Month: September 2001

End of freedom

this event will mark the end of individual freedom as we know it. calls for increasing surveillance at the expense of personal freedom will be stronger than ever. everybody opposed to giving up his personal freedom will be framed as a suspect.

expect the following:

  • total ban on encryption
  • machine-readable identification cards mandatory
  • increased use of video surveillance, face recognition
  • closer law-enforcement cooperation on an international scale
  • heavy increases in military spending
  • censoring of dissident views on the internet

now would be as good a time as ever to read the transparent society by david brin.

Can we stand living our lives exposed to scrutiny … our secrets laid out in the open … if in return we get flashlights of our own, that we can shine on the arrogant and strong? Or is privacy’s illusion so precious that it is worth any price, including surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?

update
wired reports that the fbi has installed carnivore internet surveillance equipment at major internet providers within hours of the attacks.

Value of getting out of the way

micromanagement kills productivity. as experienced at my former employer

people criticize microsoft for many things, but there is a reason why they have become such a successful company. they get it. they don’t have layers upon layers of stupid decision-making committees, instead management stays out of the way so that the line can do its work.

if this is not the case at kpmg once i return, then bye bye.

The Methodology won’t save consulting

talent does not scale. IT consulting firms learn this the hard way.

my work at a big consulting firm has confirmed what i always suspected: a few talented people are lost in a sea of morons.

fine for you if you are one of the morons, because you will have a happy work experience (with talented people spoon-feeding you). if you are one of the talented, however, bad luck. your productivity will be dragged down by creating rules for the morons, you’ll have to endure their stupidity all the time, see them gloat with tales about accomplishments that are not theirs (rather yours) and so on.

this is the best reason yet why a job change is inevitable.

Starting from scratch is a bad idea

sometimes, it’s just not feasible to re-write software. even though most developers have an urge to do so with code they have not messed up themselves. joel spolsky argues:

..it takes 10 years to write good software.. ..re-writing software is the greatest strategic mistake you can make..

i agree strongly, especially for web projects. i’m currently trying to salvage a project that has some real messy code. however, far from throwing out everything, we try to fix it up piecewise. joel has some other good articles at his web site.

The professionally idle

Well, I was bored, so I went out to Narcissus. As it happens, I meet this girl who asks me to come to a private party. Which I promptly did. The party turned out to include some 20 people, all crowded in the room of a rich Chinese son. Once inside, the music was turned to full volume until 13:00.

After which I finally found some sleep. When I asked some of the attendees what they did for a living, they went like: “nothing”. Apparently it is rather common to do just that. !?

First cvs commit

well, after some weekend hacking, i have committed XML-RPC support to the postnuke CVS. unfortunately i had no time to finish it properly, so it will probably not work for now. it’s most likely a minor issue though, and maybe there is someone else interested in fixing it up. meanwhile over on bloggerdev, the discussion continues.. and some other open source projects might support this api in the future.

it will be interesting to wait for a little while and then cook up a great demo for the talk series i am preparing at zurich university.