Diego Basch

Getting outraged is one of my favorite pastimes. Fortunately it’s an inexpensive one. All I need is to read the news. For example, this week I saw this story on Slashdot about a man being sent to prison for having viewed child porn pictures on the web. The prosecution found the files in the web browser cache (the Temporary Internet Files folder on Windows) and was able to convince a jury that this constitutes “possession of child pornography”. He was sentenced to twenty years.

Now, where do I begin my outrage? First, I believe that going to prison is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I am of the opinion that keeping the innocent out of jail is more important than punishing all the guilty. Apparently this is not the view of the legal system in many countries including the US. How else can “possession” of something be considered a crime? That concept always bothered me because it’s open to the worst possible abuses. You hate someone? Just hide drugs in their house and call the cops anonymously. The person won’t be able to cooperate (i.e. tell anything useful about where the drugs came from) so the prosecutor will be especially harsh. If you happen to live in Singapore, you are in luck. All you need is to have the police find your “friend” with 15 grams of heroin, which carries a mandatory death penalty.

Let’s escalate the outrage a bit more. The guy in the Slashdot story did not even have possession of the files. He simply browsed a site containing them, which is equivalent to watching TV. Unfortunately for him, web browsers implement a feature to speed up navigation. The first time a person visits a page, the text and images are stored on the hard drive for a while. The idea is that, if the person visits the site again and there have been no updates, there is no reason to reload the content from the internet. Because of this technical detail, the prosecution could argue that the files were stored on the guy’s computer even though, in all likelihood, he was unaware of this.

My impression of this case is that the defense lawyer must have been nowhere near the top of mount Cleverest. Anyone competent would have been able to compare this to what happens with people who own a TiVo, or set up a quick entrapment experiment. I would have brought in a laptop and send the judge an email with a link to “an interesting story that questions Yout Honor’s reputation”. Upon clicking, a browser window would have shown a bunch of random images with text like “Bang! you got child porn on your computer now!”. I guess I have been watching too much Boston Legal, since it sounds something that James Spader’s character would come up with.

Continuing the outrage-fest, twenty years? What is left for those who produce child porn? Probably not much since they are likely to be outside of the US. What are the legislators thinking? Probably something like this: “I need more soccer mom votes. I’ll double the sentences. That looks good.” Well, here’s another interesting scenario: boy dumps girl. Girl is vengeful. She finds one of those trojan programs that install spyware and sends it to him. Only this program does not install spyware. Instead, it downloads large quantities of illegal content and then erases itself. Perhaps she doesn’t even know the law and thinks he will get a slap in the wrist. Boy, don’t make any plans for the next two decades.

I hope someone smart takes up this case and shows the stupidity of the situation. Otherwise, it’s another step into a globalized, Orwellian society.

Whenever a new trend or technology surfaces, there are always people who compare it to the closest thing available before, and how that closest thing will be killed/replaced/rendered obsolete by the new one.

In the past, it happened with live musicians and recorded music, stage plays and movies, movies and VCRs. In the case of weblogs, those people see them as an alternative to regular journalism. How is it not obvious that, just like in the aforementioned examples, they complement each other?

Let’s define first what ‘weblog’ means in the context of this discussion. Today, anything running on blogspot.com, or powered by Movable Type or WordPress can be considered a weblog. We can leave out of the discussion those who are just personal pages in disguise, community discussion boards or diaries (“…today I’m wearing new socks, got a B+ and I have a crush on my neighbor’s cousin’s friend…”). There are two types of weblogs that ressemble traditional media:

- aggregators, such as Slashdot or BoingBoing. These sites add value by carefully selecting stories that interest their readers, a new one every hour or so. They very rarely post original content.

- editorials, such as Andrew Sullivan. These tend to feature opinion pieces written by one or more authors, about whatever they find interesting that day.

Some weblogs lie somewhere in between, such as Kottke or Daily Kos, posting mostly links and some personal opinion once in a while.

The important issue is: what do all these have in common? answer: they are maintained by people who work at home or in an office, far from where news happens. Unlike traditional media, they do not have armies of paid correspondents who report from all around the world. When unexpected things happen such as natural catastrophes or revolutions, webloggers can only link to news sites and speculate just like everybody else who’s not there.

Eventually, weblogs and regular media will coexist in harmony because they are good for different things. The line between weblogs and traditional media will blur. There will be more paid, specialized webloggers, some of whom will work for traditional media and other corporations. Just like we can choose from different ways of seeing movies (theatre, buying, renting, downloading), the same will (continue to) be true for news. This debate has been going on for three years now. It’s starting to smell old (like the bricks vs. clicks discussions of 1999) and it’s time to retire it.

Here are Tashi and Simone, now about four months old. We found them in the street in late February (pictures taken by Sarah).

John Battelle makes an excellent point about how users of mobile phones are subject to the whims of the carriers in terms of what they are allowed to do, as opposed to the unlimited options of “raw DSL” for a wired computer.

Having worked on synchronization of mobile devices using the SyncML protocol, I know what he means. Carriers such as Verizon sell crippled phones with the sync function disabled (it can be re-enabled through a very tedious procedure, out of reach of the typical user). It’s interesting how the carriers don’t provide a solution to allow a customer to synchronize contacts or calendar information to a server, yet they disable the functionality so that the customer cannot do it through a third party either!

