How Will You React?

Filed under: General Thoughts

What’s next?

We’ve all heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech, and now more information is going to come out, leading to a wave of media speculation, blog postings (my bad), and calls for emotionally-driven action.

So, how will you react?

Will you use this incident as a stalking horse for your issue of choice, as the gun-control and pro-gun lobbies are doing?

Will you demand immediate, emotion-fueled legislation aimed at preventing another event just like this, forgetting that almost every other tragedy will be very little like this one?

Will you point your finger at everyone, demanding that someone who is alive and can feel your revenge take some part of the fall?

Will you forget, next time, that none of the quick fixes you demanded this time made a difference?

Will you remember that we live in the safest, least-violent epoch in human history, with lower violent crime rates and murder rates than humanity has enjoyed at any time in history?

Will you glue yourself to the television, to WikiPedia, to Metafilter, to Google News, to Little Green Footballs, to the Virginia Tech website, to CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox, thereby providing validation to those that would use their homicidal urges as a cry for attention?

Will you make no difference at all?

A Rant on Coding and Quality

Filed under: Rants

I am, as Char will no doubt agree, occasionally a bit on the negative side. This isn’t always a good thing; I need to learn to tone down my vitriol in situations in which it does not advance my needs, and in those in which it is not necessary or constructive.

There are times, however, that merit a vigorous negative response.

I’m taking two project courses in school this semester; Cmput 414, which is a graphics and multimedia course with a heavy algorithmic programming component, and Cmput 401, a software engineering course and the focus of this rant.

Software Engineering is, according to Wikipedia, “is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.” Among other things, it requires the application of good design practices to the development of code, and following beneficial design standards.

So, I have to ask, why is it that people taking this fucking course cannot do something as basic as grok that it is fundamentally bad practice to add public methods to hidden implementing classes instead of using the goddamned design?! I spent three days nailing down, and countless hours tuning up, the data model for our project application, only to have one of my fellow team members simply come along and, instead of reading the goddamned documentation, which I provided as a first step, add new hooks into the mechanism, just to get at the information in a way that is not only wrong, but disables some nice and (I thought) needed functionality.

I have spent the last hour looking over his code, marveling at the glorious unification of layers that, according to good design practices, should ever remain separate — the intermingling of UI code and logic that I’d already written elsewhere, better was a real high point for me.

Gods.

I cannot wait to get back to full time work with people who know more than I do, so that instead of raging at the pathetic efforts of people whose skills are not even up to the level of an academic programmer, I can instead find faults with my own approaches, be told that I’m doing it wrong, and learn how to do it better.

Maynard

Filed under: General Thoughts, Internet, Media and Rants

Nothing on internet censorship (note: If you’re on a Canadian ISP and reading this, there are now sites blocked for all Canadians. Right now they’re kiddie porn only… but it’s a short step from that to deciding other sites are objectionable and blockable. Your ISP — the one you pay to provide you with internet access — is doing this. Respond as you will).

What I’m actually posting on is an excellent interview with Maynard James Keenan (of Tool) at the Onion AV Club.

The quote that really got me is this one:

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don’t know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how [I feel about it]. But I couldn’t responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I’m just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

He’s quite a guy, one with whom I’ve no doubt that I could argue for days.

How to steal an election by hacking the vote

Filed under: Events, Internet and Rants

How to steal an election by hacking the vote, from Ars Technica.

The next two weeks, I’ll be posting unadorned links of interest. Enjoy!

A review of OmniWeb 5.5, and commentary on polish.

Filed under: Internet and Rants

A few weeks ago, I purchased a license for OmniWeb 5.5 during its beta phase. I became aware of it a couple of years ago, when it became the darling of the mac-using contingent of the Software Systems group at the U of A, mainly due to its polished user experience and stability.

I have not been so enamoured of it, I have to regretfully confess, and I have — reluctantly, since I paid for it — returned to the arms of Camino.

OmniWeb is pretty decent, with more than a few nice features built in: It’s tabbed browser model includes a thumbnail-sized preview of the page in the tab, so that you can see where you’re going. It uses a modified version of the Apple WebKit, which means that it behaves in ways very similar to Safari, including using true Cocoa widgets for web page input. This is a selling point because much of OSX’s user experience stems from the system-wide integration of applications and services, all of which depend on the builtin behaviour of the UI widgets.

OmniWeb’s flaws, however, made themselves known to me throughout the beta. I was more than willing to wait for them to resolve themselves during the beta process, but at this point, they have released the final version of 5.5, and still they’re not fixed.

One problem was stability. With a great many tabs open, containing images or pages, OmniWeb slows to a crawl. This isn’t too surprising, because RAM ain’t cheap, but it could be smarter about keeping tabs in memory or allowing them to be paged. Add into this mix a high likelihood of crashing when under load, and you have a very irritating situation.

The worst problem, however, seems to be the fault of WebKit, not OmniWeb itself, although their claim that they use a modified version suggests improvements, when I have a sneaking suspicion it means “older version”. If you use Gmail, and who doesn’t these days, then you’ve noticed that when you create a mail message and press ‘tab, enter’ from the edit box it sends the message. Kind of a reflex by now.

That doesn’t work in OmniWeb, not at all.

