 2003 with the blackout it took considerably longer for substantially less information. Granted having electricity helped. Cell phone networks were still largely unusable for a short time after.
The jokes going across the net were quite amusing (as shown above).
Jamie Zawinski linked to a very interesting blog post about the forensics problem in the recent Casey Anthony trial. To summarize, she was using an older version of Firefox, which stores its history in a Mork DB. For those not familiar with Mozilla internals, Mork is (I’m quoting JWZ here):
ā¦the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career”.
That bug was actually one of two times where I brushed with Mork, that time learning, and another time shortly afterwards where I learned first hand how impossible it really is to work with as part of a hack I was trying to build and later abandoned. Perhaps it was my experience at the time that just made it impossible, perhaps it really was Mork.
I’ve twice (once, twice) mentioned the lack of sanitation for many people in this world. We’re about at the point where more people have cell phones than access to toilets. Bill Gates is now making it a priority to fix this problem. Kudos. This could save many lives.
Section 508 is familiar to many in IT. For those who don’t know it, Wikipedia explains it best:
In 1998 the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. Ā§ 794d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.
The F.B.I however decided it’s above this law and decided to replace the shutdown pages for a bunch of gambling sites they shut down with the following HTML (example link):
I’ve noticed this several times over the years, so this seems to be a chronic problem nobody is calling them out on.
The image (linked locally for posterity) contains the following text below the FBI and DOJ seal’s:
This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I pursuant to an Arrest Warrant in Rem obtained by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Conducting, financing, managing, supervising, directing, or owning all or part of an illegal gambling business is a federal crime (18 U.S.C Ā§ 1955)
For persons engaged in the business of betting or wagering, it is also a federal crime to knowingly accept, in connection with the participation of another person in unlawful Internet gambling, credit, electronic fund transfers, or checks. (31 U.S.C Ā§Ā§ 5363 & 5366)
Violation of these laws carry criminal penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine up to $250,000.
Properties, including domain names, used in violation of the provisions of 18 U.S.C 1955 or involved in money laundering transactions are subject to forfeiture to the United States.
(18 U.S.C. Ā§Ā§ 981 & 1955(d))
To my knowledge, this is a direct violation of Section 508. There are provisions for when Section 508 compliance creates an undue burden, however this could be remedied in under 5 minutes by using text rather than an image. It’s a clear violation. Any federal IT employee would know about this. Civilian IT professionals know about Section 508. The seals could have been one image with an alt tag containing the text “FBI/DOJ Seals” and the above text in HTML. This is trivial. I did half the work just transcribing it up above. I have no doubt the individual who put it together was familiar with Section 508.
In a world where we web developers make efforts to bring information to the disabled and make the internet easily accessible to those with disabilities, this is pretty sad and a real step backwards. The rest of the Internet has been moving forward to making things accessible via initiatives like WAI-ARIA. Target had to settle a lawsuit for $6 million for failing to make a much more complex site ADA compliant. Since financial settlement with the FBI would be very unlikely this gets ignored by NFB and others, but I don’t think it should be.
From Scientific American:
The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governmentsātotalitarian and democratic alikeāare monitoring peopleās online habits, endangering important human rights.
If we, the Webās users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.
– Tim Berners-Lee
The same web we credit with promoting freedom and taking down dictatorships is under attack itself. Will the web in 10 years still have the power to shift political power?
Tim Berners-Lee may know a thing or two about the web.
On this rainy Saturday I was reading a NY Times article about work-life balance, obviously with my work email open in another tab.
The topic is somewhat interesting considering when I entered the work place it was just a few years into the 24×7 work treadmill that quickly became the new normal. On top of that, supporting a 24x7x365 news site it seems even more natural. In my eyes the days of a 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Monday-Friday job are clearly dead and unlikely to ever return. While my primary task is day-to-day development, I also support the site, meaning when there’s a major news even (planned or unplanned), or a technical problem, that means we’re stepping up. Election nights are planned, shootings, major deaths, etc. are obviously not. Systems fail, things need to be upgraded, scheduling with a 24x7x365 newsroom who needs to always be ready to go is hardly easy. I should note that’s in addition to having a top-notch 24x7x365 operations team a phone call or email away. The repeated use of “24x7x365” is intentional.
Throw in my extensive reading to keep up on things, constant need to hack on things, occasional desire to write about things, and I think I find myself identifying with the people profiled in the article to some small degree. Truthfully I was like this in college already, having a job just replaced the academic part.
On a side-note, while I was reading this article I did a double-take when I saw John Lilly’s name mentioned. I’ve seen his name in the press on many occasions, but never unexpectedly ;-).
Paul Buchheit has a great post on the infamous “Tiger Mom” article that created all sorts of controversy a few weeks ago. I must say I agree with him largely and always found myself overwhelmingly running on intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation always failed miserably on me. I’d be curious to know what the breakdown is for the population in general and by age, as I suspect it shifts over time. If anyone knows of such research send it my way.
Interesting stuff.
There’s a curious article in the NY Times about the Common Application‘s technical glitches. The Common Application is a uniform way of filling out one application to apply to many colleges, as opposed to filling out an application for each individual college.
As a web developer, this struck me as particularly odd:
As it turns out, applicants do not have, say, 150 words to discuss their most meaningful extracurricular activities; they have something closer to 1,000 characters (Max said he eventually figured this out). And because some letters may take up more space than others, one applicantās 145-word essay may be too long, while anotherās 157-word response may come up short, Mr. Killion said.
āA capital W takes up 10 times the space of a period,ā he said. āIf a student writes 163 characters that include lots of Ws and mās and gās and capital letters, their 163 characters are going to take many more inches of space than someone who uses lots of Iās and commas and periods and spaces.ā
Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, āBelieve me, if thereās a way to do it, weād do it. Maybe thereās a way out there we donāt know about.ā
Sounds like the folks behind the common application need to go back to middle school and learn about variable width and fixed width fonts. If they had switched to fixed width fonts in the <textarea/> and used the same number of cols and font size it should be pretty accurate. I’m guessing some designer insisted on Helvetica or whatever they are using.
That said, are they actually printing these things out? Is there no way to do this electronically in 2010?
Back in my day (2002), I was advised to go the paper route since many still felt/feared that electronic applications weren’t being fairly considered (and in some cases not processed correctly). That was also the first year public colleges could join the Common Application as I recall. I suspect I was the last class where the majority did it on paper. I guess it’s still an improvement for a technophobic educational system.
Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co believes that the housing market has another 20% to go before it will bottom out. BusinessInsider has a pretty extensive slide show explaining how he came to that conclusion.
I noted a few weeks ago that I don’t think the housing market has bottomed out. Despite what various talking heads may suggest, the numbers and historical trends suggest it still has more to drop. It still seems to expensive for there to be enough of a market to warrant the price. This is a cyclical problem. Unless housing becomes more affordable, or potential buyers become more affluent (unlikely) housing prices can’t be stable much less climb in any meaningful way. Eventually prices must drop.
I’m glad to see validation that my head scratching isn’t totally unwarranted. This has bugged me for several months. People claim it’s bottomed out, but there doesn’t seem to be any rational reason to think that other than wishful thinking, which I’d argue is optimistic, rather than rational.