Frivolous Friday, 07.30.2010: I/T bar jokes

A Lenovo laptop walks into a bar. "Hey!" yells the bartender, "This place is non-smoking!"

A Windows program walks into a bar populated by Linux programs, who eye it suspiciously. "I hope you don't think that 'free as in beer' applies to you?" asks the bartender sarcastically. "It's cool," says the Windows program; I can work with WINE."

An iPod Classic walks into a bar and chats up an iPod Touch. The pair seem to be hitting it off well when the iPod Classic pays its bill, puts on its coat and starts to walk out. As it passes the bartender, the barkeep whispers, "What went wrong? You two looked like you were getting on." The iPod shrugs and says, "Eh, I guess we just didn't click, you know?"

A group of .ADD, .DEV and .DRV files walks into a bar. All, save for one, order drinks. As he hands the non-drinking file its complimentary Coke, the bartender winks and says, "You must be the designated driver."

Tux the Penguin walks into a bar with an egg tucked under his arm. "You sure you wanna bring your kid in here?" asks the bartender worriedly, "This place gets pretty rough." "Hey, it's my kid we're talking about," protests Tux. "Of course it's got a secure shell."

A USB drive walks into a bar. "What can I set'cha up with?" asks the barkeep. "We got beer, wine and mixers." "Not quite my style," says the USB drive, "but I wouldn't say 'no' if you have a port available."

A touchscreen walks into a bar, counts the money in its wallet, and asks "How much for taps?"

A Windows installer walks into a bar and proceeds to imbibe heavily. At closing time, the barkeep pessimistically assesses the installer's ability to drive. "No worries," the installer reassures him, "I was just about to call a .CAB anyway."

A Windows registry and a group of Windows programs walk into a bar. The programs become progressively inebriated, while the registry stays stone-cold sober. "They're gonna make it home okay, right?" the bartender sternly asks the registry. "Absolutely," replies the registry, "I've got all their keys."

A group of *nix command-prompts walks into a bar and outstays all the other patrons. Finally, the weary bartender announces, "Alright, folks: You don't have to 'cd /home' but you can't stay here."

Walking into a truism

A brief browser plugin issue with one of "my" power-users pushed the transitioning part of the application to a newer platform. Most days, owning the application that no one else wants to figure out can probably be considered a blessing. The downside, of course, is that no one has your back when you go spelunking in years-old code that's been the work of many hands. And it leaves you as the sole translator not only of the "how," but the "why" to boot.

Such brain-dumping, IMO, is the real reason for word processing--particularly when your brain's in firehose mode. It took two pages of twelve-point Times New Roman, multiple files open in the IDE, multiple tables and functions displayed in the database client, and the text search grinding (multiple times) through hundreds of pages of code before I remembered the adage, "If you truly wish to understand something, try to change it."

Ouch. It's not the first time that lesson's hit home for me. But usually it doesn't hit quite so hard. And knowing that I'm not nearly finished with that list only makes it worse.

Another anecdotal argument for diversity

We're putting the house back together in the whirlwind wake of the Siding and Window Dudes. The dust kicked up by a single window replacement was more evident in the bathroom than elsewhere, due to its preponderance of flat, shiny surface. Then, too, the guyzos had to wash their hands someplace, so the vanity bowl was pretty spattered. So as long as I'm wiping off dust and scouring off spatters, it wasn't that much more work to make it extra-pretty.

Somewhere along the line, Dennis, whose hobbies stretch to the study and re-creation of medieval armor, discovered that the Gel-Gloss he uses to shine and rust-proof armor works amazingly well on a clean vanity. The surfaces can be polished to beyond what Windex can offer, and for the next week or so water beads up in the sink-bowl, the better to race down the drain and not pool into scale. Lovely stuff, that.

The point--the thicker end of it, anyway--is that a fringe perspective provided a better solution than a conventional one (i.e. relying on a standard household cleaner) would have done. The sharper end of the same point is "Don't dismiss out-of-left-field ideas out of hand."

Is the internet making us weirder?

Dennis used to brew his own beer--sort of turned himself into kind of a beer snob, IMO. Which, no doubt, is what prompted my co-worker to email me an article about the world's strongest, most expensive, and probably most oddly-packaged beer. A somewhat more SFW edition is here, although it omits the part about the "koozies" being (humanely?) sourced from roadkill.

I passed the original link on to Dennis thinking that our species is becoming weirder by the nanosecond. Then I thought better of that sentiment. Rather, I think that the perception of weirdness is like the perception of violent crime, at least in one respect. Gallup and other organizations have noted that violent crime has dropped off since the early 1990s, but the zeitgeist has yet to catch up with reality . Largely thanks to the internet, crime reporting is padding for the 24 hour news cycle. For instance, child abductions are tweeted in real-time, rather than having to wait for their turn on a new print run of milk cartons. Similarly, weird doesn't have to wait for word of mouth or write-ups in irregularly-published fanzines.

But there ends the similarity. While the inflated perception of crime doesn't equate to a heightened endorsement of it, propagating the weird via the internet probably makes that little (or large) slice of whimsical weirdness that lurks in many of us feel less alone. That, to my mind, is an excellent thing. And although the decadence of a 110-proof critter-encased brew is solely the perogative of the rich, weird comes in all price ranges, even free. And, mostly thanks to the internet, much of it is open source to boot.

Programming off the grid

I had hoped to be wrong about what working in a new platform would be like without access to internet resources, but it so far is going pretty much as expected. In other words, I find myself plundering the indices of the two Android books I own. My habit for skimming is proving to be a detriment rather than otherwise, simply because of the differences in the way books and internet information are (typically) organized. To some extent, I already appreciated this, but even a few hours of conscripting a motley platoon of bookmarks really brought the point home--and slammed the door behind it.