Now, there’s a tradeoff to be made, here, of course — OmniWeb and Safari have native widgets, which means that — for example — the keystrokes I use in editing text elsewhere on the system work consistently, a bit of polish that does not apply to Camino or Firefox. It’s features are many and fabulous, but it shouldn’t be final with that set of issues.

Won’t someone please think of the statistics?

Filed under: Humour, Internet, Media and Rants

In a world of fearmongering media and government, it seems to me that life would be better if we could just fucking count!

Dyed in the Wool?

Filed under: General Thoughts and Rants

Despite the fact that I am, as the title suggests, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative in a great may respects, I like to think that I’m not particularly reactionary in most respects. That being said, there is an interesting conservative reaction I have regarding a few modern conveniences.

The first one is cell phones. As discussed on the waiter rant a few days ago, and spotted via MetaFilter (where else?) people have a bizarre love-hate relationship with cell phones, and more generally with their users. On the one hand, it’s leading to a change in social norms, as people start having conversations that could, at best, be viewed as debatably appropriate for public consumption in subways, busses, restaurants, and other places.

The rant linked above, however, is interesting because in a lot of respects the person writing it is, from his other postings, a liberal-leaning individual who is having the classical conservative reaction to the new and different — he’s decrying it as destroying social institutions as though they have inherent value, as opposed to simply existing as a consequence of previous upheavals due to changing technologies and mores. I, on the other hand, tend to take things like the cell phone in stride. Sure, the definition of what is polite changes, but that’s been happening throughout the course of human history, from the vomitoriums at Roman binges to the straitlaced, repressive Victorian ear (in public, at least) to today, with our cell phones and our email.

So, in this respect, I fail the test of conservatism.

The second issue, the one that’s been ticking about my head for the longest, is the issue of the automatic transmission. I freely admit, I’m a stick in the mud on this one. It’s weird, because on one hand I’m in favour of letting machines do the work that machines are good enough at. I support automation, and the obsolescence of the manual labourer. I come down in favour of machine intelligences being developed to remove the likelihood, and reduce the probability of human error in complex tasks.

But, despite all of that, I cannot get over my strong preference for manual transmissions, and a subtle, but definitely present, sense of elitism when I realize that I am in a shrinking segment of the population that is comfortable with controlling more aspects of their vehicles. This is classical reactionary conservatism, decrying a change that is, at least by objective measures, beneficial to society on the basis that it is… different.

At this point, I imagine that readers are thinking: “Is he going anywhere with this?”

No.

To Brin, I Direct this Writing

Filed under: General Thoughts and Rants

David Brin, author of (amongst other things) “Glory Season” and, more relevant, “Earth,” is what one might call a surveillance utopianist, if such a term might be coined.

He argues (and argues well, I might add) that a world where our expectations of privacy have eroded to the point of total worldwide information transparency, to a degree where secrecy is one of the few true crimes left in the world, would be a good thing. “Earth” is founded, vaguely, on this idea, and although its protagonist seeks secrecy for just reasons, Brin himself gives every indication that he believes privacy to be an anachronism, a legacy of humanity’s brutal rise into civilization, and one best left behind.

I do not agree.

Bruce Schneier wrote an article for Wired magazine a short time ago on the value of privacy that I think bears reading. He contends, and I agree, that even the off-the-cuff responses we have to that old saw (“If you’re not doing anything wrong, why do you care if someone is watching”) are misdirected. Saying “The definition of wrong is in the hands of the government, and it keeps changing,” or “If I’m not doing anything wrong, you have no cause to watch me” is an implicit admission that privacy is intended to protect wrong actions.

This is not, and should not, be the case. The right to privacy protects our ability to grow, learn, and change. It protects the essential dignity of a loner who would otherwise fear constant examination by a society he rejects. It forms a fundamental component of interpersonal relations, or should we all feel that we must have sex in full view of the world, lest we be violating someone else’s right to examine our every behaviour?

This claim upon the details of my life is specious, and unethical, and must stop.

This claim upon the details of your life is no more right than the claim made by a peeping tom that nobody is hurt if he only looks in through the window.

As Schneier quotes Cardinal Richelieu: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

This must not become the way of our free society, lest our society cease to be free.

Hiding from the internet

Filed under: Internet and Rants

I think that tomorrow I’ll just … avoid .. the internet. The place turns into a pile of utter shit once per year, on 1 April, as every two-bit dumb shit gets the mistaken impression that we all just stop caring about anything at all, and decides that pink site redesigns and fake album releases are actually funny.

Asshats.

Dark (Democratic) Days.

Filed under: Media and Rants

Ahh, politics.  I love the smell of…

Shit.

It would appear, from the news at least, that checking a voting machine can result in a $40,000 “repair” charge regardless of any actual damage to the machine itself.

There’s a trend in the modern electoral machine in the Unites States towards greater automation.  What there is not is a trend towards correspondingly greater accountability.  He who counts the votes, &c.

I just find myself wishing that there would be some sense of actual interest on the part of the public at large, but what there is, instead, is a whole big steaming pile of apathy.  Hell,it’s contagious — I had a hard time motivating myself to rant about it, and I can tell from the pace of the text above that I’m really just phoning it in.

So what’s the solution?