Internal Discipline

When we last left our hero the large organization was overrun by high latency task groups that were effectively obstacles to progress.

Another feature of large organizations, and by large i mean organizations with more than one person, is externally applied discipline. The problem to be solved is How does one motivate the employee to produce good work?. For the software developer, it's the wrong question.

One of the common management approaches to this problem is characterized by the carrot and stick paradigm. The idea was that to get a horse to pull the buggy, one had a carrot and a stick. The carrot was a reward for good behavior. The stick was punishment for bad behavior. Now, modern management has no experience with horses, or they'd know that the stick was not for punishment. The carrot was suspended by a string from the stick. But that isn't the modern interpretation.

Any parent will note that a promised reward is a much better motivator than punishment for children. In fact, punishment doesn't work very well, and not at all over the long haul.

But managers generally don't think that they have anything to offer an employee (which is false). They also don't think that they can get away with much in the way of punishment (which is also false). So, despite the above very common and widely talked about concept, it often plays almost no actual role in obtaining quality work.

What managers really know how to do is the paper trail. To get the developer to use source control, have a manager sign off that code is in the system. To get the developer to adhere to database standards, have a database administrator approve any database usage or changes. To get the developer to add user level help pages, have someone who only handles installing help pages on the system review the text and install it. To make sure that the customer is satisfied, have the customer sign off on the project before it is placed on the server. Each of these processes adds delays to the project, but do they ensure quality?

No. It turns out that the database administrator doesn't know anything about the application code. So even a simple query that uses only indexed keys might in fact be issued to the database millions of times. Only the developer would know that. The help text manager doesn't really know the application, and can easily miss omissions and outright errors in the text. Worse, help text usually concentrates on the details of how a function works, but never gives the end user any idea why one might want to use the function. That takes context. The customer signs off on the application, but does so at application launch. It may be a month before the customer is familiar enough with the product to be able to really evaluate it.

External discipline is inefficient and ineffective. The solution is to empower the developer to do the right thing. First, the developer should be aware of the kinds of quality that the customer wants. It may be consistency, repeatability, discoverability, ease of use, etc. Second, for those quality issues that only a developer could understand, review should be made by another developer. Code reviews have the side benefit of disseminating knowledge. Even the most senior developers learn something. Involve the database administrators early in the process, not late. The DBA should suggest good ways to do things up front, not stall a project nearing completion. To do that, the developer and the DBA need to work together. For best possible speed, they should be a single person. The customer should be able to give feedback at any time, not just before the launch.

Empowerment

Large organizations have a problem. It's a hard problem to solve. That is, how do you organize the division of labor when you have a large number of people? It's not a new problem. Sun Tzu's The Art of War covers it. The general was asked, "How large an army can you command?". His answer was "the larger the better". Old problem but solved.

People tend to learn new skills fairly slowly, so it is commonly thought that no one knows how to do everything. In any case, the large organization tends to discover, often by luck, that a person knows how to do some specific task, and then uses them for that one task exclusively. As the organization gets larger, groups of people form to perform specific tasks, and the organization tends to treat these the same as individuals, performing one task forever.

The large organization then takes these task groups and establishes processes that let the groups get things done together. When there is a complaint that the process isn't written down, it tends to get written, and becomes less flexible. When problems of quality arise, and let's face it, humans make mistakes, the reaction is to manage quality by requiring that a high level manager signs off on actions. But these people don't know how to do everything, so they don't know how to judge quality. They become a source of latency for projects, with no added value. Management thinks in terms of paper trails, and requires paper documents for everything.

The ebb and flow of work to do means that some task groups feel overloaded from time to time. They set up often elaborate queues where tasks are submitted, and 'customers' are given a minimum wait to get things done. For example, a database administration group may require a minimum of a week for any task - even if the task requires no analysis, no research, no diagnosis, just a simple command sent to the software. Often, these groups require that there is no face to face or even phone contact, and miscommunications are frequent, requiring resubmission of the task, with attendant latency.

