BAZOMBO: a discursive miscellany of topics

One the one hand, on the other hand

Wednesday, July 30 2008

The newest versions of Firefox and IE are sticklers when it comes to SSL, which is why right now this second, you’ll see this message if you use Kiwibank’s online banking:

Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to www.kiwibank.co.nz.

Peer’s Certificate has been revoked.

(Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)

Firefox is not very helpful at this point. With other SSL problems it will show you the certificate and how it was/was not verified. No such facility here.

According to the phone banking person I just talked to, the authority that issued their certificate assumed they were in the UK(!) and set various fields accordingly.

This is not good.

However, what was good was that my call was answered in about 30s, the person on the other end knew about the problem already, they had a reasonable explanation, and they had a suggested workaround. In these days of outsourced, scripted help desks, that’s pretty good indeed.

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Tags: security ~ firefox ~ kiwibank ~ support

Enterprise software as a luxury good

Friday, July 11 2008

Clay Shirky wants to know if there is social science literature that might shed light on why it is hard to sell open source software to large institutions. He wonders whether it’s broken price signalling mechanisms, or perhaps some problem in organisational behaviour.

The answer is of course that he is barking up the wrong tree. The correct literature to be reading is Thorstein Veblen; specifically, his work on conspicuous consumption.

Conspicuous consumption is manifested when people obtain luxury goods not for their use value but for the increase in status they accrue when the goods are displayed. The goods need not be ostentatious. They need only send signals to the owner’s peers. For example, in the UK a good bespoke suit is hardly distinguishable to the average punter from one bought from Marks and Spencers, and yet it sends a powerful message to the right people about the owner.

Enterprise software is purchased and deployed on exactly these principles. One of the first things that usually accompanies the announcement of a new system is a proud boast of the cost and labour involved. Of course sometimes this isn’t necessary – we know that if you bought Oracle, SAP or BEA you must have a great deal of money. This is also why the very top tier don’t go for Windows. Windows is the middle-class option. Really rich firms that are secure in their status either go top of the line (mainframe and expensive Unix) or free (like Wall St firms running Linux) because they have nothing to prove. Both the cheapest and the most expensive software cannot be bought in a shrinkwrapped box.

We should also note that in his Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the leisure class demonstrates status in that the goods defined as luxury manifestly waste the resources and labour of others. Clearly open-source software, powered essentially by the goodwill of donated labour, cannot assuage this need to demonstrate waste through the coercion of others’ labour, whereas the unwilling toil of cubicle drones, aggregated into an enterprise product, is the pyramid of our times.

There is actually fertile ground for future research in this area. Can the vendor lunch be seen as a form of potlatch? What is the relationship between printed documentation and software quality? Do taller CIOs, as they say, really have bigger budgets? We await the findings of scholars in the field with interest.

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Tags: ha ha only serious ~ management

When automated tagging goes odd

Wednesday, July 09 2008

Archives New Zealand’s National Collection of War Art is a pretty good site, in glorious XHTML.

I was interested to see that they have a tag cloud, presumably generated out of photograph metadata, and that right up there with Italy, desert, jungle and New Zealand division is… moustache.

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Tags: funny ~ linky ~ metadata ~ tagging

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