Safety Fork, the

I sat down to read about sorting algorithms and this paragraph made me laugh:

Although dictionaries of the English language define “sorting” as the process of separating or arranging things according to class or kind, computer programmers traditionally use the word in the much more special sense of marshaling things into ascending or descending order. The process should perhaps be called ordering, not sorting; but anyone who tries to call it “ordering” is soon led into confusion because of the many different meanings attached to that word. Consider the following sentence, for example: “Since only two of our tape drives were in working order, I was ordered to order more tape units in short order, in order to order the data several orders of magnitude faster.” Mathematical terminology abounds with still more senses of order (the order of a group, the order of a permutation, the order of a branch point, relations of order, etc., etc.). Thus we find that the word “order” can lead to chaos.

—Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming Chapter 5

I’ve been playing Sim City 4 this evening, using my drawing tablet instead of my mouse. It seems to be a very compelling input metaphor for the game; the whole premise of the game is basically drawing a fictitious city on the screen. It would be neat to try it sometime on a tablet computer, so that I could use the pen directly on the screen.

It also made me reconsider what Steve Jobs said in his iPhone presentation about nobody wanting to use a stylus. While I think there’s something to be said for using a touch-based interface on a pocket telephone—the whole idea is to be able to pull it out and quickly do something simple—I also think that for more general purposes a pen offers an increase of precision so useful as to be indispensable. We’re not writing letters, taking notes, and drawing up blueprints with finger paints (at least when we’re not also five years old). If there is a future for large, usable digital surfaces—and I expect there is—I predict that some kind of pen will be involved.

After a little more than a year and a half, I’ve given up on running my web presence from a server in my apartment. Last night I moved Safety Fork to a shared host. I’ll accept the loss of geek cred in exchange for better load times (my upload is pretty slow for serving images) and letting someone else handle all the administrative tasks that are required to responsibly run web and email services, et cetera—tasks I can do, but which are pretty low on my mental list of interesting ways to spend my evenings and weekends, now that I’ve done them all at least once.

I have to say, though, that shutting off a box with a couple of fast SCSI drives in it makes a satisfying movie-esque equipment-winding-down noise…and the silence left behind is awfully nice.

Almost every time people find out that I have a diesel-powered car, they will ask why I would want—why I would pay more—for such a thing. I usually start by describing the fuel mileage I get, and how I like the extra torque at low RPM it affords me; this explanation satisfies most inquisitors. Even more, however, diesel engines appeal to my aesthetic sense: I like things that are elegant.

In a gasoline engine, fuel and air are mixed before they are injected into the cylinder, compressed, and ignited by the spark plug. A diesel engine compresses only air; when the piston reaches its highest point, fuel is injected and spontaneously combusts because compression has raised the temperature of the air above the flash point of the fuel. Put another way, a gasoline engine uses the physical relationship of temperature and pressure in a gas in one direction: to push the piston down after ignition. A diesel engine uses that relationship twice: once to heat the air enough to ignite the fuel, and again to push the piston down, producing power.

So I hope the dealer finishes fixing my car today; the one they lent me is nice, but the sound of it starting just doesn’t bring me the same thermodynamically-inspired smile.

I realized on Friday that I haven’t made a release of Same OSX in a year (the last one was November 20, 2005), which isn’t particularly fair to the fifteen hundred people who have downloaded it from the SourceForge site—especially since most of the version 0.8 changes have been languishing on my hard disk for the last six months or so. If you’re one of the two or three people who I know both read this ‘blog and play the game from time to time, accept my apologies and go grab the new version. It’s a universal binary for your shiny new Intel Macs, I’ve made a few odd visual improvements, and in anticipation of every Mac lover’s favorite application complaint, I’ve made it respond intelligently to the caption bar zoom button. Knock yourselves out.

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.

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.

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.

In a don’t-think-just-twitch mood on Monday, I was playing Counter-Strike. I took a break from being pnwd for a while to have lunch and when I came back, the screen was blank. Strange, I thought, I didn’t think that power-saving mode activated while a game was running. Then I noticed that the power light was solid, not blinking. The monitor wasn’t in power-saving mode, but rather its backlight had burned out, popped, taken this job and shoved it, or whatever it is that backlights do when they stop, you know, lighting the back of the screen.

I was tempted to run out and buy something new and shiny and as big as possible, but my four cooler heads prevailed. Instead, I decided to see if I could find a new backlight. The first page that google turned up, though, had something notable to say: Warranty: Parts: 3 years, Labor: 3 years. This had not occurred to me, as I assumed I had received only the usual pathetic 1-year warranty and that it had gasped its last a year and a half ago.

My initial forays into obtaining service were not promising. The first time through Samsung’s website (using Safari), the page that should have told me whether my request was received failed to load. Switching to Firefox, I got all the way through, but even though the site clearly told me that my warranty was good until June, 2006, I was informed that my monitor was out of warranty, that I would have to pay for service, and that the nearest authorized service center is helpfully located in nearby New Jersey. So perhaps you can understand that I harbored some trepidation toward subjecting myself to my last and least favored resort, the telephone.

I called, navigated about three touch-tone menus—thankfully they weren’t voice-recognition menus, which always seem to be both slower and less accurate—and waited on hold for maybe ten minutes (could have been much worse). I told the operator that I needed warranty service, that the website hadn’t worked, and what my problem was. She paused for a moment and said, “Yes, we’ll have to replace that.” I blinked.

I hung up with a ticket number and a promise that a new (well, refurbished; probably someone else’s sent in to have the backlight replaced) monitor would be shipped to the nearest UPS Store (only two blocks away) in one–two weeks and that they would do the exchange and ship my old one back. It came today and I’m writing this on an effectively new screen (without even the one dead subpixel my first had developed) delivered much sooner than promised without hassle, aside from a website that didn’t exactly work. I’m rather pleased, because it could have been much, much worse.