Has “comprised of” become the new standard usage, or is there still hope? #grammar

Finally made the leap and moved my site to Micro.blog.

Meta Work: 

Meta Work is my term for everything from leadership strategies to individual GTD and PKM workflows—the stuff that transcends any particular domain of work.

Meta (from the Greek μετά, meta, meaning “after” or “beyond”) is a prefix meaning “more comprehensive” or …

Some Thoughts on Report Usability: 

A usable report meets a specific need, clearly presenting the facts in a way that’s appropriate for the user’s context.

As an analyst you’re an arbiter of facts and the context necessary to understand those facts. — Unknown

We love spending time on the Oregon Coast, and Yachats (pronounced like yaw-hots) is one of the best places.

Apple has a bug in a beta version of iOS that pops up an annoying message periodically, and the whole Internet lights up, and it’s fixed in a couple of days, and we all know about it the moment it’s fixed. Meanwhile, Microsoft breaks SSIS deployment in an official release of Visual …

For certain use cases, BIML is pure magic. The best kind of power tools!

Good grief, Samsung—this TV has power and Wi-Fi 24/7, but you have to wait to install updates when I want to watch something? Why?!?!?

This morning’s silly dad song: 🎶 “Banana ooo na na, half of my breakfast is banana ooo na na…” 🎶

I just can’t get enough of “Super Love” by Zero Venture ft. Natalia Natchan. It’s EDM + J-pop + NES. It’s nerdy, sweet, and just so much fun!

iOS 11.3 Beta 2 says battery capacity is at 87%, but it has shut down due to insufficient juice and is being throttled. So what—I’m just stuck? Even if I’d gladly pay $29 for a replacement? D’oh!

I just figured out that the Scroll Lock key actually does something on Windows! Made me want to scream and burn Excel to the ground, but hey—I learned something new today!

Why We Encrypt: Bruce Schneier: Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive. This is the clearest statement I’ve seen of the case for ubiquitous, on-by-default encryption.

UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity: Ars Technica: The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones.

I'm Terrified Right Now: Derick Bailey: I want this horrible, sick feeling because it means I care about what I’m doing. It means I understand that I can really screw this up, and I really don’t want to. It means I care enough to make sure I have every detail right… This gut-wrenching sick feeling that I have right now, …

You do not need permission: Brooke Allen: You do not need permission to do the right thing. No one can give you permission to do the wrong thing.

The Reward For Good Work: Derick Bailey: For me, my work and my reputation are tied together. I’m not known for social graces, being easy to work with, or having the best bed-side manner when helping others. But I am known for quality work, for pushing others to do better, and for clearing a path on which others can travel. …

How a Microwave Should Work: 

I have strong opinions about the proper UI design for a microwave oven:

The number buttons should just be numbers. Pressing the 2 button should not immediately start cooking for 2 minutes. If I want 2 minutes, I’ll hit 2-0-0-Start. I should not have to find a Time Cook button, or anything like …

One in a million is next Tuesday: Larry Osterman: Gordon’s response was simply: “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday”.

What I Want From Tech Support: 

I’ve been working with a software vendor on the same support case for 15 days now, and it’s driving me crazy. It would be unprofessional to rag on the vendor here, but I will share a few thoughts on what I want from tech support that I consistently don’t get.

Windows Batch Gotcha: Use REM Inside IF Blocks: Normally I comment out lines in a Windows batch script by prefixing them with “::"—it just looks better to me than “REM”. But today I found out the hard way (of course) that you can’t do that inside an IF block, or the script dies with… The syntax of the command …

SSIS Conditional Expressions (Lightbulb:On): 

I’ve often been confused and frustrated by conditionals ( … ? … : … ) in SSIS expressions. The concept is straightforward enough, but the syntax made it really hard for me to keep track in nontrivial cases. Then yesterday I had an epiphany: it’s much easier to keep …

I just ran across this great bit of advice I got back in 1995 from Larry Wall, creator of Perl: Don't get brainwashed by your education into thinking that all the answers have to come from teachers.

Connection: Wiretap Laws: Ed Felten, yesterday: CALEA II: Risks of wiretap modifications to endpoints Today I joined a group of twenty computer scientists in issuing a report criticizing an FBI plan to require makers of secure communication tools to redesign their systems to make wiretapping easy. We argue that the plan …

A Haiku: I have had a thought. This is the content thereof. Disappointed yet?

