“Oh, look at my little protester, all grown up! Continue reading “Occupy Wall Streeter, and Mom”
Month: October 2011
Cats and fire (taking a break before the next rant)…
I’ve never seen a cat deal with fire before, so this may be natural. I suspect not, though. The owner’s comment states that this cat likes the taste of its own singed fur, but I’m not convinced. It does seem to be licking its paws a lot, but then I’d be doing that too if my hand got too hot trying to handle an open flame. At any rate, the cat looks like it’s fascinated by the flame itself, almost like it’s analyzing it.
“Some day, I’ll learn the Big Ones’ secret about you, then they’d better watch out!”
(update: Then again…
A mini-rant about my profession…
I’ve just spent the last two days fighting a software problem at work, one that has kept me from making any progress on the task I was assigned. It wasn’t a problem with the program thatI was assigned to fix, it was a problem with the tools I was trying to use to find the problem in the program in the first place. The fact that the tools are also software, and the fact that the tools also have bugs has been causing far too much stress, mainly because it was so ultimately wasteful of time (and of my limited sanity!). As I drove home last night, after 10 utterly fruitless hours spent trying variation after variation of settings and configurations and watching them all fail to make any difference at all, I thought of ways of trying to describe to non-programmers why I was getting stressed. After all, surely software should be easy to do, and far less stressful than something physical like building a house. As I drove along, I realized a pretty good analogy in house-building.
Imagine trying to build a house, when you are limited to only the tools and supplies you have with you.
Imagine that all the tools you have to use, all the supplies you have to work with, were made with other shoddy tools.
Imagine that the tools work about 80 percent of the time. Your hammer’s head flies off the handle at odd times with no warning, your screwdriver’s handle comes off the shaft, your power drill bursts into flames. Always randomly, always without warning, and at least once a day. And you can’t replace them.
Imagine your saw is made of high-quality aircraft titanium, but it’s missing about 20% of its teeth, and is slightly warped.
Imagine you have to pour a concrete foundation for a 1200 square foot house, but you only have one 5 gallon bucket.
Imagine that the architect keeps bringing in changes every day, on things you’ve already managed to put together.
Imagine the person wanting the house insists that you put in PVC pipe, but you’re not allowed to cut or bend any of the pipe.
Imagine they also want a sophisticated air conditioner installed, but won’t tell you where, and won’t give you the installation instructions, and won’t give you the specialized parts to make it fit in and work with the power.
Imagine building a house this way, knowing you can only use what you have, even if you need more or better supplies and tools. This is what developing software is like in the 21st Century, and has been for the past 30 years of my career. We could have more robust tools, that are at least as dependable as a carpenter’s, we could have easily adaptable procedures that can handle changes to design, and we could build software that is more robust and less fragile.
We could, if there were enough people who cared, who were willing to see (and admit to) the problems, and who were willing to spend the effort in time and money to fix the problems. Unfortunately there are far too many people, both technical and management, who accept the status quo, each for their own reasons. Management is more concerned about the illusion of saving money, even though shoddy tools and the lack of good ones causes much more waste of time, which is really money after all.
Many technical people, on the other hand, don’t mind the difficulty that using poor tools entails, and often don’t even know that better ways are possible.
More on that in another rant.
Kitten with an iPad. Oh, yeah.
Doesn’t get much cuter than this, folks.
And another for good measure:
Baby makes a break for it!
“Yeah, see, Muggsy, no jail’s been made that can keep Babyface Malone locked up, see?” Continue reading “Baby makes a break for it!”
Ringo helps! (watch what he does in this classic “video”!)
The Beatles were notorious cutups on stage and in private, especially in the early days when they were becoming so ridiculously successful. Watch how Ringo (and the others, to some extent) handles the stage directions, all through their lip-syncing to their song “Help”!
*Sigh* from back in the days when music was fun, and not “important”…
Google is ruining our lives! (but not the way you think)
Comedian Pete Holmes has an interesting take on what the Internet and search engines like Google are doing to our lives. It’s funny and also thoughtful. Continue reading “Google is ruining our lives! (but not the way you think)”