So, let's say you're a developer, and the project is to project a web based application. Checking your source into the source tree requires sign off from the source code control group. Placing the application on the server requires sign off from the hardware and web server software groups. The database administrators need to sign off on the way the database is used, even if there are no new tables. The help text for your application is managed by yet another group. The application took a week to write, but takes an additional six weeks to deploy, if you're lucky.

How can this be fixed? Instead of attempting to manage quality by instituting sign offs by management enforced by restricted access to systems, the trend should be to manage quality by automated paper trails, with automated back-out systems for failure mitigation. The emphasis is on automation to reduce latency. Empower the developer to get things done by giving them the tools needed to get the entire job done. Trust that the developer will attempt to do the right thing, but don't be afraid of failure. Fear of failure causes paralysis.

There are a complicated set of issues. For brevity, this is just one of them.

Troll

Kirk vs Janeway

COBOL vs Java

Miata vs Jeep

Spaceship One vs Shuttle

Meede vs Orion

Discuss

Today is National Relaxation Day

End of joke.

Tom Swift

On the way home from Bible Camp, my ten year old son and i listened to a 4 hour book downloaded from Librivox. Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X, written by Victor Appleton II. It went over well. There was a cliff hanger every chapter, except the last. This could be serialized on radio easily. 20 Chapters, so they must have only been ten or fifteen minutes each. That's short enough for nearly any attention span.

The reader, Mark Nelson is very good. No memorable mistakes. Maybe there aren't any. He does it with a 1950's style, with gusto, WoWee! But should you want to read it yourself, the full text is available on Gutenberg.

It's science fiction, with an action/adventure feel, but i had difficulty placing just when it might have been written. It has a 1950's style, but seemed to have references to more modern inventions. Fortunately, one doesn't have to guess, since Wikipedia knows it was written in 1961. And, it knows who Victor Appleton II is, and what a busy guy Tom really is. He had something like a hundred such adventures. And those are just the ones that have been written up so far.

The story has it all. Hot sex - well - there was a quick kiss on the cheek. I wasn't paying attention. It might have been Tom's sister. And, it has violence. Well, there was an earthquake, and some property damage. Space aliens, including the Visitor from Planet X. I was hoping the space alien would have something to teach us about global warming or world peace. Not a word. The one named villain turned out to be a spy working for the good guys. In retrospect, it's hard to believe there were 19 cliff hangers.

Canoe

So, the canoe and bike rack was last set up on the previous car. It's a fairly fancy Yakima setup. There are these adapters, and the rack has been on four different cars now. But it had never been on the Saturn, so it was an hour getting it there. There probably is a clip designed for the Saturn, but i was able to make an existing set work. At least it's secure. Well, i didn't do the acid test - drive on the highway. I would have, but the on ramp to i75 south was closed. The primary test wasn't the drive, it was the canoe.

So, the canoe works. You see, there are paddles, and life jackets. A water bottle. Some binoculars. Can't go anywhere without binoculars. And... and that's it. So really, most of the test was getting the canoe onto a car.

With the rack on the car, the next step is to find the key, and unlock the lock which holds the chain. This is easy, since the lock was unlocked just a couple months ago. Except, that the key can't be found anywhere. After a half hour fruitless search, it is decided that one link of the chain can be cut, freeing the lock, and by the way, the canoe. This takes an hour. It's a very good chain (now slightly shorter).

I'd have never designed a canoe rack that has the canoe upright. I mean, when it rains, it fills with water, right? If too much water gets in there, then what do you do? The car could be overloaded, or the canoe might be too heavy to remove. Bail it? So far, though, it just hasn't been a problem. And for some reason, i've never thought to load up the canoe with everything in sight. One can put alot of stuff into a 17 foot canoe.

One nice thing about the rack is that in addition to the canoe, two bicycles can go up there. And, they go up without rubbing against anything. Nothing worse than a bike rack that damages the bikes. Or the car.

The test run for the canoe involves putting it into the water, and paddling around for a couple hours. Elizabeth Park has a nice parking lot, a little channel that goes out to the Detroit River. From there, one gets to deal with wind and waves. My trip took me to the bridge, which swung open to let a large boat through - always exciting.

