Remembering Garret

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Today’s Irish Times feels strange: Garret Fitzgerald’s weekly column is missing. Noel Whelan has a nice tribute to him.

My favourite story, however, is one he used to tell against himself. It involved an occasion when he had to overnight in a Rosslare hotel either because he had just missed a ferry departure or because his ferry was delayed until the following morning. Unusually, he found himself in the hotel room with no reading material. Intellectually frustrated, he searched the bedside locker where, apart from the usual Gideon Bible, he could only find two telephone books. This was in the days when the entire Republic’s numbers were encompassed in two volumes.

Putting the Bible to one side, he sat and read one of the telephone books. However, there was an objective to his reading. He was anxious to prove to himself a theory he had that once people from the counties of Leinster gravitated to study or work in Dublin, very many stayed there. By cross-referencing his own detailed knowledge of the concentration of particular surnames in particular counties with a reading of the 01 phone book, he apparently confirmed his theory.

Garret’s addiction to statistics was legendary. When he worked for Aer Lingus, it was said that he knew the international airline timetable book by heart. At his funeral last Sunday, his son John addressed this remark to the staff of the Central Statistical Office:

For over half a century you have enthralled our father and provided much to stimulate him. He was your biggest fan and he probably drove you mad.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Middle East

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Any foreign power hoping to promote peace, stability, and democratic inclusion in the Middle East must account for the Israeli-Palestinian divide, the Sunni-Shia divide, the Muslim-Christian divide, widespread anti-Semitism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the security of oil supplies pumped by weak regimes, Al Qaeda and related radicals, tribalism, corruption, and a picturesque lineup of despots. For half a century, the region has made outside idealists look like fools, turned realists into complicit cynics, and consigned local heroes—Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat—to martyrdom.

Steve Coll, writing in the New Yorker.

Education = civilisation?

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Here’s a depressing thought: two of the bloodiest current operators in the Middle East both had a good Western education. Saif Qadaffi went to the London School of Economics, and produced — or had produced for him — a respectable PhD dissertation (I’ve read some of it, and it looks academically respectable). And Bashar al-Assad, currently presiding over murder and torture in Syria, trained as a doctor in London (which means, among other things, that he subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath). So the belief that a good education civilises its recipient needs to be taken with a large helping of salt.

Tom West RIP

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Gosh: here’s something from a vanished age. Tom West, the engineer who created Data General’s Eclipse 32-bit mini and was immortalised in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine has died at the age of 71. He was rightly credited with saving Data General (DG) after DEC announced its VAX supermini in 1976

The Register carried a nice obit. Sample:

He was a folk singer towards the end of the 1950s and worked at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, before returning to Amherst and gaining a bachelor’s degree in Physics. He continued working at the Smithsonian, going to other observatories and ensuring that the time was precisely synchronised.

West then joined the RCA corporation and learned about computers, being largely self-taught, and then joined Data General and worked his way up the engineering ladder.

DEC shipped its VAX 32-bit supermini in 1978. This was in the era well before Intel’s X86 desktops and servers swept the board, when real computer companies designed their own processors. The 16-bit minicomputer era had boomed and DEC was the number one company. DG was the competitive number two sometimes known as ‘the bastards’ after a planned newspaper ad that never ran, and was a Fortune 500 company worth $500m. But 16-bit minis were running out of address space (memory capacity) for the apps they wanted to run.

DG launched its own 32-bit supermini project known as Fountainhead. It wasn’t ready when DEC shipped the VAX 11/780 in February 1978 and suffered from project management problems, so it is said. West, far from convinced that Fountainhead would deliver the goods, started up a secret back-room or skunkworks project called Eagle to build the Eclipse MV/8000, a 32-bit extension of the 16-bit Nova Eclipse mini. He staffed it with an esoteric mixture of people, some of them recent college graduates, and motivated them not with cash, shares or external incentives but by the sheer difficulty of what they were trying to do. It was described as pinball game management. If you got to succeed with this project or pinball game the reward was that you got to work on the next, more difficult pinball game.

Gordon Haff (who worked with Tom) described Kidder’s book as “perhaps the best narrative of a technology-development project ever written” and I agree with him. Its real significance, though, was that it was the first book to awaken the non-tech world to the idea that the computing business was a really vibrant, intriguing phenomenon.

Narrative Drift and mainstream media

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Very perceptive blog post about the BBC Social Media ‘summit’ by Adam Tinworth. Sample:

My abiding impression of the BBC Social Media Summit was of a bunch of people who are still trying to incorporate social media into their pre-existing narrative. They are trying to rope new communication technology onto the conventions of the past. They are using petrol engines to pull carriages once pulled by horses, while others are busy pottering around in cars.

