The Waffle Is Dead...

Long Live The Waffle!

The failure of interactive government

I like Barack Obama; that is, I like him in the same way I like or dislike any constructed celebrity: based on the veneer that I see on a regular basis he seems not to be a rampaging, incompetent asshole. In general, I tolerate Obama politically, which for me is a fairly generous statement -- my social and political views are usually impractical, perfectionistic, aggressive, and unpopular (at least, many of them are) so I don't expect to see a successful politician adopt them any time soon. But there has been one constellation of ideas coming from Obama and his team that I seemed to be really, honestly agreeing with: it looked like, from the change.gov website, Obama was going to actually start synthesizing a new style of transparent and interactive government from a combination of technology and "forward" thinking.

I say "forward" in quotes because it's really only "forward" thinking from a backward, beauracratic, governmental point of view. We could have started with real and meaningful open government as soon as we had technology that supported it. Minimally, the bare-bones Internet was enough to make an effort, but certainly by the early 1990's the web was available enough that it could have been put to use productively by the government.

But governments and technology generally mix like oil and water, so only now do we see the glimmer of a government that has anything to do with modern communications and interactivity.

Or rather, only now had we seen a glimmer of this kind of government. Change.gov was a brilliant platform: though it sometimes felt a little ad-hoc, it was a surprisingly open forum, where lots of people posted lots of comments about lots of things. People could make suggestions about what Obama should be doing, and then they could vote on and talk about suggestions from other people. I was impressed by this, coming from a president-elect -- it was a good sign.

But now we've lept off the precipice of warm-fuzzy-president-elect / change.gov and landed in the shit-storm that is omfg-that's-the-oval-office-president / whitehouse.gov.

I gather from the large button that says "Participate - Office of Public Liaison - Changing the way Americans engage with their government" that there is some intent to offer similar interactivity on whitehouse.gov... but right now clicking on that button gives you a stock "Contact Us" form and this introduction:

The Office of Public Liaison & Intergovernmental Affairs (OPL-IGA) is the front door to the White House through which everyone can participate and inform the work of the President.

OPL-IGA takes the Administration out of Washington and into communities across America, stimulating honest dialogue and ensuring that America's citizens and their elected officials have a government that works effectively for them and with them.

OPL-IGA will bring new voices to the table, build relationships with constituents and seeks to embody the essence of the President's movement for change through the meaningful engagement of citizens and their elected officials by the federal government.

We'll be adding many more ways for you to interact with OPA-IGA at this page in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, please take a moment to share your thoughts using the form below.

Here're my thoughts: Fuck you.

"Weeks and months ahead"? This is the web in 2009 -- weeks and months might as well be eons and eternity. And change.gov is (was) working now. What do you need weeks and months for? Are you tweaking the god-dammed color scheme for the "many more ways" for me to interact? This is like a California prop-8 bait and switch: throw out change.gov as some distant beacon of how we might start moving forward with an open government then snatch it away right after everybody realizes its actually there. I hope that little contact form has been flooded by people complaining that they miss being able to actually interact. If it hasn't been, we're in even worse shape than I thought: we had something -- something good -- and now we don't have it any more -- that should piss us off.

Some people probably think I should just be patient. Those people are wrong. They're wrong because it just doesn't take that long to start offerring real, useful interactivity on a website. They're wrong because even if it did take ages to assemble those kinds of online tools they've already been built and deployed at change.gov -- they could just be moved, if only as a stop-gap measure so the fledgling "I actually want to interact with my government, even if it's all imaginary and pointless in the end" community would have something -- some token of good faith -- to work with.

And, perhaps most importantly, they're wrong because we don't live in an age of patience anymore. Sometimes patience is still a virtue -- sometimes we need to wait for things, and savor the waiting. But most of the time our technology gives us things quickly -- I can send a message nearly instantly to any one in the world with a computer, I could travel anywhere on the planet within 3 days, I can stream entertainment of all kinds from all over the world, and I can even contribute to that entertainment (and information) whenever I wish. We live in a world of astounding agility, and we are at the dawn (yes, really, still just the very early dawn) of a world in which information and ideas race around at speeds, and in ways, that will continue to amaze us for generations.

It is long past time for the government to catch up and start acting like an agile, modern institution, instead of like a plodding 18th century juggernaut with busted cog.

I can single-handedly conjure at least a basic interactive, community building website from my ass in less than a day. A lot less if I use existing open-source platforms and tools. In fact, if I already had an existing site I could probably drop in a basic message board in minutes.

Am I suggesting that I think building a chunk of whitehouse.gov where the public can voice and discuss their concerns is as simple as whipping up a common message board? No, I'm not. But there's a whole office of the whitehouse devoted to this... and there's a substantial base of existing tools at change.gov... and there's a huge base of existing tools other people have built... and it doesn't have to be perfect on launch day, it just has to be there. And, on reflection, a lightly but visibly moderated message board with a section for, say, each item on The Agenda would actually go a very long way towards restoring my faith in this open government idea that change.gov started; aside from bueracratic crap or plain old laziness I don't see any reason why that couldn't be available tonight.

"Weeks and months" my ass.

Diablo 3 Nonsense

A while back Blizzard announced Diablo 3 by way of a series of splash pages, with their usual jovial shroud of misdirection. Blizzard has also trickled out a few handfuls of screen shots and a game-play movie... and that's were the trouble started. Shortly after this meager bounty of carefully selected D3 information was released, a community of ... how shall I say this gently ... fucking morons with pirated copies of Photoshop and way too god-damned much time on their fucking greasy hands started imagining new rules for how Diablo is supposed to look.

Now we get to listen to people whine: "It need to be grittier and darker", "It's too bright", "Why are there so many colors?", "It's not even Diablo anymore!"

