Consumer Reports provides some guidance on using Healthcare.gov (Obamacare), Cookie Mess

Who do you trust trying to use Healthcare.gov (Obamacare).  President Obama's reassurances?  Media covering the efforts?

How about Consumer Reports?  Here is a post they put last week.

Let’s jump to the advice that will get you thinking.

Clear your cookies.

Your next hurdle after creating a functioning user name and password is to reach the identity verification section. If you log in to Healthcare.gov and get nothing but a blank page, what’s likely happening, Simo says, is that in your previous visits to Healthcare.gov, your browser got loaded up with lots of cookies, bits of data and code that are implanted for later retrieval and use by Healthcare.gov. The problem is that the cookie files are bigger than what the website can accept back (yes, a design error). Result: a blank page. Solution: either delete the Healthcare.gov cookies from your browser (typically found in the “privacy” settings in Preferences), or log back in from a browser you’ve never previously used to access Healthcare.gov. That advice rang especially true to me because that's how I finally got an identity verification screen: by switching from my usual Safari browser to another that I rarely use.

If all this is too much for you to absorb, follow our previous advice: Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can. Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made. The coverage available through the marketplaces won’t begin until Jan. 1, 2014, at the earliest, and you have until Dec. 15 to enroll if you need insurance that starts promptly.

What is hysterical is the unique ID is the reference ID, a 128 bit unique.  Which is good from a technical standpoint, but not when you use it as the users reference number.

Three weeks may be a short time in government software development, but it is a very long time in Internet time. If you call support, I wish you a good connection as you try to read that 36-character reference ID over the phone.

 

...

A GUID is actually an integer type - it's a 128 bit integer (16 bytes).

It's often represented as a string of 36 characters - but the actual value is a 128bit integer value.

A possible green data center metric, carbon footprint of a Cloud VM

I was at a student panel discussion with Seattle Pacific University's M.A. for Social and Sustainable Management program. Rob Greenwood and I were discussing Environmental topics. Rob would discuss things at a broad industry, and I would discuss specifics within the data center industry and technology companies.

Part of what Rob expressed which aligns with things I observe as well is that many companies have difficulty showing the business value of sustainable efforts. In data centers with cost of power and cooling systems, improving PUE is a standard. Carbon footprint reporting is also gaining momentum. So the data center industry is different than the overall industry in that it is clearer when the efficiency pays off.

Examples are:

Google has been carbon neutral for 6 years.

Google has been carbon neutral for six years. This means that all of the work we do has a total carbon footprint of zero. This includes serving 100 billion search queries and 6 billion hours of YouTube videos a month, supporting 750 million Chrome users and delivering Google Maps in 194 countries. It also includes efforts such as developing self-driving cars and launching Wi-Fi-enabled balloons into the atmosphere.

Apple has one of the largest solar installations at its data center. And, Greenpeace has friended Facebook for its environmental efforts.

So how about this for a game changer. If users wanted more transparency from Cloud providers and required to know the power and carbon impact of a VM? It is not the standard now. This is easy for Google to say the carbon impact. It is zero. Currently no cloud provider makes this disclosure as they don’t want users to know how much power a VM uses. Why? Let’s say you are in AWS with a small VM. What would you think if your VM power use was 20 watts? 1/12 of a 240 watt server environment. Dual processor 6 core AMD with 1 VM per core. But, are some actually putting 2 VMs per core, and the power may be 10 watts per VM. You can see why no cloud provider wants to tell you how much power the VM uses.

Are you ready for the re invention of Media? Bezos, Omidyar, Jobs

NYTimes has a post about the reinvention of News Media.

What will get your attention in Paypal founder Omidyar is joining Bezos efforts in media.

Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, revealed last week that he would back the journalist Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues in a newly conceived news site to the tune of $250 million. Just over two months ago, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, spent the same amount to personally buy The Washington Post. That’s half a billion dollars dropped into serious news production, a sector that investors in distressed assets have been fleeing.

And Steve Jobs wife is investing as well.

