Mmm cookies

Okay, so it's finally all gone. I have finally got rid of all my cookies. I am very happy as I thought I would never give them all away. You see, it all started on Saturday when I decided that I'd make a triple batch of chocolate chip cookies. I was making chocolate chip cookies for the company charity auction. Every year Intelerad, the company I work for, set up an auction site on the company LAN and employees can put things on the auction site and sell them to other employees. The idea is all proceeds go to charity. It's quite a lot of fun, although it can be quite distracting at times. I don't have any scientific data but I'm pretty sure most employees spend their time simply watching auctions and trying to snipe one another on various goods.

I don't like to buy things in the charity auction so much as sell things. I think this is partly because I don't like to buy things period. At any rate, what I usually do is cook up a couple of batches of chocolate chip cookies and sell those on the auction. I can't figure out why exactly, but everyone seems to like them almost to the point of farce. They sometimes act as if my chocolate chip cookies or some kind of drug. It's quite flattering, but also really silly. The recipe I use the one you find on the back of the Nestlé chocolate chip package. Many people have tried to equal my cookies but apparently all have failed. I'm not entirely sure how.

The weekend before the auction I decided to make a triple batch of cookies. I like making a large number of batches at once because it takes almost the same amount of time to make a triple batch or quadruple batch of cookies as it does to make a single batch of cookies. Making larger batches is better because eventually you end up with so many cookies you can start to make little houses out of them or put the, in long lines, all over your furniture (what? Only I do that?). After you finish playing with them you can then give them away and make lots of friends.

In the end, I couldn't make any cookies over the weekend and so I made them late on Monday night. On Tuesday, I took in the cookies I made the previous night and started putting them up on the auction site. I amused myself way too much putting cute, little, nonsensical descriptions of the cookies on the website. I would sell them in units of two or three cookies each. This works well however, I was putting in way too much work coming up with cute descriptions that I got tired and stopped. I then realized that all my auctions have it in time approximately 7 minutes from each other. This guaranteed that I would be bothered almost precisely every second minute when somebody coming to collect their cookies and chat. While fun, it made doing code reviews much more difficult. On Monday I got through about two thirds of the first half of the three batches of cookies. (For extra points, what fraction of the total number of cookies was that?)

On Wednesday I somehow tickled a bug that stopped me from making more than one auction at a time. Every time I created a new auction all it did was modify the last auction it created. I started selling cookies in larger batches feeling a slight twinge of panic that I might never be able to get rid of them all. On the plus side, I got slightly more done that day. I say slightly more because Wednesday was chilly day and I got involved helping others get everything ready. Chilly day is a great day. It's a almost spontaneous outpouring of food. I love spontaneous out pouring of things.

Today, Thursday, I managed to figure out how I tickled the bug and started to make multiple auctions again. This time I omitted the cute descriptions and placed the end of each auction at least fifteen minutes apart and often up till thirty minutes apart. This makes creating multiple auctions very quick and it only took me a fraction of the time it did on Tuesday. What is more, the end of the auctions were enough apart that they weren't a perpetual distraction. I managed to complete the work I wanted to do that week during that day and so it was a very productive. (I say this in case there are any Intelerad employees reading this)

Thursday also marks the last of the cookies. I am now officially out of cookies. I hope the cookie junkies don't come after me now.

AHCI and freezes during startup while detecting SATA devices

You know how sometimes you're dealing with a computer problem and you find yourself trying a bunch of things, almost randomly, in a desperate attempt to try and get it to work? There's a name for that. If you're doing that while writing a program it's called voodoo chicken coding. If you're doing it while trying to debug some sort of operating system problem then I suppose it's voodoo chicken troubleshooting. it's called voodoo chicken coding (or troubleshooting) because you don't actually know what the problem is that so it is trying a bunch of random things to get it to work. It's the equivalent of mumbling things to the gods while waving some kind of voodoo chicken over the computer in a vain attempt to get to it to work.

This is not a good strategy. Even if you do manage to solve the problem this way it will probably reoccur again since whatever you did to fix the problem probably just fixed the problem by accident. (I say this coming from a background of trying to debug heavily threaded software).

