A thought on not living down (or up to) stereotypes

You can say what you like about the stereotypical programmer, but suspicion of all things new is not among the standard character flaws.  Like our idols Mister Spock and Sherlock Holmes, we can dispassionately dispense with the human bias for the comfortably familiar.

And yet.

I had to add the login feature to a web application today.  There's nothing particularly exciting about that.  Until you factor in the adrenaline-kick from sheer paranoia.  Login pages, after all, are the gateway into the castle that is someone else's data.  As a programmer, you want to do your due diligence and make sure that not only is the door itself is strong, but also that the portcullis is down, the drawbridge is up, and the moat is fully stocked with hungry crocodiles.

One of the recommended ways to go about this is to integrate something called a "stored procedure" into your web code.  If you're not a code or database geek, don't freak out:  I promise not to be too nerdy.  What you basically need to know is that this code actually resides in the database itself.  Mainly that's to take advantage of the database's own...shall we say..."immunities" to potential troublemakers.

So I started going through the usual motions of cranking out typical login code.  Then it occurred to me to check in with the database's documentation to see whether they'd upgraded the functionality which encrypts text so that passwords are rendered unintelligible to humans.  As luck would have it, a new and improved encryption function was waiting.  (Which is good, because the old standard had been compromised awhile back.)  The new function was slightly different, so I tweaked my in-progress code to deal with that and finished up the stored procedure.

When I called the procedure with my login name and password, however, the database had never heard of me.  Plus there was a semi-useful warning about data being truncated (which basically means some of it's being chopped to fit a smaller expected length). 

Weird... 

A sanity-check of the documentation and some extra poking-n-prodding says that I'm using the new function correctly.  I also have enough space for the encrypted password.  Maybe I didn't correctly encrypt the password when it was added to the database.  Whatever--let's do that again, just to make sure. 

Still no joy.  Huh.

So I copied just the relevant code-snippet into a fresh query window and executed it independent of the surrounding code.  The good news is that the snippet finds a match for my login/password; the bad news is that it won't do it inside the larger procedure.  Oh, and that warning about truncated data is still there.  Wat?

As it turns out, the problem all along was with my login name.  See, I'd set up the procedure to assume that login names wouldn't be any longer than 25 characters.  But then I used a (longish) email address to log in.  Result?  The chopped-off email address didn't match what was in the database and thus wasn't recognised. The password, on the other hand, was perfectly kosher.

But because this was my first outing with the new-and-improved encryption, I reflexively targeted it as the cause of my woes.   I have to chalk up the afternoon as a net "win," because I won't forget what I learned about the encryption feature while debugging its non-existent problems.  Though it looks like I will be still aspiring to Spockian/Sherlockian dispassion when problem-solving for some time longer.

Linked blog post

(Marie-) Arzel was gracious enough to give me the green light to cross-post something from her chef-oriented blog. Power to the People...with Passion!

Btw: If you read take the time to read the "bitter" post, it's worth your while to check out the more upbeat, and very practical stuff that keeps it company. The fact that she can rebound from a dented dream to craft occasionally dreamy, occasionally hard-nosed prose for others is only part of what makes her amazing.

Frivolous Friday, 10.14.2011: Gaming the system

At work, the conferencing software's reach definitely exceeds its grasp. This was ably demonstrated on Monday's "Area Staff Meeting," originating in the Chicago office and streamed out to the provincials in the region. What you need to understand about our office's "big conference room" is that: 1.) "Big" is a relative designation, and 2.) It was designed when a mere handful of old-timers were movin' on up to that dee-luxe office suite in the sky-hi-hi.

Cut to 2011, and we're spilling out into the adjacent breakroom, with the latecomers bringing chairs in tow. Which means that, to someone in the back, what comes out of the conference-call speakers is more than slightly reminiscent of the "Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha..." of Charlie Brown's teacher. I suppose that could be a boon for anyone needing to sneak in some writing under the cover of note-taking. Except that's far too productive. See, I figure that when a company goes to such great lengths to waste your time, the only responsible response is to take ownership of such wastage. Maybe--dare I suggest?--even profit from it.

