Your humble blogwatcher's 2009 roundup (part A)

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all over the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a USB mouse. Sounds like an ideal opportunity to look back over the biggest stories in of 2009. In IT Blogwatch, we review January to June.

By Richi Jennings. December 24, 2009.

You'll find July to December here.

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention pizza!..
 
 
In January, the Heartland data breach exercised many. Typical was Mike Masnick's cynicism about the announcement's timing:

In the past, we've joked about how with pretty much every security breach, there's an initial estimate of the damage done, followed much later by a second report that admits the breach impacted many more people. It happened with the VA. It happened with Choicepoint. And, it happened with TJX.
...
Heartland appears to have picked a pretty good day to announce a security breach that may impact over 100 million people. Everyone's off paying attention to the inauguration, so they might miss the news as it comes out today -- but they're likely to hear about it soon enough ... Considering they figured out what happened a week ago, it does seem a bit of interesting timing to wait until the inauguration was underway to disclose this information.

February saw us waiting 'patiently' for the Windows 7 Release candidate build. Paul Thurrott got grumpy:

Microsoft is now so hell bent on proving that it is listening to user feedback ... it must be a pretty impressive list of huge changes, right? I mean, the dangerously deficient default Taskbar view where multiple sub-windows are all hidden under a single obscure icon, thus uncluttering the system while simultaneously making it harder to use, has been changed, right? Right?
 
Not exactly ... Instead, what we get is a laundry list of tiny changes ... Obviously, any improvements are welcome ... Some of it, however, is silly.

Beware the Ides of March, lest Wolfram Alpha becomes sentient. Owen Thomas was true to form:

Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable ... The blogosphere has exploded in a jargongasm.
...
In the tradition of the great French encyclopédistes of the 18th century, his Wolfram Research has employed in stealth dozens of brainiacs translating specialized databases into machine-computable form. His approach is a riposte to both Google's idolization of algorithms and the fetish for crowdsourcing that swept Silicon Valley in the middle of this decade. Sometimes the best way to get an answer is to ask someone really smart. Like the Wizard of Oz, Wolfram's researchers lie behind the curtain of the answers Wolfram Alpha will provide. How comforting.

Come April, Amazon actually appeared anti-gay. Mary Hodder smelled a rat:

Amazon's ... explanation that this was all “a glitch” ... contradicts earlier email from them to authors stating that they were in the “adult” category simply for including positive gay and lesbian themes in their works and that’s why they lost their “Sales Rank” statistic that would keep them in search results. It was a very targeted glitch for sure. Targeted to, among other things, “positive references to sexual orientation == gay” placing them into the “adult” category, which allowed the other minor “glitch” by the programmer to be possible.

If all this seems like a problem, and it should, it’s because Amazon is using algorithms, which rely on their classification system, with various statistics like “Sales Rank” to rank products in search results on the site. These algorithms and classifications have points of view ... The bar for ethics in creating algorithms and classification systems should be very high. #AmazonFail proved it’s not, at least at Amazon.

In May, Microsoft took the lip off the XP Mode virtualization feature in Windows 7. James Schend 'splains:

The problem Microsoft is dealing with is the thousands of applications written using undocumented functions, diving directly into implementation data structures without using the API, saving files in places they shouldn't (i.e. blithely saving temp files into /Program Files without using the API which returns the correct folder for temp files-- lots of video games do this), relying on specific undocumented side-effects of API functions, etc. In short, for every way something could have been done wrong, it has been done wrong sometime in Windows history.
 
The reason Vista is incompatible is that Microsoft finally took the plunge and changed the layout/size of those internal data structures, had to remove 16-bit support (for 64-bit CPU reasons), and started enforcing the correct permissions (no write access to Program Files) for security purposes. Many of those thousands of buggy applications can never be fixed-- the source code is gone, or the company responsible is out of business. So the XP layer helps users run those applications, while also letting Microsoft actually improve their OS in the way that Apple and Linux (systems who don't give half a whit for backwards compatibility) can.

And June brought accusations of racism against Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies. Speaking in the U.S., he called American graduates "unemployable". Santosh Hari reacted thus:

From my purely anecdotal perspective and experience with both, the Indian education system is largely geared to churning out grads who excel in process-oriented solutions while the American education system encourages applying creative thinking to existing solutions. ... Working in a outsourcing shop like his, requires a certain mind set, which a grad from the Indian education system is more likely to be prepared for.
 
So perhaps, what Nayar meant to say was that grads from the American education system and workforce are less likely to possess the mind set to work in his company. ... To paint all individuals who work in the tech industry as employable or unemployable, because they come from a certain nation and/or education system, in a public forum no less, is just plain wrong and unbecoming of someone in his position.

 
You'll find July to December here. Happy holidays from your humble blogwatcher!
 
And finally...

• How to calculate the volume of a pizza
  

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.

 
 
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