I love the visual style of Diablo 3 -- at least, based on the insignificantly tiny snippet of imagery we've seen so far. I had my fill of games that looked like mud in a barrel stirred vigorously when I played the original Quake. The addition of things like colors and, heaven forbid, a rainbow, doesn't make it "not Diablo" -- it just makes it Diablo with more then a cramped 256 color pallet.

An aside to this bullshit, is that, as far as I can tell, no one has actually done any work to demonstrate their ideas of what the Diablo 3 artistic style should be. Instead, people have taken screenshots and fiddled with the color balance, added a little noise, maybe even messed with that lighting filter... I don't see any from-scratch mock-ups or original paintings. People are happy to bitch and moan, and to sign petitions (no, really), and complain endlessly, but I guess putting together a dungeon's worth of sample art is a bit too hard. Why don't we see an outpouring of community-made, fully-rigged and animated 3D models? Where are the meticulously grimy sample textures? The carefully crafted 3D tiles that snap together neatly to create the "properly gothic" labyrinths?

Perhaps all the "fans" really want is a little tweaking, a little filter-esque nudge, and that's why all this sample working isn't being furiously developed. If that's the case, I have a suggestion for Blizzard:

Just-in-time pixel shader plugin support.

Here's how it works: render the game to a texture, rather than the screen (it's certainly possible this is already being done, for other effects purposes). Let "the fans" plugin a pixel shader that the engine uses to render this texture to the screen (this rendering process is not, by itself, innovative, but I think the idea of letting jackasses plug their own pixel shader in might be fairly original). The great news is, you should be able to emulate most of the Photoshop-ish effects in a single pixel shader. I for one can't wait to see the repositories of "gothic filters" that creep up all over the net, with hundreds of little pixel shaders that make things just a bit darker, or a little blurry, or add lots of noise to the screen so it looks "more evil".

Here's my contribution (I think it's perfect for the people who think the game just isn't dark enough in general):

float4 d3FilterShader() : COLOR
{
    // Should be nice and dark now
    return float4(0, 0, 0, 255);
}

Put that in your elongated, pseudo-realistic, gothic, fantasy, halfing's-leaf pipe and shove it up your ass!

"The Controversial Survey" - Part 2

Oh yes: Part 2.

So the "survey" itself was mediocre. After finishing it, I had this pit in my stomach... like, maybe people familiar with my personality would feel like my usual venom hadn't been spit... perhaps they would worry that I had caved in and become something "fluffy". To allay these fears, I present here a discussion of the subtexts of several of the questions from the "Controversial" survey.

I hope you find them ascorbic and thought provoking. Then ascorbic again. In that order.

"Do you have the guts to answer these Q's and repost as The Controversial Survey?"

"Q's"? You mean "questions"? For Christ's sake if you're going to climb up Mt. Soapbox and call something "The Controversial Survey" at least write the whole word "questions". No where else does this document descend into such pointless macho posturing bullshit; it's as if the author needed to lure me into the dark back alley of the survey with a pasty-white-rapper-boy faux persona before we could "talk business" and actually use whole words.

And what does it say about our society that we need to have "guts" to answer some charged semi-political opinion questions in public? "Oh, no, I'm not gutsy enough to have opinions -- I just think we should have sunshine and bunnies and whatever anybody else says!"

I say: bunnies are delicious the sun just gives you cancer! Stay inside! Feast on rabbit stew!

Parental Licensing

In one survey circulating around MySpace we have an example of parent's hitting their kids, a 12-year-old mother and a woman who killed her 5 children! What is this nonsense about letting anybody have as many kids as they want? Having a child is a tremendous responsibility, and most people aren't and won't ever be ready for it.

You should have to be licensed to have a child.

You should be required to demonstrate that you understand that children are expensive and that they cry a lot, and won't shake them to death because you wind up sleep deprived and fifty grand in debt.

You need to have a steady job that pays all your current bills with plenty left for your savings account (which you are required to have).

You need to demonstrate some basic knowledge of child care: diaper changing, feeding, nutrition, and so on.

We don't verify anything about people before we let them pop out babies at whatever rate they please. Do we worry at all about the impact this has on the children? I suppose some people would argue that having kids is some sort of God-given right -- something you can't take away from people. I say that's a load of steaming crap. Kids deserve to be raised by competent parents, not by blubbering idiots who treat them like another trophy dog or hunk of bling to parade around in front of their friends as a measure of status. Having a child isn't about feeling better about yourself, or strengthening your relationships: it's about raising a child. If you aren't 100% clear, certain and comfortable with that, I don't think it's a great idea for you to be raising the next generation.

Alcohol and Drugs

People have a unique talent for transforming small problems into epic and often misplaced and misunderstood battles. Alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes have all been solid examples.

16 year olds like to get totally shit-faced because they aren't allowed to. Would you like to end childhood diabetes? Make vegetables illegal and watch as the average childhood diet skyrockets into the land of ultra-healthy.

In general, we seem to believe we can keep people from doing things; this is entirely untrue. Kids who want to drink will. Adults who want to do coke will. People who want to smoke will.

Making these things illegal just makes them more interesting to younger people and more dangerous in general. A much better approach to these problems is honest education, and better laws.

Let's teach our 12 year olds what booze is and what it does. Let's let them have half a glass of wine at diner, or a beer out on the boat with the family. Then lets modify the penalties for the real issues related to drinking: got a DUI? You never drive again, ever. Period. No suspended license, no community service, no second chances. After all, we've been telling you about alcohol since you were 12! You know how fucked up you get when you're drunk, and if you can't keep your shit together enough to plan not to drive when you're drinking why on earth should we ever let you have another chance? You might kill somebody!

But it's important to notice that you're not killing somebody because you're drunk. You're killing somebody because you're an idiot. The alcohol isn't what made you stupid: you were stupid when you drove your own damn self to a bar to get hammered. That little planning mis-step happened before you had your fun.