One thing that does surprise me, however, is how much mileage I'm getting from NetBean's auto-completion feature. It's not "Help" in the disturbing sense of Microsoft's much-despised "Clippy," or even so much the way a spreadsheet tries to guess what you're typing in a cell based on the values already there. Auto-completion in this case can be used to show you the classes within a package or the variables, constants and functions within a class. Which, given the fact that the books I'm using don't include a complete Android lexicon, is very useful.

That being said, the concept of learning to program from a mere book--whose examples may or may not address what I'm actually trying to accomplish--is pretty foreign now. I never, EVER want to go back to that world.

Experiment ahead (early Sunday post)

The CenturyLinq tech. who "fixed" the internet access that spontaneously died sometime after 8 am Thursday arrived & left without bothering to verify that our modem could actually talk to their servers. The earliest we can expect the problem to be addressed is Monday. Which, for me, guarantees that no significant web work will be done. In the spirit of lemons -> granitas, I'll use it an excuse to get some Android dirt under my fingernails. But with much of the development information (language syntax, examples, Q&A sites, blogs) online, that should be an...interesting...exercise.

Confession: I'm "cheating" by taking all 56Mb of the JavaSDK docs on a USB drive--I may be odd, but I'm insane. In any case, it should be an eye-opener to see how dependent I've become on internet access. Will report back Monday.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend, all. I just noticed this bright yellow thing in the sky that I think I remember seeing somewhere before--just not positive it was in La Crosse, though... ;-)

Skunkworks = Proactive pessimism

I finally managed to carve out a few hours to take a hard look at the bug/feature-tracking web application that could replace the office currently uses (that's no longer by its open-source developers). The irony is that, as much as the existing system is tolerated (at best), replacing it--even with something better--will not be pretty. For the time being, I'm deluding myself that I have no illusions about that. [insert wry expression]

Pity is, it's too late in the game to "smuggle" it into use as a skunkworks project. "Smuggle" as in, "Pssssst! Hey, look at this thing I'm using to hack into the system! If you promise not to tell anybody, I'll create an account for you." (Hey, I might as well get some use from the gossip factory, for a change...)

Frivolous Friday, 07.23.2010: Conundrum

Not to talk of myself in the third person, but this recovering tech. writer had a bad moment earlier in the week. The Siding Dudes had swapped in a new window above the kitchen sink that day. On the counter I found an almost-neon red envelope boldly labeled "Installation Instructions." Kinda hard for Siding Dudes to miss while tidying up at the end of the day, but they somehow managed it.

At the time of the discovery, however, I wasn't aware that each replacement window (for this brand, anyway) includes such documentation. (Dennis had already found at least one other by that point.) So it was dismaying, nearly nine years after the career-change, to find myself unable to decide which of the two was actually the worse:

1. The possibility that the contractors I'm paying handsomely to arm my house against Wisconsin weather are n00bs, or
2. The fact that the envelope was still sealed.

Should HR grads be the future go-to CEOs?

I needed to put a new feature into testing this past Tuesday. Our new QA dude has been hanging long enough that it's possible that he could potentially pick it out the queue. All the same, three measely hours of product "training"--a polite term for being water-boarded with an information fire-hose--is hardly enough to equip him for nuance. The upshot was that, in the time it took me to type out testing instructions & parameters, I could quite realistically have done it myself--perhaps all the way up the server food chain. But there's no way he'll ever know where the proverbial bodies are buried if there's no dirt under his fingernails. That's just the cost of doing business. That being said, it's a non-trivial cost, and one that shouldn't be paid more than absolutely necessary.

I imagine that anyone who manages people in just about any industry will nod and smile in recognition. What, then, to make of Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat: Economics Degree is Best Route to CEO Job? If, as conventional wisdom holds, the workforce whose main job is to innovate (meaning synthesizing creativity and problem-solving) may not be best organized by a value-system largely driven by supply-and-demand, and relentless optimization of inputs and outputs. Understand that I'm not trying to create a strawman picture of economists, but that's what I recall from my exposure in college, and from a healthy dose of business-related reading in my daily news-cruise.

Yet I think we can agree that--short of a skunkworks project and those have their own fallout--innovation typically isn't something you can inject into an organization from the outside. Maintaining a reliable level of creative problem-solving requires context, and that requires longevity of staff. A frothy churn in headcount means that wheels will be reinvented more often and the wrong problems will be attacked, simply because the understanding of why things are being done won't permeate the organization as quickly, if at all. And the longer it takes, the harder that context has to fight its way past pre-conceived notions.

Granted, it's been well over two decades since my last (100-level) Economics class, but I'm nevertheless skeptical that workforce-retention skills dominate the curriculum. And if the US economy looks to innovation to remain competitive, that's a problem.

- - - - -

Apologies for the lateness of Thursday's post: We lost our internet connection sometime between Thursday morning and the time I arrived home. Hopefully it'll be fixed tomorrow.

One link, two thoughts

The way I see it, there are two separate takeaways from this ArsTechnica piece: Vendor inaction leads researcher to disclose Safari, IE flaw.

The first is that convenience doesn't come for free. One of my post-college drinking buddies kept himself solvent refurbishing cars in the days before title branding, and if he taught me one lesson (apart from calling him for a diagnosis before taking my car to the mechanic so I could at least talk a good game), it's that features exist to break. Or, like automatic windows, freeze up in the -30 lows of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

In the same sense, any software that makes it easy to sling sensitive data around the internet is also breakable. And, as a matter of fact, is extra-vulnerable because a certain percentage of the software development community will be hammering at it harder than a more innocuous feature. That's the reason I never, ever allow browsers to remember form data, much less passwords, for me. It's the difference between hobbling along under your own power and being pushed about in a Barcalounger on wheels: Even hobbling, you know who's actually in the driver's seat.

