This week's (and the inaugural) Tuesday Tip:

How to play a G Chord.

Computers have been around for a while, now. The first digital computers that did useful work were used by the British during World War II to crack the Germans' Enigma cryptographic scheme, with the help of literary greats Alan Turing and Kate Winslett. Computer networks came about not long after. In fact, the network technology that most people use today, Ethernet, was developed back during the Nixon administration by Xerox. But that's really more of a hardware spec, invisible to most of us that use it, and used only in the most vaguely analogous sense by the Internet and wireless connections that we find ourselves using more and more.

What runs over those networks, well, that's the stuff that really concerns us. We wouldn't care if our SMB, HTTP, or NFS protocols were running over a length of twine connecting a couple of dead beavers, just as long as they kept the links up and the bits moving. But for some reason, these protocols, like unto the network itself conceived in the dark, smoke-filled chambers of engineering history, are still less than adequate in real world situations. I'll give you an example: There's not a computer or operating system built today that gracefully handles an unexpectedly disconnected network volume.

I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that I'm on the only moron in the world who would forget to dismount a network drive before clapping his laptop shut and carrying it out of the office. But you would think, in the 30 or more years we've been using networks to share our data, that exactly this scenario might have come up at some point in a worst-case-scenario brainstorming session by one of the major vendors. But I guess the very idea such a thing could happen was judged preposterous, and relegated to the realm of science fiction, freeing the engineering team to work on more critical issues like the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

So maybe the story I'm about to tell could land me in the rubber room, but I'll chance it, as the Truth Wants to Be Free. As you may have already inferred, in my hurry today, I forgot to dismount a shared network volume before packing my laptop and heading out of the office . Upon opening my laptop once more, I was greeted by the Symbol of Waiting, which refused to go away. All the while, in the corner of my friendly graphical user interface, said network volume's icon was displayed, indicating a continuing, vigorous mounting. Obviously, the Symbol of Waiting was my computer's way of telling me that, while it seemed unlikely that this drive could be mounted without access to its network or, indeed, any network whatsoever, it was still experiencing a moment of indecision. It was telling me that it was considering the two conflicting possibilities of a) the network connection being gone, and therefore all processes using it should be informed of this fact, or b) the server having followed me to the café I'm sitting in, installed a network cabling plant, snuggled itself under my table, and then connected itself to my laptop, and was just in the processing of booting itself back up in order to serve that dreadfully missing network share; a possibility which, I might add, the computer was willing to indulge ad infinitum. Apparently, Occam's Razor is a difficult principle to express in Objective-C.

All of this culminated in a computer caught in a permanent moment of indecision. I like to believe that every time you boot your computer, the cycle of its life is started anew, with the hopes and dreams of a better life this time around; the corollary of course being that you've had to viciously snuff out the life of its previous incarnation. Thus as I was administering the Mac equivalent of a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Cmd-Power) to this shivering, broken husk of a computer a moment ago, I felt no regret. It was better to end it there, to ease its suffering. I felt pity however, in that it probably didn't understand what it was going through, what the source of its confusion and suffering was.

But I also couldn't help think it could have been prevented. Perhaps the status check of a network mount could be moved into a thread, instead of being embedded in the main event loop of the user interface, blocking all input? Perhaps an operating system could check to see if there are any open files on a mounted network drive before betting its entire existence upon the fact that it may, one day, return? Is the termination of a single process blocking on a stat call really worth the life of the entire ecosystem? These are questions for the politicians, apparently, and not for the medics in the field.

In a technical interview recently, a man asked me if I knew the point of "hard-mounting" network shares, particularly those of the NFS variety. I gave the textbook answer he expected, that it was preferable for applications to block and fail in the case of a missing disk than to go on believing that it still existed, without the knowledge that their write operations had failed, and their data were most likely corrupted. It's easy to be so cold and calculating when you haven't seen the suffering involved in such a catastrophic break. It's easy to extoll the virtues of data integrity über alles. But from the perspective of the victim, ignorance is, unfortunately, bliss.

UPDATE: This was, oddly, the Whine of the Week on Macbreak Weekly.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, User Interface

Over 2 years ago, I made a modest little proposal about cameras embedded in cell phones:

So, I was wondering if there’s a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you’re pretty sure you’re about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, “whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o’s got your mug.? Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don’t like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

And today, what do I see?

Catching criminals in the act these days is s ometimes as easy as pressing a button on your camera phone. Now the city is moving to simplify your ability to share telltale evidence of subway flashers, house burglars or even a suspect pothole, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. "If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to nyc.gov," Bloomberg said in his State of the City address.

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself, "If the world would just shut up and do as I say, it would be a better place for everybody"? Well, I don't. I speak, and the world listens. Sometimes it just takes a little longer than it should. Stupid world.

