And every… single…. time… I reboot any of these machines, I see one of these:

I typically go ahead and let Flash do what it wants to do, and yet it keeps coming back, over and over and over again.  Based on this, I’m forced to conclude that either (1) Flash isn’t really updating correctly, or (2) it really does have a new update to install every single time I reboot.

Neither of these is acceptable.  Adobe, you’re not building an OS here.  Get it right and get out of my way.  If there’s  a *real* new version or a *real* security disaster, then let me know about it, but I just refuse to believe that there are really that many emergencies that you need to install something every single time I reboot.

If you’re wondering why folks like Apple have made such a big stink about getting Flash off their systems, this is exactly the sort of issue they had in mind.

This article was ridiculous on so many levels it’s hard to count, but the two biggest problems I saw were (1) lumping all “American” and all “Indian” developers together and (2) assuming that “better at C” or “better at SQL” means squat when it comes to writing applications that meet the needs of users.

If you’re in a position where an article like this might potentially influence hiring or management decisions, please be sure to apply your own “BS” meter to these ideas.   While you’re at it, be sure to question whether someone listing a skill on a resume really means anything about what that person knows, and whether it’s more important to know the latest framework or to have the grey matter to know if that framework makes sense for your business.  Oh, and by the way — if someone lists every new technology you’ve ever heard of on their resume, you’d be wise to question how deeply he knows any of them.

Just sayin’.

Yes, it’s a real dialog box, and no, the information wasn’t very helpful.  I’m moved almost to tears, though, at the suggestion that somebody might care.  Please don’t do this to your customers.

Yet how many of those same people are more than happy to let someone with a SQL window reach into their production database and fiddle with data to their heart’s content?  Even though that’s a big ol’ loaded gun pointed straight at their foot, most people don’t recognize it that way — starting with the people with their fingers on the keyboard, and working all the way up to the corner office.

Really? A loaded gun?

How can a data change ever be anywhere near as dangerous as a code change?  Let’s consider an easy example – you update a credit card code field to be “VS” instead of “VISA”, and all your Visa orders fail.  ”Nobody’s going to make a mistake like that,” you argue, and you’d probably be right.  But by the same logic, nobody’s going to go into the code for a production server and write “if (cardtype = card.Visa) throw new Exception”, either.  Real bugs are just a little bit trickier than that.

The data you’re really going to change is much more likely to have lookup values, effective dates, disabled flags, and so on, but the end result of screwing this data up is exactly the same: your system becomes degraded in a big hurry.  And unlike changes to source code, you’re very likely not to have a repository that’ll show you the last umpty-seven changes with comments from the guy who made the changes.

Yet, because we’re conditioned to think about code as the dangerous bits, and data as an innocent bystander, we tend to just gloss right over procedures that we wouldn’t dream of bypassing for code changes.  It’s a big mistake.

Types of data

To begin with, it turns out that all data isn’t created equal.  SAP R/3 classifies three different types of data: configuration data, master data, and transactional data.  In this usage, configuration data is limited to customizations to R/3 itself — changing labels, terms, and so on.  There’s an excellent chance that your system doesn’t have any data like this.  Master data is the scaffolding that makes our systems run.  It’s the customer types table and the status codes table and the rate plans table.  If you don’t have any values in those tables (or the right values), your system isn’t going to do squat.  Transactional data is the meat in the sandwich — it’s the reason you’ve got a system in the first place, but it’s also much less interesting and dangerous than master data.

It would appear, then, that master data is the place to focus with respect to controlling change, and that’s true to a large degree.  Your organization would be doing far better than average just by identifying its master data and putting procedures in place to manage changes to those tables, but does than mean that transactional data is completely inert?

Breakin’ the law

Not so fast, cowboy.  Although the amount of damage you can do by messing with transactional data is small compared to master data, it’s important to recognize that twiddling with transactional data with a SQL prompt is also an unnatural act.  For many lookup fields and references, your database should have foreign key constraints that prevent really bad mistakes.  The insidious bugs in this case come from the fact that you’re bypassing business rules that exist in your online system.

If an order is intended to move from status 1 to statuses 2, 3, 4 and 5, for instance, you’ve probably got some state-machine logic somewhere that defines which transitions are legal, and more importantly, what stuff happens during those transitions (updating order line-items, refreshing inventory numbers, etc.).  If you update a transaction to a different status without regard for these rules, you can introduce all sorts of “interesting” downstream behaviors.