The second point is, IMO, the unspoken point of the ArsTechnica piece, namely the difference between open source (FOSS) and proprietary software. Even when the proprietary product is more polished, more extensible (or what have you) than its FOSS counterpart, there's a crucial difference in the way that vulnerabilities are viewed.

In the case of FOSS, any functional imperfection is an unexpected outcome, and thus more or less a comment upon the person or team who released it. An actual security hole is exponentially more so. That can be a good thing (i.e. a strong motivation to fix things Right This Very Nanosecond) or a bad thing (a certain lack of big-picture perspective, which is crucial for allocating limited resources).

Then there's proprietary software. Particularly the web browser, which--sexy HTML5 notwithstanding--is IMTLHO still hugely overworked and underappreciated because of its dot-com baggage. Integrated pest management isn't the least appropriate metaphor for handling proprietary software bugs, implicit pun included. How critical is any particular vulnerability? It depends on who will have the loudest freak-out. Which is precisely the kind of thing guaranteed to get up a hacker's nose--meritocracy carrying a lot more water in that sphere and all.

Even with some grasp of the philosophical differences, I nevertheless fail--meaning, "fail" as shorthand for #epicfail--to grok the attitude of (some) brand-name corporations when it comes to security vulnerabilities or other deal-breaking flaws in their products. Why?

A.) Someone just handed them free testing time, which at a minimum merits the uncommon decency of a "thank you."
A-point-one.) That same someone isn't keeping mum about the flaw to profit from it.
B.) Someone cared enough about a product to dig that deeply into it--someone who could easily be turned in a cheerleader for the company by dint of a pleasant, appreciative response.
C.) Given the afore-mentioned meritocracy, that someone is primarily looking for kudos. If the messenger is ignored--not even shot, just ignored--the I/T community will more than amply fill the kudos-vaccuum if they are not supplied by the rightful source.
D.) By circular-filing or black-holing such warnings, the software company in question is broadcasting a signal to its wiser employees and would-be employees: "We don't have the cajones to face our problems anymore. Sure, we can snooker college grads into working for us b/c they can tell their parents/GFs/BFs/SOs that they work for us. They haven't learned the difference between Lysol and gangrene. And when they do, there are non-compete agreements...and more graduates."

With all the AntennaGate joking about reality distortion fields, what's lost is the fact that it's not an isolated phenomenon. There lies the proverbial lion's share of blame, naturally. But that leaves the hyenna's share...and even the vulture's share. I don't care what the UI books preach: At some level, the user has to take responsibility for thinking. If only because outsourcing thought in the online world is every bit as dangerous as outsourcing it in the real one.

"Circular logic"

Maybe it's just my dorky sense of humor, but I thought this was kind of funny. The back-story was that I couldn't restore a database to the server running on my workstation, and our inimitable Sys. Admin. quickly deduced that I was behind on upgrades. He pointed me to the right installation packaged, then noticed that I had two client connections open to different database servers: "You probably want to close SQL Management Studio...or it will be sad."

I snickered in appreciation of the "it will be sad" euphemism. But I also found it humorous that even somone who groks hardware and software at a level my pretensions will never manage still anthrpomorphizes computers like (almost) everyone else. We humans, when faced with something we cannot completely understand and/or control, seem to like casting it in our own image--as if that somehow will improve our relationship with it. On its own plane, there's a logic to such thinking; it's just that such logic and the logic of physics and Math and Computer Science have nothing to do with each other. Yet it is what it is.

The underlying irony, of course, is that our understanding and mastery of ourselves is, at best, shaky. And so foisting "humanity" upon machinery probably isn't the wisest thing we could do. In some senses, it's taking the elements of unpredictability and unreliability and bringing them full circle, isn't it? Maybe that's something to keep in mind the next time your workstation or home computer is "being stupid."

A kindred spirit?

Just over a week into the project, Laufenberg Construction's done pretty well by us so far. Dennis was a little disappointed that replacement windows didn't arrive last Friday (best-case scenario) but was correspondingly jazzed when they landed today rather than tomorrow (worst case scenario). Me? Well, after that the notorious three hour sales call (my first exposure to home contractors because, well, Dennis is just that competent), I was bracing for a spectrum that ranged between fine-print weaseling and outright chicanery.

Apart from being pleased overall, I'm also smiling because I think recognize a certain...shall we say...oh, what's that term again?...ah, yes, "sandbagging" in the dates. Weather Dept. permitting, I wouldn't be suprised to see things wrapped up by the end of the week--a full week "ahead" of schedule. Something we software developers wouldn't know anything whatsoever about. (Barring hearsay, y'understand...)

(Wink, wink.)

(Nudge, nudge.)

In all seriousness, though: As freaky as the weather's been lately, I can't say as I blame Mr. Laufenberg in the least. I mean, when you think about it in the cross-profession apples-to-apples sense, weather is really just another gremlin. Which makes the language of project management pretty darned universal. At least from where I'm sitting.

From the mouths of babes and all that...

For me, the first and second order of business at the La Crosse County Fair are checking in at the Bee Booth and trying not to scald myself with my yearly ration of one corn-dog. Not necessarily in that order. Today's gig, however, wound down around five, and going back home before the six o'clock tear-down would have been silly. So Dennis' and my stomachs pointed our feet to the midway.

The 4-H stand seemed like a likely prospect. And big, big ups to them for a sparkling-clean and well-organized set-up. Not to mention grilled cheese sandwiches which are absolutely textbook--yea, even ANSI-caliber--nay, make that Platonic archetype--golden and gooey. At the tail-end of closing day, no less--a time when the cooks could have been phoning it in. But didn't. Purr....