It doesn’t stop there. In July, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, invested in Ozy Media, a news start-up, joining a group that includes the angel investor Ron Conway; Larry Sonsini, a lawyer from an eminent Silicon Valley law firm; Dan Rosensweig of Chegg.com; and David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

What are some of things these  people are thinking?

“I think that technology could help find a way to actually do important journalism for our democracy that can impact many more people and help serve it to a general-interest audience in a way that can be commercially sustainable,” Mr. Omidyar said. (A separate article has more excerpts from the interview with Mr. Omidyar.)

Or some may just be dreaming.

This unfolding partnership will be fun to behold. For all their differences, the news and technology businesses share a kind of utopianism, an idealistic belief that the work of human hands can make life better for other humans.

Obamacare's Healthcare.gov operations is the new IT spectator sport, a bunch of us are having good laughs

President Obama got on TV to assure us the Healthcare.gov website will be fixed and if you want to skip the web site you can call a 1-800 number.  Uh, the 1-800 number has problems too.

There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"

The author goes on to point out a flaw in using the 1800 phone system.

There was only one problem: the Obamcare toll-free phone number was overloaded and immediately crashed. According to Lou Dubois of NBC News, "Call centers now appear overloaded due to volume. 'Please call back.'" Dubois wasn't the only one reporting the new glitches. Annie Lowrey of The New York Times added, "For the record, just called 1-800-318-2596, got a busy signal." Kasie Hunt of NBC News: "Just called the number. They said there's too high call volume and call back on the weekend. 'We're sorry for the inconvenience. Goodbye.'"

The Washingpost focuses on the damage control and Obama's speech pretty much ignores the significance of the problems.

"Hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work" is an understatement. "Hasn't worked" is closer to the truth.

But you wouldn't have known that from Obama's speech. Most of it was dedicated to the good the federal health-care law is already doing. The president emphasized that the Affordable Care Act "is not just a Web site." It's a Medicaid expansion, and it's got consumer protections, and delivery-system reforms, and all of those are ongoing.

The Washingpost highlights that the website operation is critical for the legalize and success of Obamacare.

The problem is that much of the law is a Web site. When the White House defined what it would mean for the Affordable Care Act to be a success, that definition ran right through the Web site. And Obama knows the Web site needs to be fixed. "We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team," he promised. "And we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed."

I don't know about you, but a bunch of my friends are getting some good laughs.

As we all know developing solutions that need to scale to millions of users is really hard.  The US government has never had a system that has millions of users regularly using a website as individual users.  

In the end despite all the posturing by Obama, and the Best IT talent in the country, we'll see if Obamacare succeeds or not.

In the end, though, Obama's speech doesn't matter. Either the Web site will be fixed in a reasonable time frame, and the law will work, or it won't be fixed and the law will begin to fail. The Affordable Care Act is no longer a political abstraction. It's the law, and it will be judged not on how well politicians message it, but how much it does to improve people's lives.

The 4 things that are signs of Mobile Change, Strengths of Blackberry fade

When I worked with construction guys I had to have a Blackberry Curve.  After 3 months I figured out the construction world and I were not compatible and within another 3 months I was to dump the Blackberry Curve and the construction company.  Now I have an iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and Blackberry is near end of life.  There are some who really miss their Blackberry Curve.  Do I?  No.  I have iPhone apps and social features.  I have Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with 1920 x 1080 display, quad core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32 GB  + 64 GB microSD storage, Stylus, and Android.

So what do Blackberry Curve loyal users miss?  

1. Physical Keyboard

2. Blackberry Server for reliable e-mail

3. Days of battery life

4. A kick ass cell antenna

These 4 strengths of the Blackberry Platform is so irrelevant to a large percentage of the market.  I don't use my Phone to check e-mail, but don't write on it.  Reliable e-mail is a cloud service many times better than an enterprise IT group. Plugging in once a day is OK.  Although I am sometimes able to go 2 days with my Galaxy Note 3.  I spend 98% of my time connected to wifi.