There's much more to complain about regarding drugs in general -- but there's also more of the survey to dissect, so for now at least, I'll move on (perhaps I can revisit this gem in a later post).

The War in Iraq

There has been a surprisingly effective metamorphosis of the debate around the Iraq War: the real issue is not about the war itself -- the issue is about the process by which we "prepared for" and subsequently entered into war.

It's probably safe to say that Saddam Hussein wasn't going to win the "Most Bestest Dictator of the Year" award; and it's probably true that not having him in power -- considered in isolation (i.e. without regard for the mess that's filled the vacuum) -- is a "good thing".

The problem is that we got fed a heaping platter of horse-shit about why we should go to war, and what we were trying to accomplish in the war. We had no plan to successfully complete and exit a conflict because we lacked any interest in understanding the region we were about the enter into conflict with. We went ahead in the most consistent and well-known (and globally reviled) American tradition of deciding: "them's not us over there, so they must all be the evildoers and we can fuck'em up good and make things more American-y and that's better for ev'rybody!"

America thrives on an unspoken policy of isolationist delusion. We simply declare that we're the best at everything, then lump the outside world into the "Other" category. We, as a nation, are incapable of sensitivity or nuance, and we have become (or perhaps have always been) unable to examine ourselves in the harsh light of reality.

The war in Iraq must continue now, because it is not finished (though, it would be quite in character for us to abandon it mid-stream, having decided we'd done our part). But the people responsible for it should be eviscerated; our failure to do this may be the real lasting impression of the war abroad. We will show the world -- again -- that we do not hold accountable the people who blunder across the globe inciting the deaths of nearly-countless-thousands at a time; we will demonstrate -- again -- that as a people we are unable to find any way to approach a problem unarmed.

When the war is finished, we should take a long, hard look at the cost of the war. We should ponder the way in which this vast expense could be incurred for the sake of destruction, but we cannot educate our children and we cannot heal our sick.

Of course, we won't perform these examinations, because we are a society of impotent, fearful, greedy people. We are petty; and, terrifyingly, the only nation on the planet that has not accepted it is our own.

"The Controversial Survey" - Part 1

I've been off MySpace for a long while now, since the site is really shamefully broken shamefully often. But today, feeling excessively bored and annoyed by Facebook's two-hundred-billion-fucking-widgets all of which are sending me constant invitations to "be bought", "be punched", "punch someone back", "go on the Oregon trail in so-and-so's wagon", "receive a pet", "receive a patch of grass", and so on, I decided I should peek in on the old MySpace page.

As I'm mucking about looking for show dates for a band named after a bland, starchy, snack food (yeah, I mean you ::points menacingly::) I notice there's been ... a bulletin posted a while back with the tantalizing title "The Controversial Survey".

I have mixed feelings about these survey things that circulate the social networks; most of them are shit (... I guess that's not that mixed). But I really fucking love controversy, so this worked out to slightly better than a wash.

Here, then, I present my responses to "The Controversial Survey":

Do you have the guts to answer these Q's and repost as The Controversial Survey?
No. This post is a figment of your imagination – go take your god damned meds.

Would you do meth if it was legalized?
No; but you can do it if you want to. In fact, I’d really prefer you buy your meth legally from the local 7-11 rather than blowing shit up when you drop your second-hand mixing flask in your garage.

Abortion: for or against?
I’m strongly for it. We have plenty of people already and, frankly, most people make bloody rotten parents.

Would our country fall with a woman president?
Yes, but not because of having a female president. The gender of our president isn’t likely to have any impact at all on our Romanesque shit-spiral into the lowest regions of decadence and depravity, and our overall attitudes towards the rest of the world should ensure that any leftovers from the impending implosion are mopped up nicely.

Do you believe in the death penalty?
No. In order to even begin discussing the death penalty as a viable form of punishment, you must be able to ensure with 100% certainty that it is never misapplied. Currently, our justice system is unable to ensure with any certainty at all that any law ever applies in any consistent way.

Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?
Yes. Unless you’re willing to ban all potentially intoxicating substances (which is whole-heartedly foolish, and rampagingly ineffective to boot), there’s really no point in banning any of them. Besides, this is a tremendous missed opportunity for taxation – maybe we could use the revenue to pay for something frivolous for everybody – like fucking healthcare.

Are you for or against premarital sex?
For! Marrying someone you’ve never had sex with is just a steaming load of bullshit. Unless you’re legitimately asexual, sex is going to be an important part of your relationship – figure out if it works before you facetiously commit for life, make babies, have affairs, get divorced and fuck up your kids.

Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?
If we’re going to keep heterosexual marriage legal (which is not necessarily a great idea), there’s no reason not to make homosexual marriage equally legal.

Do you think its wrong that so many Hispanics are moving to the USA?
No. However: the process of immigration in this country is a nightmare, and has clearly been designed with the intent of being impossible to navigate for virtually all immigrants; this needs to be fixed so we can actually provide a sensible legal process for immigration.

A 12 year old girl has a baby...should she keep it?
Abso-fucking-lutely not. It is probably the case that this baby will obliterate the 12 year old mother’s life (and very likely the lives of her immediately family, if they are present and involved), but of much greater concern is the fact that a 12 year old is utterly incapable of raising a child effectively in our society, and the baby is the one who’s about to be truly and seriously screwed because of it.

Should the alcohol age be lowered to 18?
Yes – in fact, even lower might be better. The issue is not young people drinking, it’s young people failing to have a sense of responsibility imposed on them that’s the problem. Let’s teach 14 year olds to handle alcohol responsibly while they still live at home, and maybe they won’t find it so god-damned fascinating and rebellious when they’re 21 and driving (not that they should be driving – but that’s a different controversial opinion).

Should the war in Iraq be called off?
That’s a bit like asking if we should call off the demolition of the old city hall after we blew the fucker up. We should be moving out of Iraq as efficiently as possible at this point – the problem is, we’ve made damn sure it’s not going to be very efficient.

