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The Plot to Understand Second Life

December 10, 2007

Last night I had the privilege of attending a reading and interview of renowned science fiction author Paul Levinson in support of his book The Plot to Save Socrates. I stayed in my bathrobe the whole time, because the event took place on Second Life.

the-plot-to-save-socrates I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about “updating” the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

World Fantasy Convention 2007, Days 3-4

November 3, 2007

Alas, all the late night boozin’ and schmoozin’ has caught up with me. I’m sick. As a dog is sick, so I, too, am sick. So I will complete my report here of the goings-on at World Fantasy by summarizing the last two days of the con. Even through my illness I do this for you, the people that read my blog, because I care about you all so much.

The highlights:

Scott Edelman and I bumped into each other several times and shared a plane flight home. As you can see by the photo on the right, the meeting didn’t go so well. (You can see more of Scott’s photos from WFC 2007 on his Flickr photo set.)
I had a long, rambling conversation with the inimitable Hal Duncan, beginning as a summary of his next work, continuing on to a discussion about the subtext of the Epic of Gilgamesh, moving on to Joseph Campbell and primitive mythology, and concluding with the psychology of the animal kingdom. Fookin’ great guy, that Hal Duncan.
Matt Jarpe and I came up with the brilliant idea of Photoshopping authentic photos so they look like they’ve been badly Photoshopped. He’s going to try to track down a photo of him and George R.R. Martin taken the other night, and make it look like he’s Photoshopped himself into it. Personally, I think we may have started a whole new art form, and I can’t wait to get started myself. (Who knows — perhaps Robert Stanek got there ahead of us?)
I finally met Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the editors at Tor! Patrick said that he didn’t recognize me without my hat, and that he reads my LiveJournal, and that he’s amused about how I boldface the important phrases in my blog posts, just like a Spider-Man comic book. (Eat yer heart out, PNH. ‘Nuff said!)
My reading of chapter 2 from MultiReal went off swimmingly, despite my horribly sore throat and need to sip water every four seconds. Nick Sagan praised my “excellent word choices,” and Paul Cornell continued to call me his “favorite current SF writer” (which hopefully he also repeats when I’m not in the room).
At the very classy party put on by UK publishers Orbit, I got a chance to meet the fabulous Scott Lynch (he of The Lies of Locke Lamora). I also had plenty of opportunity to act like a big shot and pretend like I know how to promote books online in conversations with Jon Armstrong (whose Grey came out from Night Shade this year), soon-to-be-published author Daryl Gregory, and also soon-to-be-published author David J. Williams.
Guest of Honor Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and I had a great time poring over the SFWriter.com newsletter and catching up on all the Robert Sawyer news fit for Robert Sawyer to print.

Reinventing E-mail

October 8, 2007

Mozilla Firefox managed to become the web browser of choice among techies and a legitimate mainstream alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer in just a few years. So why is the Mozilla Foundation’s Thunderbird e-mail client dying a slow, painful death?

Mozilla Thunderbird logo Recently, Mozilla began talking about spinning off or abandoning Thunderbird altogether. And just the other day, Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu, the two principle developers of Thunderbird, left the project. (Or at least it appears that way; they’re no longer working for the Foundation, but they’re staying on as volunteer “module owners,” whatever that means.) Mozilla has also brought on David Ascher of ActiveState to launch “a new mail and communications software initiative.” What exactly does that mean? Well, it’s not clear. Apparently Mozilla is skimping on paying their PR people too. (Update 10/9/07: See Al Billings’ comment below for some links to Mozilla’s explanations for what’s going on there.)

I’ve tried to use Mozilla Thunderbird before. Every time I configure a new computer, I try to go Thunderbird. The prospect of a vibrant, evolving e-mail client with a zillion plugins is just too good to ignore. But here’s the problem: it just doesn’t fuckin’ work. Every time I try to use Thunderbird for extended periods of time, it crashes on me. Repeatedly. Ungracefully. Perhaps they’ve changed things since version 1.5, but Thunderbird doesn’t recover nicely from crashes the way Firefox does. You lose messages. It’s irritating as hell.

