Author: shlomi

In preparation for a set of developer interviews I’ve been boning up on the “basics:” testing, objects, algorithms, etc. I approached testing with trepidation, as I (a) know what needs to go into it, and (b) know EXACTLY how little those needs are met in small development environments. And by small, I mean less than about 100 developers and testers.

Now I’m mostly irritated. There’s not a single thing new under the sun (yeah, I should have known that). For example, unit testing: lots of chatter about test harnesses, fake objects, parameter limits, etc. Sigh. Let’s roll back to the black & white days of FORTAN/360 (yes, that’s before FORTRAN 77). COBOL. PL1. I know, not much “objecting” going on there. But program files with sets of functions abounded even then, and functions relying on more primitive ones were more important then, in the world of memory cores and 1Mb “super” hard drives (yes, I know that age) than now, in the bloated reality of needing 4Gb just to make one’s commercial operating system happy to boot.

Here’s the ugly truth. Folks in this decade make up pretty names and “paradigms” that are literal plagarisms of the testing manuals of yore. And by literal I mean entire paragraphs pulled with some names changed. Test cases and corner cases, which are part of or sometimes synonymous with testing procedures from manuals of yore.

The net of all this, to give reason for this missive, is that companies hiring are looking for buzzwords, but what the technical managers need to be doing is listening to the words, not keywords, in describing a person’s experience. Because a rose by any other name still smells sweet.

Full Disclosure: I think an independent Scotland would be WAY cool.

Sane disclosure:

I think an independent Scotland is a _great_ idea. Except for the whole “we’ve been together for centuries and splitting things would be horrible.” As a very liberal Israeli, I’m very much appreciative of the Labor and leftist parties. Didn’t work.

• A Scottish state would reduce England’s power to calm the world. In other words, all the economic, ideological and practical pressure that Great Britain has used to keep things calm will disappear.
• I’m Israeli. While I _love_ and greatly appreciate Scottish history and culture, the disruptive and false Palestinian discourse seems to have a traction in Scotland. As an Israeli-American, I have a problem with that.
• Edinburgh is wonderful and magical. Having to wrestle between Scottish culture and society and an independent country with notes of Scandinavian and “pure” Independent philosophy.

I’m with the “keep Scotland in the UK.” Here’s why:

1. It gives Scots more power on the world stage.
2. It given Scots a greater ability to push the Liberal agenda in Great Britain”
3. I will buy Scottish Whiskey no matter what.
4. Scottish culture and tourism has nothing but gain in keeping an allegiance with Britain.

Good luck, folks!

Shlomi

One of the keystones when I read the New York Times in its staining, non-soy-ink edition, at the tail end of it’s black-and-white “Grey Lady” era was the language. Reporters wrote, editors edited and their bosses vetted articles for publication. “All the News That’s Fit to Print™.” And what was fit to print, in part, was the language of the article. Always in sync/synchronous to/in line with/alike to the current Manuals of Style (AP, Chicago, or internal) and their dictionaries. CBW became ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ RC airplanes became ‘drones,’ even if they were smaller than their decades-older ancestors, using batteries instead of gasoline-powered engines.

The press is already an endangered creature. I’ll be honest: I read the NYT and WP through their paywalls and pay only if the specific article gets my attention. I’m part of the problem: there are so many places where I can get the sensational information from multiple, free sources, and the more it bleeds, the more venues to watch/read/hear about it. After all, the Internet market is about click-throughs, page reads to set ad placement, and SEO analytics to monetize a page to the max.

Also about speed. And speed is queen, now. Who waits for the next morning to get information tweeted twenty hours previous, then blogged and shared through imagur, tumblr, facebook and a zillion other venues? Where’s the value added? Grammar? I think not.

