Southwest Virginia Blogs

Conspicuously absent from here are the things I tend to think about during business hours. I’m lucky enough to have some difficult problems to solve every now and then, especially when we have client with a scientific turn of mind. Right now, for example, I’m trying to figure out how to display very complex tree-like relationships between things. You know your family tree? Something like that, except on an enormous scale. Like, a family tree for an entire country. Potentially. Something like that.

So I say “I need something that automatically draws graphs of data,” and start looking around. Turns out that’s a whole discipline within computer science and math. Very complicated. They even hold international symposia in Vienna on this.

On the one hand I hate it when I get a problem like this. Deadlines and all, you know? But on the other … man, I think I could get into graph theory. I wonder if I would have dropped out of CS all those years ago if someone had introduced me to graph theory first. “Wait, don’t go! This is what you eventually get to study!”

We have to decide on our majors too young. We should get to wait until we’re really quite old.

I’ve been writing at Thudfactor for almost nine years now. Is that right? Yeah, just six months shy of that. When I started the weblog I wasn’t married yet, Elf and I were living in a small apartment in Prince William County, Virginia, and I still considered myself a “designer” more than a programmer. In fact, the first version of the weblog was my own blogging software written with brand-new knowledge of PHP and MySQL.

A lot has changed since then. Elf and I got married. I got laid off a couple more times. We moved a few times in the DC orbit, then finally to rural Southwest Virginia. We had a son, and then we bought a house. Professionally in that time I’ve changed from pushing PSDs, through HTML production, to web application development and now iOS development. Come to think of it, I’ve had about three career changes. But I’ve never felt like I’ve left the industry.

That’s a long time. It’s long enough for me to look back on my older posts and wonder, sometimes, what I was thinking. Sometimes I’ll start a post and I’ll think, wait, I think that contradicts something I said in 2004. And yeah, it does. It seems like I’ve changed my mind about a few things, too, without even being aware of it.

I’ve considered nixing the archives before. I’m not going to do it. For better or worse, Thudfactor is as close to a journal as I’ve anything I’ve ever had. So I’m going to keep it around, even if it is mostly ranting. It helps me keep track of my obsessions-of-the-moment. It helps show me how I’ve changed.

I don’t write here as much as I used to either. Partly because time is at more of a premium for me — I have work, and I have my son, lawns to mow, groceries to buy, meals to cook, APIs to study. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I’m trying to be more thoughtful about what and how I write. Large sections of Thudfactor read like me screaming at the television, and it has pretty much served that purpose. It’s been cathartic but not persuasive or constructive.

I’m not sure people like to read that anyway.

I’ve also slowly and gradually come to the realization that people inhabit entirely different realities from me. things that seem like they should be obvious to me sound like crazy talk to others, and vice-versa. I always had this faith that if you could explain something carefully and accurately, the people around you would go “oh, you’re right.” I believed reasoning things out would cause consensus.

Sometimes it does, if you’re starting out with enough common ground.

But time and time again I’ve run into thinking and reasoning that make absolutely no sense to me — people who seem not to just have different opinions, but live in a world with different facts. Arguing those facts is like arguing how frozen is up. It just doesn’t parse.

You can say, well, they’re stupid. Or they’re lying. Or they’re deliberately being obstinate.

But I’m not sure any of that is true. Well, sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s people off good faith, with good brains, looking at the world around us both and understanding something entirely different from me.

Robert Anton Wilson called these different perspectives “reality tunnels.” I’ve recently learned how to recognize when I’ve run up against one and withdraw. I used to stick around and fight it out because I didn’t want the other person to think they’d shut me up. But now, well, I have to mow the lawn.

And really, what can you do with someone who has different facts? How can you be so sure about your own. Neither of us are coming out of our tunnels any time soon. How do you deal with that?

All of which is to say I know things have been slow around here. But the “paper jam” light on my brain is blinking and I haven’t figured out how to clear it yet.

Apple has announced a new version of Apple TV. Apple has cut both the price and size of the device; it's now tiny compared to the old version, and costs only $99. The old version of the product was able to store movies and TV shows, but the new version only streams movies and TV, either from online sources or from content stored on a nearby Mac computer.

TV shows are going to typically rent for ninety-nine cents, and HD movies will go for $5. At a buck a TV show, a typical household could watch a lot of "must see" TV before you would spend more than the average $65/month cost of cable TV. And you can watch Netflix movies on demand for free if you are already a Netflix customer. The new device also retains the ability to stream and play music from a nearby iTunes music library; ditto with photos from a local iPhoto picture album. And Apple TV can be controlled with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Apple has pretty much completed the transition to an all-digital, fully integrated music/TV/movies/pictures system.

What do the following things have in common?

• Minicomputers
• Relational databases
• Client-server computing
• Object-oriented programming
• Web 2.0

All of the above were the latest and greatest IT buzzphrases that, over the past thirty years, were supposed to solve all the world's IT problems. Cloud computing, which by squinting only slightly, could be replaced with the word "mainframe," is the latest buzzphrase.

A good buzzphrase is meaningless, so that it can be used in a variety of conflicting and confusing ways, meaning different things to different vendors and organizations. And cloud computing is no exception. Two incidents this week highlight the fact that cloud computing is just as vulnerable to problems as every past IT buzzphrase.

In Virginia, the Department of Motor Vehicles has been unable to issue drivers licenses for almost a week because the systems that manage that have been down. Some years ago, the state outsourced DMV computer operations to a third party, which has been having some problems getting the computers back up. This situation is basically a "cloud" computing model, where a third party in a remote location provides a service to the DMV--the processing of drivers licenses. In this case, the DMV has outsourced a core function, which puts the organization at risk if there is a major failure, as accountability for the failure is diluted via a business contract--as opposed to calling the head of IT in for a dressing down.

A second incident was personal. I got a call from a well-known nationally recognized bank, which happens to hold our mortgage. They claimed that we had missed a payment, but oddly, could not tell us immediately what month we had missed. It took over an hour on the phone speaking to a total of six different people before we figured out the problem. What does that have to do with cloud computing?

We pay our mortgage using the bank's online payment system, which is basically a cloud computing application. What I found out is that it is riddled with design flaws and bugs. We had confirmation numbers for every payment in the past several months, but several of the people we talked to had no way of looking up those confirmation numbers--confirmation numbers generated by their own cloud computing application. Furthermore, they stubbornly insisted that in fact, we had never even logged in to make a payment recently, even though we had confirmation numbers! What this told me was that their system stinks; it lacks adequate logging of transactions, loses transactions, and that the bank's internal interface used by their staff is grossly inadequate to provide even minimal customer service. The idea that a major bank could provide a customer with a confirmation number for a large financial transaction and then later have NO RECORD of that transaction is appalling.

Is cloud computing bad? No. It's a tool, just like any other IT tool. But slapping the term "cloud computing" on a computer system does not make it invulnerable to problems, and does not mitigate problems caused by careless design, inadequate planning, and poor data management.