Better Questions: 

Organizational culture emerges from the process of answering questions. The answers aren’t necessarily articulated explicitly, but they’re expressed in the decisions people make, the way people treat each other, and in so many other ways. Organizational leaders may be unconsciously undermining the …

Time Limits on Browser Plugins?: 

When Steve Gibson talked on Security Now 398 about how few users' Java plugins are actually up-to-date, this question hit me:

Should browser plug-ins have built-in expiration dates?

The problem with having all of these old Java versions running around is that attacks always get better. How much more …

New Project: Backbone Reference App: Today I released a JavaScript reference application, built on Backbone, Marionette, and RequireJS. I've learned a lot over the past several weeks, and at times the learning curve was steep, partly because I couldn't find a good reference application that I could learn from. To-Do apps are the …

Lessons in Bug Hunting: Yesterday's lesson in bug hunting: don't assume you're an idiot. I spent a few days trying to figure out why my success callback wasn't being called. It had been working before I updated to jQuery 1.9.0, and I didn't think I had changed anything. After much head scratching I found out that jQuery …

/time: I wanted to GET a lot done today: /coding, /writing, &more; but try as I might, I got 302, and /time returned 404.

Shipped!: I launched a new intranet application today. Nothing fancy, just a simple app to address a real need in my organization. Initial feedback has been very positive. Feels good to ship!

Gun Control and Strong Encryption: In light of recent events, I wondered if anyone was making a connection between gun control and the regulation of strong encryption. So I googled it and found that someone had: me, two years ago. Related: why do so many news reports use the term “gunman” (emphasizing the noun; Google …

Recipe: Tuna Salad: I recently made a salad that everyone in my family loved so much we made another batch the next day. I don’t have precise measurements, but this will get you started: 12 ounce can white tuna, drained A decent squirt of ranch dressing (enough to bind the tuna together, but not enough to make …

Day-of-Week Differences in MySQL and MS SQL Server: Heads-up! In MySQL, WEEKDAY(‘2012-11-09’) = 4 (0-6 starting on Monday), but in SQL Server, DATEPART(dw,‘11/09/2012’) = 6 (1-7 starting on Sunday). If you’re extracting data from MySQL to load into SQL Server, the correct translation is ((WEEKDAY(date)+1)%7)+1.

Merlin Mann in Back To Work #41: If you're not asking the right question, then there is no correct answer.

Washingsoft UAnix: Here’s another product parody Lars and I did in college: Washingsoft UAnix. This was born out of our frustration with the way the University of Washington had—shall we say—embraced and extended standard Unix functionality.

Microsoft Orifice: Aaahhh, the joys of Photoshop and free time. I just stumbled on this little trip down memory lane—a parody of a Microsoft Office box that my roommate (Lars Blacken) and I did in college.

How to Override IE's Compatibility View Behavior On Intranet Sites: To force IE to edge mode (even on intranet sites, where IE would otherwise use compatibility mode), the server needs to send X-UA-Compatible as an HTTP header. Using a meta element in the document head doesn’t work reliably. I found the answer buried in this Stack Overflow thread. In my case, …

Single Sign-On Epiphany: When I wrote about my experience setting up AD Single Sign-On for Linux, I said the next step was to extend the transparent SSO experience into WordPress. The biggest reason for that—I thought—was so that the WordPress server could then impersonate the logged-in user to pull resources …

Something Old, Something New: Digging into a web portal application. It uses Ajax … and frames. 17 years of Web history, all on one page. (I didn’t know browsers still supported frames.)

Converting to Project Connection Across Multiple Packages in SSIS 2012: 

I’m migrating a Business Intelligence project from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012. Microsoft has, overall, done a great job with their development and migration tools, and some of the new features of SQL 2012 are great and will save me a lot of time going forward. One neat new feature in …

Generating a Range of Dates in MySQL: 

Working on a report from a MySQL database, I needed a table of all dates for the next year. With SQL Server (2005 and later) there’s a CTE/recursive method to do this pretty elegantly, but I couldn’t find anything similar for MySQL. All the solutions I found involved temporary tables, …

Active Directory Single Sign-On for Linux Intranet Servers: 

