Josh Wieder

A long time ago in a data center far, far away, the word "computer" was a job title. For a person. One of those people was Grace Hopper. Grace, h@xing on a sweet laptop in the 40's Grace worked her way up to Rear Admiral in the US Navy; no small feat for a woman of any time, but even more amazing as she started her career in the 30's with a PhD in math from Yale. In the Navy, she would go on to work on the Harvard Mark 1 (the first modern computer), and she headed the team that wrote the first compiler . Her contributions to computer science are immense. They are also largely glossed over by a science and an industry that is, let's face it, a bit of a sausage fest. It wasn't always that way. When computers were people, the industry was dominated by women, who tended to have better typing skills than men, and were cheaper to hire. Their contributions to the industry have been forgotten for decades, but thankfully there is a bit of a renaissance in unc...

This morning the headquarters of Parisian comedy rag Charlie Hebdo was attacked. Masked gunmen entered the magazine's office and killed 10 employees and 2 French policemen who tried to intervene. The gunmen escaped, and are apparently at large. While there has yet to be a formal claim of responsibility, just about everyone with a news press or a TV camera believes that the perpetrators are Islamic militants. Hebdo HQ has already been attacked for publishing funny papers mocking the holy Muhammed; about 3 short years ago, the office was firebombed. This blog o' mine is focused on fixing computers. Occasionally, we talk about how computers are used (and mis-used) to violate people's privacy. Rarely, if ever, do we get political; excepting once or twice when we have mocked US government attempts to abolish encryption . This post will be an exception. I take free speech seriously. I have always enjoyed shooting off at the mouth. Moreover, the newspaper racket is somewha...

For many years in the IT community, it was assumed that time spent travelling on an airplane was wasted. At best, you could make do with expensive and often-unreliable cell network coverage for connectivity. Even that was an issue, though, because of the airline's histrionic and decades-out-of-date concern that electronic devices interfered with flight navigation equipment. On top of having to pay a premium for unreliable service, you had to be sneaky about it, as well. Some of us handled the situation better than others So when in-flight internet services first started to become integrated to major airline fleets en masse, many tech people applauded. Those of us who had to attend trade shows, travel to meet customers or were responsible for multiple data center locations could get things done as we bounced back and forth across the country.  The bandwidth was every bit as expensive as roaming cell network charges, regularly more expensive, but the planes were being equipped ...