A rolling stone gathers no rest, so I’m off for yet another adventure in a couple of days; this time I’m going to the French Alps to injure myself terribly whilst attempting to snowboard. That’s one part of the coolness mentioned in the title, but I’ll spare you the obvious additional pun. Instead I’ll follow that line of thought: two days ago the temperature here in Sweden dropped considerably…and suddenly. As I decided to walk home from work at 7-8 PM I was prepared for the temperature we’ve so far had this “winter” - around freezing at worst, and more often than not a few degrees plus. Celsius that is. We may be close to the polar circle, but we have this nice thing called the Gulf Stream just metaphorically outside our metaphoric window to heat things up. Still, the so-called winter has been extremely hot and this sudden drop to -10 degrees took me by complete surprise. I had forgotten how it feels to take a long brisk walk but still not get warm; my fingers were like flesh-covered pieces of bone only mildly heated by the circulatory system and overall body heat. …Oh crap, my similies suck.
That’s another part of the coolness, but I think it’s time I got to the point and mentioned the real thing I had in mind. A few years ago I realized that my literary explorations in youth curiously had omitted Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. I bought it, read it, and liked it. And subsequently forgot about it. Until a week ago or two when I ordered books from the Sci-Fi Bookstore up in Stockholm. “Hey. What’s this? Rama II? The Garden of Rama? Crap, I’ve forgotten to read the sequels!” As I was reading Rama II I came upon something very cool: one of the characters in the book quoted a famous saying.
This is where one of my readers objects: “What’s so cool about that? Dude, didn’t you note that Richard’s small robots quote Shakespeare all the time. Quoting things is not unusual in that book.”
Ah yes, but at first I didn’t recognize from where I knew this quote. I had to pause and think about it a few seconds. The original quote is: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.” And guess who wrote it. Of course it was Mr. Clarke himself.
I really started at that. My esteem for Clarke just rose a bit further: in his book he assumes that characters two hundred years in the future will be aware of his quote. That’s cool by itself. And with all probability true. But the fact that he had made a masterful stroke at combining the invented world with the real world was also cool; by making his character discuss the saying he brings an immense sense of life to the novel. It’s not a parallel future - it’s our future. We use that saying now, and it’s such a profound statement that we can imagine that future people will hold it as truth as well. It all fits in. And it also corrects a major pet peeve of mine: when movies, books or other media explains too much. Take the example of a vampire movie in which no of the characters are previously aware of what a vampire is. What the hell? Who doesn’t know what a vampire is? Sure, the writers might feel the need to introduce the concept somehow…but doing it like this they break the illusion that things are happening in the world we live in. Clarke correctly assumes that the current world knows of his saying, and extrapolates that future generations will know it as well since it’s a good quote. That’s thinking immersively.
Granted, I don’t know who exactly wrote that bit. It could very well be his co-author, as an inside joke. The idea still holds, though.
Now, onto effects of the media. As I read Rama II I could recall some rumours that Clarke was a paedophile. “Oh well,” I thought, “he writes well anyway.” Then I decided to look him up on Wikipedia - and was surprised to see that he was completely cleared of the rumours. But did I recall that? Of course not. Media had probably fed me all the sensational news about the famous writer’s paedophilic tendencies, but forgotten to make a big thing out of the fact that it turned out to be (if one can trust that) untrue. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, I find it highly fascinating that I’ve thought the rumour to be true for all these years. All because media reported it long ago.
Sometimes my own susceptibility surprises me. And I view myself as relatively critical; imagine what Mr. Joe Regular thinks. (Of course, he probably doesn’t know who Clarke is. But you know what I mean.)
As a final interesting tidbit, the temperature drop here in Sweden completely took me by surprise. I wonder if media informed about it beforehand - I haven’t watched the news for a week or more, so if they did I completely missed it. I wonder if my disinterest with media reports is a result of my steadily growing cynism regarding what they report. I wonder if I should stop wondering so much.