I mentioned a while ago that I have a Linux web server set up with Kerberos SSO in our AD domain. Setting it up was a lot more tedious than it seems like it should have been. I found bits and pieces of useful information here and there, and some step-by-step guides to help with specific sub-tasks, …

Intranet Milestone: Transparent Authentication: I’ve started a project to move the front-end of our intranet from SharePoint to WordPress (SP is just too icky to do any serious front-end work with). The plan is for WordPress to become the front-end and CMS for news-type content, keep SharePoint for file library and calendar-type stuff (at least …

The Problem With GTD: I’m a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, but it suffers from one major shortcoming, at least for me: it offers some great methods for managing inputs and outcomes, but it is little help for managing knowledge in a usable electronic form, largely due to its reliance on paper as a …

Knowledge Work: Marshaling Inputs: I’m beginning a personal project to help me manage the barrage of different inputs I juggle every day. I know I’m not alone in this, so I’ll be sharing my thoughts here as I work through this project. I don’t know what form the end-result will take—could be software, could be a change of my habits …

Mart Laar, Prime Minister of Estonia (1992-1994 and 1999-2002): I was young and crazy… I didn’t know what is possible and what’s not, so I did impossible things.

Where Good Ideas Come From: This is a great video from Steven Johnson about where good ideas come from.

Beware the Limits of Reductionism: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies. – Shakespeare I said before that generalization, patterns, and abstraction are powerful ideas, but they have their limits. It is useful to reduce a thing to its core principles, but beware! Taking …

Powerful Ideas: Ideas are the most basic of tools with which we understand and influence our world. And like tools, not all ideas are created equal—some ideas are more powerful than others. What makes an idea powerful? A powerful idea conforms to absolute truth—the way the world actually is, not necessarily the …

Generalization, Patterns, and Abstraction: εν αρχη ην ο λογος – John 1:1 Our world behaves in consistent, predictable ways. If it were not so, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, philosophy, economics, engineering, medicine, and countless other disciplines would simply not work. Every discipline studies a range of specific phenomena …

Internet Wiretap Bill Misses the Mark: Charlie Savage reported Monday in the New York Times that the Obama administration is seeking legislation that would require “back-doors” in all encryption products and services in the US. Of course, they cite terrorism as a primary motivation. How best to balance the needs of law enforcement (and …

Seattle Photo: From my trip to Seattle a while back. Unfortunate circumstances that took us there, but we did get a chance to hang out at the waterfront for a while. I just kinda liked the unusual perspective and framing of this one.

When Low Tech Is the Best Tech: We’ve been thinking about developing a quick application to replace a paper HR process—should be a simple state machine with four possible states: Submitted, Accepted, Rejected, and Completed. But then we realized we would need email notifications and a coherent security model. These …

The Enterprise Information Protection Paradigm: It used to be that network infrastructure was one of an organization’s most valuable assets and security was geared toward protecting the infrastructure; but costs are falling, and the network has become a commodity. Meanwhile, the volume and value of information stored electronically are growing …

Fun With Flowers: I borrowed my wife’s Valentine flowers for a while Saturday. This lily was a very patient model, and I had a lot of fun! (1/4 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400)

Recipe: Missile Burgers: I was blown away by how good these are. I inherited this recipe from a friend. I can’t find it anywhere on the Web, so I’m putting it here. Enjoy! Ingredients: 1 lb Hamburger 1/2 cup Ketchup 1 Tbsp Mustard 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce 1/2 tsp Chili powder Onion powder and garlic powder to taste …

Book Recommendation: Getting Things Done: Stressed at work? I highly recommend Getting Things Done by David Allen. The main thing I learned from GTD was how to manage my email—keeping my inbox empty and using a single folder for archived messages. It’s been several months, and I need to read it again, but even the few tips I remember from …

The Spam That Got Through: All of my company’s inbound and outbound email goes through a security service that scans for spam and viruses. From time to time I get an email from someone saying that they got a message that they consider spam. I see that as a good sign. Here’s why: Spam filters are machines, with some human …

On Failing Successfully: Inspired by an episode of the Ockham’s Razor podcast: Mark Dodgson: I want to argue that failure doesn’t get the credit it deserves. If you want to understand success, you must appreciate the ubiquity of failure, and if you’re not regularly failing, you’re not trying hard enough. William …