Archive for April, 2004

Threat Advisory Questions

Monday, April 12th, 2004

Today I noticed a reference to the US Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory System in an article I was reading, and decided to see what I could find out about it. Basically I couldn’t find out much, but I noticed a helpful link to contact the Department of Homeland Security, so I submitted the following message:

To Whom it may concern:

This message is to question the role of the Threat Advisory Level and the legitimacy of the Low and Guarded levels. In my short experience with the system I have the following comments:

  1. I don’t know what it means or how to react to changes in the threat level. I did see there is a link to a “Citizen Guidance on the Homeland Security Advisory System” at http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interweb/assetlibrary/CitizenGuidanceHSAS.pdf However, the link did not work and resulted in what is known as a 404 or Resource not found error, as an additional problem I was not permitted to view the standard 404 error page “http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/error_404.jsp” as I was given an “Access Denied” or 403 error. I would appreciate it if you could provide a legitamate means of obtaining this document for my review so I can understand what the threat level means to a citizen.
  2. I have spoken to a few police officers, they don’t seem to have any understanding of what the different threat levels mean, either. This is troubling, as this department is now the recipient of funds withheld from my paycheck I would like to know that the most numerous supporting cast for Homeland Security (police officers) have some level of procedures and understanding about what this most public vestige of the department means.
  3. Are there any plans to utilize the Low or Guarded levels for the threat advisory meter? Throughout the time since the inception of this meter it seems that the level has been “elevated” or “high.” Are the lower levels destined to go the way of the “small” soda at McDonalds or is there actually a purpose for them? There are numerous childrens stories which are embedded in the US culture that extol the benefits of not being overly enthusiastic in making claims of emergencies that don’t seem to be actively materializing. (See “Chicken Little” ISBN: 0694010340, or “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” ASIN: 0553372327).

While this message may seem overly critical, or seem like a big joke, I assure you that it is not. I am a concerned citizen and I am doing my civic duty by requesting more information and pointing out what appear to be problems in the perception of the current policies and information sharing of this newly formed, very large, and expensive branch of the US federal government.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Kevin McAllister
Citizen United States of America

In the unlikely event that I receive any kind of feedback I will post it here.

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p>Found some working links to the Red Cross documentation on the Advisory System.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Individual Productivity Considered Harmful

Thursday, April 8th, 2004

kasia’s description of a day in the life of a programmer was fairly accurate, if not a little overly optimistic. I mean c’mon, one whole bug?! Usually that is the fruit of many days labor. Especially when dealing with code that was contributed from many different authors.

When I am feeling especially stressed about lack of productivity, I like to read things like The Tyranny of Email and pretend that somehow I will be able to incorporate those suggestions into my routine. And on occasion I was able to enact some policies suggested in that article. Of course the inevitable result was a catastrophe that I got stuck fixing for a large amount of time because I was ignoring email.

Here is a scenario: As the smart programmer is not able to rein in a poor idea being circulated immediately, because the other powers that be are having a near real time discussion over email and choose to enact said poor idea without the mandatory idea cool off period. The result will be that the customers expectations are already set in such a wrong-headed manner because of course a bad idea can’t just live inside your company it must immediately be communicated to any and all customers, who will undoubtedly agree with and begin to demand that it be implemented.

Of course the only true way to untangle this mess is to kill the people that started it, and anyone who is propogating the myth that this dumb idea is any good. Sort of an idiot genocide. But life, often, seems to be about compromise. Short of killing everyone in a two mile radius, you will probably need to put your creative solution hat on (caution: this may involve consuming alcohol) and find a way to provide the eventual end result of the requested feature, in a less evil way. Which of course will simply be added to your queue of very, very, very urgent things that need to be done.

Now you have these options:

  1. suck it up, and fulfill the new requirement.
  2. The ever popular, ignore it and hope it dies of it’s own poisons
  3. The customer (much like a small child) may have a propensity for distraction, and you can simply pop the adult equivalent of “Finding Nemo” into the proverbial DVD player.
  4. Go back in time, check your email, and launch a preemptive strike to avoid this horrible alternate timeline where Biff Tannen becomes rich and marries your mother.

The lesson in this discussion is that if you redefine your theory of productivity to value the stamping out of bad ideas over the actual producing of goods, in this case bug free software. Then you can happily go through your day reading email, calling people stupid, and using your rapier-like logic to destroy all the bad ideas. You can then leave at 4 PM feeling very accomplished. This will put you right on the fast track to upper management. And leave you plenty of free time for practicing martial arts, in case you miss an email and need to proceed with the idiot extinction plan.

Posted in Hacker | Comments Off