A new unit of measurement

As if the farce of Davos wasn't absurd enough, this week also brings Uber batting its eyelashes at European governments.

First off, Uber's arrogance is breathtaking.  Witness this blurb from CNN's "Money":

"'Uber can share smart data with partner cities to help them manage growth, reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions and expand public transportation,' the company said in a blog post as CEO Travis Kalanick unveiled its pitch at a major tech industry conference in Germany."

For a company hailing from the land of urban sprawl to offer any advice on traffic congestion, greenhouse gases, and public transportation to a continent that groks urban density is just beyond absurd--it's surreal. 

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but I think they're probably ahead of you, Uber.

Pedestrian-only areas in cities.  High-speed rail.  Chunnels.  Mass transit systems carrying tens of thousands of passengers per day decades before San Francisco was patting itself on the back for having a few dozen trolley-cars.  Bicycles as a legitimate form of commuter vehicle...even for heads of state.  Far too many of those concepts are largely sneered at as socialist tree-hugger pipe-dreams from the political center rightward in North American politics.  One has only to look at subsidies and tax breaks to petroleum producers, bailouts to auto manufacturers and contrast with the sorry shoestring state of Amtrak & Via to see where the priorities lie.

But absurdism slides into delusional in Business Insider's version of Uber CEO Kalanick's comments:

"How many unemployed people can come on this platform and find a way to make a living, to be part of an economic opportunity," he said.

If you haven't been following the never-ending controversy that is Uber's dystopian twist on the sharing economy, you've missed how the company's always couched its contractor head-counts in terms of Full Time Equivalent jobs.  My Gentle Reader needn't be shocked to learn that a contractor would have to work well over 40 hours a week to "make a living," as demonstrated by another Business Insider article.  (Original source, plus more lies, d--ned lies, and PR numbers here.)

To quote The Daily Show's Jon Stewart:  "Are you lying to yourself, or are you lying to the people out there?  Because you're lying."

As much as I'd like to place all the blame squarely on corporations and governments disproportionately populated by sociopaths looking out for Number One, we as a culture share some of the blame.

Namely, we've let those folks degrade the word "job" to the point where it includes people working full time, using their own resources, with zero severance/UI, and still having to be subsidised by family and/or state to make ends meet.

Nuh-uh.  If you want to live on ramen as a freelancer while you build up your own business, that's one thing.  But it's high time that we demand that anything that can't support the minimum standard of living and has no safety net for layoffs is not allowed to be called a job.  Period.  Not on the government's job reports.  And certainly not out of the mouths of CEOs like Travis Kalanick.

Thus "job" becomes a very precisely defined unit of economic measurement.  Not unlike when governments stop debasing coinage, the economy is the better for it, because people can trust the standard again.  Check your history books for examples.

But here in the 21st century technocracy, disposable day-labour is not "disrupting" jack-squat.  It's dragging the entire economy back to the Gilded Age robber baron hell of the Industrial Age.  And if I wanted to see that close-up, I'd invent a time machine.  

Frivolous Friday, 2014.01.16: Lies programmers tell themselves*

"It would be easier to do this in pure SQL than in PHP/Ruby/.NET/Node/Scala/J2EE/Whatever."  (And vice-versa.)

Pizza is a vegetable.  Because tomato sauce.  Also, walking down the stairs to pay the delivery person counts as exercise.

"You know what would make this place more productive?  A ping-pong/foosball/air-hockey table!"

90% feature-complete == 90% done.

"But I'm only changing one little thing..."

Faster hardware makes everything better.

"No worries--we'll document everything first thing after the release."

Caffeine is a suitable replacement for motivation.

"It works/looks just fine in Chrome, so I don't need to check it in Safari."  (Also vice-versa.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a programmer writing Python in emacs must be a badass coder.

"Another 15 minutes of work and I can check this in and go home."

jQuery and Node make JavaScript a grown-up programming language. ;~P

"I can finish this over the weekend when there are no distractions." 

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* Shout-out to Dennis for a couple of ideas...and for confirming a few of mine.  Because, apparently, we're both pastmasters of self-delusion.  :~/

Progress is child's play

One of the problems with dead-tree magazines--apart from the obvious dearly departed tree--is that they carry a bit of the "sunk cost fallacy" baggage.  To me, this seems particularly true of folks who care enough about a particular publication to subscribe to it.  Thus, I occasionally am the beneficiary of slightly out-of-date magazines like National Geographic, Popular Science, etc.  (Yeah, some of my tribe is old-school.)

Last December's Discover carried an article about Science Kits aimed at the 20th century American boy...with a nod to Gilbert's (pink!) "Lab Technician Set for Girls."  Cringe-worthy cultural norms aside, one paragraph in the description of the Gilbert company's bread-and-butter product, the Erector Set, caught my attention.  (Caveat:  Wikipedia's photos aren't at all evocative, so here are some more.)  I suppose you could call the Erector Set the precursor to Legos...maybe in the same way that wolves are the ancestors of teacup chihuahuas.

