Web site refresh

We just refreshed the web site. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

We still have some tweeks, but to my eye, this is a big step in the right direction. A big thanks to my daughter who did most of the work.

Web site refresh coming soon

We're working to create a new look for the web site. I don't have any screen shots that I'd like to share, but I'm guessing the new look will ready sometime this weekend, or next weekend. I'll announce it here of course, and look forward to your comments.

Upgrading to FiOS

I upgraded to Verizon FiOS today. The speed is a bit better than Comcast cable -- one rough test showed a download speed of 7.4 mbs with FiOS versus 2.4 mbs for cable... and FiOS is $10 cheaper per month to boot. A friend has had FiOS for over a year, and heartily recommended it as reliable and fast. The fast part seems to be there -- though it doesn't honestly seem to be that much faster than cable. We'll have to see about the reliability. The guy doing the in-home install noted that there's no power on the stuff outside -- it's just glass, so there's nothing to short out, etc. It comes with a wireless router which was easy to set up... overall a positive experience. Imagine that.

Ignoring Sycophants

Suppose you're some rich/powerful person. How do you prevent being surrounded by sycophants. Communication between two people is difficult and often leads to misunderstanding. Effective communication between different levels of a hierarchy is even more difficult. How does a Bill Gates or a George Bush get an accurate picture of what is really going on?

Almost by definition, they can only talk to people who are already in their orbit... people who may be just as much out of touch with reality. I suppose they must come to rely on gathering information from more impersonal sources -- e.g. reading articles, books, etc. where the author isn't affected by the inclusion of a Bill Gates in the audience. If they rely on advisors instead of impersonal sources, they're likely to be told what they want to hear instead of the truth.

For impersonal sources to offer meaningful criticism, the target of their commentary must be transparent -- i.e. only if they have access to the same general body of data as insiders can they offer informed observations. Whether in government or large corporations, secrets serve to arm insiders with knowledge hidden from general view. Insiders have a vested interest in preserving the shroud of secrecy, since this gives them power to control the debate. A leader surrounded by secrets can rely only on advice from people in on the secret -- a population with a viewpoint guaranteed to be warped by the sycophants it contains.

Effective leaders have figured out this dynamic; less effective leaders have not.

UPDATES: Fix punctuation; fix spelling.

Obsolete will be Obsolete

No, I didn't make the change to the way obsolete files will work in QVCS-Enterprise just so I could use topic heading above....

Currently, in QVCS-Enterprise, when you 'delete' a file, the server just marks the associated archive file as 'obsolete', and then the client deletes the associated workfile.

In 2.1, this behavior will change -- and the concept of 'obsolete' files goes away. The new behavior will remove the archive file from the server's archive directory and move it to the archive 'cemetery'. The client application then deletes the associated workfile. If you need to do anything with the deleted archive, you'll need to create a 'view' that uses a view date that preceeds the date when the file was deleted.

This change is needed in order to implement the boundary use case described here. It also has a more coherent feel than the previous implementation. I've completed the coding for moving the deleted archive to the 'cemetery'. I still have to go through the rest of the refactoring to remove all code that deals with obsolete files -- since that code is now obsolete.