These recent weeks I’ve become interested in economy for some reason. After I saw A Beautiful Mind I became intrigued with John Nash and his supposed (according to the filmatization) critique against Adam Smith; but this vague and dormant fascination with economics has suddenly flared up. As a technical person I’ve always held economists in a slight contempt (just as they with all certainity feel the same about me) because I figured that the area of economics isn’t scientific enough. Wow, how’s that for vague? Since I haven’t studied economics I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on exactly what’s lacking, but I’ve assumed that they just borrow a little from statistics, a little from social sciences, a little from psychology and put it all together into something I view as sort of pseudo-scientific.
I won’t say that my recent delve into this area has left me convinced that this isn’t the case, but at least now I feel that economics is full of brilliant ideas and brilliant people. Not in the least, aforementioned Adam Smith himself. Imagine this absent-minded Scottish scholar walking around muttering to himself; liked by all, studious and thorough, producing theories that - basically - hit the spot over 300 years ago and still hold up rather well today. I have a very warped sense of what’s cool, but Mr. Smith is definitely what I would call cool. Total icebox.
However, one thing struck me about his comments about value and price. First of all, I’d better paraphrase (with the risk of misinterpreting or omitting something important) the argument:
An observation: things don’t cost what they are worth. It’s a common complaint; athletes earn too much, teachers earn too little, and so on. Likewise, the same could be said for objects. In Adam Smith’s time diamonds had no practical use in the industry, so their only redeeming quality was that they were pretty - they were essentially worthless. On the other hand, water is immensely valuable; without it you’ll die. Now, that’s pretty freakin’ valuable.
So, what we have is something that’s enormously valuable - water - that doesn’t cost anything at all, while diamonds which have no practical worth at all cost a mint. The usefulness, or value of an object is not reflected by its price; the price is a separate thing that is governed by supply and demand rather than value. Water is commonly available, but diamonds are rare.
(I know that worth and value aren’t really synonymous, but please consider them so for the span of this blog post. My vocabulary wanders.)
Professor Timothy Taylor quotes the old saying that a cynic is a person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing, but changes it to be about economists instead. The argument is that economics deals with objective things like supply and demand and prices, but cannot judge values since they are incredibly hard to quantify due to their subjectivity.
When I heard this I instinctively felt like objecting. Okay. I admit that value is nigh on impossible to determine. You can’t set a numerical value on water’s worth. It would be an exercise in futility. Here’s a subjective list for me, for example:
- Water: 1 GWth
- Diamond: 134 Wth
- Nintendo Wii: 1024 Wth
- 100 Mbit Internet connection: 2 TWth
The units are of course Worth (Wth), MegaWorth and GigaWorth. If you receive the urge to comment that a diamond could get you many Wiis and thus should be worth more, remember that that’s the price you’re talking about now - not the worth of the object itself. And yes, the list is a joke in case you’re wondering.
But despite the intangibility of value, you can’t omit it completely from the calculations and pretend that you’ve made a functional model of supply and demand without it; it’s like approximating a function of [insert a natural phenomenon] and pretend that you have the whole story. Sure, you can reach results; and sure, this might be the practical way of approaching it all. But to my layman mind it seems like value is a bigger piece of the puzzle than the lecture pretends that it is. If you have something that’s slightly less plentiful than another item, but you think that its value is greater than the other, you’re bound to purchase it despite supply and demand models.
What we have here is a status quo of sorts. Value is needed for complete calculations, but it cannot be quantified. Are the economists correct in skipping this parameter then? Approximations might work anyway. I say nay! (Only because I like the word nay.)
I may roll over like a dog most of the time, but not this time. Why not try to quantify value? Here’s a spontaneous thought: Maslow has presented a hierarchy of needs in which needs have various levels of importance. First come the physiological needs such as breathing and eating, and then comes safety needs and so on. I may be grasping at straws here, but it seems to me that water could easily be fitted into the physiological need, while diamonds fit into the aesthetic needs far later. Hey, what do we have then? We have quantified the values of water and diamonds, respectively. Sure, there are no MegaWorth values attached to the items, but we have a relative value against each other. That ought to suffice to include value into some calculations.
