What is acceptable and what is not? Does a facebook status differ from a twitter tweet?

I starting thinking about this when I thought of a humorous little comment, that I was going to post as a facebook status. When I then thought “wow, I have coworkers on here. While they may be friends also, is this something I wanted them to see me doing while within the 8-5 time range?”

Yes, I had this humorous comment come to me during work time; and yes, one of the first ideas that came into my head was to share it with people I know. That would be either tell it to them, email it to them, or post it to facebook.

The first idea would not work, because I am at work, and some humerous comments are not acceptable. The second idea, while working, would have been hard to fully convey. The third would work, because people do not mind having only part of the joke and filling in the rest.

However, I am at work. Some of the people I work with are on facebook, and are my friends. So, in a way, options 1 and 3 start blurring together. Then I thought, “what if I had a twitter account, would that be different?”

That has led me to wondering, is there a difference between facebook status updates and twitter tweets? If so, what is the rationale for such a difference? While everyone who is your friend sees your status updates, unless they have chosen to hide you, people who have chosen to follow you on twitter see all of your tweets. So, where is the difference, at least in what is, or is not, acceptable?

A response to Jason Calacanis

Just a few days ago, Jason Calacanis wrote an article called The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts, in which he laid out his reasons for disliking Apple. Now, I don’t begrudge anyone hating any company just because, but when you start making up bull-shit to support your feelings, I get a little perturbed. However, many other have responded already, so he has written another missive, Apple’s Master Plan (and why even fanboys should be scared) which raises the bar on bullshit.

First, I want to say from the bottom of my heart, Fuck You Jason Calacanis! I am not saying this because of your bullshit reasons, but for your god damned use of non-black for your text color. And not only that, but hexadecimal 999, which is somewhere around middle gray. Oh fuck you! Thank damn Opera lets me turn off Author-mode style sheets.

A beautiful confidentiality notice

I just received an ad, and this was the included Confidentiality Notice. While it contains the usual violations of common sense and legal theory, I really love the last line. Go ahead and read it.

Confidentiality Notice: The information contained in this e-mail transmission is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. This e-mail transmission, and any documents, files, previous e-mail transmissions or other information attached to it, may contain confidential information that is legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail transmission, or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of this transmission or any of the information contained in or attached to it is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail transmission in error, or you do not wish to receive any further communications from us, please immediately notify us by return e-mail transmission or by telephone at the number above or at the address above, and destroy the original e-mail transmission and its attachments without reading or saving it in any manner.

So, if I do not wish to receive any further communications from them, then I can reply to the email and request to be left alone, or I can call their phone number (which was not included in the email, contrary to the notice), and all is good. But wait! I also have to destroy the email, without reading it. Huh? How the hell am I expected to get this far in the email and follow the instructions, without reading it?

I just love this stuff sometimes.

Pound, SSL, and real Certificates

Recently, I have been working with setting up some web servers, using Pound as the front-end. The idea is that there are multiple back-end servers, and the single front-end that controls which server requests go to. One of the problems is using SSL for HTTPS pages. All of the documentation I can find online covered creating a self-signed certificate.

But if anyone has followed the self signed certificate problem knows that this is not a great idea, especially if the site is to be used by anyone.

Poking around, I finally found my answer, partly through an older post on the Pound mailing list.

My SAN, let me show it to you…

I HAVE A SAN! Wait, I have 2 SANs, 3 Data servers, 2 Metadata servers, and 2 load balancers! BWAH HAH HAH!

Hasn’t Microsoft Learned Anything?

Sometimes, it is pretty difficult to figure out what versions of Vista there are. At it’s release, there was no less than 5 versions.

• Home Basic
• Home Premium
• Professional
• Enterprise
• Ultimate

Now, you couldn’t buy the Enterprise, unless you were a high end “enterprise customer,” in which the only version you could buy was Enterprise.

As time went by, this plethora of versions just weren’t confusing enough. I have tracked down 4 retail versions from
Microsoft’s comparison page for editions, the Enterprise edition s tucked away at their Enterprise Edition page, then there is the Starter version (which I like to call Vista Celeron), and then two “N” editions which lack media software. Add that up, and you get 8 versions.

Now, you would think that after all of the hell Microsoft has gone through in the release of Vista, and the overall rejection it has received, that they would have learned some lessons.

You would be wrong. It seems that Windows 7 is going to be coming out in 6 different versions.

Windows 7 UAC is already broke

If you haven’t read it yet, go over and read Long Zheng’s article about the security flaw in UAC for Windows 7.

Wow, just wow.

Windows 7 boots faster

Well, another Windows 7 beta build is out [really alpha], and ZDNet had the great idea of benchmarking it.
Do they pull out the time-demos for games? No.
Do they try iterations of common tasks in programs like Excel, Photoshop, or even MP3 encoders? No.
Do they even try the basic “copy a bunch of files and see how long it takes” test? No.
They decided to go with some benchmark tests, and the ever popular, and helpful, boot time test.

Originally, the tests pitted Vista 7 beta against Vista 32-bit, however, they did update the test to compare against XP SP3 also.

The conclusion…

Changing the water pump on a 1995 Jeep Cherokee

If you don’t know much about replacing the water pump on a Jeep, don’t worry, most people don’t. But it goes something like this: