I could shield my body from a medieval sword attack using nothing but my amassed collection of printed out vim tutorials. I thrive on them. They sustain me.

I hate the idea that I could be using something like vim in a sub-optimal fashion. I want to do things the best way possible; it’s an obsession that extends to much more than just vim.

I do realize it’s a major flaw. It breaks the fundamental Zen rule of not letting the best be the enemy of the good. Well, I don’t know if that’s a Zen rule, but it seems like it would be. Do you guys have similar obsessions, and if so, how do you handle them?

Given the fact that Google is doing a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and are supposedly working on a presentation app as well, do you think it might be possible in the near future to skip the craziness of maintaining various local applications and just just Google instead?

(long sentence)

I can think of two reasons not to do this off the top of my head:

1. Security: It’s not going to be easy to convince anyone (including myself) that I should edit a vulnerability assessment report online, and maintain a copy somewhere in the Googleverse.
2. Outlook. Even if you could replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, email and calendaring (Exchange) is absolutely essential to business for most people. I don’t see anything replacing a fat client as the ideal interface to this resource in the foreseeable future.

But other than that…err…those, just general, personal documents and such seem ideal for web-oriented replacements. Not enough people use PowerPoint away from work, so that leaves spreadsheets, email, and word processing.

Wait a minute here: let’s do this for the two realms: business and personal.

Business:

• Email’s likely to stay in-house due to the company tie-in.
• Word processing will stay in-house due to privacy (unless Microsoft does it).
• PowerPoint (privacy again?)
• Excel (privacy again)

Personal:

• Email (already largely online)
• Word Processing (very good market for Google Docs)
• PowerPoint (not many users)
• Excel (very good Market for Google Spreadsheets)

Interesting. So the main growth areas are getting home users to not buy Microsoft Word or Excel for home use. Other than that, Microsoft is sitting fairly comfortable. Forget that you read this post; it’s been little more than a typing exercise.

I guess I just started thinking about this because I’m strongly considering dumping NewNewsWire as my newsreader and going with Google Reader. I could see that being followed up with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well. Anyway, I’ll put a bit more thought into it…

Thoughts?

Let me start by stating that much of what I’m about to cover was seeded by a wonderful talk I heard by Marcus Ranum back in 2003. Since then I’ve been sort of mulling everything over, and here are the basic ideas:

From Marcus’s talk:

1. Q: What does a packet filter do? A: Looks at a few parts of packet headers and decides if it is bad. If it is, it drops it.
2. Q: What does a stateful firewall do? A: Looks at a more of a packet and decides if it’s bad. It uses the loose concept of “state” to help it. If it’s deemed inappropriate, it gets discarded.
3. Q: What does an IDS do? A: Looks at a bunch of stuff in the packet and decides if it’s bad or not based on signatures and/or some heuristics. If it’s bad, it notifies you.
4. Q: What does an IPS do? A: Looks at a bunch of stuff in the packet and decides if it’s bad or not based on signatures and/or some heuristics. If it’s bad, it drops the traffic and/or notifies you.

Marcus went on to ask: what’s the difference between these supposedly fundamentally different technologies? The answer was clear — not much. They’re all doing some sort of detection and then performing an action based on the result.

(Here I’m going off on my own tangent so I’ll leave Marcus out of this)

So, ultimately there’s very little difference between a rudimentary packet filter from 10 years ago and a modern IPS. I see all these devices becoming one; I think a good name would be a “Security Check Point”, or a security “Gateway”.

The point is that in the future you won’t have to isolate these different technologies. You’ll just lay down a diagram of your environment and decide where you want filtering. Virtually every device on your network will be able to do all of these functions. All the way from the border router to the workstation.

This is the next evolution in the security space, I think. It’s even more advanced than NAC. Essentially, all pivot points and end hosts in the enterprise are part of the collective. The SIM/SEM functions as the brain. If there are performance issues then one type of security or another can be disabled on various pivots as needed, but in general all pivots will be able to perform all functions.

When an incident occurs, the system will simply isolate the problem by implementing ACLs on the nearest pivot point. If it wanted to, it could even push security information down to all other systems in the enterprise. To the security system, routers, firewalls, workstations, servers — they’re all the same. They’re just security nodes with various properties. Imagine object-oriented programming.

