Running is therapy

By now most of you have heard about the Sony rootkit, and the other problems and trials surrounding that mess. I am pretty pleased overall with what has happened. It could have been much worse. It could have been easy.

What does that mean? Well if the rootkit that Sony produced had not created a security flaw, it likely would have gone mostly unnoticed. I would have noticed, and so would you, but mom and pop consumer would not have noticed.

I guess my problem with the whole thing (corporations acting without thought to others), is that, well, no corporation exists with out humans. They are an entity that is strictly human. However I see over and over again situations where a corporation acts as though it is a non-human entity. “No one is responsible for the poor retired employees at Enron, that was done by a company, not a person”.

This kind of dehumanizing is very troubling to me. When we abstract humanity from the corporations they create we do ourselves a great disservice. Namely that of reward/blame. If a corporation does something that benefits a community, the persons responsible for that ought to be heralded as humanitarians (think: the money that Bill and Melinda Gates give away), however if a corporation does it’s community a disservice, then there ought to be humans held responsible (think: Bill Gates destruction of Netscape with his criminal anti-trust practices).

Maybe it’s just me.

So tonite my GF brought over a computer for me to “fix up” so that she can give it to her grandmother. I have never been a big fan of windows, and certainly not of windows’ (or linux’s for that matter) printer support. It always seems like such a huge pain in the ass just to print some stupid text to a page. Well I have 2 printers and neither of them appear to want to work with this Win98 machine. Now I will not argue that XP(2000) is a better itteration of that whole mess, but this computer has 64 megs of ram, so XP is not an option. At any rate it’s after 9 on a Friday and my GF is at walmart buying a new printer, so I can fight with that when she gets back…ARGHGHGHGHGHGHG.

What am I up to you are thinking? “He hasn’t posted in several days, something is afoot!”…ok maybe that is a little more self important than what is really going on. I am hard at work! I have an application that has stolen my focus. I will be releasing it very soon, and more details are sure to follow. Needless to say it will be an application that anyone who is anyone will want :) And on a serious note, it is an app that many people will enjoy. I have been digging into the finer points of perl for this one.

I am also readying a talk I plan to give at my employers “Tech Summit”. I plan to speak on the subject of AJAX. Which should be interesting given that the current app I am writing makes use of AJAX and that it is such a hot topic ATM.

So what do I have that helps you. Hmmm, not sure. I did realize yesterday that javascripts ‘eval()’ does have a use afterall. I had always thought it was a curious function, good for only making apps that evaluated javascript. However upon futher review and taking with Eric I now see that when doing AJAX eval() has a very valid use. Namely that of executing JS returned from server side program. So instead of just retuning text, one can return JS and have it execute client side. Now that is exciting!