In fairness, I hope you wouldn’t be considering SQL updates if your system was already operating exactly the way it should, so you probably have a pretty good reason for feeling that you’ve got to make changes to put the system back on the rails.  Fair enough.  Just be hyper-aware that you’re taking chances with this data, and if there’s a choice that gets you moving again with less manual intervention, it’s probably the right choice.

SQL = WMD

Do you know what happens if you highlight the UPDATE part of an update query, leaving off the “WHERE” statement, and then run it?  ’Nuff said, I hope.  You have the capacity to do a staggering amount of damage in a very short amount of time.

A better approach

If any of this stuff sounds like it applies to your organization, you might be wondering what you can do to bring a little law and order to your database management world.  Good news!  If you’ve made it this far, you’ve taken your first step: awareness.  Simply understanding that you need to exercise care when making ad-hoc data changes is a great place to start.

Next, try to understand which of your data is transactional and which is master data or configuration data.  This may be a large task, and you might find tables for which the answer isn’t very clear, so start with some of your most visible or notable tables and work through the rest as you’re able.

Once you’ve identified your master data and transactional data, fine-tune your processes for updating these tables.  You should consider making master data changes in a test environment and promoting these to production just as you’d handle a code change, but regardless, be sure to review how you’re managing these changes, including tracking the content and context of any changes.

If your organization has any tips for managing master data, be sure to let me know!

Google is plenty big enough all by itself — just look at how difficult it’s been for Bing to claw out any sort of market share at all.  I’d really like to think that the market is still open to someone who wants to build a better mousetrap, but this sort of behavior is going to make it just about impossible for a new player to break into search.

So take a look around — this may be as good as search gets.

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In this case, though, there was a section of the email entitled “Your Content”:

When I saw this, I was pretty excited, because I’d forgotten (for the time being) about both of these issues.  I’d posted questions in VMWare’s forums for a couple of issues, and I hadn’t recalled seeing solutions for either of them.   According to the newsletter, though, there were updates available on both questions.  Happy day!

Until I went and read the forum topics.

It turns out that VMWare’s little newsletter-writer counting tool was counting *all* views and *all* replies, so in both cases, it turns out that my post was the last one in the topic.  Worse, yet, my posts were six and nine months old, respectively (no wonder I’d forgotten about them).  So instead of reaching out and building ties with me, in this case, VMWare merely succeeded in reminding me that their open issues aren’t being fixed, and that their support forums are effectively dead.

“You break up…call back in six months.”

You know what else Google does?  They build a browser called Chrome.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it.  I’ve heard of it.  I’ve been using it for the last couple of years, and it’s generally really nice.  ’Cept here’s the good part — it doesn’t like to work with Blogger.

Note - no image

I happened to see a new blog post from Roger Sessions today — it popped up in Google Reader (yeah, I drink the Kool-Aide), and I clicked over to his site to leave a comment.  So far, so good.  When I clicked the link to comment, however, it popped up a comment form in a popup window (minor annoyance, by the way), but then, I noticed that there was a Captcha-style image verification panel that wasn’t actually showing an image.

Hmmm….

This has got to really cut down on spam comments, right?  Intent to get my message to Roger, though, I opened his blog in Firefox and clicked the comment link — it turns out Google likes Firefox better than Chrome:

No problem here...

Looks fine in Firefox, doesn’t it?  Incidentally, I also tried in Internet Explorer and saw the same problem I saw in Chrome, but then, I hit the link a second time, and it was fine.  Having hit upon a possible solution, I tried again in Chrome, and sure enough — it worked fine in Chrome, too, the second time around.

I’m not sure what the problem is, here, but it’s pretty telling that Google hasn’t seen fit to update the commenting system on Blogger.  After all, the native commenting system in WordPress has undergone continuous improvement since it was launched, and it’s also stupid-easy to integrate commenting systems from folks like Disqus (which I use) and Intense Debate.

If you’re a blogger, you may want to look at giving Blogger’s commenting system the boot in favor of one of these other systems until Google gets its act together.