Using this model a security engineer could look at their network and simply assign logical security zones based on trust. The software would do the rest. The hardware at that point becomes transparent. It’s just carrying out the conceptual wishes of the engineer. I imagine an interface like the one in Minority Report, with a large view of the network infrastructure being displayed:

These here are all trust level 3… (dragging and dropping with arm motions). This here is a priority filter (points at a central hub, holds, and selects from a dynamic context menu). Trust level 0 resides here (pointing at a cluster of server nodes). All surrounding filters move to sensitivity 9 and associate reporting procedures with the existing standard.

So basically, you design how you want it to work, and the devices just make it happen. There’s no need for this kind of firewall or that kind of IDS — all security devices will merge into one — with each of them being able to do all filtering. The only reason they were separate was because they came into existence independently and there were performance issues. As these issues fade away there will be no reason whatsover to keep their functions separate.

Anyway, just a few thoughts…

For most people of a materialistic nature, “better” is always superior to great. This is a problem because there’s always something better. If there isn’t now, it’ll be out in six months. So if you ever want to be happy, focus on what you have that’s “great”, and forget about what could be an improvement over it.

Another way to look at it is to view happiness as being about relative changes, i.e. becoming more or less content with your situation. If you accept that view, it becomes important to maintain relatively modest and static expectations if you want to be happy. Then, as your material situation improves it will continue to pull away from your expectations, and you’ll become more happy. But if you let your expectations follow you as you progress, you’ll always be in search of the elusive duo — better and more.

Tom The Cool Guy

A good example of this is Tom the cool guy who has a beautiful wife, a nice C-Class Mercedes, and a 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood. He’s quite happy with this situation because he’s never had these things before. But now he’s getting a promotion and a whole lot more money. He decides to move to the “really” nice neighborhood.

Suddenly, all the wives are better looking — so he’s not as happy with his anymore. His C-Class Mercedes is now being laughed at by people as he drives by, and all the houses in this area are at least 4-bedrooms. Now his baseline has shifted; what he was happy with just two weeks ago is now sub-standard. That would have been fine if he wanted it to happen, but the odds are that it was completely subconscious.

As a result, Tom won’t be ever be happy again until he “upgrades” somehow, and that is the never-ending road to an empty, shallow existence. He’ll always be looking at the houses up the hill — pining for them. He’ll get a 5-Series BMW and hate it within a month because some guy up the street (with a prettier wife) has a 7-Series.

Enough

I think the trick to capturing “enough” is to not let it change without your permission. Enough should be relatively static, and should only change after a long, hard internal debate. This is important because if enough is less than your reality then you tend to be happy, but as soon as it creeps up above reality you have problems. Don’t let it creep.

As technology continues to be come more compact and more powerful, I think one of the biggest consumer/business breakthroughs is going to come in the form of a personal assistance application with pseudo/quasi AI capabilities.

Imagine an application that spends 24 hours a day optimizing your life. It will probably run from some sort of hosted provider in order to benefit from specialization, but it will be marketed as “living” on your personal system, i.e. the single, mobile device that everyone will have. Let’s call it your “companion”.

The basic functionality will essentially work like this: you start by going through this in-depth enrollment process with the system. It’ll greet you, you’ll skin it (most will likely turn its interface into a beautiful woman) and it will proceed to ask you about yourself. You’ll tell it what kind of news you like, your favorite holidays, your top 10 foods, the kinds of products you care most about, who your friends are, etc.

A Hassle Proxy

Using all this information it’ll organize your life. It’ll sit in between you and the digital world — filtering emails, fetching pertinent news for you, organizing it according to your preferences, etc. It’ll learn who you want to be interrupted for when a call comes in. It’ll learn who to put on or remove from your spam list. It’ll learn your preferred way of receiving news. Should “she” read it to you? Send you an email? Build a web page for you to read an aggregated summary from?

Here’s how I see it being put into practice: you wake up in the morning by some sound she makes for you. Rooster, soothing voice, whatever. She proceeds to ask you questions about whether or not you want your news now, do you want to hear who sent you email while you were asleep, etc. At any time you can modify the application’s behavior by giving commands like, “Don’t ask me about news in the morning anymore.”