One obvious objection to this is subjectivity. For a kid a Nintendo Wii will be very useful and valuable for recreation, while an elderly gentleman might view it as a piece of junk that gets placed on the shelf next to the DVD and the transmogrifier, never to be used. But couldn’t we apply some statistics here? No, I’m not being hypocritical - I’m just suggesting that we make the approximations as late as possible, and don’t hide important variables.
But hey, considering the brilliant people everywhere this must have been considered and discarded already. Or possibly, it comes into play in more advanced economics - I’m just on Economy 001, also known as bullshit and spare time speculation.
Every once in a while I receive the urge to draw something silly; I could show you some questionable comics I drew years and years ago, but let’s just say that I’d better leave those sleeping dogs lie. My humour is not only questionable - it’s outright offensive to most people. As an example, while doing my military service I drew a comic that featured an infamous German dictator and his rather infamous doctor accomplice. I found it hilarious to display them as a comic due along the lines of Laurel and Hardy. I guess the military leadership I saw in real life inspired me.
My debatable humour is not my only obstacle: I also suck at drawing. More specifically, at drawing original things. I can do decent sketches based on others’ works, but I can’t make an original composition very well. This is not a good thing for someone aspiring to produce comics.
While all of this might or might not be interesting, where is it all leading? I drew an inane comic just now, and just for laughs I thought I’d put it up here. After all, what’s a blog for if not to be filled with content of dubious quality? Before I do that I’ll show you some other comics o’ mine. Have you heard of Flakey? He was an impressive early robot constructed by SRI, and in an AI class back in 2000 we got to see a video clip showing off his capabilities. Most impressive was the scene where he accepted a vocal command and then performed the task admirably. The task was “Bring Lesley a bagle.” This is crucial for understanding many of the comics below.
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey1.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey2.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey3.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey4.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey5.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey6.jpg
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/Flakey7.jpg
I love Flakey5, personally. But I guess I’m just a tad biased in this matter.
Now, onto the topic of my recent comic. Compared to the ones above, it sucks. Sorry, there’s just no getting around it: Flakey was poorly drawn but the jokes were topical, the cast was specified before I started drawing, and the humour was accessible (if you can ever say that computer science humour is accessible). There was a plan behind it all. With this latter comic I just started drawing a bit, without any idea what to produce. I had read a bit about Chiaroscuro paintings and thought that the technique was interesting, so I went with a completely black background. Some experimenting to and fro resulted in this:
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/comics/saturday_afternoon.jpg
Note how dull the comic is; note how the text and images don’t really match; note my poor use of the space; note how the hockey hair magically disappeared in the second and third “frames”; note how my experiment with leaving the eyes see-through only results in the appearance of spectacles; note how I’m mixing obsessive symmetrical thinking with chaotic assymetry; note how I fail at drawing convincing emotion.
So what is it that I’m saying? That I’ll give up drawing strange comics? Of course not. But the next time I pick up the drawing pad I’ll have a plan beforehand: the art style needs to be thought over, the cast needs to be defined, and the jokes need to emerge before I start scribbling random things.
Regardless of artistic deficiencies, I think that I am able to create a decent comic - it just requires a bit more work if the raw talent is missing. John Stuart Mill wrote marvellous philosophical and economical pieces, but he always claimed that he was nothing special. Anyone could do what he did if they had the same background and upbringing, he claimed. I don’t agree fully, but hard work can definitely make up for many shortcomings; genius isn’t always a trait one is born with - I believe that it can be aquired.
Well. Except for me, when it comes to comics. I’ll settle for someday possibly becoming competent.
I saw this blog post with text analyses of various articles by different authors - very fascinating stuff with lots of cool linguistic statistics. However, I felt that the pieces compared were…a bit similar. It makes sense to compare oneself with one’s peers; it’s what we all do instinctively and intuitively. Still, I wanted to get a broader spectrum of comparisons, so I got statistics on a blog entry of my own, a DDJ article, two CNN texts and one linguistic article. Oh yeah. Let’s bring on the stats. For completeness’ sake I’ll include the four examples from the original blog as well.