The wind-down, no doubt, fueled a certain up-tick in marketing, namely the young gentleman who made the rounds with a $1.25/slice tray of sausage pizza. "Goes great with pie," he noted in reference to our desserts. I LOLed in appreciation of his efforts and countered, "What doesn't?" (In retrospect, I'm kinda sorry I did--it might've just been worth the extra time on the ellipticals.) Less than a minute later, the price had dropped to $1.00/slice, and less than a minute after that, one of the youngsters across the way was attempting to chisel the per-slice-price down to seventy-five cents by way of fifty. "They learn quickly," I thought (with no small amusement) during the haggling that ensued.

Which is as it should be. I only wish I'd had that I'd had such a grasp at the same age.

A most important question

Whoever last sided/painted our house picked a combination of gunmetal grey and black. The grey (siding) part was battered and showing its age, so we (gulp!) bit the bullet to have it replaced. Vetting the new siding color probably pales in comparison to, say, electing a new Pope. Or a Venetian Doge. Or the latest American Idol.

Probably.

But that was only the first part. Black and creamy yellow don't play all that well together. So in this afternoon's full daylight, I hung a handful of sample cards at intervals along the front, and Dennis and I played out the usual domestic schtick. Our finalists were:

• "Congo," a darker green, was selected for its sharper contrast against the yellow.
  
• "Royal Forest," its softer green and muted grey notes guaranteed to lighten the whole front of the house.
  
• "Chipotle Paste," almost a burgandy, promised to hold its own against the wide swaths of yellow--and then some.
• "Royal Liqueur," with its brandy-eque richness, played up the creaminess of the yellow while simultaneously cozying up to it in a way the other three didn't.
  

[Insert wry expression] Blech. I dislike choosing colors almost as much as I dislike painting. But Dennis once wished that Garanimals would make clothes for engineers, just he didn't have to figure that kind of thing out on his own. So I figure I'd better step up.

Even considering factors like curb appeal (for when we eventually sell) didn't narrow down the list. "Any one of them would work," said Dennis. "Well," I observed, "it basically boils down to: Do you want to blend in or do you want to stand out? It's just like life." A second later I thought, "Y'know, that applies to business too."

An hour or so on--impatiently waiting for paint samples to dry--I haven't revised that thought. I don't think that there's anything wrong with either choice: It's just the eternal weighing of risk versus return, with elements of style, taste and temperament also thrown into the scales. So I wouldn't presume to favor one over the other. I just know that you can't ever have both at once.

Frivolous Friday, 07.16.2010: "Language" support

One of my projects for this weekend involves setting up an installation of the (open source) bug-tracking system Mantis and customizing it convincingly enough to make it passable for a demonstration on Monday. Part of said customization is switching its (relatively) bare-bones list of statuses to something closer to what the office would use.

Mantis is polished enough to have internationalization capabilities, but I couldn't resist joking to Dennis that the "English" version wasn't nearly specific enough. I mean, speaking as a 'merican an' all, there's English, and then there's how they talk over on that lovely little island to the west of continental Europe.

Big difference. I know, 'cuz I more or less grew up on BBC re-runs, y'understand. And it was definitely educational. For instance, I know that J.S. Bach wrote one heck of a lot of classy theme music for the BBC. Years later, I'm still at a loss to understand why they're all lumped together as the "Brandenburg Concertos." C'mon...even I know that Brandenburg is someplace in Germany. That's most certainly not Great Britain. (Best efforts of the Saxons and Hanovrians--with honorable mention to the Luftwaffe and Operation Sea Lion--notwithstanding, nat'cher'ly.)

But back to the point.

So. Let's say, for example, that the "English" version of a bug tracker has the following statuses:

• New
• Assigned
• In progress
• QA passed
• Deployed into production
• Closed
  

Extrapolating from my public television education (plus a handful of Eddie Izzard DVDs), the British translation should, by all rights, look more like this:

• Wotcher!
• Up for it
  
• Stuck in
• Sorted
• Bob's your uncle
• The dog's bollocks

But then--albeit a tad belatedly--epiphany struck: "Hold up! Why on earth would we even need language support? After all, aren''t programmers mostly the same the world 'round? Why not just support a more universal language? You know: The Esperanto of Geek?" Simply put: You could cross several generations of programmers with a syntax that borders on Junginan racial memory. I speak, of course, of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. To wit:

• There's one!
• Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: You're my only hope.
• It's not impossible; I used to bulls-eye wamp rats in my T-16 back home.
  
• You're all clear, kid! Now let's blow this thing so we can all go home.
• Great shot! That was one in a million!
• The Force will be with you. Always.
  

(Or, perchance, for a slightly campier and gothier crowd, Army of Darkness:

• In God's name, what Hellspawn lurks there?!
  
• Well, hello, Mister Fancy-pants!
• This...is my...BOOMSTICK!
  
• Groovy.
• Buckle up, bonehead: You're goin' for a ride.
• Hail to the King, baby.)
  

Now. I suppose that if you had a strictly Gen-Y crowd, you might want to opt for Firefly references instead. (And if your I/T staff is a Millennial pure-play...well...Cthulu help you, because I certainly can't.) But you get the basic idea, yes?

Except that then I remembered that non-programmers might actually want to submit line-items to a bug tracking system. At least in theory. I've heard...rumors...that code might not actually be perfect when it reaches The Real World. (I speak strictly of other programmers' code, of course.) In such a scenario--a statistical outlier, to be sure--perhaps such statuses might be confusing, perhaps even startling, to the uninitiated. Fair enough.

The point (and believe it or not, there actually is one) is that the more fluently a tool--be hardware, software, or sharpened stick--speaks the native dialect, the more likely it will be used.

Lemons -> Lemonade

Working in I/T seems to breed a paradox in expectations. On one side of that proverbial coin, it's a truism that developers underestimate--sometimes grossly--the amount of complexity, time and bugs will be involved in code they develop. On the flip-side, there's no small part of paranoia in trusting code not written by themselves or their most reliable colleagues.