Based on your tone the app will answer back with stuff like, “Sorry…no need to be grumpy about it.” Imagine the customizations here. This will be THE killer app. The life manager for business people, and the digital companion for consumers. More ideas:

1. “Let’s review my news interest items. I don’t want to hear anything else about the new Playstation 10; I don’t have time to monitor that anymore. Show me everything cool about building patios — and I’m going to use oak, by the way.”
2. “Hold calls from Julie from now on and give them to me in my daily summary.”
3. “Go and collect everything there is to know about spaghetti sauce. I am making it tonight. Focus on the Italian approach.”

You, Times Ten

So the idea here is that this application will then go and run through all these pseudo-intelligent algorithms (that are constantly updated and improved) in order to do what you want it to do, not just what you told it to do. The difference is massive. And as technology evolves, it’ll become better and better at it.

For consumers this will do everything from fetching the best recipes to collecting porn for you for when you get home from work. “Here’s the stuff I found for you while you were gone.” And it will be with you all day as well, chiming in when something major happens. “Breaking news, Daniel…Toyota just bought Ford. You want me to connect you to CNN’s video feed?” “Oh, Michael just sent an invite for dinner tonight, should I voice him or just reply with a yay or nay?”

Humans Are Better, But They’re More Expensive

Personal assistants make powerful people ten times more powerful, but so few people can afford to hire someone to manage their lives in this way. This will be the killer app because it brings at least some of that functionality to everyday people. It’s going to be so sick. Think of the marketing. Japan will have it first (of course), and the major updates to the products are going to be insane.

Imagine the skinning options alone. As the apps avatars get better and better people are going to become “attached” to their companions. It’ll be a new disorder, there will be new experts to talk about how someone’s DC (digital companion) ruined their marriage, etc.

Yeah, this is the future. Hell, I should talk to some people and see if anyone’s moving in this direction yet. I’d love to contribute some ideas to such a product. Not only is it cool to potentially improve the efficiency of millions of people, but the consumer side has billions of dollars of potential. This is the “must have” application.

I think one of the things that separates those who are successful from those who struggle is the ability to make use of existing resources — especially information.

Those who can do this effectively end up doing like a tenth of the work while yielding double the output. Those who don’t spend their lives reinventing simple tools, and as a result achieve just a fraction of the results.

Being successful is largely a matter of having a better system for doing things, and this is a major part of it.

It occured to me recently that having what I belive to be an “opinion” is actually a pretty high standard. I know this isn’t true in the strictest sense of the word, i.e. according to the dictionary anyone can have one, but I disagree.

The vast majority of “opinions” are nothing but echoes of peoples’ latest influence. They are parrot songs that were particularly catchy for whatever reason. I think a true opinion is one that stands on a solid base of knowledge and then branches from there.

I was struck with this while debating a friend about the fall of America. I found myself giving the whole “fall of Rome” argument. I’ve heard the argument a number of times, and it’s always made sense to me, but what do I really know about Rome? Not much of anything.

So do I really have an opinion about what caused the fall of Rome? No. No I don’t. What I have is the ability to echo a very small portion of someone else’s opinion, which I find rather intellectually hollow.

Don’t make that mistake, and call others when they make it. It’s not a real idea until you’ve already benefited from existing knowledge and then have something new to add based on that understanding. Until then you’re just posturing.

Perhaps the most useful life skill is the ability to learn life lessons via proxy. This can be through anecdotal evidence, reading, or whatever. Those who can learn what to do — or more importantly, what not to do — without having to actually have the experience have a massive advantage in life.

The other night while driving back home I happened upon a stretch of country road that had dozens of frogs either hopping across or just sitting there.

I hit many of them, and it bothered me greatly. I swerved to avoid quite a few, but some were just so bent on suicide that they basically jumped right in front of me.

The irony was that I was listening to Danzig at full blast through all this. So I’m singing along to “satanic” music being pumped through the car at a deafening volume, yet I am getting upset because I’m inadvertently killing little frogs on the highway.

The real question at hand, though, is how most other people feel about killing frogs on the highway. Especially those who would judge me for listening to Danzig. I can’t help but think they wouldn’t care much.

One of the best ways to learn to speak with a proper accent in a given language is to study the accent those people have when speaking your language.

You’ll find that the mistakes nuances you hear in the way they speak English are precisely those that you’ll need to emulate to sound authentic in theirs.