Obscurata Craptacula

Crummy Variable Naming Not Restricted to Lousy Source Code

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 08:56:00 PDT

Have you ever tried to read source code littered with variables that have undescriptive names like i, ii, i0, ii0, temp, temp1, temp2, and so on? Such names are arguably concise and tolerable in some circumstances such as when:

The symbol is being used for something of very low conceptual weight, e.g. an index of iteration that’s no more than a dummy variable that hardly deserves a name, and whose purpose is little more than walking over some simply indexed set of values.
When the use of the symbol is highly local. Hopefully its scope is restricted to the body of a small loop, or other relatively compact code block, and it’s not even visible outside of it.
When in some other context, hopefully widely known by your audience, those symbols are universally used as you’re using them. Denoting coordinates in the plane with variations on x and y is probably familiar to everybody. In other cases you may want to be more explicit and careful.

When variables with ultra-terse, non-descriptive names are used in the absence of these conditions, code gets much harder to read. Its meaning is less clear on initial inspection, and maintaining a sense of it burdens the working memory of the reader.

It turns out that annoying source code isn’t the only place this happens. I was recently reading something, which will be left unnamed to protect the guilty, that contained roughly the following passage:

The system has three eigenvalues: one positive, one zero, one negative. Let us call them alpha, mu, and upsilon respectively.

Alpha, mu and upsilon? WTF, man? Are you trying to annoy the reader, when five pages from now, you next refer to these quantities? Here’s a suggestion! Why don’t we assign the one with value zero the convenient name “zero?” I vaguely remember that the Arabs of antiquity even provided a convenient notation for this quantity. I believe it was some kind of circle. It’s an amusing exercise to come up with less useless names for the other two eigenvalues.

And lower-case upsilon? Maybe there’s a reason people often avoid using that particular letter in written mathematics… especially in handwritten mathematics? Seeing a whiteboard full of sloppily rendered u’s, v’s, upsilons, and the uppercase counterparts of the first two is a strong predictor of a plunge into the dunk tank of tortured exposition.

But what do I know? I just write one cranky post every three months, and it’s generally devoid of u’s, v’s, upsilons (to say nothing of interesting content).

Satisfied Customer Feedback

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:49:00 PDT

While reading book reviews on Amazon this morning, I encountered the following gem:

While I’m positive that this book will serve engineers well, I cannot recommend it to practitioners of pure mathematics, videlicit those who are not comfortable with the bloodied abortion that is mathematics to the engineer. It blows my mind that we ever got a man on the moon! A good example can be found in the first line of page 7. omega^l=omega(l+(2*n+1)). Keep in mind that n is an element of the set of positive integers, their claim not mine. Now, if you solve for n you’ll find that this equation can only be satisfied for n=-1/2, clearly not an element of Z+! Perhaps rational numbers are included in the set of “integers for engineers.” Enigmatic despite the absurdity. And yet they seem to indicate that it holds for all n in the aforementioned set! I pray that I’ve missed something and that someone will embarrass me by pointing out my mistake because as irate as I am right now, blood will likely shoot out of my nose in the next 5 minutes and they’ll find my dead in my office at day’s end.

As an author, you know you’ve really reached a reader when he or she begins fulminating with fantasies of violence and injury directed at his or her own body rather than yours. Whether the book in question can be blamed for the reviewer’s use of “videlicit” remains unclear.

Hotmail UI Junk to Joy Ratio Considered Appalling

Thu, 25 May 2006 07:25:00 PDT

A friend who has been having experiences of great joy with Hotmail realized this morning where some of his intense user satisfaction comes from… Presented for your consideration, his visual analysis:

He’s also been a bit generous about what he classifies as non-junk. I’d be fascinated to know if any living entity has ever clicked on the “Free Newsletters” link.

I’m faintly curious about how long it’s been there since I apparently dismissed it with all the other visual chaff of flavors like “Ten Hot New SUVs for Fall” and “Two ways to make your bourgeois, pretentious, luxury-consumer-twit furniture smarter.” Even having had my attention drawn to it by this marked up screen leaves with me with somewhere less than no desire to click on the thing.