Do you believe in spanking your children?
I can’t answer this one: if I ever have children, it will mean that my beliefs have shifted so fundamentally that any answer I provide now will be utterly meaningless. As for you spanking your children: no, I don’t believe in it. I do believe you shouldn’t have had children, though, and that your likely total failure to prepare for parenthood is likely the reason why you now have rambunctious brats whom you’d like to hit.

A mother is declared innocent after murdering her 5 children in a temporary insanity case...opinion?
A thing over there just happened that might be kindof shady, but maybe nobody is getting blamed, per se, for it… opinion?

This question is full of vagaries; generalizing guilt, innocence, and punishment into little snippets of provocative drivel is 90% of the reason our justice system is a train wreck of racism and generalized bigotry ruled by wealth instead of sense.

It's between you and a person who is being kept alive by life support machines… one has to die, who?
It depends: is the other person being kept alive by life support machines with no chance at all of recovery? Is he or she already brain dead? If so, then I’ll be happy to yank the plug from the wall and go on my way, feeling, frankly, like I’ve done my good deed for the week.

If, on the other hand, my fate-bound-buddy on the tubes is likely to recover in some measurable capacity, this becomes an entirely different question, and would no doubt have a much longer answer... to be fair, it probably still involves me not being the dead guy though.

Global warming: fact or fiction?
Fact. Next?

Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?
I’ll leave it to your no doubt fruit-filled imagination to guess at this one.

I live in a shit-hole!

I was browsing my local news on news.google.com today after I got back from my psychotherapist appointment (surprised? no, you're not :b) and was treated to this headline:

Providence cancels holiday fireworks display

Wow.

Providence routinely lights huge bails of wood floating in a river on fire (they call it "Waterfire", I call it "touristy bullshit"), so you'd think they'd be fairly good at managing burning stuff. You'd be wrong, though.

Apparently Providence has been launching fireworks from a plot of land near various state buildings since 2005. That's important because it's only just this year, with not enough time to find an alternate site to launch them from, that the fire marshal has "remeasured" (you can probably read this as: "bothered to measure for the first time") the distance between the fireworks and the buildings and discovered they're too close together to be safe.

And why remeasure now? Because of the "discovery of burns on the roof of the state medical examiner’s office". That's right: for 3 years Providence has been almost but not quite burning down, at a minimum, the state medical examiner's office.

Splendid.

And, partly to give credit where credit is due, and partly to convince you I'm not actually creative enough to make this shit up, here's a link to the original Boston Herald story: http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1104356&format=comments#CommentsArea

and a longer story in the Providence Journal: http://www.projo.com/news/content/PROVIDENCE_FIREWORKS_07-01-08_BJAN5R2_v10.3e822ea.html

Say what? Another blog??

I realize at first it seems counter-intuitive, since I'm rotten at updating this blog to begin with (which probably explains my essentially zero-person readership), but I've spun off a second blog.

Why?

Because I'd like to discuss web development (and to a lesser extent general programming concerns) in a space that isn't cluttered with personal cruft. Likewise, I'd rather not loose my opportunity to dump my personal cruft into a giant blog-shaped barrel for the world to occasionally stumble onto. So, The Angry Waffle will be my personal blog, as well as my place to ramble about games and things along those lines, and Bloody Great Leaf will (surprisingly?) be just a bit cleaner, and devoted primarily to discussing issues that one way or another influence my professional life.

Politics ::sigh::

On April 16th, I watched ABC's Democratic "Debate" in Philadelphia. It was wretched and I would like very much to be compensated for the time I wasted on it.

Something has gone very very wrong with our politics, and, indeed, with us as a nation -- it is not a new fault, but it is a festering one, and if it had less critical consequences it would comedic to watch from a distance.

Throughout this campaign process, I have been treated to endless media-driven banter, batted about from every side and in every direction. I have been inundated with meaningless propaganda, assaulted by ceaseless political double-talk, and, in the real final analysis, been told absolutely nothing.

Huge tracts of time were devoted in the April 16th debate to absolute silliness, with middling bullshit like:

• Does Obama believe in the American flag?
• Is he more patriotic than Reverend Wright?
• Does he think Clinton can really beat McCain?
• Does Clinton think Obama can beat McCain?
• Does she really think people should get up and walk out of a church if they don't like the pastor?

Even when the questions turned vaguely towards real issues, the answers were thin, patronizing, and intentionally distracting.

It is very likely that they were also all lies.

I put forth this assertion for simply because the art of politics, in those increasingly rare cases when it is not openly and grossly about media glitz, is about bullshit. To a large degree, I tolerate this on the part of the politicians, because, in the end, the public persona of a politician is a surprisingly squishy surface, that tends to ooze into the mold we, as the public, hold up to it.

And there is the real problem: as a country we have decided that we adore meaningless crap. We devour it like candy, and the more of it we're fed, the more insatiable our appetite grows. I am at a loss as to why we tolerate such volumes of useless pseudo-information being flung at us during something so (purportedly) important as a campaign to choose the person who may go on to become the leader of our nation (the campaign to actually elect the president becomes an even more baffling slug-fest of grime-covered crap). Perhaps the explanation is "innocent": we're all just bloody stupid, lazy, ignorant, or disinterested; or, for a more conspiratorial jilt, perhaps we're all intentionally so over-worked, under-paid, and terrified of being attacked by the "enemy" that we aren't capable of rational discussion any longer.

In the end, I don't care if Obama keeps a little stack of silken American flags in his bathroom to wipe his ass with. And in the same vein I don't care if Clinton has marched out of a thousand sermons leaving little comment cards (no doubt with a little American flag pin in the corner) about how a good pastor should conduct a sermon.

