"Back to the Future": The coding version

So there's this.  Tongue firmly lodged in cheek, I call it "The Mark I" (code name "Sylvester.")

See, over the past 10 years, we've tried training Mister Kitty to stay off the counter.  With the result that he's merely become progressively stealthier about it.  Which basically makes it an arms race.  Opening a new front in the war, the "Mark I" compensates for our less-than-preternatural hoomin hearing.

The thing hanging off a mini-USB cable at the top right is a programmable microcontroller (an Adafruit Trinket).  The green rectangle with all the pin-holes is a mini-size solderless breadboard, used to connect all the pieces.  The white square inside the green rectangle is a passive infrared (PIR) sensor.  The black button under the yellow and blue wires is a Piezo element (for making sounds).  And a pushbutton is trying to hide under the second blue wire.

The microcontroller is programmed to listen to the PIR sensor for the signal that it's detected movement of a warm body within its radius of operation.  Finding movement, the microcontroller has the Piezo element play a few bars of Tweety Bird's song ("I tawt I taw a puddy-tat...").  The pushbutton arms and disarms the device.

Crude?  Sure.  Ugly?  Yep.  But it scored its first success this morning when I busted His Doodness.  One yell and he was downstairs, not to be seen for a couple of hours thereafter.  The hope is that eventually he'll realise the futility of his schemes and keep his filthy litter-clogs off the counter.  And then I can re-use all the parts in other projects. 

As a programmer, this sort of project is something of a departure from the norm.  For one thing, software takes second place to hardware.  As the builder, you're responsible for making sure all the circuitry works and you don't fry components, blow fuses, or burn down the house.  That's not something that I normally have to worry about, even when, say, adding more memory to my PC.

But even the software side takes some getting used to.  It's not the language (which is a variant of C++, something I learned back in Programmer School) that's the issue.  It's the confines of the platform.  The Trinket's hardware isn't too far ahead of what went into 80s arcade games.  So you're not going to be writing the War and Peace of computer programs, right?

More significantly, there is no operating system--the processor merely runs the same program over and over until power is interrupted or new code is uploaded.  Now, if you've never written code for a web browser or a smartphone, the only thing you need to understand is that both these environments are set up to be able to do several things at once.

For instance, when you type a search into Google, each time you type a letter, the web browser goes out to a Google web server and lets it know what's currently in the search-box.  The web server responds by sending back its best matches.  That's how the results can change even as you type.  The major point is that the browser can listen for your key-strokes, fire off its information, and present the results as three loosely-connected processes.  In a word:  Multi-tasking.  Just like we easily-distracted hoomins can do.

The Trinket, by contrast, can only do one thing at a time.  In the case of the "Mark I," for instance, it can't listen for the reset button while a note is playing.  So I have to sneak in a check on the button's state in between notes.  But even then I have to be precise about the timing because the button needs time to "debounce" (don't worry about the definition of that--it's not important) and I have to make sure that doesn't add too much of a pause before the next note.

It took more error-and-trial than I should probably admit to, just to make something relatively simple like that work.  I suspect that the browser/smartphone mindset I've lived in for over a decade has a lot to do with that.  Unlearning is always harder than relearning.

Trust me, I'm absolutely not whining.  Back when the Trinket's processing power would have been considered cutting-edge, I would have had to program it in Assembler.  Which is the coding equivalent of building the Taj Mahal one Lego at a time.  Maybe that's what hipster programmers do; I dunno.

But I will say that having this little thing basically kick my butt is actually pretty fun in a "retro" sort of way.  Building like it's 1982...partying like it's 1999.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.27: Geeks and Bees

The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 have been a double-whammy for bees.  At least in our backyard.  Damp autumns, soggy plus dangerously late springs.  I'm not holding out much hope for the handful of hives barely visible in the backyard.  And I'm not at all happy about paying a ridiculous price to basically start from scratch in less than a week.

See, the problem is that the go-to source for imported honeybees, a.k.a. the United States, is pretty much off-limits (some Queens excepted) because of parasite/disease issue (and no doubt the usual tribal stupidities besides...glad we passed NAFTA and all...).  The most logical Canadian sources (Vancouver Island, southwestern British Colombia, and southern Nova Scotia) don't seem much interested in filling the gap.  Or, for all I know, they're just overwhelmed.  So obscene amounts of fossil fuels are expended to import honeybee "packages" (basically starter colonies) from--I kid you not--New Zealand.

From what I can see, the importers (at least the ones we're working with) are almost gratuitously conscientious about it all--even escorting the bees on their journey and making sure they're fed and all.  I'm not knocking them...however much I might envy their trip to New Zealand this time of year.

