Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I’m stumped; so this is a shout out to the lazy web.

For the some of the sites that I publish I load shift the bandwidth for serving images to another machine. I do this by having those site do a temporary redirect to images.redzephyr.net which serves the image from a cache. If it is not in it’s cache it pulls the image from the original server.

This scheme was working fine until image server was upgraded and moved it to a new IP address.

Since that change my the cache directory on the image server seems to slowly fill with images from which the first N bytes have been dropped. If I clear the cache the problem goes away for a while; but reemerges slowly but surely.

Meanwhile this is polluting the browser side caches of my users and I need a scheme to clear their caches. I have a lame scheme to do that (changing all the redirected URLs).

If anybody recognize what stupid thing I’ve overlooked?

ps. How to “Bypass your browser’s cache“.

DAIC, which sounds like Daisy, is one of those BSchool/Psychology-Today frameworks I picked up at some point in my work life. It’s mnemonic for four roles that employee’s might play in the process of reaching a decision:

• Driver
• Approver
• Informed
• Consultant

Since entrepreneurs ran the organization inside of which I learned this particular framework they most loved the role of Driver; but in different organizations you tend more affection for one or another role. I have, for example, worked in organizations where the consulting and informed roles were dominate. Some groups do a fine job without one or another role. Some groups manage to get into a dysfunctional modality where two roles are in opposition and the others are ignored.

This model is pretty good, as these thing go. It gets better if you start to dig into the complexity of performing any one of these roles. That’s easier to think about if you add in a fifth entity; i.e. the decision being made.  Make it concrete: a proposal, a mailing list, a meeting, a plan, etc.  The players then rendezvous around that. That is pretty standard advice in the negotiation literature; e.g. that multiparty negotiations can only work if you rendezvous around a single text.

Once that rendezvous point, that single-text, is introduced then you can begin to see some very constructive things about how the role of each of the four kinds above should play out.

• Driver: keep the text moving, enable others to succeed at their role.
• Approver: own/disown, sign, accept, embrace, reject, comprehend, send back the text.
• Informed: comprehend, monitor, and as necessary demand access to the text
• Consultant: add value, critique, collaborate, network

Any of these parties can cause the process to fail by intent, neglect, or (more typcially) by misunderstanding their role. Any of these players can become quite powerful by if they play their role with skill.  Any one of these can be the dominate one in shaping the resulting decision.

By way of example; those in the informed role often presume they lack power to shape the outcome and think they have only the power to obstruct; and certainly that is one of the powers inherent in that role.  But you can do a lot of shaping by asking the right questions and assuring that your actually informed - that process can cause huge course corrections.

Martian speaks wisely about why open voice networks aren’t a technology problem but a social entrepenural one.   At the same time he is also talking about a minor aspect of why internet identity isn’t a technology problem.

These days I find myself thinking that internet identity is hard because the gap between people’s intuitions and the technology substrate is so vast.  In the real world privacy tends to be the default; in the virtual world it’s the other way around.  Saying we lack a substrate for creating privacy in the net is the worst kind of understatement; it’s a bit like saying I lack x-ray vision.

As he says we lack good understanding of what makes an open v.s. closed network.  Capitalists care about that, since closed networks have the potential to generate great wealth.  I care because there is a huge swath of tiny groups that can’t get the benefits of adding a virtual aspect to their existence.  For example the 3rd grade parents can’t put their contact list on line.  Which is killing these groups and that’s very bad for the social network’s health.

Thought provoking: my morning mail reports that the ID card servers at the university are down and that this effects “card readers” across campus.  Reminds one that hubs are a target for assorted criminal activity.  I wonder what boundry crossings people are discovering they can’t make right now?

Meanwhile I’m told we citizens get our new regional transportation passes at the end of the month so that getting on the bus and subway will involve bringing the card into physical proximity of the toll collecting gates.  RFID I presume.  So this morning I wonder if that system has a central point of failure?

When you work on standards it’s always interesting how one constituency has concerns that another constituency has to struggle to appreciate.  That’s the real work.  In the early days of the Liberty Alliance one of these was how extremely reluctant, to the point that it had the potential to be a deal breaker, the web site builders were to add anything that might effect their reliability.  That’s a severe barrier to adoption for any identity provider.  It is very difficult for an identity provider to guarantee that the system administrator’s bonus will never be adversely effected.

If I can’t get into the pool today who will compensate me?

Possibly last posting about the World Household Wealth Distirbution study.

First off I’m bemused by two articles in the New York Times.  One about giant purses:

“…clients old and new staggering under the weight of huge purses and griping about neck pain. “It’s an epidemic,” Ms. Ehrlich said. “We’re busier than ever before right now and big bags are the reason.”

A common side effect is that one shoulder becomes slightly higher than the other, she said. “A lot of women talk on their cellphones while they’re carrying these bags, which only intensifies the problem, because in addition to balancing too much weight on one side, they’re lifting the shoulder at the same time.”

Ms. Ehrlich recommends weekly massages for the pain. Gentle stretching and warm baths with Epsom salts can help bag abusers, too, she said. But she would never tell a client to ditch her Mulberry Elgin tote.

“It’s like telling a woman, ‘You cannot wear Manolo Blahniks,’ ” she said. “It’s just not realistic.”…”

One about giant planes.

“… private jet much like Air Force One, which is a 747. Each plane carries a list price of about $275 million. Boeing will not identify the customers, … personal use.”

Finally there is a note in the report that points out that zero is, of course, not the bottom of the household wealth distribution.  Debt allows household’s wealth to be negative.  Because most of the worlds poor are “unbanked” you need to go into the developed world to find the absolutely poorest households.  How’s that for a triggering a worry-some eye brow raising moment?  Since, the currently popular fad in this problem space is micro-finance.