And, i made it back alive. Mostly. Nothing damaged that can't be cured
with a little wine and a long bath in the hot tub.

Harry Potter Book 7 - no spoilers

I've now read half of the book. The non-spoiler review so far: i like it.
There's not much to say beyond that without giving something away.
So, I'll stop.

Please don't post your spoiler here.
For example, don't flip to the last page and tell me the last word.
Even if that word turns out to be "the" (which is unlikely. I'm not sure
i could construct a sentence that ends with the word "the").

I'm not reading the web until i've finished the book. It could be
a few days. Unfortunately, i have to eat and sleep, too.

iPhone Diet

The new buzz is that one of the women at work got a new iPhone over the weekend. She's been goofing with it, and showing it off, pretty much as one might expect. In fact, lunch got moved back quite a bit. Not just for her, but for many of us.

I'm calling it the iPhone Diet. It can affect those around you, too. And, they don't get to decide if they want to participate. I didn't get to decide, and i don't even want a phone. My angle is more what user interfaces could be adopted for the Palm Pilot.

This isn't a balanced diet. You could get serious malnutrition from it, if prolonged. Fortunately, like most diets, it isn't expected to last.

See also, the Relative Diet, and Zeno's Diet.

Bad Weather

We have a thunderstorm, right now, raging outside. I'm glad i closed my windows.

If you closed your windows, how did you post to your blog?

I mean, the windows in my car.

Coolest new app

Well, it's new to me.

sudo apt-get install dict
sudo apt-get install dictd
sudo apt-get install dict-web1913

This gives you a 1913 English dictionary with definitions, from a local dictionary. That means it continues to work even if you are off line. From the command line, this example gives you a definition:

dict synopsis

How fast is your thumb?

My beloved 128 MB Jump drive is lost. Stolen, actually. One of the things that i really liked about it was that the cap really sealed the stuff inside. It survived being left in a pocket and going through the wash. Twice.

My 512 MB Firefly was lost, so i had no thumb drive at all for several weeks. Well, not exactly. My iPod Shuffle is 512 MB (discontinued), and often has 100 MB free, and can be used to transfer arbitrary files too. But, I finally broke down and went to a store. My Jump drive cost something like $35 way back when, and being somewhat short on cash, i wasn't going to spend more than $20. I'd just have to get a small one. In a bin by checkout at MicroCenter, were 2 GB Kingston drives for $15.95. With tax, that's $16.90. So much for settling for a small one.

The Firefly turned up shortly thereafter. Both drives are in use. And something odd turned up. I downloaded interesting audio books from LibriVox, which turned out to be several gigabytes. The Kingston drive seemed to take quite a while to fill compared to the Firefly. Yet, transfer speed at home was much better.

At first, i thought that perhaps the computer at work had an older USB 1.0 interface. That's absurd, though. It's nearly three years younger than my computer at home. And, why would the FireFly be so much quicker? Well, the firefly is a quarter of the size, so maybe that's it. There's no way to get to the bottom of this without some measurements.

It turns out that i'm only writing data at work, and only reading it at home. And the Kingston is nearly nine times slower writing than reading. The Kingston is about 20% faster at reading than the Firefly. But the Firefly is only half as fast writing than reading. So, the Firefly is four times faster writing than the Kingston. And, since it's a quarter the size, filling it takes a 16th of the time.

OK, so the speed of the device is not listed anywhere. Would it be a deal breaker? No. It's quick enough, cheap, and has large tracks of land.

Carded

They card you for Nyquil. Perhaps it still has alcohol.

I would not give anyone like this any strange ideas. For example, when crossing the border into Canada (or on the way back to the US), and they ask, Do you have any drugs?, it's probably not such a good idea to say, "Damn. I left them at home. I knew I forgot something!

When crossing the border, and they ask, Do you have any fire arms? It's probably not a good idea to reply, I can get you anything you want.

But let me know when you're going. I'd like to go along and see if they strip search you.