First: this is the text statistics tool; go analyze some other articles if you want to - it’s great fun!
Anyway, here are the results:
Wi-Fi Protected Setup: this is my latest blog post, and deals with a new Wi-Fi configuration standard. Technical mumbo jumbo with WLAN jargon and so on.
Total Word Count: 913
Total Unique Words: 391
Number of Sentences: 48
Average Words per Sentence: 19.04
Hard Words: 71 (7.78%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 42.83% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 10.72 (what’s this?)
Agile Testing Strategies: more technical mumbo jumbo, but this time from DDJ.
Total Word Count: 1513
Total Unique Words: 539
Number of Sentences: 83
Average Words per Sentence: 18.24
Hard Words: 154 (10.18%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 35.62% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 11.36 (what’s this?)
Doctor denies saying that Castro in serious condition: the first CNN article on their page.
Total Word Count: 304
Total Unique Words: 148
Number of Sentences: 19
Average Words per Sentence: 16.04
Hard Words: 27 (8.88%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 48.68% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 9.95 (what’s this?)
Another CNN article; I took another one because of the low Fog Index on the first one. I wanted to have more data to be sure.
Total Word Count: 707
Total Unique Words: 312
Number of Sentences: 37
Average Words per Sentence: 19.14
Hard Words: 54 (7.64%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 44.13% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 10.70 (what’s this?)
Finally, a linguistic arcticle as well, for comparison.
Total Word Count: 649
Total Unique Words: 307
Number of Sentences: 22
Average Words per Sentence: 29.54
Hard Words: 62 (9.55%) (what’s this?)
Lexical Density: 47.30% (what’s this?)
Fog Index: 15.62 (what’s this?)
And here are the results of the four different articles analyzed in the original post:
raph:
Total Word Count: 1575
Total Unique Words: 637
Number of Sentences: 71
Average Words per Sentence: 22.24
Hard Words: 122 (7.75%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 40.44% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 11.97 (what€™s this?)
tycho:
Total Word Count: 657
Total Unique Words: 360
Number of Sentences: 34
Average Words per Sentence: 19.34
Hard Words: 51 (7.76%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 54.79% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 10.83 (what€™s this?)
m3mnoch:
Total Word Count: 983
Total Unique Words: 409
Number of Sentences: 117
Average Words per Sentence: 8.43
Hard Words: 82 (8.34%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 41.61% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 6.70 (what€™s this?)
peckham:
Total Word Count: 737
Total Unique Words: 399
Number of Sentences: 26
Average Words per Sentence: 28.34
Hard Words: 66 (8.96%) (what€™s this?)
Lexical Density: 54.14% (what€™s this?)
Fog Index: 14.92 (what€™s this?)
Now, I’m sure you’re speculating what all these terms mean. I sure did at least. And likewise did m3mnoch in the original blog entry. So here’s a link to a definition of lexical density, and here’s a link that explains the term Fog Index. (Oh, I’m such an anal bastard… Directly after I wrote that I felt like correcting myself. “No, the link does not explain the term at all - it just points to a webpage that explains the term.” In my own particular idiom I’ll leave my mistake here for all the world to see.)
Essentially, the lexical index shows how varied your text is, and the Fog Index is the hypothetical reading level (measured in years of required education) that the reader has to be at in order to understand the text.
For reference, the New York Times has an average Fog Index of 11-12, Time magazine about 11. Typically, technical documentation has a Fog Index between 10 and 15, and professional prose almost never exceeds 18.
Looking at the results above, I note a few things:
- The percentage of unique words in an article varies quite a bit, but it rarely deviates extremely. Depending on what your definition of extreme is, of course. I won’t try to make any more comments on this since the sample set isn’t big enough (and the articles aren’t long enough) to say anything conclusive.