Does anybody measure the effectiveness of this UI at getting click through to ads and content? Does it really produce mad revenues of a magnitude that justify its being such an awkward, homely, noisy, distracting, unusable eyesore?

But what do I know? I’m not a free webmail baron that paid $400MM for this thing before I grafted it into an also-ran, money losing sump of a brand.

"Tech Stocks Retreat!"

Fri, 12 May 2006 13:45:00 PDT

Several times today I’ve heard people say that Expedia’s earnings disappointment was “a bad sign for tech stocks,” or that it could, or should, or did “trigger a retreat in tech stocks.”

I don’t know why. A hundred years ago, if Sears-Roebuck hit a soft spot in the mail order catalog retail business, did the feckless, chattering, financial news classes, in whatever primeval form they then existed, burst forth to warn of a bad signs for the pulp and paper industry?

PowerPoint Killed The Technical Talk

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 10:55:00 PDT

With apologies to The Buggles, Peter Norvig and Edward Tufte...

I saw your PowerPoint slides for your technical talk,
Glazing over as you read each one aloud,
The crappy format stopped knowledge coming through.

Oh-a oh

Its many wizards gave ugly, eye-sore templates,
Low contrast gradients and still homelier fonts,
And that’s notwithstanding the content you killed.

Oh-a-oh

It ruined your sem’nar
Oh-a oh

Why did you do this?
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.

Six bullets on ev’ry slide.
Oh-a-a-a oh

Subject-less sentences and vague passive voice,
Weaken my verbal and spatial instincts.
Disembowel any statistical sense.

Oh-a oh

Your talk need’nt be crap.
Oh-a-oh

But you just droned on.

PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
Four-thousand words on every slide, just print it out, it’s gonna suck.
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh

PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.

Four-thousand words on every slide, just print it out it’s gonna suck.
Don’t stare at the screen, it’s just a crutch. Kill the slides, they’re just clip art.

This was a technical talk.
This was a technical talk.

PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.
PowerPoint killed the technical talk.

PowerPoint killed the technical talk (this was a technical talk).

Origami Handheld--For Y0U N0W

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 08:09:00 PDT

I have a hotmail account.

I still use this account, despite the fact that the user interface and performance of the service are now so long in the tooth that you can practically see bare jawbone poking through the putrid, reddened, inflamed flesh of your inbox. Despite what appears to be a near total lack of effective investment in improving hotmail since about 1999, I still have this account for two reasons:

History: I’ve used it for a long time, many people remember its address, and I’ve even lost track of all the other addresses that forward to it, so getting rid of it would be a hassle;

Spam: It’s better for that account to drown in a plunging cataract of junk mail than one that I actually use regularly. Please spare me any discussion of the fact that hotmail has a “spam folder” and “spam filtering.” I’m not sure what the algorithmic basis of its spam filter is, but I’d assume that if it’s Bayesian, then it’s not what you’re thinking, but instead is eponymously named for the good Reverend’s little known, long lost, second cousin Cletus Jim Bob Bayes who “dur’n’t quite do numbers so good.”

Hotmail’s inability to identify spam as such (its ability to positively classify legitimate mail as spam is a whole other sniping blog post) does however give its users great opportunity to see what those crazy spammer kids are trying these days. I feel depressed to think that there might be a single human being who has been rooked into opening a piece of this garbage by a subject line that has somehow pandered to their needs (health insurance, a new job), desires (personal success, becoming a hit with the ladies, getting free consumer caca in exchange for being a secret sh0pper or poll taker), or fears (any number of things could be dysfunctional or deformed! Open this message and find snake tonic that will remedy this instantly!).

The letters that attempt to suck the user into opening them often use the promise of something presumably desirable to bait the trap. Now the ladies… This is understandable to anybody who has ever worked in Redmond and stood sullenly shuffling his feet on the sidewalk outside the Claim Jumper with the restaurant’s LED-based Mark of Cain in his hand, dolorously waiting for its brazenly flashing and beeping clarion call to herald the start of quasi-ritualized feasting on all the factory-prepared chili packable into one’s face port. By the way, a helpful tip on this matter? Stop wearing free company logo T-shirts and quit tucking them into your jeans, which you should also not hike up to your xiphoid process and secure with a superfluous belt. I have the fashion sense of Quasimodo, and even I understand this.