Those who believe that Twitter is mainly about “broadcast” for mainstream organisations are not just wrong, they are wilfully ignoring the experience, successes and failures of many others. And that was one of the most powerful messages that came out of the summit to me – that some people will work very hard to exclude the experiences of others that challenge their own preconceptions of their working environment. I’ve called this “special pleading” in the past. Every single market we serve at RBI has given me reasons why social media won’t work in their market. Most memorably, someone from Computer Weekly gave me a long speech on why people in the tech industry would never, ever use social media. Ever single piece of special pleading has been proved to be false.

Elements of the “mainstream” media have already started to change their narratives. Alan Rushbridger’s mention of “mutual media” was probably the most compelling sentence uttered in the entire day. But then compare the name of his publication – The Guardian – to the Telegraphs, Mails, Heralds, and Mercurys – broadcast names all, in their own ways. His implies a relationship with the people they serve beyond that of those-who-are-speaking and those-who-are-listening. The others do not.

Until the mainstream of the “mainstream” media learn that 10,000 quiet voices can be more powerful than a single loud one, then days like last Friday will have elements that are useful and even compelling – and I think the talk from Al Jazeera was one of those – but ultimately be dominated by too many voices raging against the irrelevance of their own story. They no longer have an angle, and they hate it.

And while we’re on the subject, why does every conference now have to be a “summit”?

#PRfail. Or how not to get attention

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Aw, isn’t that nice. This email just popped into my mailbox from a PR firm which shall be nameless.

Hi John,

I’m getting in touch because I thought you’d be interested in hearing about a new celebrity mobile video service launching today. It’s called Sparkle.

Sparkle brings you video messages from the stars, direct and unedited. It is the only subscription-based mobile video service that guarantees regular authentic, never-before-seen footage of genuine stars. Sparkle connects you via video message directly from your favourite celebrities’ mobile phone to your own, at least three times a week.

Sparkle is launching to coincide with the Gumball 3000 Rally 2011. Celebrity Gumballers including Hollywood’s Christian Slater, the cast of Dirty Sanchez, hip-hop star Eve and Sparkle Ambassador Tamer Hassan will film and share their Rally experience in real time only on Sparkle.

We’d like to give you the chance to test Sparkle for free.

Note the cheery familiar tone, and the assumption that a tech blogger might be interested in news about celebs — which suggests a complete failure to do any background research on the intended recipient of such trash!

And the funny thing is that until this moment I thought that Sparkle was some kind of domestic cleaning product. It isn’t — but it’s a lot of other things besides.

Apple makes late entry into whack-a-mole game

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

After weeks of dodging the issue of a recent widespread malware outbreak, Apple has changed course and is addressing affected customers’ concerns.

On Tuesday, Apple finally posted instructions on its support site on how to avoid or remove the malicious program, and said an Mac OS X update in the coming days will remove it or block it from installing in the first place.

The MacDefender malware, one of the few to actually target Mac operating systems, is a phishing program that fools users into thinking they are downloading anti-virus protection when it’s actually going after credit-card information. ZDNet estimates between 60,000 and 125,000 Mac users have been affected in the past month, and in an eyebrow-raising report quoted an Apple tech support insider who said they were expressly forbidden from helping callers remove the malicious program. That supported leaked internal documents that Gizmodo published last week which, among other things, told customer service reps: “AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.”

While support from Apple is a welcome development, the company’s initial reaction is disturbing from a customer-service standpoint. Just as disturbing to many Mac users is the realization that their OS’s, so long considered safe from most Internet viruses, are not immune after all.

This is beginning to look like a pattern. Remember the clueless way Apple handled the problem with the iPhone 4 antenna and then the controversy about the ‘bug’ which enabled iPhones to accumulate and store unencrypted location data on the devices? The problem Apple has is that its reputation for effortless design superiority now leads to corporate paralysis whenever events threaten to undermine the image.

And of course there is the problem that as the Mac becomes more and more successful, the juicier a target it presents for malware.

UPDATE: The Apple advisory note is already out of date.

Ed Bott says “File that memo under, ‘Too little, too late.'”

Within 12 hours of Apple’s announcement, the author of the original Mac Defender program had a new variant available that renders key portions of the current Mac Defender prevention plan obsolete.

A security researcher for Intego, the Mac-centric security company that identified the original Mac Defender, found the first example of this new code via a poisoned Google search very early this morning.

Several factors make this specimen different. For starters, it has a new name: MacGuard. That’s not surprising, given that the original program already had at least three names. But this one is divided into two separate parts.

The first part is a downloader. In the original version, this asked the user to enter his or her administrator password. The new version works on the assumption (generally correct) that most Macs are single-user machines –which means that the user has the requisite privileges and so the malware bypasses the admin-password dialogue. The software then installs an application named avRunner, which launches automatically and installs the second part, which is similar to the original Mac Defender. The installer then deletes itself from the user’s Mac, so no traces of the original installer are left behind.

So Apple is now embarked on the same game of whack-a-mole that Microsoft has had to play for years. The evidence so far suggests that Steve Jobs & Co aren’t experienced players. Maybe they need help from Redmond, where they know more about this than anybody else.