What is not often stated, however, is that knowing how a system works can sometimes be of no help either. I recently had a problem on my PC where the computer would freeze early in the startup process while the BIOS was still scanning for IDE devices. I ran into this issue I was trying to switch my SATA bus over to AHCI. AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. It's a newer protocol for talking to serial ATA devices that offers more features than the normal parallel ATA protocol such as hot swapping and native command queuing. I wanted to enable this on my internal hard drive for two reasons: 1) I thought I already had enabled it at some point in the past. 2) I wanted to enable native command queuing because it sounds cool. 3) I need to enable it in order to run the Mac OS which I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to get running on my computer since I bought it about a year and a half ago. At least part of the reason I haven't managed to get it running is because I haven't managed to get my computer running with AHCI.

Anyway, I turned on AHCI in my BIOS I started getting this freezing problem when the BIOS was scanning the SATA bus looking for new devices. I was a bit confused because as far as I know there's absolutely no way that anything I had done to the hard drive, in terms of formatting or partitioning or installing software, could cause this problem. Scanning for new devices shouldn't be reading anything on the hard drive. That's just weird. Well, it turned out that this was indeed the problem.

After trying everything I could think of I decided simply to wipe the drive in a voodoo chicken debugging attempt to try and get the system to recognize the hard drive without freezing. Amazingly, after doing a low-level formatted the drive and rebooting it worked fine. I still don't understand why this is. Why the heck is it reading off the drive during the device detection routine? Well, I don't know. Anyone want to explain this to me then feel free. Anyway, I'm just happy it's working now. Native command queuing is indeed cool!

So, I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. I think it is that once you've eliminated everything as being impossible the only thing that's left is the impossible, which is impossible. This in turn means you have absolutely no clue what you're doing and might as well start trying a whole bunch of random stuff that shouldn't work.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some chicken stew to eat. yummy!


Sidenote: Switching from parallel ATA to AHCI requires installing drivers under Windows. Unfortunately installing drivers under Windows requires AHCI to be enabled. Enabling AHCI renders Windows unbootable unless it has the drivers for the AHCI controller installed. This is a very fun situation as it means you can't install AHCI drivers until AHCI is enabled and you can't load Windows if AHCI is enabled. I managed to get around this problem, on my machine by using my two SATA controllers to enable AHCI on the second controller, install the drivers in Windows for this controller, then manually change the hard drive over this this second controller. I then rebooted Windows under the second controller and turned on AHCI under the primary controller. I then moved my hard drive back to the primary controller and start up my machine again. And that effective all these shenanigans with the have AHCI enabled on both controllers and a half the drivers for these two AHCI controllers installed and enabled. There are apparently ways of installing the drivers by booting up from a CD-ROM or other startup disk and then inserting a floppy drive with those drivers at some point. I didn't bother reading up on how to do that as the above methods seemed far simpler to me.

Computer issues

Arggh! This is driving me crazy! Is there anyway I can actually get any work done without being thwarted by stupid, little computer issues.

Yesterday is was trying to setup an FTP server on my WindowXP machine. This is pretty much a single click operation on MacOS X (not including the usual NAT shenanigans) on windows it took forever.

• The user manual was wrong.
• The IIs FTP component needed to be installed separately.
• There's a hidden button for setting the file sharing permissions into "simple" (read useless) mode. For some reason, the document doesn't mention that certain menu items in the MMC sharing controls don't show up in simple mode. grrr..
• The sharing controls are hideous and there's at least one hideous violation of standard UI widget behavior that blew my mind. For the curious it's a checkbox on a settings dialog that doesn't represent a setting but an action to do when you apply the settings. Someone apparently figured that since they were writing code that did actions (like saving settings) when the user clicked ok, that the dialog represented the actions to take when hitting ok instead of the state of the preferences that are mirrored when the user pressed ok.. grrr.

Today it's open office. I wanted to finally start fixing up one of my long text documents - adding things like style information and a table of contents. I opened up the file and spent 3 hours or so adding style information and a table of contents. Just a few moments ago I reopened the document to start adding content again. Humm, all the style information had gone. Did I open the wrong file.? nope, all the textual information changes were still there, just the style information. I looked at the file type: txt!

You have got to be kidding me.

