Related link: http://ipodder.sourceforge.net

My brother’s employer, BIG BANK Inc., has decided to get every employee above call center and administrative staff an iPod so they can listen to things like earnings calls on their way to work. All 6,000+ will also get a free subscription to audible.com for those few times when they might be motivated to listen to non-work-related stuff. (hah!)

He said that he wasn’t sure what was in it from the Bank’s perspective, but I replied that it seemed like a sneaky, blackberry-like way to reclaim more of the few off-work hours he has (in addition to the marketing value for potential employees).

He wasn’t worried — he figured by the time he got his MP3 collection on there and a bunch of audible.com audio books, there wouldn’t be too much room for work stuff :-)

Know of any good iPod downloads more interesting than quarterly earnings calls?

Related link: http://www.tenbyten.org/developers.html

This is worth seeing for yourself. From the developer page:

If you’re an artist or developer interested in information visualization, 10×10 can be a great data resource for you and your work. As an information artist myself, I understand the difficulty of finding interesting and timely data sources on the web. 10×10 hopes to help this problem. Every hour, 10×10 gathers the 100 most important words and pictures in the world, based on what’s happening in the news. You are welcome to use the information produced by 10×10 in your own non-commercial projects.

As to how it works:

Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

I’m going to play with it for a few days and see if it holds my interest.

Seen anything else like this lately?

Related link: http://www.bloggercon.org/iii/

Here are my liveblogging notes on this afternoon’s sessions:

Bloggercon: Politics
Bloggercon: Making Money

If you were here, what did I miss? If you’re not, what did you miss?

Related link: http://www.bloggercon.org/iii/

Here are my liveblogging notes on this morning’s sessions.
Bloggercon: Journalism
Bloggercon: Journalism

If you were here, what did I miss? If you’re not, what did you miss?

Related link: http://www.evoting-experts.com/

A mostly technical site on e-voting.

Anything not on that site you’d like to see there? (Cracks to elect your favorite candidate subject to ideological screening before posting.)

Related link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,145726,00.asp

One of the great cliches of the classic Star Trek episodes is the crew-member in the red shirt. This short lived, uniformly attired character served as a plot device whenever the real characters where confronted with a hostile environment. They lived just long enough to demonstrate the lethality of the various alien claws, tentacles, death beams etc. that menaced the Enterprise landing party.

Okay, so what does that have to do with email viruses? Well, wouldn’t it be great if you had a red shirted member in your organization, someone who would unflaggingly open every email on the server and blindly double-click on every single attachment? This brave co-worker (call him Homer? MS-Bob?) would use an unpatched version of Outlook, open zip archives trying to run every file inside, run strange Office macros, etc and in so doing trigger every bit of malicious code entering your organization before it made it to your desktop. The howls of frustration from the cube next door would give you advanced warning of incoming mail-based doom, or alert your mail-server so that it could be deleted before you had a chance to be infected.

Well, that’s essentially what a company called Avinti has provided with their iSolation Server product. I really don’t know much about the product besides reading the marketing copy, but since it’s kind of an obvious extension of the server-based honeypot to a desktop setting, it seems like it would work really well.

Either way, I confess that I am completely enamoured of the metaphor.

FWIW, for those of you without the resources to procure a legion of self-destructing, email-reading red-shirts, check out Prevx’s free intrusion detection product for desktops. Intrusion detection is certainly less slick that eliminating threats before they get to your desktop, and I wouldn’t recommend it to folks intimidated by the technical jargon in the IDS pop-ups, but I believe Prevx blocks much more Spybot, and you can’t beat the price.

Do you know of any more interesting security-related applications of virtualization?

Related link: http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/oracle-article/2004/000015.html

Domains, Domains, My Kingdom for a Domain!

While editing Chris Date’s upcoming book on the relational model, I came across
a discussion on domains, which, among other things, are intended to prevent
the sort of error that you see in the statement below:

SELECT S.SNO, S.SNAME, S.CITY, P.PNO, P.PNAME
   FROM SUPPLIER S, PART P, SUPPLIER_PART SP
   WHERE S.SNO = SP.SNO
   AND P.PNO = SP.SNO;

Domains are a feature of the relational model not widely implemented by vendors.
Actually, I’m not sure whether any vendor even attempts to implement them. It
occurred to me though, that domains are essentially user-defined datatypes,
and that it might be interesting to apply Oracle’s user-defined datatype features
to the problem of properly distinguishing between simple datatypes such as supplier
and part numbers. Oracle’s user-defined datatypes were conceived of as object
types, so using them as the basis for simple, numeric columns was a bit of a
stretch. I ran through a little experiment, and, if you’re interested, you can
read about how it went in my article titled: Domains,
Domains, My Kingdom for a Domain!