Deepwater Horizon Explosion

So now the news reports are all about how Halliburton didn't use the right kind of cement for the Macondo well cap before it blew out and caused the fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and didn't properly test they stuff they did use to see if it would really work. But didn't we discuss back in April or May how BP put pressure on the well contractors to skimp on safety in order to save time and money? While it's great fun to dogpile on Halliburton because of the company's image of corruption and crimes, there's still plenty to consider when looking at whether or not anyone at BP was paying attention to the conditions and would have taken any action that could have increased costs or delays.

Like most of the software project failures I'm familiar with, there's more finger pointing than root-cause analysis going on right now. But that's just noise and the self-interest of the companies involved. The real root cause of the failure must go back to the regulatory and enforcement oversight environment that allows cheap, shoddy work, and unsafe operations to continue.

United States of Movies

Oregon only gets The Goonies? Why not one of those great Gus Van Sant movies?

Retro blogging

I'll be importing selected entries from my old LJ, going back to late 2003, as I review them. I found a very nice set of blog to blog converters at Google Code. If anyone else is interested in migrating a blog, check it out.

True Self-Nature

Zen is said to be about finding your true self-nature. Through practice, we realize our own Buddha-nature. Stated this way, this is enormously wrong. That "your" and "our" is the ego getting in the way. There is just self-nature, no "my" self-nature. Buddha-nature cannot be owned.

Curiosity, Research, and Formulating Questions

Sometime in the past couple of months I realized that I've started to formulate questions as Google keyword searches. It might be while I'm waking up in the morning, or as I'm reading a book or article, and I'll starting considering how I might go about finding out more about this or that tangent.  To my consternation I often start to compose my question in search terms, rather than thinking about how I'd investigate the topic in a more systematic way.

I've found it's easy to get lazy and just type a word or words into the Google search box and think that the results found that way are whole and final word on the topic.  In reality, though, I'm more and more convinced that this is a profoundly deceptive attitude: To think that reading a few web pages from search results do more than satisfy an impulsive interest. Even if the material doesn't suffer from an unknown bias on the topic, it can't be more than a shallow veneer of data.

I'm trying to break myself of my new-found tendency to think that because I Googled "the answer" I actually know something. Instead, I'm working to recover the atrophied skills in research methods that I picked up in my schooling. Maybe I'll actually learn something.

The Feast of St. Crispin

October 25, Saint Crispin's Day

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

Firefox 4 status bar breakage

Ugh. I just noticed that as of the beta8 milestone, Firefox 4 has removed the status bar. You know, that little bar at the bottom of the window where it shows the URL when you mouse over it?  It's now the AddOn Bar, and it's disable by default. It took me a bit of digging to get my addons back: Under View->Toolbars, check the "Add-on Bar" item. Now about those URLs. When you mouse over a link it shows up in the "Awesome Bar". I guess that's OK, though it really needs to be a few shades darker grey to be readable.

I don't know why they made the change, but I bet some other browser *cough*chrome*cough* did it first and the FF people feel the need to copy it. Bletch.

lapses

Skiffle music shows that even John Lennon could have lapses in musical taste.

It's Monday

I used to be a software developer. Now I'm trying something other things. Sometimes, when interesting things happen to me, or I have random thoughts I want to share, I'll post here. In the meantime, stay warm and dry.