I've set up a few Cisco Valets and they pick some rather amusing default SSIDs.. usually an adjective plus a species of plant. And the guest password is some kind of fruit or vegetable followed by digits. Some seem so appropos.

Between OS-X, IOS and Android, this discussion is more than a little comical.

Even I, a non-hunter, know that around here deer are normally killed with either a lead slug from a shotgun or with buckshot (notice the word "buck" in the name) which is a shell filled with 9 pellets each of which can contribute little shavings of lead into the meat.

I'm not sure it's legal to hunt deer with a rifle at any time in my state unless it's a herd-thinning thing.

or proceed as if a interested party couldn't equip all those new typewriters with high-tech keyloggers

Remember them? They're still the bane of my existence. Many trucking companies still communicate only by fax.. which injects just enough credibility to keep a lot of other people thinking that faxing is a sane thing to do.

Even very complex problems can be made to look simple at various levels of abstraction. Hiding complexity inside objects that represent real-world objects is a good way to make the code that uses those objects simpler.

In development, plan to do at least one major refactoring after the project is feature-complete to move complicatons in and out of abstractions, add new abstractions or collapse old old ones as needed to make things "feel good".

just got an "iHome" BT keyboard for my Nexus 10. Makes chopping through those email replies a lot faster on the road. I was going to get Poetic the keyboard-case thingy but decided I didn't want to carry the keyboard with me everywhere. Also this keyboard is wider than the tablet, so it's better to type on.

Microsoft is well on its way to becoming SCO.

Confirmed here ... it was down for about an hour including the admin control panel.

One nice thing about multi-tennancy is problems get attention immediately.. they simply cannot be ignored.

When I finally put a stake in the heart of the SCO UNIX system that hosted our legacy accounting system, someone commented "so I guess UNIX is dead now, isn't it?" Then I pointed out that our server infrastructure was still Linux-based, and that the Google Apps we used ran on Linux, and that the NetSuite ERP system we use ran on Oracle Linux, and that the few macs we have were BSD Unix-based, and then the iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Android tablets and well, pretty much everything except the Windows desktops were UNIX-based. I think they were more confused rather than less after that explanation, but it felt good.

I get at least two or three calls a day on my employer-provided cell phone from someone who wants to lower my credit card rates. You have to press "1" to talk to someone about it. If you complain to them or ask who they're calling from they instantly hang up. Unless I'm very busy I always put the phone on speaker and press 1. Then I say hello to the human, and wait for them to say something. If there are other people in ear shot I'll take the phone off speaker and and stage-whisper "die in a fire!" into the phone before hanging up. If there's no one else around I will say something considerably more creative along the same lines. Something that will come to them in their dreams for weeks or months, I hope.

Worst case I cost them some minutes and lowered their rate of return.

I would dearly love buckling spring keys but still the "bend" of my MS "natural" that I have gotten so used to. I can still type faster on a model M - I have several, but the ergo keyboards are so much better for my beat up wrists.

It's not like Microsoft was ever going to be interested in that anyway. They must get cents back from the disk manufacturers for perpetuating their ever-growing temp folders.

What about SSL? We're looking into expanding our use of an SaaS ERP system into China. If it requires SSL will it stop working some day?

And "Pretty much all of Asimov's works" ? Really. The man was ridiculously prolific and was the ultimate polymath. You're talking about 3 slim novels and a handful of short stories. By profession he was a biochemist but also wrote a number of pop-science books that sold far more than anything else.