Make Mine a Double

Radio Lab on WNYC is available as a podcast. Season three starts out with a discussion of the Placebo Effect. For example, the doctor tells you that this light blue pill will make you better, and it does. Only, there are no active ingredients in the pill. You got better, at least to some extent, because you thought you'd get better.

Now, you might think that a doctor who gave you a sham pill is a quack. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's selling moon shine - that is, something you could have gotten without him. But the deal is, you actually got better.

And even the medical doctors who have real training, and are backed up with real medicine, put on their white coat and talk to their patients in a way that convinces them that they'll get better.

Now i listened to this show while sick. I stayed home from work. I'm not paid when i stay home, so when i stay home, it means i'm on death's door. And when i only feel terrible, i go back to work. After all, if i'd stay home, i'd feel terrible, and if i go to work, i'll feel terrible. I may as well get paid for it.

I'm not a good salesman. I've mentioned the bagel club. For me, giving out bagels and donuts for free is a hard sell. And, i'm very skeptical. That means the story has to be really good for me to have any chance of believing it. Double blind clinical trials are the gold standard. Pray to Jesus just isn't going to do it. I can't be hypnotized because, well, i don't believe in hypnotism.

So, imagine that i'm cheap. I don't want to go to the doctor for antibiotics. I have an idea how long it will take me to get over things, and, for the most part, antibiotics don't make me well any quicker. But, i do want to get something that will help. What do i do?

Here are my cures for the common cold. Drink lots of water. In fact, drink a gallon of water a day. You can drink more water if it's room temperature. A gallon is alot. It's probably twice as much as you think it is. So keep a full glass in front of you all day. Drink it. Linus Pauling advocated high doses of vitamin C. I've not found that mega dose pills help at all. Nor an orange. But a pink grapefruit seems to help. Eat the whole thing, without sugar. Avoid sugar altogether when ill. Get lots of sleep. As much as you can. Use any trick you can to get to sleep. Lie perfectly still and try not to think. Turn on a boring radio program and close your eyes. Whatever works. Shower. Brush your teeth. Sore throat? Gargle with aspirin. Gargle with salt. Gargle with mouthwash. Gargle with chloraseptic.

I'm not sure that any of these things work. That is, i don't know that they have any external helping ability. But they feel like they work. And, if you do them all day long, you should at least get the placebo effect on and off all day long. And the placebo effect is real. It's real chemicals that your body releases. And there are no side effects. And, in double blind clinical trials, it really works.

It's mind over matter, after all.

Steve Martin said it best: "I'd like one of those new double strength placeboes, please".

Astounding Science Fiction

I'm just a bit behind in my podcast listening queue. At the beginning of April, Escapepod ran their 100th episode. They run short science fiction. The stories are typically under and hour. Episode 100 went slightly more than an hour. However, it was written by the legendary Isaac Asimov. Nightfall. And, it's good story. Many say it's the best ever written. It's not really dated. You might expect that from a story written in 1941. What i will say is this: If you're only going to listen to one science fiction short story, this is the one to try. And, you might just get hooked. Fortunately, the archives go back to the beginning.

Fall Well

So, Jerry Falwell is dead. I've linked to a site with a video of one of the better euolgies. If you don't have a high bandwidth connection for the video, you can at least read the blog. But the video is priceless. I hope when i'm dead, someone has the guts to stand up and say it like it was.

Falwell was pretty much beyond delusional. And now, he's going to burn in hell, contributing to Global Warming.

Ten Percent

One estimate of the total number of people that there have ever been on Earth is about 60,000,000,000 (60 billion, or 60 thousand million). There are currently about 6,000,000,000 (6 billion, or 6 thousand million) people alive on Earth. So, ten percent of all people who have ever lived are still alive today. Clearly, the chances of not ever experiencing death is ten percent. This isn't extrapolated from a small sample. This is a one hundred percent sample.

Do you want to live forever?

