Solved problems, and weekend reading

My neighbor and I were victims of the ultimate network attack.

I was offline all weekend.

So first I finished Dan Geer’s Economics and Strategies of Data Security. Whoa. I bought it based on Richard Bejtlich’s review. My copy was large-type; I’m not sure if that is standard. I already lent it out to my supervisor and asked him to to pass it up to our director when he’s finished.

Then I read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. I’m also mid-way through Bruce Tognazzini’s Tog on Interface, but I actually finished The Design of Everyday Things cover to cover this weekend – I had no internet or television. I still find user-centered interface concepts important and thanks to the efforts of Tog, Norman, and dare I say it, Neilson, most shops get it. But I don’t find it interesting anymore. Actually, I never found Neilson interesting, but Tog and Norman’s books, while both excellent, have become a bit dated.

It reminds me of when I finally read esr’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar a few years ago. I am reading these foundational works after they’ve been adopted and championed by thousands of other people. So many of them were successful that they created the world argued for in the text.

Well, shit!

Now the books aren’t as interesting!

These core, often cited works have become history books! User centered design eh? No shit! Open Source is really going to take off eh? Do you think?

As with catb, I devoured The Design of Everyday Things in an evening and a half.

Interesting is like “nice” or “cool”. It’s self-defined and weak at that, and always better replaced by actual data, but bear with me. Lately I’ve been unfairly categorizing non-interesting efforts as “Solved Problems”.

Antivirus? Oh that’s a Solved Problem. Solved so poorly yet paradoxically, adequately, and necessarily, that I don’t find it interesting at all. Firewalls? Solved Problem. User centered design? Solved Problem. Well, OK maybe the implementations aren’t demonstrations of solved problems but the knowledge is out there.

It’s pretty stupid of me, but I’m trying to figure out why I find what I do find interesting to be interesting, and there is a lot of noise out there. Wasting time polishing solved problems is pretty stupid. It rots the mind.

“Pretty Stupid” was my previous internal trite label for non-interesting efforts. Solved Problem is better than Pretty Stupid isn’t it?

After the ~design~ history book I went back to finish the last 20 pages of Brave New War by John Robb, which I borrowed from Ben a few months ago. Brave New War is so interesting I can’t read it very quickly – I keep putting it down to think, or to do something less intense.

Tonight my plan was to finish Brave New War so that I could return it to Ben, but I got an itch to check on the cable line behind my house. 72 hours without the web makes me something something. When I pulled on the line that runs from the pole in the alley behind my house over to my house, I discovered why my cable modem RECEIVE light had been blinking over and over.

A young vandal had cut the coax running down the back of my house in the alley in two places, with what looks to be dull lineman’s pliers.

It’s fun to make very specific guesses based on little evidence, Sherlock Holmes style. In this case the wire was definitely cut, not snagged or ripped because it the sheathing was still compressed. And I posit the cut was made with dull pliers because the sheathing wasn’t cut completely – somebody borrowed the pliers from dad’s toolbox.

The lines were cut Friday, and I actually checked for a physical attack Saturday, but the cuts were cleverly placed behind my gutter downspout.

I have the tools and hardware to terminate coax, so I fixed it.

How am I ever going to finish Brave New War now, when I’ve got Twitter and Facebook and Google Reader!?