Apparently, OpenOffice was fine with me adding the text style information but had no intention of actually saving said information.. Or even pointing out that I was adding text style information to a text document. Which makes no sense!

Last time I used microsoft word (version 5.0 mac) it didn't do this. The behavior was to stubbornly insist that if you wanted to save to something other than word's default format you manually go through the save-as process each and every time. It insisted on warning you that you might loose formating information each and every time. In the end one tended to give up, write the thing in word's native file format and save-as something else before sending.

I believe that the modern version of word will actually warn you that the specific things inside your current document can't be saved to whatever you've chosen. I might be wrong on this, though. I haven't been able to get past the modern version of word's interface. Where are the keyboard equivalents listed???

Photoshop won't silently save a file with layers or other non-savable info to a png (ie: it won't loose your layers silently). I can't think of any program that would have allowed me to just waste time like this in all the years of using a computer. This is a first: a completely novel way of destroying my data.

Thankyou Open Office. Thankyou, you stupid, useless application. May the idiot that responsible for destroying my data suffer some sort of miss-fortune... like loosing his data while using Open Office in the same way.

US healthcare documentary

I just finished watching the Frontline documentary. It talked about the US healthcare situation. Basically, what the documentary was about was how healthcare is done in five different countries. It contrasted this against how healthcare is provided in the US.

Healthcare, in US, is very inefficient. The health expenditure per capita in the US is basically twice what it is in most other countries. That's really quite spectacular.

I don't live in the US, however I get the impression that the health care debate is incredibly politicized there. It looks like this is making it difficult for them to make any progress with their healthcare system. That's a shame.

I live in Canada. Our healthcare system has had it's share of problems recently. From what I gather, most of these problems have stemmed from underfunding. This underfunding was in turn caused by a need to service a large national debt. Now that the debt situation is under control funding is increasing again. It looks like we're doing pretty well.

Canada wasn't one of the five countries in the frontline documentary although Wikipedia apparently has an article comparing the Canadian and US health care services for those interested.

Think of it, with all the money Americans would save they could buy a couple more maglev trains. You can never really have enough maglev trains.

I like maglev trains... and efficient healthcare ... and Wikipedia. :-)

700 billion dollars.

Wow, 700 billion dollar bailout.

A few weeks.. or was it months?.. or maybe it was yesterday.. I can't tell time.. Anyways, at some point in the past I ranted about the lost opportunity that was the Iraq war and how they could have used the money on several other projects. That amount was 500 billions dollars. Now they want to spend 700 billion.

For comparison, canada's national debt is now 467 billion dollars. Aiii!

To be fair they say that they'll get the money back.. Well, most of it.. probably.

It's only ~2000$ per man, women and child in the US. Canada's national debt is ~15000$ per person which is still pretty bad given that Canada's population is about 33 million vs the US' 300 million or so.

Congress, at this writing, is balking at this amount. Honestly, I don't blame them. This is a ridiculously large amount of money and as much as I can appreciate the occasional need to prevent contagion, this is on a greater scale then.. well.. anything I've ever hear of. Honestly, I'd give this a miss too without some really convincing evidence that they know exactly what their doing.

I wonder if Colin Powell would consider giving another speech.

Communication between engineers and management.

Human beings work on two levels. The first is the emotional level. This system is very good at making very quick decisions based on the data but doesn't think very deeply. The second level is the rational level. This is the level that can do mathematics and understand software design. Psychologists think of these two levels as being different systems in the brain. They call the first level system one and the second level system two. Given that there's absolutely no way of understanding a very complex piece of software, like an operating system, if someone's trying to explain to you what's special about the newest version of Windows or Linux or MacOS X, there may be a little technical data transmitted however the bulk of the information will be directed directly at system one, the emotional system.

Very often explaining the positive and negative aspects of the complex design doesn't involve trying to make people understand the whole system, even when the system itself is really only understandable as a whole. It's possible to transmit one's excitement about the system or the elegance of the system through one's own excitement and a few choice examples. You need to transmit your excitement because otherwise your words come off as disingenuous. You need to use a few examples because this is something the brain can understand. In antiquity we weren't always able to prove things mathematically so what we did instead was we used anecdotal evidence. Examples are like anecdotes. They don't have the advantage of being associated with a different person, but if you can make your example personal and that's almost as good.