At The Deathbed of Darwinism

I've just finished reading At The Deathbed of Darwinism. It's newly available on Project Gutenberg. It was publish in 1904, and was a collection of papers written by E. Dennert, Ph.D. I look at the work from an historic perspective. I'm not an historian, but have interests in how things are figured out, or not. It appears that many great ideas come from people with no significant standing. For an excellent example, see The Reminiscences of an Astronomer, by Simon Newcomb. And, a great many poor ideas come from people who one would think should have known better. This is one of those. It proves that anyone can get a doctorate. If you've wanted a doctorate - go for it. Remember, you heard it first here.

From the title, one might think that Darwinism is just about to vanish from scholarly thought. But over a hundred years have passed, heredity was being discovered, genetics was developed, tons of experimentation has been done, and the essential bits of Darwin's On the Origin of Species is still considered solid truth, more than ever. So what happened?

It's not that easy to pull it out. For one thing, this collection of papers rambles. The translation is excellent. Through it, you can still get the feeling of someone grasping at straws, any straws, to find evidence that supports the author's conclusions. And make no mistake, the conclusions were drawn first. Then the evidence is weighed. And, if the evidence does not support the conclusions, the evidence is downplayed, explained away, outright ignored, or out and out falsified. And pointlessly. But this isn't good science. It's non-science, which can be shortened to nonsense. And this is how the author argues. If it is too hard to argue with a speaker's ideas, then attack the character of the speaker.

The first question to answer is, what motivation does the author have? He spells it out. He considers Darwinism to be an affront, really an attack on Christianity. Why it is such an attack is hard to guess. The author is either silent, misleading or vague on this question. It could be because a literal interpretation of the Bible has God making the Universe in six days about 6,000 years ago. It could be because the author is uncomfortable with being related to apes, or even distantly related to slugs. Some of these things bother people today. They shouldn't. In particular, my own Christianity is completely compatible with the evolution of animals, including humans. It is completely compatible with the origin and evolution of the Universe. And, being related to slugs gives my life a connectedness to life on Earth, and a relationship with the Universe, in all it's glory. The ancient Biblical word translated as "day" could be as easily translated as "era" or "epoch", without a stated length. At that point, it is largely compatible with the Big Bang and Evolution models. And even if it wasn't, Genesis has moral lessons, like the fall from grace, and i never expected a history of the Universe.

The other bit about the book title has to do with the word Darwinism. Christianity is a belief system. The title, Darwinism, is not. One does not say "I believe in Darwinism". One might say, "Darwin's theory of natural selection is a powerful mechanism to explain the evidence". But if extraordinary evidence became available that suggested that Christ never existed, Christians would still be Christians. Yet if extraordinary evidence became available that showed that Darwin was wrong, scientists would drop it like a stone. That's because it isn't a belief system. That said, both Christianity and Science are attempts to learn truth. And truth is truth. Darwin's ideas weren't great because Darwin was a great man. Darwin was a great man because his ideas have stood the test of time.

E. Dennert, Ph.D. attempts to argue that natural selection doesn't work. He embraces all sorts of people who have ideas that might replace this concept. But it should be pointed out that these other ideas also support descent in general. That is, one species changes or branches into another. These ideas simply have other mechanisms. But natural selection, of itself, isn't the idea that is so offensive. Descent is. And this fundamental problem doesn't seem to be noticed in the text. And the flow of the ideas suffers from it. So the author dances around the problem. But in the end, you're left with the feeling that since Darwin introduced descent, he should be punished, and it doesn't matter how.

His first attack is a series of four questions.

1. Is there any evidence that such a struggle for life among mature forms, as Darwin postulates, actually occurs?

Apparently E. Ennert, Ph.D. didn't get out much. My cat ate all the chipmunks, moles, mice, and even rabbits in the neighborhood. Only the Grey Squirrels survived.

2. Can the origin of adaptive structures be explained on the ground of their _utility_ in this struggle?

He seems to argue that if there any features of any organism anywhere that can't be explained, that the theory must be wrong. But Darwin also talked about sexual selection and other factors that are conveniently forgotten.

3. Is there any reason to believe that new species may originate by the accumulation of fluctuating individual variations?