Okay, so I'm willing to meet Mother Nature more than halfway by tilting at the windmill of keeping honeybees alive into the next spring by dint of making sure they're healthy and well fed (to the extent that such contrary beasties will allow me to intervene).   I'm certainly not above hacking besides.  (Mind you, with electronics--i.e. logging temperature & humidity readings--you're fighting the triple-whammy of unreliable power supplies, the even less reliable elements, and the bees' propensity to shellac everything that's not comb with a substance known as propolis.   Making it all affordable for beekeepers working on precarious margins is another subject altogether.)

Those are the challenges.  But I would take it kindly if the governments of Canada and the United States would, in tandem, extract their craniums from their backsides and figure out how allow healthy, cold-tolerant bees to cross the border in volume.  Even back in Wisconsin, I found the reliance on southern (by which I mean less cold-hardy) bees silly.  Particularly when some of the most notable pollinator research in the U.S. is being done by the University of Minnesota.  I would argue that, all other things being equal, regional boundaries count for much more than national ones.

Given that one out of three bites we take has to be pollinated, my left brain fails to grok how this sort of thing is not a priority for any government.  Particularly for a government so obsessed about national security that it has time to care about who wears what during a citizenship ceremony or is willing to bomb people on sketchy second-hand rationales or wants to classify anything threatening the economy of Canada as "terrorism. "

Trinity

Triads such as those that show up in medieval poetry were, as I understand, a memory device.  And, of course, three is a magic number in a lot of places--literature, religion, what-have-you.

The trinity upon which I sort of bumbled now--prompted by a passage from the somewhat fluffy and unconvincing first novel of The Dresden Files--has to do with one's life as a craftsperson.  Even in a mostly intangible craft like mine.

Student - We have to start somewhere.  But we need to step into other levels as quickly as possible, or it's all just academic.  Worse, we never gain any meaningful confidence.  That only comes from stepping beyond the pre-fabricated exercises, failing, figuring out why, and (hopefully) fixing.  And while it is a dangerous thing to expect to be in this mode indefinitely, it is more dangerous still to think that everything is still ahead and that you have nothing to share with anyone behind you in the journey.

Practitioner - Now we've learned to do something...probably many related somethings.  If we don't know exactly how just yet, we can look it up...or piece it together from StackOverflow, tutorials, YouTube, whatever applies.  Often, we can get by on understanding the "how" more so than the "why."  It is a dangerous thing now to think that we are forever past the Student phase.  It makes us afraid of mistakes which makes us afraid of experimenting, and too attached to what we already know.

Teacher - Stepping into this role should be profoundly humbling.  Humbling by dint of sheer panic and frantic research when we realise that our understanding is not nearly so fleshed-out as we imagined.  Because teaching is ultimately an exercise in creating context in which knowledge can be transferred from experience to inexperience.  This forces us to verify things that we took for granted as Practitioner--taking us full circle back to Student and probably Practitioner besides.  Or should, anyway.  Because if it doesn't, that's the most dangerous state to remain for any extended length of time.

And so the healthiest head-space for any craftsperson to live at any given time is all three. Learn. Do. Teach. Repeat.

Whimsical chagrin

A reminder from Dennis reading aloud to me while I was washing dishes after he made dinner tonight:

"From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.  So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.  Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.  Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Welcome to computer debugging, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.  Only in place of that drop of water substitute "It doesn't work!" and you'd be perfectly at home in the 21st century.

Vicious cycles, Part II

Back in 2009, when "Views from the Bridge" were but a wee lass, I poked fun at a weakness I share in common (solidarity?) with other crafters--namely, the infamous Designated Tote Bag Syndrome(TM).  As it turns out, I was being too narrow in my satire. Because, apparently, it's not just a crafter thing.

Alas, the Moncton area's options for dealers in off-the-shelf electronic components is pretty thin right now.  Also, the loonie-greenback exchange rate being what it is(n't), it's becoming more expensive to mail order certain kinds of stuff.  And, as always, the wanna-be mad inventor can also expect to pay through the nose on shipping.  That confluence of costs makes bulk-purchasing more attractive.  Even for a tight-wad such as your faithful blogger. 

So, pitting my frugal Upper Midwestern upbringing against itself (i.e. saving money by dint of spending money), I ended up with eight programmable micro-controllers (a.k.a. "Trinkets"), because at that quantity they were under 10 loonies a pop (ignoring tax and shipping, as our consumer-geared brains are wont to do).   Those micro-controllers, however, aren't much use to me without a mechanism to plug them into something--in my case, a breadboard. 