Thus, although I've experienced the brilliance of the Ubuntu developers, testers and packagers time and again, I backed up all critical files before upgrading. As it turns out, hardware was ultimately the culprit, bringing to life the worse-case scenario of rebuilding and reconfiguring my workaday setup. "Worse-case," you'll note--not "worst case." (There's plenty more room on the darker end of the good-bad-ugly spectrum.)

Time I could have used for creating stuff is now irrevocably lost to the process of upgrading, debugging, reinstalling, and configuring--all bookended by schlepping files between internal and external hard drives. That's the "lemon" part. The "lemonade" payoff comes in terms of a cleaner computer, and a healthy triaging of applications and data. In other words, the evolution of Ubuntu Linux emphatically does not select for fatter pack-rats.

Understand that I'm not looking down on Windows or Mac users when I write this, but I wonder whether folks on those platforms wouldn't ultimately be happier with those systems if an upgrade (and a highly recommended backup prior to it) were available in a span of months rather than years.

Rumors of the desktop's demise...

I'm patching a new installation of Linux tonight, after Dennis (who still enjoys playing with hardware) dropped a new motherboard into the desktop case to deal with a flamed-out hard drive controller. After over a week of computing on my second-hand laptop, I honestly don't grok the prediction that the desktop dinosaur will be superceded by fuzzy mammals small enough to hitch a ride in a backpack, pocket or man-purse.

As much as the laptop's keyboard feels natural, my problem-child wrist is a bit grouchy, my lap is quite warm, and most importantly, I frankly haven't done much "work" since losing the desktop that hasn't been word processing or web browsing. Mainly because I'm too spoiled with screen real estate--something that's at a premium, even on a battery-pig like this.

If the work of the future is all about creativity and collaboration, that pretty well guarantees multi-tasking. We have a number of different jobs at my office, but none of us has anything less than either two monitors or one honkin' big one. Why? Because collaboration means email and IM at a minimum. Folks on leaner budgets may also live & die by Skype for communication as well. Then there's the need for research and corroboration: Enter the web browser. Finally, there's whatever tool-set is appropriate to the job. (In my case, you can pretty much count on an integrated development environment, at least one database window, and probably at least one other tool for file comparison, search, or transfer.) I'd happily take a third monitor if I could.

The point is that only something with that physical real estate (plus text input and ready access to all the user interface elements available) allows for information to flow between people and between applications and eyeballs without the cost of interruption. Single-tasking--that darling of the "curated computing" simply won't cut it for anything but specialized applications and recreation. But the cross-disciplinary work that creates those applications and amusements? Trying to build those on a gadget could be the short road to flying lessons for the gadget in question--or at least to bankruptcy for the company that tried to make a profit that way.

Policy liability

Watching our office's thoroughly indispensible Sys. Admin. attack a problem is always a thing of wonder. Today was an especially good example, riding shotgun through the debugging of email not being sent by a new Linux development server (set up safely inside our network). In the end, the fix boiled down to two options:

A.) Open a ticket with the (swamped) corporate I/T folks to white-list the test server and wait an indefinite amount of time
B.) Shunt mail off to an email relay under our control and have a fully-functional application ready to demo by next Monday

Gee, bet'cha can't guess which option we chose, huh? Fortunately, Sys. Admin. knows his stuff: Frankly, I'm flat-out embarassed to have ever held a similar title. Thus, it's not a big deal from a security standpoint. But it does highlight the rationale for hiring good I/T folks, keeping them close to the folks they enable, and giving them a wide swath of latitude for exercising their judgment.

Think that I/T (and their pesky habit of asking for more hardware) is merely overhead? Here's a not-unlikely scenario. Suppose that space on a network hard drive is rationed (because hard drives cost money, don't'cha know) and/or I/T isn't supposed to "waste time" setting up limited group access to specific resources. (Absurd, but does it ever happen!) Network hard disk usage stays under its cap: Good job--here's a cookie.

Except that a middling Windows-savvy employee who needs to make files available merely has to share her/his hard drive (or a folder on that drive) to make it available to people with whom they need to collaborate. If the network uses the standard Active Directory setup, absolutely anyone--not just their collaborators--on their network should be able to see whatever they share. Definitely not a good security scenario, that...

What's worse, though, is that if only network drives are being backed up (which is typically the case), if the person sharing files ever loses that hard drive to corruption, bad hardware, etc., the data (and productivity) on which others were relying are gone, quite possibly forever. Oops. Guess it would have made more sense to let I/T spend fifteen extra minutes to give someone and extra five bucks' worth of hard drive space, hey?

The fundamental problem with policy (in which I include overly-formalized processes)--in my biased and considerably less than humble opinion--is that it's almost always geared at a lowest common denominator. When the upper percentiles in skill level are saddled with those limitations, they will probably flout the rules altogether. Which in itself is probably no great harm, except that it also leaves the middle. By which I mean the kind of folks who might've learned a trick at their previous company or picked something up from one of the "technorati," only without the context of when it is and isn't appropriate.

That's a dangerous scenario. And if it blows up, I certainly can't spare any pity. Because it's not a technical failure: It's a failure of leadership and innovation.

A thought on Fortune favoring the prepared

An interesting message was waiting on the home voice mail this evening. Apparently a honeybee swarm was hanging out in the maple tree next to the office. The caller, commendably, was trying to do the right thing, meaning not call the exterminator. So I've left a message on the gentleman's work voice mail, letting him know that we'll take care of it tomorrow, assuming that the bees haven't already found their long-term digs by then. Dennis' beesuit and the oversize IBM swag shirt I wear during our apian adventures are in the dryer now, largely because the lingering scent of smoke would be counter-productive in a swarm scenario.