Hurricane Kyrill is blasting across Germany at the moment, leveling trees and flinging stucco about. Man, you'd think Gabriel was tooting his horn outside, the way the locals are reacting. Mind you, Kyrill's not really a hurricane, but rather a winter gale. That would be the way LEO translates the german word Orkan; well, that and hurricane. But a hurricane is necessarily in the Caribbean, moving west. Technically, anyway.

But I'm not here to split hairs, I'm here to talk about battering winds, upwards of 200 kilometers per hour. Not sure how fast that is in real measurement, but I can confirm it's a-howling through the alleyways outside. You can actually hear it whistling through the cathedral belltower, a good half-mile away. It's sort of a low hoot. The roof tiles they have over here are bound to start flying around at some point, injuring passers-by unlucky enough to be out in it, à la Ben Hur. I've still got to get home from this bar I'm sitting in right now, but I'm close enough that it would be a lucky shot, indeed.

They've stopped all trains in the entire country, even the streetcars, and the kids are staying home from school tomorrow. As are many businessmen, their firms more concerned about their safety than the four-hour workday most people put in on Friday over here. All in all, it's a pleasant diversion for everyone, an act of God that brings a bit of excitement to the daily routine. I'm just glad the bars are open, otherwise this entry would have been about four lines long.

It's sort of like it used to be in Atlanta before the Yankees came, when we got a few flakes of snow on the ground. Once the slightest flake fought its way through the climatical defenses enough to land and shout, triumphantly, Allahu Akhbar! Quake with fear before me! before becoming a small puff of vapor, well, that's when the fabric of Atlanta society would start coming apart at the seams. The groceries stores were run upon, with milk and bread being carried by the truckload to the homes of weather-maddened Southerners. The schools were locked down tight; lest the inexperienced, though well-meaning bus drivers tumble off a cliff, out of control on ice-slick roads with a full load of schoolchildren. We didn't like snow, not even the rumor of it.

Growing up in Cherokee County, we had a rather enviable relationship with snow. It's a large county, with a hilly bit up north, in the Canton area. But the rest of the county sits around Lake Allatoona, and is predominately mild in its winters. School closings, however, are granular only to the county level, which meant that whenever some meth-addled bus driver in Ball Ground happened to notice a patch of frost on the grass on her way out of the trailer park, the school board would immediately be notified, and all educational activities throughout the county brought to a halt. Sometimes, some farmer's pond was frozen over in a forgotten corner somewhere; the very presence of ice somewhere induced enough unease among the elected county officials that they just played it safe and let the kids have the rest of the week off.

During the Winter of '87, we actually had 16 days off in a row for snow. Down in our end of the county, we did indeed see snow the first day. I remember it well: We were sitting in home room, the first class of the day, when the first flakes began to fall, the shimmering little harbingers of freedom. In panicked tones, the principal came on the PA and announced that we should all get on the buses, or hop in our cars, and get the Hell home, not forgetting of course to stop on the way for whatever bread or milk might still be available in the local grocery store, every man for himself! I could just see him in his office: laying down the intercom microphone and strapping himself to his chair, cradling his service .45, a captain going down with the ship.

Predictably, once we were all home the snow stopped. In fact, it was 65 degrees by midday, and we were playing football in the yard with 8 men per team. It was a pleasant diversion for a Tuesday afternoon, but we were resigned to getting back to the grind bright and early the next morning. But there was no school the next day. Nor the day after that. In fact, for the next two weeks, despite spring-like temperatures and sunny skies, we were out of school on account of snow. Every day the disruption continued, the fun factor was reduced by half, until finally we were all wondering whether they had forgotten to tell everybody to go back. But no, there was Guy Sharpe every morning, announcing the one and only school closing in the state of Georgia: Cherokee County. For two solid weeks. I always wondered what people in other counties thought of that. At one point, the guy shows them a map of Georgia with little suns all over it and 60+ degree temperatures, then announces that our hillbilly asses still won't come out from under our rocks.

They cancelled our Spring Break that year because of that. Bastards. I didn't think much about it then, being a latchkey kid, but I can imagine that a lot of parents had actually planned their precious two-week vacations to coincide with Spring Break. But then, Cherokee County was a different crowd back then. I mean, to have vacations implies that you, you know, have a job.

But it became clearer to me in my last two years of High School how something like that could happen. It was easy to start rumors about snow sightings in Canton. Even mentioning an ice storm in Birmingham would have the teachers looking nervous. Do that in home room, and by lunch it would be all over school. Somebody would come up to you and tell you that the county seat was under a six-foot sheet of glacial ice, and that school would be cancelled forever, what with the coming ice age and all. It's a miracle that the public school system functions at all.

Weather is always what the Germans call a gaudi, a good time.

Technorati Tags: orkan, puppy, snow day

Apropos this post over at Wordpress, I'll be upgrading to the latest version. Please pardon if things look screwy for a bit.

Update:  Well, that wasn't so hard.  As you were.