Why don't we actually debate something meaningful? And I mean really dig into it. I don't want a 3rd grade shouting match of "my health care plan is better" / "no mine is better!"; I want proof. I want numbers and nit-picky details. I want to be convinced by something mostly irrefutable (that is: by math with a few well-backed assumptions about the future) that one plan is better or cheaper or more feasible than the other.

But that would be awfully dry wouldn't it? It's a lot more fun to run around screaming "Witch" -- I mean: "Terrorist" -- at every opportunity -- and to cheer about "patriotism" and wave our little flags around and pretend that if we just love one candidate enough and hate the other one just the right amount God will come down and take care of sweeping the troops out of Iraq and cleaning up health care and fixing our tragically broken education system and all sorts of other things -- just poof! Now all we have to argue about is which candidate pisses God off the least, and that is more fun than math and financial planning.

You did it

When you send an e-card from Amazon (which you usually shouldn't do, because their e-cards are just god-awful) it says at the end: "You did it! Your card has been sent."

Read it again: "You did it! Your card has been sent."

That's right, Amazon is talking to you like a 3 year old who just managed to use the potty. "You did it! You got to the bathroom in time! Way to go honey!" I don't need this kind of talking-down-to after I settle for one of their e-cards; I already feel like I failed somehow.

Of course, maybe they meant to evoke the image of a kid taking a crap, as a sort of inside joke about knowing how bad their cards have gotten... another of life's little mysteries.

So this has been a strange month. On December 4th, with no particularly immediate warning, my father passed away. For people who read this and weren't aware, he'd been in a nursing home for a couple of years now, and had a whole host of health problems. The surprising part about it was that he had just seemed to really be settling into a stable position, and everybody was under the impression he was going to be around for a good while longer; even just a few years ago, he seemed to be much worse off, and, frankly, I had been starting at that point to wonder how much longer he would be with us.

The consensus is that he experienced some sort of "major cardiac episode". If there can be a fortunate side to this sort of thing, it's that it seems like it was a very sudden event. My father is not the kind of person who was suited to withering away, and he passed exactly as he should have: quickly, and basically in the middle of an argument about how he was fine and could take care of himself.

All else set aside, loosing my father has certainly made me think about my own life in a somewhat more immediate way. My dad was only 56 -- which means I am roughly at the mid-way point of his lifespan myself -- and, though I don't aspire to a short life (contrary to my outward personality at times), it's a harrowing thought to be confronted with the loss of a parent at such a relatively young age (for both of us); there's also a mixed sensation when you're suddenly surrounded by people who tell you that you "look just like your father when he was your age", and "you sound just like him": on the one hand, I've taken some pride in those sorts of statements, and counted them as compliments, but on the other, what does that say about my future health, if anything?

Friday morning I was thinking about application development cycles, project management, and process in general. I'm a process geek and these things interest me. They are of particular interest while I do things like sit, immobilized, connected to a very badly mis-configured VPN downloading source code from a Microsoft Visual Source Safe repository.

In fact, maybe I should start there: Visual Source Safe (VSS from now on) is horrid. It's not the fluffy "oh-it's-from-Microsoft-so-it's-funny-bad" kind of horrid. It's horrid on the scale of vomiting sulfuric acid while the bottom half of your body is slowly dissolved into a liquid by the digestive juices of a million tiny leeches feeding on you at once. A good sign that VSS is a bad choice for version control software comes right from Google -- go ahead, Google it -- that's right: the first page of results has two articles decrying VSS as terminally unsuited to the task of version control for any project. Even the sponsored adds are composed mostly of taglines like "Sick of Visual SourceSafe" and "Fed up with SourceSafe?". I would not expect the applications in the sponsored ads to be any better (though I suppose I could be wrong).

VSS is also slow. Very, very slow. It doesn't help that I'm forced to connect to a VPN in India to access the repository (VSS repositories are more or less just network shares -- they don't play well over any kind of Internet connection). I expect it will take, at the current rate, somewhere in the neighborhood of a one real, honest-to-God, day to download all of the code for the project I'm working on. A day of solid computer (or at least network) time. To download source code. Plain text. Plain text full of repetitive phrases that would shrink down to nearly nothing with good compression... or any compression. But compression and efficiency is not for VSS.

Efficiency doesn't really seem to be for anyone, though, and I think that was my original point when I started writing this last Friday. As terrible as the VSS setup I'm working with is, maybe I shouldn't be complaining: it's only the second job I've worked at with any source code control (SCC now) what-so-ever. Now that I've said that out loud (err... you know what I mean) I realize that I should be complaining a lot more. I've done web development and programming work for about ten different companies or organizations now and only one other used any SCC methods at all.

It's also only the second company to use some kind of project management tool (we have Basecamp -- it's like some kind of little nirvana of sense -- I love it). The other company used to have Basecamp, but ditched it in favor of a more "robust" solution; the developers revolted (and reverted to pen-and-paper notes in large part). I quit the job before I saw the results of the uprising, but I'm not optimistic about how it all went.

It's also the only company I've worked for to have an actual bug tracking tool in place (yes, it's badly configured, slow, and a little obnoxious, but at least it's there).

It's consistently stunning to me how little anyone ("anyone" is harsh, perhaps, but there certainly seems to be a trend towards majority here) really cares about keeping track of what needs to be done and what has been done.

I'm fairly sure I had a lot more to complain about when I started this post on Friday, but reviewing it now, I really think I've babbled enough for one blog post. Who has the patience to read something this long anyway?

Between 12 PM and 1 PM I eat lunch. "Eat lunch" is a geeky euphemism for "snack randomly and read Slashdot then look for new shmups to play for the last 20 minutes of my official lunch hour".

Today, while "eating lunch" I read "Don't Trust the Servers" by John C. Dvorak because it was "sitting on the lunch table" (read: linked to from Slashdot). I don't usually bother to read articles about the risks of emerging software technologies or the horrors of Windows and such because they don't really add a whole lot to my world view most of the time. This article, however, had a couple of such spectacularly ridiculous quotes I couldn't resist.