But the good folks at CE3 pointed me to BJW Electronics, who were happy to solder headers onto them.  (For the record, I'm not deep enough into this hobby to justify a soldering iron plus accessories.  That, and my Mom still has the toolbox I tried soldering for her in middle school Industrial Arts, and it's frankly embarrassing--like Nidavellir collectively sneezed on cheap sheet metal.  But that's just how Moms roll, so...#whaddyadoamirite?)

That all--again minus HST and whatever shipping costs are associated with me picking them up myself--added about five loons a pop.  But it's still better than the $30-40 CDN you'd pay for a full-blown Arduino, yes?

I already have two--okay, probably three--projects earmarked specifically for the Trinkets, and I assured myself that the other six or five will come in handy.  Sometime.

But then I thought of Halloween.   

And how I can certainly figure out how to make red, white, and yellow LEDs imitate candles in lieu of waiting for the Grande Digue winds to (inevitably) blow out the usual tea lights inside the Jack-o-lanterns.   

And there's no reason (apart, of course, from rain) why the LEDs couldn't be triggered by a passive infrared sensor.   

And as long as I have to pay postage for a PIR sensor anyway, I might as well get a handful.   

And at that point, it might make sense to have another PIR sensor trigger a servo-motor to loose a gravity-propelled "ghost" on a guy-wire strung between the pine trees and our front door.

Aaaaaaannnddd....

My Gentle Reader sees where this is heading, right?

The problem is, now I definitely don't have enough Trinkets to make this happen.  And the irony of it all is that we average two sets of trick-or-treaters per annum. 

But that's just the problem.  With some people, the means infers the motive...and then the motive infers the means...which then again infers the motive...and so on.

Culturally, I suppose, it's a good problem to have.  Except for when the credit card bill arrives.

The unresearched project is not worth doing*

I've been hoping that Clay Shirky's low profile on his blog means that he's flogging away at the keyboard on another book.  Frankly, I'm jonesing...to the point of re-reading Cognitive Surplus for, like, the fourth time.

Chapter 1 reminded me of the McDonald's milkshake research project.  (And, unsurprisingly, the engineer's urban myth about General Motors's vanilla ice cream problem**.)

But what do fast food and cars have to do with software development?  In a word, problem-solving.  (Okay, maybe that's two words...except when I cheat by hyphenating.  So there.)  Anyhoo, problem number one is making sure you're solving the right problem in the first place.

In the case of McDonald's, their problem was lacklustre milkshake sales.  The obvious attack vector on the problem is of course, experimenting with the formula and taste-testing it.  That gives a number of variables:

• Sweetness
• Flavour profile
• Consistency
• Mouth-feel
• Temperature

The problem is, McDonald's could spend millions of dollars in the lab tweaking the formula along multiple axes.  But what if the formula is not the issue? 

As it turned out, 40% of milkshake sales were purchased not as a dessert or treat, but as a commuter-friendly breakfast***.  The milkshake could be consumed one-handed, didn't leave crumbs (or stickier things) on the car (or commuter), and had more staying power than a doughnut.  Moreover, milkshakes, because they take longer to consume, had the added value of providing frequent (momentary) distractions during heavy traffic:  

1. See the car ahead start to roll forward...
2. Accelerate...
3. See the brake lights of the car ahead come on...
4. Step on the brake...
5. Pause...
6. Reach for the milkshake...
7. Sip...
8. Put down milkshake...  
9. Aaaaaaaannnnd repeat until the commute or milkshake run out.

Not surprisingly, the researcher who identified the important commuter demographic (Gerald Berstell), didn't do that from inside the lab.  He sat in a McDonald's for 18 hours for that epiphany (among others).  And then came back to quiz customers--not about how they thought the milkshake tasted, but what kind of problem it was solving for them.

And while I'm sure that Mr. Berstell's time and observational skills don't come cheap, they're infinitesimal compared to a whole bunch of biochemists and nutritionists and marketers flailing around in labs and focus groups.

Moral of the story?  Research done before the project starts is cheap--dirt-cheap.  In fact, it has a negative cost when compared with the cost of solving the wrong problem. 

- - - - -

* A nod to Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living."

**  Snopes classifies the story as "legend," but it's a fun read and far too believable because there's no substitute for hands-on debugging.

*** Clay Christiansen, Scott Cook, Taddy Hall, What Customers Want From Your Products - Harvard Business Review, 16 January 2006

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.13: Tall tales for tourists*

Returning home from Moncton on Wednesday, I happened to fall in behind a truck towing a power-boat north on Hwy 530.  Now, Wednesday had, hands-down, the nicest weather of the week, so my first thought was that someone was being a just a tad optimistic.  But the driver eventually turned into the driveway of the local boat hibernation grounds, so I’m assuming that they were having some tweaks or maintenance done.  Which makes more sense, although I still think I caught a whiff of wishful thinking.

