Tom Mollerus' Weblog

No, that title isn't a mistake. It refers to an idea mentioned in a Ben Stein article, where he writes an amusingly logical piece asking just why we should trust Henry Paulsen with $700 billion taxpayer dollars, given that as Treasury Secretary he was supposed to be on watch for large, impending financial meltdowns, and has a former head of Goldman Sachs he was uniquely qualified to recognize a banking crisis when he saw it.

Paulsen has strenuously resisted any attempt for the bailout plan to stipulate Congressional oversight of how he would spend the money. Given the huge financial importantance of this spending bill to Main Street, and the fact that Paulsen and the Bush administration don't have much clout with either with Congress or with voters these days, I'm suprised that he would hang on so fiercely to that idea. I'm not suprised that he wants it; it represents an incredible amount of power that I'm sure is attractive to him.

But is a bailout of Wall Street the right thing to do? That's what Ben Stein asks, and one alternative is what someone in the office called the $700 bailout: what if we bailed out homeowners instead of bankers?

One final little thought bubbles into my mind: Maybe the bailout should not be of the banks at all, but of homeowners themselves. Maybe if we make the government the buyer of last resort of homes, we will stabilize the markets, stabilize the debt associated with the markets and take the gain out of the credit-default swaps for the speculators. Yes, price would be a huge issue, but so it is for Mr. Paulson’s plan for buying debt from banks.

Why not? We do it for farmers. Why not for the individual homeowner? Oh, right. Because Treasury secretaries don’t know any of those people.

Ben makes a good point here; I had always assumed that any kind of bailout would have to involve payments to the large financial firms instead of to homeowners because, logistically speaking, it's easier to write a few large checks than it is to write millions of small checks, but perhaps it wouldn't be beyond the means of our government. After all, the IRS already processes the annual financial records of most U.S. citizens-- couldn't we staff them up to verify who should receive housing assistance and who shouldn't? It would be no different than the stimulus package that was passed in the spring, except this time we could pass out mortgage vouchers. People could only use the vouchers with lending institutions, who would then turn them in to the government for cash.

The idea is, as Ben Stein points out, that it's worth thinking of a few alternatives to a bailout of Wall Street.

I just have to say that I find Bob Herbert's latest article in the Times to be well-stated. It's about how, despite what the McCain campaign and other supporters say, the press should indeed be exploring and challenging the opinions of vice-presidental nominee Sarah Palin:

The McCain campaign has done its bizarre best to shield Ms. Palin from any sustained media examination of her readiness for the highest offices in the land, and no wonder. She has been an embarrassment in interviews.

But the idea that the voters of the United States might install someone in the vice president’s office who is too unprepared or too intellectually insecure to appear on, say, “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation” is mind-boggling.

The alarm bells should be clanging and warning lights flashing. You wouldn’t put an unqualified pilot in the cockpit of a jetliner. The potential for catastrophe is far, far greater with an unqualified president.

The United States has been lucky in terms of the qualifications of the vice presidents who have had to step in over the last several decades for presidents who either died or, in Richard Nixon’s case, were forced to leave office. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson became extraordinary presidents in their own right. Gerald Ford successfully guided the nation through the immediate aftermath of one of the most traumatic political crises in its history.

For those who think Sarah Palin is in that league, there is no problem. But her unscripted public appearances would lead most honest observers to think otherwise.

Herbert goes on to detail some of Palin's remarks during her interview with Katie Couric. He finished with a simple, fair, analysis:

The press has an obligation to hammer away at Ms. Palin’s qualifications. If it turns out that she has just had a few bad interviews because she was nervous or whatever, additional scrutiny will serve her well.

If, on the other hand, it becomes clear that her performance, so far, is an accurate reflection of her qualifications, it would behoove John McCain and the Republican Party to put the country first — as Mr. McCain loves to say — and find a replacement for Ms. Palin on the ticket.

My wife's company, advertising firm Hill Holiday, is growing its accounts left and right and has several open positions. Cool office space, too. If you're interested in having your resume referred by an insider, drop me a line.

Boston or New York:
- Senior Developer
- Developer

Boston:
- Tech Lead
- Quality Assurance Manager
- Senior Producer
- Producer
- Art Director
- Flash Developer (responsible for creating and maintaining Flash projects for websites, display advertising and applications)

It seems that beer advertisements have the best humor for men these days. I wish I had a shed...

I want to thank Joshua Cyr of Savvy Software for his great presentation last night on strategies for building, deploying, and upgrading software-- as someone with a few projects myself, I benefited from his thoughts enormously. If you want to view his presentation slides, just go to Todd Sharp's SlideSix site.

