Smartphones and Museum Security

This is almost unrelated to Sharepoint, but directly related to management issues within software development. And museums.

I recently acquired a smartphone, one of them new-fangled pocketglass businesses. It is from Google because my friends are hackers and therefore when they hand down phones, they hand down the best phones, flat glass things with changeable batteries made in Korea like fashion will be for the next ten years, and the phones are generally scraped absolutely clean of nonsense. After receiving their phones, I place them in plastic boxes and use them until they are run over by cars.
Number Of Phones Lost To Being Run Over By Cars, Last Three Years: Six.
Suspicion of Value of Phones Generally: Very High.

As an outsider to how systems are supposed to work, this new pocketglass causes me deep-set suspicion.  Every major piece of software I have ever touched has seemed, once I got inside it, hideously broken. I am aware in my bones that things rot. For example, there is almost certainly a botnet in nearly every major museum, all over the world, because as museum staff we just don't have the money to prevent them; bureaucracy, of which proper software security is an evolved form, is hopelessly expensive. Having gone through the wringer of Microsoft's idea of the future, always a relay race of catch-up, I wonder how long it will be until these tiny perfect glasses begin to break. My hacker friends say not long.

There is an interesting problem here: banks tend not to store things that are actually irreplaceable, in the sense that more cannot be printed, but museums sure do. Whatever it is a given museum stores, it is almost certainly not multiple. We don't do multiples. There are no copies of this work. The work is the work and the whole of the work, and though there may be records, scans, and 3D prints of it, once it is gone, it is gone. And museums are almost always going broke, but lately, they are going broker, faster. The things we store are valuable because they are the sort of thing that is not taxed as income, and cannot be easily shared, except, of course, that it can. We hold the cargo cult in our bellies and our basements and our records-keeping. We are no longer truly funding or valuing our own research, but the things we were once researching still need to be preserved, at great cost.

A pocket glass radio that can control everything, including electronic locks, and that talks to other pocket radios by touch. I am wondering what their common cold is going to look like, and what doors it will pop open with its coughing.

Why Is Sharepoint So Broken, Anyway? A History Lesson.

So why is it that nothing in Sharepoint quite works, even when you undo it later, or fix it, or it should be fixed but is not? Simple: there are handshakes missing all over the place. Parts of Sharepoint just do not talk to other parts. This is not part of the planned functionality of the thing, I mean, probably someone at MS really cares about the technology. It does work well in some very small, key ways.

The overall terribleness, though, is an extended part of what we call a Corporate Culture Problem. The problem is that, really, Microsoft is a risk-averse company with a risk-averse history working in an incredibly risk-forward industry, and it has not learned to hedge its bets in any sort of correct fashion. Microsoft has been late to the party while simultaneously refusing the party's best lessons for years now, then trying to make up its homework by copying the substantially better work of its peers.

The reason for this is simple: Microsoft lost all its corporate caché in the late 1990s, just as the first run of the webkids was leaving school. We'd land in the teeth of both the web crash and the recession, later, and in the meantime, although MS attracted Coupland - and therefore Gen X - it lost out on the much larger boom of the baby boomer's kids. It did this by developing a corporate strategy based entirely on disconnected systems and computer security, rather than openness, sharing, and peer review. The much larger generation of Web Kids learn by doing, mostly, because MS made its systems locked and university seemed expensive but the web itself has always been accessible. We are mostly self-taught - and likely to become moreso, as enrolment in CS programs drops.

They jumped too soon, and Sharepoint sucks because it is sharing software manufactured by a company that does not like to share at all, in any way, at any level. You can see this in the DNA of the software: there are errors, frequent ones, caused by what appears to be nothing more than bad team management. Everything is driven from the back end, in ways that once might have been good, but are no longer good, because they are not actually well-organized; organization is a function of sharing. They are dependent on assumptions and libraries that have to do with basic Windows architecture... which stops working the moment you recognize that the internet is an inherently unstable system.

