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Nineteen Eighty-Four (henceforth “1984”) is one of those books that seems to follow you around, like Alice in Wonderland. By that I mean that references to it keep cropping up around you, but more than that, it’s like the references to these works somehow encode some information which underlies some central truth to the universe. Follow the white rabbit, as Morpheus would say. In fact it was at the intersection of these two great threads that I resolved to read 1984. I was visiting a very dear friend, who I saw had started reading this book, which piqued my interest in it again, but at some point in my conversation with her, she mentioned one of her favourite books, Alice in Wonderland of course, and I said something like, “Yes, it’s very important for [imaginative artists] like you to read that book.” (or words to that effect) and then said “I wonder if there is an equivalent that [responsible software engineers] like me should read?” Naturally, her reply was 1984.

The short answer is “no”, in case you are happy to just take my word for it and don’t have time to read my justification for this view. A slightly longer answer would be “Hotwire version 0,710 would be the best piece of software ever (until the next best piece of software ever comes out) if a finite number of bugs were fixed and a finite number of relatively simple features were added.” Many of the bugs and features missing are related to the usability of the user interface, which is to some extent a matter of taste, but there are usability improvements that can be made based on certain widely accepted metrics. Below, then, I give a mixture of a review, an infestation(?) of bug reports, and a design concept.

Just when you start to get surprised at some of the complicated pages that IE7 can render flawlessly, you bump into another almost trivial page which the browser laughably fails on. I think I need to add some more tags for categorising my blog posts, as I don’t want to spend longer than necessary answering the question “Is this IE bug the same as one I’ve already reported?” It appears this one is new, though, so I will write it up. I should say that the bug does not affect Firefox, and I only found it after noticing that IE7 did not have the styling I expected for a piece of popular third party code. Admittedly I can’t state exactly how popular the code is, but it was at least of significant enough size that I did not want to consider maintaining a fork. The good news is I managed to work around the bug in this case with a one line fix, but that is largely to do with the nature of the page, not by finding a universal solution.

Freedom is its own reward, but it shouldn’t be surprising that choosing Freedom leads to many unexpected positive side-effects. For instance, Miro is designed to make online video more democratic, allowing anyone to become a publisher and anyone to subscribe to any publisher, without central control, but by embracing this model, users of Miro, if they are like me, find that they have access to refreshing new creative works, that change how they view media. It’s like the jump from TV to PVR, and the jump from closed source to “open source” (or at least shareware) all in one go. That is why suddenly going without it because of an upgrade to a separate program (especially after paying for a greater download cap from your ISP) can feel jarring. If you have found that Miro crashes at the end of each video (or just errors tens of times at startup) then my findings might be relevant to you.

2007-12 for me is “Python appreciation month”. Going a whole month being appreciative of it wasn’t so difficult, and was the least I could do after realising how much I had under-estimated a program written in it, particularly as that program is going a long way towards fixing the very problems with the console that I’ve been was bemoaning. I suppose this post belongs with the last one, and I could be writing about MySQL or a sed joke instead, but it is New Year’s eve, so I’ll have to hope that the blogosphere appreciates the quality if not the quantity of these posts, while I go off to a party.

I recently achieved a long-standing goal, and in doing so, possibly measured the progress of Linux on the desktop. The goal was to make a music notation editing package, of the same standard as Sibelius (or greater) and compatible with it, available on Linux to a non-technical user. For several years now the user has had access to a PC running Ubuntu Linux, which meant that the operating system itself was not standing in the way, but there were no packages for Linux which offered all the features that Sibelius had and that were used by a musical professional. With the (admittedly hardware-related) failure of their Windows ME computer causing them to resort to a pencil and paper, I thought the least I could do was to try again to make Sibelius work under Wine.

We know that sometimes the only winning move is not to play, and that in a debate it is easy to get brought down to the level of your opponent in a desire to protect your wounded pride. Even in much milder cases, the obvious response is not the right one, and we can find ourselves constructing elaborate rebuttals in order to overcome the most basic of arguments put forwards by our interlocutor. If someone is acting ignorantly, we can think that we have to counter this with ever greater degrees of sophistication. It is with great relief, therefore, that I have found myself able to apply a growing knowledge of logical fallacies to debates I have with people. I now find that where I would once have got bogged down trying to attack some indefensible point, I can now counter it with just a couple of words — that is, the name of the fallacy which they are presenting.

A new month nearly upon us, and the only thing I can think to blog is about the difficulty I had configuring the logging in piece of in-house software recently. The software was written in Java, and used the very configurable log4j library for logging. In an almost textbook use case of the library, I was tasked with converting the software from logging to stdout, to logging to a file which would be more permanent. There are, of course, several things to consider when logging to file, not least security, but another major concern was the size of the log file created. These are not new concerns however, and I decided to make use of the standard syslog facility used in conjunction with the logrotate program, both of which were available on the machine in question.

Of course, log4j supported outputting to syslog, which meant that with a simple configuration change based on any good example on the Web, I could get syslog logging instead of (or as well as) stdout logging. I could even exploit syslog’s network-transparency to log to another host, but I didn’t need that. In theory everything was now ready to go, but when I restarted the Java program, the problems started.

Three events happening at once that stopped me using the computer (and thus blogging) should give me a chance to take stock of my situation. I realised what a pressure it is to get two blog posts done in a month, but also what a rewarding activity it is and one I look forward to. It made me realise how lucky I am to have a computer and the Internet at all, although the number of people who have one or both is increasing. Finally, of course, it made me wonder how vulnerable I am to single or multiple failures in my hardware and connection (significantly mitigated by having a mobile phone with Internet access).

The three events were

1. A permanent hardware failure
2. An unexplained Internet connection outage
3. The start of my holiday (away from my computer).

Admittedly the last of these was not unexpected, but the fact that the first two happened at the same time as the third, turned an otherwise welcome occasion into a contributory factor. I’ll spoil the ending and tell you I am writing this from my (fixed) computer using the (fixed) Internet connection, but how did I deal with this situation? I’ll tell you…

I’m glad to find that ideas keep coming for blog posts, even if that means my ongoing projects and list of possible future posts are languishing. It’s surprising, also, how much having a social life can interfere with one’s regular blogging patterns. Fortunately I have come to my senses and stopped spending time with interesting people, thus I have an opportunity to place more of my supposed wisdom on the Web for prosperity. Don’t think I’m so self-absorbed that I’d use this post to chat about what I did on my weekend though. My intention is to talk about something that may be useful to people, especially people who are paranoid about becoming victims of fraud (and possibly also useful for people attempting to carry out fraud, albeit with a high chance of detection).

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