Naturally, I mean having the foresight to set up a betting pool, with the winner having the best accuracy in predicting:

1. Number of minutes between the official start time of the conference and its actual start
2. Number of inside jokes that only the "host" office understands
3. Number of times the video connection freezes or freaks out
4. Number of times one or both ends of the voice connection drops
5. Number of phone calls taken or hushed among the Powers That Be
   
6. Number of PowerPoint slides that contain the word "vision," "opportunity," or "strategic"
7. Number of remote workers dialing into the call who forget to mute their end of the connection
   
8. Whether or not corporate I/T will push out a Windows update that requires a reboot in the middle of the presentation
   

(Belatedly, it also occurs to me that the above could be trivially adapted to a college drinking game. Uh-oh. Needless to say, I won't be mentioning that to my co-workers: Given how our "keeper"--and I mean that in a good way--no longer bothers to lock the liquor cabinet, that could be exceedingly bad.)

A humbling thought for content creators

The end of an NPR segment--to which Dennis & I were tuned in on the way to see The Ladykins on Sunday--ended with a clip from Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" single. Serious as the segment's topic had been, I (naturally) couldn't help but smirk, thinking of Weird Al's send-up.

Exposing yourself to parody is, doubtless, a mark of character--but it's also a bizzare badge of honor in the music industry...at least to my way of thinking. But Dennis made a more sage point when he wondered aloud, "How many of the people he's lampooned are here and gone, and he's still around."

Ouch. For someone with pretensions to being a "content creator," that's more than a little sobering. (That despite the poetry/song filk that's whiled away any number of my Frivolous Friday evenings.) But in the unlikely event that writing superstardom awaits your faithful blogger, that's one problem worth having.

Frivolous Friday, 09.30.2011: Nerdery is a continuum

I'm finding I comedy works best to keep me from dwelling on how much longer I'm going to be on an elliptical machine, treadmill or what-have-you. So earlier this week it was an old standby, Office Space. (If you haven't seen it, suffice it to say that it's sort of a cult classic for programmers.) Coincidentally, this was also the same week that someone decided to riff on one of the movie's plot-points and steal fellow programmer's red Swingline stapler. Twice.

I polished off Office Space and turned back to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, riffs from which are unavoidable in the SCA. That'd be like trying to play golf without at least one wink-wink-nudge-nudge reference to Caddyshack.

Bad enough that Dennis & I have already trained each other to phrase "or"-type questions (as in, "Do you want four cheese or meat-lover's supreme?") without expecting the answer to be an obligatory "Yes." Or "True" or "1" if someone's feeling exceptionally nerdy. But then I made the mistake of remembering the phrase, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

(If you're not a Star Trek: The Next Generation maven, here's the schtick: The Federation has bumped into (yet another) alien race that (surprise!) just happens to be recognizably humanoid. Moreover, the Universal Translator can even babblefish--yes, I just used that as a verb-- their language into English words. Problem is, it still doesn't make sense, because the Tamarians exclusively communicate allegorically--meaning through references to stories from their history. Think of it as tribal knowledge on steroids.)

At first I thought, well, we're not that bad. But then I realized--particularly after being chagrined at how much of the "Brave, Brave Sir Robin" song I've forgotten--that any nerdery is a continuum. Meep! Ummm...how many restroom stops until Tanagra?

Ultimatum

Maybe it's that I've been reading too much non-history, non-fiction lately. Or maybe the topics are just too...shall we say...inbred. But I've bumped into enough mentions of a game called "Ultimatum" that it's stuck with me. The word "game" is a misnomer, at least in the sense that Ultimatum is nothing you'll find keeping Monopoly company on the closet shelf. It's actually played by those who've volunteered for psychological studies in universities and other institutions that study human interactions in factor-controlled circumstances.

The basic premise starts with two people. Person A is given a fixed dollar amount (usually ten bones in the cited examples) to be split with the other person. There is no negotiation--Person A makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer for Person B. The catch is that if Person B refuses, each person receives zero.