"With pulleys, gears, metal strips and beams (both straight and curved, depending upon the model), screws to fit them all together, and even a DC motor in bigger sets, Erector soon became the gift that mechanically inclined boys wanted for Christmas.  Many parents were happy to indulge those wishes during a time when engineers generally earned more than doctors [emphasis mine]."

[Double-take]

Whoa...waitaminnit...d'y'mean to tell me there was once a Golden Age when engineers actually had that kind of clout???

But before I started cobbling together a time machine from my stash of Legos and Buckyballs, I had a change of heart.

It wasn't just the fact that the glass ceiling for engineering of a century ago, like most everything, was bulletproof.  Medicine (in which category I also include nutritional science) was still shedding its aura of quackery.  And it certainly didn't standardise, much less scale to the level of an HMO.  A few cases in point:

• 2014's Ebola deaths numbered under 8,500.  The influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed 20 million people worldwide.
• Yeah, there was no such thing as a flu shot.  The only time-tested vaccine available was for smallpox, and the production/scaling issues were still being worked out.  You also took your chances with tetanus, polio, measles (regular and German), diptheria, and whooping cough.  Those fighting yellow fever (malaria) put their energies into mosquito control.  And you could contract tuberculosis from drinking the milk from an infected cow.
• With absolutely no support from the U.S. Supreme Court, reforming legislators* in the 1900s and 1910s were fighting an uphill battle against poisonous food additives and false therapeutic claims in "patent medicines" laced with narcotics (or worse). 
• Contraception--in the form of condoms--only became legal in the U.S. in 1918 after, ahem, "rigorous field testing" in WWI.  Women were left to control their own fertility via (cough!) "hygiene" (cough!) products of dubious claims.  Canada's 1892 morals-guarding anti-contraception law was repeatedly challeged (and honoured more in the breach than observance) until finally decriminalised in the 1960s.  
• Having shaken off the pseudo-science of astrology and magneticism for healing, modern scientific medicine brought radiation out of the lab and into the clinic**.  X-rays could spare a patient the dangers of exploratory surgery...albeit while endangering them and those who administered unregulated doses for staggeringly long intervals.
• School lunches (which guaranteed a child at least one nutritious meal per school day) were experimental programs in Philadelphia and Boston***.
• And speaking of Boston, Massachusetts implemented the first water quality standards and municipal water treatment in the nation during the late 1800s, but not all states were on board until the 1970s.

I, for one, will not object to the "nanny-state" interventions that helped (forced) medicine & public health to cleave more tightly (if not always perfectly) to their scientific underpinnings.   At the time of the Erector Set's invention, U.S. & Canadian life expectancy was 20 years less than it is today.  U.S. infant mortality rates have plummeted to 6.7 per 1,000 live births in 2003 from 131 in 1911 (which is itself a huge improvement from the 1/4 to 1/3 of children lost in the previous century).  Despite a spike in maternal death rates in the U.S., 13 per 100,000 live births is considerably preferable to the 1 in 100 of the 1920s.  You just can't argue with those numbers.

Thus ended my pouting over the engineer-doctor wage differential in these latter decades.  Clearly, the health industry is serving us far better than it did a century ago.   I also like to think the reversal also means that quality of life has become more valuable than mere things. 

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P.S.:  Shout-out to Dennis, who reminded me to mention the advances in vaccines.  Because taking them for granted is bad, as we're once again seeing.

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* Canada was 30+ years ahead of the United States (1874 vs. 1906) in regulating food and drug purity, at least at the federal level.  This was largely the response to the outcry against the glut of adulterated booze on the market.  Which should tell my Gentle Reader everything s/he needs to know about the priorities of the 19th century male.  (Women, who might have had something to say about preservatives and fillers and shorted weights at the market, of course didn't have a vote.)

** X-ray applications became even more mainstream in the 1920s, using the fluoroscope to measure shoe fitness and remove unwanted body hair.

*** Pioneered by Ellen H. Swallow Richards, the first female graduate student at MIT, the first female chemist in the U.S.,champion of water quality, nutritionist, and basically a Force of Nature.  (Suck it, Gilbert Lab Technician Kit for Girls!)

"Living History"

A coda to last Friday's adventure in home appliance repair:  About an hour later, the repair tech. called back to see whether or not his debugging and repair instructions had panned out.  Which was certainly professional of him.  But before Dennis hung up, the tech. requested his own form of payment for services rendered:  "Oh, if anyone from the office calls, tell them that somebody else told you how to fix it."

Which made the History major in me smile:  Clearly rumours of the guild system's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.01.09: You know it's cold in New Brunswick when...