But it’s a reminder that we’re on the downswing of winter, even with the 25-40 cm of snow that next week is throwing at us.  Which means it’s time to start prepping L’Acadie for the spring rush of cottagers and summer rush of tourists.

The first order of business, of course, is to melt all the ice and snow.   Fortunately, Canadians have figured out how to harness their two national resources in tandem to accomplish just that.  My Gentle Reader is of course aware that snow and ice reflect sunlight.  But it might never occur to her/him to juxtapose the timing of maple syrup production with the end of winter.

Of course, tourists don’t visit New Brunswick in the winter, so they don’t see the huge parabolic reflectors that collect and concentrate the reflected sunlight.  (The reflectors are ferried away to Shediac Island around April 1st, which is well before anyone is willing to come venture north of the border to see if New Brunswick even has daylight yet.)  The energy is harnessed to boil the maple sap in ginormous underground vats.  Once the sap has been reduced and caramelised into syrup, it travels through long and winding pipelines.  Its transit transfers all that heat to the ground, which melts the snow and incidentally cools the syrup enough for bottling.

Clever, huh?

Naturally, the whole point of a tourist economy is to give people experiences they can’t have at home.  One obvious choice in these parts is moose encounters.  But for moose, the novelty of having their photo taken wore off even before the advent of the instant camera.  So to compensate for that, some areas have taken to lining their roads with tourist-friendly “Moose Crossing” signs.  Huge lettering, big flashing lights.  Facebook-friendly enough that people like pulling over just to photograph a road sign.  I probably shouldn’t let the proverbial cat out of the bag, but the moose are usually hiding just a skip off into the woods, laughing into their hooves.  Apparently, it never gets old for them.

Anyone who’s seen the tourism brochures for New Brunswick will likely recognise the Hopewell Rocks.   The current story is that they were formed over millions of years, but in fact the area was the development ground for the “crystal growing” science kits that were a thing back in the 70s.  (In the early days, matters got a little out of hand before the product was ready for the market and, well, there you go…)  Unfortunately, after the fad ran its inevitable course, interest dropped off.  So the Tourism Board fell back on the boring, hokey old “natural wonders” shtick to keep the credulous coming through the gates.

There’s a darker side to our tourist economy, however, and that’s the slaughter of countless lobsters for the p’tits pains d’homard (lobster rolls) that are the staple of nearly every eatery hereabouts. Mind you, the buoys and boats are just for backdrop—nobody around here actually fishes for them.  No, no:  It’s much more sinister than that.

Anyone who’s driven through Shediac on Hwy 133 can’t possibly miss the “World’s Largest Lobster,” and they can be completely absolved of assuming it’s pure kitsch—I mean, it’s right next to the Tourism Centre, after all.

What outsiders don’t know is that, every year, the lobster is trawled out to sea to make an appearance.  Because years ago, the locals were able to convince the lobster tribes of Maine and the Maritime provinces that the giant lobster is their god—a god that demands sacrifice.  So each tribe is required to provide a given amount of tribute each year.  Which in itself is bad enough.  But that set up perpetual war between the tribes, so that what it turned over each spring and summer is largely captives.  A horrible, horrible secret history of this place.  Which is part of the reason I refuse to eat the stuff on principle.

But don’t hold it against all of us up here, okay?  There is a movement afoot (aclaw?) to put an end to the madness.  Sadly, we all know how it is when humans develop a taste for religion and war:  We can’t expect lobsters to be better than we are, right?

On the more positive side, we go to a lot of trouble to spruce up the joint for visitors.  Mulching all the (unclaimed) skis and snowshoes lost under meters of snow.  Paving the snowmobile trails we’ve commuted over for months.  Cleaning half a meter or so of dead maple leaves from the half-submerged bathtubs just so the Virgin Mary statues don’t give us the side-eye when we put them out to soak up the summer sun.  Pulling out our flashcards and re-memorising our French and Chiac to do our part for “local colour.”  (Another guilty secret:   Everyone speaks English when no one from out of province is listening.)

And though we can’t eliminate the mosquitoes, we have been able to selectively breed them to apologise after they’ve zapped you.  (These critters survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, for cryin’ in yer Molson’s; there’s only so much even genetic engineering can do.)  Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to make it loud enough for you to hear yet.  We’re working on it.