That, and I'm cutting my doses of anti-depressants to a quarter of what they were a couple of months ago so my bitterness and deep cynical opinionated asshole muscles are flexing hard.

As an asshole, I would like to address each paragraph of the article in turn (skipping the ones that just don't inspire a comment):

Page 1, Paragraph 1 (lets do P1-1 from now on, ok?)

There's a nice little dig here about how only MS operating systems were dumb enough to have a problem because of their "phone-home"-ing. See, I'm saying nice things too!

P1-4 "One aspect of..."

The "kind of system" WGA is is, of course, a terribly broken and ill-conceived one. But it doesn't seem like the impact of the WGA server failure was to suddenly cut users off from Windows like a cutlass severing their left hands. Instead, in the case of earlier editions of Windows, it would seem users were just cut off from non-critical Windows Update... erm... updates. Oh, and they had to see an annoying notification bubble.

Vista users were hit much harder: no Aero (though based on what I've seen of business users, the Windows 9x interface still seems popular, even under XP and Vista), no Windows Defender (if this was your only application filling the roles of "anti-spyware" and "anti-virus" you deserve to be fucked for two days -- and I mean fucked like raped with a nail gun, not just fucked like "in some trouble"), and no ReadyBoost (OH NO! My hard-drive isn't fast enough to open Word!! Shit!). In the end, I admit, the Vista hit becomes legitimate when Reduced Functionality Mode kicks in and nothing works.

This whole paragraph is still just fear-mongering and whining (the WGA servers are at ORANGE -- Reliability Threats Detected -- everybody look out for stuff that seems... terrorist-y!)

P1-5 "All this proves is that..."

Here comes the good stuff.

WGA (during it's best or worst times) doesn't prove anything at all about "Web-based applications". WGA isn't a web based application: it's a poorly conceived OS component that chatters away across the Internet to an unreliable server to discern generally useless information about piracy. Saying that WGA's failure is indicative of anything about web based applications on the whole is like saying that because the guy at my local hardware store cut my duplicate house key badly locks are a dumb idea.

As a side note, I think I'm ready to declare that all users are stupid. In fact, I would okay making that part of the definition of "user":

User:
-noun
Stupid (son-of-a-)bitch who breaks software because they're expectations are not in line with the reality of modern software engineering and software development.

I'm a programmer and I hate users. They suck. I am also a user, and I'm sometimes terribly stupid -- not because I don't know what I'm doing, but because I, in fits of rage, refuse to accept that the software has not read my mind and done what I think it ought to have done.

P1-6 "If this WGA were designed right..."

If WGA had been designed right (really "right", not pretend fluffy-world "right") it would have proceeded exactly as follows:

Joe Management: I need you guys to build a system that disables Windows piece by piece unless it can contact a badly maintained server here at Microsoft and verify some product key and software legitimacy data.
Developer's (as a chorus): I'm sorry but I can't ethically do that, and even if I could, I wouldn't because it makes very little sense and is an inherently flawed and undependable system.

This is the point where the idea is axed in this world of righteousness. This is not where we live. Any other discussion of how WGA should have been designed is pointless. It's like arguing that flying bombs that go off at random and can't be disarmed are a "good idea" if we "design them right".

P2-1 "The bigger issue here..."

True, a lot of applications are moving towards a service-based model, but I think this is a Good Thing for the most part. Regardless of my opinion, however, here are two clear prongs about why it might be happening:

1. The Evil Prong: It's harder to "steal" service models. There's no CD to burn and no product key to pass around to your friends. Bill users by the hour, or by space, or by document, or by intangible widget usage ratio, or whatever, and it doesn't really matter all that much if one person shares the service with 200 other people: they still generate 200 people worth of usage and the pirate probably foots the bill.
2. The Pragmatic Prong: It's easier to maintain. Patching software is a bitch. All software is broken (read that again; I said it and I mean it) and all software needs patching, debugging, and updating. I don't like having to download patches and install updates, developers don't like having to package patches up for use by clients, it's all just a slow terribly mess. Web based applications update smoothly (okay, "smoothly") without user intervention; it's easier that way.

Google Docs is not as good as Word, BTW. It lacks many of Word's advanced features. If you think that's a good thing, then great: use Google docs and be happy. If you think it's a bad thing, you're savvy enough to use the advanced features of Word well (because God knows you didn't find them without looking) and therefor you can probably manage things like emailing files to your friends...

P2-2 "Easier to share files?..."

It's really mother-fucking hard to attach a doc file to an email. User's are stupid. They are also lazy, sedentary, quick to anger, impatient, stressed, and Stupid.

Emailing a document is so hard that some people are more likely to write the "email" in word, print it, stack it on top of a copy of the document, add a cover sheet and fax it. (And that's the good version of a true story that went much worse.)

Even with user stupidity set aside, emailing a document really is kindof hard: it's amazing it works as often as it does. You'd be hard pressed to manage to count the number of email clients available, let alone the disparities between them, especially if you add web mail into the mix. There are three major operating systems to contend with, all of which disagree slightly on how files should be stored, manipulated, and identified. Are those Mac line endings? Where's the Resource Fork for this file? WTF is a Resource Fork?? Why did this document come through as two files? How do I open a .SIT? Why doesn't this have an extension? How come Windows doesn't know what kind of file this is?

P2-3 "And what happens if the system fails?..."

Where you store your information doesn't have any bearing on whether or not it should've been backed-up. And just to be clear: it should've been backed up!

Saying that if I was going to back up my online files locally negates keeping them online is another non-sense exaggeration. When I backup my files onto a DVD, I don't immediately delete the originals thinking "well, there's no sense having two copies". Lot's of copies are good. Besides, my files are online because I want to do something with them online -- like share them with other people without going through the maze of emailing versions back and forth.