Don’t take my word for it; I’m not the only one who’s had problems with Thunderbird. The commenters on Slashdot aren’t exactly technoidiots — most of them, anyway — but in the Slashdot discussion “Thunderbird in Crisis?” I’ve learned that Thunderbird also:

Permanently loses all your e-mail if a folder climbs over 2GB in size
Has an import function that’s “more buggy than a New York City apartment in the summer”
Only shows three e-mail accounts in your accounts folder, regardless of how many you actually have
Doesn’t have its shit together where calendar integration is concerned

Thunderbird’s not the only e-mail client that’s in transition. The once-mighty Eudora software has been discontinued by Qualcomm, and Microsoft has changed its bare-bones e-mail client from Outlook Express to Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail in the space of a year. Yahoo’s webmail has been undergoing a facelift for the past, oh, thirty years, and so far everyone except Walt Mossberg has greeted it with an overwhelming yawn.

You want to know why programmers lose their hair? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the state of electronic mail!

It’s been approximately 35 years since Ray Tomlinson tacked together two names and an “@” symbol to create the e-mail address. The latest estimates say that there are about 171 billion e-mail messages sent per day (of which 70% are spam). And yet just look at all the things you still can’t do reliably across platforms on e-mail:

Confirm that your e-mail has been received
Indicate high or low importance on a message
Ensure that your message will reach its recipient
Authenticate that the message sender is who she says she is
Include basic formatting like bolding, italicizing, and underlining
Have a reasonable expectation that your message won’t be intercepted by someone else

E-mail standards are still all over the place. When Mac users send mail to Outlook users, often the formatting is stripped out or filled with unintelligible characters. When Outlook users send e-mails to any other client, there’re still burdened with clunky, semi-invisible attachments. Some e-mail clients prevent you from opening attachments; others block CSS styling. Some, like Gmail, strip out just about everything but the plain text.

Take Control of Your Information! (Part 1)

September 24, 2007

I started a post last week about the future of web content, and the problems of content distribution in web 2.0, and why we should all adopt open standards to structure everything we write on the Internet. The piece got much too long, so I split it into three parts. Here’s part 1.

***

Remember how the experts told us that computers were supposed to eliminate paper — and then for twenty years we wallowed in ream after ream of wasted paper? It was a running joke for a generation.

Now we see that computer technology really does eliminate the need for paper. My laser printer mostly sits idle these days. I primarily use it for two things: (1) printing out copies of MultiReal for editing and publishing purposes, and (2) printing out driving directions, because syncing them to my Treo is such a goddamn pain in the ass. The rest of the paper in my house is going away too. I can’t remember the last time I sent someone an actual letter. I gather most of my news through websites and RSS feeds instead of newspapers, and 90% of the mail is either advertising I don’t want or paper bills I should be receiving electronically.

So why did it take twenty years for paper to go away? Why was there such a huge boom in paper use after computers became ubiquitous?

A lot of it had to do with simple economics. Computer usage needed to hit a certain critical mass. Computer screens needed to be large enough, cheap enough, bright enough, and portable enough to serve as a comfortable substitute for the printed page. Adobe needed to see the business case for creating a technology like PDF.

But in addition to all that, people just didn’t see the potential of digital media. Some people still fail to see it. There’s a large segment of the population that sees the Internet as simply a convenient distribution system for paper. Attorneys are notorious for this, and doctors are the same way, but plenty of other businesses have this misconception too. Suffice to say any company whose website relies mostly on downloadable, printable PDFs to convey their product information just doesn’t get it.

The battle against paper is largely over. I’m bringing all this up because there’s another equally important battle looming, and that’s the battle against unstructured content. Turning all those stacks of paper into gigabytes of 1’s and 0’s was only the very, very first step. Just like there were many people twenty years ago who didn’t understand the benefits of email over paper mail, there are many people today who don’t understand the benefits of smart, structured content over unstructured content. Just like we understand now that the Internet isn’t just a distribution system for paper, we need to understand that it’s not just a distribution system for big globs of text.

The kicker is that the stakes are much higher this time around. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that plain, unstructured content is not only inconvenient in the long run, it’s dangerous. We need to develop open standards to structure all the electronic content we create, and we need to start insisting that everyone use them. If we don’t, we’re quickly going to find ourselves facing a monopoly that’s much more pernicious and dangerous than Microsoft’s ever was, and that’s a Google monopoly on information.