- The average words per sentence also differs by quite a bit; for example, the linguistic article and peckham’s piece both have long sentences at close to 30 words per sentence, while one author had the average length of 8 words per sentence. The most common length seems to be around 19 though. This is probably just a choice of writing style, but I think it’s an indication that ~20 seems to be about average for common people while ~30 and above points at either a deeper understanding of the language (which leads to more complex sentences), a more complicated text (which demands more complexity)…or pretentiousness.
- The percentage of hard words is high in the DDJ article and in the linguistic article, but remains within the span 7% - 9% in the other ones. A few - such as the last results above - have closer to 9%. I will hazard a guess that the amount of hard words is closely linked with the author’s vocabulary and the jargon of the genre; however, it’s impossible to say for sure since an article deals with a specific topic. If your article discusses an anthology, you will repeat the word a few times. (Of course, this also applies to the amount of unique words in a text.)
- Then we have the lexical density and the Fog Index. First of all, they are not linked at all. I would really have suspected that a more varied text would also feature a higher Fog Index, but that - and the opposite - is apparently not the case. Again, there’s too little data to say anything for sure, but I’ll point out the high Fog Index on the linguistic article and the last blog post.
What I wanted to see was a clear difference between technical writing, news articles and linguistic articles. However, it’s really not that obvious: nothing seems to be totally out of place, and judging from the definitions, the Fog Index is fairly normal in all texts. Normal, but there is still a bias toward complexity in a few cases - the linguistic text and peckham’s blog entry. I have to admit that I haven’t looked at that one yet; maybe it will turn out to be a brilliant review of Ulysses or something. Either way, if I must draw any conclusion I think that the conformity in the articles arrives from necessity; this level of writing is essentially what’s required to not appear too retarded but still appeal to the general public.
I’m pretty pleased with my results: they’re not that bad for a non-native English speaker. Thank Bob that the tool doesn’t measure how well-written a text is, as well.
Yesterday, Wi-Fi Alliance presented something called Wi-Fi Protected Setup. A brief summary can be found at DDJ as well. I’ll make an even briefer summary:
Setting up a wireless network isn’t trivial; there are many terms circulating: WEP, WPA, WPA2, PSK, EAP, EAPOL, WLAN, WAN, SSID, BSSID and so on. Requiring a home user to be aware of what an SSID is really isn’t that necessary, and neither is requiring him to know how to configure both his access point and WLAN clients to use WPA-PSK (or something similar). That’s where Wi-Fi Protected Setup comes into play: it’s a standard for simple PIN-code based configuration of WLAN clients. Here are some slides from Wi-Fi Alliance that sum it up neatly.
The idea is that a user plugs in his client card, installs the software, and - poof - up pops a window that asks him to enter his PIN code. Then the AP and the client will negotiate everything between themselves automagically. There’s also an alternative method using a button instead: the user presses a button on both AP and client in order to start this configuration. As far as I can see, that method uses the principle that if the user has physical access to the AP and the client, he is authorized to configure them both. Sounds excellent for home use, albiet a trifle unsecure. Not that I mind.
I’m all for simplification. In fact, I see no reason to require a PIN code even - the physical method should suffice for home users. That’s where my first doubt enters: Wi-Fi Protected Setup requires all clients (or Registrars rather) to support PIN setup…and the button method is optional. I don’t see the reason for that. Printers and USB hard drives would work excellently with button setup - it just becomes bothersome to require PIN setup for devices with no good access to user input. Oh, but they’ve thought about that: the PIN authorization procedure can also be performed by logging onto the AP’s graphical user interface.
What?
Okay, I admit that I haven’t read up much about this topic, but that seems intuitively to be unintuitive. The idea is to not require bothersome configurations or access to the AP’s GUI; this method of PIN authorization sounds like a last-minute addition. “Oh right. Crap. If all Registrars have to use PIN setup but USB devices have no input device, I guess it must be up to the AP to do this part of the task. Let’s not remove the PIN setup requirement - that would be too easy.”