But how can this BE, you ask, you who has paid good money for this system, and trusted the corporation selling it to you?

1. Sharepoint is built on seven separate base technologies, all of them huge, most of them legacy spare parts that have been dolled up like a late-run K-car and re-sold.
2. The dolling of these parts has not been well-managed, due to Sharepoint being, in large part, nothing but a weird profit centre for a long time. 
3. This has long historic roots. Microsoft fucked up at the internet way, way back - back when they were first getting into it - and have been engaged in playing catch-up as the fat kid ever since. 
4. They chased Dreamweaver with Frontpage, which became Sharepoint Designer after a rebranding.
5. Dreamweaver was terrible to begin with.
6. They missed Search and tried stealing Google's results for a while
7. Now they're stealing Apple's store design, and tablet design.
8. This is because Microsoft is a relatively old company, with a long legacy, working in an industry that is moving incredibly quickly. Their history is one of business software and risk-aversion, but they cannot make money without selling a new thing. 
9. Additionally, they are controlled by people who are uncomfortable with risk, presently unsure of  their core business, and worried about shareholder value rather than product quality.
1. This has to do with their age, which has to do with Nuclear War and The Boomers Have All The Money being a thing they were actually threatened with, where our age is still arriving, and is - see also Fiscal Cliff - likely to be more janitorial in its disasters. Cleanup in Aisle Twelve.
10. Their decisions are therefore being driven by marketing, rather than by actual use.
11. Because the company is not, even now, quite sure what the fuck the internet is for.
12. Which means that they are dedicated to selling their products to people who are afraid of the cloud
13. Want something shiny for their cash if they are going to hand it over
14. Who believe in Security
15. But are not able to grasp what in practice that means
16. And they are saddled with the buggiest, most hackable operating system and most difficult consumer-grade software because that used to be how you made money. 
17. No-one is sure how you make money now, but Brushed Aluminum and Shit Doing What It Says On The Packet is working out pretty well for most of them.
18. This scares Microsoft because, having missed out on the web, and utterly lacking any interesting technology except perhaps the xBox, where they continue to haul defeat from the jaws of victory, they are failing. Very, very slowly. You can fail for a long time before your company dies. You can make a lot of money failing, and take a lot of people with you.
19. Welcome to the life cycle of the American corporation, where, as we all know, money for shareholders is more important than people.

Unfortunately, unlike candy [Hershey's] , or beer [AB InBev], both of which are luxuries that can be put aside, the Microsoft problem has a direct consequence on the architecture of business operations in pretty well every English-speaking country. The maintenance of this software is boring, but necessary, as driven as it is by selling rather than making something worth using, and as important as it is to major corporations with a great deal of money running through them.

This is really pretty stupid, all of it, because it is like having two filing cabinet companies, and one of them simply has broken locks on everything. There is no end in sight, but the first filing cabinet company to do it better - thus far, Google - will have a mighty prize. It is already turning up in Android phones, alongside the new malware marketplace.

Unfortunately, twice, is that Google is now publicly traded, and is interested in documenting every last bleeding thing you do. It is very probably not long before this style of problem expands; how should a company be?

Soon To Be Hungover, Still Full Of Bears

What's this blog about, anyway? Menswear that remains flattering? Software giants having difficulty navigating the quick rate of change despite their massive cash reserves? The desire of said giants to maintain reserves of cash and walled gardens rather than simply making things better?

All of the above! Sharepoint 2010, new in 2013. There will be a new release of Sharepoint this year, and it has been said through the grapevine that Microsoft has caved. We are to be allowed Nice Things, like normal web-development administration privileges. Using text editors. Fewer of the Madd Haxx. This seems pleasant, in theory, although I could wish they'd released it five years past; it seems promising, on the surface.

Like cake. We all like cake, correct?

I am sure at this stage that it can be taken as understood that said cake is, in fact, a lie. You're still going to have to administer legacy systems. You're still going to have to use terrible haxx to do it, and you still have a pretty sweet gig breaking broken things and being angry for a living. But today, today is the day before New Year's Day, and therefore it is safe to assume that one of us is preparing for a hangover.