So make sure your passport is up to date, and do give Acadie and New Brunswick a second look as you’re planning your summer vacation.  You’ll have plenty of amazing stories to take back to the folks at home, guaranteed.

- - - - -

* Credit due to Dennis for the inspiration of the Hopewell Rocks.

A Hufflepuff's rebuttal

Today for, like, the second or third time since moving to New Brunswick, someone has advised me to recruit clients from out of province and/or out of Canada.  Without deliberately trying to use straw-man arguments, I think that they're doing this based on two (at least partially faulty) rationales:

1.) "You're in I/T, so you can work from anywhere."  Yes, I've made no bones about the fact that I have the luxury of living where other people come to vacation.  Yet it's 2015 and videoconferencing still leaves A LOT to be desired.  And that's when you're lucky enough to be a moving postage stamp on someone's screen and not just a Basecamp avatar (and when the latencies are appreciably better than the Mars Rovers'.) 

There's simply no substitute for being able to read body language, for being able to size up the vibe in the room before the meeting starts, or the random productive collisions that happen as people are streaming out of the conference room.

Also?  Time zone differences suck.  True, I've never been accused of being morning person--so that delta might just level the playing field when I'm collaborating with the proverbial "larks" pre-lunch.  But mostly it just messes with me getting into (and staying in) The Zone.

In other words, working locally has a decided benefit of reducing the wear-and-tear on the client relationship that the friction of distances almost inevitably involves.

2.) "Exporting your services brings fresh money into the local/provincial economy."     Ah, but the nature of my trade (database and the un-sexy business logic parts of web applications) is providing my clients with a strategic advantage over their competitors.  Sometimes in markets that don't yet exist.

In that case, I ask you:  Would you, as a hypothetical New Brunswicker, prefer that I do that for businesses inside or outside the province?  (Granted, I might give one NB firm an edge over another, but I think that the point still stands.)  Short-term gain vs. long-term pain, yo.

. . .

Yes, it's been quite awhile since I made peace with the fact that I was sorted into Hufflepuff (and not the more glamourous Gryffindor or Ravenclaw).  But that's not why I'm writing this.  Loyalty can, sadly, be a euphemism for the sunk cost fallacy when it applies to people or causes.  Yet in the case of my trade, at least, I think you can make a fair case that working locally, like buying locally, is good business sense.

Of course I wouldn't turn away out-of-province clients and any tasty problem they care to pay me to solve.  Business is business, yes?   But given my 'druthers, it's in my tactical as well as strategic interests to collaborate within a reasonable commute.

Another cost of commoditisation

Twenty years ago, when internet usage started up steep slope of its hockey-stick growth in adoption rates, web programming was much "closer to the metal" than it is today.  I'm certainly not advocating for a return to those days.  (For one thing, FTP via command-line is tedious unless you're a preternaturally fast and accurate typist--and I'm certainly not.)

Nor do I think that it's a loss to my trade that content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal have taken a lot of grunt-work out of setting up a website.  They've certainly given people less of an excuse for not updating their website content, too, which is all to the good.  I'd muuuuch rather be working on business logic or databases than jerking pixels around on a screen.  More power to them who can do it without their brains leaking out their ears.

Plus, I've hand-coded a blog in HTML before.  Booooooorrring....  So I'm glad that Blogspot--and to a lesser degree the messier Tumblr--have made formatting a highlight-and-click operation.

It's great that the tools have become slick enough that someone with little to no programming/database knowledge could click an icon, step through a wizard, and have their own customised website.  And, if they're willing to put up with a certain amount of jankiness, they can hook it into a shopping cart and payment processing for an online store.  Sweet.

But the increasing sophistication of the tools and platforms for putting words and images on the internet are making my life difficult in one respect.  Namely, that when I do need to open up the "black box" to (figuratively) poke and prod, I'm seeing less and less ability to do that.  At least with shared hosting, which is the cheapest (and thus most commoditised) way you can rent web server space from someone. 

But as such tools/have lost their rough edges and hidden the complexities and underpinnings of the system, the server "landlords" have--in my experience--been removing access to those underpinnings.  Sometimes in ways that make absolutely zero (if not, in fact, negative) sense.  For instance, I'm finding it difficult to fine-tune access to my databases because the tools are incomplete...when they're not completely unavailable.  Without being too technical, that's a Big Deal(TM) for me because it impacts overall web application security.  When you make it difficult for me to protect my clients' data to the best of my ability, we have a problem.

In other words, the lid of the "black box" has been nailed down.

Worse, trying to make the support techs understand that is wasting more of my time than I can afford to spend lately.  Which tells me that I'm dealing with people who are more used to fiddling with the dashboard than going under the hood.  That's disconcerting. 