I arrived home--laundry in tow--from a longer-than-usual Christmas holiday in Cheddarland to discover that the washing machine needed debugging.  Specifically, the flow of the cold water had slowed to a trickle, although water pressure was fine everywhere else in the house.

The local folks being (apparently) uninterested, I found a repair place in Moncton willing to venture out our way.  The deal was that they were supposed to phone Wednesday morning to arrange the actual appointment time.  So pretty much at the crack of ten a.m., the phone rang.  Dennis answered before I could reach it, and was thus conscripted into the role of local debugger.

After pulling out the washing machine, turning off the water, disconnecting the hose, and borrowing one of my screwdrivers to pull off the filter, it was discovered that the culprit was merely gunk in the filter.  (The hot water was not affected, it seems, because its gunk is likely residing in the heating tank.  Yum!)  A quick rinse plus a bit of manhandling (to un-mangle the filter that hadn't been cooperative about being removed) put all to rights.

No service call, no wasted resources.  Clearly, some folks will do almost anything to avoid climbing in and out of a truck on an especially uncongenial day...even for Canada.  Being what StackOverflow co-founder Jeff Atwood calls an "indoor enthusiast" m'self, I can't say as I blame him.

Third dimension of debugging

It's pretty much become an I/T cliché that software peeps blame the hardware, and hardware peeps blame software for any particularly nasty gremlins. 

The phenomenon dates, more or less, from the PC boom of the 1980s and 1990s.  Not only were there more players in the hardware market, but the standards were somewhat more in flux.  (Anyone foolish enough to whine about accidentally buying a mini-USB cable to charge their micro-USB phone within the earshot of any SysAdmin of a certain age can--and should--expect be summarily wedgied.)

The standards issues leaked into the software development as well.  For instance:  Even during my late-90s stint in Programmer School, I remember losing points on a test because I assumed the number of bytes in the data types were based on Borland's C-language compiler rather than Microsoft's. (If that seemed like gibberish to you, don't sweat it; just trust me when I say that it was kind of a big deal Back In The Day(TM).)

Then along came the (commercial) internet.  And then broadband internet.  Which, in addition to opening unparalleled opportunities for data exchange, opened unparalleled avenues for data theft, denial-of-service attacks, and the digital equivalent of graffiti.  Thus did using a PC on a network lose its dewy-eyed innocence. 

Enter the firewall.  In laypersons' terms, it's a device that can be configured to allow or deny network traffic based on where it's coming from or destined for, and also what channels (a.k.a. "ports") it's using.  (Firewalls--most famously Windows Firewall--can be software-only and designed to protect a single computer, but that's another story for another time.) 

As an analogy, think of an airport operating when zombies have taken over another part of the world.  Flights originating from entire continents might be turned away altogether.  Flights originating from "authorised" locations might be allowed to land, but are still restricted to certain gates.  Similarly, planes might not be allowed to fly to questionable destinations, or are only allowed to use certain terminals or runways.  Any overrides/exceptions to those rules, of course, are potential weak points in the system that heighten the risk of zombies taking over the entire world.

Then, too, security for groups of networked computers inside the same network has evolved, mainly to minimise the damage a rogue operator can do.   Folders and whole file systems, servers, databases, what-have-you can require separate passwords, or only allow you to do certain things (such as read but not update).  This is analogous to how airports are segmented into terminals, have restricted areas, etc.  It even, to some extent, mimics the redundancies in security one experiences with a connecting flight on an international trip.  Usually, that's a more seamless process than the idiocies of post-9/11 Security Theatre.

Usually.

This week has not been one of those times.  Thus do I find myself doing the legwork for a junior support tech at a shared hosting provider's Help Desk.  (Grrrrrr.)   And realising anew how much more I'm going to have to stay on top of the networking & security aspects of maintaining a server than I have in years past.  It's not so much that networking/security technology has taken a quantum leap and I'm playing catch-up.  No, it's mainly a human issue.  To wit:  When I can no longer trust the word of the wizards behind the consoles, it adds another dimension to debugging.  Debugging, I might add, that sometimes has to be done under fire in production.

These days (responsive web design and the usual Android/iOS tug-o-war excepted), hardware ranks relatively low on the list of usual suspects when a gremlin pops up.  Network and database permissions, on the other hand, have shot up that list to a near-permanent slot in second place.  Suspect #1, naturally, is always my own code.   But when I haven't touched said code since early Dec., and scheduled jobs suddenly stop working around New Year's Eve  (holidays being a favourite time for techs. to sneak in updates)?   Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!  Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a new winner.

All of which sounds like whining on my part, and I'm really not.  (Pinky-swear!)  I'm merely hoping that this facet of a custom software developer's trade helps to explain why it's not a trivial activity.  And why we don't do for free.  (Note:  Code written to scratch our own itches before we let other people make copies of it is not the same thing as "free.")  And why we don't appreciate hearing, "This should be easy for you."  And also why we are so darned insistent that our clients actually try apps. out for themselves before turning them loose on the world.  Because "It works on my network" is the new version of the dreaded "It works on my machine."

