Incoherent Ranting...

So I've been re-acquainting myself with The Daily WTF. Ah, classic anecdotes of the finest Darwin-esque behavior as exhibited by self-proclaimed "software developers". Personally, I've devoured an uncountable number of tomes about the art in software development; likewise with respect to the craft within the same. I've disassociated myself from code and seen systems from a God's-eye view..

Uh, I guess they call doing stuff like disassociating oneself from implementation details "abstraction", although I never quite understood the applicability of the word. To me, abstract == oil-on-canvas "paintings" produced by drunken, self-proclaimed "arteests" in a fit of psychological self-molestation; not some shrunken-head, metaphorical representation of some intangible thing consisting of many smaller parts, in turn which consist of more, ever-smaller (yet in some deranged sense, 'logically related') parts, nested deeper and deeper, eventually reaching a scale analogous to the quarks of quantum psychics, ad infinitum...

...the complexity of which, in many cases, is enough to turn even the most salted codemonkey into a drooling, babbling fool with a nice heaping tub of tapioca pudding between the ears.

Now, as to how these sorts of intellectual land-mines ever make their way out of the bedroom/basement of some prepubescent/post-pubescent adolescent... okay, enough of that. You want it straight? It fucking amazes me that some of the utter turds passed off as software systems that I've had the misfortune to encounter have ever seen the light of day, much less the crack of the asshole that spawned them.

What?

An example? You want a fucking example?! Ugh.

Fine, then; pick a layer, any layer..

The Data Layer

• Loosely typed database schemas having predominantlyimplicit relationships, manipulated via an untyped scripting language (vis a vis VBScript!).

The "Business Logic" Layer

• Business logic is handled by the UI (except what the stuff we accidentally coded into the database [the details of which I don't remember in the slightest]), so I guess we don't technically have a "logic layer", per se...

The "User Interface"

• Wtf? Just ask anybody who's had to write a user-input validation library from the ground up... you can BDUF until you're blue in the face, and the users will always find a way to fuck it up!!
  

By the way, were you aware that there are only two industries on the planet that refer to the consumers of their wares as "users"? Yep. Wanna know which industries? Well, one is pretty easy...

1. Computers, and
2. Hard drugs.
   

Just something to ponder...

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot:

</GRIPE>

Waking Dream

A cat's paw on glass?

Curiousity and Reflection;
face to face, yet alone;
examining Understanding.

Yet the Reflection did ripple,
therefore Understanding flees;
so Curiousity wanders outside.

           > spring, 2006 <

I actually wrote this several months ago, but I just ran across the scrap of paper in one of my pants' pockets. It's also been revised and re-revised several times; hopefully it turned out better than the original verse... to critique my own art, it had started out as quite a "virtual skidmark of linguistic diarrhea", and I feel now that it has achieved a more noble status of "verbal cow patty in the final stage of digital decomposition".

I hope it leaves it's mark on your mind (no pun intended).

22 years later...

"Formerly sealed documents from a lawsuit against AT&T for allegedly helping the National Security Agency spy on Americans' communications without a warrant were released in redacted form Thursday, and confirm the legitimacy of documents published earlier by Wired News..."

I don't know about anyone else, but the fact that one of the oldest and largest telecommunications companies in the world has the ability to directly tap supposedly "private" conversations (be they between people or computers) is downright fucking SCARY.

Which leads me to explaining the title of this post... 22 years ago, it was 1984. Allow me to quote the aforehyperlinked (is that a word?) page here (emphasis is mine):

"In the novel 1984, George Orwell depicts a dystopia with his use of a futuristic setting while incorporating the fear of technology. A dystopia is a society where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives. In a dystopia, social and/or technological trends have contributed to a corrupted or degraded state of deprivation and oppression. Governmental tyranny and an exploitation of the people are also prominent in a dystopia."

Hmm, sounds familiar... if you read the article, it appears that NSA has finally said "fuck civil liberties - we're The Government; we can do whatever we like and you can't do shit about it cuz it's all in the name of national security."

Stupid! I'd bet $100 right now that the next major "national security" incident turns out to be the product of some goverment-hired or government-contracted employee who nobody knew was actually working undercover for Fred's Fearless Freedom Fighting Force who runs out the door and down the street with some laptop containing the name, address, social security number, blood type, and penis/breast size of every legitimate American in the country.

Suddenly, establishing tighter security around the Mexican border doesn't seem like such a bad idea... if it weren't for the backlash it caused - what's the fucking point, anyway? We build a fence, they build a tunnel. We set up security cameras, they hop over in the dark. We patrol the border in 4x4's; they learn the patrol routes and sneak through when the gas-guzzling government SUV is a mile and half away.

Unfortunately, that seems to be something our government is never going to learn - even the most innocent-looking, well-behaved feline might still sneak in your room while you're sleeping and eat your pet gerbil - it's the law of nature: survival of the fittest...

I bittersweet irony when the time comes that somebody finally looks up, frowns, and plants a steel-toed boot square in the nuts of Big Brother Bush and Papa Bush for interfering with the lives of hard working citizens (who don't need to start a fucking war to earn a bit of extra cash). But I disgress.