Because it is the slow patch, and because you will soon begin the painstaking work of repairing and styling an installation of Sharepoint 2007, take today to permission some things, then go read some of the Top Ten lists that were supposed to occupy your time over break. While you in reality slept and read and slept some more.

Here are some ever-adorable Pizzly Bears on Melting Ice by Masahiro Minami.

Perhaps you could review the Comprehensive List of Internet Emoticons, hosted by wikipedia. ಠ_ರೃ

Mykki Blanco is an awesome artist and this video is very good.
As is Ane Brun's Do You Remember
It fades nicely into Rae Spoon's Ocean Blue/Death In Venice.
Then you get to the Azealia.

It is New Years Eve, so the only conceivable reason you are working at all is for the money. At the same time, it is safe to assume there's shit-all to be done at your office, so here is some stuff from The Billfold, like my rental history as of last year - non-comprehensive - or bits on the best things people have done when they've quit their terrible jobs. Use that to kill some time. Poke around the neat corners of the web. Take a break already. You'll have more fighting to do soon enough.

Audience Settings Hide Things In Plain Sight

In some institutions, the intranet is controlled by a panoply of people. They all have equal permission to ask you to do something, and they all can see what appears to be the full intranet. They do not, however, all do the same work. They do all run out of things to do at about the same time each week. About that time, they start looking for things to do, rather than bunking off work or reading a book under their desk.

Although, as previously established, you don't like your job or anyone who tells you you're lucky to have it, you are proud of your work, and you like letting other people do theirs, too. Mostly the people who control some levels of content are not so tight with the analytics, which routinely fail in Sharepoint 2010 installations anyway.*

*Really, there's no information on the internet as to why they simply crap out, but as a front end administrator you're powerless to fix the problem. Batch start as many jobs as you like, adjust all the timers you want, you're still boned.

 So how can Sharepoint help with office busybodies?

Just as you can set permissions so that people can access a thing, you can set audiences so that their group is the only one to see that thing. Or to not see it. This is usually set in the navigation.

• Open Site Settings, People And Groups.
• No, wait. Open Site Permissions.
• Notice that unless a permission has been explicitly set to a piece of content as a permission within your site, the group you want doesn't show up even if it does exist already.
• Great now People And Groups.
• By default it will open your default Members Group for whatever Site you happen to be on. Misleading!
• Look on the left nav. There will be a thing called Groups. There will be a More link. You want the More link.
• The More link will lead you to People And Groups: All Groups. 
• Due to weird convulsions in Sharepoint's site settings, expectations, team site settings, and pre-loaded "site features," it is entirely possible none of this is real or will work for you.
• All Groups has a list, for editing, of every single group in the entire site and all of its subsites. You can actually see what is going on here, which is why it is incredibly well hidden. It is a feature of use.

In All Groups you can set up new groups and see groups that are not necessarily relevant to specific permissioning, and here is where you will set up your new group, seeHiddenThings.

• Click New at the top of the page. There's also a settings link where you can make the left nav of people and groups more useful.
• Name your new group.
• Populate your new group with people you want to be able to see whatever link to whatever thing.
• Leave people and groups and go to Site Settings, Site Navigation.
• Set up your new link to whatever. 
• Note that, although Sharepoint nominally inherits things from one stage to the next, it has trouble tracing where you actually are within its file structure. Have an ominous sinking feeling about that, which you will not address for some time to come.
• On your New Link, set your Audience to your new group. Note that you can set the Audience for this link to be whomever you like - anyone in Active Directory, any pre-existing group.
• It is, however, much easier to just remember that Group Linkname can see and access Link In Question.

Boom. People not in that group cannot see that link. Unless you named yourself to that new group, you can't see that new link. No-one can see it but the people in the group.

If you were extra smart, it is a link to a private list or library, too.