A few thoughts stood out for me during the presentation...

A recent posting on Slashdot titled Testing IT Professionals on Job Interviews? was similar to a question posed to me by my manager. After I had forwarded him the test I was planning to use for candidates for our web developer position, he cautioned me that he thought it was possible that someone with years of experience might just be a little insulted at having to take a skills test. I understand that thought completely, and I would never want to insult someone in that manner-- but I just don't think that a test would or should be a problem for a candidate. From my perspective, any smart employer will want to measure just how good of a developer you are, and I would really hope that they've applied the same care in selecting the other developers I'd be working with.

So I want to pose a question to the rest of the community: do you think it's fair to test a candidate during an interview? Oh, and here's the manner in which I apply the test: I always tell the candidate before they come in that I'm going to be testing them; and, I let them browse the web during the test for solutions as long as they're not copying-and-pasting the answers-- after all, I look up other people's tips and solutions myself several times a day. As long as a developer can produce good code in good time during the test, I don't necessarily care whether they wrote it all from scratch or had every answer in their head.

What do you think?

Why did Google go to the effort to create their own browser, named Chrome? If you read Google's own explanation of why they built a browser, here's the essential part of what you'll read:

"At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they're doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

Certainly that's an admirable goal of helping end users. That's what puts Google in such an enviable position in the Internet space-- any time that the size or the use of the Internet increases, they stand to gain from the inevitable need we all have to get help in navigating the web. Google is the helpful, ubiquitous traffic sign on the information superhighway.

But is their intention with Chrome completely selfless? I don't think so. One part of Chrome's default homepage is labelled "Search your history".

This made me wonder: would Google capture a user's browsing history on their own servers to use for their own purposes? Reading Chrome's privacy policy, a few of the bullets are revealing:

"...Google Chrome features send limited additional information to Google:

• When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
• If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here."

It seems clear to me that Google is collecting the browsing history of anyone who is using Chrome. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'll leave up to you. Personal browsing histories which used to be isolated to your own computer would now be stored on Google's own servers as well. What happens to that remote data when you want to delete your own history-- does it stay in Google's datacenters? What might someone malicious do with that information if they ever had access to it?

I know that Google has disclosed this information in their privacy statement, but to me it seems to come close to running afoul of their corporate motto, "Don't be evil".

In some applications such as MovableType, WordPress, MediaWiki, or any site using certain JavaScript libraries, I've noticed that query strings are appended to some of the calls to the CSS files or script sources. Most often they just pass the version of the application, but sometimes they pass other information:

<script src="/js/2.0/scripts/scriptaculous.js?load=effects" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/blog/mt-static/css/main.css?v=4.01" type="text/css" />
<script src="/wiki/skins/common/wikibits.js?164" type="text/javascript"></script>

I've searched on this technique, but can't figure out for the life of me what good it does. Does anyone have any idea why information would be passed like this? I understand that maybe the script library could react to the the load=effect variable passed to it, but it baffles me as to why you'd bother to pass a version to an otherwise static file. Anyone have any ideas? Please comment with your thoughts.

I was tasked with providing a wiki application for the use of the sales team here at Ping Identity. For the sake of a mature solution, we chose to use MediaWiki, which is the open-source PHP application that runs Wikipedia.

MediaWiki is built to support the same editing system that Wikipedia is founded upon: namely, to let anyone create or edit content, and do so via a self-created account or anonymously (with the IP tracked). Now Ping Identity, as a single sign-on and identity management software, is all about easy identity management. Besides the fact that most of our users from sales would balk at having to create yet another user account, I would be breaking faith with the company if I didn't allow automatic provisioning (ie, the automatic creation of new accounts if they've been authorized by our AD server). So, after getting MediaWiki installed, I went off to search the blogosphere for single sign-on solutions to make our Apache web server authenticate against our Active Directory service, then have people automatically recognized and provisioned as necessary by our wiki.

Come join us at our next Boston CFUG meeting on September 16th, 6:00pm, at Bay Cove Human Services in downtown Boston. The topic? Josh Cyr of Savvy Software discusses software releases. Whether you work on commercial software, open source projects, or a software-as-a-service website, you'll find the discussion with your peers to be most valuable. Oh, and make sure to RSVP. We're having another drawing at this meeting; everyone who attends will be in the drawing, and everyone who RSVPs will get an extra ticket. Our prize will be a DXG 5.0MP Digital Camcorder.

So make sure to RSVP: http://www.bostoncfug.org/index.cfm?event=showMeeting&meetingID=CA07FF45-D61B-FA8C-8561F1F06EF4459D

Food and drink will be provided, and I for one will be continuing the festivities at a local bar after the meeting. ;)