Status-Q

Jenny McCartney is rightly cynical about the condolences from Gerry Adams.

On a cheerier note, this can't be true, but it's a great story. Apparently the Advertising Standards Authority have told Möben Kitchens to remove the umlaut from their name, because customers might be fooled into thinking it's a German company and that the products are therefore of a higher quality than is actually the case.

The web address of www.moben.co.uk is a dead giveaway. They should have registered www.moben.de. It's still available...

Few events have demonstrated the power of modern media more than those on Tuesday. We're used to receiving entertainment, sport and even news events from the far side of the world, but on Tuesday a tidal wave of shock and grief was transmitted around the globe. In the past, one would read about such events in the newspapers, several days after they happened, possibly accompanied by a black and white photograph or two. Now, we sit mesmerised by multiple repetitions of high-quality colour footage from all angles only minutes after the tragedy. We've even actually heard people's final phone calls. Many of us walked around in an unbelieving half-dazed state for several days.

Is the world better as a result of this huge multiplication of grief? Of course, it also generates a huge multiplication of sympathy and support - I'm very proud of the way my country and others have stood side by side with America in so many symbolic ways - but since there's very little practical action that even people right on the doorstep in NY can take, there's nothing but a multiplication of frustration for the rest of us. Yes, we can donate money, but, frankly, that's not what they need.

Perhaps the greatest good that can come from the media coverage is this: What was probably intended as an attack on America is being interpreted as an attack on the whole civilised world. That might just be more than the perpetrators, and others of their kind, had bargained for.

Have just returned from a long weekend in the Lake District, my favourite place on the entire globe.

As my brother, my 6-year-old nephew and I skimmed stones on the surface of Derwent Water, I wondered about this curiously male pastime. I don't think I've known any women, young or old, who were enthusiastic stone-skimmers. Why is that? Is there something in it that harks back to our primitive male hunting role, when the best stone-throwers would probably bring home the best food, attract the best wives, etc? Or is it just that women have more sense than to partake in such a pointless activity?

At 10.54 this morning, Dan Gordon, Martyn Johnson and I finally switched off the Trojan Room Coffee Pot camera, seven years and nine months to the day after it was first connected to the web.

The official website will be updated in due course, but since the Computer Lab is in mid-move, it might take a little while. Until then, you can read more about the life and times of the Pot.

Article on webcams in general, and the coffee pot in particular, in yesterday's New York Times.

Well, I wrote that 'Zen' piece on the 14th without much careful thought, and in particular before I had seen John Naughton's pointer to Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman's remarkable essay "Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code", of which it is not worthy to be a minor sub-paragraph. And while a skeptic might say that the word 'erotic' is in that title more to attract attention than because it's a major theme of the essay, the attention is certainly deserved. Recommended.

Recommended, at least, if you have the time to read over twelve and a half thousand words. There's an assumption, built into most types of writing, that what you are saying is worth the time and effort of the person reading it. The longer the piece, the better it needs to be, either in terms of the enjoyment of reading, or of the knowledge gained by doing so.

Weblog entries tend to be brief. Quick to write, quick to read. While in general I dislike the trend towards a sound-bite culture, I would argue that weblogs are important chiefly because of their brevity, and this is not just because of the ease with which they can be jotted down and the speed with which they can be skimmed. It is because many of us are not sufficiently confident in the value either of our ideas or of our writing skills to feel comfortable imposing large quantities of text on our fellow man. By publishing just a couple of paragraphs we can try out an idea and see if others find it worthwhile, without imposing too great a burden on them if it isn't. The timid publisher has had very few such opportunities in the past. Publishing pamphlets was too expensive, writing to the newspapers was too subject to editorial rejection, and creating websites required too many specialist skills. This, I think, is part of why weblogs are a genuinely interesting new medium.

Zen and the art of Bug Removal

We often think of programming as architecture or as engineering - the construction of complex working machines out of many small parts. Build it properly, and it doesn't fall apart. Here's a different view, which probably has limited validity and no useful purpose, but which I thought was interesting.

Computers can do things without any human intervention. If you power up your microprocessor and point it at a large chunk of memory containing random bytes, exciting things may happen. Your disk may whirr. Your screen may display colourful rubbish. If you're lucky some lights on your computer might flash on and off. Or it may just stop dead. Whatever happens will probably be chaotic, unpredictable and, above all, not very useful.

Programming, then, is the art of taming this wild behaviour. Of imposing order on a system that would otherwise run wild. Of reducing the almost infinite number of possible actions to the relatively small number that are useful. Of producing order from chaos.

To pick an analogy suitable for this part of the world, you might compare it to digging irrigation channels so that you could reclaim agricultural land from a flooded plain. Programming languages provide the component parts - the ducting, the pumps, the weirs and sluice-gates - which make this process easier than simply digging with a spade. If you use higher-level programming languages, you might get complete viaducts and locks ready-made. But the natural state of the water is one of chaos. If you misuse the components or forget anything, you get bugs. One day, a high tide, combined with a westerly wind and an unfortunate usage of sluice gates, will allow the water in one channel to leak out and cause another flood.

The perfect irrigation system would use the minimum number of channels in the perfect locations with exactly enough sluices and dams to control the possible flooding situations, but no more. The most aesthetically pleasing programs are those that provide the most complete and elegant order out of the chaos with the minimum amount of intervention from the programmer.

Enough for now - I have to go and tidy my desk...

Strength through diversity: I like Dave Wilson's "Windows, Windows Everywhere".

Ahh, nostalgia! You can find some very elderly versions of Netscape still available for download on Netscape's FTP server. Still have a Windows 3.1 machine? No problem! Just grab a copy of Netscape 2 or 3.