My wife and I are having marital troubles... although if this AT&T/NSA thing turns out to be nothing more than the tip of the iceberg, I imagine there'll be much bigger things to be worrying about... like where to hide when Bush's political tap-dancing earns his a nuclear tomato impacting him right in his big fat head.

Our nation is but rolling, seething mass of ignorance and stupidity... and the part that sucks the most is that 99% of the population is too ignorant and/or stupid to realize and do something about it.

Ah, despondence... thy name is me.

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Postscript:
So was that incoherent enough for ya?!? Huh?!? Was it!??#?!$ Serves you right for reading the blog of a scatterbrained software developer!$!$%!# Ya like that??!??$%! Ya want some more?!$?

Too bad... ;-) Maybe later.

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References:
Wired News: Court Filing Confirms Spy Docs
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71008-0.html?tw=rss.index

Wired News: Whistle-Blower's Evidence, Uncut
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.html

EFF: Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/

CNN.com: Theft of vets' data kept secret for 19 days
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/23/vets.data/

MSNBC.com: Violence against border agents at record pace
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7997408/

3 AM systems

The company I work for relies heavily on a homegrown software system they use to manage thier business. Sounds normal, right? Of course. And ("naturally"), the system has evolved over time from it's inception as a simple, 1,000 line kludge into a multi-million line enterprise infrastructure. Also reasonably normal, right? Of course.

Now the thing that blows my mind is that not only is this normal for the sort of work that goes on behind closed doors (e.g. being a in-house software developer, such as yours truly), but this type of "guided mutation" is also the primary source of revenue for several high-profile, high-dollar software publishers.

What, you want examples? Good grief, how many?!? PeopleSoft, SAP, Great Plains. Even Microscoff and Beezelbill's most successful products were, at one point, disgusting, sloppy, sickly-smelling "leftover surprise" sorts of products, where several bad products are sort of sm00shed together, with a handful of unripe "new" features (usually already present in 99.99% of the competition's offerings) baked into the most unintuitive places, & even a sprinkling of eyecandy (or what they think passes as eyecandy... that stupid paperclip still gives me nightmares), effectively producing, in a nutshell, a half-baked , slightly warm pile of steaming dog shit. And a really really long run-on sentence having also bad grammer to boot, eh. uNF uNF, goddammit.

Show what 12 hours nonstop chasing bugs down a source code alleyway with no flashlight, no map, and no idea what might to jump out and try to scare/suffocate/sodomize you. How would you like to take a patchwork workflow (I oughtn't even mention the fact that it was cobbled togther from many bastardized bits of code), two similar yet logically unrelated (well, conceptually, anyway - the implementation is so fragmented you have to wonder if you're really looking at the right fucking parts) business entities.

Or how about websites written in Classic ASP, that have been reworked and overhauled innumerable times over the course of about five years, and only in the last year and half has the code actually migrated into the bowels of a source control system? Do you have any idea what it's like wading through 500 files trying to figure out which 5% are actually being used, which 5% are defunct or redundant implementations of the same feature, and which one are pure garbage? Uh.. okay, okay, so I'm exaggerating - the garbage is obvious. Files in the production source tree with name like default_1012004_john_broken_test_dammit_wtf_oops.asp. Give me a fucking break!

Or how about the slightly modified copies of scripts lying around (but not under source control!! oh no, can't have that!) that nobody even knows about until after you delete in in error?

Oops.. I just realized..... heh. Okay, I'm tired. And done.



(....Wait a minute... Microsoft still puts products like that on the market......)

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here...

"...for drivel shall spew forth and cauterize thy eyes..."

So I've done it; I've finally set aside my preconcieved notions of how the predominant characteristics of "bloggers" were ultimately a lack of intelligence, perspective, and better things to do with one's own time, and just went ahead and set up a stupid-ass blog for myself.Not that I don't enjoy reading blogs; on the contrary, sometimes there is no better resource than the published opinion of a fellow human being who happens to exist outside the realm of that certain form of manipulation of the public's opinion known as "corporate sponsorship".

I happen to see sifting through all the fucking cruft that is the web as an enormous waste of time - there's just no good way to find what you're looking for, and if you do happen to find something relavent, it's usually so saturated with bullshit (either produced by the consumer or the consume-ee), that it makes me want to break shit for wasting as much time as I did looking for it.

Anyway, why did I bother? I'll tell you why; a very old and very dear friend of mine turned me on to blogging through his blog - Black Rabbit. It didn't seem like much to me, until I read through the entry titled "You start on Monday" - man, that really hit home. At that point, it finally struck me: I don't communicate enough with any of my friends or family - I'm a self-certified workaholic, which is 50% worse than my dad (he's not self-certified).

So I figured (even though underneath, it probably has a lot to do with to my own lack of intelligence, perspective, better things to do, and [most likely] good judgement) that it couldn't be all that bad for me to set up another semi-anonymous text-based fountain of frustration and anguish in the "blogosphere", and maybe someone I know will stumble upon it one day.

So now I have my own platform from which I may spew forth my thoughts, however meaningful or meaningless. Can't hurt, right?

After all, who's really gonna read this drivel, anyway?