Browser Passwords

If you get frustrated by having to search your browsers password settings database, or better still if your typing skills are about as accurate as my “hunt and peck” or “hammer and nail” techniques, you might find this Javascript useful.

To use it, create a browser favorite, then just paste it in the URL filed, at least thats all thats required in Chrome, Edge and other chromium variants.

If the password field is completed, click the favorite it will be changed to clear text. If you want to check as you type, click the favorite and type and it should display each character.

javascript:(function(){var IN = document.getElementsByTagName("input");for(var i=0; i<IN.length; ++i){F = IN[i];if (F.type.toLowerCase() == "password"){if(document.all){var n = document.createElement("input");for(var k in F.attributes) if(k.toLowerCase() != 'type'){try{n[k] = F[k]}catch(err){}};F.parentNode.replaceChild(n,F);}else{F.type="text"}}}})()

Goodbye Cube life…

This month marks the end of my 41st year in information technology, IT; or a it was called back when I started, Data Processing.

Interestingly, officially yesterday I cleared out my “executive” cubicle at the mau5trap and for the first time became a remote (work-at-home) worker. I have to say I’d have preferred not to, but really given the distributed nature of our team it was simply a waste of time and space to maintain the cube, especially since I’m there infrequently; and for the most part, none of the other technical team members are.

It also means I don’t have to waste 90-minutes per day getting to and from the mau5trap, which has got significantly worse in the last 5-years. Yesterdays drive home was an epic waste of time, nearly 2-hours of which 90-mins was getting through downtown Austin.

Over the years I’ve worked at the head office of the businesses I’ve worked for; commuted by train, planes and automobiles to offices; worked on international assignment, temporary assignment, and virtual assignment; but I don’t ever recall actually giving up an office entirely before. In my later projects at IBM I was remote from the team and regularly worked from home; that was actually pretty demotivating.

As it turns out, it’s a pre-cursor to the start of other changes, and probably marks the beginning of the end of my technology career. I have no plans to retire just yet, but as someone who spent his career thriving off the enthusiasm and excitement created by being around others, spending days doing whiteboard architecture and design, I find the current state of tools, webex, powerpoint, chat and the omnipresent  email less and less an attraction.

Add to that my recent tendency to take-on the jobs and assignments no one else wants, or is hoping someone else will do, and there you have it.

| Edit. Thanks to #1 for pointing out I had too many “too’s”

Getting into it…

Former IBM Colleagues, especially those who’ve been working in the X86 server business, which is being sold to Lenovo, might enjoy listening to the latest This American Life, #516, Act 1 of Stuck in the Middle. It starts out with this introduction, “he spent his entire career working for IBM, going back to the 50’s and 60’s, when working at IBM was like working at NASA”.

Obsessive, compulsive types rejoice, you are not alone. You can click on the sound bar, the act starts at 11:50’ish, or go here on the This American Life website. Hear it out.

Oh yes, Opus No.1 is here. Tim never made any money, he didn’t get a drink for it, he never used it to pick-up women. This American Life is offering Opus No. 1 as a download, here.

Good at PowerPoint?

Current status (to quote @cathcam): “I used to be good at my job. Now I’m just good at PowerPoint.”

— cote (@cote) May 23, 2012

Customer service – You’ve been Zappos’d

When I first ordered from Zappos.com and they screwed up with the packaging, craming a $200+ dollar jacket in a shoe box, so much so I had to have it professionally steamed to get the creases out, I was prepared to forgive them. After another order they put me on their VIP list, free shipping both ways[read shipping included in the price, since they are anything but cheap.] Zappos is an Amazon.com business.

My 3rd order was for some shoes, I ordered a 12, they shipped an 8. I returned them free, instead of a refund, I got a credit note. I’d have happily accepted the right size, but they didn’t have them. I did do at least one more order, but have backed off recently.

Then late last week I got an email telling me they’d been hacked, some of my data and my password had been compromised, they’d reset my password and I should logon and change it. So I tried. Their system responded “”We are so sorry, we are currently not accepting international traffic. If you have any questions please email us at help@zappos.com”.

Here is my summary email sent back to them today. What’s clear is that their customer service, average under normal circumstances, is less than what I’d expect, VIP or not.

“No wonder you got hacked. Let recap, please read carefully…

1. You got hacked
2. You write to me telling me to change my password
3. Your system won’t let me change my password because I’m overseas attending my father’s funeral.
4. I ask you to remove my account and ALL my data
5. You write back telling me to change my password
6. I write back telling you that wasn’t what I asked, and to delete my account and remove all my data
7. You write back telling me to deactivate my own account
8. I can’t. See #3
9. I write this email back pointing out how useless you are.”

I need…

I had planned a long year end post that was around of all that happened in the past year, including some important updates on some of the software development that’s been going on here at Dell. Suffice to say the complexity of writing something that wouldn’t get me in trouble either for disclosing too much, or making it sound like finger pointing, which it wouldn’t have been, meant it never got written.