Now where was I? Ah, yes, I was about to rant about the teaser items promised in the spam. Lots of them are obvious. The aforementioned success with the ladies. The v1agra and c1@lis that presumably complement that as naturally as that quasi-rancid, off-brown dip substance goes with the Blooming Onion at the Outback Steak House. Large screen TVs. The free gas-sucking SUV that costs $120 to fill up even now, before Hubbert’s Peak is unambiguously behind us, and while the feckless goonscrewing of the entire Middle East is only in its early stages. A new computer. A vacation. A great work at home job with mucho $$$. And a new Origami ultra mobile PC!

”What? What’s that last thing? Something new and exciting I haven’t seen before? Where do I sign? What personal information do I need to surrender to get a crack at this sweet piece of war3z?”

Control yourself, n00b… and look at this thing. It seems kind of like a Tablet PC. But smaller. With a form factor a bit more like the PSP, except that you could probably have more fun on the sidewalk with a couple of pieces of colored chalk. Maybe it’s cheap? Nah, the prices I’ve heard bandied about make it sound comparable in price to a nice new x86-based Mac laptop, i.e. a product people demonstrably want and that isn’t based on some also-ran, low-rent Celeron chip. And the marketing drivel that tries to convince us someone would want one of these? Well, users who gulp down the Windows experience like it was store-brand wine cooler at a sorrority party, they must be signed up for it already. After all, if you check the weather on your RefrigeratorPC in the morning, and then receive an SMS from your GarageDoorPC telling you that you didn’t close it, before driving to your office where you’re going to spend nine hours gazing rapturously at Clippy and the Windows Update dialogs, before you return to your AutoPC (they’ve sold what, like two of these?) and drive back home to sleep before beginning the whole, useless Sisyphean process anew, how could you not want this?

One argument I’ve heard is that there’s some fraction of the day that I’m going to spend somewhere that, gosh darn it, I just don’t have Windows available to continuously prop up my digital hipster “lifestyle” and that this jarring discontinuity will be so bothersome to me that what I need to do is drop another $700 on some crappy device that I can squeeze into this crack of Windows-less despair like grout between the mildewed tiles in the shower of a $20 motel room.

The problem is that I’m not sure I need the digi-dork lifestyle to be so pristinely uninterrupted. Does Windows just need its users constantly in front of it, caring and sharing and interacting and consuming, because that will help with future quarterly numbers? If so, then it seems that The Maker’s problems are no longer the customer’s problems. Trying to make the customer experience of devices that once had a purpose “stickier,” as I heard some marketing guys at the next table wanking about, runs a real risk of driving the products across the border from “useful” or even “enjoyable” and into the savage hinterlands of “burdensome” and “irritating.” If your company’s problem is getting users to “spend more time in front of your product” then unless sitting in front of that product is intrinsically enjoyable or edifying somehow, then you’re turning it into a needy girlfriend and this isn’t going to be in your interest in the long term. People use things like personal finance software, systems administration tools, and a host of other product categories, to save themselves time. If they are going to want your product, they’re probably going to want it to make their days, shorter, easier and less difficult. They don’t want their days made longer, harder, and more mind numbingly boring by being forcibly shackled to your crappy products and their misguided, self-serving marketing strategies.

For years we’ve heard about the “Windows Everywhere” strategy. This appears to mean battering and shoehorning Windows into some form that can be run everywhere that a microprocessor may exist within an arm’s length, including situations where Windows may, from performance, usability, or style standpoints be utterly gauche. “Windows Everywhere,” pursued in this single-minded and dogged way turns the operating system into a Procrustean bed, on which the users, which is to say Windows’s customers, are stretched or hacked as necessary to fit not their needs or desires, but those of the product’s maker.

Origami looks like the latest unholy and frilly duvet cover to toss over Procrustes’s queen size. I can’t imagine who other than a paid shill could work up even an iota of enthusiasm for this thing, much less enough lust-blinded zeal to click on the darn spam mail that’s trying, in a manner as tone deaf as the process that probably led to Origami’s conception, to use it as the compelling hook to reel in a mark.

But what do I know? I’m not a marketer or a spam baron.