I keep CDs I've ripped MP3's from too... and I burn music I've bought from iTunes to CD... they're both worth having for different reasons: sometimes I want backups, sometimes my friend's car doesn't have an MP3-aware CD player, but I want to listen to my music while I mutter angrily about being outside.

P2-4 "To analyze the illogic of certain trends..."

Alrighty, I'll play "the explosion of anti-time game":

We start with server-based applications filling the world. We roll back and suddenly see these nifty desktops arrive on the scene, everyone is excited that they can have direct control over how badly their information is stored! Let's keep going, historically, though: the machines get smaller and less utilitarian, slower, clunkier... slowly they fade away into... terminals connect to a mainframe! Good lord, we're back at the beginning with software on a big machine "somewhere else" and dinky little "clients" accessing it on a time-share model of some kind.

This particular approach only makes sense if you stop running time backwards at the point where you're comfortable with the technology (apparently for Dvorak this is when "the desktop computer with a quad-core processor and huge hard drive" appear -- in other words just before now -- the lowest possible energy state of "having to learn new stuff to keep functioning". By that I mean: it's lazy and convenient.)

P2-6 "Though tech trends are..."

Of course the 19-but-not-72 hour failure happened to Microsoft. Microsoft is a massive behemoth that lumbers along with, essentially, no fear. Arrogance (and limitless cash-flow) tend to breed bravado and a it-can't-fail-here attitude. Joe's Server Farm and Toaster Repair would've had a backup server because there would've been something real for Joe to loose if he fucked up. Microsoft just cackles "whatcha gonna do? use Linux??" Someday (perhaps soon, perhaps not) there will be enough chinks and divots in the armor of Microsoft that it actually does have to care about things, but that day is not today.

P2-8 "What is often lost in individual analyses..."

I agree: being at the mercy of one company is probably Bad Thing. But shit happens. I can have all the backups in the world of my non-internet-dependent Linux box, but when the electric company fucks up, I'm still screwed. Unless I have a generator. Then I just need fuel... or I could peddle, I guess.

I'm a cynically guy, but even I have to admit, when I really think about, that the failure rate of online services is amazingly low. Given the enormous volume of traffic handled by some online services (Google's sprawling mass of online knicknacks, for example), it's impressive they aren't broken all the time.

I feel good about Google being in charge of backing up this blog post. They have thousands of distributed servers. I have a CD/DVD burner and a flash drive in the same building. Google wins.

Don't get me wrong here, Microsoft definitely earns another 50 "dumb idea" points for not thinking about a redundant network infrastructure for their anti-piracy services, but let's not go crazy with the spook stories and end-of-the-web warnings just because a lazy company screwed up a service nobody really wants for 12 hours (which, assuming WGA went live and "mandatory" in July of 2005, is only around 0.07% of it's total lifetime by my, admittedly hasty, calculations).

Damn, now I've overrun my lunch hour! ;p

What's this you say? I can post my Google Documents directly to my Blog?

Naturally the question is: how on earth does that all work out, and the only way I could come up with to answer it was to try it; so here it is: a blog post from a Google Doc.

If it works, I have plenty more to say today; if it doesn't I guess I'll just have to go back to the Blogger form...

Seattle WA

Why has my blog been so silent for so long? Why is my WoW character stuck at level 31? Why are there 32 un-heard messages on my answering machine? ...because I'm in Seattle meeting-and-greeting at the University of Washington and exploring the general environs.

Yes, I have pictures, and I'll be posting them when I return to Crap-hole, USA.

Why spammers need to pay more attention

I get a fair amount of spam. I've learned to try and look at it as lots of free joke-of-the-day emails. It never ceases to amaze me what sort of crap people will try and hock; sometimes you get really lucky and something truly ridiculous comes through... Today, for example, I received the following at 5:28 AM:

Hi! I am bored this evening. I am 25 y.o. girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at ewjs@anymailonline.info only. Hope you like my pictures.

...the from line read: "Harvey Wyatt"

CuteGod Prototype Release

The truth is, I'm probably too busy to be working on prototypes of nifty games, but don't worry: I haven't let that stop me!

I've been able to add a number of features to the CuteGod prototype:

• Recognition of ground patterns
• Houses (automatically generated when patterns are completed)
• A nifty "pattern holder sidebar-thing"
• Sounds, which I think really spiffied the whole thing up
• Some flashy sparkling stars for effect (and more importantly, a framework for future special effects)

Here's a quick screen shot:

And, happy days for you no doubt, here's a link to download the prototype.

If you want to give it a try you'll need Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0, XNA Framework 1.0, and DirectX 9.0c.

If you do give it a try, I'd appreciate it if you can let me know if it worked or not (if not, please email me a copy of the log.txt file in the directory you installed the prototype in -- in fact, even if it does run it would be great to see the log file, so I can get a sense of what sort of machines it's working on).

Controls are very simple: click to pickup the highlighted block when your "hand" is empty, click to drop a block you're holding on top of the highlighted block, right-click and drag to pan the map around (be careful with this -- it's not my fault if you pan yourself into oblivion!).

The list of things that aren't done in this prototype goes on for about a mile, so don't expect any miracles or anything. That said, I do think it's already pretty fun to play around with.

Not dead, just still crazy busy

So, I'm still insanely busy, so the blog continues to suffer, but I'm determined not to let it fall completely off my radar. Here's a rundown of the employment changes since my last entry:

Internship with UW
Signed up and started today. Officially I'm a temporary employee, not an intern, but this is entirely good news as it turned into a freebie per-hour pay-raise for me. There's a lot of interesting work to be done here, and huge portions of it will ultimately be open-source, which is a nice ethical upshot.

Freelance Web Development
I'm still doing work for the small Utah company, at a fairly consistent pace.