Free Tech Tools Worth Blogging About

September 13, 2007

It’s phenomenal how much free software is out there on the web for the taking. I, for one, definitely take it for granted. Back in the days of taping LP records onto 90-minute cassette tapes, I used to pine for a computerized music library. Now I’ve got a computerized music library that I built for free, and my CDs are largely gathering dust in the basement. Do I marvel at the whole thing on a daily basis? Do I spontaneously jump up and click my heels throughout the day in jubilation because I live in an age of cheap technological miracles? Er, no.

Here’s a random list of some free software tools that I do feel like jumping up and down about. In no particular order:

Windows Live Writer is a desktop client for interfacing with all your blogs in one convenient place. It’s got a very clean Windows Vista-ish look to it (see screenshot to the right), and works rather like WordPad or MS Word. Of course, Microsoft wants you to compose things and publish them on their Windows Live Spaces. No thanks. But they’ve opened up the API so you can easily create, edit, and publish entries on WordPress, TypePad, and LiveJournal, among others. There’s no big mystery here or “gee whiz” factor; Windows Live Writer is just a nice, simple blog post editor that includes a lot of the basic features the WordPress interface leaves out. For example: automatic image uploading, quick image editing, headline tags, and quick table creation. (This post, in fact, was composed entirely in Windows Live Writer.)

TweakVI is a nice GUI customization tool for Windows Vista. Similar to the popular (but unsupported) Microsoft TweakUI tool that’s available for Windows XP. In addition to all the standard GUI tweaks (Start menu customization, Explorer tweaks, etc.), TweakVI will do some behind-the-scenes performance tweaking as well. I’m too lazy to actually run benchmark software to see how effective it is, but something I did in TweakVI was enough to give my wireless networking a big performance boost. (Be warned that although TweakVI is free, they do pester you to upgrade to the paid subscription service quite a bit.)

Copernic Desktop Search is the coolest desktop search program I’ve found yet. It’s just as thorough as Google, twenty times faster than Windows’ built-in search (even Vista’s), and it has a slick user interface. Copernic’s search-as-you-type feature just rawks. (Be warned that I did have stability problems with an earlier version; but Copernic seems to have fixed those bugs since then.)

What the WordPress Needs Now

September 10, 2007

I haven’t always been kind to open-source software (read exhibits A and B), but sometimes you’ve got to give credit where credit is due. WordPress — whose version 2.2.2 powers this blog, as of this writing — is a remarkably polished CMS with an extended community that rivals that of Mozilla Firefox. Me likey WordPress.

But WordPress has some irksome shortcomings that need to be overcome if it’s going to reach that Firefox level of ubiquity and respectability. I can’t pretend to be savvy enough to give any kind of real assessment of the shortcomings under the hood. But as a user and a web developer, here are some of the improvements I’d like to see to WordPress.

Simple plugin updates. Since it’s so easy to create a WordPress plugin, thousands of people have thrown together plugins of varying quality and durability. I’ve got about a dozen plugins running on my WordPress installation, but the only way to check for updates is to browse to the developers’ websites one at a time. Sometimes I’ll go for months without bothering to check. There needs to be an easier way to update plugins — or at the very least an easier way to notify WordPress users that plugin updates are available. (I see from this entry on the official WordPress blog that this is a feature slated for version 2.3. Hurrah!)
Better word processing window. For an application that revolves around words, WordPress has a pretty lousy word processor. That’s not entirely WordPress’s fault, since it uses the TinyMCE JavaScript Content Editor, itself an impressive open source project. Still, the TinyMCE editor has a number of irritating quirks. Formatting often breaks in mid-composition, and once this happens the only thing you can do is save and reload the page. The editor will often do some very bizarre things with spacing that aren’t apparent until you publish. But the worst sins are the sins of omission. There are no buttons for simple tags like headlines and horizontal lines, and you can’t add id’s or classes to your HTML elements without switching to “Code” view. I’m aware that there are plugins out there to extend and customize TinyMCE. But honestly, headline tags should be available out of the box.
Page sections. WordPress takes a very limited view of what type of content you can have on your page. All the default installation allows is one big text blob surrounded by preconfigured dynamic sidebars. But what if you want to include a callout box in your article? What if you want to subdivide your article into multiple sections with different formatting rules for each? Currently the only way to accomplish this is by digging through the HTML and CSS code and rolling your own sections by hand.
Read more

Shelfari: LibraryThing with a New Coat of Paint?

