Safety Fork, the

I read this post of Tess’s while I was at the Coffee Hag yesterday, and this came to mind:

I read some random guy’s ‘blog on Friday. It wasn’t even that memorable a ‘blog—I’ve forgotten the URL—but I was bored. What stuck with me was this guy’s attachment to his web server’s uptime. He’d get upset about having to unplug his server to fix his UPS or solve his floating ground problems. I mean, it’s cool that he is proud of how stable his server is, but nobody really cares if it’s been running for one day or one hundred.

Availability matters with web servers, uptime is irrelevant. I could reboot my server at three or four o’clock every morning, so that the uptime was never more than twenty-four hours, and no one would care. Why should they? No one accesses my server at four in the morning except script kiddies trying to brute-force my ssh login,¹ and I confess that I don’t really care if I interrupt them. I care that I don’t have to reboot my server every day, that as a matter of quality my software and hardware are more stable than that. But if I bought a UPS, I would have no qualms about shutting the system down for ten minutes to install it—the benefit to reliability would be measurable and the detriment to current uptime merely cosmetic.

¹ A waste of time, since I permit only public-key authentication.

My senior year of college, I didn’t have anywhere to put a regular alarm clock next to my bed (when I built my custom double-bed-over-desk loft, I omitted an alarm perch), so I used my iPod plugged into my computer speakers. The ultimate problem with this arrangement was that I eventually developed an aversion to any song I picked to be my wake-up-call.

Which is why, I suppose, I was a little startled at work today when “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” started playing—I was listening to a bunch of classical music; I should have been expecting it. But I was pretty involved in debugging my new table view, so at those first notes I sat up straight and immediately thought, But I don’t want to g—oh.

It’s a shame, but I know I’ll get over it eventually. I’ve watched The Blues Brothers enough times in the last six months that I can once again listen to “Sweet Home Chicago” without a similar reaction.

Also, there was this one squirrel.

I was promised many squirrels. You know who you are.

Sim City 4 crashed while I was playing tonight. As I was reloading it, I realized that the EA Games and Maxis logos can’t be skipped. This seems like the height of arrogance. I paid to use their software, it broke, and I’m expected to look at their logos for fifteen seconds before I can—not resume where I was, but—re-do progress I’d lost.

So here’s a suggestion for publishers: if you’ve the audacity to think that your customers want to see your logo before having fun or getting work done, show us some respect; skip the logo when your program starts after a crash.

So kids, snap out of it! Get off the cell phones, get away from the computer, and mail someone a fish! Before it’s too late!

From this week’s episode of Car Talk.

This tree is pretty.

Also, there’s a rabbit. Seriously, there’s a rabbit, you disbelievers!

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I am easily irritated by false arguments. Today, I ran into this one: Freedom to Run Means Freedom from Complexity. The gist of the argument is that free, open-source software isn’t really free if it’s difficult to use—because the technically unskilled can’t figure it out, they’re not free to use it.

This reasoning is patently ridiculous. One’s freedoms are not bound to one’s abilities. There are many things I am able to do, but which I am not free to do, and conversely there are many things I am free to do, but which I am not able to do. I am able to drive my car at one hundred miles per hour, but I am not free to do so—I’m likely to be arrested. On the other hand, I am certainly free to dance ballet, but I am not able to do so.

Applied to software this means that the GNU Compiler Collection, for example, is open-source, even though most people will never find it simple to use. The grant of license does not include a guarantee of ease of use. This is the same license used on a large portion of popular open-source software, some of which is easy to use and some of which is not.

Our freedom to use open-source software does not bind its developers to make it easy for us to do so.