To be a complete nitpicker, I also skimmed through the white paper for Wi-Fi Protected Setup to see if I could find some inconsistencies with the information I’ve seen so far. Search and ye shall look! No, I mean find. If you look at page 9 on the slides, you’ll note the following text:
WPA or WPA2 security is enabled, and the passphrase can be auto-generated or configured by the user
Neato. But oh-oh-oh, page 9 of the white paper mentions the following:
Use of a random PSK enchances security by eliminating use of pass phrases that could be predictable. [...] the credentials exchange process requires little user intervention after the initial setup action [...] is completed, because the network name and PSK are issued.
This shows a few things:
- The second quote could be interpreted to mean that user-specified passphrases are still possible. I would not interpret it like that, though, due to the “issued” part.
- The slides might have been written much earlier than the final paper, and feature some old ideas that were thrown out.
- Either way, it still leaves some confusion regarding the use of PSKs, IMNSHO.
- I may be one of the few people who actually note the different spelling of “passphrase” and “pass phrase” in the two writings (and is slightly irritated at the lack of consistency). I’m instantly reminded of an English lecture I had where the teacher asked us what the correct spelling of rain-forest is. He was very smug when he produced three different dictionaries and three different official spellings: rainforest, rain-forest and rain forest. His point was that there are often many “correct” ways; just make sure you’re consistent.
- I need to lay off the black tea - I’m ranting about irrelevant inconsistencies.
Wi-Fi Protected Setup will be expanded in the future to include NFC and USB setup as well. Near-Field Configuration (I think that’s what it stands for) is based on simply moving the client close to the AP in order to transfer the authorization credentials, and USB setup means that the client device is physically connected to the AP (through - oh, I don’t know - maybe USB) to transfer said credentials. Then the clients automatically authenticates with the AP. Interestingly enough, a colleague mentioned that the NFC method was the first version suggested when Wi-Fi Protected Setup was discussed in Wi-Fi Alliance; I guess they chose to focus on “normal” clients first instead of pursuing that route.
All in all, I like the way things are going. Simplification is good; a behaviour that simulates automatic configuration like Bluetooth is just fine with me; less configuration and better security (since users now won’t leave their networks unprotected) is good. ‘S all good.
I like to have instant access to articles and opinions and cool stuff; that’s why I have many collection sites among my bookmarks. One can be seen in the link to the right: Qatfish, a great resource for independent game developer blogs. For more AAA-directed game development news, Gamasutra is awesome as well. Slashdot is also nice - because of the varied articles posted there; not because of the strange mix of rabid, infantile and thought-provoking comments. When it comes to cool stuff and humour I mostly visit Swedish sites like Buzz and Ollo.net. But I’m a regular reader of Something Awful as well. All in all, I’m very fond of sites that collect large masses of information/pictures/articles/opinions/etc and supply some form of user-defined ranking of the material. I don’t agree with the decision most of the time, but it’s still nice to get a quick-and-dirty summary of what others have found interesting. (I know that Ollo.net and Slashdot and Gamasutra technically don’t have a ranking system, but they’re pretty strict about what goes up there so it works anyway. And Something Awful doesn’t even have that, but it’s still full of great stuff amidst the crap.)
As a contrast to the sites with plethora (you know, I even used the word plethora in my CS thesis; there’s no end to my pretentiousness) of information from various people, I also like productive people who put their stuff online. Stuart Campbell has a great site called World of Stuart, for example. (Go read it now! His humour is brilliant. Read the short about page there if you don’t know who Mr. Campbell is.) Then there are people like Chad Austin who have awesome projects and interesting thoughts as well.
This is starting to sound like a praise post for the Internet. “Oh look, all these wonderful things to read supplied by all these wonderful people! I think I’ll go kiss the Internet’s ass a bit more!” There’s a downside to all of this as well: if you can’t decide what information is valid and which isn’t (and under what circumstances!), you’re going to get pretty screwed. I know that everyone is aware of this, but I saw something that really made me chuckle and made me want to reiterate this warning. It’s a very graphic example from the new article collection site devbump, aimed at supplying game developers with (I quote) cool game development stuff:
The image screws up the display… Dammit. So here’s a link instead:
http://www.cynicalstuff.com/images/misc/in-game-ads.jpg
I think T. S. Eliot was one of the modernist writers/philosophers who claimed that there are no absolutes - that for every statement you could always find a viewpoint from which a statement is true. That idea has probably never held as much truth as right now, in our age of rampantly spreading information and opinions.