If the swarm doesn't abscond and we don't make a complete mess of hiving this batch, there are a couple different scenarios that could play out. If it's a tiny swarm, likely for a normal July, the Ladykins and their Queen will shortly be on display at the La Crosse County Fair in the booth behind the Dairy Bar. (In case you were wondering: Why, yes, that is a shameless plug. So glad you asked...) A larger swarm--presaged by our caller's "I've never seen anything like it"--would spend some time in quarantine (to check for foulbrood and mites) before taking up residence next to the other two. In the either case, we have whatever options the two splits (i.e. starter hives with Russian-Carniolan hybrid Queens) care to offer us.

But the point is that we'd be a couple of dorks in beesuits, armed with a saw and a ladder and a cardboard box, were it not for the woodworking competence of Dennis. Dennis who disappears into the garage for a day or weekend and comes out with more-than-functional equipment. (Have I mentioned that I married a quiet genius?) Which, philosophically, more or less pinpoints the no-man's-land between my belief in lean processes and my understanding of the need for a bit of slop in inventory and schedules to roll with slightly freaked-out voicemails. It's not unlike the adage about always trusting your fellow man and always cutting the cards.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not counting on a successful hiving. (Heck, I'm probably jinxing the whole venture just by writing about it.) Because, in seven-plus years of being trained by bees, we've had a perfect record of coming up skunked in such ventures. (n00bs!) As I'm starting to suspect, honeybees are like the Ancient Gods: If you want to give them a good laugh, make plans. But if you want to disgust them, don't try at all.

The Managers of Catan

My best friend--henceforth known as H.--just switched roles at the brand-name company for which she works. (Yes, it was Reorg Season again...) For the first time, she's stepping into a position that is not a hand-me-down. Nor is it a particularly well-charted position. Despite the fact that such situations are, at best, the proverbial double-edged sword, she's cautiously enthusiastic about being able to pick some of her own colors in a such a paint-by-numbers organization.

As part of the transition, H. took two developers who previously worked for her, with the prospect that management might supply more. I teased her about the possibility that this uncharted territory upon which she (and possibly other managers) were loosed was actually her company's version of Settlers of Catan.

Sadly, she didn't buy into my theory. Pity: It might just take the edge off the depressing spectacle of corporate empire-building if one could think of it in those terms. Granted, I've never won a game of "Settlers" in my life. But at least I'd understand the rules.

The flip-side of "Know thy enemy"

The 2010 summer meeting of the Wisconsin Honey Producer's Association was held today. I'm not politically-saavy, but I'm beginning to suspect that Wisconsin must carry some clout in the world of honeybees, given how guest speakers have traveled from halfway across the country for our sweet sakes.

This meeting the ante was upped a bit, as no less than the President of the American Beekeeping Federation (David Mendes) flew in from Boston to give two spiels, one more didactic and the other more of a "listening tour" session. What's particularly significant--quite apart from such a generous donation of time--is the fact that rapproachment continues between the ABF and the American Honey Producers Association (AHPA), which splintered off (with all due acrimoniousness) from the ABF sometime--I believe--in the 1960s.

In a sense, Mr. Mendes was in "enemy territory" in another sense. His outfit is almost exclusively dedicated to pollinating, with a secondary income from selling off the bees he doesn't have room for, and honey only a far-distant tertiary money-maker.

The history of American apiculture since the split has certainly been interesting--in the sense of the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." Highlights: The virulent bacterial disease known as American foulbrood pulled ahead in the evolutionary arms race against antibiotics. Africanized honeybees invaded the southern United States. The parasitic varroa mite population exploded onto the scene to devastate bee populations (kept, but especially wild) and begin its own arms race against pesticides. And in the last decade, colony collapse disorder appeared, triggering the ongoing debate on whether it's a disease or symptom.

Those are just the big hitters. The list of apian diseases, disorders and parasites numbers in the dozens. All the while, government budget cuts on various levels have closed bee lab after bee lab, and pushed the brunt of the research into a handful of university entomology or agriculture departments. And, to a lesser degree, private industry groups such as the ABF. Even the perennially cash-strapped WHPA sets aside a small sum to fund researchers.

In 20/20 hindsight, such R&D cuts couldn't have come at a worse time. I mean that largely from a scientific standpoint, but also from a human one. Bickering added to the competing interests of the beekeeping world certainly didn't help present the united front that would have been required for making the case for continued tax-funded investment in bee research. And, as important as the research itself, the investment payoff in the form of an ever-growing central repository of data, results and peer-reviewed recommendations representative of the entire United States, not just a handful of southern locales.

But such regrets are just so much honey through the gate. In 2007, the ABF and AHPA held their first joint national convention, and have tentatively planned to do so triannually. But, perhaps more hopeful for new solidarity among besieged beekeepers was the rapt attention to Mr. Mendes' summary of his year as a pollinating beekeeper, and the techniques used to minimize the stress on his hives. More hopeful still, the intense question-and-answer period following that.

Honeybees are infinitely amazing creatures, biologically and socially. But perhaps we wingless two-leggers can, after all, adapt to communicate and organize and cooperate in our own "hive" in ways that would astound even them. Here's to a more combined future.

Frivolous Friday 07.09.2010: One gadget to rule them all

Earlier this week, I caught the @arstechnica article about the Chromium operating system being enhanced with accelerometer support. (For the non-techies, think Wii and the ability to shuffle the songs by shaking the newer iPods. That kind of thing.) Ironically enough, I saw it on the heels of watching a video of Don Norman talking about the flux in the new "rules" of gadget interfaces breaking the mindset set by decades of desktop use.

So, as long as we're mapping out the new device convergence, may I humbly submit my minimum requirements? Just modest little amenities, such as:

• Touchscreen interface (Android, nat'cherly!)
  
