Sacramento Sunrise

I took this photo in downtown Sacramento. The image links to a 1024 x 768 version.

Tags: Photography, Art, Sacramento, California, sunrise, City

The Information Private Toll Road

In colonial times people had to pay, with money or sweat, to learn to read. To produce reading material people had to pay for a press and supplies. The founders of our country determined that the distribution of this information should be free. In fact this is was one of the conditions on which the US Constitution was adopted.

The Preamble to The Bill of Rights

Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

This makes it clear that the founders’ intent was to add The Bill of Rights. The first amendment states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This makes it clear that the founders intended the flow of information to be free. In colonial times information flow was limited to speaking to someone within earshot, handwriting, and most importantly “the press”.

The printing press was the mass communication tool of the era. It brought about the free flow of information on a scale the world had never before seen. So governments, aristocrats, and anyone with power did their best to control it. Our founders obviously felt the free flow of information on a large scale was a good idea.

They felt so strongly about these rights that they risked their lives to fight a war against the greatest military power of the day.  This wasn’t a war like the US Civil War, WWI, WWII, etc. where the political leaders sat in their comfortable offices while the soldiers fought the war. George Washington was on the front lines. There was no doubt that the war would be fought at home. These men knowingly risked everything, on a long shot.

Today information flows through various channels. Television, Radio and print media are largely controlled by a few companies, an oligarchy at best. The channel through which the flow of information is free is the Internet. This is good and bad. Any idiot with access to the internet can publish just about anything they want, even people like me. I am not a modern day Thomas Paine by any stretch of the imagination. The point is his ideas could not have been heard if the British government, the British East India Company, or some other entity had been able to silence his voice.

We must preserve the free flow of information on the Internet. AT&T, Verizon, and other large corporations want to control the flow of information on the Internet. They want to be able to decide what sites you have access to. They want all politicians to be as stupid/corrupt as Ted Stevens. They want the best government they can buy, and they want to pass the cost on to you.

Here are some links to more information about this issue:

• http://www.pbs.org/moyers
• http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/10/02/slayers/
• http://www.savetheinternet.com
• Vint Cerf's (one of the guys who invented the Internet)
• Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who invented the World Wide Web)

Tags: Politics, Media, technology, Internet, Web, Freedom, America, Net Neutrality

It's Just a Minor Bug

When you’re working in a company with only a few people in IS, developers usually have to test their own code, manage database resources and just about everything else that goes into developing and implementing an application.

There are some advantages to this. When a developer tests their own code they have a pretty good idea where it’s most likely to break. Unit testing in particular is best done by the developer. However once you compile the code the developer becomes less effective at testing. Anything the developer overlooked in unit testing, the developer will most likely miss when testing in “user mode”.

All programs have bugs. I define a bug as any instance in which the application functions in a way that is unexpected. Using this definition, some bugs are better than some features. Finding, tracking and fixing bugs is much more difficult in a non-structured environment. That is one reason it is better to have another person test the application is the structure that situation imposes. At minimum, the tester will communicate the bug to the developer, who fixes the code, recompiles, releases and tells informs the tester, who then retests. That is where a one man show breaks down.

When you’re designing an app, writing another, and fixing bugs on a third, while doing some admin type duties, it’s very easy to skip a step. When the step you skip is compiling, and nobody is there to verify the fix, the bug doesn’t get fixed any where but in the source code. That’s exactly what happened to me. My background is quite varied. I’ve done tech support, training, documentation, QA, development, design and management of those disciplines. So I’m well versed in the development process and the reasoning behind the various steps. All the more reason I should have been able to avoid this mistake.

How did it happen? I was finishing up an application that gets data from a SQL table, performs some calculations, and updates the records with the results. I was also writing an app that converts a AS400 signed integer format from a fixed width text file and inserts it into various SQL tables. Since the both of the apps were needed ASAP, I was in a bit of a time crunch.

The bug itself was simple. There was some confusion as to which field should contain the results of a particular calculation. Once the expert determined the field in which the results should be written, it was a simple, almost negligible, fix. The main problem with testing the fix was lack of test data. Since it was such a simple fix, I assumed it would work. After all, I only changed the SQL column name. If I made a typo it would return a SQL error.

After we started getting live data (or as live as we get), and people started generating reports based on the results the application recorded, I decided to double check the code. Somehow the change wasn’t there. That can’t be possible, I thought. So I checked the dll and no, it hadn’t been changed since before the date that fix would have been implemented.

Why did the code revert? Most likely I didn’t save the changes and didn’t compile. Yes, I would love to blame Visual Studio. However, it’s been years since I’ve seen VS fail to save a file properly. Humans are much more fallible.

Fortunately the effects were extremely minor, since it was discovered when it was. A couple of months down the road and it would have been a big problem. Also since it’s an ASP.NET app, the dll only needed to be updated on one machine. The lesson is simple - document bugs. That’s the best way to insure that fixes are implemented by the time the app is released.

Tags: Quality Assurance, QA, Software Development, Project Management

FSM Pumpkin Carving Contest

Halloween is just weeks away and some people have started carving pumpkins. (Actually every future event that isn’t happening in the next 7 days “is just weeks away”) Some people carve scary things like witches and sharp teeth, and some people carve religious symbols.

The Pastafarians have even joined in the Halloween fun and are having a pumpkin carving contest. The photo is an entry from last year’s contest.

Tags: FSM, pirates, Intelligent Design, Education, Global Warming, Halloween, Pumpkin, contest