When it comes to engineering, one of the greatest dangers and engineer faces is misunderstanding a system. To simply not understand a system is not as much a problem because you typically know that you don't understand the system and seek out knowledge, advice and otherwise treat the system with respect one would expect to give to a potentiality dangerous blackbox. When an engineer misunderstands the system he feels free to tinker with it, to change it and then put it into production. Many bugs in software actually exit because an engineer changed the system, either data feature or fix a bug, but didn't understand how that existing system worked. As a result of their tinkering they introduced a subtle problem. As a result, software engineers, in fact all engineers, tend to become professedly more paranoid about misunderstanding concepts as they get older.

This sort of paranoia about misunderstanding a system does not exist in the general population. In fact, it may not even exist in engineers with respect to non-technical matters. When people not in technical roles interact, in such ways that can influence the design and manufacture of complex engineering system, there will almost certainly misunderstand the system.

Working on a complex piece of software requires holding a lot of state in your head. It acquires understanding in detail the software system. In a typical day a software engineer will make many decisions that will affect how long it takes to build a piece of software, how robust that piece of software will be and whether or not a feature gets implemented. He will make these decisions either explicitly or implicitly based on the design he chooses to implement. While requirements suggest design design suggests requirements also. A good engineer will optimize the time it takes to write the software, the quality of the software, and the number of features in the software. Frustratingly for managers, the only person who actually has enough information to be able to make the trade-off is effectively is a software engineer. Frustratingly for software engineers the only person with enough information to be able to understand whether the system should be optimized for speed of development, quality or features is the manager.

From the manager's perspective, it is impossible for manager and to know everything they need to know in order to make a design decision that will influence the schedule, quality and capability of the software their team is building. While I think it would be possible for managers to be able to do this with certain high level features. However, in practice a good designer will be able to understand the whole system in its entirety and for any given set of features, schedule and quality objectives will be able to optimize the design, in its entirety, to the optimal. A common manager mistake is to try and exert control over the software team by withholding important prioritization information.

From the software engineers perspective, it's impossible to know exactly which of features, schedule or quality is most important given the current political climate. This includes pressure from clients, budget pressures and maintenance duties. A common software engineer mistake is to build the wrong thing to a ridiculously high standard.

Communication between management and software engineers is tricky. From the software engineers point of view, he can't give the whole picture because it would simply take too long. In fact, if you were to give the whole picture to the manager to manager would know the same amount as a software engineer about the system. Nevertheless, software engineer doesn't need to give an accurate picture of how the system works. All we need to do is give some idea as to the emotional landscape of the solution space. Essentially, any combination and quality features will result in a schedule with some risk parameter. Negotiating a combination of quality, features and schedule is the process of understanding the solution landscape and then picking a solution with an agreeable combination of factors and a tolerable risk.

A manager can help speed this process along by attempting to communicate the political climate, as much as it relates to the priory of features, the satisfaction with current quality and schedule pressure to the engineer. By doing this the manager gives the engineer context as to what sort of environment the software is being built in. This process is very similar to going to visit an on-site client to find out what sort of workplace pressures the client is under and what sort of environment the software is expected to run under. While a manager can drag and engineer round with him to get yelled at by executives the manager can try and communicate as much as possible the current priorities.

Managers need to be over trust are software engineers to make the right design decisions. This is a matter of professional trust and competency but also a question of having the right information.

Software engineers need to try and poll their managers and under other members of the organization for what the priorities are what the priorities are likely to become and how satisfied everyone is with the current state of affairs.

Learning is fun

Well, you learn something everyday. This is especially true if you're working with computers. Today I learned the following:

1- windows file sharing permissions are weird.
2- Entourage X (mac outlook) will irreversibly corrupt its database if you push it over 2 gigs.
3- Sylpheed doesn't know how to import an mbox file if said mbox file uses mac style line ending.
4- Sylpheed crashes most spectacularly if you try to import a 1.6 gig mbox file with mac line endings.
5- Practically no text editors will work with 1.6 gig files.
6- Knowing how to program in Java and having a development environment ready to go has its advantages.

Tune in next week when I learn that beating oneself over the head with a pan is a good stand-in for using a computer.