So now we have outlets, like this CBS affiliate in my home town, where spell-checking is left to the computer, and the urgency is in the report, not the readability of the content. Such as, in this case, the content surrounding an Amber Alert. I’ll quote it from here in its entirety, just to point things out:

Amber Alert Suspect In Custody After SWAT Standoff
August 8, 2014 6:18pm
UPDATE: August 9, 12:20 p.m.
Austin Amber Alert suspect Jesse Thomas has been taken into custody, according to Harris County Sheriff’s Office. According to DPS officials, Jesse Thomas, the suspect in an amber alert out of Austin, was reportedly involved in a stand off with police in the Houston area. According to Sgt. John Sampa, troopers located Thomas’ vehicle this morning on the southbound frontage road of Highway 249. The road is blocked at Spring Cypress. Police had the suspect cornered in a parking lot of a Petco store. He says they were actively negotiating with him. Thomas turned the child over to authorities around 9:30 a.m. and was taken into custody after a brief struggle a shot time later. Officials would not say if a weapon was involved.

According to Austin Police Detective J.J. Schmidt, Thomas will be charged with Burglary for kicking the door in, DPS will charge him with Endangering a Child and APD will add several other charges related to kidnapping within the next several days.

9:15 p.m. UPDATE:

Police say Jesse Thomas is Cheyenne Johnson’s biological father, but he was told today that he no longer has parental rights.

He is currently out on bond for the aggravated assault against a peace officer with a deadly weapon. The biological mother is currently incarcerated. And the grandmother had full custody of the child, police say.

Investigators say Thomas went to his mother’s home, where Cheyenne was located. She refused to let him in but he went to the back of the house and kicked the door in, and got the child before fleeing the scene.

He was spotted at 5:15 p.m. at a U-Haul Storage facility, located at 1030 E. 46th St. Officers attempted to make contact, but as he saw them approaching he came at the officers with his vehicle and left the scene at a high right of speed, police say.

A short pursuit ensued, but was terminated due to heavy traffic and his erratic driving pattern — speeds of over 100 mph with the child in the vehicle.

Thomas has a violent history with other felony charges pending right now, police say.

If you see him do not make any contact with him. Call 911 or the homicide tip line at 512-477-3588.

Police say they believe the child is in danger.

EARLIER:
Police have issued an Amber Alert for a missing child last seen Friday afternoon in South Austin with her father — but his parental rights have been relinquished and he’s considered dangerous.

Investigators say two-year-old Cheyenne Johnson was last seen at 1:54 p.m. in the 1800 block of Anita Drive, just west of South Lamar Boulevard and south of Barton Springs Road…

The highlighted errors don’t change the story. I’m sure that Detective (Lt., by the way) JJ Schmidt (one of the best officers ever to be put in front of a microphone or camera) didn’t dictate the text.

The issue here, picayune as you might think, is that getting the basic spelling correct is part of the reporting. It’s a lot easier to trust someone who knows how to spell with at least 7th grade capabilities than someone who relies on “autocorrect” to get the words right. Spelling and punctuation change the meaning. And the reputation of the source (CBS’s KEYE-TV in this case) is on the line.

Getting it right is job #1. Getting it right quickly is a close, but not competing, second. If spelling stops being important, the facts are a close second in losing to ignorance or “fat-fingered” spelling.

In Citizen’s United, the Supreme Court awarded citizenship to corporations. Now, the same majority on the Court ruled that family-held companies, whatever the size, can have a religion.

The golem of the corporation as a person arises, one step at a time, from the nightmares of dystopic fiction into the Koch-fed reality of our purchased Congress.

It’s not just Hobby Lobby. It means that family-held Desseret (aka LDS) companies may apply their religious strictures on womens’ health to their religious doctrine. Scientologists owning business can refuse to pay for mental health care.

Jehova’s Witnesses? No surgery, blood transfusions, or any other invasive procedure for their employees. Charismatic Christian? Excellent: just prayer and the odd rattlesnake for you. Their employees don’t need no stinkin’ “modern” medicine.

This is a boon for insurance companies: the less they cover, the more they rake in. More irony: that’s something that President Obama counted on for insurance company support for the bill in the first place: requiring healthy younger folks to pay into a system to help those less healthy. So now insurance companies get money from the young, encourage smaller, closely held companies to “stand up for their religious principles,” and up the costs for healthcare a smidge because of “all the bureaucracy” with the law and its court-ordered complications. More than one someone is laughing themself into a cerebral hemorrhage — all the way to the bank.

