i’m saying the same thing that many before me have said — this is all over the web at this point, largely because those of us who run web-based startup companies rely on this medium for innovation and for our livelihood. i encourage you to speak to your representatives about this issue and spread awareness. a few months back, i reached out to my representatives and signed a petition on the White House website. just a few days ago, i received this response from the latter:

Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet

By Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt

Thanks for taking the time to sign this petition. Both your words and actions illustrate the importance of maintaining an open and democratic Internet.

Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support—and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet.

While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.

We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values.

This is not just a matter for legislation. We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.

So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days.

Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.

Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation. Again, thank you for taking the time to participate in this important process. We hope you’ll continue to be part of it.

Victoria Espinel is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget

Aneesh Chopra is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Technology at the Office of Science and Technology Policy

Howard Schmidt is Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff

my favorite quote: “LeBow is reluctant to embrace a technology that he believes carries hidden costs, chief among them productivity losses while he and his staff master the system.”

classic short-term thinking — save money today even if it means losing money over the long run. granted, the doctor in question is 66 years old, so perhaps he’s got a reason to think about the short vs long term.

granted, there are questions about the return on investment (ROI) of electronic health record systems for doctors, especially if features like decision support are not built into the system. i argue that there are two issues here: first, many doctors are slow to adopt new technology. there are completely valid reasons for this — for example, they’re too busy saving lives to spend time learning flawed, nascent technologies. that said, their resistance to established technologies is unfortunate. second, the government has not clearly outlined the value for doctors. instead of doing this, they have set up a carrot-and-stick incentive model — a $44K payment actually encourages short-term thinking. the ROI is clearest for the government and insurance companies (benefits of cleaner reporting) — if the government is going to be in the business of pushing EHR’s down onto doctors and eventually patients, they need to make a clearer case.

as a technologist who is involved in the world of global health care, i know the value of a complete EHR system exists for all parties involved, but i’m not the one who needs convincing.

for my ‘day job‘ (oddly named since i often find myself working on it at night), i manage a website that is used by thousands of health care professionals around the world. in order to keep things running smoothly on the site, we have a series of tests that we run every time we make a change to the code powering the site. these tests let us know that the code we have just written (often for a new feature) hasn’t broken the expected behavior of existing functionality.

these tests are Very Important. i cannot stress this enough. if you are a software engineer, a software QA engineer, and especially if you are a support engineer, i am preaching to the choir.

i’m not saying that our test suite is perfect. but we have one, and we add to it regularly. we do this because the penalty for failure to test can impact thousands of users and in the worse case, drive them away from using our site.

i also run my own site. for many years, i wrote the code behind the site myself, but over time, i started to realize that i was essentially building from scratch what the folks over at WordPress had already implemented quite well. since they test their own code, i had no incentive to create a test suite for my site or my wife’s blog.

about 6 months ago, i upgraded WordPress from the absurdly old 2.0.x to a more modern 2.7.x — an upgrade which went seamlessly and also allowed me to use their new one-click upgrade feature (i.e. no more unpacking tarballs and editing config files). however, the feature was DOA.

after some digging, i found that i needed to move to MySQL 5 in order to take advantage of the quick-upgrade feature. the data migration wasn’t painless due to the vagaries of our hosting provider, but after some massaging, i got things ported over. next, i found that an upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5 was required — luckily, i just had to add a line to the .htaccess file in the root directory. with a few other minor tweaks, we were good to go.

earlier this month, my wife tried to log in to the administration panel of a custom CMS she purchased a few years back. the login failed, as did the contact form submissions she had been receiving for a few months. i looked into the issue and found portions of the CMS code were not PHP 5 compatible (despite 5 being theoretically backwards-compatible with 4). turns out that adding the .htaccess file to the root directory, as my hosting provider had recommended, caused PHP 5 to be used in all subdirectories.

why didn’t i catch this earlier? well, i was making changes i thought only impacted our WordPress installations. i had not touched other databases or code installations. since my wife’s wedding website appeared to work, i did not think to test features like the CMS admin panel or contact form.

why was it a big deal? if the issues had just impacted our blogs, it would not have been. however, the contact form on my wife’s wedding photography website is used to field questions by prospective clients. empty emails mean missed opportunities. the good news is that she’s putting her business on hold while we adjust to becoming parents, but this sort of mistake is still relatively costly.

would testing have helped? certainly testing of some sort (manual) would have helped. automated testing would have been harder to set up, since we had a bunch of different interfaces, but something like Selenium could have done the trick.

why don’t we have automated tests for our personal websites? discuss.

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/guest-contributors/2009/12/life-saving-health-information-a-global-necessity/

the theme of the presentation is “freedom and responsibility”. given that these characteristics are two that i prize highly in a work environment, they started off on a good foot.

you should read the whole presentation (it doesn’t take that long), but here are the points that stood out to me (not that I agree with every word, but a lot of it rung true):

• “The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”
• “The Keeper Test Managers Use: ‘Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving in two months for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?”
• “In procedural work, the best are 2x better than the average… In creative work, the best are 10x better than the average”
• The desire for process grows over time in a company not simply due to increasing complexity, but due to dilution of high-performance employees in the face of increasing complexity.
• The Netflix vacation policy is probably the most-quoted part of the presentation when it is referenced on the web, but I hope that people look past this (I think it’s a common-sense move I happen to strongly agree with) and see some of the other points in the deck.
• “Act in Netflix’ Best Interests” — the premise here is outstanding. I have always thought that the time and wages it takes to fill out and process lengthy expense reports is simply wasteful. If someone willingly abuses the system by acting in an irresponsible manner, fire them.
• “Managers: When one of your talented people does something dumb, don’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what context you failed to set.”
• The compensation plan can’t be adequately summarized in one bullet, so check it out. Just outstanding.

read Jim’s announcement about GHDonline
the GHDonline site