The work from my past internship is also, only just now, picking up -- I'm not sure exactly what held things up, but I'm not really complaining.

.Net Developer
I've started in on this job, but I have to admit I'm seriously on the fence about it. All my issues and thoughts around this are at least one blog on their own, so I won't get into them now. Suffice to say, I'm not sure how long-lived the job will be, especially with so much other exciting work coming my way.

Squabs
I'm seriously impressed by the convenience of developing with XNA. XNA and Windows Forms (once they started playing well together) made building a basic level editor much easier than the Java alternative seemed like it was going to be.

Twitch
As much fun as I was having with Twitch, I've decided to table it for now so I can focus on Squabs a bit more in the little free development time I have. I'd still like to get a couple of screenshots on line at somepoint though, even if only for posterity.

Cute God
Something new (like I have time)! I read Lost Garden pretty regularly, and every once and a while the author posts some free artwork and suggests a game to design with it. The most recent of these "prototyping challenges" was CuteGod, which had such an interesting and straightforward concept behind it, I couldn't resist giving it a try.

So, after a few hours of coding, here's a screenshot of the 2D presentation of the playing area:


There seems to be a lot of discussion about an orthogonal 2D display not really being very intuitive, so I'll probably try implementing full-3D when I get a chance.

Facebook's bottomtooth problem

Lately I've been on Facebook fairly often -- I think they've made some good changes recently, and one of them is a generally spiffy-ing up of the layout of the site. But there's one thing that's been driving me nuts:


What is the deal with that little pokey extra bit on the edge of the content area for the pages? Is that designed that way? Is it some kind of flare or flashyness that's supposed to be cool? Well, all it does for me is make my eye keep drifting to the little notch that's been slashed out of the side of the page, so I wrote a greasemonkey script to fix it: here it is, if anybody else wants it.

4 GB in a plastic tube

For some reason I won a Computer Science award at my college. There are a few points that make this an interesting situation:

1. I was not, in fact, aware that this award existed
2. At no time was I aware I was eligible for, let alone being considered for, the award
3. I do not believe I have earned an award: I consider myself a mediocre programmer for the most part and a positively rotten student

All that set aside, it's a nice little bullet point on my resume near where my degree info is about to go. I also got a little congratulatory gift from the CS department -- a 4 GB flash drive. Admittedly, that's pretty nifty. I wanted to use it for Vista's "ReadyBoost", but it apparently doesn't have the "necessary performance characteristics", which I'm starting to think just means it wasn't made by some company that's in bed with Microsoft, since it won't tell me what the necessary characteristics are.

Even so, I can always use 4 GB of portable space.

Software Testing

I just finished my last major college project (hopefully!) for my "Software Testing" class. It was an arduous, trite, annoying 24-page assault on everything I know about "good" and "bad" documentation.

I have a recollection (of the sort that might be real, or might just be something that seems like it ought to have happened, and so now, as far as my brain is concerned, it's a real memory) of my mother asking me after I finished some homework when I was younger if I didn't feel better now that it was out of the way... the answer then is the same as the answer is now after this software testing paper: No.

I feel more like this: Imagine you're being raped in the ass by the pointy end of a rhinoceros and then I shoot through your groin with a high powered rifle and kill the rhino. Do you feel better? Maybe. But not for long. Technically, it's "better" now that a giant horn isn't ripping your intestines apart any more, but in a couple of seconds you're going to really wish it hadn't happened at all. So that's how I feel: like I've been raped up the ass by a rhino and shot in groin. I want my 4 hours back you son of bitch!

More than that, this testing class has really terrified me. Is what we saw in class really representative of the current state of testing in the software world? The "W Model"? My god: that's like taking pipes covered with asbestos (the "V Model" of software development), which already gives people cancer, and wrapping them in fiberglass insulation that's full of holes so that people both get cancer and get lots of little glass splinters.

It's archaic.

Worse yet, it was a class of badly taught archaic methodologies. We never saw a real, concrete example of a test case put together and explained in detail. We didn't experiment with jUnit. We didn't do a static code review in class. We didn't review a requirements document to see if it was even in the realm of "testable" and "accurate". We had a professor who dodged legitimate questions and didn't ever seem to have any good facts at hand to back up his statements.

We had 3 hours a night for what, 12 weeks? As a group we had, essentially, one full work week worth of time. We easily could've broken into groups, written a complete (albeit very very short) software design document, done a static review of the document, prototyped the application, written test cases, configured an automated build and test process with Ant and jUnit and gone through a complete testing cycle.

I know, it seems like so much work... it isn't. We didn't have to code a new operating system from scratch, or build a movie-production quality 3D rendering package. We could've written Tetris, or Space Invaders, or a fucking calculator, or Minesweeper, or a program to draw happy faces depending on the time of day or the weather, or goodness knows what else.

So why didn't we? Simple: we suck. We all suck. The students are bored and unmotivated (justifiably so, perhaps), the professors are overworked, underpaid, behind-the-curve, and consequently getting pretty damn lazy in their personal ruts, the school doesn't support technology nearly to the degree it should (the CS department has no wireless network -- the dining center does though), and there's now three and a half years of lazy teaching and lazy learning behind everyone in this class.

Write a program in 40 hours with specs and tests and all that??? It would take 30 hours just to lookup how to start the program from scratch! We've never done anything like that before!!! ::panic ensues::

The whole lot of us needs to grow up.

I'm not mister follow-through -- I've always had a hell of time ever finishing anything; it's a big problem for me, but at least I work on it -- but I wrote iTunesBiggieView in about an hour. You can write a supporting tool in a day -- a "work day" -- eight hours. With 36 hours of class time that leaves 28 hours to write docs and build tests and learn shit.

I really wish we'd spent those 36 hours learning shit, instead of getting fucked in the ass by the rhinoceros named boredom.