During lunchtime yesterday I expressed my disgust at some people’s behaviour - it seemed like they were more interested in not getting blamed, rather than ensuring that the end result was a success. I’m the first to admit that I’m (regrettably) not always productive and that I often let personal interests guide myself, but I try to prioritize: the most important thing is to Get the Stuff Done(TM) regardless of who receives the most credit. Or rather: regardless of who receives the less amount of critique. I thought about specifying negative critique, but I think I’ll leave it like that. Of course I hate making errors, but everyone makes them. Seriously. You do too. So it’s not a big thing in the long run.
At this point I have three separate things that I’d like to rant about, and in an attempt to break off from the normal discourse in blogs I’ll sum them up here:
- The original topic: what happened after I had expressed said disgust? Where was I going with that?
- Making mistakes is human, but it’s not really like me to make an understanding and helpful comment like that without attempting to apply a twist. Of course I have something else to add.
- This style of writing: I could easily have written a normal monologue where I slowly shifted between these topics, but instead I chose to make the reader aware of my plans. Why?
For fun (no, that’s not the answer to why; this sentence continues) I’ll number the paragraphs below so that you can skip to your desired topic at a quick glance. Just like these go-to-page-or-chapter-depending-on-what-kind adventure books we all read as toddlers!
1. The response I received to my disgust was a thought-provoking question: “Don’t you think that your point of view is pretty Swedish?” Possibly; and I hadn’t considered that. Many different nationalities were involved with the issue I was discussing - Swedes, French, Dutch, Arabs (sorry - I don’t know the term for people from UAE) and so on - and it just might be the case that I was too critical since my values and expectations are wildly different.
2. To be human is to err. I guess I want to be non-human then. Unhuman. De-humanized. You get the point. I hate making mistakes; I’m getting better at ignoring them, but I still feel slightly panicky when I think of mistakes I made earlier in life. As an extreme example: I nagged my mom into buying me a plastic toy when I was six years old, and when I got home I realized how infantile my nagging had been - the toy wasn’t important enough and didn’t give me pleasure enough to warrant my annoying my mom. The shame of that realization still burns. It’s one thing to say that everyone should own up to their mistakes, but making them - and admitting to it - can be very painful.
3. For fun.
4. Where the hell did 4 come from? Let’s just say that it’s vaguely relevant to point 1 above. I read an article called The Essential Unified Process: New Life for the Unified Process today, and I felt…uninspired by it. Maybe cynical, even. Elaborate processes - even ones that try to simplify and be agile - feel so pointless: it’s just an attempt to rationalize something too large - too complex. Consider point 1 above: processes are often conceived by people of one nationality…and then they’re adopted (and adapted, thankfully) by people of other nationalities. But people have different sets of values. Using a single management process for everyone is like trying to [insert vulgar verb phrase] with [insert suitably humorous noun phrase].
5. I really didn’t want to make yet another numbered point, but symmetry requires it since I felt like making a new paragraph here. After my rant in 4 I guess I ought to conclude that the article was pretty interesting after all. Agility and the Unified Process is a big step forward from stagnant older processes, and if the EUP indeed moves toward being as flexible and extensible as the article describes, it sounds like yet another step in the right direction. Processes can never be perfect due to individual variations, but I guess that they can be better or worse tools for making educated approximations. I’m still not a happy cynic, though. I work differently from my co-workers. Swedes work differently from Finns. Making things agile or test-driven or xtreme or [insert new buzzword] is definitely no solution to the variations.
6. I think I need to cook some dinner before I get even grumpier.
245. It’s pitch black. You were eaten by grue. Go to section 1.