August 23, 2007

LibraryThing seems to have a new competitor. Or, at least, I’ve just become aware of them.

I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’m a big fan of LibraryThing. I’ve spent hours and hours tweaking my LibraryThing profile, adding books to my catalog, and just browsing around other people’s shelves. I’ve spoken with Tim Spalding, LibraryThing’s founder, and he’s taken the time to respond to e-mails of mine and feature me on the LibraryThing blog once or twice.

So I felt a little like a cheating spouse when I responded to someone’s invitation to sign up for a Shelfari account last week. But it was actually much easier than cheating on a spouse, because I didn’t have to go through that whole tedious seduction and getting-to-know-you routine. I exported my whole LibraryThing catalog in about three clicks, and imported it right into Shelfari. In a way, it was like moving in with your mistress and skipping straight to the seven-year-itch all in one shot.

Here are screen captures of my catalog on LibraryThing and Shelfari, side by side. (Visit my shelf on Shelfari.)

After noodling around with Shelfari a little bit, here’s a synopsis of my thought process:

The name “Shelfari” is incredibly lame.
Shelfari looks slicker than LibraryThing.
Shelfari is more user-friendly than LibraryThing.
LibraryThing is fairly slick and user-friendly in the first place.
So why would I switch to Shelfari?

The big difference between LibraryThing and Shelfari is that LibraryThing caps its free accounts at 200 books; Shelfari doesn’t appear to have any limits. But keep in mind that the LibraryThing rates are eminently reasonable. $10 a year for all you can catalog, or $25 for a lifetime membership.

Oh yeah, and Shelfari has a Facebook application. (I see that LibraryThing is testing out MySpace and LiveJournal widgets, which is cool, but IMHO they need to get cranking on a Facebook app.)

But there’s a huge amount of functionality that LT has which Shelfari doesn’t seem to have. I went browsing through “my shelf” on Shelfari and discovered that my copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends doesn’t have Silverstein listed as the author, only as the illustrator; and despite the fact that there’s an “Edit” link next to Edition Details, there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit that information. I was able to change editions to one which does have the author listed… but this one doesn’t have an illustrator listed. LT, by contrast, lets you edit book details to your heart’s content and upload custom covers that the whole community can use. Does the system think that “J.D. Salinger” and “JD Salinger” are two different people? Easy enough to fix that in LibraryThing.

This community focus is one of the things that makes LibraryThing so appealing. It’s kind of like — well, a library. It’s really, really easy to import and export your entire catalog so you can use it in other applications. Put it on your blog? Tie it in to your Firefox? Access it from your cell phone? No problem! If there are inaccuracies in the catalog, everybody pitches in to help fix it. If you read through the help menus and fine print, you’ll see quirky little bits of humor that give the site some attitude. “If the buzz page doesn’t convince you,” says a little blurb on the LibraryThing home page, “you cannot be convinced. Go away.” There’s a lack of commercial focus that’s very reminiscent of that library feeling. Come on in! Put your feet up, hang around as long as you like, buy some of the books on the Community Used Book table in the back if you’d like, but no pressure.

In Defense of Microsoft

August 14, 2007

When I wrote my not-so-complimentary piece on OpenOffice the other week, I expected to receive at least a few slams from fans and believers in the open source movement. And I did receive an interesting comment from a fellow who signed his name MnMKY, which I excerpt here:

The accomplishments of a worldwide effort, unifying multiple cultures and countries, is what OpenOffice.org represents. It is not a company sole bent on making money but on helping…

Microsoft has showed little innovation since the beginning days, no wait they took the concept of a graphic interface from someone else to. Microsoft was a great marketing agency; their best client, themselves. Bill Gates is the ultimate master…

OpenOffice.org deserves your talents unless you would rather sit on the bench and criticize and follow the the rest of the groupies. Innovation does not come from working in a bubble (MS OS, MS Products, MS Backend, MS tools) and neither does efficiency. Innovation comes from competition and not buying it.

This has brought up something that really sticks in my craw that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. So now I’m going to ramble about it for a while for your edification and entertainment. You have been warned.

Bill Gates as the Borg For some reason, all semblance of rationality goes out the door when techies talk about Microsoft. There are people out there who simply hate Microsoft. I’m not talking about people who just dislike Microsoft products; I’m talking about people who believe Bill Gates and Company are actually evil. Microsoft is throttling the open source movement! Microsoft is practicing mental slavery! Microsoft is an evil capitalist enterprise that seeks to dominate, control, and destroy!