I had a great end of year Christmas trip back to the UK, the main reason for the trip was to get a new US Work visa, since my change of status, Permanent Residence aka Green card hadn’t been approved. After a few days in the West End dealing with that, I decamped to Islington and spent a few days out there including a great trip out to Stratford and the site of the 2012 Olympics. While in East London I caught this track a few times, called, I need – performed by Maverick Sabre who is now from Hackney, East London.

Maverick was of course one of our software project code names, the words made me laugh, “I need sunshine, I need Angels, I need something good and I need”. The irony won’t be lost. Enjoy.

The first Maverick Sabre album, Lonely are the brave, will be out Feb 6th, 2012.

An old man and money

I was just sent a link to this ConnectedPlanet article by Susana Schwartz, and given my background in mainframes and x86 asked what I thought of the central premise. The analogy that came to mind almost immediately was too good not share.

The question the article was addressing was “will the IBM zEnterprise make mainframes sexy again?” My analogy, Hugh Hefner! Do you think Hugh Hefner is sexy? He has all the money, is a great revenue generator has some good products, but mostly while they do the same stuff they’ve always done, are looking a bit long in the tooth. What’s interesting is what surrounds Hugh. Same with zEnterprise, only there are much better ways to get that smart technology.

After a few miss-starts with a google search for “old man and young girls” – that will have set off some alarm bells in Dell IT, I set Google safesearch to strict and search for “old man with young women” and here we have it, my analogy for the IBM zEnterprise.

Image courtesy and copyright of the sun.co.uk

Do you want Hugh Hefner in the middle? He’s worth loads of money…

Any similarity between Hugh Hefner and an IBM mainframe is entirely coincidental, after all we all know mainframes are older and come from New York. Hugh is from Chicago.

Feel free to use the analogy to argue either way… just be careful to keep the discussion work safe. I’ve still got that J3000 spoof press release somewhere as well.

Deviation: The new old

Deadmau5 Analalog Modular setup

IBM 360/40 at Attwood Statistics

Anyone that knows me, knows that I’ve retained a high level of interest in dance music. I guess it stems from growing up in and around London in the early 70’s and the emergence of  funk, and especially Jazz Funk, especially through some of the new music put together by people like Johnny Hammond(Los Conquistadors Chocolate), Idris Muhammed(Could Heaven Ever Be Like This) which remain to this day two of my all time favorite tracks, along with many from Quincy Jones.

Later, my interest was retained by the further exploitation of electronics as disco became the plat de jour and although I, like most others became disenchanted once it became metronomic and formulaic, I’m convinced that the style, type and beat of music you like and listen to create pathways in your brain to activate feelings.

As so it was that with time, and energy on my hands over the past few years I’ve re-engaged with dance music. Mostly because I like it, it activates those pathways in my mind that release feel good endorphins, I enjoy the freedom of the dance.

I’ve been to some great live performances, Tiesto and Gareth Emery especially down in San Antonio and Houston, and anyone who thinks these guys are just DJ’s, playing other peoples music through a computer or off CD’s is just missing the point.

However, one electronic music producer more than any other has really piqued my interest, Deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmerman from Toronto. I first saw Deadmau5 during South by South West (SXSW) in 2008, when Joel played at the now defunct Sky Lounge on Congress Ave. The club was small enough that you could actually stand at the side of the stage and see what he was doing, it was a fascinating insight. [In this video on YouTube, one of many from that night, not only can you see Joel “producing” music, but if you stop the video on the right frame at 16-seconds, you can see me in the audience! Who knew…]

I saw him again in March 2009 at Bar Rio in Houston. This time I had clear line of sight to what he was doing from the VIP balcony. It was fascinating, I actually saw and heard him make mistakes, not significant mistakes but ones that proved he was actually making live music. [You can read my review from the time here including links to YouTube videos.] It turns out he was something he was using during that Houston concert was either a prototype or something similar to a monome.

Joel regularly posts and runs live video streams from his home studio, and recently posted this video of his latest analog modular system. It and some of the other videos are a great insight into how dance music producers work. Watching this, this morning, I was struck with the similarities to the IBM 360/40 mainframe which was the first computer I worked on, especially I can remember the first time I was shown by an IBM Hardware Engineer, who might have been Paul Badger or Geoff Chapman, how the system worked. How to put it into instruction step, how to display the value of registers and so on. I felt the same way watching the Deadmau5 video, I got to get me some playtime with one of these.

And yes, the guy in the picture above is me and the 360/40. It was taken in probably the spring of 1976 I’d guess, at Attwood Statistics in Berkhampstead, Herts. UK.

The power and capacity of the IBM 36/40 are easily exceeded by handheld devices such as the Dell Streak. Meanwhile, it’s clear that some music producers are headed in the opposite direction, moving from digital software to analog hardware. The new old.

New Friends, missing news

Turbo Todd muses over on his blog that he missed the friendster/facebook announcement because he was on a plane and it didn’t have wireless and the implications of being behind.

Todd, get over it, you are not in fact behind, getting off the plane after something has been announced, you are in fact ahead in these modern interconnected days. Just through our common twitter “friends”, there were 10-blog posts within 90-minutes that carried the news and gave an analysis, just like the VMware/Springsource acquisition, there are more angles than you can measure with an Isosceles triangle. Unless you are suggesting your are wiser than the crowd and knew all these angles and more.