The classical economics they teach you in high school and college would predict that even if Person A offered Person B one cent and kept the remaining $9.99 for her/himself, Person B would still have a penny more than s/he had before, and would therefore accept. Because something is always better than nothing, riiiight???

As it turns out, capital-R reality doesn't exist to fulfil the premises of classical economic thought any more than it does, say, story problems in Math. Because the ultimate result was that a low-ball offer basically meant that Person B had very little to lose, either. And, maybe it's just because the Puritans gained such an early toe-hold in the American psyche, but the impulse to punish high-handed greed is fairly strong, too. In practice, 50-50, 60-40, and even 70-30 splits had a fairly high likelihood of being accepted. But once a threshold of "unfairness" was crossed...not so much.

The metaphor to the current state of the U.S. economy (and political state) seems all-too-obvious...

• As banks sit on hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout-backed credit
• As corporations hoard even more than that in profits, waiting for someone else to create the jobs...and demand for their products.
  
• As pay is not so much a fraction as it is a logarithmic base of productivity
• As the cost of a college degree rises in tandem with offshoring and union-busting
  
• As pernicious unemployment and foreclosure rates undermine consumer confidence...and spending
  
• As we expect an entrepreneurial "creative class" to spontaneously emerge from generations taught to standardized tests
• As gerrymandering and astro-turfing polarize the electoral landscape
• As the concentration of wealth into a shrinking pool of bank accounts further tilts the political and legal table
  

Remind me again, what's the point in earning good grades, putting in your 40 hours, paying your taxes, financing your upward mobility, investing for your long-term financial security, voting on schedule, etc.? At some point, the Social Contract has to be a win-win, rather than the game of Ultimatum that's it's rapidly becoming.

If, en masse, the American worker/consumer walks away from the deal, it might actually be good on some levels. Among them decreasing personal debt and a mom-n-pop entrepreneurial boom, and maybe--just maybe--an increased focus on quality of life. But apart from that...boom. The pity is that those who play the role of Person A in this "game" they're playing will not walk away with nothing. At best, they'll be less-rich. Once again demonstrating how freakishly carefully-controlled lab results can mutate in the wild.

Frivolous Friday, 09.23.2011: Close enough for government work

Slashdot today ran a piece about the U.S. Government paying its own programmers half the going rate for contract programmers. The comments, at least early-on when I read them, tended to focus on the premise that contract programmers are paid extra to, well, go away on short notice. (I've worked as a "temp"--high-tech flunkie as well as office minion--and, frankly, I have no idea where that notion comes from, at least not if a temp. agency is involved.)

Me, I'd tend to place the discrepancy at the intersection of hiring freezes and the spend-it-or-have-your-budget-slashed-next-year school of fiscal "management" that I've seen in the private sector as well.

But speculation, however plausibly grounded in past experience is not the point. Combine nerdy quirkiness and stupefying levels of through-the-looking-glass bureaucratic "logic," and the reasons could well fall outside the pale of our workaday norms. The most likely of those, to my way of thinking, include:

1.) Well, duh: People from the outside are always smarter

2.) Legendary public sector "job security" includes cubicle in lead-lined bunker and cryogenic suspension in the event of thermonuclear Armageddon

3.) Pay comparison doesn't take into account standard government-issue solid gold laptops

4.) Coders willing to take lower pay to develop "secret government technology" cachet irresistable to fellow geeks of the preferred gender

5.) Pay differences easily offset by illegal kickbacks from soda and energy drink vendors

6.) Former college interns didn't notice the "indentured servitude" clause in their NDAs

7.) Government I/T departments are the digital tar-pits where old COBOL and VB6 programmers go to die

8.) Uncle Sam's coders are rented out as cheap off-planet labor for our secret extraterrestrial allies--and neural implants don't grow on trees, you know

9.) Daily flogging and haranguing by Grover Norquist & Tea Party to destroy self-worth

10.) Once-in-a-lifetime chance to hack Andrews Air Force Base and take Air Force One out for a joyride