I'm all for making the toolset more ergonomic, even (maybe especially) in the cognitive sense.  But that doesn't require taking away powerful, if somewhat more arcane tools.  Even in the name of saving screen space.  In fact, hiding the latter toolset behind an "Ugly Tools" header would pretty much encourage anyone who doesn't, say, know how to write a stored procedure to back out after the first curious peek.

I realise that it can often be negligible, but there is a difference between mainstreaming technology and dumbing it down.  The current state of things (at least as I've experienced them in the last year or so) has definitely crossed that line. 

Then again, I live in a world where people are willing to pay top dollar for a slick interface to a walled garden--or should I say Apple orchard.   Which is precisely the problem.  I won't buy an iPhone on principle.  Yet there are any number of alternatives that don't think I'm too incompetent/precious to, say, add more memory, change the battery, side-load apps., etc.

But when commoditisation of the web hosting market not only limits my choice, but interferes with my due diligence as a web developer?  That just makes me crabby.  Look, I'm glad that we've can scale solutions to problems mostly likely to befall the fat head (not a pejorative term) of the long tail.  But some of us are out there tackling problems for the niches who may someday become mainstream.  Don't make our work any more challenging, alright? #grumble

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.06: Anthropomorphism is a two-way street

We humans (or "hoomins" in lolcat-speak) are narcissistic creatures.  We see our image in way too many things...and when we don't, we do things like Mount Rushmore.  So it's no surprise that someone could parlay people captioning cat photos into a multi-million dollar empire.  (Truth be told, pretty much everyone who's not Mr. Huh should be ashamed of her/himself for not thinking of it first.)

But every once in awhile, you'll encounter humour that turns anthropomorphism on its head...even in an age diminished by the retirement of The Far Side's  Gary Larsen.  One of the better samples is If People Acted Like Pets.  Also, Things Cats Do That'd Be Creepy if You Did Them. 

With dogs and cats, those folks are reaching for the low-hanging fruit.  Yes, I have a standard-issue Office Cat.  He keeps a fairly regular schedule.  There's the regulation morning lap takeover.  (And he acts like he's King of the World for jumping up, even after I've invited him.  Dork.)  Then it's usually nap-time until about 1.5 - 2 hours before Second Kibble Time, during which he becomes insufferable.  Mercifully, he equates opening the office door with feeding and zooms into the hallway...after which I shut the door on him (and his whining) and turn up the volume accordingly.  Then Second Kibble Time and then a second lap takeover and finally post laptime-naptime (which not coincidentally is the most productive part of my day). 

But the Office Finches I'm stuck with the entire time I'm clocked in.  We brought six of them north with us.  Four were already older than the average life-span for their species.  The other two--a Zebra finch and an African Silverbill finch--were very young.  So it was a shock a few weeks back when the Silverbill (first named "Belle" and then "Bill" and then "Belle" again because she liked gender-bending before finally laying the question to rest...along with several eggs) caught us off-guard by sickening and dying in less than a day.

The remaining finch (named "Harpo" for a raucous call that's all too reminiscent of the blond Marx brother's famous horn), freaked out at being alone.  So for three days I streamed YouTube bird songs to calm her down until I could make it into town to recruit an acceptable substitute for Belle.  I found it in a Society (a.k.a. Bengalese) finch with two toes that point upward instead of downward.  (It seems to do just fine, btw.)  New finch is a golden-brown (sort of a buff colour) which suggested names like "Buffy" or (in homage to my country-of-residence) "Timbit."  But I try not to be superficial, and held off to allow it to name itself.

And so, after Belle's dainty ablutions in the water-dish were replaced by wholesale splashing and drenched newspaper, new finch duly earned its tribal name of "Duck."  Yep--this one has a freaky side.  And I wouldn't want it any other way.

But just as cats and dogs hold up a fun-house mirror to human behaviour, the same can be said for finches.  For one thing, finches are maniacally social (not surprising for flock animals).  The only exception I've known in 18 years was a runty Lady Gouldian Finch named Irene who didn't like anyone...except a damaged little Silverbill rescued from the horrible PetCo on the north side of Rochester, MN.  She'd peck anyone else out of her personal space...yet "Vir" was allowed to sleep absolutely plastered up against her at night.

Less humourously, finches are pretty ruthless about enforcing the pecking-order.  They can literally bite the hand that's trying to help them.  They can be stubbornly picky eaters and throw away a lot off perfectly good food.  They can be dreadful parents (at least in the case of some Gouldians).  And sometimes even "normal" relations can become abusive.  (As much as they would have preferred to share the same cage, Harpo's grooming of Belle was enough to pull out feathers, and so they had to have adjacent cages.  They sat as close as the bars possibly allowed.)