Also, since Silicon Valley is to the tech industry, what LA is to the movie industry, get used to making new friends, this years movers and shakers are next years fail whales or Scott and Larry, either way, you’ll need new friends!

Oh, yeah, we must be friends, Facebook says so…

Why do Analysts blogs make it so hard to have a conversation?

One of the most eloquent parts of blogging is the simple use of pings and trackbacks. It allows blogs to do what the web does best, link related conversations and information.

After writing my most recent blog entry, I noticed something that hadn’t occured to me at all before. Very few IT Industry analysts blogs provide this facility. Variously they require you to fill in forms, answer captchas, register and worse. In deference to Roblin Bloor, he has already posted my comment on his blog. But why might do IT Industry analysts make it so hard, surely not because they want to control the conversation?

This is also a tip-of-the-hat to the boys over at Redmonk.com, whose blogs not only support pings and trackbacks, they also post tweets along with blogs entries. Nice one chaps.

Profiles in, err, courage

Back in March I caught an early morning bus on Saturday to downtown Austin to attend Bar Camp IV, suffice to say it’s mostly not a bar, and doesn’t involve camping(anymore).

I attend a few interesting sessions, I learned a few things about Windows 7, mobile development and attended a session on airships and blimps that I assumed was some kind of coded language for a session on clouds, but it wasn’t it WAS about airships and blimps and more.

Big-up to @whurley @sarad and @linearb for organising and to the various sponsors which included not only free attendance, but also free lunch and libations.

I was on my way out when I bumped into Texas Social Media Awards finalist and local tech analyst and sometime contact, Michael Cote from Redmonk. We passed the time of day, and he asked me if I wanted to be interviewed for a podcast, why not?

I learned a ton about Cote from the interview, mostly that he doesn’t forget anything. We’ve met probably 5-6 times in the past and he seemed to pull 1x question from each discussion. I mostly laughed the whole way through, I thought it was going to be a tech discussion, and we did touch on a few topics, but it was just a fun way to spend 10-mins. You can hear the podcast and read the liner notes here on Redmonk Radio Episode 55. – And no, I have no idea why the series was called “profiles in courage”, why I was selected, a why I giggled all the way through. It’s been a while since I did my press training, I don’t remember them telling us about giggling as a technique!

Social networking/Web 2.0 amnesia

I’d never really thought about longevity of email addresses, I’ve no idea how long I’ve had my yahoo.co.uk address, probably not 10-years but I have no idea. [Update: Yahoo think’s I’ve had my email since Oct. 1999]

When I was first at IBM UK they insisted on openness and transparency, and so we were encouraged to use our work Internet address by default. So – was name@vnet.ibm.com and then name@uk.ibm.com for most email from 1987. But then I got in a legal fight over an online triathlon forum I ran, and the companies lawyers wrote to IBM to complain as that was the only way they had to contact me. My boss at the time suggested it would be smart to separate my identities, I figure that was only about 2001. Since then I’ve fairly successfullly kept my online persona separate.

I don’t recall having an Internet email address before I joined IBM, but we’d had teletype and terminal systems where we could send messages between systems across the world, kinda like twitter but point to point mostly. My first memory of this was around 1978…

Transparency and declarative living have really been the default since then, the tools have got better overtime. I like the way things are coalescing around a few tools. Facebook is becoming a useful repository, being able to redirect via RSS your journal, tweets, pictures, friends, social contacts, travel plans via tripit etc.

Livejournal really hasn’t kept up and really serves little purpose these days except its original use, as a journal. Here it still stacks up better than many other blogging platforms as it still has private, friends, public entries.

However, I continue to be concerned that Facebook will eventually have a screw-up that will amount to mass amnesia, all sorts of content and contacts will be lost and irrecoverable. For that reason I still do 6-monthly backups of Livejournal to PDF’s via LJBook – that way my memories still have some collective memory, although I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I’ve often thought about giving my lawyer passwords for key accounts etc. along with my will…

Have any others given this any thought ? Are there any Facebook backup or data extraction tools? What have you done about longterm password, or data storage? In 30-years time, possibly after you pass on, how will that picture get removed from Flicker ?

Life is visceral

After I posted my “Is SOA Dead?” entry, Joel Zimmerman, aka Deadmau5 reminded me of this by Spiro Agnew, in a speech, just down the road in Houston, Texas, on 22 May 1970, where VP Agnew said in response to the Vietnam War riots: “Subtlety is lost, and fine distinctions based on acute reasoning are carelessly ignored in a headlong jump to a predetermined conclusion.”

“Life is visceral rather than intellectual. And the most visceral practitioners of life are those who characterize themselves as intellectuals. Truth is to them revealed rather than logically proved. And the principal infatuations of today revolve around the social sciences, those subjects which can accommodate any opinion, and about which the most reckless conjecture cannot be discredited. Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated.”

You can read the full text here or you can listen to it here. Why don’t people have diction like that anymore? Why have I taken to spelling everything the American way? And why are there no riots anymore over outrageous goverment actions?