Ironically, church-based hospitals can’t use the narrow Court ruling.

It’s a pity progressive religious such as those worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster can’t discriminate against deists: “No oxygen consumption allowed for our employees who believe in anything other than physics. And pirates. Arrrrrr, matey!”

Dr. Tyson’s latest edition of Cosmos focused on leaded gasoline and a scientist’s unanticipated fight to stop it’s use as a side-effect of his work on cosmology. It’s a quaint, simplistic and, with the animation, almost naive approach to the story (although I’ve never seen an animated short quoting articles from Nature). While the primary important issue was Dr. Patterson‘s “aha!” moment on lead in gasoline, the subtext, as Mother Jones pointed out, was corporate greed.

In the context of many changes we Americans have encountered over the past twenty years, it’s worth revisiting Superman’s credo:

• Truth
• Justice
• The American Way

97% yes, 2% unsure, 1% no.

Truth: Hitler made the ‘big lie’ a key weapon in his propaganda and brainwashing of Germans and the rest of the world. That lesson has been learned well by those in the US who believe that the “truth” is the lie spoken most loudly.

The truth is objective, not subjective. Fact, not opinion. Data, not belief. In the America of 2014, this means… not much. Politicians big and small make poisoned statements, disclaiming their need to stand behind them. Cue President Obama.

Justice: Justice has always been a squishy thing. It’s injustice for the loser. And what is just? Sure, property claims, business liens, tort law… these all apply. Justice as in “let’s kill the murderer to serve justice” is a hairsbreadth away from “eye for an eye.” (Don’t get me wrong: if we had a working justice (sic) system, I’d see the necessity for putting down a human animal. Not for justice, but to keep them from hurting society.) Is it just when a court orders putting down a religious artifact on public grounds because the majority of the local powers believe it’s the just thing to do? Justice in the time of Superman was decidedly on the white, male savior side. While justice occasionally rears its head in the form of marriage equality, the injustice of perverted law claimed as justice is the travesty of our time on the public national stage.

Now we’re left with “The American Way:” Which should be interesting given that we’re teetering at the cusp of a white minority in these here United States. So what’s the ‘American Way’ going to look like in my grandchildren’s time? (Kids, please don’t get any ideas!) Apple pie replaced with flan? A chorizo wrapped in a tortilla? A quiet, calm Tesla in lieu of a muscle car?

Bottom line: TJaTAW is a product long past its expiration date in America circa 2014. A pure truth today invalidates many of the initiatives and their idiot religious sycophants on the Justice side. And practical demographics will lay waste to the white, male, Christian ‘supermen’ that keep minorities and women economically beneath them.

Good News Everyone! Astronomers smelling planets!

I wonder what the earth smells like? Is it like one’s own flatulence, tolerated by self and abhorred by others? Is that why aliens keep coming to our planet and then dashing off at top speed?

The culture “war” (to besmirch Rupert’s pet yellow rag) continues. This time it’s “Ban Bossy,” an alliterative sound bite. Proponents of putting “bossy” in the same isolation ward as “retarded” say it’s because the word is fundamentally pejorative and used in conjunction with girls.

Unlike the “R” word (thanks, Tali, for being early in the game in having that banned in our households), “bossy” isn’t an objectively difference in a person from the perceived physical or psychological norm, it’s the user’s subjective opinion of another’s behavior.

Bosses should be “bossy.” In a random grouping, there will be leaders and followers. Leader frequently “boss” others to achieve their — and hopefully the group’s — goals. Bossy is a power term: this person directs others.

In the warped world of misogynistic etymology, “bossy” is the new “assertive” (trans: “aggressive”). Should we ban “assertive?” How about “pushy?”

Let the words roam free, I say, and attach the meaning to the speaker and context, and not the sequence of letters. And if that makes me bossy, or a pushy bastard, so be it.