(A lot of people have had the same kind of irrational delusions about our last two presidents. These are the ones who don’t think it’s enough that George W. Bush is incompetent and has made really dangerous decisions for really bad reasons during his two terms in the White House. No, George Bush actually plotted to overthrow democracy by rigging the tragedies of 9/11! He’s sending your children to Iraq to die because he hates Muslims and wants to claim all their oil for his Texas cronies! On the right, these are the folks who believe that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely murder their enemies, and then lob a few cruise missiles at random aspirin factories to distract us.)

I think part of the problem with the hardcore Microsoft haters is that many of them simply don’t understand business, or capitalism for that matter. It’s not for nothing that I compared the open source movement to socialism in a previous blog piece.

Here’s the thing: Microsoft is a business whose primary goal is not to help people, but to make a buck. And there’s nothing wrong with that. America is all about making a buck. The main reason this country was founded in the first place was not because the Americans had philosophical differences with the British monarchy, or because they wanted the right to freedom of speech and assembly. It’s because said monarchy was taxing the colonists to death and not giving them anything back for it.

(A side note: Paul Johnson in his often brilliant History of the American People traces the character of this country back to two primary groups. There were the Jamestown folks who settled in Virginia primarily to make money; and there were the Plymouth Rock folks who settled in Massachusetts largely for evangelical reasons. It’s a brilliant thesis. Money and religion: if you think about it, those words really do sum up the two sides of the American culture pretty well.) (Update 8/15/07: I should add the caveat that Mr. Johnson gets a wee bit cranky and reactionary when talking about the late 20th century. He believes JFK was just a playboy blowhard and Nixon should not have been impeached for Watergate.)

Not only is there nothing wrong with Microsoft being out to make a buck, but that’s what a corporation is for. And yet one of the nifty benefits of a business making a ton of money is that it does tend to help people. There are thousands of ordinary people who made millions of dollars by investing in Microsoft stock back in the ’80s when Bill Gates was just the richest dork in the world. Tens of thousands of people have built long, prosperous, stable careers from Microsoft paychecks. And Gates’ private foundation is already one of the most generous and successful non-profits in history; some people estimate that Bill and Melinda Gates’ efforts to make malaria drugs more affordable in third world countries have saved millions of lives. Millions of lives. That’s not trivial.

OpenOffice: One Strike and You’re Out?

August 1, 2007

You want to know why people use Microsoft products? I present to you Exhibit A.

The new Sony laptop I’ve been bragging about came without a licensed version of Microsoft Word. Sony included a trial version of Office 2007 Student and Home and a copy of Microsoft Works. So I figured I’d give OpenOffice another try after having a few bad experiences with version 1.

And as far as functionality goes, I like OpenOffice 2.1. It’s got a nice, clean, consistent interface across programs. Writer includes just about all of the features I’m likely to want or need from MS Word, and a few conveniences that Word lacks. (How nice it is to choose which custom dictionary you want to add unrecognized words to straight from the right-click menu.) It reads and writes Word documents pretty seamlessly, and although it crashes a little too often for my tastes, it always seemed to recover gracefully so I could pick up right where I left off.

Until Monday.

On Monday, OpenOffice Writer corrupted Chapter 38 of MultiReal. Corrupted it good. The file won’t open any longer. No file recovery option. When I look at it in Windows Explorer, it’s mysteriously shrunken in size by about 25K. When I open the file in Notepad or use one of the gazillion corrupted file recovery utilities out there on the Internet, I can still see amidst all the gobbledygook about 7 pages out of the original 12. For whatever reason, it seems like Writer truncated the file at that point.

Between the recoverable text from Notepad and old versions of the document, I was able to cobble together most of Chapter 38 again. And considering that I had just (re)written that missing page a few hours earlier, I think I’ve been able to reconstruct most of what I’ve lost. I suppose I could have downloaded a hex editor that would let me scour the raw data on the hard drive for those missing paragraphs, which are probably still floating on the hard disk somewhere.

But my confidence in OpenOffice has now been shaken, possibly for good. How do I know that Writer didn’t corrupt other documents that I wasn’t just working on? How do I know it’s not going to mess up the next chapter I open? I can’t afford that kind of uncertainty. I can’t afford to lose another three hours trying to recover the next mess.