But finches can also reflect the qualities that we "hoomins" prize most about ourselves.  When Dennis & I made the trek from Wisconsin to New Brunswick, I was more than worried about Skip, a Gouldian male who was extremely near-sighted.  The poor little dude spent most of the trip on the floor of the cage, but valiantly survived...and lived for most of year afterward despite being well into the upper end of Gouldian life-expectancy.  When Joe, another Gouldian, became frail and also extremely near-sighted with age, he kept his spirits and his song until a week or so before the end.  My hero.

There are the escape artists who who made me laugh even through the frustration of trying to catch them.   The Gouldian pair who kept up a steady Statler-and-Waldorf commentary through the Green Bay Packers radio broadcasts.  The Society finches who would have happily tried to brood a football until it hatched.  The Gouldian who generously let me top up her babies with finch formula at night...but glared at me the whole time as if I was feeding them Skittles & Mountain Dew.  The Society finch who could hang upside down like a bat.  The ones with whom I (apparently) made a communication breakthrough, because when I made a certain noise, they would respond in a specific way.  (I have absolutely no idea what we were discussing but...whatever.)

I miss them all.  Dreadfully.  But the current pair reminds me that there is plenty of quirk still left in the world.  They've already shown a tendency to yell bloody murder when I dork around with piezzo buzzers on the Arduino.  Sometimes they also yell at my music choices.  (Problem is, with finches, I'll never know if they're actually objecting to my tastes or just ironically shouting "Freebird!")

Yet I'm pretty certain that my code would lose something without their chatter and (mostly) harmless madness in the background.  And my sense of noblesse oblige would most certainly take a hit if I only had to think of my own care and feeding.  When you sometimes don't make it outside the house for a week at a time, it's a reminder that you don't necessarily have to surround yourself with humans to maintain contact with your humanity.  Or "hoomanitee," as the case may be.

"The Free Market(TM) is great until business shows up"*

The first draft of the long-postponed contract overhaul was reviewed yesterday.  When we bought our first house, I learned the fundamental lesson that the property is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.  Similarly, there is nothing sacred or "canon" about contracts.  They are what both parties agree that they are when they're signed.  In both cases, buyer's remorse usually has to work at it to impress a judge in the event that things go into litigation.

At a previous job, I also learned that lawyers write contracts for other lawyers.  Which is at least 90% of the problem with contracts.  Unless, of course, you don't use a contract and relations with the client go south, in which case that's 100% of the problem.

One of the revised clauses had to do with both parties agreeing not to recruit each other's employees and/or customers.  As much as I want to give potential clients warm fuzzies (as well as cover my pastey-white dimpled posterior), I instructed the lawyer to nix it.

See, I figure that if it's actually an issue for my potential client, they'll have the great, good sense to negotiate that point.  (Which, incidentally, tells me some very interesting things about their mindset that I otherwise couldn't get at that point in the cycle--always a good thing.)  But having employees/customers poached emphatically does not number among the things that keep me awake at night.

Why?  Because I figure that if someone can smooth-talk someone else out of their relationship with me, then I'm either failing as a boss or a vendor.  Moreover, it calls into question whether that relationship was worth sustaining.  For all I know the "poacher" could be doing me a favour.  It's like the adage, "If he'll cheat with you, he'll cheat on you."  In which case, I wish the poacher all the joy of the new relationship...

But on a larger, philosophical level, I was a bit outraged at the fact that such contract provisions take away the choice of the employee and the customer.  I mean, it's not like either of them has any say--they'll likely never even see that clause, much less sign the contract.  The upshot is that if this sort of language is standard for business contracts, it's basically reinforcing oligopoly and its underlying attitude of entitlement--toward labour as well as markets.

I call shenanigans on that noise.  Maybe such clauses are like the non-compete agreements in the U.S. (basically not worth the proverbial paper they're printed on...and certainly not worth the toner--that stuff's expensive!).  I don't know, and it's likely I won't.

But enforceable or not, people keep letting lawyers pad out contracts (and their billable hours) with such twaddle...probably often enough to buffalo the inexperienced (or those who can't afford to risk even answering a civil court summons).  And so it continues.

Which is yet another reason why I roll my eyes at free market libertarians.  See, if their pipe-dreams even allow government enough power to enforce contracts (iffy), such contracts infringe upon the transparency and frictionless free-flow of information that's supposed to inform the market's "rational actors."  Most especially workers whose wages/benefits could be artificially depressed, or the customers whose prices could be artificially inflated.  Bottom line:  Collusion has the force of law--even in Galt's Gulch. 