There is now, of course, with genetics, evidence down to the molecular level. But there is also considerable variation in just siblings, available to the author.

4. Does the evidence of the geological record--which, as Huxley observed, is the only direct evidence that can be had in the question of evolution--does this evidence tell for or against the origin of existing species from earlier ones by means of minute gradual modifications?

He uses this question to launch an argument of the gaps. If you have two fossils A and C that differ, then where is the intermediate form? When such a form B has been found, the argument now asks for two new fossils: one between A and B, and one between B and C. But even Darwin suggested that the intermediate forms would be very rare. And rare they are, though certainly non-zero. There is also evidence for speciation among living creatures, plants and animals.

So that's the first ten percent of the book. It continues on in a meandering manner. It continues to using logic that is frustratingly close to correct while consistently missing the mark. It is not much fun to read. I'd much rather read up on a null result experiment.

OK, so E. Ennert, Ph.D. was biased going into the work. And so was i. I owe a considerable amount to Darwin. If Evolution didn't work, then modern antibiotics wouldn't work. Without modern antibiotics, modern surgery wouldn't work. Without modern surgery, when my gall bladder ruptured and became gangrenous, i'd have died a painful death. Clearly, it's time for a prayer of thanks to God for Darwin.

Evil

How evil are you?

Mom says i was a perfect child. Apparently, i've grown out of it.

In Particular

I blamed my cube mate for getting me into the particular habit of using this one particular word to particular excess. When writing a any particular essay, if a particular word is repeated particularly often, i'd look it up in a thesaurus and consider a synonym. When speaking, there's much less editing, and any particular word that comes to mind comes out of the mouth.

But this particular word isn't my cube mate's fault, or at least, not exclusively. It seems to have infected many people. I hear it in podcasts. Live interviews, that is interviews without a script, seem to be filled with this one particular word.

I've not looked it up in a thesaurus. I know a synonym that fills the same purpose. Silence. Read this again, but skip that one word each time it occurs. Does it still make sense?

Guilty

OK, so it's been a year, and i've calmed down. More or less. Last year, the City of Southgate, MI, issued me a speeding ticket. Fort Street is a three lane in both directions boulevard - which is to say that it is divided by a grass median. I pulled onto the street by making a right turn at a light. I then crossed two lanes to get into the left most lane. That's when the bubble lights went on. The officer claimed that he clocked me doing 37 MPH. There were two conflicting problems with this. First was that in the distance i had just traversed from a stop, my car doesn't get up to 37. Second, was that, well, so what? This street has a 45 MPH limit, at least. The fact was, i wasn't pushing it. I had gone to the far left lane because the business that i was to visit had an odd address, suggesting that it was on that side of the street. I'd need to be closer to that side to avoid missing it.

But crossing two lanes of traffic is suspicious. I didn't cut anyone off, or pass anyone, but there was other traffic, and that's that. The officer was not swayed by my story in the slightest.

I wanted a day in court, but when i called the number for the court on the ticket, i was presented with City Hall voice mail hell. There was no entry for the court. I fumbled for a few days, trying to figure out what to do, and realized that the deadline for paying the fine was coming up. Screw it, i'll just pay the fine. Well, they don't accept checks, there's no address to go to to pay in person - which leaves a credit card. That can be done by phone, but for an outrageous surcharge. Perhaps someone better at bureaucracy would not be found guilty as charged with no evidence, and no representation, guilty with no chance to be proven innocent.

I went back to Fort Street, and verified that my car can't accelerate to the speed quoted by the officer in the distance available. I drove around and found that the speed limit is 25 MPH. But in neighboring towns, this same road indeed has 45 MPH and 50 MPH limits, even though the business strip density is identical. So this strip of road has an arbitrarily low speed limit, coupled with high enforcement. I wouldn't call it serving the public, i'd call it milking the public.

There's a clear message that Southgate was sending me, and in the past year, i've taken it to heart. It says, "We don't want your business". I haven't been back. And it is clearly too bad for those businesses. Thousands of dollars lost.