Is Microsoft Word perfect? Hell, no. It’s bloated, it’s a resource hog, it’s got usability problems, and I’m not sure how I feel about the whole Ribbon concept MS has adopted in its 2007 version. Plus it’s a big fat target for every malicious hacker on the planet. But I can’t remember the last time Microsoft Word corrupted a file to the point that it was unrecoverable. Perhaps sometime two versions back when I was using Office XP. Yet it’s happened after only a month using OpenOffice.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that my Diskeeper or McAfee Security Suite caused this. Perhaps the laptop got nudged while it was writing to the hard drive, or maybe something funky happened when I closed the lid and put it into Sleep mode. But what are the chances that these things would only corrupt the last file I was working on, out of all the hundreds of thousands of files on the system? I can’t rule out that I might just have been unlucky, and I know this kind of thing happens in Microsoft Office too every once in a blue moon.

This whole episode has brought home to me the fact that the most important factor for any piece of software is the Hippocratic factor: first, do no harm. I don’t care how smooth and pimped-out a ride your car is; if it routinely leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere, it’s useless. (Incidentally, I also got stranded in the middle of nowhere by my Honda this past weekend, but that’s a different story.) (Okay, so Chevy Chase, MD isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. But I lost another few hours of writing time regardless.)

Keeping Up with the Kludges

July 30, 2007

There’s a very useful word in the techie sphere of influence that remains largely unknown in the wider world. It’s called kludge. According to Wikipedia, a kludge is “a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem or difficulty.”

Kludges usually come about in programming when you either don’t have the time or the budget to deal with a certain problem. A basic example: you build a website that works just fine in all the modern versions of Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Flock, Safari, Netscape, Konqueror, etc. And then you get a call from an account rep in a different department asking in a strident tone of voice why the website is causing sparks to fly out of his client’s ancient WebTV box.

Jesus Christ, Webmaster If Jesus Christ were your webmaster, he would clap his hands and come up with an elegant and elaborate piece of code that accounts for every browser on the market. This piece of programming legerdemain would not only deal with every WebTV and Mosaic 1.0 and Lynx browser still out there, but it would do so in a systematic way that would ensure compatibility with future unknown browsers and web services too. But you’re not Jesus Christ. Not only that, but you’ve got a million other pressing issues on your plate that are much more important than this.

On the other hand, this particular WebTV user happens to be the sister of the uncle of the CEO, and it’s worth spending ten or fifteen minutes to keep the CEO happy. So you grumble a little bit, fire up your text editor, and insert code that looks something like this:

<For all normal users...> <Do this.> <If the user is on a WebTV browser AND it's a Tuesday AND there's a full moon...> <Do that.> <Unless it's a Thursday and "Heroes" is still winning its timeslot, in which case...> <Do something else entirely.> <Now back to the normal code.>

Voila! You’ve created a kludge. It’s of no use to 99.9% of the world and it will slow down your application for everyone by some small fraction of a second — but on the other hand, it’s only taken you two minutes to write and the client’s happy.

Here’s a dirty little secret that the programmers don’t always tell you: all computer programs are full of kludges. Nobody ever intends to use them. Everyone’s application starts with the best of intentions and the cleanest of architectures. This is going to be the slickest widget ever! People will still be using it every day in 2035! Then life and the marketplace intervene, and the application wanders off track. You start to add kludges.

If Microsoft let you dig in to the source code for their operating systems, you’d see bazillions of kludges. Microsoft in particular is notorious for preserving backwards compatibility at all costs. Which means that in 20 years, when the only person left in the world using Lotus 1-2-3 is an old man with Alzheimer’s in Patagonia, the Windows Vista 20-Year Anniversary Edition (Now with Sherlock!) will still be able to run it.

But it’s not just computer programs that are full of kludges. Our lawbooks are full of kludges. I see from a page called Looney Laws that, in Michigan, a woman’s hair legally belongs to her husband; in Newport, Rhode Island, it’s illegal to smoke a pipe after sunset; and in Logan County, Colorado, it’s illegal for a man to kiss a woman while asleep. (Whether the same holds true if a woman kisses a sleeping man, the page does not say. In fact, it would be nice if the page would cite some references somewhere, but I won’t hold my breath.)