• Fold-out / flip-out QUERTY keyboard
• GPS-aware
• Camera for video/still
  
• Solar-chargeable back
• Tricorder
• Phaser
• Light-sabre (yes, gentle reader, we're mixing franchises...)
• Fold-out hoverboard capable of generating its own force-field and smokescreen for expeditious escapes
• Encyclopedic references to all the modern sciences (for desert island use)
• Fully indexed copy of The Necronomicon--with pronunciation guide!
• Fold-out Numenorian blade, wrought in Westernesse in the young days of the Dunedain (for those chance throw-downs with Nazgul Lords, y'understand...)
• Corkscrew (b/c cutting the top off the bottle w/the light-sabre means the bottle can't be re-used. I have my priorities.)
  

(Oh, and a cellphone with galaxy-wide 4G coverage would be kinda sweet, too.)

But in good Hitchhiker fashion, I still expect to bring my own towel. I mean...sheeesh: What kind of geek-consumer do you think I am, anyway--spoiled or something?

Idle musings from musing while idling

While on hold yesterday, the soundtrack was something that sounded like Elvis, made even more retro by the poor sound quality. That made it easy to for the imagination to slip back into Norman Rockwell Americana, when radio was the workaday window into the world for most. But Elvis's America--at least in pop history--is more about television than radio, I thought. Which, alas, more or less broke the spell.

But I'm not certain I regret that as a loss of anything more than a way to keep myself amused while waiting for customer support. Here's why. Even at the time I was old enough to be self-aware, the phrase "As Seen on TV"--don't ask me how--still conveyed some sense of significance. It was a time when "reality TV" meant the public access channels (and their low-to-no-budget production values). Even several years on (i.e. after cable became commonplace), my post-college roomie's bored channel-surfing landed on a recording of our teammates from Forensics doing improv. theatre (as "Sounds Like Fish") on public access. I clearly remember thinking something like, "Man, they're too talented for this," meaning that they were good enough for "real" channels.

More aptly, though, they were just too early for an internet capable of mass-hosting and mass-streaming original content. Serious bummer, that. As soothingly "simple" as a dial-driven, one-way world driven by radio and television seems, this is still the world I would choose, hands-down. The world where professionally-produced content is voluntarily released cheek-by-jowl with shaky videos of children and cats, Lego animations (both poignant and twisted), mashups, you-name-it. True, the amateurish stuff is why the phrase "As Seen on the Internet" would be laughed into oblivion. But the lack of a content caste system (dictated by the Bicoastal Brahmin) is everything. Absolutely everything.

(Now, if we could only get all the Fish back in the same pond while the flip-cam's rolling, I'd be sorely tempted to call it a perfect world...)

Another "Wall of Separation" needed

Disclaimer: First off, I'm not much of a gamer online or off, so I don't have a horse in the proverbial race. But when Jeff Atwood and Felicia Day called out the upcoming requirement for RealID on the World of Warcraft forums, I took notice. Ashelia gives the insider's take on why this is a particularly bad idea, so I won't reiterate those.

In the vast majority of cases, I'd champion transparency--sunlight being the best disinfectant and all. This is not one of those cases.

I think what's implied, but not explicitly stated, is simply that nearly every downside to MMORPGs ultimately rolls up to folks who can't draw the line between a game and The Real World. And Blizzard's decision to blur that line even further just strikes me as mortally bone-headed. Normally, I'd write it off with a shrug and a "Live by the Stupid, die by The Stupid, morons. Except that I can pretty much bet that this will end with someone stalked and dead and Blizzard having at least one butt-cheek sued off and having to take the Evony low-road to maintain their gravy-train profits.

(Oh,and, by the bye--just purely incidentally, mind you--online gaming is further sensationalized/demonized in public opinion.)

In the long term, no one wins. And, frankly, that brasses me off because any number of suits should have known better. Even toddlers--heck, even that my cats, who exactly aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer--have a better sense of context. The whole point of gaming is to exchange the interacting and problem-solving that Real Life requires for the interacting and problem-solving that actually interests and engages people. Granted, I can't point to corroborating stats, but I feel pretty safe in guessing that most folks mentally impose that Wall of Separation for their own well being ('cuz, well, that's kinda the whole point an' all...). Blizzard has to know how over-the-line bulldozing that wall is. But, then, you can say pretty much the same for every other big-business blow-out ever.

Office survival tip?

I've been reading Emanuel Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz in nibbles during the last week or so. Lots of goodies there, if you're willing to gnaw your way through some over-explained parts. But it only just dawned on me that there's actually a tasty bit of info. in the anecdote (on page 151) that made me laugh when I read it last night.

Russ Bernard, a researcher, had been with a group studying cliques that form in prisons. In his group's work with hundreds of cliques, the network ties always made sense: Race, geography and even--oddly enough--the type of crime committed. Except for one. Then the unexplainable clique escaped together: Mystery solved! (Oops.)

Where I work is far too small--and too naturally tight-knit anyway--for me to explore the ramifications of this insight in workaday life. But should I, by unhappy happenstance, again find myself in a large and unfamiliar office space, it's a tool I'll try to remember is in my toolbag. If you want to find the trouble-makers (in both the good and bad senses of the term), look for the cliques that have no visible context. At least, that's the tip I'm drawing from this anecdote.

A thank you I wish I'd been able to say yesterday

I forget whether this is the second or third time I've managed to brick a workstation by dutifully following instructions from the "experts." But at least one person's directions are worth the bytes: [Linux] PHP not working in userdir (public_html).

I'd love to say thank you on devPlant's website, but--ironically enough--PHP seems to be borked there. But at least once the workstation is un-bricked, I know why the the LAMP upgrade borked my development website, and how to fix it for real next time.