And I call shenanigans on that, too.

- - - - -

* Title quotation courtesy of Dennis, who made me LOL with that zinger.

No (real) blog post tonight

I'm finishing my first review pass at a new contract template tonight.  Which not only limits my non-development time, but also renders suspect my ability to use the Queen's English.  After 21 pages of pure legalese, I'll be lucky to write my own name tomorrow without resorting to "herein," "hereunder," "hereunto," "notwithstanding," or similar fluff.

Better luck Wednesday, Gentle Reader.

Silly Sunday, 2015.03.01: The Programmer "Anxiety Closet"

Fans of the 1980s-ish comic-strip Bloom County will instantly recognise the term "Anxiety Closet."  It was the repository for a lot of pop-culture satire masquerading as neuroses of the overly-sensitive character Binkley.  One Sunday strip gave us a bonus peek into the Anxiety Closets of other characters in the strip--the most memorable being budding hacker/genius Oliver Wendell Jones being chased by a giant slide-rule.

Normally, I keep my nightmares to myself.  Mind you, some nightmares are pretty much public domain.  The "showing up at school/work naked (or trying very hard to get that way)" one?  Check.  The "it's the end of the semester and you realise you've been blowing off a class the whole time" one?  Oh, heck yeah--my subconscious mind has even upped the ante to multiple classes.  (Stupid brain!)

But what if certain subsets of the population also have nightmares in common?  In my case, I mean geeks--specifically programmers.  (I've had SCA-themed dreams, but to date, the only one that turned ugly was that nightmare about the only fabric store in town morphing into the potpourri-reeking fake-flowers-and-wicker-baskets frou-frou kind of craft store.  [shudder]  And I don't even want to think about the nightmares that ComicCon-/GenCon folks could have...)

Anyhoo.

The backstory is that in a couple weeks I'm due to give a presentation on Arduino.  The slides are done, so it's not like I'm behind.  Sure,  I don't have more than a few Arduino projects under my belt at this point.  Yet I personally know one person more qualified than myself to speak on the subject, and he seems to have zero interest in hanging out with Team Coder.  #lesigh 

Basically, it's just like that episode of M*A*S*H where Radar finds an abandoned, injured horse, and Hawkeye and B.J. are pressed into veterinarian service.  Except that first they have to catch the "patient."  

Hawkeye:  "You know anything about horses?"
B.J.:  "I rode a pony once."
Hawkeye:  "You're in charge."  

Moral of the story:  The bar for "expertise" can be set to a very relative--i.e. low--height sometimes.  My apologies for any destroyed illusions there.

So, yeah, I feel kinda like a poser...except I'm probably still in a position to save my fellow geeks a whole bunch of time reading/Googling--not to mention possibly some bling on hardware besides.  Which might explain why last evening's nightmare was about not being able to find the presentation slides on my laptop, rather than about freezing up under the gaze of my peers.

But while curating my resistor collection this morning, I had time to reflect on said nightmare.  Which is when I had a disconcerting epiphany.   It wasn't so much that I was worried about being worried about the presentation.  It was the awful suspicion that this might become an archetype for my dreaming mind.  And, worse, what if this is merely one species in the genus of programmer nightmares?  There are dark, dark regions in the left-brain.  Yet, like any self-respecting D&D dungeon, they somehow support a thriving ecosystem of nastiness:

• Project requirements include IE6/7 backwards-compatibility.
• Source control hiccup leaves code in partially merged state, but you don't catch on until you've made a whole pile of changes to your local copy.  #beentheredonethat
• Zero downloads from the App. Store.
• You think you're working in the test database, but it's actually the live copy.  #gotthatbadgetoo #twice
• The "ninja" co-worker your boss hired (over your objections) isn't sanitising inputs...but is rewriting core APIs that s/he doesn't understand...which is clearly most of them.
• The historical data that you didn't realise was critical when you archived it to tape won't restore.
• 1:1 assumptions during design magically turn into n:n expectations during beta. #crazytalkinorite
• User(s) demanding to know why there are "obvious" (to them) bugs in the app. that they agreed to review before sign-off...after they've signed off.
• Unscheduled system maintenance and/or power outage during a code roll-out weekend.
•  Apple/Microsoft/Google rolls out an uber-slick near-clone of your world-changing app. the week before you're supposed to close your next round of funding.

So there's that kind of thing lurking about the door of this programmer's Anxiety Closet.  It's probably best not to peer further into the darkness, amirite?