Here’s a little nugget for the IT management at financial companies… for that matter, it’s probably useful for IT management at any company that has individuals as customers.

This is provided gratis for all and I’m hereby relenquising any future intellectual property claim:

Don’t allow customer data to be stored on individual user machines, least of all on those that leave the building with employees!

I just don’t understand how stories like this, this, and this continue to happen on such a consistent basis. You’d think that it would take just a story or two like this to come out before any company with personal customer data would jump on it. In some companies, devices such as iPods, USB keys, or cameraphones aren’t even allowed in the office — for fear that an employee might copy sensitive data from their computer.

Doesn’t do much good, of course, if the machine itself leaves with the employee.

It’s refreshing to read of a company like Amazon.com, though, that takes the security of customer data very seriously. This entry from Werner Vogels, Amazon.com CTO, says what’s on the mind of consumers everywhere — you guard it with your life.

From this page on the Yahoo/FIFA official site:

Donovan, for his part, denied that this was a "crushing" defeat. "A loss is a loss, I'm not sure 3-0 is entirely fair, but they made three plays that we didn't make."

I’m not sure what qualifies as “crushing” in his mind, but he’s right... Given that the US had just one shot on goal and Czech Republic had five, not to mention far more dangerous plays on the attack, it should have been more like 5–1. The US team had just two corner kicks and not a single offsides call — pretty good indications of how little time they spent in the attacking third of the field.

I hope Donovan can swallow his pride, own his (lack of) contribution to the team’s performance, and come out looking aggressive on Saturday. Otherwise, he’ll be watching elimination play from Southern California.

Seems like most of the traditional media outlets have a “blog” now, from television stations to newspapers to magazines.

But what do all three of those “blogs” have in common? No feed. I’m all for businesses jumping on the “informal, community-facing content” bandwagon (the more content available via syndicated feeds, the better), but if you’re going to do it… do it right.

Those three examples links above were pretty easy to find and aren’t exactly things I’d subscribe to if they did have a feed. What’s frustrating is to come across one that’s got content, is regularly updated, and you really want it to have a feed — but it doesn’t.

In some cases, sites will have a single feed for their main articles or “top stories”, but nothing that’s specific to a category, department, or writer — it might not even have the content I’m viewing. In one case (the Rocky Mountain News), the URL for their “centralized feed” page is broken.

Bottom Line: I don’t think it counts unless Firefox can “see” the subscription feed (via the LiveBookmarks feature) and the feed it sees is specific to the content I’m looking at.

On the flip side, there are major outlets that get it right.

“Rands in Repose” is a blog on life as a software development manager and one of my all-around favorite blogs. He writes a handful of articles a month and they’re invariably insightful and well-written. Managing a development team can be a tricky thing, given that developers sometimes have quirks that are “outside the mainstream” — such as being night-owls, extreme introverts, very focused, or logic-driven at the expense of diplomacy.

He just started a new series called “Deconstructing Managers” that I’m really enjoying. In it, he’s breaking down some of the stereotypes of engineering managers and trying to serve as a translator between “the manager” and “the engineer”. It’s great stuff and takes a balanced, humorous view of this relationship.

So if you’re new to managing a development team, or if you’re on a team and have a new/challenging manager, it’s definitely worth subscribing and following along.

Edward Tufte, author and infoporn guru, is giving a series of one-day courses in various cities across the country. I just registered for the course in Denver on July 21 and am really looking forward to it. The course fee of $360 seems like a great deal, especially given that attendees receive copies of four of his books.

Now if only that other ‘guru’ whose work I admire could come to this area…

Did that suck, or what? It took two years to get another season out… and it came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. I know they’re doing another “mini-season” next year (already shot… but we still have to wait a year), but I’m not sure how much I care.

Honestly, for a show that started off so strong, the creative team and/or HBO is sure doing a good job of marginalizing it.

Assuming this goes through and shows up without a hitch, the server migration is done. The Server Intellect folks were great when I had questions about control panel issues or moving mailboxes during DNS propagation.

The kind folks at Server Intellect (my hosting provider) are adding some newer, beefed-up servers to their data center… so it’s time to migrate everything over. I always feel like I’m missing something when I’ve done this in the past, but this time I’m feeling good. They have a really good setup and migration plan in place, so as the DNS updates there should be little, if any, downtime.

Crossing fingers…

Google announced a number of new products/tools yesterday, but the one I find the most interesting is “Google Trends” (also found under the “Labs” section).

It basically lets you see the history of a search term’s use over time… and if the search term appears in Google News as well, you see that along with regular web searches. Just as with Google Finance, there are links along the chart to news items that occurred at that point in time. A search for ‘tivo’ yields:

You can also view the popularity of a search term by city, region, and language.

Even cooler is that you can supply multiple search terms and compare them all on the same chart. This lets you do things similar to what the “Google Fight” site has done for a while (by running both searches and scraping the count of items found). Here’s a comparison between the phrases “playstation 3” and “xbox 360”:

I’m not sure how current these search results are, but with E3 happening this week and a bunch of PS3 announcements, I’d expect to see a spike there pretty quick (for both, though probably with PS3 searches surpassing 360 searches for a time).

Also interesting with this search is how Seattle appears in the searches-by-city result… among the lowest in searches for “Playstation 3” and the highest of all with searches for “xbox 360”. Wonder why.