A thought on the power of expecations

Last week the buzz was about the contrast between the real 2015 and what was predicted in Back to the Future II.  And a movie-buff pal reminded me that we'll likely be doing the same in four years with Ridley's Scott's Blade Runner.  That was on top of watching Ironman and The Incredible Hulk within a week of each other.  Then last evening I noticed that Dennis had left a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer (arguably the seminal work of the cyberpunk genre) laying about, and picked that up for the first time in probably 15 years.

Neuromancer doesn't name the current year, so the future us won't have the navel-gazing satisfaction of critiquing its technological naïveté or marvelling over its Cassandra-like soothsaying.   But something about the book's central conflict made me think about how science fiction (mostly) seems to divide into two camps when it comes to optimising technology:

One camp prefers to optimise for the tools.  Death Stars, phasers, spaceships, mech-suits, tricorders, time-machines, transporters.  You get the idea:  It's a galaxy where a laser-on-a-stick is retro, yo.  Any cybernetic life-form (e.g. ST:TNG's Data or the androids in the Aliens movies or Blade Runner's replicants) provokes suspicion at best.  And, of course, we do not for a second pity Darth Vader for being dependent on machines for his survival.  (Five seconds of imitating his whooshy breathing was enough to reduce my little sister to, "Doreeeeeeen!  I'm telling Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-om!!!".)  Small wonder he's been Evil's poster boy for about three generations so far, hey?

The other camp optimises for hacking humans rather than tech.  Radioactive spiders accidentally give us crime-fighters (Spiderman).  Implants can turn us into walking flash drives (Johnny Mnemonic).  Or meat-grinders (Wolverine).  Government experiments of dubious ethical oversight (and even worse quality control) can save Europe (Captain America)...or trash entire city blocks at a pop (The Hulk).  Gibson's weltanschauung might just be the most dystopian of all, however.  On the sketchier streets of Japan's Chiba City, yakuza goons flex vat-grown muscle, the eyes of the fashionable are replaced with cybernetic cameras, and high-rent prostitutes have neural implants that allow them to cater to a client's fantasies literally in their sleep.  Naturally, cosmetic surgery boutiques are as rife as Starbucks in Seattle.

Granted, my experience of SciFi is admittedly rather thin.  Then again, I'm mainly concerned here with the bits that the genre contributes to the general zeitgeist.  And apart from the Star Trek universe, I can't think of any where universally decent standard of living is assured for anyone willing to live under the benevolent--if slightly banal--auspices of a civilisation capable of supporting it.  (For the record, I'm typically okay with that flavour of banal, thanks.  People are capable of amazing levels of productivity when they don't stay awake at night wondering how they're going to pay the bills.)  

Also, so many of popular science fiction's prediction's haven't come true.  An average 21st century #firstworld teenager can't afford a hoverboard.  The 20th century did not host a Third World War, followed by a one-world government.  Thankfully, we're still waiting on the AI insurrection.  And why, for pity's sake, doesn't Siri use Majel Barrett's voice?

And, yes, I've watched enough Mystery Science Theater 3000 to have developed a healthy "It's just a show; I should really just relax" reflex.  Not that it's always a reliable reflex, mind you.  By all rights, I should have been kicked out of the Lon Cheney Phantom of the Opera--ask Dennis.


Yet surely there is a niche in storytelling for a universe in which our species can focus its attention and know-how on bettering our culture--and by extension, our world.  There are certainly demons enough to fight in that battle:

• Institutionalised greed -- including the complicity of the disadvantaged...at least in some cases
• Inane bureaucracies (public and private) that entrench the above greed
• "Charities" that exist only by prolonging the problems they purport to fight
• Fanatics who can't abide a world different from their self-serving fantasies
• Eleanor Roosevelt's "small minds discuss people" paparazzi culture
• The impulse of the Have-Lesses to shut out the Have-Nots so that the former can at least feel superior to somebody (which is, frankly, as much a distinction as being the smartest Kardashian)
• Magical thinking (e.g. "Everything happens for a reason") and the special snowflake syndrome it engenders
• (as Will Smith put it) People spending money they don't have on things they don't need to impress people they don't even like

I mean, Einstein was more sure of the infinity of human stupidity than he was of the infinity of the Universe itself.  If that isn't a BigBad (to borrow a Buffy-ism), what is, I ask you?

Again, much of our futuristic visions haven't come true...yet.  All the same, when we cast our future in terms of our present, all the technology really boils down to is mere window-dressing.  Props for the play.  It means we've given up hope.  At which point our best and most forward-thinking writers of fiction (which, IMO, is heavily skewed toward SciFi writers) might as well get to work on the human race's epitaph.