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As so often is the case, I started to leave a comment on his blog, but as it grew, I figured I might as well make a post of its own about it.  There are a number of core issues going on here, in my opinion.  If you’ve got a blog, or even if you just comment on others’ blogs, it’s worth considering how you feel about these issues.

Do you want comments?

If you’ve got a blog, it’s your baby and you can do what you want with it, but I think it’s important to be clear about your objectives with respect to comments.  If you’re really interested in a public discussion of the thoughts presented on your blog, then you’re somewhat obligated to embrace and foster an open exchange of ideas.  If, on the other hand, you’re not really all that interested in an open discussion, then turn off comments.  I suppose a third possibility is that you want to see comments, but only the ones that agree with you.  In my opinion, this also really defeats the purpose of comments.

Whatever your objective, it stands to reason that if you respond to a negative comment by going nuclear, you’re not going to encourage an open exchange of anything at all.  Sadly, it’s a given that people behave more rudely and abusively on the web than they would in person (especially under the veil of web anonymity), and this shows up in comments.  When you see a comment that strikes you as truly abusive or destructive, you’ve got every right to moderate it, but in the case of Mike’s anonymous commenter, that’s not what I saw.  What I saw in Mike’s response, though, was Mike suggesting that the commenter hadn’t read his post (or, apparently all of Mike’s previous posts) carefully enough to form a well-reasoned opinion.  That’s not a great way to encourage more discussion.

How’s the weather in your little echo chamber?

If you blog, why do you do it?

Although there are any number of reasons, I suspect that every blogger at some level wants to make an impact on people.  We want to share our opinions and, hopefully, sway some readers to consider our opinions, and hope against hope, maybe to even adopt our opinions.

So how much are you really accomplishing if you’re only reaching people who think just like you?

But that’s not what I said…

If you’re looking for an example of open discourse done right, Robert Scoble is the best I’ve ever seen.  There are plenty of people who disagree with almost everything that comes out of his mouth, but Robert will engage any of them in an open conversation about what he’s said, and he does it without taking negative comments personally.  As a result, Robert has made a name for himself as a communicator, and I suspect he may have even learned a thing or two along the way.

Who have you seen that manages comments well?

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And if you expect your users to need to use your help system, and if you choose to make that help system an internet experience, and if that internet experience is going to use a browser that’s had so many restrictions placed upon it in the name of security that you can’t sneeze without seeing some sort of exception (IE, I’m looking at you….), you should probably consider the likelihood that your users (already frustrated because they can no longer accomplish something that they used to be able to accomplish on their own) are going to encounter a help system that looks something like this:

Thanks a lot, Microsoft.

It’s entirely my Mother’s fault; she drilled proper grammar into my skull from an early age, and I now cannot help but notice the absolutely atrocious spelling, grammar, and punctuation that permeates our culture.

Have you ever watched a history documentary where they read some crusty, tattered old manuscript that some Civil War soldier left behind?  Not ol’ Honest Abe, or even Grant or Sherman — just some guy who wrote to his folks or his girl.  These everyday soldiers invariably sound like Shakespeare compared to the IM-speaking crackberry addicts we meet today.

But surely, even if the everyday American has given up on proper grammar, our journalists are still upholding these standards.  Surely, they manage to set a positive example for all of us: showing us the error of our ways and offering their own writing as a shining sample of excellence, and surely among all of these highly-trained journalists, the writers for the Wall Street Journal would be right at the top.

Surely, this must be true.  Right?

Sadly, no.  Here’s an excerpt from an article I saw from the WSJ a while back (preserved with spelling, capitalization, etc., exactly as found in the article online):

“A lot of traders are getting carried out of there seats. There are lots of liquidations including hedge funds out of riskier assets,” Michael Franzese, head of Treasury trading at Wunderlich Securities in New York. “No one was expecting this sell off in stocks and the euro and a flight to quality trade is in full effect and it not yields levels it just capital preservation.”

Read it again.  Sorry – yes, I know it hurts.  This time, just try to figure out what it’s supposed to say.  I’ll bet you can’t do it.  It’s like swimming a 100 IM in a pool full of Jello.

People, if you’re going to commit anything to writing, please make a passing attempt to make it readable.  If you supposedly make your living as a writer, don’t ever, ever do anything like this.

Thanks.