In any case, I just thought that the person(s) behind devPlant deserved a shout-out for sharing what they know, and saving me from re-bricking that PC.

Geeky growing pains

I'm certainly not scoring any Geek Points by admitting this, but I was just pwned by the Nook's web browser. Used to vertical & horizontal scrollbars functioning as both location indicators and navigational tools on the desktop, the ethos of the touchscreen school of user interfaces--wherein Nixon drags China to him rather than bothering to go there himself--was temporarily lost on me. Never mind that this is how the device's main menu functions. Oh, no-no-no-no-no: I've been hard-wired by going-on-twenty years of windowing.

It could have been worse, though: At least my iPhone-packing nephew (and/or his Wii-addicted younger brother) wasn't around to see that near-mortal bout of uncoolness.

Changes have teeth--and have been known to nip. All the same, not changing until it's too late almost always bites. And with that, I'm off to upgrade software and plant my eyeballs back into Reto Meier's excellent book on Android application development.

Frivolous Friday, 07.02.2010: How blogging saved my brain

Go on, laugh if you must, but there's a point to this. Earlier tonight, as I was logging into Twitter, I caught a link to a new Muppets video and followed it to YouTube. There, the Swedish Chef was making "popcorn shrimp" with all the (nearly incomprehensible) mayhem one could want. And off to the side of the main feature, Sam the Eagle presenting "The Stars and Stripes Forever," which begged to be posted to Facebook on the advent of the July 4th weekend.

So I sent both URL to myself, along with a Viking longship rendition of "In the Navy" (from the original TV series) for Dennis--the household Nordic history maven. I even rudely interrupted his Eve-playing to insist he watch the first two, just so I could have the fun of watching him watching those. Next thing I knew, Eve had been literally Rick-rolled by the Muppet rendition of "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Which is when I realized that perhaps the "viral" meme might not be adequate for the likes of YouTube. No, mind-controlling parasite is far more apt. I remembered reading of one parasite that perpetuates itself by making its cricket host drown itself, and still another that tricks its caterpillar host into defending--literally, to the death--the wasp brood that have already fed on it. But I wasn't positive that I had the details all down, so I did a bit of digging.

Whoops.

Turns out, there's way more of that going on than I knew about. Mice are brainwashed out of their fear of cats to perpetuate their parasite's life cycle. Similarly, crustaceans not only change color after being infected, but also seek out their predators. Crickets are chemically near-neutered to promote promiscuity and thus the parasite's transfer as an STD for the six-legged. And it just gets weirder from there.

Then, after being smacked upside the head with the sheer insidiousness of it all, the horrified realization dawned on me that I had infected my husband. Fortunately for me, though, I had a blog post yet to write. If nothing else, I could at least summon the will to warn the internet of websites that not only feast on your time, but also convince you to propagate them to other hosts.

You're welcome.

And now, if my gentle reader will excuse me, I have a husband to rescue.

- - - - - -

Citations for above--one, ironically enough, a YouTube video:

• Assorted critters being mind-controlled by other critters: How Parasites Manipulate Host Behavior
  
• More Gordian works and self-drowing crickets, plus necrophilic houseflies and zombie cockroaches: Weird Worms and Zombies
  
• Wasp parasitization of a caterpillar: Body Invaders
  

Routine freak-out

There's an ulterior motive for this post. Maybe--just maaaaaybe--if I write this out, the project management lesson will stick with me (for good) this time.

For background, when you change a software system, the basic phases run something like:

1. Define
2. Design
3. Code
4. Test
5. Roll-out
6. Post-mortem
   

What's missing from the conventional wisdom is Phase 5.1: Freak-out.

Now. I don't mean to imply that users are necessarily hysterical, although roll-outs are excellent for learning which members of your team are easily-spooked. (And I'll readily admit to having nerves of tin-foil, m'self.) But the bottom line is that, to many folks, the equation is simple: Change I can't control = Danger. That's just the way the cookie crumbles: Get used to it...and use a spoon to fish it out of your of coffee/milk.

So the upshot is, that--regardless of whether the roll-out went flawlessly or had some hiccups--there will be a window of time in which every single last tiny anomaly--real or perceived--will be considered a direct result--or, "the fault," if you will--of changes just rolled out. At which point, your Magic Programmer Hat(TM) doesn't work anymore. You are no longer the High Priest(ess) typing arcane incantations to coax benevolence from the magic pixies living inside the computer. Rather, you are something akin the Sorcerer's Apprentice from Fantasia.

At that point, you need to grab your (Muggle) Desktop Support Hat. And if you don't have one because you've never worked directly with the customer before, you are in Very Serious Trouble. It's times such as these when anything I know about programming computers means bupkis to my customers (until any real problems are debugged and fixed in five minutes or less). What truly matters is good old fashioned bedside manner (the result of two years of support work). And, occassionally, the ability to write explicit instructions for fixing things I can't fix remotely (the result of two-plus years as a technical writer). For someone who suddenly can't get their work done in the way they're used to doing it, that's where the rubber hits the road.

The takeaway is: Don't fool yourself into thinking that there will be no freak-out, even when the roll-out is boringly flawless. But, above all, do not-Not-NOT crash the freak-out, no matter what. That being said, do not try to know everything--even when you're Five Nines Certain you have the gremlin dead to rights. So far as your peeps are concerned, you don't. (Otherwise, things would seem normal, right?). That's where phrases like, "I'm not 100% positive, but my gut feeling is..." come in handy.

Then again, it's not like I'm exactly in a position to be (cough!) "mentoring" (cough!) the next generation of programmers, given that I can't seem to remember to budget time nor emotional capacity for a project's "freak-out" phase. But, hey, at least a negative example is still an example, right? Note to self (and everyone else): Next project, don't be me.