Wednesday, September 24 2003

and encouraging your employees to be dysfunctional workaholics. I am being a bit unfair because it's a pretty interesting piece from a design point of view. It's just that the worldview behind it smacks a bit too much of the scene from Microserfs where two characters are discussing the idea of flat food (food you can slide under a programmer's door thus ensuring higher productivity) as though it were a good thing...

hired to lock down an 802.11 network in an office that spanned seven floors.

The first step was to secure the actual network which involved firewalls, VPNs, complicated rules at the router level and, if it had kept going, more stuff that would have made me fall asleep faster than I already was. The second problem, however, was what to do about people bringing in their own wireless hubs and just plugging them in to the network. The solution? The company bought seven Aibo's, each equipped with 802.11 cards, that were left to wander around the offices. Whenever they got within range of an errant wireless hub they were programmed to sit down and start barking.

and RSS aggregators (like everything else, so the truism goes) are striving to be email clients.