This Wall Street Journal article from last week complains about the same issues and gives a more business-like perspective, comparing the carriers with Soviet-style ministries.

Anybody who has been following the Java language since its inception ten years ago is aware of the discussions about its performance and the comparison with other languages such as C++. Some people who complain about the lack of performance of a language or platform are guilty of not looking at a system as a whole, a combination of the programs, the operating system it runs on, the processor and the input/output systems. This article discusses performance issues in Java and dispels old myths. It is a good reference for people who complain that their Java program is too slow, so it must be the language’s fault.

The Java Performance Debate, by Andy Roberts

Here’s an interesting article on the pseudo-sience of creationism by Richard Dawkins, author of the excellent The Selfish Gene.

Ultimately, proponents of creationism are not open to scientific discussions since their belief in science stops where it starts contradicting their faith. Perhaps it’s best to accept that some people don’t want to be convinced and let them be. Still, it’s useful to expose the illogical nature of their arguments to those who still don’t have an opinion on the matter.

Here’s a transcription of a talk about science and religion with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

Earlier today at the office there were a bunch of people watching a tennis match on the TV projector screen. I was trying to get some work done (not really, but let’s pretend) and the noise was quite annoying. In particular, the ESPN tennis theme song before and after commercial breaks was disturbing the flow of my web browsing. Something had to be done about it, so I put on my headphones and tried listening to some music. Looping through the only mp3 file on my hard drive got old after nine minutes, so I decided to install an mp3 streaming server at home.

I did a web search and I found a bulletin board post praising Gnump3d. I downloaded it and installed it. Configuring it was really easy, I had to change a couple of settings in the config file and that was it. I directed my browser to my home machine and was met by a cleanly organized directory of all my albums, automatically generated playlists for each one and download links for individual songs. The navigation options are excellent, including the search function (you can run a search and play all the results). It has many other useful features such as selectively allowing a list of clients, downsampling the bit rate of songs selectively by ip address and more. I am listening to Robert Cray as I write this and I’m happy.

How do people evaluate a prospective new job, or whether to stay at the current one? I can only speak for myself, and this my current thinking after twelve years of working several engineering jobs. To me, the compensation offered by a job can be measured in three different axes: monetary, social and emotional:

Monetary compensation

This one is pretty obvious, and many people tend to believe that money can make up for the other two. The utility of the economic compensation depends on a person’s financial responsibilities and amount of savings. On one extreme, those who live paycheck-to-paycheck have a minimum requirement below which they must reject a potential job. On the other, the independently wealthy (or very frugal) can choose low-paying jobs that rate high on the other variables. Some people fantasize about becoming wealthy and spending their time sipping margaritas at a tropical beach. While this may work for a few months, eventually most of us would start craving the non-monetary compensation that a job provides.

Social compensation

Whether you are comfortable with your peers in your work environment. I believe this is one of the main reasons people tend to stick around in office jobs that are not that interesting or pay that well. I had jobs where the highlight of my work day was having lunch with my coworkers. If you work a nine-to-five job, think about how much time you spend interacting with other people. There are also the extra-hours activities such as sports teams, office parties, etc. The lack of this compensation is what makes telecommuting unappealing after a while. Face-to-face interaction at the workplace cannot be replaced with other forms of communication.

Emotional compensation

This one could also be called enjoyment factor, how much you like the type of work you do. I have worked jobs that rated high in this respect while relatively low in everything else. Over the years, I spent months at a time writing software at home just because I enjoyed it. Sometimes I made some money, other times very little. If you don’t enjoy what you do at all, eventually you will start feeling frustrated regardless of how much money you make. Lots of people stick with unrewarding jobs for a variety of reasons, and many of them learn to deal with this lack of emotional compensation.

The choice: stay or go

One problem with evaluating job satisfaction is that we are usually very aware of any fluctations in our monetary compensation. We don’t like pay cuts, and raises give us some instant gratification. On the other hand, changes in the social and emotional aspects are sometimes hard to perceive. They tend to happen gradually over time. For example, in the case of software projects the initial stages are more creative, and over time the focus shifts into maintenance and bug fixing. If a company is not doing well, the overall mood changes and the most desirable people start leaving. In my personal experience, it has been useful to go through the exercise of evaluating the three axes every once in a while and give the job the thumbs up or down.

When taking up a new job, the social factor may not be so obvious to evaluate, especially if we don’t spend much time at the prospective location. Tech companies usually subject candidates to long one-on-one interviews with all the potential teammates. Most people think this is because they want to appear as very selective and not let any unqualified applicants in. While this is true, equally important is that the new person gets along with the team. The only way to evaluate this is by spending as much time as possible together before making a hiring decision. Of course, it works both ways. I’ve interviewed for companies where I didn’t get a good feeling about the climate or my potential boss.

In short, there are no formulas (there may be some, but I’m skeptical). Ultimately, the choice of a job is a subjective one and it becomes harder the more options we have available. It can be misleading to take advice from others for whom the satisfaction points along the three axes can be different than ours. All we can do is be honest with ourselves and make sure we know what we really want.