Ajaxturbation

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 20:20:00 PDT

ajaxturbation n. Excitation of oneself by gratuitous use of XmlHttpRequest, JavaScript and DHTML in contexts where they’re not necessary or useful, and where they result in needless code complexity, maintenance hassle, cross browser incompatibility problems and runtime brittleness.

To be sure, I like Ajax as much as the next guy (probably even more) but coining this term seemed like too much to pass up after the afternoon of debugging I just did.

Horrifying Purex Detergent Commercial

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:29:00 PDT

While running on the treadmill this morning, I saw this Purex commercial which featured a disturbing fish man character who, as far as I could tell with the sound down, appeared to be heckling a housewife in her laundry room about what I imagine could only have been one of two subjects:

The unholy and unspeakable reek of her family’s dirty clothes, or…
A dark and horrible secret of her ancestry that will soon be revealed by the unveiling of a gruesome atavism with horrifying implications.

Learn more in The Shadow Over Purex. As horrifying as all of this was, it still paled by comparison to the episode of the supernaturally unfunny Ellen Degeneres talk show that was playing on the adjacent television. Shudder.

SWIK, Multi-Language Systems, and Welcome

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:49:00 PDT

Along with Marc Wandschneider and Alex Bosworth), I’m one of the developers of the new SWiK site. In the past, I’ve worked on many things including operating systems, multimedia, security and crypto software, a virtual machine, niche embedded stuff, network appliances and more. SWiK’s the first web-based tool for the open source community (indeed the first web application of any real size and traffic) on which I’ve had a chance to work, and I think it’s quite neat what Sourcelabs is trying to give back to the open source commmunity by sponsoring the system’s development and hosting it and its ever-growing heap of content.

I’m generally interested in building multi-language systems where, to speed development, a system is decomposed into subsystems whose implementation technologies are chosen independently to make life easy. Pieces can then be replaced, tuned or re-implemented as reality and empirical measurement dictate, hopefully leading to less development time spent and cost being incurred than would happen building a giant hairball out of technologies that are lower-level (and thus more expensive to work with) than they need to be. It appears that someone has given roughly this idea a cute pattern name: AlternateHardAndSoftLayers

So, I guess I’m an AlternatingHardAndSoftLayerer since 2000. Before that, I spent a few years working in a place where one used the company’s doctrinally correct and ideologically pure technologies for everything, whether they made any technical sense in context or not. When I moved over to work on and with more open source software, the sense of relief was comparable to finally being allowed to use clean one’s teeth with a special-purpose brush after years of being permitted only to use an old screwdriver with a bent blade and a cracked handle.

SWiK, which is mostly implemented in object-oriented PHP 5, with a smattering of side-utilities written in Java, and a few bits in Ruby, is sort of an example of this idea, and has served to get me interested in Ruby, which has in turn moved me to look at Rails. In particular some of the efficiencies to be gained from metaprogramming in general, and from Ruby’s particular expression of some ancient and frequently rediscovered ideas from Lisp and Smalltalk has caught my attention. I’ve not yet had a chance to build something really big with Ruby or Rails, but my initial experiences have been quite pleasant, and so I’m on the lookout for opportunities to do so if these technologies genuinely appear to be (at least part of) the right solution.

For some of the same reasons, I’m also hoping to pick up Python again, after having briefly dabbled in it a year or two ago, before I was sidetracked by something else. Strangely, on returning to Python, it seems just a little bit less nice than it did two years ago. I don’t know how much of this is due to readjustment pangs, and how much comes from subconscious comparisons to Ruby’s arguably nicer structure and syntax. Time may tell.

First Entry...

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:31:00 PDT

After fiddling around and posting written scraps in a smattering of random places, I’ve finally decided to set up an actual blog.

I considered throwing together a quick blogging application of my own using Rails, since, as innumerable screencast demos have shown, this takes the average Rails demonstrator at a conference roughly 11 femtoseconds. Given my relative noobliness with Rails, it seemed I could get what I wanted done in under a weekend, even at my primitive state of knowledge.

After spending a few minutes thinking about what sorts of features I’d want to build to make things basically functional, I decided to check out Typo… After a quick download and install, here we are. The unsolved problem now remains coming up with a visual theme for the site that isn’t obviously the default one…