human nature

I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true.  It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though.  The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....

I can no longer count the number of times that I've been able to re-invigorate a problem investigation, even if I have zero visibility on the actual problem.  This takes some self-discipline that doesn't come easy, especially during an urgent investigation. Here's that one weird trick:I do the depth of reading myself.  If I see multiple threads, I'll read all of them.  Then I will write as short a summary of all of the facts that I can....

Went for a walk (more on that after the jump).  So, back in the hotel... watching TV.  There's an advertisement for a women's beauty product that seems to promise itself as a skin lightener.  I thought of this as crazy (even though Indian friends of mine have mentioned this before), so while writing this paragraph, I found a blog describing skin lightening products for men.  Of course, products that market to a 'better self-esteem' are popular everywhere, but ....

It never used to bother me, but now it does. Every time I hear about one of those laptops stolen with secrets, but "no secure password", I believe that corporate password retention policies are to blame. I have now come to the point, where I work, that the various password systems, with their vastly different password policies, have collided to make it impossible for me to keep up anymore. I will now be one of the countless hoardes that puts my passwords on a sticky note above my notebook's keyboard....