There are articles and there are funny articles. To make software designers responsible for overly complicated products seems indeed ridiculous to me, But obviously it's typical management thinking that their simple mind orders ("That program must do what I'm thinking!") have to result in easy hacks to be implemented in a few days by the company's coders. The fact that

Companies are struggling to cope with increasingly difficult and complex product design projects

I'd like to ask the authors of this Mercer study on life quality in various cities of the world how they honestly could put Düsseldorf at place 5 of their ranking. Did they ask people living here? At least I was not asked; if they had asked me, I would have shown them such beautiful quarters like Garath, Wersten, or Eller, that are considered deprived areas.

When SQL Slammer flooded Intranets a few years ago, even the laziest administrators got aware of the danger of viruses and worms and the importance of network security. Ness Shroff and colleagues (Ohio State University, Dept. of electrical and computer engineering) developed a simple but effective measure to recognize worm attacks within a few minutes: by monitoring the number of network scans a machine sends out, they are able to determine a possible attacker, since infected machines usually do numerous scans in order to find new victims. (Source)

This approach is interesting, because it is a first step to regard the network as organism that must develop sort of an immune system to find out what parts are infected. Asking the meds how the body implements his immune answer could be rewarding, because a.) several possible measures against intruders might be imaginable (up to fever), and b.) the immune system is an adaptive system that gains knowledge and that has a memory. Such an adaptive system that is capable of learning might stop the usual game of cat-and-mouse between intruders and security experts.

Industry laughing stock "Bitkom", an association of IT enterprises in Germany launched yet another ridiculous statement: in general, they back data retention and utilization of user data in social networks (on user permission), especially if crime fighting profits by these measurements. (Source)

That's not very surprising. Bitkom is a lobbyist network and an Internet that retains user's anonymity would not be in their consent. The only good thing I see here is that it's now obvious for the common Internet user that for the most part he's alone in his demand for anonymity in the web and for protecting his personal data. Bitkom's members have a large interest in commercial solutions for massive utilization of user data and are absolutely incurious about the privacy concerns of their customers.

RepRap is the next must-have gadget! The "replicating rapid-prototyper" makes use of additive fabrication (molten plastic builds 3D objects). Another astonishing fact is that this machine is able to produce itself! And - get prepared - it's open-source and you are allowed to build your very own RepRap! (Source)

According to a recent study by the RISP (Rhein-Ruhr-Institut für Sozialforschung und Politikberatung e.V.; an institute for applied sciences at the university and the city of Duisburg) IT workers are risking their health. IT workers working in software development projects and consulting are suffering from psychosomatic disorders - fatigue, nervosity, sleep disorder, stomach trouble - four times more often than workers in other sectors.

There is a rise in chronic exhaustion of 40%, usage of antidepressants is 60% higher than in other sectors, usage of psychotropic drugs beats the average value of all employees with even 91%.

Possible reasons are no surprise. They can be found in:

• Project work: IT workers are often working in several projects at the same time. Contradictoriness have to be solved by the individual workers.


• Particularization of work: instead of getting the whole picture, many IT workers just treat with small parts of a project, thus experiencing an assembly line work effect.


• Stress by management: restructuring in companies and the urge of self-organization for the individual worker unload management tasks on people who once decided to do technical jobs (instead of an management job).


• Changes in performance appraisals: by replacing performance ratings on efforts instead of results, workers are likely to expand their work time.


• Fear of losing the job.


• Constraint of constant self-improvement, even when companies won't pay for courses. Often IT workers train themselves in their spare time (especially freelancers).

83% of all interviewed managers (n=700; managers of companies with more than 200 employees) also admitted to have problems: concerned about losing their job they suffer from bad sleep. A third of them feels overcharged, nutrition often consists of fast food to save time. (Source)

It is often said that young women who hesitate starting a career in IT do that because of the lack of role models. Here are plenty of them: at ACM's Committee on Women in Computing.

Being an Apple Aperture user for months, the appearance of the main window suddenly got distorted: as if the window would be much larger than it really was, all tab controls and the contents of the browser/viewer area were displayed above the main window's top border. There were no scroll bars to get the thumnails or project folders back into the window's center, so the whole application was plain unusuable. Even my photos looked distorted under special circumstances, it was a whole mess. I've read about similar effects where the window extended to the right or left without giving the user a chance to make the content visible again.

After logging in as a different user and starting Aperture, there was no error. That proved that something in my local Aperture settings was wrong. Before this I re-installed the application, but to no avail. Seeing that it would run with different preferences was a crucial hint.

After fiddling with the various settings in com.apple.Aperture.plist and com.apple.Aperture.DodgeAndBurnPlugIn.plist in /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ with no effect I simply deleted them. Voilà: after the next program start the main window was working again. Problem solved.

What it means to prefer older and short-lived models to the young and attractive ones is explained in detail at today's eclectic imaging.

Because I have more readers at eclectic imaging than I'm having here, just read there my rant about a ridiculous press release that shows once more that my country is still the home of social tribalism.

(No I won't stop this blog or starting to point elsewhere with every new entry here, but there's a nice photo as well.)