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Good bye, Symantec

Symantec anti-virus has just told me that the tool I have downloaded is suspect, and has deleted the file for me, so that I am a safe and happy drone on the Internet. The message was: " WS.Reputation.1 is a detection for files that have a low reputation score based on analyzing data from Symantec’s community of users and therefore are likely to be security risks. Detections of this type are based on Symantec’s reputation-based security technology. Because this detection is based on a reputation score, it does not represent a specific class of threat like adware or spyware, but instead applies to all threat categories. " So, if not enough people use a special purpose tool for a small industry, that file downloaded from the company must be bad and is automatically deleted to protect me. Good-bye Symantec anti-virus. And your solution, Symantec, of: " WHITE-LISTING Software developers who want to accelerate the reputation building process for their new software applicat
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Net Neutrality

Discussing “Net Neutrality” is like discussing “Gasoline Neutrality for your car. Ford motor company does not have an exclusive deal with British Petroleum so that you have to buy BP gasoline to get optimum fuel efficiency. In much the same way, net neutrality is a given when what you are purchasing is bandwidth, not connection to specific services. The neutrality of the Internet needs to be maintained in the same way that long distance providers are not allowed to be partial to any specific local carrier. If Comcast or AT&T is allowed to select who you are going to get access to at full speed, what is to stop them from extorting money from Google or any large content provider to allow unfettered access? The Internet is a utility in this modern day and age, and must be treated as such and legislated in the same vein.
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what is Net Neutrality anyway?

Net Neutrality is really a misnomer; it’s not just about neutrality. Calling Common Carrier requirements for Internet providers “Net Neutrality” is like calling your car gasoline neutral. If Ford or General Motors made an exclusive deal with Exxon-Mobile so that their vehicles only got the rated gas mileage using that brand of gasoline, and all others would produce sub-par results, there would be no question about legislating against that. So why then are the carriers allowed to try to hold content providers hostage over bandwidth and performance? When I purchase Internet access through my ISP, I am buying bandwidth to the net at large, not to the companies that have cooperative agreements with my provider. I expect that the content provider may throttle requests and responses to mitigate issues such as being slashdoted and having unusually large amounts of traffic at an unpredictable moment, but that is in their business model not in the business of the Internet Provider who has so
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Thankful for the Internet

This time Google found the hint I was looking for. I use SciTe to edit when I am working on Python projects. But on the brand new machine running Vista it was coughing up the "No module named ..." error. A couple of Google searches later, I actually found this blog that had the answer to editing the Windows path and XPATH variables to find Python. One would think that the Windows installer for Python would have done that already, but apparently not. *sigh* And now back to my regularly scheduled programming projects.
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Strings - a movie review

Well, first let me say that I just watched a movie whose characters are all marionettes. That should put the rest into a little more perspective. The theme of Strings is that we are all bound to one another. The metaphor of strings is obvious in the strings that control the actors, but is also carried throughout the story in other more subtle ways. When our hero is exposed to the world outside the city, he sees some of these connections, and has some shown to him. The story itself is a hero saga, with our hero the young price setting forth to avenge his father that he wrongly believes to have been slain by their historical enemies. Of course there is an evil uncle who is furthering this for his own ends, being control of the kingdom, but that is about as trite as the story gets. Our young prince disguises himself and leaves the city with his general alone to seek the rebels who he believes murdered his father, leaving behind his sister in the clutches of the evil uncle and his henc
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teaching an old dog a new trick

learning a new trick is always a difficult proposition. The new trick I am attempting to master this time is the use of dictation with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It actually feels somewhat silly to sit and talk to your computer. Which is doubly so for me given that I was raised reading science fiction. Teaching this old dog new trick of using dictation software instead of typing is going to take a bit more practice than I had expected. I hope that at the end of this process dictation will prove faster than typing and I may yet get a few short stories into electronic ink.
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Useful thought for getting going

Web Worker Daily was a lovely article on rescuing an unproductive day. I really have to thank them for reminding me to turn the music on. Drowning out the conversations from the cubes around the floor, and the noises of the toys the folks around here use to help adjust attitude when taking support calls is a godsend. Pandora really helps in providing the soundtrack I actually want to listen to. Setting up a channel for 80s bubble-gum pop music, or loud, stompy industrial, is great for fixing a broken day.
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